What I’m seeing that makes me say “This is a wave, not a data artifact” is the consistency of the larger curve shape. The consistency of the larger curve here is, as they say, not attributable to chance.
Here’s that data source again: https://umn.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/fd0350c812334c5f9733ca5b6186db0d
This is just “eyeball data science” here, no publishable results — but sufficient to make some reasonable decisions about my own behavior.
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