I plead guilty At least in this sense, I'm an absolute moron.
I've been checking the graphs for the past year, or reading media reports about the cases/hospitalizations/deaths, but not too critically. In June, all the numbers were down, and I started to plan accordingly, but when August brought quickly increasing numbers, all plans were changed.
I get your point, that if I just wait 2 weeks, I'll get a more accurate picture of what was happening in the pandemic 2 weeks ago. I prefer a consistent measurement, even if slightly flawed, to a sudden change in measurement that complicates comparisons with what came before.
With all due respect, and I believe you are due much respect, a) I don't think you understood my point, and b) I don't believe you. To be very clear, I don't think you're lying, but I think you're (unintentionally) misrepresenting how you look at and analyze the data. I'm going to address B first, and then try to explain my point.
B) If you follow the charts, you'll see that case counts are the first to rise, followed 3-7 days later by hospitalizations, followed 2-3 weeks later by deaths (the old way). You'll also notice that while case counts and hospitalizations drop fairly quickly after a peak, the downward slope for deaths is a little softer. Without getting into the whys, what ends up happening in reality is that deaths peak after waves have already ended, and stay relatively high when spread is at its lowest. I believe that when
you look at those stats, you automatically explain away and discount the elevated death counts as a natural result of the previous wave.
As an example, take a look at FL's data from July through October of 2020. Cases peaked around the 3rd week of July, and deaths peaked around the 2nd/3rd week of August. Throughout the entire month of September, we averaged about 2500 cases per day, but we were still announcing 100 new Covid deaths per day. You can't tell me that you saw those numbers and thought we still had a serious Covid problem in this state at that time. However, the media and other people are looking at a chart that is screaming at them, "
There are 100 people dying every day in Florida from Covid!" Which brings me to A.
A) My point isn't that if you wait 2 weeks, you'll have a more accurate picture of what was happening. My point is that for accurate data on what
is happening in the pandemic, you need to look at testing and hospital data. Those stats tell you how it's going. Death stats tells you how it went. The announcements of the daily deaths never told you anything useful, other than how many of the people who were sick anytime in the last 1-6 months eventually died over the last few weeks. It didn't tell you when they got sick, how long they were sick for, or when they died, and it certainly didn't tell you the current state of Covid in FL.
(With regards to the chart that was posted from Salemi, I would take a look at another one of his charts he has labeled as "FL COVID-19 Resident Deaths by Date of Death." The chart is D5. If you hover over any point on that chart, you can see a distribution of each day's death by day of announcement. He used to have a better bar chart I believe I posted here in the past, but I can't find it right now.)