COVID-19 Daily Update for Yesterday, 8/26/2020

Automation Update, Available Figures:

I am now automatically generating several figures each day and pushing them to an online "git" repository. I have had two volunteers offer to work on creating a web page that will provide a more useful interface to the figures/data. But for now, you can browse the figures with this link. 

There are several things available so far. 

First, I am running the rt.live algorithm on the US as a whole (which they don't do). There are some good reasons they don't do that (the US is a diverse place, and some areas are doing better than others). But for those interested in what their algorithm has to say about the US as a whole, I now provide that visual updated every day.

As I have previously discussed, I disagree with the conclusions of rt.live's algorithm. I believe they are FAR too aggressive in adjusting for testing rates, which causes them to assume that the first peak(in April) was much higher than the second (in July). I believe they were of roughly the same size. So I hope to eventually provide a modified version of this analysis that more accurately adjusts for testing rates. 

We are providing tests and cases for each state. As an example, here's New Mexico: 

For these figures, the scale is set such that the tests are at a scale 10 times that of the cases, therefore, if the cases are above the tests in the figure, then the percent of tests that are positive is over the danger zone of 10%. The goal is to keep the cases (orange line) well below the tests (blue line).

 

And finally, we are providing the % of tests that are positive information directly in its own figure. As an example, here is New Mexico again: 

Again, the goal is to keep the % positive rate below the danger zone of 10%. 

Because I am now producing these figures for each state every day, you can check your own state, without waiting for me to do one of my "daily updates" on the state you care about. 

This is all a work in progress, so hopefully the user interface for viewing all this data will improve substantially in the future.