Already atypical holiday likely to disrupt coronavirus counts
The holiday weekend could mean a significant disruption in daily coronavirus data reporting.
Case counts may drop Thursday through the end of the weekend as public health departments operate with reduced staff and test sites temporarily close, then spike as counties catch up with the holiday reporting lag. Those numbers probably will not be accurate reflections of what is happening in the community.
“Very few states will do full, if any, reporting on Thanksgiving,” said Erin Kissane, cofounder of the COVID Tracking Project. “We’re not sure how many will wait until Monday to do a catchup or even later.”
It is hard to know how long the numbers will seesaw as the virus spreads uncontrolled in many parts of the country, but the experts think it will be unlike the effects we saw over the summer on Fourth of July and Labor Day.
“The main thing is we now have something that looks more like a fourday weekend than a threeday,” Kissane said. “We’re also well into a nationwide case surge and hospitalization surge. It’s really going to hurt the data.”
Most jurisdictions relay numbers by the date they are reported rather than specifically when tests are taken and symptoms appear. There is typically an additional lag in processing and posting the data publicly.
In California, numbers
typically drop over the weekend due to counties not reporting, and then we often see an uptick on Monday as public health agencies dump data.
Most deaths take more than a week on average to report, which is why most public health departments rely on sevenday and 14day averages as their main indicators.
“Every one of these pipelines starts with a human being,” Kissane said. “It goes through a bunch of loops and twists and lags. It goes through messy pipelines. The best data we have anywhere is only an estimate at best of what is going on.”
While Thanksgiving could cause a minor disruption in data reporting, the current trajectory of the virus is cause for concern.
“We don’t know what to expect,” Kissane said. “We just have to hold on.”
With many people planning to flout public health warnings on indoor gatherings to varying degrees, we will see a legitimate spike in cases shortly following Thanksgiving, causing a further backlog in reporting.
“There’s going to be that false spike that’s too close,” Kissane said. “And then there’s going to be the real data. We expect to see some kind of rise, and it’s going to be a bigger backlog than we’ve seen before.”
Where should one look for the most reliable numbers of where we are with the pandemic?
The experts say current hospitalizations and new admissions will be the best indicator of what is happening in the coming weeks. We probably will not see the impact of Thanksgiving infections until at least the second week in December, just in time for another data disruption around Christmas.
“We couldn’t have designed a worse holiday than Thanksgiving or worse time for it than right now,” Kissane said.