zico wrote:Any thoughts as to what's happening with the daily statistics?
Infections - big drop in mid-July, and even though they've risen since, still below the mid-July level.
Hospitalisations - small drop end-July, and now higher than mid-July.
Deaths - no drop, just a levelling out for a week or so in early-August, and now resuming a steep upward trend.
The observations you've listed could imply that there's been a shift towards only getting tested when you have symptoms
- or conversely.. a shift away from trying to comprehensively catch cases as you would in the "trying to prevent spread" phase
- if we had a breakdown of symptomatic/asymptomatic in the cases we might be able to lend some credence to this
Considering alternatives:
vaccine efficiency waning would case the proportions of cases that convert to hospitalisations and deaths to increase
- but the relative swings in these data sets with respect to the infections seems too abrupt for that to be the case here
- as the vaccines were administered over a fair period of time and you'd expect waning to be similarly spread
So I'm going to suggest that "freedom day" (as a concept more than a specific point in time) brought about a paradigm shift in approach
- sd