Today it is at 1.28, and outside of New York it as 1.32
Apart from New York, the whole Acela corridor, from Massachusetts to Virginia, today saw their cumulative death totals rise by more than 10 percent.
I am seeing articles that suggests that it takes more than a day or two for deaths to be reported in these figures. Economists of a certain age might remember the phrase “long and variable lags.” If the average reporting lag is constant, then the trend is still reliable. But if the average lag is also variable–sometimes 1.5 days, sometimes 4.5 days–then the trend will be difficult to establish.
In any case, the growth rate of deaths is declining more slowly than I have been hoping for. The experts who in early April warned about a rough two weeks ahead seem to be correct.
I Lowess smoothed the numbers here: https://github.com/lintondf/COVIDtoTimeSeries/blob/master/analysis/ANALYSIS.md
Very, very nice.
Geez a lot of experts were correct. Again it is reasonable to cut slack on experts here as they don’t have a lot of past data to work from. Sort like develop baseball WAR in 1894 after 1 year of 60 ft. pitching mound to home plate distance and there will always .400 hitters in MLB.
1) Probably the best news I have seen is the 7 day average on new cases has dropped in NY, LA, CA, and WA, four states that moved quickest on COVID-19. It is working as long you take daily data has a lot of bumps in it. And yes deaths are the ‘strongest’ variable here but it have lags in terms of disease growth (2 weeks behind) and positive test (1 week.)
2) The issue of daily data is a lot of medical reporting is not used to daily updates on this stuff. Look up flu deaths last month and it will look low as the data is collected from thousands of local authorities and it will solid in 14 months. The right demographic analyst know
And remember .400 hitters were very common until 1930.
Actually not.
There were 15 from 1876-1899 and 11 from 1901-1925. (In 1901 the American League–the Junior Circuit–joined the National League–the Senior Circuit–as one of the two Major Leagues.) After 1925, there were only two, Bill Terry in 1930 (.401) and Ted Williams in 1941 (.406). All together, only 20 players ever ended the season at .400 or above. A number of the greats did it more than once, which is why the table at the link has 28 entries.