ETFan said:
What caused the sharp drop in Houston? Effects of SD/shutdown finally kicking in or reporting?
Mainly, they shut the drive thru testing in favor of just testing as patients showed up at the hospitals. The only thing the US was tracking for a while were severe cases or hospitalizations. Now we are ramping testing again and the numbers are continuing to go up, but we are catching a lot more of the mild cases.
Overall, infection rate seems a worthless measure right now as its more driven by testing than anything else. Severe cases, hospitalization, deaths I think are the only meaningful measures now......maybe antibody testing will eventually be a meaningful measure, but right now, no one knows what having antibodies does for you.
Another measure that would be interesting is to measure the economic toll vs number of deaths or severe cases. Saw a report that showed economic shut down is costing 500-600 jobs per death from Covid. If you apply minimum wage, that roughly 16-18mm/yr of wages lost due to shut down for each death......or roughly 1.5mm/death/month. Unfortunately, I think this measure will go down overtime as the deaths pile up and some jobs come back.