Fresh From The Cupboard, page-1043

Hi TDA,
Yes, at the time I did notice the " aggressive " massive short covering bringing the daily gross short sales report down to 22.4M on the 8 March. I had attributed that to a crossing of 5.19M the day before but when the short position reverted or increased to approx 28.1M on the next trading day, on 11 March, I was puzzled.
I tried but could not reconcile the 2 reports ie the daily gross short sales and the daily short position reports. I think there are some discrepancies in either one of those 2 reports on those 2 days.
For the daily gross short position to revert or increase from 22.4m to 28.1M, the preceding 4 days daily gross short sales reported has to add up to approx 5.7M. And if we add up the 4 trading days ( 6 Mar-11 Mar, T4 lag) the total is only 418K. Even if we were to "drop" the 11Mar figure and "replace" it with the 5 March, the total is only 1.6M still well short of the 5.7M.

My take is that there was probably no massive short covering followed by a spike in new shorts. Just some reporting error. Am happy to be corrected if I missed something.