Georgia was one of the first states to reopen, and since then it’s had several “oops” moments as the data it releases has turned out to be wrong in various crude and obvious ways—all of which, by coincidence, make the state look better than it really is. I don’t really care too much about that, though, because I don’t trust much of anything these days other than death rates, which are hard to manipulate. (Not impossible, but hard.) So let’s take a look at that:
So far I don’t see much of anything happening. Daily deaths look to be on a modest downward trend for the past month, probably due to the lockdown that was in place until mid-April. Starting on May 12, however, it looks like death rates started to increase again, which is about what you’d expect if there’s a three-week lag between interventions ending and death rates starting to increase.
Still, it’s too early to tell what’s really happening. A month from now we’ll probably have a pretty good picture of how Georgia is doing.
