The US is having a consistent plateau of 20,000-25,000 new COVID cases per day. However the location of those cases are moving. The Northeast has effectively crushed the epidemic spread. The Great Lakes is making progress. The South and Sunbelt however are heating up. One of the metrics that is useful to look at to determine spread is how many days does case count double? At the start of the epidemic, doublings were happening every three to six days. No state is at that pace; thanksfully. However there is massive differences between the fastest and slowest doubling states:
Arizona has the fastest current doubling time in America at just over 2 weeks. At current pace, Arizona will quadruple its case count in a month. Even if there was a magic wand waved that stopped transmission this afternoon, Arizona would see a 20% increase in cases over the course of the week as there is a multi-day lag between when people get infected and when people are tested. There is no magic wand. There are smart public health measures and harm minimization techniques including wide spread mask wearing that can slow spread down.
New York got crushed in March and April. However aggressive lock-downs and wide spread changes in social behavior have produced massive changes in disease spread. Now case count will double in a year. New York’s hospitals have a fighting chance to now accommodate any unexpected surge or reasonably expected non-COVID disasters.
The April-May story was a Northeast and Pacific Northwest story. The June-July story will be a Sunbelt story.
Kosh III(
Sadly the southern states are controlled by Trump worshippers who are not taking the needed precautions. Expect many more deaths in the region due to their stupidity.
I popped into a big box in an affluent mostly white and R(egressive) part of town, few masks on customers, NONE on staff.
dr. bloor
Our species will vanish because we refuse to learn that Mother Nature doesn’t care whether or not we believe in her power.
TK_1
Take it from me, it’s a bad time to live in a deep red state. Lot of these people are not only ignoring the harm reduction strategies, oftentimes they’re aggressively ignoring them and seemingly priding themselves on doing so. Scary days ahead.
low-tech cyclist
Never mind – wrong thread
Erin in Flagstaff
As an Arizonan, I am not thrilled by our prominence in news stories about COVID-19.
wvng
A few days ago the republican governor of Arizona, in a statement where he said he would not issue an order requiring masking, said we have to learn to live with this disease. Yes, and living with it means masking if you want to not have a lot of dead people. This really isn’t that complicated.
wvng
@TK_1: Here in Hardy County, WV, starting to get amused looks and stink eye for wearing a mask. I expect that to turn hostile pretty soon.
On the positive side, we did have an “I Can’t Breathe” march last Friday that went off without difficulty … after police shut down a “protectors of Hardy County” plan to put snipers on rooftops to shoot looters.
Jeffery
The snow birds are now leaving Arizona taking it home with them wherever they live.
Amir Khalid
With numbers like that, I don’t understand how state governments can even consider easing lockdown.
MomSense
My poor dad and stepmom are stuck in Florida. I sent them a photo of us our walking and they asked if everyone here is wearing masks. Apparently that is NOT the case in Florida.
Also assholes “from away” are coming to Maine to vacation and I am not confident they are following the 2 week mandated quarantine.
WaterGirl
@wvng:
Holy fucking shit.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: Folk gotta have their free refills of iced tea.
Kristine
@Jeffery: ::damn:: Illinois has been doing okay so far. I didn’t think about returnees from winter homes.
catclub
rolling coal.
Amir Khalid
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I wouldn’t risk death for a can of Coke Light Lemon, let alone a glass of iced tea.
Seriously, I wouldn’t consider easing lockdown with infections rising like that. And I wouldn’t do it without a plan for keeping people safe. Masks, hygiene, social distancing, the works. Remove two of every three restaurant tables, rope off the bar and make people order drinks from their table, that sort of thing. It’s just crazy not to do that.
bluefoot
Massachusetts has been doing well lately, but if the colleges open up in the fall it’s going to get ugly. The population of Greater Boston goes up by something like 40% during the school year. That’s a lot of people coming from all over the country. Sheer numbers means we’ll see a big increase in cases, even if everyone wears masks, practices social distancing (which IMO isn’t really possible on a college campus), etc. I expect we’re going to be back to stay-at-home orders by October.
Ohio Mom
Yesterday I had my annual exam. My internist is a part-time administrator at the hospital and that is taking up all her time during the pandemic so I saw another doctor in the practice.
Who kept scolding me, “You’re very high risk (for COVID)” after I told her Ohio Dad is going on a business trip to Las Vegas at the end of the week. “So is he!” was all I could answer.
I promised I would turn the master bedroom and bath over to him for two weeks after his return and camp out in the guest room. But the rest of quarantining Ohio Dad in this little ranch is going to be a challenge.
I guess I will keep all the windows open all the time, and enjoy Cincinnati’s summer humid temps of 90+ in the comfort of my home.
P.S. He’ll be in a warehouse every day, it’s not like he’s going to the Strip or other touristy places.
Wish us luck!
Mike J
There may be more to come in the PNW, but the growth seems to be in the rural counties over on the dry side of the mountains. Yakima and Franklin counties bot had more new caes earlier this week than Seattle did.
Amir Khalid
@Ohio Mom:
Remind Ohio Dad not to risk joining in after-work socialising over beers or dinner.
ETA: and to get tested — when he comes back, and post-quarantine too if possible.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: Why do you hate freedumb, Amir?
Barbara
@wvng: I would like any insight into whether elderly people in Arizona — a significant share of the population, especially the voting share — are having any kind of epiphany over their evidently rather low status within the Republican political ecosystem. Wearing masks around other people is EASY.
hells littlest angel
Everyone knows the southern US will be fine once the weather down there warms up.
Aziz, light!
This is all part of the plan for November. Unsafe conditions in the toss-up states. People with brains in their heads stay home; Trump voters vote.
Baud
@Aziz, light!: The people with brains aren’t going to be cowed, if the evidence so far is any indication.
Barbara
@hells littlest angel: It never cools down in Arizona. Well, not enough. Ditto for Texas and Florida, though more varied across the state from north to south.
Aziz, light!
@Baud: It will have an effect on the outcome. Hopefully not a major one.
Archon
@Aziz, light!:
If what happened in Wisconsin is a guide, it would have to be the Walking Dead outside to prevent Democrats from voting this November.
Uncle Cosmo
Transmission probability will be low for people who get outside & stay outside – even at bars & restaurants so long as they eat & drink on the terrace. That may last till High Summer in its full thermonuclear & megahumid glory hits, with the associated stampede to take refuge in the A/C – enclosed areas with social proximity & (in all probability) recirculated atmosphere (what bar or restaurant owner is going to pay more than s/he has to to cool down hot humid air from the outside?) Toss in a “super-spreader” or two & the virus will be celebrating for months on end.
I would guess that ‘Rona In The ‘Zona will be especially nasty – lots of old folks & a High Summer climate that anywhere south of Flagstaff is essentially unendurable without omnipresent A/C.
artem1s
@bluefoot:
Great Lakes regions are going to get set back by students returning this fall from Red States. We have outbreaks already in Ohio high schools that have opened up football practice. Our campus is considering a lot of options, even cohort learning for undergrads so they can manage spread if there are outbreaks on campus. No word yet about how they expect to manage intake of students. If everyone will be required to have an entrance physical, quarantine period, participate in testing and tracking? But all of it will be for naught if the sportsball teams are running around the country infecting each other every frigging week. The NCAA is going to kill us all.
The Moar You Know
The Zonies are doing what they have always done, come out to San Diego for the summer as their low-tax paradise is inconveniently uninhabitable for four months a year. Maybe they should have chosen to live somewhere else.
Not a goddamn one of them are wearing masks. So Southern California is going to get screwed by this as well. We were doing pretty well.
Kelly
Don’t count the PNW out yet. Oregon doubling time on the Covidexitstrategy chart is 24 days. New clusters on the sparsely populated east side with limited health care services. A big cluster at popular coastal tourist town Newport. Fire season is coming and most of the state is in drought. Forestry Dept is scrambling to reorganize fire crews to minimize contact between crews. Can’t minimize contact within crews. The good news is the great outdoors is where Oregonians spend their summer days.
zzyzx
I would hope that NY has a much longer doubling time as it’s a lot harder to match all of the cases it had when things were insane a few months ago than it would be for Arizona which was mostly unharmed then. It is good that there isn’t another immediate second wave as things loosen a bit since that sends good messages about reinfection and how many people might actually be immune. Here’s hoping the northeast stays sane!
Kristine
@The Moar You Know:
Aren’t they due for a water supply crisis in Arizona, if they aren’t having one already? Phoenix is one of the fasting growing areas of the country, and damned if I understand why.
WaterGirl
@zzyzx:
I don’t quite understand your confidence here. The curve is going up again in many, many states, and started going up again as soon as states started loosening things up.
Zzyzx
@WaterGirl: referring to in the northeast there. Most of the places being hit hard now are experiencing their first wave. Places that were horrible back in late April aren’t getting bad again yet.
JaneE
California here, Eastern Sierra and Victorville area. The local Bishop news used to have the county health status update daily. They stopped doing that, coincident with the local beginnings of reopening. We have added 5 new cases since opening started, the last two weren’t published in the news at all. That would be a 26% increase in cases since reopening, but when the total is only 24 the percentages go crazy with a single case. We had been new case free for at least 3 weeks before we were allowed to open before the state. County health requires masks indoors and where 6 ft distancing cannot be maintained outdoors. The local businesses I patronize require masks for entry. Masks are getting more and more rare, but how many are local and how many are tourists from counties that don’t require them I don’t know.
Victorville has a lot of people without masks, and a lot of people complaining bitterly about the fact that some businesses require them. I think Costco is enforcing it, but Staters really isn’t. City hall will do a temperature check, which is causing bottlenecks getting in, as if service wasn’t slow enough to start with. The ones not wearing masks seem to be more cranky in general than those who are.
One other observation – BLM and similar protesters are mainly masked, and distancing. The conservative counter protesters are not doing either. I interpret that as one group really does care about the lives and health of the others in the community and the second group does not. Their behavior regarding Covid-19 just reinforces their messaging.
J R in WV
@Ohio Mom:
Hope you seriously beg him to wear a mask 24/7 and eat room service alone in his room the whole trip. And send him off with a sufficient number of masks.
Good luck to all of your family~!~
J R in WV
@Uncle Cosmo:
It’s been years since I spent a lot of time in Houston TX, while my dad was being treated at M D Anderson. The outdoor bars and restaurants there had huge fans with misters blowing on the outdoor customers, like the ones you see at late summer NFL game sidelines.
I can’t help but wonder what those would do for spreading the viral load to everyone? Anyone have an opinion based on evidence? My reaction to that situation is death wish on the part of all those customers at this time.
Locally in WV mask wearing is very common where required by government or management.
Those who decline at the big box Kroger’s grocery where I shop appear to be almost all smokers, as I watch them approach the entrance burning tobacco of build up their blood level for their shopping trip, and none of them then put on a mask when they got to the entrance and had to ditch their butt.
This was kind of a revelation to me, but shouldn’t have surprised me at all… smokers are suicidal, after all, and in serious denial about it.
mr perfect
We live north of the 49th. My octogenarian parents sold their RV in Wellton, AZ this February after 21 snowbird winters there. They have noticed a significant change (and not good) in people’s attitudes since the Trump administration and felt it was a good run but time to cash in their chips. And I am ever so happy. My mother has observed there are many year round residences in these RV parks being the cost of living is quite low in SW Arizona. Come the notorious desert heat, like right now, air conditioning is a must but RV models aren’t insulated all that well so electrical costs running 24 hours a day to keep their units comfortable isn’t affordable. So the residents tend to gather in the social centre during the day. You have to wonder how badly Arizona will get hit with many of these folks having underlying medical conditions and many other RV sites in a state that has more than its fair share of RV Parks.
J R in WV
@Kristine:
Yes. In the county where we built our “winter camp” they allowed farmers to drill 18″ irrigation wells for big center pivot irrigation installations, and my cousins deep well suddenly pumped her home’s plumbing full of mud and gravel. This water aquifer is fossil water, not being replenished, and so will never recover.
There’s a farm across the road from her 5 acre lot with multiple half mile long center pivots, and they pump a million gallons a day thru each system. It obviously cannot continue indefinitely, is already causing damaging subsidence, and when it ends suddenly is anyone’s guess.
We operate on desert levels of water usage, as if we were using a hand-dug well. Navy shower, wet down, shut it off, wash, rinse as briefly as possible. Almost no one else does anything like that, even though they all live in nearly the driest desert climate in North America.
All while farmers are spending millions of dollars planting orchards, and building grain elevators where just the rebar for the foundation pour costs $250,000. Will they break even after paying for that? No one knows. Talk about denial~!~
I avoid Phoenix like the plague, it’s sweltering even in the winter. Tucson is OK in the winter, it’s also 1200 feet higher than Phoenix, which allows outdoor fountains and swimming pools, and irrigated golf greens.
Mai naem mobile
@The Moar You Know: I have a friend who just came back from San Diego. She said everybody was masked there. Everybody. Here in Phoenix I see probably about 50 percent masking at grocery stores. I haven’t done much beyond convenience stores and grocery stores. I hardly see masking in convenience stores. I’ve picked up food from restaurants a few times. People seem to mask there. I don’t understand why you would mask for a take out food order but not a convenience store. Ducey,to me, just looks continually scared shitless and has no idea what to do. He can’t be planning on running again and I have a feeling his presidential ambitions just got flushed down the toilet.