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Florida’s death count is gonna hit 600 soon, I predict
July 15, 2020
I’ve spent a bunch of time worried about Florida and COVID in the past few months, partly because my grandma lived there for a number of years and so I spent a bunch of time there growing up. It’s a really vulnerable place, in some ways more so than Manhattan. And according to the data, and some reckoning, I figure the daily death counts will soon hit 600. I explain why in my new Bloomberg column:
Florida’s Covid-19 Deaths Might Rival New York’s
The state’s daily fatality count could hit 600 in a few weeks.
More of my Bloomberg columns can be found here.
Categories: Uncategorized
mathbabe 
Bloomberg has a paywall that many can’t afford. So I can’t read you anymore and I’m sad. You need to open your column for anything related to covid? My daughter lives in Somerville. Jean Palmer Lincoln MA
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I would like to see these articles on WordPress, too. I have just read my last free article for the month and I cannot afford another newspaper subscription.
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You can definitely exceed the free-article limit at sites like NYT and Bloomberg by using multiple browsers and/or devices. Clearing cookies, cache, etc. in a single browser on a single device might also work, but I haven’t tried that yet.
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Right around the 4th my Google Alerts caught an Orlando TV news story in which a close childhood friend of mine, a lifelong Republican, gives a brief statement wearing no mask (with his adult son and stepson standing right next to him, also maskless) regarding his family’s trip to Cocoa Beach for the holiday weekend in a party of 20 (!) that included his wife’s parents who are both in their mid-80s if not older. According to the wife’s FB page, everyone’s currently doing fine, but wow—was it really worth risking their (not to mention others’) lives just to go to the beach?
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You’re probably right. This past week Florida reported 635 deaths and the numbers have been climbing fast. A good web site to look at Florida specifically is https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/7572b118dc3c48d885d1c643c195314e/. An excellent web site to visualize the progress of the disease is at https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/.
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So I read this article on MSN and decided to see if this was going to be anywhere close to reality and if not, the author would acknowledge they missed the mark. I even waited a few extra days to see if the prediction was anywhere close to reality. Let’s look at the “death” count the last seven days according to the AP: 120, 225, 247, 73, 62, 178, 257 = average of 166/day. The author predicted 600. I’m not a math whiz but the error is +261%. I could even cherry pick the highest death days and not even get near 600. It also appears the count is mostly coming down. So, this is yet another way over the top prediction where the author does not raise his/her head and say “I was wrong”, just crickets. The author can certainly now apply for a job with Neal Ferguson or Chris Murray with these credentials. The author failed to realize that we are now much better at treating the disease and the vast majority of cases are at a younger age. Blindly looking at case counts is woefully inadequate.
I’d like to see a follow-up article by the author taking some accountability.
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I’ll rescind the above – I see a new article posted on Bloomberg.
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Now we’re scrubbing the data for “excess deaths” to explain the error – good lord.
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