May 23, 2020
May 23, 2020
An article appeared on al.com today, written by Ramsey Archibald, that reaches some misleading conclusions from data for the week ending Friday, May 22 at noon. The article acknowledges that Alabama saw its largest spike in new cases during the week but states that testing "vastly increased" and the percentage of positive tests "decreased slightly" suggesting reduced community spread.
According to the ADPH dashboard, Alabama witnessed 2,512 new cases over the last 7 days, including today, which is nearly 25% higher than the prior week (2,029).
Here is where the article is misleading. Over the same time period that new cases spiked, only 28,810 tests were performed, down from 29,118 the prior week. Therefore, the positive test rate was 8.7%, which is, in fact, the highest rate since April 24 (see graph on bamatracker.com). This increase in the positive test rate indicates community spread is increasing in Alabama, which is not surprising in light of the spike in new cases.
Below are the new cases for the last 14 days. To avoid confusion, I decided to report the daily numbers just as they appear on the ADPH dashboard. That has resulted in a few minor adjustments because the database I was using before (worldometer.info) applied a different reporting period.
5/10 - 252
5/11 - 270
5/12 - 305
5/13 - 256
5/14. - 343
5/15 - 313
5/16 - 342
5/17 - 311
5/18 - 304
5/19 - 388
5/20 - 359
5/21 - 406
5/22 - 369
5/23 - 375