Week 17's COVID-19 Report

Week 17:

It's time for the Week 17 Texas COVID-19 Report. We start with the plots for New Cases (bottom) and Fatalities (top). Each graph represents data for a given region; each bar within the graph represents the cases (fatalities) over a week whose color corresponds to a one of five "periods". We are currently in the second week of what I call "Rollback". All data beginning on June 29 (two weeks ago) is shaded in cyan.

New Case Results clearly show a Ramping up of New Case Rates during the last week of Phase 2 (5/31-6/6). Once Phase 3 began, a doubling time of around 2 weeks was measured for all regions (normalized by population). In the case of the Border, the doubling rate is less than two weeks. Recall that officials in El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley wanted to postpone Phase 3 and requested "Special Forces" support from the Governor to control their numbers which were putting pressure on local Hospitals. As shown, the Reopening Strategy seemed to be based on schedule of 3-week per Phase.

Given the various lags (testing, results turnaround, DSHS Investigation/Dashboard posting), the spikes in New Cases and Fatalities always seemed to show up towards the end of that 3rd week; however, the Governor indicated that as long as Hospital Resources were available to fall back on, he did not want to pause to see whether further case increases were in the "pipeline". The End of Phase 3 coincided with 3 weeks after Memorial Day Weekend and High School/College Graduation. These gatherings compounded the increases placing a demand on testing resources and Hospital Plans for resuming elective surgeries.

So here we are. Several posts have remarked that Deaths are still Low - however, that is not what the data says. Spikes aligned with the Second Week of Rollback are well defined. I will spare you all any kind of t-test to show that this wave is the first of several associated with the step change in increased cases that started towards the end of Phase 3. Others have commented that the Death Rates should actually be higher. I will let others who are closer to those records work on that. One does not need this contribution to see that there is in fact a measurable increase in death levels Most worrisome is that for 3 weeks in a row, the Border fatalities have doubled and Hospitalization Numbers have gone up by a factor of 10.