One of the tasks I have at Duke Margolis is to support the Covid Exit Strategy team. I have a daily task of looking at the numbers and trends and finding something interesting to say before my first cup of coffee. With the exception of a three day break in mid-August, I have been doing this every day since mid-May.
We categorize states into four categories:
Green — Trending Better
Yellow — Caution Warranted
Red _– Trending Poorly
Dark Red — Uncontrolled Spread
These colors are derived from CDC and White House criteria for reopening which are a set of criteria for new cases per million, testing positivity rate, hospital capacity, and testing numbers.
My comment for this morning was a line graph of states in Green by day:
As of this morning, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine are Green.
New York and New Jersey had been Green for most of August and September. Southern New England would bounce in and out of Green every couple of days.
If anyone had asked me in May to put a 50:1 bet on no more than 5 states being Green on September 23rd, I would have declined the bet.
Right now, I just can’t even.
Van Buren
I am going back to only doing a food shop every 2 weeks. I am one of a small handful of teachers granted permission to teach remotely through the end of the year, and although it is a TPIA I am very glad to not be going into Brooklyn 5x a week.
J.
And we are now entering the traditional flu season. We are doomed.
Now for some good news: The new season of the Great British Baking Show begins this Friday on Netflix!
download my app in the app store mistermix
I check that site every day – ever since you added the dark red states, I prefer it to CovidActNow, which doesn’t have enough differentiation.
So, when I saw that NY went yellow, eek! I think we’ll be green again, soon, once we get through this Labor Day bump which was exacerbated by some dipshit evangelicals.
Cheryl Rofer
It’s gonna get worse.
We need more testing. Why isn’t everyone, including that Mayhew guy, shouting that from the rooftops?
The University of Illinois, which got laughed at for its plans, is doing reasonably well BECAUSE IT IS TESTING LIKE CRAZY.
Yesterday Andy Slavitt was teasing news about testing for today.
PsiFighter37
The Northeast is the only part of the country that seems to have behavior (excluding college students) that will keep spread at very low levels. Given that we are past summer vacation season, I would encourage the Northeast (of which I would grudgingly include New Jersey, only because Cuomo has this belief that they are inseparable from NY) to basically shut themselves off from the rest of the country throughout the winter. It won’t happen, though.
Immanentize
@Cheryl Rofer: I agree about testing. It’s the only way to direct actions like quarantine and isolation. Example? Rice University Dashboard.. Since August 1, over 25,000 tests, .09 infection rate (21 people).
Testing all the time also reminds people to behave!
wvng
The health department in Hardy County, WV (where I live) has been doing a sterling job with tracing and quarantining and quickly responding to reports of businesses backsliding on masking by employees and customers. But we know we’re on a knife’s edge between managing spread and getting buried by some super spreader events. A bunch of churches aren’t taking precautions, and it’s just a matter of time before they ruin it for us all.
JaneE
I really expect we will be bouncing around for another couple of years. Most of the people will wear masks, because they care about themselves and others. There will be agitators who won’t because Republican, and they will keep a reservoir of virus going around to infect people who let their guard down, and that does and will continue to happen.
Unless the vaccine(s) are better than 50% effective, there will still be a huge number of uninfected people for years, and that is after (or if) the vaccine(s) are widely available. I don’t expect to see what the new normal is for at least 5 years, if I live that long.
NYCMT
@Van Buren: You drive in from Nassau? We’re in Forest Hills. The elder boy has been fully remote for fourth grade since mid August, and there is an avalanche of parents moving kids from the blended model to the fully remote model right now – such that teachers are being reassigned. The younger one has been going to a small daycare, but the case numbers in Kew Gardens – the next neighborhood over just doubled (!א דאנק לאנדסמאן)- and I am quietly hyperventilating in renewed anxiety.
Meanwhile, all the local Israelis in the schmatta business are freaking out in very poorly behaved ways on the local listservs about full-time inperson school and pretending that the disease will disappear after November 4.
Catherine D.
Cornell is also testing like crazy: 5000 to 6000 per day on weekdays, about half that on weekends. After an initial bout of returning student idiocy, positives are down to something like 0.02%. I go for my weekly test this afternoon. Students and faculty/staff who go near students are tested twice a week.
Another Scott
@PsiFighter37: The NE USA has recently done better than other regions, but it’s still having 2000-3000 new case per day and that’s far too many.
https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/regional-cases
This fall is going to be a disaster unless people get serious about doing what needs to be done: wearing masks all the time, not doing stupid stuff indoors, distancing, and all the rest.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
eric
david, you, missed the layup……video
burnspbesq
@Another Scott:
Then it’s going to be a disaster in Texas. If you’ve seen photos of the crowds at high school football games, you know what I’m talking about.
JPL
Since I live in GA, there is little hope that we will see green anytime soon.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
I have a cousin that lives in VT and so wish I’d lit out for there when this all started. But my wife is in health care and she can’t do telemedicine only, so she would have had to quit her job. One thing I find frustrating about the universities testing so frequently is that…my wife has not been tested a single time by her workplace, much less has she been tested routinely. She’s seeing patients live, in person, two days a week. So are all her colleagues in her clinic. None of them are tested routinely once or more a week. There is testing available if they develop symptoms but the hospital is not being aggressive about identifying cases.
One could cite financial pressures except DC Children’s Hospital has a huge endowment. They have the money to do better, they just aren’t. I know, there are strings attached to how endowment funds can be used but there are generally emergency clauses that make it easier to use at least some of that money in emergency situations, and I mean, if this isn’t that then WTF are they ever going to consider an emergency?
We’re in MD, which has done…mediocre I guess. We were hit sort of hard early but not as hard as the NY, CT, NJ area. Since then we’ve been demonstratively worse than those areas. I don’t think our positive test rate has ever dropped below 3. It was above 10 for a large chunk of the summer before falling to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5 – at least that’s what the State health department says it is.
One thing I can’t figure out is why the WaPo and some other sites I check have positive test rates for MD that are roughly twice what the State Health Department reports. Like, WaPo (and maybe CovidActNow) will say our positive rate is 5-6% and I check the Maryland Coronavirus Update page (the official State page) and it says like 3%ish. I don’t know why the numbers would be that far apart.
frosty
I check it every day. It was a gut punch when NY turned yellow. They were my one guide that somebody in the US might be able to manage COVID.
WASF.
VeniceRiley
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Okay now I’m scared.
Matt McIrvin
@JaneE: It’ll be particularly fun after President-for-Life Trump outlaws public mask-wearing.
sdhays
I’m surprised by this. In April, maybe there was still some hope that the country would take this seriously enough. But by May, we already had ample evidence that red state governors were both stupid and insane and the Federal government would never be there, except to make things worse. True, the national commentary was delusional, warning about a “second wave” in the fall when the first wave was still hitting us.
I feel like it’s another artifact of “the view from New York” that so much of our media has. It was really bad in New York, and New York responded like a minimally competent European country and it got a lot better, so the assumption was that the US was going to have an experience like Europe. But huge portions of the rest of the country didn’t respond that way and clearly did not have the will to even try. The signs were there, but no one really wanted to accept what they were saying.
Geoboy
Thank God I live in New Mexico and thank God for Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and everyone supporting her.
WereBear
@download my app in the app store mistermix:
Likewise, even though we are much closer to the Canadian and Vermont borders here in the ‘Dacks, I have declared take-out rules back in place, now that the leaf season is coming.
Freemark
I live in York County, PA the anchor county for Pennsabama. Last week we were one of the five worst counties for new COVID cases per capita in the entire Northeast. Still having school districts talking about suing Gov Wolf to remove all restrictions for school districts and school sporting events. And we are of course anti-mask central. Anti-maskers even caused a Walmart in York to shut down and evacuate a few weeks ago.
Talk about, “I can’t even…”
Kelly
We returned home Monday from the Oregon Coast where we fled the Beachie Creek fire and massive smoke. Good clean air and out of state plates. Many plates from uncontrolled spread Idaho and Nevada. The most out of state plates were Washington and California. Sprinkling of plates from as far away as N Dakota. Guy in the room next ours for one morning was from Alabama. He was reading his bible in his Jesus Saves tshirt and came over to offer a friendly handshake. I declined which he accepted with aplomb. Restaurants were busy, we ate take out. Now in our 2 week fingers crossed phase. Tests are free at Kaiser may just get tested.
Sab
@sdhays: Two states in the whole midwest are yellow. Everything else is red or worse. And his own party wants to impeach DeWine.
Benw
I hope Cuomo rebans indoor dining this fall and that people here keep being pretty strict about masks.
JanieM
I’ve been taking a screenshot of this map every day for a couple of months now. It’s beyond depressing that instead of more states becoming green, stalwarts have dropped into yellow. But actually, I’m surprised that with our recent numbers Maine is still green. Two people just <i>had</i> to have an unmasked, undistanced, overcrowded wedding, and a lot more carelessness and defiance (notably from the pastor who married them) followed after that.
randy khan
I’m interested in the choice to code each state based on its worst measure. I’m not saying it’s wrong – it’s conservative in the best sense of the word – but when you see a state like Virginia where the case load and positivity numbers are going in the right direction, but it’s red, it’s a bit disconcerting.
frosty
@Freemark: You have my condolences on your location. That’s where I am too – although I see almost 100% masks in stores when I’m out, including our local Walmart.
Another Scott
@randy khan: One thing I really dislike about the Virginia (and most state) numbers is that there’s no accurate indication of people recovered. There’s tests, positive cases, and deaths (and hospitalizations and so forth if one digs deeper). But nothing about numbers of people who are currently being treated or in quarantine/isolation outside of hospitals/ICUs or recovered.
So, if one looks at Worldometers.info one sees things like:
Ohio 144,524 total cases 4,636 deaths 122,671 recovered 17,217 active cases
Virginia 141,138 total cases 3,021 deaths 16,880 recovered 121,237 active cases
I do not believe that Ohio has 7.27x as many recovered people as Virginia. :-/
We still need national standards for reporting so that people have a better sense of what’s happening and where more active measures are needed.
And we still need much, much more testing.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
See, the Covid Exit Strategy page says Maryland is at 5.2% positive test rate. The Maryland Department of Health says the positive rate for the State is 2.6%. There’s only one formula to calculate a percentage so one or the other has to be flat out wrong. Which is flat out wrong – the State Department of Health or the folks who say the positive rate is twice what the Department of Health is saying?
Ohio Mom
Sab: sometimes I have a flicker of pity for DeWine, then it passes.
He is one of the last not completely awful Republicans and it’s a hard road he’s walking. Then I consider that he is giving cover to all the Ohioans who want to think of themselves as old-fashioned Republicans and I get disgusted at the lot of them. Such self-delusion that is causing such damage to all of us.
Suzanne
@Freemark: I’m in Pittsburgh, and from what I see here, the vast majority of people are following the rules. CovidActNow breaks down the data by county, which COVID Exit Strategy doesn’t. It’s helpful.
MuckJagger
If I’m not mistaken, Maine, NH and Vermont were three of the states that shut things down dead right away. I think you still aren’t supposed to go to Maine unless you’ve had an very recent test and/or be willing to self-quarantine for 15 days.
Two Republicans and a Democrat, but judging from my conservative’ friends FB posts, you’d swear that Governor Mills of Maine was the female Antichrist.
randy khan
@Another Scott:
Yeah. It’s a problem.
J R in WV
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
A shame we have to anticipate the government(s) are lying to us, here in the United States.
Just like Zimbabwe, we can’t trust Trump to allow our government to tell us the truth about what Trump has done to us. He is doing his best to turn us into just another shithole, and THAT he is doing pretty well at. Unlike most of his actual duties.
boatboy_srq
@PsiFighter37: You might be surprised. Maine has quarantine-or-neg-test-result requirements for entry, and with many states limiting testing to the already-exposed or at-risk, there’s no good way to get past those requirements. Northern New England may not be “walled off,” but it might as well be.
boatboy_srq
@Another Scott: Virginia is also hampered by federap operations, both maladministration and DoD/DHS contractor. The whole Farmville superspreader cluster, for example, was exacerbated (caused?) by DHS actions aimed at putting CBP officers in DC. Stuff like this negates a lot of what Virginia is attempting.
FlyingToaster
The view from Greater Boston: The unis that are doing testing &/or reducing dorm density (BU, Emerson, NU, Tufts, Harvard, MIT) are doing well. The unis that aren’t (Boston College FTW) got their contact tracing taken over by the state.
Our primary problem this summer and September have been gatherings and the returning college kids. Two HSs (Lincoln-Sudbury and Dover) had to go remote because of large [drinking] parties by HS students that were broken up by the po-po and reported to all-n-sundry. There have been multiple big parties down on the Cape-n-Islands that caused a surge in cases down there.
Our generally competent but an asshat governor Baker demanded to know why Watertown wasn’t reopening (hint: plan published in August with the metrics for why Sept-Oct is remote). The School Committee and the Town Council are going to send them the fucking URL in response. And the special needs kids started live yesterday. Everyone else started remote. Oct 22 the Pk-5 go back live, IFF the numbers stay down. Unfortunately, Watertown is in the middle of everything (Cambridge w MIT/Harvard/Lesley on the East, Waltham with Bentley/Brandeis on the West, Newton with Lasell/UMass/BC/etc to the South, and Allston/Brighton with BU and B-Fucking-C to the Southeast. So those calculations are built into the system.
In better news, WarriorTeen*’s school started live a week ago; they’re mornings live, M-T, afternoons & Friday remote. Fall Play rehearsals start today (Zoom). There have been multiple cases in the school community while we were remote; there is one possible teacher case that caused 5th grade to go remote until testing results are returned. Since they draw from all over the Hub, they are all about precautions and masks and transparency.
* WarriorGirl-That-Was turned 13 this past weekend. And they’re “they, them, their” from now on. Huh.
FlyingToaster
@MuckJagger:
She’s keeping the hordes of infectious Massholes from infecting the bodily fluids of Mainers. Also, keeping those Massholes from spending money in Maine.
Mathguy
@MuckJagger: There’s a reason that LePage, the human bowling jacket, was elected twice in Maine (with a plurality of course–how else would such a POS get in?).
spc123
@sdhays: NYS is on the higher competence list for Western entities – wouldn’t say minimally competent – there has been some competence mediocrity in parts of Europe.
errg
I don’t understand the “trending poorly” category. For example currently Louisiana is in that category, but number of cases has gone from 737 to 571 over the past 14 days, and the case positivity has gone to 5.4% to 3.5%. New cases per million are relatively high at 123, which is why they’re in that category, but it seems to me that it confuses things to have states that are actually headed in the right direction put in the same bucket as ones where things are getting worse.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@errg: Going by here in California it takes like a month or more for the poor sods to die from the virus, so the deaths lag the infections and would result in what you are seeing.
Wyrm1
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
I hope your wife stays safe. I teach in DC and we’ve pretty much been told schools are expecting to open on hybrid in early Nov. Kids travelling on metro and being in schools with crap hvac is going to be a disaster
MuckJagger
@Mathguy: Well, to be fair, we had that one guy so full of himself he ran third party *twice* — and Democrats really had an underwhelming candidate for that first election; I think she finished behind the independent.
We *might* be able to avoid that particular bit of nonsense in the future now that we have ranked choice voting. Heavy emphasis on might.
Another Scott
@errg: Any single bad indicator determines which bin a state is in, as I understand it.
https://www.covidexitstrategy.org/definitions-and-criteria
Cheers,
Scott.
mad citizen
Interesting. My state is trending poorly of course, a midwest red state with a Republican governor sailing to an uncontested election win this fall. Even in his ads he touts how we are all “One Indiana” etc. Check your local listings, but it seems our local media (the last few newspapers, the local tv channels) have given up the part of journalism that investigates and provides a critical eye on how those in power are doing things.
You look at the graphs of daily cases, lower in May and June, now we have the second wave. It’s not hard to say “we failed” or “someone failed” or “what the hell are we doing wrong?”
Freemark
@Suzanne: Pittsburgh and Philadelphia have both done a good job. I guess I need to thank Penn State and Center County for pushing York County down the county rankings this week. But from what I am seeing we are going to do our best to retake the lead.
Bill Arnold
@frosty:
FWIW (mid-Hudson valley here, currently about 1000 active cases per million, up from about 500) in August/September I saw too many house parties (we’re talking houses on 1-2 acre lots), where there were like 30 cars and a pro-forma tent or pavilion outside and maybe 10 people outside, never a mask in sight. Also I’ve heard about least one local wedding-reception superspreader event. similar.
This is in an area with 100 percent mask discipline in stores. Restaurants are open inside with separation inside, which is bad and will be very very bad as it gets colder.
I expect that churches leading the lack of discipline. Some remain disciplined but some not.
Nutshell; the masks and general discipline are keeping numbers down in NY but as social gatherings move indoors, we need to expect an increase. It probably won’t get April-bad but it will get much worse, due to stupid selfish [psychopaths].
WaterGirl
@Kelly: Glad you are back home. How awful to have to deal with fires on top of COVID, and vice versa. sigh.