New COVID-19 measures

Apparently, the Massachusetts Executive Office of No Shit Sherlock COVID-19 Is Still A Fucking Problem finally got Governor Baker's attention. He held a press conference today to announce new COVID-19 restrictions:
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Baker also announced changes to the daily dashboards, including changing the reporting time to 5PM. Supposedly the underlying data files won't change too much, but we shall see.

Local COVID-19 updates

As of 5PM today, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ... has dramatically revised its daily dashboard - and has changed the underlying data files in ways that break my existing formatting and trend calculation code.

Today's report has a whole bunch of front page changes. The following data points have been removed:
- The six "traffic light" indicators (which hadn't changed for months, anyway)
- The totals (since the beginning of the pandemic) for confirmed deaths, confirmed cases, individuals tested by molecular test and molecular tests adminstered
- The count of new individuals tested by molecular test
There are now five different groups of data points on the front page:
- "Testing and cases", including: newly reported confirmed cases, total new molecular tests reported, seven-day average positivity and estimated active cases
- "Hospitalization", including: total confirmed COVID patients in hospital, total confirmed COVID patients in ICU, and average age of hospitalized cases
- "Deaths", including: newly reported confirmed deaths and average age of deaths
- "Turnaround time": specifically, the 14 day average turnaround of tests from sample draw to results reported to DPH
- "Total cases by age group": showing case counts for age bands 0-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79 and 80+ years

The page 2 "key metrics" have also changed. The number of hospitals using surge capacity has been removed, and has been replaced by a seven-day average of confirmed new cases. The number of patients hospitalized has been changed from a three-day average to a seven-day average.

And there are a whole bunch of new graphs and data buried in the later pages of the dashboard.

All this is cooler than heck, but it does mean I have to do a bunch of thinking and troubleshooting to decide how to keep things consistent with my earlier postings. For now, I'm just going to note that today's report shows nine new confirmed deaths, 725 new confirmed cases, and a total of 51,149 new molecular tests performed. Those are all down from yesterday's numbers, which is unsurprising given that today is Monday and the weekend is often much lighter in terms of reported data.

The town of Acton has yet to post an update today. As of the most recent report at 2:45PM on October 28, the town of Acton reported 233 cumulative cases of COVID-19 in town with 11 individuals in isolation, 201 recovered and 21 fatalities.