So, I was not crazy…

That’s a sad statistic. Since roughly around July 21, 2020, we’ve sustained a roughly consistent death rate of over 1000 deaths per day.

And while the South (Texas and Florida mainly) and Arizona (in the West) look to be declining in infection rates, the Midwest appears to be surging – the surge started in July and is still going strongly in August.

But, I’m kind of suspicious about the decline in infection cases in the South and Arizona.

About two and a half weeks ago, I did a post on my suspicions about the COVID-19 data because although I saw the overall cases declining – mainly due to the South declining – the testing was also decreasing. It seemed to me that the decline in testing was right on the heels of when our President complained about how much testing we were doing “because the more testing you do, the more cases you have”. He said at the Tulsa rally that he asked everybody to not do so much testing.

Here’s the decline in testing (yes, the dates got cut off – I didn’t catch that before):

I did say in the post that the decline might be due to the lag time in getting test results back. So many people were requesting tests that the testing facilities became overwhelmed and thus results were coming back a couple of days later, or a week later, or even longer. That overall delay in test reporting could have driven down the number of testing and thus number of positive cases.

In the meantime, while Texas saw declining cases of infection, it also saw a precipitous decline in test – a really steep drop – but a worrying rise in positivity rate. That positivity rate was going over 20% which could either mean Texas was not doing enough testing (yes, they weren’t) and/or the virus was spreading rapidly across the communities, with no insight as to who has it and who doesn’t.

Now I’m starting to see articles posing that same suspicion. Here and here are articles talking about the decline in testing happening at the same time as the decline in infection rates, questioning our “improving” situation. Are we as a nation really winning our fight against the pandemic? It looks like a few health experts are dubious about the decline in infection rate.

Here are some graphs for Texas/Georgia/Florida and California/Arizona/Washington as of 8/12/2020. The only difference between the two graphs for each series is that one shows hospitalization rates and the other shows testing rates.

So, yeah, we’re probably operating in the dark. Between the “slowdown” in testing and the change in hospital reporting, we’re in the dark. Way to go, people, way to go.