Monroe County (Rochester) New York is trending towards becoming an “orange zone” (average 4% positive rate on a 7 day rolling average). This would mean that schools would be required to go online only. But, as part of being a “yellow zone”, we are required to test 20% of the in-school population, and right now the positive rate in schools is 0.14% on a significant (~3650) number of tests.
This means, put simply, that COVID precautions work. Kids in the districts being tested are going to school daily with masks and distancing. They’re not coming to school obviously sick, and they’re not spreading it if they’re not obviously sick. Based on this finding, our county public health commissioner is going to recommend that schools stay open even if we become an orange zone.
The sad part of this is that the testing isn’t happening in the mostly brown, low-achieving Rochester City schools, because they’re online, for a variety of reasons that include total chaos in the administration after the last superintendent basically hid a $60 million budget shortfall. Our mostly white, high-achieving suburban schools are being tested and doing well, even though the suburban towns where they’re located have just gone through a post-Halloween spike. The kids who can least afford to miss school are being hurt the most.
Well, I guess it could be worse — they could live in North or South Dakota.
Metal premium growth differences
Villago Delenda Est
Embedded institutional racism is a very real thing. This country MUST do better.
Mathguy
Only 4%? We have a 33% county positivity rate as of 11/16 and our schools are still doing some in-person teaching. Then again, we are extremely stupid.
waratah
MSNBC interviewed a medical person from North Dakota this morning. I immediately thought of your family. I know what it is like to live long distance from family when you cannot go to be with them .
Major Major Major Major
It’s great that they’re taking such a cautious approach to the schools, but if you aren’t closing indoor dining and drinking I don’t know that you can really say you’re taking appropriate precautions. Obviously this is complicated by the fact that doing so helps devastate industries the state doesn’t have money to subsidize, whereas changing school processes is free-ish, but I feel like people shouldn’t congratulate themselves for having the courage to take half-measures.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Major Major Major Major:
Agreed.
marduk
@Major Major Major Major: That’s what happens if we hit Orange. (which we likely will this upcoming Monday)
Barbara
My husband’s family has cancelled the annual Thanksgiving get together, and we are having Thanksgiving with immediate family only (four people, in our case, including daughter coming from another state by car). Other daughter in NYC refuses to travel over the holidays and hopes to come for longer visit after her current semester ends.
raven
Savage Inequalities.
NotMax
@raven
One hit wonder band from the eighties?
:)
raven
Major Major Major Major
@marduk: Probably best to shut down the primary drivers of spread before things get to orange, but better late than never. NYC is treated as some idiotic special case with lots of loopholes and extra restrictions so I can never keep track of what’s going on in the rest of the state…
Benw
@NotMax: you’re thinking of The Precautions. Great Irish band who scored big with “5,000 Masks”
patrick II
Wouldn’t it be great if we had a national program that could even out some of these disparities?
Benw
@raven: thx for the reference
marduk
@Major Major Major Major: They developed a statewide plan with varying levels of restrictions based on the infection rate in conjunction with epidemiologists. They’re following the metrics they established months ago. The response isn’t ad-hoc, it isn’t arbitrary, and it isn’t ill-considered. What else could any state do?
The Moar You Know
Shut down in-person education and you’ll halve this spike in cases, if not more. Nationwide. The kids are vectors. They don’t get sick but they’re asymptomatic carriers
If you want to end it, shut down bars (jesus, who even thought leaving those open was a good idea?) and all in-person restauarant service. Delivery and take out only.
Can’t stop people from being stupid and seeing family this Thankgiving (funerals for Christmas!) but we can make this less tragic.
Major Major Major Major
It is in NYC, where the rules are applied seemingly at random.
As I said: write better rules that will actually shut down spread at the appropriate time, and then enforce them. Schools aren’t even that big a driver, they’re just ‘cheaper’ to shut down and provoke less backlash. The drivers are what they’ve always been: indoor dining, bars, houses of worship, and private gatherings. And the correct time for restrictions is when it’s always been: sooner than feels appropriate.
We have the scientific consensus available if we choose to use it.
patrick II
We think of Donald’s trump fans as being enraptured by him, as robot love zombies who blindly do anything he asks of them. We may have the relationship backwards, or at least understand only half of it. Donald is the indulgent father who lets his brats do all of the things they want to without the discipline it takes to create a mature adult. Have his basket of deplorables always been dying to say n****r? Sure go ahead. Want to beat up the kids they don’t like? Have at it. Want say offensive things and say fuck your feelings when someone calls you out? Donald’s their man. Want to not be bothered with masks, cause no one is telling you what to do? Even if it might cause harm to others? It’s their choice only, like terrible two year olds total narcissism who perceive the world totally in relation to themselves.
The thing is, Donald can’t tell them to wear a mask now. Then he would no longer be Donald. He would be telling them to do something they don’t want to do. And he can’t make them get a vaccination. And he can’t make them take down their Nazi and Confederate flags. It would be like John Wayne kissing a boy. They would never forgive him, and he needs them to love him. He’s more dependent on them than they are on him. He encourages the worst in them because that is what they truly want, and because now he can’t do anything else. So he sits in the White House and does nothing, partly because he’s stupid and lazy, but also because he can’t do anything to discipline his unruly children without losing their love. And the pandemic rages on.
bluefoot
I fucking hate all this racism and profound inequality that causes children to not have resources and that results in people dying. The whole re-open thing started as soon as it became clear black and brown people were disproportionately affected by the virus. And of course there are the long-standing inequalities in health care – even if you’re a middle-class or rich black or brown person.
I don’t even know what to say anymore.
WereBear
@patrick II: This mirrors what I have been thinking. Trump only rules then when he issues commands they LIKE.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
I would say something slightly different about the correct time for restrictions: we need to look at the reproductive ratio rather than the absolute daily case count. If the reproductive ratio is greater than 1, you’re in trouble and need to do something about it. That’s the key to exponential growth; even if the absolute caseload looks low, it won’t stay that way for long if Reff is greater than 1.
oatler.
https://www.joemygod.com/2020/11/trump-approved-christian-tv-host-taunts-the-fbi-in-celebration-of-fl-bill-allowing-citizens-to-kill-looters/
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: Well, I was trying to be pithy, but you’re absolutely right. And that’s the thing about exponential growth, in the early part when it looks linear or like a blip, you are already behind.
marduk
@Major Major Major Major: Shutting down things at the appropriate time is exactly what the current rules are designed to do. Yellow, where Monroe County is at, significantly restricts indoor dining. Orange eliminates it. This IS relying on the scientific consensus.
jl
Thanks for important post, and congrats to the local authorities for doing a good job, which is alarmingly rare in the US, even among the right minded and enlightened areas.
Everyone makes mistakes when making decisions in real time in an emergency involving lots of unknown unknowns. As a WHO expert on emerging disease epidemic control said (paraphrase since I don’t remember exactly), ‘It’s impossible to get an A, but if you keep working you should be able to get a B’.
The Czech Republic and Slovakia have had horrible resurgences that make their first waves look like picnics in the park. These weren’t because covid-19 is some unstoppable doom machine, but because of several factors that should be familiar here in the US: some right wing rabble rousing against any precautions, population resistance to masks and simple social distancing rules (which when done right, allow a heck of a lot of business and life in general to continue half way normally), and political interference with good public health advice for perceived political gain. But those countries can correct themselves.
After the standard draconian shutdowns didn’t work well enough or quickly enough to be workable, Slovakia tested their whole population over a week, got infected isolated, seems to have knocked their resurgence down very quickly afterward. The kind of tests needed to do that are not even approved in the US. What is worse, the FDA hasn’t even been willing to set up a system to get that kind of very quick very cheap and very easy home test approved.
Edit: a more conventional home test was just approved in the US, but it is Rx only, and not designed to efficiently separate out those who are most important to isolate. And due to horrid US health care system, it is not very cheap.
The Czech Republic also had a huge surge in testing that seems to be knocking its resurgence down, but less clear whether their shutdown or the testing did it. And I can’t find any reports about what kind of testing they did. I’ll watch the control policy databases to see if they report the details.
The US public health system, and how it marshals expertise in controlling the epidemic is a scandal, and we need to find out the reasons for our grotesque failure at doing much of anything to control it. The US FDA seems obsessed with test characteristics that are needed for very high sensitivity tests for inpatient clinical diagnosis, but aren’t really suited for population wide epidemic control, it doesn’t seem to be able to even understand anything else.
raven
@oatler.: That’s some spamy shit right there.
Rusty
The schools in Monroe county have not been the problem. Strict rules, masks, distancing, cleaning, etc., the test numbers are very low and no indication of transmissions at the schools. The problem is the community. Spreader events have been private events (clam bakes, sleep over birthday parties, Halloween parties, teen parties), eating establishments (restaurants keep closing due to positive tests), etc. They are trying to prioritize the schools over sit down dining, bars, gyms, shopping and more. As it goes yellow, orange, red, if the schools can stay low they can stay open.
Going all remote means losing some students entirely, they never log on. The poorer the community, the more kids that disappear without in school learning. Just another terrible aspect of the city schools already being remote. NY is not perfect, but they are trying harder than most states to prioritize and intervene early.
jl
@Rusty: I think a problem with the US, is that there are very few places that have a contact tracing system, and integrated system needed to track the main drivers of outbreaks versus transmission channels. I haven’t seen a good analysis of complete outbreak databases that can find more than 50 percent of cases due to residential socializing that the US is obsessed with (house parties, snot nosed punks at beach bars, etc.). Important to control those. But you aren’t going to shut down an epidemic if you can’t even find out where 50 percent of the cases are coming from, let alone shut down what is causing them.
In California, I’ve heard county official put household gatherings and retail responsible for 90 percent of the spread. But they can’t see how much of that is due to cases coming in from other counties due to commuting patterns. CA promised to set up an integrated case tracking system to track inter country spread, but it never happened.
IMHO, a lot of it comes down to inability or unwillingness to pay attention to essential workers. They are mostly lower income working class, which doesn’t seem to exist in the minds of the rest of society. Their health and lives mean nothing, even if endangering those threatens the rest of us.
Major Major Major Major
@marduk: it is not and New York’s rules have been criticized since inception for being insufficiently aggressive. The time to shut down major vectors is when cases start to rise—further exponential increase is probably baked in—not when it starts to feel dangerous.
@jl: we can leverage contact tracing from the rest of the world, which tells us that the vast majority of cases are caused by restaurants, bars, offices, houses of worship, and private indoor gatherings. Why would we be different?
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
My town has just gone to all remote for the middle schools high schools were already all remote, due mostly to staff shortages for in person teaching( many staff are quarantined due to possible COVID-19 exposure to staff the schools in person). Going remote for the older kids frees up some staff to be moved to the elementary (K -5) schools. Now many school sports have also been shut down until at LEAST 8 January, hopefully the parents do not go protest in Hartford again.
Unfortunately I think people really thought, back in April, that this would be “all gone” by winter.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: I disagree. Some countries, France and Czech Republic are places where most of the resurgence is due to household socializing and population disregard for basic precautions.
For many others, there was a series of superspreader events at workplaces, like mines, ag and meat processing plants, distribution centers, that got the resurgence in motion. So sure, Madrid had dropped the ball, and had dangerous conditions in its restaurants, but the resurgence wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if there were not a wave of cases moving across the country from superspreader events in agriculture, mainly because employers broke the law and pressured infected and exposed workers to show up. In Poland, it was a series of huge superspreader events in the mining sector.
I’m not saying that restaurants and bars don’t need to be controlled (bars and nightclubs probably just have to shut down for the duration and paid to close down). But that is only half the picture.
A lot of news reports are BS. Reporters just go around to places they are familiar with, like restaurants, see that transmission channel and obsess over that. They don’t do any investigation into other places that might be producing large numbers of cases. that is all I am saying.
marduk
@Major Major Major Major: It’s not “when it feels dangerous”, it’s based on specific case infection rates. I understand you want a more aggressive response and that’s a perfectly fine argument to make but you’re just pretending NY’s guidelines aren’t based on considered scientific judgement when they absolutely are.
catclub
I take this as evidence that either the NSA either does not actually know where your phone is, or is not being recruited to use its knowledge of where your phone is, to do contact tracing a la South Korea.
Almost certainly the second – not being called on. The first is still possible.
catclub
and if the lockdown had been total, and lasted from march through at least the end of may, possibly June, it would be.
Instead, trump was saying ‘Have your easter service! free michigan!’
jl
@catclub: You can start by just putting enough people in looking at patterns of where and when the case counts are moving across the country. Don’t need no high tech crap.
Major Major Major Major
@marduk:
Not according to the scientists and public health types I read. The guidelines are loosely based on science, but the cutoffs are not aggressive enough, and this is widely known. The refusal to shut down businesses at the right time is based on politics: since Mitch is blocking any sort of direct payments, those businesses and workers are fucked either way, though slightly less fucked if they stay open. Keeping them open during uncontrolled spread (i.e. two weeks ago) is not a decision informed by science and public health. It is a compromise that will, on balance, kill and impoverish people.
I doubt many epidemiologists think bars should be open in New York right now. Nobody is helped by pretending we’re actually doing what scientists say.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: There, I agree with you. for example the GOP obsession with immunizing employers from any liability at all for covid spread in their workplaces is ridiculous and homicidal. It’s a recipe for even more disaster on several fronts: health, mortality, and economic.
And the details of many rules are guesswork. When new information comes in that indicates a change is needed, there is no harm in just saying that and making appropriate adjustments.
Major Major Major Major
@jl: The GOP is turning a mere catastrophe into a generational crisis, as always.
There’s a lot we don’t know, and being flexible (and patient with said flexibility) is crucial right now.
Re: my above posts, here’s a perfect example: the announcement, just now, that NYC will shut down its public schools because of a 3% city-wide test positivity rate. Guess what’s still open here?
jl
@Major Major Major Major: We have similar weird priorities in CA. I think influence if $ are involved.
sdhays
@jl: The complete absence of the Federal government is probably making the difference here. If the Federal government had money available for propping up businesses during times of lockdown, local governments would feel a lot more free to make those decisions.
As it is, state and local governments can’t expect more money from the Federal government, basically at all unless Democrats are able to flip the Senate in January. I’m not sanguine about McConnell agreeing to pass another stimulus/COVID emergency package. It would come down to how much pressure Republican Senators up for reelection in 2022 feel.
KenK
And, (most of) Erie County (Buffalo and ‘burbs) went to Code Orange this afternoon.
jl
@sdhays: it’s not just during lockdowns. Evidence keeps coming in that more than half the economic lockdown damage would have happened anyway, due to people spontaneously taking precautions when first deaths, or spat of cases from first outbreak, or news of hospital prep for future surge, hits the local news. Lockdowns are useful for keeping people from coming out too soon and causing a resurgence, and pushing prevalence down more to get better control.
The funding should really be labeled disaster relief, not stimulus. Some areas don’t need a stimulus, since they may need to be closed, or operating at reduced capacity. But they do need disaster relief, they’ll be in trouble with or without lockdowns, and will be for the next year.
We shouldn’t need half the disaster relief that we do. Half a dozen comparable countries are doing far better than we are, with no resurgence. And several European countries with disastrous resurgences look to be getting them under control.