The Weekend Drop Has Come
Let's keep this short because numbers are not accurate during the dry period.
Brazil: Daily infections remained at 23.8 per 100K and trending up less steeply. Daily death numbers fell to 0.431 per 100K, but trending up a little. Let's see what numbers look like in three days when Brazilian weekend dip is usually over.
Outlook: Very Bad With Maybe Some Hope
US minus CA,NY,WA: New infections and new deaths have unchanged trendlines in spite of both numbers falling, daily infections to 16.8 per 100K and daily deaths to 0.329. Daily positive tests also remained at 6.8% as did the R-value. The risk map had Washington going orange and Arizona going from red to orange.
Outlook: Very Bad With Hope
California: Same pattern as the day before. Daily infections dropped to 18.7 per 100K and daily deaths increased to a high 0.450. The R-value's five-day decline was stopped with an increase to 0.94 and the risk map has Lassen County go from green to red. The governor has rolled back reopenings.
Outlook: Very Bad With Hope
Washington: Same pattern as the day before. Daily infections fell to 8.8 per 100K (trending further down) and daily deaths to 0.250 (trending further up). I am still waiting for new testing data to be released. The R-value remained at 1.08.
Outlook: Bad With Hope
New York: Same pattern as the day before. Daily infections inched a little lower to 3.6 per 100K and trending flat. Daily death numbers remained at a low 0.026 per 100K. The daily positive rate remained at 1.0% and the R-value increased a little to 0.97.
Outlook: Satisfactory With Concern
United Kingdom: Daily cases fell from 1.28 to 1.12 per 100K with an unchanged trendline pointing up. Daily deaths fell to 0.081, trending up unchanged. Daily positive rate and R-value are OK and look thus better than their French equivalents.
Outlook: Satisfactory With Concern
France: The French statisticians are taking their well-deserved weekend. Here is Saturday's analysis: Construction of the second peak is well under way. Daily cases increased from 2.39 to 3.41 per 100K, with a now steeper upward trend. Daily deaths remain very low at 0.018. Daily positive rate, which increased to 1.7%, and R-value (1.36) remain of concern, as does the number of clusters and vulnerable Départements.
Outlook:Satisfactory With Concern
Germany: Daily cases (weekend) dropped to half, from 1.35 to 0.67 per 100K, which made big local news (see Remarks below). Daily deaths dropped to an incredibly low 0.001. Most importantly, the R-value went up to 1.32. This value is averaged across the last 7 days and thus not as susceptible to the weekend drop. The fact that it goes up should have been the big news and not the halving of the cases.
Outlook: Good With Concern
Tunisia added 22 new cases, including 10 local. Daily case numbers increased to 0.19 per 100K and no new death was reported in eight days. The daily positive rate eased from 2.1% to 2.0% and now to 1.7%. Good.
Tunisia has no weekend drop because they are a Muslim country that has adopted the Christian weekend but does not pay as much attention to it as majority-Christian countries do. The only times there are drops in reporting is during the big Islamic holidays Eid-al-Fitr and Eid-al-Adha, which both happened not too long ago.
Outlook: Excellent With Concern
In the wake of the Corona crisis, venerable time-honoured news outlets like the New York Times in the US, the BBC in the UK or Tagesschau.de in Germany changed their style to be more racy, more flashy.
Just today, the large news site "tagesschau" mentioned the huge drop in German daily cases (from 1000 to 500), which is true but completely misses the point because it was reported as something good. In reality though, the drop in number reporting on weekends makes numbers go down on weekends in almost all countries. The French even stop number reporting altogether. This drop has thus no significance and should either not be reported as special or reported with an explanation.
The same goes for the reporting of absolute Corona numbers. Countries with larger populations have higher numbers, so what? German news outlets also use absolute numbers for comparing German states to another. As does the RKI dashboard (but their large central section is by 100K). Even the Hopkins data visualisation does it. Hamburg, a German city state, has fewer cases than Northrhine-Westphalia, the most populous one. If you report the numbers by 100 000 though, Hamburg becomes number one in Germany. If you ask a German about the state with the highest infection numbers, they will mention the three biggest states but never Hamburg. But absolute numbers are absolutely irrelevant. Yet, our news make them relevant to us.
A recent example: The BBC and Tagesschau, like many news outlets in the world, reported that Brazil's cumulative deaths have passed the 100 000 mark. Wow, how bad! Shall we feel superior now? If they had consequently reported numbers by 100K, they would have noticed that Belgium had passed this threshold in mid April already and their cumulative deaths per 100 000 are now twice as high. Still not newsworthy but certainly more honest.