Georgia's Covid death rate declines

Here's an explanation you're unlikely to get from the hand-wringing set on CNN or NBC or FOX or even WSB.  The news readers don't understand the news.  All numbers are from the Georgia Department of Public Health's website.

First, even though case numbers are bullshit for many reasons, let's set that aside and look at case numbers graphically over time:

 

Looks pretty scary where it begins to tail upwards in early June, doesn't it?

 

Okay, then let's graph Georgia's deaths over that same time period and see how those look:

We see the same trend near the end, with gross numbers rising after a long flat period earlier in the year, then a dip in June before climbing a lot near the end of July.

If you've seen any analysis at all on your TV news, that's about all you're getting - a simplistic trend analysis with an emphasis on the numbers at the end going up.  So we can say that both case numbers and deaths are up in Georgia, right?  Fair enough, but that's not the whole story.

What's the actual RATE of deaths?  Has anyone mentioned that lately?  Probably not, because it's going down, going down dramatically.  The simplest way to calculate that rate is the obvious one: divide the daily deaths reported by the daily case numbers.  That'll give you a daily death rate.  That graph looks like this:

 

Well, bless your heart!  The death rate is going down to nothing.  Why?  Because while deaths are indeed up, the case numbers are up a heck of a lot more.  The percentage of people dying from Covid in Georgia is a very, very small fraction of the number of people who get it. 

But deaths lag cases, right?  That is, people who die on March 10th aren't the same as the people who are reported sick on March 10th.  They're more likely to be part of the group reported in the case numbers back on March 1st.  So let's offset the deaths and cases by ten days to assume a lag time between the case report and the subsequent death.  That graph looks like this:

 

 

The actual percentages are different and probably more realistic, but the trend is the same - down, down, down.  

You aren't seeing this reported because it doesn't work to scare you, but it's the truth, because...math.