shutting down the shutdown

Yesterday Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said the state is ready to begin phase one of opening the economy, in part because deaths from the virus are beginning to decline.  While I support wholeheartedly getting people back to work, I firmly disagree that Georgia's death rate is tapering off.  It is not declining; it is increasing.

Here's a chart I made from the data posted daily on the website of the Georgia Department of Public Health, the agency tracking cases and deaths from the Wuhan virus.  The daily deaths are the yellow line.  The 5-day median is the red line, recalculated every 5 days.  Every 5 days, it's gone up so far.  It has not gone down.  In other words, every five days more people die than the previous five days.  I'm using median as the best measure of central tendency given the huge variability in the data. 

While I am all for opening up the state, I have no frakking clue what they're looking at to say that any rate is declining when their own numbers, released daily, are telling me the death rate is still climbing.

 

I hope that while the rest of us get back to work, we take extraordinary measures to protect the most vulnerable Georgians.  Up to now it looks to me like we've not done enough to protect our nursing homes, while doing too much to lock down everybody else.  Maybe we can change some of that going forward.