4 ms·
Weekends, as Tomte said. No testing for 2 days then a backlog to clear during the week.
by robthebrew 5y ago
Weekends, as Tomte said. No testing for 2 days then a backlog to clear during the week.
- tgflynn 5y agoIt's obvious the CDC data shows weekly periodicity but I've never really understood why. Are testing centers really closed on weekends ? What about the death data, that also shows a similar periodicity ? My guess is that it has more to do with how the data is getting collected, like maybe some states don't report cases/deaths on weekends. It seems odd that for as long as this has been going on no one in the media has thought to ask this question.
- Tomte 5y agoIn Germany many local authorities only report cases back to the federal agency on weekdays. They do contact tracing, as much as necessary on weekends, but the things that are not urgent, like reporting cases, are left until Monday.
- wnkrshm 5y agoThis question has been asked and answered in the German media in 2020 iirc - the institute doing the counting, the Robert Koch Institute, has an explanation in their FAQ [0], to paraphrase: In general, there are fewer cases reported to the RKI on weekends, since a) fewer people go to a doctor on the weekends (since normal pcp's offices are closed in Germany) - this leads to fewer samples being tested and thus, fewer cases reported and b) additionally not all of the local communities have active health departments on the weekends, so this contributes to a drop of reported cases on the weekend. [0] https://www.rki.de/SharedDocs/FAQ/NCOV2019/FAQ_Liste_Fallzahlen_Meldungen.html https://www.rki.de/SharedDocs/FAQ/NCOV2019/FAQ_Liste_Fallzah...