Monday, March 30, 2020

Why do Coronavirus.ohio.gov numbers differ from Governor DeWine's daily reports?

The data sets from Coronavirus.ohio.gov and Cleveland.com (taken from Governor DeWine's daily briefings) do not seem to match, unless I have horribly misunderstood something.  

Coronavirus.ohio.gov shows cases in Ohio that existed before March 9, have a rise to a maximum of 153 on March 17, and show now that the number of  new cases per day is diminishing.   

However, if you go back and plot the number of announced cases at each day's conference with Governor DeWine, you get a significantly different picture.  There were no confirmed cases of Coronavirus prior to March 9. The cases thereafter increased with a steeper exponential and perhaps only in the last few days starting to (maybe) slow down, if the trend continues.

This is shown in my graphs below, and just to prove I didn't make it up, I photographed the coronavirus.ohio.gov graph of the data.  

How can this be? I am certainly not one to allege a conspiracy theory.  I suppose that the Coronavirus.ohio.gov graph must be a model that assumes the virus was present before it was detected, and the ability to detect the virus has improved, so it looks like the cases are increasing.   Still, they should explain the difference so that people like me don't get upset.  


Here is a clean version of the coronavirus.ohio.gov numbers (blue) superimposed with the numbers reported at the governor's daily briefings, transcribed by the author using Cleveland.com summaries.

The graph below is just the daily new cases, or the daily total minus the previous day's total.  The upshot is that if you accept the ohio.gov numbers, the virus has been here longer than we previously thought, therefore the increase is not as rapid as it appeared.  The information from the Governor's briefings are a bit more threatening, although it too seems to show leveling off at some number around 300.

Hopefully someone can clarify for me.  Again, I'm not an expert, I'm just trying to make sense out of the numbers.   




This cell phone screen shot (sorry for poor quality) shows the total cases (light blue), with just a few new cases each day.  On this graph there are 33 cases shown on March 9, even though the news media reports that that was the date of the first confirmed case.  The darker blue upper part of the bar shoes the daily number of new cases, which reached a maximum of 153 on March 17. 

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