Cases declining but so are testing?

The last two weeks or so, I noticed that case infections were declining or stabilizing in Florida, Georgia, Texas and Arizona and hospitalization capacity stabilizing – neither going up or down dramatically. And this was after our President said he asked “to slow down the testing” because if you test too well, you will get more cases and after the hospitals were directed to send their data to DHS rather than to the CDC.

Here’s the general set of graphs for the south:

And here are some more graphs for the specific states:

I will admit that with our President’s comments about slowing down the testing combined with directing the hospitals to submit their capacity data to the DHS, the declining case infections I was seeing in the graphs made me suspicious. So I decided to check on the testing levels to see if the levels were declining. If the testing levels were declining, then we could be looking at a real “slowdown” or it could be indicative of slower testing responses (taking days or weeks rather than hours).

Here are new graphs centered on testing levels – I replaced the hospitalization with testing levels:

Texas, Arizona, and Florida are showing a slight decline in testing levels. It could be due to backlogged testing but I remain highly suspicious. The only positive is that I’ve read in the news that doctors and nurses have noticed an ease in the hospitalization capacity.

Here’s an instance where the numbers alone are not enough to inform you; you have to hear information from the horses’ mouth. As long as doctors and nurses say that hospitalization rates are easing, then I’m with the data and I don’t have to worry (as much) about the enforced slowdown of testing.

Yeah, this bears watching because we need to know if infection rates are increasing so we can respond appropriately. It’s hard enough as it is.