I have no reason to believe that those recent trends are anything but good news. (For example, I don’t think the testing positivity rate has gone up.) So that should be celebrated as good news.
Here’s the caveat: We should be prepared that people will take these recent trends and use them in completely bad faith in order to push back against things like mask mandates, business closings, or virtual learning for public schools. If someone says, “Hey, cases are actually declining now” ask them whether they were ever concerned during June and early July on the other side of that steep curve. Because I’m convinced that people are going to focus on the recent decline in cases while ignoring the fact that average daily casess are still twice as high as they were in late May and early June.
Republicanism has turned half the country in to science denying morons who will never do anything that the radical leftists think is right.
Add in that kids will be kids, and you get this photo. If the school policy doesn’t mandate masks, kids aren’t wearing them. Think of how hard it is to get a kid to wear a bike helmet if the rest of their friend group doesn’t. Now apply that risk to something way less “visible” and even the few kids that have smart parents are going to be way less likely to wear them once they get to school.
Ya that is my fear as well. We will get down to a 7DMA of 40,000 or so and people will go back to celebrating it is over and then the next peak will be 100,000+.
I looked into testing last night and it looks like a large portion of the increase in overall testing is coming from CA since 7/12. I think something like 13 or 15 states are well down in testing the last 4 days or so. Cases still seem a bit lower factoring that in but not by that much vs. the peak.
My step sister works for Ohio Health and says they are almost out of tests, and are probably headed back to where only symptomatic people can get tests. The hospital my dad is in (not an Ohio Health facility) is out of rapid tests and no longer testing before discharge like they were. Turnaround on testing is up significantly. I’d expect our positivity rate to start climbing.
The researchers went through 6,332 studies from around the world - much of it not formally published - to try to get the answers. They identified only 18 with useful data.
These were a mixture of studies that tested how the virus spreads in schools or households through rigorous testing of contacts, as well as studies that test large numbers of people in a population for the virus to see who is carrying it.
The analysis showed children were 56% less likely than an adult to catch the virus when exposed to an infected person.
Children and adolescents are half as likely to catch the coronavirus, the largest review of the evidence shows.
The findings, by UCL and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, will feed into the debate about how schools are reopened.
Children also appear less likely to spread the virus, but the team said there was still uncertainty on this.
The evidence was less clear-cut about how easily children spread the virus. For example, one study of 31 clusters of infections showed only three (10%) were started by a child. The equivalent figure in influenza is 54%.
USA#xx just needs to work out what to close to drive the cases down in order to open schools
We are not sending out 8 year old back to school. This is going to be severely inconvenient for us and are aware this is going to be tough for our daughter too. It may put her back a year or two depending on how everything shakes out. We are going to do our best to make sure she is learning but we both work full time and feel like we can’t spend enough time with her during the day.
This is a bad situation.
But for a lot of the country this is fucking existential.
This is a terrible study that doesn’t account for the most basic of things; children are less likely to be symptomatic and therefore get tested. These aren’t randomized samples.
Anyone who has had a kid or worked with kids knows that they are germ factories that get you sick. There’s no reason to suspect covid is different.
@Danspartan here’s the 2 week weekly SDI vs. new cases offset for Texas updated through last Tuesday (I think you switched this to one week). It’s worth noting that while cases aren’t up a ton, they will be going up this week in Texas unless reporting is lower than it has been in any recent day.
I think I’m going to start giving bonus SDI points to places that have widespread mask mandates. California’s continued case drops don’t make much sense without an adjustment for mask usage because it’s so far below the perceived target SDI. I’m almost thinking widespread mask usage adds 10 SDI points at this point, but I’d like to track it a little longer before I become confident of that.
