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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
It’s sad that a high school student’s untested idea was used to affect so many people without politicians giving it a second thought, that’s what’s sad.
You can’t test something that far-reaching just with models, since the models are based on assumptions, and as we’ve seen those assumptions haven’t borne out the way we were told.
That article bent the needle on my BS detector. In reality, some student merely did a demo of an already well known phenomenon that had been in the news due to the 2005 avian flu worries.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/pandemic-influenza-strategy-2005.pdf
https://www.who.int/influenza/resources/documents/FluCheck6web.pdf?ua=1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372334/
Yes, and even worse, her dad is probably the one who actually did the work.
Thanks. I’d seen the earlier pandemic plans which talking about it. I don’t get the whole social distancing/mask thing as compared to the lockdown issue. I understand discussions about where distancing is or is not appropriate and how much distance and, as to masks, the relative effectiveness of various types of coverings and where to wear them but the basic concept in terms of things you do to prevent infection from communicable diseases passed by contact or breathe is pretty basic. A little more distancing and masking would have been more effective than all of the lockdown mania.
I wondered about that. I thought it unusual that scientists hadn’t already been on that topic. But if they hadn’t been and it took a high school science project to trigger them, that would be fine, too.
We don’t know that. A lot of that happens, but this is something a student could have done on her own. Or Dad could have suggested the project and she took it from there. To maintain credibility I would hold off on the “probably.”
People have been using common sense to do social distancing since long before this. They’ve been doing it before the germ theory of disease was well established. There is nothing sad about a student researching the models, and there is no basis for blaming politicians’ bad behavior on those models. It strikes me as weird to criticize the student for it.
I’m not criticizing the student, I’m criticizing the politicians who come out and say with a straight face that we need to stay six feet apart and that we cannot have groups of more than five people together, threatening fines and shutting down businesses. But then doing nothing about thousands of protesters overwhelming large sections of cities across the country. Since we still don’t know whether asymptomatic spread is possible, the numbers of cases everywhere in the US not named “New York City” have not justified the actions taken.
I found this excellent debunking of the recent cry of “Corona Virus Spikes in the Southwest” by Daniel Horowitz which was linked by a commenter on the “Morning Jolt” coulumn by Jim Geraghty in National Review.
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-new-panic-lie-increased-coronavirus-hospitalizations-cases-southwest/
Despite being a Conservative, Geraghty often uses anecdotal evidence to bolster the Pandemic’s lethality, just like all the left-wing journalists do. It looks to me like the Pandemic is fizzling out in the U.S. just like in every other Northern Hemisphere country, despite a few anomalies here and there.
Then why detract from your points by bringing up up the student? I think governmental lockdown behavior is a problem, too, but it wouldn’t help my cause to bring up a goofy point of connecting it to a student’s science fair project.
Just as there were in the WSJ Editorial, the linked piece has several errors regarding AZ. Much of the authors’ argument is predicted in the increase in hospitalizations being due to more testing of patients coming in for other illnesses. There is certainly an element of that but it misses the point that testing of all incoming patients became routine in late April but the sharp increase in known or suspected Covid hospitalizations did not begin until May 25. Since May 25 that number has increased by 639 in 20 days, while it only increased by 299 during the 44 prior days. It also correlates with the significant increase in known or suspected Covid patients showing up in ER’s which does not depend upon testing. It also matches with the anecdotal information from my daughter, who’s an ER doc at two Phoenix area hospitals, who told me in the last week of May that she and her colleagues were seeing an increase in visits by Covid patients. Moreover, as mentioned above, this is not an artifact of more testing – the positive test rates in the Phoenix area have almost tripled in the past month.
It may very well be that the mortality toll will be lower than previously if the virus is weaker and since it is hitting a younger demographic Let’s hope so. We’ll get a clearer picture of that in a couple of weeks.
Also, care and treatment seems to be improving, which should also help. We hope.
Yes, they know quite a bit more about the disease and handling of patients than in March. As long as hospitals don’t get overwhelmed they can also provide much more personal care.
I was merely pointing out that her project was the origin of this modeling exercise, at least according to the Albuquerque Journal.
Thanks for the local information. One of the pluses from being in the Ricochet community.
I went back and checked out the Arizona website for their Covid information. What you say might be true about a genuine increase in Covid patients and hospitalizations in Arizona or the Phoenix area, but it is not having any impact on the rate of people dying. It has been three weeks since May 25th, which should be enough time for more deaths to start showing up, but haven’t. I know many pundits use the number of Wu Flu cases as their barometer of how bad things are going, but I think it is nearly irrelevant. If 300 million Americans were to get a mild case of Wu Flu, it would amount to a minor inconvenience.
This is not marked as such, but it is the Arizona death-from-Covid chart.
I tend to pay more attention to the deaths than the cases, which may be why I was puzzled the last few days by people talking about “frightening spikes” in some states. (Of course, if you want a spike to be really frightening, you should elongate the y axis and compress the x axis of your graph.) But still, if people are surviving it and if most of those who survive are not much the worse for wear, it’s not nearly as frightening a pandemic anyway.
One thing about just concentrating on the death rate, though, is that people typically take a long time to die from this disease. There is a considerable lag between change in the rate of infection and the rate of death. That also means ICU availability can get iffy, as the serious cases stack up in the ICU and clog up the health care system, many of them not to recover. So the number of cases should be a concern, too.
Today I was trying to find a one-stop web site where I could see graphical representations of covid cases over time as well as deaths. The IMHE site provides such graphs, but it is not nearly up to date. For some states it’s two weeks behind, which isn’t very helpful. So I’m still looking.
I have heard about some long lag times between onset and death. I’ve also heard the opposite, of people dying within 10 days to two weeks of onset. My wife told me about a couple of those at the hospital in which she works. I thought somewhere I read that the average death was about three weeks after onset of illness, but don’t quote me on that. I could be wrong.