Alaska COVID-19 COUNT Sunday March 22 - Up By 8 To 22 [UPDATED, Up to 32 Cases Sunday Night]

What's New?

1. Updates will be made daily, not just weekdays - this weekend being the first.  This is good since the virus doesn't take the weekends off.
2. The counts up to now, apparently, were for the data from 11:59pm the day before.  I say 'apparently' because it doesn't tell us when that policy started.
3. But it's going to change to 5pm postings, it says, but it doesn't tell us what the time frame of those numbers will be.  Obviously not 11:59pm, but when?  And this will mean that comparing days after this starts to days before it starts will be from different time periods.  

All this comes from the top of the first chart posted today (Sunday, March 22, 2020)

They haven't defined 'date of onset.' Previously, I thought the dates were when the person was confirmed positive.  The top says "Laboratory Confirmed Cases." Was I wrong?  Did it change?  There's no explanation.  I thought the addition of the chart above would help us see how the number of confirmed cases grows over time.  That's what it seemed to add to the chart immediately below.  But it's easier to use the chart below to figure out where the confirmed cases are.

Here's the link that defines the economic regions.

From today's chart we learn:

• Anchorage (pop 292,000)  has six - all travel related cases. 
• Gulf Coast (pop 81,000) has three - one non-travel.
• Interior (pop 110,000) has seven - three travel, four not.
• Southeast (73,000) has six - one travel and five not.

Given that Anchorage is the biggest community by far, perhaps Mayor Berkowitz' early drastic actions (closing most everything from schools to restaurants) may have been a good call.  But it's too early to tell.

[UPDATED 9:56pm:  From Anchorage Daily News:

"Statewide, as of Sunday evening, there were 32 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Alaska: Seven in Fairbanks; 13 in Anchorage; six in Ketchikan; two in Mat-Su, and one each in Juneau, Sterling, Soldotna and Seward."

That makes 20 new cases since the State reported yesterday.  More than doubled since Saturday.  That's the kind of exponential growth people are talking about and why people need to stay home unless it's absolutely critical.  The link on exponential growth takes you to a video that explains the concept and its application to COVID-19.]

These graphs continue to be frustrating for me.  I like that we can see tests over time.  If you look closely, these are the same two graphs that were posted yesterday.  The numbers are the same and they both end on March 20, 2010.   As I've said before:

[UPDATE Mon March 23, 2020 10:00pm:  The two graphs immediately above were replaced sometime after I did this post with the next day's graphs.  That's good, but it would also be helpful if they mentioned that they did that.  Here are the new ones.  Then I'll post the info that was posted today.

These numbers will be reflected on my chart that I'll post later tonight.]

1. Ideally these would be interactive and your cursor would show you the numbers for each day
2. The bottom one would have numbers attached to at least the last day as in the graph above
3. A third line combining the blue and red lines
4. I'm still not sure why these distinctions between State labs and commercial labs are important 
5. The lettering on the charts is going to get smaller and smaller in the next couple of weeks as they try to fit everything in.

MY UPDATED CHART

Given the changes in what the State is offering, keeping parts of my chart current is getting impossible.  There's nothing here to show a change in total tests between today's post and yesterday's.  

The only two columns that I've been able to track consistently are the first [total positive/confirmed] and the third [new positive/confirmed cases].

Alaska Covid-19 Data by Steve on Scribd

This is turning out to be one of those projects that grows way beyond the initial post.  I'm hoping I can straighten out the missing and inconsistent numbers tomorrow, if I can get through to the State Department of Health.  I know they're busy, but this seems like a fairly important set of numbers.

I'm sure the reports from other states have their own share of issues.  This all reminds me that any collective number for the US or for any state or any country is just an approximate number.  Meanwhile you can check out Worldometers pages on Corona Virus for a constantly updating count of cases, deaths, and other numbers from around the world.  As of right now (March 22, 2020, 9:11pm Alaska time) they list world wide:

• Coronavirus Cases:   338,879
• Deaths:   14,688
• Recovered:   99,011