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How to Tell If Utah Is Having a Bad Day Today

It's Saturday, September 19th. It's a couple of hours before today's Utah case numbers come out.

How do we know if the recent  uptick is continuing to get worse? Here's a number for you: 634 new cases.

That's a lot less than yesterday's 1,089 new cases.

How could a big decline from yesterday be a bad thing?

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Here's how. The case count data is seasonal.

Seasonal is the word used in economics (and other fields) for data measurements that have a repetitive pattern in them. For example, employment is higher every December due to retail firms hiring more workers for holiday shopping season. Seasonality is a generic name: it doesn't always have to be related to seasons. What's important is that the pattern occurs regularly.

Case data in epidemiology is usually seasonal too. Importantly in this case, there are weekly seasonals in case data for most diseases. The reason is simple: the weekend. Doctor's offices are open less. Labs have fewer people working. Sick people who might have been out and around a bit and able to pop into a testing center on a weekday decide to hunker down at home for a couple of days, and so on.

With positive test results, they're usually higher early in the week (as the labs catch up from the weekend), and lower on the weekend when only the most urgent tests are completed.

A particularly simple way to deal with this is to look at the growth rate between the same day each week.

This is really bad folks. That's a multiple that's plotted. When it's above one and level, we'll get more cases on a day than we got the same day last week. An outbreak, could even show up in something like this: if it bumped up to a new level, and then stayed horizontal (say, we'd been getting 5% more cases each week, and suddenly we start getting 6% more).

But this multiple hasn't even leveled out yet!

Do the math. Yesterday's total of 61,775 cases was about 1.09 times larger than the previous Friday's 56,693 cases. So, if the outbreak is the same today and is was yesterday, we should have 1.09 times as many as last Saturday's 57,275. That's 62,409: an increase of 634 from yesterday.

Anything more and that upward sloping line has taken another step upwards.

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Here's some speculation on where this outbreak came from (credit to MJ). The uptick starts a week ago Thursday. That's 3 days after Labor Day.

The incubation period for COVID-19 is about 4-5 days. All of this is consistent with students away at college mixing with family back home over the holiday weekend. Given that the outbreak is mostly in the population center Salt Lake and Utah counties, and has skipped over some other counties with big student populations (Cache and Weber), I suspect the direction was from the colleges into the Salt Lake metropolitan area.

Here’s a bit more about my college to city hypothesis.

The data from this comes from the state’s dashboard, but you have to go down to the heading “Cases by Local Health Department” to see the graphs showing that it is mostly a Salt Lake and Utah county event. Just over half the state’s population lives in those two counties.

The official Salt Lake City metropolitan area is quite a bit larger, but when most people think of Salt Lake, or the Wasatch Front, they’re thinking of Utah, Salt Lake, Davis, and Weber counties, with maybe Summit thrown in. Really … Box Elder, Juab, Morgan, Tooele, and Wasatch counties are not “Salt Lake” — and Cache definitely is not — no matter what the Census Bureau says the CMSA is.

Two of the big universities in the state — the U, and BYU — are in this area. Weber State is too. And Utah is a state characterized by fewer students from other states, and few students leaving to go to schools in other states. There are some other universities in Utah, but they mostly draw from other parts of the state (and also SUU has gone to a quarter-like calendar, and only began the session just as the uptick in the statewide numbers started).

Also, it’s a given that for many college students this year, living on or near campus is less likely.

Now, follow the logic:

• BYU draws from the furthest distances, but most of those students wouldn’t go home to Utah would they? And if you are worried about living on or near campus, it’s an easy commute from Utah County, and a do-able one from Salt Lake County.
• The U is more of a commuter school already, than most flagship schools. And again, an easy commute from within Salt Lake County, and a doable one from Utah County.
• Weber State does not have as many students, and is much more of a commuter school. But it would be a tough commute to and from Utah County and the southern parts of Salt Lake County, so my guess is that a lot of those students choose to live in Ogden to get away from their parents.
• And then there’s Utah State: comparable in size to BYU and the U, and close to impossible to do as a commute from Salt Lake County or Utah County. And not much of an uptick in its Cache County.

So here’s what I think. It’s tough to imagine reasons why an outbreak would flare up after Labor Day in just Salt Lake County and Utah County. That is, unless there was an influx of people from outside into both of those counties. Some people might go from Weber and Cache counties to school in Salt Lake and Utah counties, but the numbers must be much larger going the other way.

And I think they did the easy 2-ish hour drive back home for the long weekend, bringing their admittedly low incidence levels into thousands of otherwise COVID-insulated homes in Salt Lake County and Utah County.

Finding Out the Hard Way

Cold Spring Shops on the COVID-19 experiences of colleges and their students:

Is anybody really surprised that when you peddle the residential campus experience as a social experience, and the classroom stuff might be secondary, that people might take you up on the offer?

I hadn’t thought about it that way yet. But yeah … I do notice there’s a lot less outbreaks at commuter schools and community colleges — where students take their studies briefly and then head to home or work.

Cross-posted from SUU MacroBlog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

The Vote-by-Mail Issue No One Is Talking About

Chicago Boyz brings up a good point: no one seems to be worried about within household pressure to vote appropriately.

I would add, what about within household vote fraud: person 1 throws their ballot away in disgust and person 2 fills it out fraudulently.

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And here’s a salient test. If you don’t think this is going to be an issue, you should be able to tell me where someone can report a problem if there is one. If you can’t, pipe down.

Buffalo Gets MLB

The first major league baseball game in Buffalo in decades is on right now.

Here’s coverage from The Beaverton.

FWIW: I have posted about Buffalo’s past attempts to get an MLB team. BUT, you may have noticed that Google sucks these days, and it won’t find a link to it. Long story short, Buffalo was the front runner, until groups in Miami and Denver offered a whole bunch more money in east to carry bags.

UPDATE: Google may suck, but Bing does not suck as much. They found this post about how Buffalo was supposed to get an MLB team in 1969. That team went to Montreal. How’d that work out for you MLB? Still looking for the post about how Buffalo was supposed to get an MLB team all through the late 80’s and early 90’s until that WTF day.

UPDATE 2: Woo hoo. I found it the old-fashioned way: I spent a few minutes looking for what Google took milliseconds to deny the existence of. Here’s the link. Also, the link in the post is being redirected (for who knows what reason), but the original is here. The skinny is that MLB laid out what it wanted in a major league city, Buffalo did it, and then they chose the money.

Some George Will

George Will revisits Jose Ortega y Gasset:

The cancelers are reverse Rumpelstiltskins, spinning problems that merit the gold of complex ideas and nuanced judgments into the straw of slogans. Someone anticipated something like this.

Today’s gruesome irony: A significant portion of the intelligentsia that is churned out by higher education does not acknowledge exacting standards of inquiry that could tug them toward tentativeness and constructive dissatisfaction with themselves. Rather, they come from campuses, cloaked in complacency. Instead of elevating, their education produces only expensively schooled versions of what José Ortega y Gasset called the “mass man.”

In 1932’s “The Revolt of the Masses,” the Spanish philosopher said this creature does not “appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. . . . He will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes.” (Emphasis is Ortega’s.)

Much education now spreads the disease that education should cure, the disease of repudiating, without understanding, the national principles that could pull the nation toward its noble aspirations. The result is barbarism, as Ortega defined it, “the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.” A barbarian is someone whose ideas are “nothing more than appetites in words,” someone exercising “the right not to be reasonable,” who “does not want to give reasons” but simply “to impose his opinions.”

Remove the sexism, and the third paragraph describes a teenager in our family.

Read the whole thing, entitled “Much of today’s intelligentsia cannot think” in The Washington Post. Via Cafe Hayek.

Beirut

I am not usually into disaster porn (definition here), but the explosion in Beirut has got my attention. This photo especially.

You can also see this in the aerials: the amber slope is grain. Lebanon imports 80% of its food, and if you look at the satellite images, there’s a single grain elevator complex at the harbor. This is it afterwards. We don’t usually think of food as getting destroyed.

Some Cognitive Dissonance

Some people want:

• Relaxed mail-in voting rules or ID rules
• The U.S. to be governed more like other OECD countries.

Here’s the dissonance:

… There are 36 member states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Forty-seven percent ban mail-in voting unless the citizen is living abroad, and 30 percent require a photo ID to obtain a mail-in ballot. Fourteen percent of the countries ban mail-in voting even for those living abroad. [emphasis added]

The percentages are higher if we restrict the comparison set from the OECD to the European Union.

My experience with mail-in voting is that the damn things just show up in the snail mail. Yet in other countries you have to present your ID to even get one. Funny that.

If concern about voter fraud with mail-in ballots is delusional, it is a delusion that is shared by most of the world.

You can read the whole thing in that bastion of conservatism and Trumpers, Newsweek.

But wait … you can’t actually have cognitive dissonance until you’ve at least heard both sides of the argument.

Innumeracy: Beirut Explosion Edition

Reports are that the Beirut explosion was caused by 2,750 metric tons of Ammonium Nitrate.

That’s 2.75 Kilotons.

BUT, ammonium nitrate is not as explosive as TNT. In fact, it’s 0.42 times as explosive.

Equivalent tons of TNT is how a nuclear weapon’s power is estimated, so this is roughly 1.3 Kt. (Got to factor in that it’s metric tons, and Kt are measured in American tons too). That’s a lot smaller than Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but a lot bigger than the tactical nukes that the big countries armies have intended to use on the battlefield for decades.

So, here’s the innumeracy:

… a blast the equivalent to three million kilotons of TNT …

This innumeracy is from the Daily Mail. Not a great source, but certainly a popular one with enough money to employ journalists who know a thing or two.

Or not.

The author doesn’t appear to know that:

• A ton of something (even something explosive) does not mean the same thing as a ton of TNT.
• A ton of ammonium nitrate does not have the same power as a ton of TNT, or
• Most egregiously, that megaton and kiloton are variations on the same measure, and are almost never used to compound one another. When we’re talking about megatons of kilotons, we’re in the scale of all explosives on the planet, ever, all in one place.

Three strikes and you should be out.

Prima Facie Causality

6/20: Trump rally in Tulsa without social distancing.

6/29: Herman Cain tests positive for COVID-19.

7/30: RIP.

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In stats classes we all learn that correlation does not imply causation.

That’s always true in cross-sectional analysis.

But it’s not quite so always true in time-series analysis.

And, do note most importantly that the converse is true: causation does imply correlation (although you might have to correct for a lot of interference from other data to uncover that).

Going back to Bertrand Russell (and others), before there was a field of time-series analysis, it was established that temporal ordering was an important feature of causality: the cause must precede the effect.

Correlation between past events that could theoretically be causal, and future events that could theoretically be effects, is known as prima facia causality.†

And it’s a substantially stronger indication of (true) causality than mere correlation.

In this case, the 9 days between the rally and the positive test is right in the middle of the current CDC range for exposure to onset of symptoms.

† My 1992 dissertation did quite a bit of work on this in the context of monetary policy.

Words Have Meaning

Like pretty much every human, I was genuinely horrified by the shark attack in Maine this past Monday.

But I am a bit bothered that I have seen nothing, anywhere, noting that you probably shouldn’t swim in a body of water named after food.

I dunno’, I think it’s plausible Mackerel Cove was named after all the mackerel there.

Smaller mackerel are forage fish for larger predators, including larger mackerel and Atlantic cod.[2] Flocks of seabirds, whales, dolphins, sharks, and schools of larger fish such as tuna and marlin follow mackerel schools and attack them ...

There is a public beach there. My guess is that it was opened when sharks were mostly fished out of waters in the northeast. Fair enough.

But that doesn’t mean that the words shouldn’t mean something to potential swimmers.

Somehow, we seem to have evolved into this sort of “societal teenagerism”, where the connections between words and implications for ideas are readily ignored. Like this:

Fishing out all the sharks, and

Safely swimming in a place named for shark food.

Those two ideas go together. So does their inverse.

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FWIW:

Yes, I love swimming in the ocean too.

Yes, I am part of the Jaws generation, and I worry too much about sharks.

Yes, I can see myself not giving these names a second thought.

None of which changes anything above.