Seis de Mayo: modeling (and not the good kind :))

It's Wednesday!!!  Hump Day!!!  Even if there's no real hump.  Woo woo!

It's also seis de Mayo, in case you need further reinforcement after yesterday -- a real Mexican holiday.  Woo woo!

We decided we needed Mexican food to celebrate.  We called the most local Mexican place (by which I do NOT mean Taco Bell 😒) -- every decent sized, or even small (I remember the one in my uncle's "town" which is a crossroads), town in America has one.  Or tried. It was busy.  And busy.  And busy.  When we finally got through (this shouldn't have been a surprise, Sherlock!), we were told it was a 90-minute wait for our dinner.  Okay, we wanted Mexican.

For the record, it was good.  More food than we could eat and I didn't even get my side order of rice. 😦

So, yes, we are still in a state of stasis here.  We are in the "red" area of the state, bordering to the west on the yellow area, which some things are different.  Though, according to the charts and the news reports, not much.

But cases are down in PA.  A bit.  Actually, yesterday's tally was up from Monday's.

Which gets us to the title: modeling.  

If you've been paying some nerdy attention, you will have noticed that day-to-day reporting on cases is a funky thing to watch.  Some days it goes up, some days it goes down, then the next day it goes back up.   Given that this is human behavior and an erratic kind of spread, some of that is to be expected.

But there also turns out to be a "weekend effect" to watch, too.  It seems reporting is always lower on weekends -- it isn't till Tuesday that you get a quality count.  There is an analogy with teaching -- students tell you not to expect their best on Monday or Friday.  Or too early any day.  Or too late any day.  In other words, there's a really good window for half an hour on Tu, Wed, and Thurs that is worth hitting. 😂

So, we know not to get too excited about Monday numbers (thus, Monday's low count in PA wasn't the win it looked like)

Of course these tabulations matter.  We've had 65,000 people die in this country already, and the guesstimates on the final number widely vary.  It seems the White House prediction has fluctuated a lot, as represented by the President changing it publicly almost every time he talks, having missed the low end (70,000) and sometimes pushing a high end closing on 300,000. 

Depends on the model.  And your assumptions.

With states like Florida opening up (isn't Florida kind of the definition of an at-risk group?), the model has to shift from a spread rate of X to Y -- in other words from R<1 to R>1. ( I guess R stands for "rate" but I keep seeing R=Republican and am hopeful for less than 1 of them 😂).  I've seen figures that say New York is now down to R=.9, which means the virus isn't spreading.

But I wonder.  I saw the President in Arizona yesterday, sans mask.  I know *I* am not risking infection for Mexican food in a restaurant (or anything else).  I wonder about those who think opening is a good idea because there'll be enough business to make money from in-person service.

I just hope the models are right that think things are "normal-ish" come August. 

Fingers crossed.