Something Hinky Goin On

If you've been following, you recall that I've been following covid case numbers pretty closely. You probably appreciate that I'm not shoving them at you lately with equal fervor. You're welcome.

Problem is, lately there has been something hinky going on, and not just in certain (red) states under reporting numbers, doing less testing even as numbers are scooting way up, and anybody at all relying on numbers that get covid-laundered by the administration pet liars, totally bypassing the CDC. If you've been paying attention, none of this is news.

I gave myself a project a few months back. I started keeping daily track of certain numbers. These - coming from, Worldometer, Minnesota's own website, and Arizona's own website - have been taken down daily. I started with just US figures, cases and deaths.

Then when the BLM protests started in Minneapolis, I wondered what that would do to caseloads in Minneapolis. This is the city my daughter and son in law live in. Not finding those, I settled for Hennepin County's case and death numbers. I also keep track of cases in the county I have an offspring living in, just because I worry and hope he's OK, as well as where my brother lives. Hennepin's I write down, the other two I just note daily. It's reassuring to see only one death where my son lives, and none where my brother is.

When the Tulsa rally was held, when a million people signed up to attend and just over 6,000 actually showed up, not socially distancing nor wearing masks, and with several of the president's advance team testing positive, my interest was peaked and I added OK to my list... for a while. Florida and Georgia and Texas and we were all skyrocketing, and it got to be a bit much. I settled for watching those numbers but not writing them down. It was interesting to see New York and New Jersey slide down the list out of their #1 and #2 worst positions, and watch Arizona bounce from 10th to 8th to 7th and back to 8th again. We're getting close to 7th again. Maybe another week or two?

I have been tracking another metric. Arizona posts cases - not deaths, just cases - by zip code. I started tracking mine, then a nearby friend's, then observing those around us for a couple tiers out. When I started, my zip code had 23 cases. It's slowly climbed, relatively speaking. Perhaps so many of our residents are up north these days, relative to neighboring areas. I know this neighborhood is pretty sparsely occupied, if one can go by houses lit in the early evenings. (I've noticed since I've been driving Rich to his job recently: he has split shifts.) On July 7th I started writing our numbers down as well.

Normally they would rise a few cases a day. Once they climbed by 10, once 12, another time by 20. These were outliers, possibly a catching up in reporting, possibly accurate. Then as things ramped up, jumps of 10 or more became common for a bit, until the pattern slowed again. Since those numbers fairly well matched state numbers, the levels seemed pretty believable. Slowing back down seemed normal as well. Our hospitals have some space again, one reliable metric.

It's just lately the numbers got hinky. Not just once, but it's repeating. Starting August 8th, the number of daily total cases in my zip code have gone:  429, 428, 427, 428, 430, 427.

Somebody's fiddling with the numbers! It hasn't happened in any other set of numbers I've been writing down. Cases only keep rising, sometimes faster or slower, and in an area as small as my zip code they might even flatten for a day, though that hasn't happened since very early on. But NEVER DO THEY BOUNCE UP AND DOWN, UP AND DOWN!

NEVER!