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I've been trying to put the rise in cases in the State of MI in context - the 7-day avg hit a low of 150 on 6/13 and has now risen to 349, so more than a doubling. But deaths has stayed low, 7-day avg of 16 down to 11 over the same time span. (1/n)
Note that this disconnect has not been the case earlier in the pandemic, when they mostly tracked with a lag. We started seeing smaller changes in April when case counting mechanisms started changing a bit. But nothing this sustained or divergent (2/n)
Why are deaths not following the rise now? Has the lag between cases and deaths increased? Are new cases in younger, healthier populations? Where is the secondary infection of vulnerable contacts? Has the virus mutated to become less severe? (3/n)
Our metrics for tracking the pandemic are not great. Cases is impacted by testing availability changes. Positive test rate is used a lot lately, but many factors pull it in different directions (4/n)
Deaths has too much lag, so acting on deaths means acting too late. Hospitalizations would be better, and has been reported in MI since mid-April, but no DB exists (that I know of) with counts over time (5/n)
So, since I'm a dork, I used the @waybackmachine on the reporting page ( https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98159-523641--,00.html) to pull hospitalization numbers since first reported on April 12th, overall and by region (6/n)
Statewide, we are at our lowest Covid hospitalizations since we started recording, with 315 currently versus nearly 4,000 when first recorded (7/n)
Cases and hospitalization tracked pretty close until recently. Deaths and hospitalizations have maintained a close tracking. (8/n)
To highlight the differences better, here is just the month of June (thru 7/2) (9/n)
Testing is not really explaining any of this. We have mostly plateaued since mid-May (10/n)
Yesterday, @wandering_gu asked me this, based on the recent rise in cases: (11/n) https://twitter.com/wandering_gu/status/1278819848403873793
Back to the questions, it doesn't seem to be a lag issue, since hospitalizations (which have much less lag than deaths) are still not rising. Secondary infections may still be coming (12/n)
But, the other 2 explanations would seem to support the data we're seeing - cases in healthier populations and/or virus mutating for the better. (13/n)
I still can't completely get beyond the rise in cases without corresponding rise in tests. These new populations are not living in a bubble, so I still think the bill may come due on this at some point (14/n).
But to answer @wandering_gu question, I'm a little more optimistic after taking a deeper dive. So, for now, I might say this (15/15)
