Notes From All Over, Part 4 -- Late Morning Edition -- December 18, 2020

Over at the sidebar at the right, I have a feature called "The Next Big Thing." I haven't added to it in a long time. 

That "feature" was started years ago when my son-in-law and I argued "Netflix vs Roku." He be on Roku; I bet on Netflix. I'll leave it up to readers to decide who won that argument. 

Be that as it may, it may take a long time but Roku is finally on a roll. A huge roll. 

Headline: ROKU forges deal with AT&T's WarnerMedia Stream HBO Max. From Zack's:

The two companies had hit a deadlock since HBO Max was launched in May over the financial terms for Roku to carry the streaming app. 

Markedly, in exchange for hosting an app with advertising, Roku typically takes 30% of the ad inventory to sell on its own. 

Markedly, Comcast CMCSA owned NBC Universal and Roku had been previously locked in negotiations for months over Peacock streaming app before they struck a deal in September. 

These standoffs have been a sign of how Roku, which has about 46 million active users, is flexing its muscles as the largest platform in the United States for aggregating streaming services.

Chinese flu watch: "percent positivity rate." This was new to me. I happened to catch it during a live television interview with a public official from Iowa. Here's the link from The [Cedar Rapids] Gazette. There is a graphic at that link. The caption to that graphic reads:

Chart updated December 17, 2020. Most of the state's June 2, 2020, data was late for The Gazette's 11 a.m. June 3, 2020, review of the numbers. 

There was another backlog resolved by the July 19, 2020, review. 

Positive antigen tests were added on August 27, 2020 [despite Johns Hopkins saying this is really, really inappropriate -- see below].

Meanwhile, with regard to "percent positivity rate," Johns Hopkins writes this: 

When states report testing numbers for COVID-19 infection, they should not include serology or antibody tests. Antibody tests are not used to diagnose active COVID-19 infection and they do not provide insights into the number of cases of COVID-19 diagnosed or whether viral testing is sufficient to find infections that are occurring within each state. 

States that include serology tests within their overall COVID-19 testing numbers are misrepresenting their testing capacity and the extent to which they are working to identify COVID-19 infections within their communities. States that wish to track the number of serology tests being performed should report those numbers separately from viral tests performed to diagnose COVID-19.

On another note, I absolutely do not understand the whole issue of "percent positivity rate." Oh, I know what it means, but it seems reporters are misinterpreting the results. At the Johns Hopkins link, the analysts also raise other issues with Iowa's reporting. 

Bottom line: the data collection and county health reporting across the US is still a mess; reporters don't know how to report the data; and politicians are making decisions on bad data. 

By the way, this is currently the most common "shape" of "new cases reported" looking at the charts from the 50 individual states:

This screenshot was taken of a single state (fairly consistent across all US states with a few exceptions). This was data released prior to the Covid-19 vaccine rollout in the US. This is not an uncommon curve seen in pathogenic viruses about to "burn themselves out." It was also seen, although perhaps not as dramatic, prior to the introduction of the smallpox vaccine.