COVID ACT NOW has tremendously different data than many of the state websites. I know for instance that in my county in Georgia, Cherokee, Covid Act Now has 83 cases per day while the GA DPH has 29 per day. That is a huge discrepancy, and is unrelated to the media reports earlier in the year about discrepancies at GA DPH, which have long since been cleaned up. I had a discussion about this on Twitter today with a former soccer teammate of mine who is now an attorney with Covid Act Now, in fact:
He claims that Covid Act Now is scraping data from different sources than the official count, but we don’t know what those sources are. So that discrepancy needs to be nailed down before the question can be answered. Covid Act Now may be double counting somewhere, or counting antibody tests.
..they track new infections by age bracket, which you can compare to the total infection rate graphs. As we now know, IFR varies widely by age bracket. IFR under age 25 is about one third of ordinary influenza, while IFR in all brackets age 65 or older is around 8 times higher than ordinary influenza. Deaths are very age related. The deaths curve for Georgia looks almost exactly like the “60 and older” infection curve, and seems unrelated to the other age bracket curves, which is what we should expect given the IFR by age differences. So the very easy answer is that the only infections that matter for deaths are the elderly, and the current wave of infections is not appreciably affecting the elderly.
3.
A three week lag between reported infection and death seems entirely reasonable given how this disease progresses typically.
1.
COVID ACT NOW has tremendously different data than many of the state websites. I know for instance that in my county in Georgia, Cherokee, Covid Act Now has 83 cases per day while the GA DPH has 29 per day. That is a huge discrepancy, and is unrelated to the media reports earlier in the year about discrepancies at GA DPH, which have long since been cleaned up. I had a discussion about this on Twitter today with a former soccer teammate of mine who is now an attorney with Covid Act Now, in fact:
https://twitter.com/Freakoutery/status/1326610597568458753
He claims that Covid Act Now is scraping data from different sources than the official count, but we don’t know what those sources are. So that discrepancy needs to be nailed down before the question can be answered. Covid Act Now may be double counting somewhere, or counting antibody tests.
2.
When you go to GA DPH’s website,
https://dph.georgia.gov/covid-19-daily-status-report
..they track new infections by age bracket, which you can compare to the total infection rate graphs. As we now know, IFR varies widely by age bracket. IFR under age 25 is about one third of ordinary influenza, while IFR in all brackets age 65 or older is around 8 times higher than ordinary influenza. Deaths are very age related. The deaths curve for Georgia looks almost exactly like the “60 and older” infection curve, and seems unrelated to the other age bracket curves, which is what we should expect given the IFR by age differences. So the very easy answer is that the only infections that matter for deaths are the elderly, and the current wave of infections is not appreciably affecting the elderly.
3.
A three week lag between reported infection and death seems entirely reasonable given how this disease progresses typically.