VA Daily COVID Status

  Daily Status, August 30: This morning, I decided to write a bit about my approach to analyzing the data.  If you are interested, here is the link: Data Approaches Summary/Situational Awareness Again, today's concern are with the universities.  Only one school is doing well (W & M), with no increase since the students arrived.  UVA is showing increases, but probably consistent with the increased populations -- they have moved to monitor closely.  Meanwhile, there is community spread is present at Virginia Tech, JMU, Radford, and VCU.  More on this in the section title "Colleges".  The discussion of colleges will take up most of the new discussion Across the commonwealth, there were about 938 reported new cases .  This with is slightly below the average number of cases in the last three week, but within 1 standard deviation.    Regionally, all parts of VA are increasing except eastern VA. SW VA is leading the pack, mostly the result of the outbreak at Radford.   It is

Overview In this report I am describing how I interpret the data.  What are the approaches, and pitfalls in the approach.  First some definitions: Signal :  what I am looking for:  the growth of the disease in a population Noise :  Random variations in the data unrelated to the signal Clutter :  Other events that mimic the signals I am looking for.  One man's signal is another man's clutter.  The only way to remove clutter is to look at other data source, such as press reports.   Data The data I use comes from the Department of Health.  The Department of Health collects reports from the various labs and collates into a common format.  The data are reported as cumulative number of cases, hospitalizations, and testing by day and by geographical area.  The geographical areas include Health District, political location, and Zip code.  But not all data is reported at the same granularity.  Some is only by health district (e.g., cases by age or race).  Some is at locality, and number