Data Without Doctoring

Data Without Doctoring
 Dr. David Owen
 08/16/2020

Morning report: A somewhat typical weekend report with low deaths and stable but low hospitalizations. The outlier is deaths in Broward which have spiked tremendously. Broward deaths accounts for approx. 40% of all state deaths recorded today and the county has averaged 25 deaths per day for the past week. This is a huge outlier and remains unexplained. In fact, Broward may finally catch up to PBC in deaths, with PBC having more than Broward since the pandemic's inception.(and Broward with 24% more people!). Reporting issues are probably at play here but I think it's more than that. I would be interested to review the NH/ALF data in the county to see if we aren't in another wave of deaths in those facilities.

What few deaths reported yesterday were mainly assigned to the first week of Aug. where we might see daily death levels top the 160 or so which we saw the third week of July. This first week and the following week may prove to be the apex of this particular pandemic mini-spike. Positive tests continue to drop but this as always is a misleading indicator. Hospitalizations, which have fallen dramatically, remain stable but lower in all three counties today.

All in all a good report and we'll check the number of catch up deaths next week as we hypothesize a top for the second week of Aug.
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