VA Daily COVID Status

Book keeping:   First of all, you may notice I moved off of Facebook.  This is for a variety of reasons.  Some are privacy concerns:  I also would like to be able to reach beyond Facebook.  I know many people that refuse to use the Facebook platform.  This will also allow me to easily see the number of users.  I when I realized I had over 600 on VVCP, and another 200 on my personal page.  Thee are people who "liked" my post, suggesting at least 700 readers and possibly more.    This will also provide a means for me to capture thoughts on other sites, and provide better resources through other easy to find links.  Finally, it will be easier to archive my results.  I plan to include links at the bottom of each entry.   Second, I have changed the age/northern VA plot:  I am adding trend lines for the age groups, which required me to change the colors.  The purpose is so we can see the different trends for different age groups. Daily Status, August 16: Summary: Today, across the

The goal of my reports are:  provide a clear and concise status of COVID in our community Apply physics-based data analysis techniques to identify and understand the trends. Provide straightforward graphical representation of the data Capture the uncertainties in the data. Present without politics, fear uncertainty and doubt. The differences in approaches are religious arguments between scientists (e.g., people looking at the physical reasons for something happening) and statisticians (e.g., data scientists), who parse the data looking for patterns. To me, what is interesting (I am a physicist) is to try to deduce what is changing in the underlying mechanisms….In my case, we are we going from stable to exponential growth.   In the data approach, the data is everything.  You might assume an underlying model, but you do not know anything about things like mask ordinances.  The advantage of that is you can automate it — run numbers for every county, and possibly every zip code in the coun

Daily Status, 08/15:    The numbers state wide, are at 912 new cases.     This is with increased testing as students at various schools go back (I assume those numbers are being reported to the state).      If we look at Virginia Tech, where the reporting is on campus, we can see the surge in testing in the past week as students return.     Not shown is the lack of increase in the number of cases. That means the VT college students are not (to date, and mostly to Cadets) are not bringing COVID with them, and 2) more testing of an uninfected population does not mean more cases (Sorry Fox News).       At this point the week over week numbers are still being impacted by a data glitch.  This week’s numbers appear lower, but that may be (emphasize may) an artifact of the data issues last week and before.   If I look at the three-week trends, they show continuing growth in much of state, (Hampton Roads is decreasing rapidly).  Yesterday, the sky was not falling and today, we are not doing gr