On April 1, I had noted that the pandemic had, thus far, largely bypassed California. On that same day, Illinois' daily new infections number tripled its level from just a week earlier. Illinois was well into its long climb up the slope toward its mid-May single-day peak of 4,014 new infections. On that same day, April 1, the State of New York already was deeply mired in its own emergency, with 8,669 new infections; the state would go on to exceed 10,000 daily new infections a number of times during the month of April.
On May 20, in a National Review Online blog post entitled "Where Does Ron DeSantis Go to Get His Apology?" the magazine's editor, Rich Lowry, praised the Florida governor's efforts to combat the virus. Lowry characterized that approach as cautious, measured and evidence-based - and courageous in the face of a fusillade of media criticism. At that time, Illinois was still stranded on the high summit plateau of its daily infections chart, recording 2,388 new infections that same day. By May 20, New York's infection rate had receded dramatically, although it still recorded 2,088 infections that day.
That was then. Things have changed since then, to put it mildly. As Illinois and New York infection rates and other key metrics have continued to move in the right direction, four states in the South and Southwest, Florida, Texas, Arizona and California, have seen sharp increases over the last few weeks. Here is our local suburban newspaper:
Illinois averaged 772 new cases a day between June 28 and July 5, the time when the four hot-spot states began seeing exponential growth in cases. Those states all averaged thousands of new cases per day during that time, according to the CDC. Florida alone averaged 8,373 new cases each day. California and Texas each saw more than 6,000 new cases a day. And Arizona averaged more than 3,500 new cases daily.The State of New York averaged 639 new infections during that same period. If one were mean-spirited, s/he may wonder whether Florida Governor DeSantis needs to go get in line, hopefully staying six feet distant from others in the queue, to return those apologies.
But let us refrain from the urge to make this too political. The four hot-spot states are, from east to west, reddish-purple, reddish-purple, blueish-purple and deep, deep blue. And it seems likely enough that the explanation for the shift in infections is more due to demographics than politics.
The early hotspots like New York and Chicago experienced their worst outcomes among urban residents, in sites like nursing homes and penitentiaries (and, at least in the case of Illinois, in meat processing facilities), and among the elderly and already-unhealthy. There also was evidence that black and Latinx residents were disproportionately infected.
Why has the coronavirus apparently moved on to new geos, leaving the old hot spots behind? One of the frustrations in trying to understand the coronavirus is that data is not easy to come by. But from what I have seen and heard, the demographic profile has changed somewhat in these new hotspot states. I believe that urban residents continue to be at risk, but the virus also is now progressing in more rural and resident-dispersed areas. I understand that black and Latinx residents continue to be disproportionately infected, although I continue to believe that those outcomes are primarily attributable to those residents being clustered in urban areas and having poorer general-health outcomes than those of the country as a whole.
It's also widely believed that the patients have been getting younger, and that this is a function of the states starting to reopen. A friend of mine in Florida tells me that the average age of newly infected residents is 30 years old. Bars and taverns are thought to be prime spots now for new infections. Texas has closed its bars. California has shut down its restaurants again.
Yet New York and Illinois, despite pursuing their own reopening plans and having no shortage of young adults, so far have not seen the sharp increases that these hot spots have.
So again, why the difference in experience? I don't think anyone knows with certainty. It seems difficult to point to any decisive factors which, say, New York got wrong for two months, and then got right - and which California, over the same time period, first got right, and now is getting wrong.
My own intuition is that maps are not particularly helpful in understanding the coronavirus. To be sure, the droplet (or is it aerosolized?) form of spreading the infection means that it gets passed to people in the vicinity of an infected person. But if one of those infected persons gets on an airplane and flies across the country, the virus may be "jumping" several states. It is not so much pure geography, but rather some mixture of demographics and health, which is resulting in the US having such a bad experience with the virus. In the Chicago area where I live, some demographic profiles have been ravaged, while it has had no major impact on my family's life nor the lives of most others whom I know. It's a depressing thought, but it may be that the US consists of several different "countries" interlaid upon one another. I happen to be in a healthy demographic bubble, a fact for which I should be giving thanks. People not physically far from me but demographically distant had a terrible March, April and May but now are doing much better. And meanwhile, some people (but who?) in Pinellas County, FL or Riverside County, CA are having worse outcomes than they did in the spring.
The other item worth bearing in mind is that there hasn't been a treatment game-changer yet. All of us, whatever our individual vulnerability, probably aren't markedly less or more vulnerable than we were last quarter. I don't know of a compelling reason that Illinois or New York (or the EU, or China) couldn't experience a sharp and sustained uptick in new cases next month, nor that Texas' or Arizona's rates of new infections could start plummeting tomorrow.
At this moment, the only thing anyone has going for him or her is masks and hand-washing. Gov. DeSantis can stand in the snow for a week, and he still won't get an apology or an excommunication lifted by me. He is a dangerous dolt. As he points out, we are getting cases down in the 20s and 30s age range, mostly. They can take a day off, then go down to the gym again and feel great Meanwhile, they may have infected their mother, their great aunt, the doorman, their boss, the next guy to pump gas where they did, and 0.7% of the pizza delivery guy. Check out the R0 rate Anne C mentioned today in the "Back to Church" thread. (Ours is 5.7) DeSantis ignores it, may not know it exists, and, like Trump, expects that the current pile up of cases will be shaken off like the common flu by the young-'uns. If they were right, of course, Texas and Arizona cities would not be running out of ICU beds right now. Tonight.
ReplyDeleteAnd Dr, Fauci says this is not the big, second surge. This is still part of the way we messed up handling the first wave. Of course, some people -- standing on their free-speech and religious-freedom rights -- refer to him as "Herr Fauci." But I would hope Rich Lowry is past that kind of dummkopfery now.
"At this moment, the only thing anyone has going for him or her is masks and hand-washing."
DeleteAnd staying home.
"And staying home." Of course as a retiree I have that part easy. And those who can work from home also have an advantage. My old job was hands-on, though. If I was not retirement age a prolonged furlough would have been a financial disaster. As it is for a lot of people; they don't have a choice, they have to go back to work. Especially in our state, since our governor just decided to end the Covid unemployment extension a month early (previously he had said it was until Aug. 1). His reasoning was that "the jobs are out there, the employers are hurting." Well then. It's settled. I wish he would use his leverage a little, and tell the employers that part of getting people back to work depends on them making the workplace safer. As the packing plants have done, tardily, after causing our numbers to go through the roof. But crickets about that. Though he did say something about people needing to get off their butts now ( well not quite in those words) but you get the picture.
DeleteKatherine, right - people who need to leave home to work are at risk. It strikes me that among those who are especially at risk are those who must deal with the public - think restaurant servers and delivery drivers. Many of them are young adults, and I suspect that they account for a good percentage of the new, younger profile of COVID patients.
DeleteThis is part of what I had in mind when I wrote about the different demographic layers that make up our country. The younger and the poorer often have the essential but low-paying jobs. They are getting it from all angles: they must put themselves at risk in order to work; they also are, I believe, disproportionately among those who were laid off during the stay-at-home orders.
People like me have it very easy by comparison. I can just sit in my work cave and tap away on a computer keyboard and yammer on conference calls all day. I've gone for 5- and 6-day stretches during this thing without ever getting into a car. If not for church-related duties, and if I was patient enough to order the family groceries for delivery, I could go for a month without stepping outside.
My remark about staying home was not aimed at workers, but at those of us who, faced with the choice of staying in or going out and doing something fun, choose the latter. Maybe for reasons of mental health, and supporting local businesses, we can risk an occasional outing. But my fear is that there is a powerful psychological pull on us to try to go back to the behavior patterns of the old normal - and that is risky.
DeleteI don't have to eat out tonight. I don't have to be with friends in-person this weekend. Those things would be pleasant but those activities are how the virus spreads.
That's just my advice (the best I can think of). For all I know, it's on the wrong track, and the virus is spreading in some fashion such that those activities don't really make much difference.
Like everyone else I thought that the younger people could shake it off yesterday. This morning I read that a local doctor says some of his supposedly cured 40-year-old patients wheeze up stairs like 80-year-olds. And the local dept. of health officer says there seem to be long-term effects on the brains of children.
DeleteAs David Gergen points out, Great Again has 4% of the world's population and 25% of the world's cases. The Chosen One chooses to consider that an inconvenience
Governor Cuomo and Bill Deblasio, being members of the Democratic branch of the One Neoliberal Party did not shut down right away upon learning of the virus. And the virus had already been here and nobody knew it. Governor Wolf in PA was pressured by the Repubs to quickly reopen. If people still respected the seriousness of this pathogen and there was a strategy to extinguish outbreaks, this reopening thing might work. But I passed a newly reopened bar in the Stroudsburg area the other day. Parking lot was full. And not a big bar. Nobody was outside. If one person had COVID, forty or more have it now. This thing will explode all over again.
ReplyDeleteForgive me for being obtuse, but not really sure what your post adds up to Jim. What's your point? Maps don't help? No one knows how the virus works? Resistance is futile?
ReplyDeleteFwiw, I do find state and especially county trends helpful, and I use them to help guide decisions about where/how to shop (inside or curb service) or whether to have limited visits with anyone.
A friend of mine (the one in Florida) used the metaphor of whack-a-mole a couple of days ago to describe the virus and it stayed with me. We put out the fire somewhere and it springs up somewhere else.
DeleteJust to add to my previous comment: my sense of the national conversation is roughly as follows:
Delete* Defeating the coronavirus is amenable to government policy, if we can identify the right policies
* People who follow the government policies are good and virtuous, and they are rewarded by an abatement of the virus
* People who scoff at the government policies and assert their liberty to do whatever the $%^& they want to are sinful, and they are punished by contracting the virus
* Virtuous people are Democrats, while sinful people are Republicans
* The experience of places like Chicago, and especially New York, where many media people are based, as well as the EU countries, demonstrates the truth of all these suppositions, because cases and deaths continue to decline (or at worst hold steady after having declined steeply) in New York, Chicago and the EU countries, most of which are ruled by wise and virtuous people (i.e. Democrats and their EU equivalents) who believe in science.
I'm skeptical to varying degrees of all of those points. Television news broadcasts are wont to show maps of the US with all of the South and Western states colored red, signifying virus hot spots. Those maps look an awful lot like political maps, with the red-shaded South and Western states as the heart of Republicana, and I think a lot of people interpret the maps that way (which is, I also suppose, the intent of producers of television news).
The basic problem with that understanding is that that is how the political map looked in Ronald Reagan's day. Many of those states are purplish now. And California has been deep-blue for many years now. I would be surprised if the Biden campaign has conceded any of the four hot-spot states (Florida, Texas, Arizona and California). In fact I'm pretty sure they fully expect to win Texas and Arizona, think they have a pretty good shot at taking FLorida, and haven't counted out Texas.
As for the virus itself: California did well, until it didn't. New York did poorly, until it didn't. Both are ruled by Democrats, and both have followed essentially the same policies. Why the differences in experience so far? The short answer is, Nobody knows.
When the numbers are aggregated nationally, the US is doing terribly right now (even though my zip code is not so bad). The EU, as a whole, is doing quite well right now. We shouldn't assume that will continue to be the case for ever and ever. For the sake of Europeans, I hope that they continue to do well, but they also are reopening; and not all European countries have done well all along; Italy and Spain did poorly previously. I don't know of a compelling reason that Germany can't become a hot spot in the next 60 days. If it happened in California, why not there?
In the previous comment, I wrote, regarding the Biden campaign: "In fact I'm pretty sure they fully expect to win Texas and Arizona"
DeleteI meant to write, "... I'm pretty sure they fully expect to win *California* and Arizona"
"Television news broadcasts are wont to show maps of the US with all of the South and Western states colored red, signifying virus hot spots. Those maps look an awful lot like political maps, with the red-shaded South and Western states as the heart of Republicana, and I think a lot of people interpret the maps that way (which is, I also suppose, the intent of producers of television news)."
DeleteNumero uno, the last time I looked at one of those maps, it was pretty much red everywhere, like when Reagan ran against Mondale. That is pretty much because COVID-19 is on the march everywhere; that datum is not fake news.
Numero two-o, Television cameras, for some reason, like red, white and blue better than tan, gray or beige. Why some network back in the Neanderthal age established the Rs as red (at a time when Rs kept saying the Ds were the Reds) and the Ds as blue is a mystery. It is a fact, though, that nothing has ever been designated as green on television maps.
Numero three-o, the Florida governor is R, and he takes medical advice from the Don and not the deep state. The governor of Texas is R, and he was just born like that. I don't know about the other governors, but since more are red than blue, it should come as no surprise that there is a lot of red on the maps.
Numero four, on the whole I'd feel safer in Taiwan or Germany, and I wonder the top four losers against COCID-19 are Great Again and the Chosen One's best buddies, Bolsonaro, Putin and Modi while the democracies are doing pretty well, thank you very much.
So you're mad that the Lefties and their media minions are demonizing and blaming Righties for the pandemic, basically.
DeleteOf course I agree it's more complicated.
My sense is that the Limousine Liberals don't get why everyone can't just put on a mask and stay home and have the lobster Newburgh catered in every night while the government prints more money to give people who are jobless.
Meantime, right-wing nutters steeped in conspiracy theories want to brandish their stockpiles weapons and vent rage at the sheeple wearing masks.
The plight and concerns of regular people are ignored between those two groups of fantasy dwellers.
That said, I think government policies to control the virus can help (they did in the 1665 bubonic plague). But of course there are other factors that contribute to higher rates of infection: Voluntary compliance with CDC guidelines, median age of population, how much travel the area gets from outsiders (tourists, ex), median income, access to health care and hospitals, etc.
And I do think that those not following CDC guidelines do show a disregard for others. But I don't think that necessarily falls along party lines, to wit:
*Young people, who are supposed to be aligned with liberal politics, are mixing with others at bars and summer venues without masks. Only about half the protesters in Lansing, mostly students, were masked. They are the worst offenders.
*In my very Republican home town an hour north of here, where we shop at a fresh meat and produce market once a month, masking and distancing is the norm. Infection rates are low. People are cheerful.
Re the election, I'm still calling it for Trump. His people, while in the minority are jacked up. they'll vote. Biden looks more and more frail. I am hinky about voting for him.
I'm a little hinky about Biden, too. Who he picks for veep matters a lot. But I'm not hinky enough to vote for Trump, or not vote. Oh hell no. I'm thinking there are a lot of us "Oh hell nos" out there.
Delete"The virus waxes, and then it wanes, and then it waxes somewhere else."
ReplyDeleteMy personal theory is that the "silent spreaders" who don't even have symptoms, or very mild ones, are driving that. I think there's a lot more of them than we know.
But there has to be a reason why 4% of the world's population has produced 25% of the world's cases.
DeleteOne reason might be that the ones like Taiwan handled it better on the front end than we did (when we were still in denial). Which would have blocked spreading from even the silent spreaders. Whereas countries like Italy were apparently taken by surprise, or were also in denial.
DeleteFriday, June 10: Florida now has 100 people dying every day. We, as a country, have fought wars with a lower death rate. Palm Beach County will pass the 600 death mark today or tomorrow. (Taiwan still stuck on 7.) The Don and his governor say it's just young folks getting the coronavirus, and they shake it off easily. Like the 36-year-old who died yesterday. There is NO intelligent life here.
ReplyDelete