Corona-zona

  As noted in yesterday's weekly numbers update , I have been puzzled about why the positive test percentage in Arizona has been consistently trending down when new cases have been consistently  trending up. After all, it takes a test to identify a case, so it seems like the positive test percentage should go up as the new case rate goes up. The ASU Biodesign Dashboard has data on raw numbers of positive a negative tests.  So I downloaded that data and had a look.   One thing to note is that the number of tests has gone way up over the last month.  On August 6 the seven-day total was about 66K tests.  By August 28 the seven-day total was about 97K tests—almost a 50% increase. Of course, more testing don't explain the mystery downtrend by itself. But things become clearer when we look at the trends in positive vs. negative tests (dotted lines are trendlines): As we can see, both positive and negative tests are trending upward, but negative tests are t...

  Here is the summary of Arizona pandemic numbers for the week just ended: This is really not looking good. New cases for Maricopa County took a big jump, and statewide the increase is double what it was last week . The trend can be most clearly seen in the seven-day average of new cases: I should mention that the value for the 25th is "imputed" (the average of the 24th and the 26th). Data was not available for the 25th due to an outage of the state dashboard.  Anyway, that's a qualitative change on the 24th. It makes the line look more like an exponential curve (where the increase for a given day is more than the increase for the previous day. We are also close to matching the peak in July of last year. That was 3,844 cases (seven-day average) on July 6th. The number yesterday was 3,741.  The way we are going, we will easily exceed the July 2020 peak number this week. Safe to say the numbers did not peak in mid-August as Dr. Scott Gottlieb optimistically predicted at th...

Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis has had his wings clipped by a Florida judge.  The judge threw out his ban on mask mandates in schools.  The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by parents who were worried about their kids getting exposed to the virus while at school.  The judge concluded that mandated mask use is "reasonable and consistent with the best scientific and medical opinion in this country." DeSantis had planned to withhold funds from schools who defied his ban. The judge said he would issue an injunction prohibiting that.   The judge also suggested, essentially, that DeSantis should grow up and look for solutions rather than throwing bombs in the culture war.  "We will not solve any issue if we can't sit down and work together and take positions recognizing what's going on is not some recent imposition or some attack on the country," he said. Somebody buy that judge a beer.  Apparently not everyone in Florida is equal parts stupid and d...

  NBC poll results released two days ago give the latest picture of those who have and haven't taken vaccines. The poll was among 1000 adults and was collected August 14-17.   They report raw numbers , but what fun is that? I turned those numbers into charts for your viewing enjoyment. Here is the breakdown of vaccination status: Sixty-nine percent of respondents say they are vaccinated. As of now, about ten days after data collection,  JHU reports that 52.3% of Americans are fully vaccinated. So that is a bit of a discrepancy.  There are three explanations (which aren't mutually exclusive):  The sample isn't representative of the population as a whole.  This is possible, but you'd think NBC would pop for a good sample. The question is poorly worded.  It is at the least ambiguous. The relevant response option asks "Have you already gotten the vaccine?" So the number may be high because it mixes people who have gotten both doses and those who've ...

It seems that some people, instead of taking a vaccine proven safe and effective hundreds of millions of times, are taking horse medicine instead. That's a special kind of stupid, and as comedian Ron White reminds us, you can't fix stupid . The horse medicine in question is ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasitic worms. It apparently has approved uses and dosages in humans, but horses are, y'know, a lot bigger than humans.   The FDA says it "has received multiple reports of patients who have required medical support and been hospitalized after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses."  They are so concerned about this they are tweeting at people to knock it off: The "treatment" has become especially popular in the U.S. South. A state health officer in Mississippi  called  the practice "kind of crazy" and likened it to getting chemotherapy at a feed store. I've not been able to track down where the idea to use ivermectin for...

  Here is the pandemic numbers summary for the week just ended: Despite my optimism that new cases might be leveling off last week, we are back to increases both at the state level and the Maricopa County level. The increases are small but not as small as last week. We can see that that the upward trend is pretty consistent can be seen in the graph of state-level cases over the last two months: The new case rate is six times what it was two months ago.  At least the line doesn't look exponential over the last month.   The only bright side is that positive test percentage is dropping slightly.  Otherwise, the COVID-19 hospital bed percentage increased by a little more than it did last week.  A bit over one-fifth of beds are occupied by people who wouldn't be there had they taken the vaccine. I have dropped the line in the summary table for the Delta variant because it is making up nearly all of the cases now.  It will continue to do so until some new va...

  The Lincoln Project has a new spot out "honoring" COVIDiot AZ Governor Doug Ducey for his Orwellian plan to funnel COVID-19 relief funding to schools that are not relieving COVID-19.