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New case data is in for yesterday, and the model now picks up an upward trend. This is still preliminary and may change depending on data over the next couple of days, but it's concerning. And it looks quite different from yesterday's version, what happened?
The answer to that lies in the data process. When positive results come in they get reviewed manually before entering the system. Some get re-tested. Some get moved around. Here is the difference in today's vs yesterday's data, quite a bit of added data for the few days.
While this delayed data is a bit annoying, it's part of how the data gets generated. That poses a bit of a problem for doing trend lines, here is some more background on this. In short, it means the trend line is always biased down a bit. https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2021/01/30/on-covid-trend-lines/
The shift is driven by Fraser, which shows a clear uptick in the data. We will have to watch if this will turn out to be just a wiggle or the start of a more sustained trend.
The upward trend is visible in all Fraser health regions.
Looking across Canada, BC has now slipped into 4th place among the mitigation provinces, with only QC and SK posting worse numbers. For the Atlantic provinces NB is looking good again, but it's too early to celebrate. However, NL is in trouble.
However, several mitigation provinces decided it's the right time to "open up" again, and reservations for in-restaurant dining picked up already for Alberta. With new variants on the rise this may prove to have been premature and undo a lot of the hard work over the past months.
Vaccinations are set to ramp up again, the current state of vaccinations is still too low to have a meaningful impact on suppressing overall spread. It will take some time until the vaccine effect will kick in and make it easier to control the virus.
I won't be tweeting these images every day. If you are interested, they auto-update daily in this GitHub repo where you can also find the code. Links to the individual notebooks are at the bottom of the README. https://github.com/mountainMath/BCCovidSnippets
