Describe the problem
On April 22, 2020, Louisiana started reporting probable deaths. We began capturing confirmed deaths on April 27, 2020 and probable deaths on May 12, 2020. It was unclear whether their main deaths number included probable deaths or excluded them so we had some switching between using the main number as confirmed and subtracting the probables from the main number to get confirmed. On May 5, 2020, the state clarified to us that their main death number did not include the probables and we settled on using a consistent calculation. However, the confirmed deaths numbers got shifted backward four days in the timeseries for May 3, 2020 to May 10, 2020, leading to a misalignment between confirmed and lumped deaths. As a result, we are patching confirmed deaths, probable deaths and total deaths from screenshots for April 22, 2020 to May 12, 2020 so that confirmed deaths is the main number Louisiana reported, probable deaths is filled (since it was previously empty), and lumped deaths is the sum of the two.
karaschechtman
commented
3 years ago
State or US: LA
Describe the problem On April 22, 2020, Louisiana started reporting probable deaths. We began capturing confirmed deaths on April 27, 2020 and probable deaths on May 12, 2020. It was unclear whether their main deaths number included probable deaths or excluded them so we had some switching between using the main number as confirmed and subtracting the probables from the main number to get confirmed. On May 5, 2020, the state clarified to us that their main death number did not include the probables and we settled on using a consistent calculation. However, the confirmed deaths numbers got shifted backward four days in the timeseries for May 3, 2020 to May 10, 2020, leading to a misalignment between confirmed and lumped deaths. As a result, we are patching confirmed deaths, probable deaths and total deaths from screenshots for April 22, 2020 to May 12, 2020 so that confirmed deaths is the main number Louisiana reported, probable deaths is filled (since it was previously empty), and lumped deaths is the sum of the two.
Link to data source https://screenshots.covidtracking.com/louisiana/