Dispatch from Coronaville: Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3. . Is this thing on?

As the coronavirus once again blossoms throughout the land, one of the explanations for the increase is that it's due to an increase in testing. President Trump even suggested (jokingly?) that we should slow down the testing so we wouldn't get such high case numbers.

I was curious to know if there'd been a recent massive increase in testing in some of the new hotspots such as Florida that would have preceded the accompanying massive increase in cases.  I wasn't able to find any definitive information to this effect. It just seems like it would have made sense to announce: "We're pumping up our testing capabilities, so expect to see a rise in cases in the next week or so." But our country has lacked leadership at the top and suffered from uneven leadership across the states, so I suppose asking for such an organized and coordinated response would be asking too much.  As it is right now, there's no definitive answer explaining the explosion of cases across the South and West.

In the process of trying to get some answers, I've been looking at a number of interesting websites. There's the Kaiser Foundation website and the Covid Tracking Project at the Atlantic to name two.  Particularly interesting is the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University. Their data indicates that Florida, Arizona and other states with surging numbers do not meet the positivity recommendation of lower than 5% positive results from testing. High positive percentages indicated that there's still not enough testing going on because we're tending to get results only from those that are already showing signs of illness. 

It would appear that whatever is causing the surge in positive cases, it's not the testing.

Today in the United States we have a had a total of 2,337,456 cases of COVID-19, a 3.7% increase over the past three days, and mere 900 or so cases more than I predicted. There have been a total of 120,838 deaths, only a 1.1% increase over the past three days. That's 500 or so fewer than I predicted, and the lowest rate of increase in deaths we've had since I began keeping records. Based on these numbers I expect 2,423,942 total cases and 122,167 total deaths by Friday, June 26, 2020.

Ohio and Florida are both down in new cases over the past three day period, though down for Florida simply means the second highest number of cases the state has ever recorded in a three day period. Their case numbers still exist in the stratosphere above our other two benchmark states. Ohio's new cases fell quite a bit though not to June 14 levels, which were the third lowest since I started tracking the data. Nebraska remained virtually flat, with the new cases at 366 compared to Saturday's 365.

Total Cases:

Florida: 103,495 total cases, 0.47% of the population. Florida joins the 100,000 club of seven states with a total of over 100,000 cases.

Ohio: 45,537 total cases, 0.39% of the population.

Nebraska: 17,957 total cases, 0.92% of the population

Deaths are down for all three states. with Ohio posting the steepest drop to just seven deaths over the past three days, just one more than the perennially low Nebraska. This is the lowest number of deaths in Ohio I've ever recorded.  I will be watching those death rates closely over the next two weeks, especially for Florida to see if all those new diagnoses translate into a higher number of fatalities.

Total Deaths

Florida: 3,143, a rate of 3.4%

Ohio: 2,697, a rate of 6.1%

Nebraska: 255 a rate of 1.4%