[dirk digler]

Originally Posted by petegz28

That would go against what we have seen thus far. Again, the data is what it is, not what you want it to be. And at no time during the initial surge in cases did we see deaths decline. At no time. Deaths increased daily with cases and didn't decline until cases started to decline. Sure there is some lag but you can't revise things to be what they aren't because you want to make some kind of point.

Will the downtrend in deaths continue? Let's hope so. We certainly are seeing a divergence between deaths and cases at the moment anyway and you should be hoping it stays that way.

I hope it stays that way as well but from the very beginning everybody says deaths lags by weeks. That is why the recovered number barely goes down because it takes a long time to either die or recover. The people that are dying today got infected a month ago.

Come Aug 1 we should have a better idea of those positive cases that has happened in the last couple of weeks.

Deaths are the ultimate lagging indicator, especially with Covid-19. It takes several weeks after a diagnosis for a patient to die. Then it takes more time, sometimes weeks, for doctors to fill out death certificates and health officials to adjudicate the deaths. Only then are they finally added to the official state tally.

“You can’t look at deaths as an indicator of where the outbreak is at this particular period of time,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Waiting for data to roll in requires “patience that is hard to muster during a crisis,” said Joe Gerald, an associate professor of public health policy and management at the University of Arizona. But “if you want reliable, complete data, you have to wait for it, especially on deaths.”

In Arizona, the time between diagnosis and death from Covid-19 now is about 14 or 15 days, up from four or five days early in the pandemic. Then the state health department must verify the death, so there can be a three-plus week lag between a new case and a fatality being reported, Gerald said.

Half of the deaths reported for the week ending June 14 were more than a week old, so he expects it to take at least another week before he can reach any conclusions about the mortality rate for this surge. A modest bump could be expected with younger patients being hospitalized at a higher rate of hospitalization, Gerald said