Feb 2022 is when they started transitioning from pcr's for everyone to home tests.
May 2023 is when they declared an "end to the public emergency" and ended the emergency and stopped requiring hospitals to test people.
This year they stopped requiring hospitals to report much of anything.
I guess this is just how it's going to be from now on, and we'll have to figure out what damage it's doing by analyzing excess death rates
BTW many parts of the US (Hawaii and SF, and my little town apparently) and world are experiencing a pretty sizeable covid surge at the moment. Most likely from the FLiRT variant, and there is also a different variant coming up called kp.3, so that's fun.
The graph at the top is odd. It's specifically from Santa Clara County, CA. The biobot data nationally, and in my region never looked like that. i.e. the waves following omicron were much more mild in concentration.
Here's another showing the January wave, with the current uptick still very small in comparison. Makes me curious what's up with SCC's data. Maybe they didn't capture the omicron wave very well in their rolling average? It looks like a single data point at the peak. If that wave wasn't captured well it'd cause the following waves to look anomalously larger after scaling to case numbers.
The more you zoom out, and the longer this has gone on, the less data points we've had resulting in far less accuracy when averaged at greater scale. At a county level, there's been traveling spikes moving throughout the country in unmonitored counties that are basically feeding the surrounding areas and keeping the floor raised.
Also as this has gone, and with the variety of variants, the synchronicity between people's immunity to any specific variant has become wildly out of step. So you get half your population immune during one wave, and then a few months later their population wanes and you see a sudden spike because the next county over caused an outbreak in your now immune less population.
I'm afraid I don't have the screenshots for it anymore but a really good example was in Monroe county Florida they began monitoring out of nowhere, and then suddenly spiked higher than anything the neighboring (and well populated) miami-dade county saw the entire pandemic. Monroe county (and eventually Miami-Dade) then stops monitoring and we have no clue what's happening down in that area of Florida.
Anyway tldr, the raised floor we're seeing is being sustained by the unmonitored counties spiking that we're not seeing.
Oh, I do have Seminole county which did something similar, but we had much more data. Seminole County neighbors Orange County (Disney, etc) and popped higher than any recorded data we had the Disney area.
Here's when I noticed Monroe county spiking and saved some of the data. https://hexbear.net/comment/3919179
what a shitshow
Oh, this is embarrassing, but you spelled 'most efficient system' wrong.