Thread by @TheLawyerCraig

Saw this story, and I swear to you I thought it was from ~2 months ago as I read:

"Covid-19 cases will likely surge again in the U.S. as the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant takes hold across the country"

Nope. Dated today. Yowza.

Brief thread 🧵🧵🧵
cnbc.com/2021/05/05/cdc…

Here is the link to the CDC model the story references.
The model used "data available through March 27, 2021" to forecast cases, hospitalizations, and deaths varying vaccination (low/high) and NPI (low/moderate).
cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7…

B117 has comprised more than 50% of our cases for likely more than a month now. The CDC has it at ~60% as of 4/10. Here's the link:
covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tra…

Per the state dashboard data that our team gathers and that I post nightly, 7-day-averaged cases peaked on 4/13. They've been dropping precipitously in the 3 weeks since. You have to go back to early October to get to our current case counts.

Not only that, but the positive testing percentage is at pandemic lows (7DA) damn near every day now, so it's likely that we're capturing more infections with our reported cases. Regardless, we're hitting new 2021 case lows daily.

(Another big week-over-week drop coming tonight)

We have California as a majority-B117 population than can barely muster 1% positive on a bad day. Come on, folks.
public.tableau.com/profile/helix6…

I'll end with the case graph from the CDC model at issue, with my additions in red based on the actual data. And they put this out today as if it's some real-time harbinger of doom?

Swing and a miss...

(Red dots might even extend a bit lower, but I wanted to be conservative)

Credit to @erikaedwardsnbc for her article on the CDC's release of the older model. Played it as a straight news piece but with much more appropriate framing, and showed some knowledge of the data. Even (correctly, imo) used "uptick" to describe rises we're seeing in the PNW.

Whoops, meant to link the article as well! I'll do one better. Here's her tweet with the article:

https://twitter.com/erikaedwardsnbc/status/1389966616545435648?s=20