I haven’t made any changes to my Indiana COVID-19 plots since the last update, but I wanted to comment on some of the trends. The Governor announced a week ago today that the state would move to Stage 5 of our response. The reduced restrictions took effect on Saturday.

It’s far too early for drawing any causal effects. Nonetheless, I find it interesting that fate seems to be saying “I’ll show you!” In the last six days, the trend in daily deaths is upward. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday have averaged an increase in 7 deaths over the prior week (although the two-week comparisons are much noisier). The week-over-week change in cases is riding a five-day positive run. This is the first stretch longer than three days since early August. Normally the new case count varies wildly in both directions, so it’s unusual to see a stable run like this.

The state’s dashboard hints at an upward trend in the positive test rate again. Hospitalizations are up 16% (135 patients) in the past week. This trend has continued fairly steadily for the past week and a half.

What concerns me most is the model verification. The last few weeks of IHME forecasts were initially running a bit high, but in the last few days, they’re now under-predicting the daily death counts. This could suggest that the bad scenario predicted for December will be worse than forecast. It also may not. This is a short window, so we’ll have to see how trends hold.

As I said at the beginning, these bad trends in Indiana’s data cannot be tied to the move to Stage 5. But it does suggest that it was a bad decision. As my friend Renee wrote today, it’s less that things have improved and more that we’ve just grown accustomed to things being bad.