Data Without Doctoring Dr. David Owen 08/29/2020
Morning update: Ah back in Tour de France heaven. At any rate, no change in our trend lines with slowly decreasing deaths and more rapidly decreasing hospitalizations. Today's statewide hosp. number will almost certainly have to be revised upward a bit however as PBC drastically undercounted covid hospitalizations today. That number too will almost certainly be revised upward, but still the trend continues significantly downward for covid bed utilization.
Many deaths continue to be recorded to the last days of July, with July 23rd now having the highest number of recorded deaths at 193. The period of July 19-25 looms as the likeliest period of daily deaths in excess of 200. But we have still not crossed that threshold in daily deaths which was forecast by some of the modelling weeks ago. Deaths assigned to Aug., particularly after the 5th. are much lower. So we should not see deaths in excess of 150 per day, once all of them have been assigned to the Aug. dates in a couple of weeks. This, in a slow. sluggish way, represents true progress in exiting the worse of the pandemic. One final observation, daily deaths in Dade really seem to be in a noticeable down trend and this would account for the downtrend in the state.
In terms of bed usage, Dade continues to open up nicely and Broward is no longer critical in terms of ICU bed usage. As I said before, with the covid bed stress effectively over, I will not comment on individual hospital bed usage for now. Another good bed report will be on tap for tonight ___ www.frankcastingmediagroup.com www.frankmulhall.com