Not-so-happy Canada Day

I've made it a habit, the last several years, of noting the coincidence of the Canadian national holiday and my own personal natal day by wishing a Happy Canada Day to my northern neighbors, along with a bit of a bilingual joke about pressing "2" for a French translation.

This year, not so much, what with the horrific discoveries of hundreds (if not thousands) of unmarked graves at Canadian "residential schools":

More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were forced to attend church-run, government-funded schools between the 1870s and 1997.

An amendment to the Indian Act in 1894 made attendance at residential schools compulsory. Children were removed from their families and culture and forced to learn English, embrace Christianity and adopt the customs of the country's white majority.

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation examining residential schools has identified the names of, or information about, more than 4,100 children who died while attending these schools, most due to malnourishment or disease.

Former senator Murray Sinclair, who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) examining residential schools, has said he believes the death count could be much higher because of the schools' poor burial records.

Not a local COVID-19 update - yet

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in its infinite ... something ... has changed the data format for its daily raw data file - again. At least this time, the changes didn't cause my loader to blow up; however, some of the data I'm using has moved, and there's a fair amount of data no longer being reported at all.

So, of course, my loader needs tweaking. Happy birthday to me.

Local COVID-19 updates

The state is giving advance warning that they're taking Monday off:

Please note: the daily COVID-19 public health report will not be published on Monday, July 5th. The report published on Tuesday, July 6th will include data for Saturday, July 3rd through Tuesday, July 6th.

Meanwhile, the state has apparently decided to tweak the data format yet again, with several fields no longer reported - including the fourteen-day average test turnaround time, the estimated active case count, and the city/town risk color code. At least they're still providing enough data for me to calculate that color code directly, so for the sake of consistency I've made that change.

( Wall-o-text )

Once I worked through all the data format changes (and, in particular, added a way to calculate the color codes), the day-to-day changes are ... mixed. Deaths are up, but cases are down, as are hospitalizations. The seven-day averages are a mixed bag, as well; cases and deaths both are at their Lowest Observed Values, but percent-positive and hospitalization averages are up a wee bit. The weekly city/town data continues to improve, as five fewer towns had enough cases to get even to the green code. And, of course, my own town has no cases listed for the past several weeks, which from a personal standpoint is great.

The town of Acton's current Google Data Studio dashboard is showing zero active and 981 cumulative cases as of June 30. There have been no new cases shown on this dashboard since June 2. The most recent "newsflash style update" at 11:45AM on May 28, 2021 reported 978 cumulative cases with 3 individuals in isolation, 943 persons recovered and 32 fatalities.