Spreadsheet of San Francisco Bay Area Covid-19 Data and Charts • Hacker News Board

Re: Spreadsheet of San Francisco Bay Area Covid-19 Data and Charts

#41

Post by colechristensen » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #37

colechristensen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe this is a reliable metric. Who gets tested is a moving target. Stanford a short time ago did a free-for-all testing binge in order to collect data, but finished that and is now restricting tests to people requiring specific risk factors to give a test. The first time I tried to get a test from another provider I just wasn't able, they didn't know of anywhere that would test me outside of hospitalizati…

> After two video appointments with separate providers I was able to get tested yesterday and the result came back negative about 22 hours later. It took me about 8 hours of effort and time to get that done, a luxury many people do not have. Is there any value in people self-selecting into personal choice testing? You could get infected tomorrow, for instance... If we wanted a full picture of community spread we'd ne…

Aren't there ways of turning self-selection populations into random sample populations for statistical purposes? (It has just been a while since I have had to think of these things).

But really we want more than just accurate statistics, we want to minimize damage. Any increase in testing is good testing, and triaging testing to highest risk individuals makes sense when your capacity is limited.

The consequences though are that reported statistics are often just wrong. Skewed towards higher negative outcomes and comparisons between dates are flawed without much additional information.

Re: Spreadsheet of San Francisco Bay Area Covid-19 Data and Charts

#42

Post by danans » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

The conspicuous lack of realistic infection data from India, coupled with the extreme challenges to containment and control there (just due to the sheer crowding) is frightening, regardless of whether the poor data is intentional or just because India is hard place to coordinate.

That the published infection and mortality rates are so low strains credulity in the extreme, especially when much smaller-population countries at similar proximity to the equator but greater distance from China have higher case rates (i.e Brazil, Ecuador, the UAE).

Re: Spreadsheet of San Francisco Bay Area Covid-19 Data and Charts

#43

Post by denster » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:27 PM UTC

@andfrob, just saw your comment about SF Chronicle removing their timelapse view.

We made one here from the NYT dataset on MintData [1]:

https://nyt-map.covid42.com/

(note: I think we need to update the cumulative counter, we'll be fixing that shortly)

@andfrob happy to get you free/unlimited access to MintData if you're interested in making similar visualizations, please DM me if this would be helpful.

[1] https://mintdata.com

Re: Spreadsheet of San Francisco Bay Area Covid-19 Data and Charts

#44

Post by pkaye » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

grandmczeb wrote: post #25

pkaye wrote: post #16

California unfortunately has a huge backlog of pending test results. The cause seems to be the private labs (Quest in particular) accepted test samples and build up a huge backlog of the earlier manually processed test samples. Other labs would push back if their queue got too long. The newer samples are run on the Roche high speed machines.

Do you happen to have a source for the cause of the backlog? Not doubting you, just curious to read more information.

See the link to the Atlantic mentioned by boyd.

Re: Spreadsheet of San Francisco Bay Area Covid-19 Data and Charts

#45

Post by grandmczeb » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

boyd wrote: post #38

grandmczeb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m asking for a source on why the backlog happened. Unless I’m missing something, that just shows the number of pending cases.

They accepted more tests than they had the ability to quickly process. They also appear to have accepted many tests that required use of a lower throughput assay before switching to higher throughput testing on Roche 8800s: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/next-covi...

Thanks, googling found this[1] statement by Quest that they have a backlog of 115,000 tests, down from 160,000 on March 25th. It would be interesting to know what percentage of the California backlog is contained within that.

[1] https://newsroom.questdiagnostics.com/COVIDTestingUpdates

Re: Spreadsheet of San Francisco Bay Area Covid-19 Data and Charts

#46

Post by andfrob » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

calebsurfs wrote: post #33

samcheng wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the most important metric is deaths, and from what I can see, the SF Bay Area has done relatively well in that metric. No overcrowded hospitals, for example.

To me the hospitalization rate is most important. * Overcrowded hospitals is what leads to large jumps in fatality rates. * It only lags the date of infection by about a week. * It also isn't subject to external factors like availability of tests. (Though availability of hospital beds is a factor later on)

Agreed! Still not available much on a county level in the San Francisco Bay Area :(

Re: Spreadsheet of San Francisco Bay Area Covid-19 Data and Charts

#47

Post by Jommi » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 12:10 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #15

Jommi wrote: post #10

Where is the most important metric? Daily tested vs tested positive stats.

I don't believe this is a reliable metric. Who gets tested is a moving target. Stanford a short time ago did a free-for-all testing binge in order to collect data, but finished that and is now restricting tests to people requiring specific risk factors to give a test. The first time I tried to get a test from another provider I just wasn't able, they didn't know of anywhere that would test me outside of hospitalizati…

It's one of the most reliable metrics we have, and a lot better than just tests or just confirmed cases.

After you have this info, you can compare the rates to what kind of testing policies the areas have, and make some initial conclusions.

Re: Spreadsheet of San Francisco Bay Area Covid-19 Data and Charts

#48

Post by Jommi » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 12:11 AM UTC

samcheng wrote: post #22

Jommi wrote: post #10

Where is the most important metric? Daily tested vs tested positive stats.

Honestly, the most important metric is deaths, and from what I can see, the SF Bay Area has done relatively well in that metric. No overcrowded hospitals, for example.

In the end, yes deaths are most important, but in order to make temporal decisions that affect that number, we need infection-related data first.

Re: Spreadsheet of San Francisco Bay Area Covid-19 Data and Charts

#49

Post by Jommi » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 12:12 AM UTC

calebsurfs wrote: post #33

samcheng wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the most important metric is deaths, and from what I can see, the SF Bay Area has done relatively well in that metric. No overcrowded hospitals, for example.

To me the hospitalization rate is most important. * Overcrowded hospitals is what leads to large jumps in fatality rates. * It only lags the date of infection by about a week. * It also isn't subject to external factors like availability of tests. (Though availability of hospital beds is a factor later on)

Yes, this is very important. But one should not forget also the avg. hospitalization time (which will go down once we have clear procedures for treating COVID in different stage)