Covid-19 in Saint Charles County - Graphs

Below is a collection of graphs that I have created to show several different data points that I find helpful in tracking this disease in the county. You can read some of my notes about the data in these charts here.

Covid-19 Data Issues in Saint Charles County

May 22 Update:
I reached out to the County Health Department about this discrepancy and received the following reply/explanation:

The County’s health and information systems departments did switch reporting systems recently and noticed an error in the presentation of reported numbers. This caused the issue you note, and this was corrected as soon as possible.

I am not sure if the switch refers to the update to the PowerBI dashboard or if it refers to the actual source they are collecting the data from. I have not nioticed any updates the the actual layout or content of the dashboard, so i assume it is the data source. If the change in source resulted in a greater than 5% negative change in reported cases, then there seems to be valid reason for concern with the validity of the numbers that have been previously reported.

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Original post:
I have been tracking the spread of Covid-19 in St. Charles County since the day the first case was announced. For several weeks, the County only had a table of current data on the site, so I was manually tracking daily case totals in a spreadsheet in order to see the trends. Finally, the County utilized PowerBI to provide some graphs of the data in a dashboard format. However, the County had not created some of the graphs that I thought helped better tell the story, so I continue to input and update daily new cases and deaths into my spreadsheet, all based on the published County data.

Over the course of this pandemic, firm numbers regarding positive cases, and even deaths, have been hard to establish. For Saint Charles County, the tale is no different. Most days, I have to scroll back though the previous days and update a few up or down by 1 or 2 cases. Typically, most of the changes occur to dates within the past 14 days, which makes sense, as this is within the window of symptoms presenting and test results being obtained. However, over the past week, I have noticed that the numbers are changing on dates much further back in time. 

Active Cases of Covid-19 in St. Charles County

Currently, the County website continues to show cumulative case numbers and does not show active case numbers. I have been tracking this data for over a month and present the below for reference.

Updated 06MAY20

Current Cumulative Cases: 637

Current Active Cases: 126

You can view the entire collection of my graphs that are updated regularly here.

Covid-19 Graph Notes

I have published some of the charts that I have created about Covid-19 in St. Charles County, MO. level data. Below are a couple of notes about how I arrived at some of my data points.

Notes:

• I have utilized the daily death total that I have been tracking on my own, as the county still does not publish them in a table at the daily level. 
• Due to the unavailability of the Recovery data at the county level, I have assumed the standard 14 day recovery window for all cases. I realize that this is variable, but for consistency sake and trend analysis, I felt like this data point was useful.
• I have calculated the number of Active Cases as follows:
• Active Cases = Yesterday's Active Cases + Today's New Cases - Today's Deaths - 14 Day Prior Daily Delta (Defined : Daily New Cases - Daily Deaths Announced)  

On the Fiscal Cliff

Thomas Sowell expresses his thoughts about the Fiscal Cliff, and these portions echo exactly what I think and feel:

First of all, despite all the melodrama about raising taxes on "the rich," even if that is done it will scarcely make a dent in the government's financial problems. Raising the tax rates on everybody in the top two percent will not get enough additional tax revenue to run the government for ten days.

No previous administration in the entire history of the nation ever finished the year with a trillion dollar deficit. The Obama administration has done so every single year.

Referring to the Federal Reserve System's creation of hundreds of billions of new dollars out of thin air as "quantitative easing" makes it seem as if this is some soothing and esoteric process, rather than amounting essentially to nothing more than printing more money.
Debasing the value of money by creating more of it is nothing new or esoteric. Irresponsible governments have done this, not just for centuries, but for thousands of years.
It is a way to take people's wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

But it is not the same politically, so long as gullible people don't look beyond words to the reality that inflation taxes everybody, the poorest as well as the richest.

And there are these nuggets from Part 2:

A key lie that has been repeated over and over, largely unanswered, is that President Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" cost the government so much lost tax revenue that this added to the budget deficit-- so that the government cannot afford to allow the cost of letting the Bush tax rates continue for "the rich."

What is remarkable is how easy it is to show how completely false Obama's argument is.

What both the statistical tables in the "Economic Report of the President" and the graphs in Investor's Business Daily show is that (1) tax revenues went up-- not down-- after tax rates were cut during the Bush administration, and (2) the budget deficit declined, year after year, after the cut in tax rates that have been blamed by Obama for increasing the deficit.  

And here are the table and images referred to above:

Why I Think America Is In Deep Trouble

Last week I was thinking about all of the hype surrounding the debt-ceiling when it occurred to me that I haven't check the status of the Federal Reserve's Monetary Base lately. What follows is a lengthy post where I try to recapture all of my thoughts on this and various topics that I have written about over the course of the past few years.

I started tracking the Monetary Base prior to attending the April 15, 2009 Tea Party in downtown St. Louis, after which I posted my reasons for attending the tea party event. Included in that post was a graph showing the National Debt Per Capita and the Adjusted Monetary Base.

US States Compared to Foreign Countries

The Economist released the following map showing the size of each state's GDP as it relates to another country. For example, Missouri's GPD is roughly the same size as Finland's with a population that is equivalent to Paraguay's.

(HT: 22 Words)

Economics and Health Care

I found the chapter entitled "The Economics of Medical Care" in Thomas Sowell's book Applied Economics to be incredibly informative and a helpful presentation of facts versus myths in the healh care discussion. For example:

Fourty percent of uninsured Americans are under the age of 25 and more than 60 percent are under the age of 35. Fewer than 10 percent of people over 55 are uninsured, despite the widespread political use of an image of old people who have to choose between food and medical care. This may be the political image of the uninsured, but it is hardly the reality. - p67

To Whom Much Is Given - The Hole In Our Gospel

- Today’s 1,125 billionaires hold more wealth than the wealth of half the world’s adult population. (The World's Billionaires: A New Count, A New Record)
- The wealthiest 7 people on earth control more wealth than the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the 41 most heavily indebted (poor) nations (Poverty Facts & Stats)
- The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for just 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of the world’s income. (United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2007/2008, p25)
- The top 20 percent of the world’s population consumes 86 percent of the world’s goods. (United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2007/2008, p25)

- The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, page 122.