The BC CDC posted its new #COVID19BC situation report.

Here is my updated plot of positivity by age groups. A few things jumped out at me. As usual, my personal motivation is I'm a concerned parent trying to assess risk of toddler in daycare. #bced

1. The Sitrep now reports ages 0-4 and 5-9 as separate categories. That's helpful - lumping 0-9 into a single category is overly broad.

Babies and toddlers are quite different from school-age kids.

2. I won't speculate on the motivation of compressing the rightmost Y axis as much as they did. If you look carefully, positivity rates never approach anything near 20%.

This may seem pedantic, but it makes it harder to precisely estimate the height of the dots

Its second practical effect is that by compressing the Y axis, it makes difference between MSP and combined tests less stark.

Sorry for the MS Paint graph but this is what I mean...

3. Going forward the figure will include facets for the new age categories. I still think there's value in enabling comparison with previous reports though.

So I made an ugly simplifying assumption to allow this: 0-9 is average of 0-4 and 5-9 for dataviz purposes.

4. As the young child positivity rate - including for very young children - keeps sharply climbing, the testing intensity (as reported by the coloured bars) still seems laser focused on adults.

Remember: High positivity implies you're likely missing cases.

Sadly, as @realreporter points out new situation report indicates more kids in hospital

I know children usually recover. I remain worried about long term effects. But I'm *very* worried about their transmitting this to parents and grandparents https://twitter.com/realreporter/status/1350284415209857044?s=20

I encourage reporters covering this to follow some best practices:
- Report positivity alongside case numbers, and explain why positivity matters
- Do not report the MSP+private positivity rate, except as a curiosity. The valid value for understanding the situation is MSP only.

I'm now thinking it might be time to go back and scrape the bar values to show how testing intensity has changed across age groups over time. Is testing per capita actually *dropping* in kids as positivity is going up?

Many professional reputations are being put on the line to defend schools as safe.

But *by definition* these trends mean we're getting an increasingly poor picture of what's happening w/COVID cases in kids. People should be getting *less confident* in their assertions, not more

And look, maybe schools are fine. I have no idea.

But these data show that case numbers alone aren't providing the evidence needed to say it. And asserting that a respiratory illness rarely transmits in a school setting is an *extraordinary claim* that requires strong evidence

... and since I just know someone won't be able to resist popping up and saying "ontario is worse!"

yes that is factually correct. But unless we're identifying policies to avoid, that fact is not really related to the core issue here. https://twitter.com/imgrund/status/1349916686149963776?s=20