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Daily count of new Covid-19 cases drops below 2,000 for first time since November
By adamg on Tue, 02/02/2021 - 10:48pm
Massachusetts today reported 1,963 new Covid-19 cases, the first time the daily number has dropped below 2,000 since Nov. 30 - and down from the peak of 7,635 reported on Jan. 8.
The state reported 45 Covid-19 deaths, 1,631 people hospitalized with the virus and a positive test rate of 3.44%, all also representing declines.
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That Caribbean vacation was
That Caribbean vacation was totally worth it.
I've been on two vacation
And ZERO Covid. The prices are ridiculous, round trip to Aruba for $120.
Thanks for being petrified. Also my vacations will pay for themselves as i bough a tone of AAL, UAL and JBLU stock in late March.
Note: Yes i quarantined upon my return so stuff it where the sun doesn't shine.
Now how about
getting the vaccines out a bit faster, Charlie?
I suppose it's "good news" that we are no longer behind Mississippi in vaccine distribution.
Yup
We're last place in New England. CT has managed to inject 80% of their allotment but we're only at 60%.
It's been six weeks since the first doses shipped. Other states have managed to figure out how to get needles in arms so it's not an insurmountable problem.
Pretty embarrassing we are
Pretty embarrassing we are behind WV...they are killing it w/ the vaccinations. While here I cant get my 81yo mother a shot anywhere...well I could drive out to North Adams w/ her.
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Word is...
...we're going to start getting more vaccines. How many, and whether the state will remedy its boneheaded rollout plan, remains to be seen.
Working on it
Lack of supply remains a problem.
MA had been theoretically allocated 100,000 doses by the end of December, but that was slashed to 40,000 and then only 20,000 showed up. (See also: Jared's "blue states can just die" as he steals our PPE to sell to big Trump donors) There was no distribution plan other than playing favorites and punishment/reward and it is taking time for the grownups to sort that out.
Hmm, data?
Mass received 287k doses by Dec EOM. I'm keeping track on a spreadsheet here.
There were some doses...
...that were "allocated" for the state by the feds, but that the state never had control over, and has no information on. I got this on a call from my state senator last week. Basically, there are doses that the feds show as having been allocated for the state, and supposedly delivered, but that never went through the standard channels. Direct to the VA perhaps??? Wild guess???
How would more supply help,
How would more supply help, if we’ve only used 60% of what we already have?
That's okay
Come two weeks from Sunday they'll be back up because 30% of adults will be unable to stay away from a Super Bowl gathering of some sort.
But the Patriots aren't in it.
And that guy with Tampa Bay - who cares about him anymore?
Not exactly
Oh, boy, Swirlygirll do you want to tell him or shall I? Almost all spread (94+%, last week) is from clusters within households, not people going out to a "gathering".
But someone has to bring it home
So if someone goes to a party and gets it, then shares it with their household, because they’re not social distancing or masking at home, it counts as household transmission?
Seriously ...
maybe there should be combination Super Bowl gathering - COVID vaccination events.
"Get your shot! Then watch the game on our big screen! (Socially isolated and masked, of course)"
except that you can still catch it
You need like 2 weeks to develop immunity and you're not 100% immune until around 2 weeks after the second shot. The day of and for 2 weeks after, take all precautions. Even after that, you should still take precautions because the vaccine helps you fight the virus, not magically repel it meaning you can still be a carrier and infect others. It's going to be lit when I get my vaccine but only like 6 weeks later to be careful.
Read Tuesday numbers with caution
With a lag of about 2 days between giving/taking a test and getting a result, these are Sunday numbers. Not the most popular day for Covid tests. I would imagine that the numbers on Thursday will also be pretty good looking.
That said, hospitalizations are off a third since the peak, which is definitely a good sign. Covid wouldn't be too bad without all those people getting very sick and dying.
Last weekend was the first
Last weekend was the first ACTUALLY cold yucky weekend... wonder if winter finally rolling in and encouraging people to stay at home will help.
I've actually been wondering
I've actually been wondering for a while about when the results data we see each day was actually collected. If nothing has changed since the fall, the current daily test data is what has been received by DPH from the labs as of 8am on the day the numbers are released.
For most places, that means the soonest the sample was collected, in the most efficient PCR testing setup, would have been VERY early in the AM hours. Some of "today's" numbers will be from the previous day if they were processed in a lab with a good turnaround time, some are the 2 days before that you suggested, but some are still going to be older than that! Not all of the commercial labs are hitting the sub-48 hour mark to return results.
If you wait a few days, you can look at a subsequent report from DPH (or the raw data which is available on their website) you can actually see the true daily positive test results, identified by test date rather than reporting date. I suppose if someone went through and compared all of the daily cumulative counts to the real daily cumulative counts from the test date set, we would have a sense of what the current lag is.
I don't quite go that deep
But I have been fascinated with the reports, to the extent that I almost made what could be considered a stupid comment about the death counts at the height of the latest wave. The actual daily death toll was (slightly) better than the daily reports made them out to be. The other thing they do is apply the new data to the appropriate date, meaning tests are assigned to the date of test and deaths are assigned to the date of death, meaning that the immediate real numbers could be better than they seem, while the numbers a few days earlier were worse than they seem. At the end of the day, the aggregate numbers are key, but I always take the most recent numbers with that grain of salt. The numbers 3 or more days back, while less current, are more accurate.
The trend is your friend
The numbers on any given day will have a fair amount of wiggle room for the reasons mentioned above. I tend to focus on the trend as opposed to fretting over any particular report. For example, I always look at the deaths per day which were in the 20's and eventually worked their way up above 100. They are trending back down to the 40's (and hopefully back to 20 or less soon.) Any one day's report is only meaningful as a part of the long-term trend.
Now you got me riled up
We haven't had more than 100 Covid deaths in a single day in Massachusetts since mid May. The highest single day death toll in this wave was 86 (January 10.) I mean, I'm not happy that 86 people died that day, but the reality is that while more than 100 deaths were reported in a daily report, but that didn't mean more than 100 people died that day.
Just reporting what I remember seeing
I know for sure the daily chart in the Globe had deaths above 100 at least once and maybe a handful of times. If that was later amended down, so be it, but I really do remember seeing at least one 100+ day.
You saw right
I saw it in the news, too. But the information you saw was kind of misleading.
Trend definitely your friend
There's a lot that you can look at in the case data, but looking at the report day versus the same day the week before is a pretty good way to look at trends, since Mondays behave like other Mondays and Saturdays behave like other Saturdays (for the most part, it gets a bit wonky during the holidays). Charted here on the "new cases" tab.
Basically, in mid-January we went from trending up (red line > 0) to trending down, and have stayed trending down. That's a good thing. As cases get lower, the red line will have to trend towards zero, since we can't have negative case numbers to report (as nice as that would be). Stay home, but really stay out of shared airspaces with other people, wear a mask, save lives. Not that hard!
For comparison
This was about the same level of cases we had at the peak in April (although testing was so scarce then, that number is surely lower than actual number.
I’d be curious if there was comparison Deer Island data from late April/ now
this is good but not the end
One day is not a trend plus the mutations are starting to take hold so more transmissible. Experts are saying ramp up the vaccinations to compensate but I read today we're facing a "hurricane" in 6-12 weeks and that doesn't count Super Bowl and Valentine's idiots thinking "but we're going to be really safe about it".
What about the poop testing?
Are they still tracking the, er, latest movements there?
I want to hear the cannon
Yes, they are still testing. A weird spike last week on the southern sector but it appears to be bad data. Good trends, but still only down to late Nov levels.