It seems like the main alternative would be to have something like Alameda County’s reporting, which has a couple days fewer lag at the expense of less quality control: https://covid-19.acgov.org/data.page?#cases.
It’s really unclear to me that Alameda’s data is more informative than SF’s. (In fact I’d say it’s the opposite—I tend to look at SF over Alameda even though I live in Alameda County.)
I think there is some information lost in SF’s presentation, but it’s generally less information lost than most alternatives on the market. SF is also backdating the data to when the tests were actually performed, thus being transparent about the fact that most test data is about what happened several days ago. Websites that claim to give you more up-to-date information are not actually doing so, they’re just hiding this fact.
If you looked at the next 4 days in the time series it would probably look something like: 500, 200, 100, 100. Not because Omicron is abating but because most tests taken in the last 4 days haven’t had time to be processed and recorded. I think if I was careful I could squeeze a small amount of information out of those numbers (e.g. based on whether the 500 was actually 400 or 600) but it would require a lot of work. I tried this in the past when working with some public health researchers and it’s surprisingly hard to not fool yourself into thinking that cases are going down again when it’s actually reporting lag.
Also my personal take is that SF, on a pure scientific/data basis, has had one of the best responses in the nation, probably benefiting from having UCSF for in-house expertise. (I’m less enthusiastic about the political response—I think we erred way too far on the “take no risks” side, and like everyone else prioritized restaurants over schools which seems like a clear mistake. But on the data front I feel like you’re attacking one of the singularly most reasonable counties in the U.S.)
It seems like the main alternative would be to have something like Alameda County’s reporting, which has a couple days fewer lag at the expense of less quality control: https://covid-19.acgov.org/data.page?#cases.
It’s really unclear to me that Alameda’s data is more informative than SF’s. (In fact I’d say it’s the opposite—I tend to look at SF over Alameda even though I live in Alameda County.)
I think there is some information lost in SF’s presentation, but it’s generally less information lost than most alternatives on the market. SF is also backdating the data to when the tests were actually performed, thus being transparent about the fact that most test data is about what happened several days ago. Websites that claim to give you more up-to-date information are not actually doing so, they’re just hiding this fact.
If you looked at the next 4 days in the time series it would probably look something like: 500, 200, 100, 100. Not because Omicron is abating but because most tests taken in the last 4 days haven’t had time to be processed and recorded. I think if I was careful I could squeeze a small amount of information out of those numbers (e.g. based on whether the 500 was actually 400 or 600) but it would require a lot of work. I tried this in the past when working with some public health researchers and it’s surprisingly hard to not fool yourself into thinking that cases are going down again when it’s actually reporting lag.
Also my personal take is that SF, on a pure scientific/data basis, has had one of the best responses in the nation, probably benefiting from having UCSF for in-house expertise. (I’m less enthusiastic about the political response—I think we erred way too far on the “take no risks” side, and like everyone else prioritized restaurants over schools which seems like a clear mistake. But on the data front I feel like you’re attacking one of the singularly most reasonable counties in the U.S.)