Week-Over-Week Analysis, September 29

The two things that Mr. Dixon and I watch most closely for the epidemic trends in Minnesota, and occasionally elsewhere, are active cases and the week-over-week analysis.  The week-over-week analysis is designed to examine the change in the change in cases, etc.  Take a day of the week and compare the number of cases a week earlier.  That percent change can be tracked over a number of days to see how it is changing, gives you a sense of are cases accelerating, decelerating or on a plateau.  The analysis is lagged a bit because it takes a while for most of the cases related to a specific day to be reported.  The current charts are below and they would suggest that we are kind of sitting on a plateau in Minnesota.  If school hadn’t opened and wild testing begun related to those age groups, we might be on a case downtrend, but no certainty in that either.  Just eyeballing more recent data indicates no acceleration, but not really a deceleration yet either.