In my state, as previously noted, as deaths increased the state got further behind. The effect was to time shift “reports of deaths” from the past into the future. On the public facing side, people saw high daily “Reports of deaths” and this seemed to peak in January. However, the actual peak day of deaths was December 9th.
In the past couple of weeks, Ohio published 4,000 death counts in that week’s death reports but all occurred in October to December and they just caught up.
Iowa acknowledged this problem.
For this reason, I prefer to track hospital bed census. It is ear real time and reasonably accurate.
Death reports and daily positive test cases are poor quality data series.
