The Tuesday Turbulence - Covid Musings

Today I checked the Covid cases graph after a long time and looks like we are past the peak. And I sincerely hope this downward trend continues.

However what piqued my curiosity were those frequent dips in case counts. And the regularity of those dips did look very suspicious. On looking closely, I realised all these dates were Tuesdays.

So what was so special about Tuesdays? Does the coronavirus take a half day on Tuesdays?

My best guess was that maybe covid centres operate for shorter hours on Sundays. Because of this the number of swabs that are collected are lower on Sundays. Since the test reports usually take a couple of days, I guess the number of positive cases are reported on Tuesday. And, thus the case count on Tuesday turns out to be smaller.

A quick Google search and my suspicions were confirmed and the covid centres do operate shorter hours on Sundays.

And that is another example of how understanding business processes and analysing how your data is generated might be more important than running the machine learning algorithms that the kids of WhiteHat Junior are so adept at.