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Day 146: COVID-19 Surfing the Second (Protest) Wave?
We are now 16 days into the post social distancing era brought about by the circumstances of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. What was proscribed before became courageous now as thousands gathered in protests, riots, and funerals to promote social justice. And “health officials” told us that social justice trumps the public risk of COVID-19. And so social distancing was no longer the sign of a virtuous person. At least so long as those violations of health orders were in support of an approved cause. Not church, not family, not social relations, and not commerce. And certainly not Republican politics. President Trump’s (now) June 20 rally in Tulsa, OK, is — according to the media — an extreme health hazard.
@susan quinn asked back on Day 137 –
I wonder if anyone is going to track whether there is a spike in cases reported in the next two to three weeks in those cities with protestors and rioters. I’m not sure the data would be helpful, since if people contract the virus, they could be asymptomatic. But it would sure be interesting to know.
On Day 139 @hammer, the wrote —
I am very much hoping that these protests do not result in any spikes whatsoever, and [that] that it is the final straw that breaks these lockdowns.
When we wake up in a couple of weeks and rioters and hospital staff protestors are stacked up like cordwood in the streets waiting for their corpses to be carted off, it will be very, very, very difficult to suppress a sardonic chuckle.
On Day 140 @julespa observed —
I will applaud you going to 150 days so that you can catch the second wave, or observe its absence. I think 10 more days ought to more than cover what went on with the lockdown protests, the racial protests and the BLM looting and burning.
I have persisted to nearly 150 days now, and it is time to ask: How are we doing? Were these social distancing violations the kind of disaster of which public health officials had warned when they were not for approved actions?
The screengrab from the 91-DIVOC website above says “no.” At least nationally there has been no increase in hospitalizations — the measure I watch most closely to see whether conditions are getting worse. Confirmed case counts will continue to increase as testing continues, but unless hospitalized, cases do not mean illnesses that are life-altering or life-threatening.
All epidemics are local, so the lack of a national increase in hospitalizations could still mask a hot spot. Let’s look at 8 locations where there were large demonstrations and compare hospitalizations before and (now 16 days) after the social justice protesting began:
New York City. One of the places with large and persistent protests.
Decreasing trends continue for infections and hospitalizations. (https://forward.ny.gov/covid-19-regional-metrics-dashboard)
Minneapolis — where the protests began and persist. Data is for all of Minnesota, but Minneapolis/St Paul are the biggest cities in the state.
Again, trend line is downward. (https://www.startribune.com/coronavirus-covid-19-minnesota-tracker-map-county-data/568712601/)
Atlanta. Scene of large demonstrations and disorder. Biggest city in state. Stats are for all of Georgia.
Hospitalizations are flattening but not rising. (https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-georgia-covid-dashboard/jvoLBozRtBSVSNQDDAuZxH/)
Denver. Protests.
Hardly anyone hospitalized on May 28; fewer now. (https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/50dbb5e7dfb6495292b71b7d8df56d0a)
Chicago. Major protests and destruction.
Stats are Illinois statewide (Chicago represents about one third of statewide cases). Trending downward. (http://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/hospitalization-utilization)
Seattle. The battle continues.
Hospitalization continues a downward trend. 65% of deaths in Seattle are from Long Term Care facilities. Apparently being out and about whether protesting, rioting, or conducting commerce does not result in serious COVID-19 illness. (https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/key-indicators.aspx)
Los Angeles. Big demonstrations and looting.
Data is for the entire state. Los Angeles represents about 40% of state totals. Trend is fairly flat to downward. Positive patients are test confirmed; suspected patients have either not been tested or results have not yet been returned. (https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID-19PublicDashboard/Covid-19Hospitals?%3Aembed=y&%3Adisplay_count=no&%3AshowVizHome=no)
Philadelphia. Persistent protests and riots.
Stats are for Pennsylvania state. Philadelphia is the largest city and the location with the most number of COVID-19 cases so state hospitalizations could not be going down overall if Philadelphia hospitalizations were increasing by any significant amount. (https://www.health.pa.gov/topics/disease/coronavirus/Pages/Cases.aspx)
Data appears to put the lie to a risk of serious illness from COVID-19 from mass gatherings. Did some people get infected? Probably. But risk of serious illness is low if you are not elderly, particularly in long term care, or a cancer patient undergoing therapy that kills your immune system.
On June 11 the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board opined —
Democrats cite a spike in cases in Florida, Arizona and Texas as evidence of a virus resurgence. But more testing, especially in vulnerable communities, is naturally turning up more cases. Cases in Texas have increased by about a third in the last two weeks, but so have tests. About a quarter of the new cases are in counties with large prisons and meatpacking plants that were never forced to shut down.
Tests have increased by about 37% in Florida in two weeks, but confirmed cases have risen 28%. Cases were rising at a faster clip during the last two weeks of April (47%) when much of the state remained locked down. Now restaurants, malls, barbershops and gyms are open if they follow social-distancing guidelines.
In Arizona, cases have increased by 73% in the last two weeks though tests have increased by just 53%. But a quarter of all cases in the state are on Indian reservations, which have especially high-risk populations. The rate of diabetes is twice as high among Native Americans as whites and the rate of obesity is 50% higher.
Liberals and the media demanded more testing before states could reopen, yet now are criticizing states because more testing has turned up more cases. Keep in mind that New York has reported about the same number of new cases in the last two weeks as Florida, though it ramped up testing earlier so the relative increase appears less significant.
A more important metric is hospitalizations. In Arizona the weekly rolling average for new Covid-19 hospitalizations has been flat for a month. Emergency-room visits for Covid-19 have spiked this week, but the number of ER beds in use hasn’t changed since late April. Hospitals in Arizona (and California) have reported an increase in cases from U.S. citizens and green-card holders returning from Mexico where hospitals are overwhelmed. But with 22% of ICU beds and 62% of ventilators available, Arizona hospitals should have capacity to manage an increase in patients as it reopens.
Texas has also recently reported an uptick in Covid-19 hospitalizations, mostly in the Houston and Austin areas. Current Covid-19 hospitalizations are up about 20% since the state began to reopen, but Gov. Greg Abbott says hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and much of the increase is tied to nursing homes. The number of currently hospitalized patients per capita is still about 80% higher in New York City than in Texas. Mr. Abbott started reopening six weeks ago while Mr. Cuomo began letting manufacturing and construction resume in the Big Apple this week.
Fatalities are a lagging epidemic indicator since most people who die have been in the hospital for two to three weeks. But deaths also aren’t surging. Texas has recorded 151 deaths this past week versus 221 in the last week of April. Florida has reported 239 deaths, 72 fewer than in the last week of April.
Deaths are probably declining in part from better and earlier treatment, but this means there’s less to fear from reopening.
The media of course will continue to stoke fear because that is what drives views and clicks. But it appears that there is no longer an “emergency” unless there is political advantage for there to be one. People are catching on. First a trickle, then a stream, and finally a flood.
[Note 1: I will be arbitrarily ending the daily COVID-19 posts on Day 150. It is clear now more than ever that this is not a public health crisis, it is a public policy crisis dressed in whatever garb best suits those that promote government control over our lives. That will be the constant battle of the remainder of my life. But it has nothing to do with the disease we labeled COVID-19.]
[Note 2: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
Brilliant, @rodin!! But of course they will still try to instill fear and panic whenever they can. I so appreciate your analysis here; you have done a masterful job of shining a light on the lies and deception. Thank you.
It looks like it behaves like the flu virus. It’s sensitive to temperature and humidity, but whatever those limits are, they are off by about thirty days from the flu cycle. So it will start and end thirty days later than the flu season, but it will end, just as the flu season ends. Just using his common sense, President Trump said in March that this would pass by Easter, which was April 12. Since I believed that too, just following the trek of the virus around the globe as it was reported by the mass media, I am delighted to see that we were both right about it. :-) It peaked that week, and it has been quieting down since then.
I’m a language nut. A long-standing area of interest to me is how language affects public perception and the course of history. What threw scientists for a loop with this virus was the initial use of the word “novel” by the first scientists to isolate it. We rarely see that word anymore used in association with the name of the virus because scientists around the world have thoroughly squashed the idea that it is “novel.”
Let us hope, and I’m sure they are right, that the scientists in Italy who are reporting that this virus has already mutated into a far less virulent form are right.
The problem now is getting the public to relax. I went into one of our local garden centers last week. They had just opened up the inside of their business (the nursery has been open for a month now with plants and fertilizers and soils sold outside). I could not believe my eyes. Plexiglas everywhere. The entire store rearranged for one-way foot traffic. The money this business has spent this past month is wild. Multiply that single business’s outlays by millions of businesses and we get a tragic momentum to keep the scare alive.
I’m glad I’m not the president. I don’t know what I would do to fix this now.
I’m hoping these encouraging numbers after the protests will put an end to the scare.
My mother always said, “Some good comes out of everything,” and I’m hoping that these riots, as horrible as they are, will prove her right once again.
The people either need to relax, or they will be exhausted by the hype and efforts they’re supposed to make that they will basically give up on following most of them. They may maintain some obvious virtue signalling (like masks), but things will pick up because we’re fed up with the nonsense.
I hope you are right, but in my little world of gardening, I’m flabbergasted by the amount of belief in global warming and the bee apocalypse that persists in spite of the growing pile of evidence that neither is happening. I think one reason these two movements carry on is because there are businesses making money from continuing to promote the scare.
I hope that doesn’t happen with this virus.
I’m going to be doing badly in four says when you stop analyzing this. We need your posts, and the conversation it generated to put the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle together.
Even if they aren’t part of the series, please keep on.
Now, back to your post.
I agree completely on the scare tactics. But at least the plexiglass and yellow tape businesses are booming, right?
I feel better having read your post. It’s like having a translator. Thank you.
Yup. :-)
My husband and I are laughing at the displays we’re seeing in stores of hand sanitizer and masks. Will this stuff be put in boxes for next year?
I read an economics book years ago in which the author was trying to explain the term the “time value of money.” He used the vivid example of the price of a Christmas tree on December 26. :-)
The money movements during this short-lived pandemic are fascinating to watch.
Seconded! @Rodin, the quality of your posts, analyses, questions on this subject have exceeded the information from the MSM and CDC/NIH as far as I’m concerned. I hope that some ecision makers somewhere are noticing your work. They could use it.
This article about how the virus mutates and why it has been so infectious is fascinating. This article is in today’s New York Times. The New York Times drives me nuts, but they’ve done a pretty good job explaining what scientists know or don’t know about this particular this virus. Their graphics department is amazing. :-) The Wall Street Journal has done the best job tracking the global response to it. :-)
It remains hard to predict what it will do next. But it strikes me from reading this article that it will continue to operate differently in different geographical areas because of its unstable nature. So I guess it is a good gamble to store the masks and hand sanitizer. :-)
Thirded! :-)
I have really enjoyed this series. I don’t know what my brain will do when you stop writing it. :-)
Thank you. :-)
@marcin, I wonder how much of what people are doing is tied to virtue-signalling or actually making changes to their lifestyles. Except for stuff they buy, much of which others can plainly see, are they doing anything different in their lives? Or are they just spouting the words? Meanwhile, people can make money off their foolishness!
Things and attitudes are different everywhere. I went to Dick’s Sporting Goods in Leawood Kansas…a very wealthy county that is a part of the Kansas City Missouri greater metropolitan area…to buy some golf balls. Nobody but the employees were wearing masks. I was really surprised.
Re the WSJ Editorial, its comments on Texas and Florida are accurate, but not so regarding Arizona. Its assertion that a quarter of the cases are on Indian reservations is incorrect. The original big outbreak was on the reservations, particularly Navajo, and at one point was a quarter, but it has been declining as other parts of the state have increased.
It is also incorrect that hospitalizations have been been flat a month. Hospitalizations of known or suspected Covid patients are up 78% statewide since May 25. What has happened is that while the serious outbreak in Navajo Nation has continued, we’ve seen a big upsurge in cases at the two major border crossing areas (Yuma and Nogales) and in Maricopa County (Phoenix), which has 60% of the population but for a long time only had around 40% of the confirmed cases – it is now above 50%.
I’ve also seen the argument that the AZ increase is due to increased testing. While I think that true for Texas and Florida, once again it does not seem true here. Testing jumped substantially at the end of April and has maintained around the same level since. We expected some rise in absolute numbers of cases but what is happening now are much higher positive test results, not just higher totals as a result of more tests. Over the past four weeks Maricopa has gone from 5% positive to 9% to 12% to 14%.
The only potentially bright note is that the positive tests are skewing much younger. In early May 60% of all cases were 45 or older, while that has now dropped to 40%. If the infections can be contained in the younger group, mortality will be much less.
I wish you would stop talking about the uptick in Arizona. You are destroying my temperature and humidity theory. :-) :-)
One of the things that occurred to me thinking about the situation here is that we have the opposite situation here from the North. Our outdoor time is from October into May. Now people congregate inside in air conditioning.
That has occurred to me, too, when I see that some of the places where Covid-19 is increasing are in southern states or relatively hot climates. But I wonder if there is a lot of air conditioning in some of those hot countries
Great job again Rodin!
Gov. Cuomo is correct that the big issue is not deaths among the protesters/rioters who become infected in the protests/riots, but deaths among people in the true vulnerable groups (mainly geezers) that they directly or indirectly infect later.
This means several long (due to healthy immune systems) cycles among the invulnerable before we start seeing more geezers get severe infections. Just in time to blame Trump.
And when they blame Trump rallies, watch for the tension in trying to maintain the “women and minorities hit hardest” narrative.
Some other interesting facts re: AZ and COVID
Ethnicity of cases: 18% White; 26% Latino, 11% Native American, 3% Black.
Ethnic makeup of AZ: 54% White; 31% Latino, 5% Native American, 5% Black
Ethnicity of deaths skews even more towards Native American (18%)
As someone who’s works has his work looking specifically at hospital census’s the number of cases are rising, the system is NOT overwhelmed, other reservations are now having outbreaks and we are seeing more and more Hispanic cases.
Finally, one reason why hospital beds are filling is the challenge as to where to discharge patient to.
Further finally, if we see no discernible bump from the protests (and we’ve had daily protests in downtown Phoenix) this will tell us that opening up is NOT a mistake but that we’re just going to see continued cases and (so far) at a level the health care system can handle.
I just listened to Michael Osterholm on Fox News Sunday (which was probably first broadcast this morning) and I couldn’t help shaking my head. Chris Wallace kept wanting to nail him down on the current state of the virus, where it’s spreading and where it’s not, and the good doctor finally said, “We just don’t know.” Now there’s a true statement.
38% of cases in AZ are currently listed as unknown race/ethnicity. I suspect that most Native American cases have been reported with ethnicity because the bulk are Navajo and being treated at Navajo Medical Centers which report to the state so my guess is the percentage of White and Hispanic cases is substantially higher than being reported. In addition, the 11% figure matches up well with what Navajo Nation is independently reporting and would also allow for several hundred cases from other reservations.
Only 12% of deaths do not have ethnicity/race reported. Of those that do, 51% are White, 22% Hispanic and 18% Native American.
I agree that currently the system is not overwhelmed and that Hispanic cases have been increasing the fastest. The Hispanic population is also younger so that may also help lower mortality.
I have been highly skeptical of “Social Distancing” from the very beginning. It is an extremely crude method of keeping people from getting infected from one another, that is not derived from any scientific analysis or study. It is just a primitive “rule of thumb” somebody created for the ignorant masses. I just found out recently that the six-feet distance is not even a constant throughout the World. Different countries in Europe each have their own favorite measurement requirements from two meters (6 feet 8 inches), 1.5 meters (5 feet), and one meter (40 inches). I guess the European Union has not standardized social distancing yet.
If they thought the public had any brains, they would have instead focused on disseminating information of how viruses spread through direct coughing, sneezing, and hand contact followed by touching the mucous membranes in your mouth, nose and eyes. This is not rocket science, and all but severely retarded people can understand some simple practices like washing your hands. Instead, they would have you believe that you catch the virus simply be standing within six feet of someone. Not six feet of someone who is actually infected, but just anyone. It reminds me of the AIDS Epidemic when many people thought you could catch the virus merely by performing anal sex with someone, regardless of whether your partner was infected with the AIDS virus or not.
My wife and I went to a garden center last week. I was surprised that they are one of the few businesses in our area that require the wearing of masks. 80% of the place is a spacious outdoor nursery exposed to wind and bright sunshine, which kills the virus within seconds. I guess they haven’t gotten the word that outdoors in sunshine is the least dangerous place for viral spread.
Oregon is in much the same position. There has been an uptick in confirmed cases which public health officials say is due to more testing, workplace outbreaks and increased contract tracing. (Testing is more than triple the rate of three months ago.) Nobody is blaming the protests which are continuing after two weeks. But the hospitalization rate is still very low with 47 Covid confirmed or suspected cases in ICU and 200 beds available. Nonetheless, the governor used these numbers as an excuse for delaying further reopening. Her issue is that the state can’t let the new cases get ahead of the ability to contact trace those new cases. Contact tracing is becoming something of an end in itself.
Navajo are nearly 60% of reported cases in New Mexico, which is astounding. Outside of the Navajo Nation, there have been roughly 4,000 cases here. Which is almost precisely the number of “recovered” cases counted by the state. I was told last night that currently less than 1 percent of tests are coming come back positive here, and of those, a vanishingly small percentage require ICU treatment. Our hospitals are removing ICUs from the “COVID-19” category, so that they can actually service other people, but that means the percentage of COVI-19 ICUs available remains small.
While that’s meaningless (since ICUs can be recertified for COVID-19, that’s one of the key measures our governor is using to keep us under lockdown. So she can continue vying for Biden’s VP slot. Health has nothing to do with her decisions at this point.
Sadly, the entire idea of “social distancing” was born from a science fair project by a high school sophomore here in Albuquerque. It’s based entirely on modeling, and has never been scientifically tested.
https://www.abqjournal.com/1450579/social-distancing-born-in-abq-teens-science-project.html
I’m not sure what’s sad about it. It’s great that a high school student came up with an idea that scientists would study. The studying has mostly been with models, though, but what else can you expect at this point? You can’t do experiments like that on human subjects without tracking a population a lot more closely than I’d want a government to have the power to do. Research is going to have to be less direct, and therefore less than conclusive.
I think the social distance concept came from measuring the distance droplets often travel in a forceful sneeze or cough.
It’s not something that I think needs to be studied. It’s pretty straightforward. Mothers and fathers of newborns usually keep their new baby away from other people during the colds and flu season.
I think the “social distance” notion was simply a way to articulate something most of us do instinctively when we are around someone with a bad cold who is sneezing and coughing. The point the public health advisers were trying to make was that this particular virus could be passed from person to person in close contact with each other when neither knew one of them had become infected.
Some of what we thought we knew about that type of transmission came to us via China’s experience with the first SARS outbreak in 2003. We have since found out that this virus is not as infectious as we originally thought it was.
It was interesting to read the latest contact-tracing program procedures for Massachusetts which look at only a two-day window before a person tests positive and asks the patient to tell the tracers about people who have had very close contact with that patient for an extended time period for the two days prior to the positive test. So a nurse, for example, who had close contact with patients during that time period would be of concern in terms warning her patients to get tested and possibly self-quarantine.
It’s the same kind of issue with the droplets and fomites. No one can prove that a person ever got sick from contact with a droplet left on a door handle by an infected person. But we’ve been cleaning surfaces with disinfectants for at least a hundred years. It makes sense to do so.
Back in the 19th century, the Indians of New Mexico practiced social distancing in times of epidemic. They broke up into smaller groups that stayed away from each other. I imagine such things happened elsewhere, too, but that’s an example I recently read about.