The slow decline in deaths seems like it must be primarily due to delayed reporting.
We know that there were a few big batches of delayed reports, plus day of the week effects. I can’t think of a good reason to expect those without also expecting a significant number of small batches.
I expect that hospitalization data is much more reliable evidence about the timing of bad health. It shows the expected sharp drop. It also dropped faster than the death rate after the summer wave, and maybe slightly faster than the death rate after the first wave.
In order believe that the death rate was dropping much more slowly than the reported hospitalization rate, it would seem to require something like deaths per hospitalization rise as hospitals become less overwhelmed, or that there are reporting problems that have a significant effect on the rate of change of hospitalization data. Neither seems likely.
I suppose there might be some predictable demographic changes that alter the death rate (i.e. younger people get infected at earlier stages of each wave), but for recent data it’s hard to reconcile that with the effects of vaccines.
It’s got to be either reporting delays, or people dying months after they contracted the virus. I’ve changed my mind a bit, and I’m currently guessing it’s more the latter.
I compared the ratio of reported deaths over the past week in California (1273) and New York state (406). This clearly has no connection with people who recently tested positive, since New York has been reporting over twice as many new cases as California recently.
It was only before mid-January that California last reported something in excess of twice the new cases that NY reported, and only around Christmas or earlier that California reported 3 times as many new cases a NY.
So unless there’s something quite misleading about the ratio of California to NY numbers, recent deaths are dominated by people who contracted the virus around Christmas / New Years.
The slow decline in deaths seems like it must be primarily due to delayed reporting.
We know that there were a few big batches of delayed reports, plus day of the week effects. I can’t think of a good reason to expect those without also expecting a significant number of small batches.
I expect that hospitalization data is much more reliable evidence about the timing of bad health. It shows the expected sharp drop. It also dropped faster than the death rate after the summer wave, and maybe slightly faster than the death rate after the first wave.
In order believe that the death rate was dropping much more slowly than the reported hospitalization rate, it would seem to require something like deaths per hospitalization rise as hospitals become less overwhelmed, or that there are reporting problems that have a significant effect on the rate of change of hospitalization data. Neither seems likely.
I suppose there might be some predictable demographic changes that alter the death rate (i.e. younger people get infected at earlier stages of each wave), but for recent data it’s hard to reconcile that with the effects of vaccines.
It’s got to be either reporting delays, or people dying months after they contracted the virus. I’ve changed my mind a bit, and I’m currently guessing it’s more the latter.
I compared the ratio of reported deaths over the past week in California (1273) and New York state (406). This clearly has no connection with people who recently tested positive, since New York has been reporting over twice as many new cases as California recently.
It was only before mid-January that California last reported something in excess of twice the new cases that NY reported, and only around Christmas or earlier that California reported 3 times as many new cases a NY.
So unless there’s something quite misleading about the ratio of California to NY numbers, recent deaths are dominated by people who contracted the virus around Christmas / New Years.
I can test that hypothesis a bit more robustly but I think this requires the delays be longer than they previously were.