In flying there is a phenomenon called a “pilot-induced oscillation”. This is when an airplane starts porpoising through the air, not due to anything wrong with the controls, or wind gusts, but due to the pilot moving the controls back and forth, overcontrolling each time.
The official Florida COVID19 dashboard page is constructed in a way that you can not see what is going on. The graphs only go back one month, and they report daily figures. There is so much daily variation that it is difficult to perceive long-term trends. So I went looking.
Way down at the bottom of one of those official pages, in small type, was a link to the underlying data. There you can download the raw data going all the way back to January, with information on every COVID case in Florida; over 64,000 of them. There is no personal data, but there are dates, ages, county, were they hospitalized, did they die, etc.
With a bit of number crunching I was able to reduce this to the data you see here, which is the number of cases per week. Using such a large interval smooths out the noise and reveals the real trends. Then I added in the period of the “state mandated stay-at-home” order issued by State Idiot Ron DeSantis, which ran from April 3 to May 4.
It is clear that the decrease in cases is entirely due to the stay-at-home order. It really works. This is not a wave in the virus going by. We have not “navigated through this pandemic together” as the COVID-19 page of my local hospital boasts. It is just a reflection of people’s behavior. We can easily deflect this line back down again by returning to what works. Or we can deflect it upward by doing foolish things like holding political conventions and opening churches and restaurants.
UPDATE: As requested, here are the hospitilization and death numbers presented in the same way. It looks like fewer people are being hospitalized even though the case numbers are increasing, but this is very unreliable. Most of the records just have “NA” or “UNKNOWN” in those fields. The dark blue line is the ones explicityly marked “YES” for hospitalization. The green line that swoops up at the right is the ones marked “UNKNOWN”.