I’d really hoped to not have to write another of these. The optimism I felt at the end of March when all the numbers were on the way down and vaccination was becoming widely available has now vanished. As the so-called delta variant races through the country, all of Indiana’s numbers are heading upward again.

Recent trends

After a slow downward trend to start the summer, the last few weeks have shown an increase in COVID-19 deaths.

This is to be expected given the increase in cases and hospitalizations. In fact, the hospitalizations have increased faster than any time since the state started keeping records in early April of 2020.

The state had over 1,000 people in the hospital on Thursday (the latest data available) for the first time since May 4. If Friday was also above 1,000, that will mark the first time with consecutive 1,000+ days since mid-February. Hospitalizations have gone up 146% in the last month.

Indiana surrenders

The state used to update its COVID-19 dashboard daily. Then it stopped on Sundays. Now it’s just updated on weekdays. There’s no sign that the state government will do anything to require either masks or vaccination. Some local governments are re-implementing (or at least considering) mask mandates. I haven’t heard much about vaccination mandates except for at universities.

With schools starting or about to start, some districts have decided to have a mask mandate after all. (My kids school is among those, thankfully.) Others are leaving it up to individual families. Considering roughly half of K-12 students are not eligible to be vaccinated yet, this seems like a monumental policy failure. This is even more true if the delta variant is more severe in children than previous versions of the virus. At the moment, that appears to be more than a hypothetical.

It seems to me that the state has just surrendered. The governor is nowhere to be found on this, despite doing fairly well in the early days. In a recent press briefing, the state’s Health Commissioner was very diplomatic, but my interpretation of her answer to a few questions was “I wish we’d stop being dumb as a state and have some smart policy here. But my hands are tied without support from the Governor or the General Assembly.”

Projections

Unsurprisingly, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) forecast model continues the trends for the next few months. The latest model run projects a peak in daily deaths in the low-30s in mid-October. This is the “reference” scenario. The “worse” scenario peaks around 55. The worse scenario isn’t out of the question with an increase in in-person school and work. So much will depend on whether or not people wear masks and get vaccinated.

The good news is that if the reference scenario verifies, it will be lower than the previous two major peaks in deaths. The bad news is that a lot of people will still die unnecessarily.

As you may notice in the graph above, I had a long gap where I wasn’t adding new IHME model runs. Since it’s now clear that we won’t be done with COVID-19 any time soon, I’ll probably go back in the next few days and fill in that gap a bit. This way we can get a better sense of how the early summer model runs did.

Dashboard changes

I’ve made a few changes to my dashboard this weekend. First, I’ve changed the moving averages to be centered instead of trailing on all of the graphs. This keeps the last few days of data from distorting the trend.

In addition, I’ve added columns for a percentage change in deaths and cases week-over-week. The idea here is to produce a graph that shows the trends in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. This would allow the viewer to see the relationship and delay between the three measures. To make it less noisy, it’s actually a comparison in the cumulative data over a seven-day window. That’s not necessary in the hospitalization data because that census is conducted every day. But cases are subject to a lot of variation throughout the week, and even the same-day-last-week comparisons seemed all over the place. Deaths are a relatively small number so small changes can be a big percentage.

I’m not going to bother putting the resulting graph in this post. It’s still a lot of spaghetti and not particularly informative. Later on I might play around with doing a second derivative. Perhaps showing how the rate of change is changing will be easier to understand.

Future dashboard changes

I’m beginning to hit annoyances with Google Sheets. In particular, inserting a new column (unless it’s at the far right of the data) means I have to re-adjust all of my graphs. I’ve been toying with the idea of using the Python Pandas package to do analysis and graphing. Then I could publish the graphs to a static website. It would also allow me to do a little more analysis, like listing the top 10 days for a particular stat or trend.

Another option I’ve been thinking about is splitting the sheet into multiple tabs. I could have a tab for the observations, another for models, etc. I’m not sure how well Google Sheets would like that, but it’s something to toy around with. It doesn’t seem like as much work as completely rebuilding it in a new system, but it’s also not trivial.

Given my lack of free time and the amount of effort that either of these options would require, I wouldn’t expect to see either happen for a while. However, it seems like I’ll be maintaining the dashboard for quite a while, so who knows?