Lagging indicator

For a couple of weeks I ' ve been seeing reporters puzzling over the reported death rate from Covid-19 not going up even as the case incidence has been skyrocketing in many states. The Republican governors of some of those states, and VP Pence, have first claimed that the increase in case finding is entirely a function of increased testing. The Resident has even claimed that if we just stopped testing, we wouldn ' t have so many cases, so we should stop testing.Sadly, no. Actually even as testing has increased in some states (not all) the percentage of tests coming back positive has also increased, and by a lot. In Arizona a couple of days ago the test positivity rate was about 28%. If the positivity rate is increasing even as the testing numbers are going up, you have an out of control epidemic.So they shifted the premise. Now it ' s that most of the identified cases are young people and they ' re unlikely to get sick. But now the hospitals are filling up in Arizona and Texas, and hospitalizations are increasing in all of those states with rapidly increasing cases. And what we have always known is that the answer to the apparently steady state death rate is that deaths are a lagging indicator.It takes at least two or three weeks from the time of diagnosis to the time of death, often longer. And then it takes another week for the death to be registered as a Covid-19 death. So when we look at death, we ' re looking back a month. So let ' s take a look at Arizona (I could have ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs