I live in NC and our county has made face masks mandatory for customers and employees of restaurants, grocery and retail stores while indoors, and even outdoors if you can’t keep six feet apart (and yes, of course this doesn’t apply when you are actually eating). They are also being required on public transport.
Yes, the Washington Post has a tool that shows case / death counts in the various states as well as the dates of stay-at-home orders and “reopening” (although this is a very rough measure, since “reopening” can mean a ton of different things depending on the state). States that have reopened at least a month ago without any apparent surge in cases include Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island (and possibly Louisiana and Wyoming, which look like they might have had some very recent upticks but are otherwise pretty flat – hard to tell yet if it’s anything serious or just a brief blip). There are also a few, like MN, WV, and WI, which look like they had a post-opening surge but then it subsided. Honestly, I’m having a hard time seeing any clear pattern.
Yeah, we’re going to have to stop saying "they released restrictions therefore doom is predicted in 2-3 weeks. Here in Ontario, it was similar to the last states you list. We opened sooner than science said where our numbers should be and there was a bump in cases but now a steady decline. Looks like the disease is kinda burning itself out for now.
More than a few scientists say this is still the 1st wave.
I keep seeing references to spikes in the news with no reference to any particular location nor number, and then I look at the nationwide and the state case counts and everything seems to be following the same curve as it had been.
I wouldn’t expect any spikes for about 3-6 months - I mean, it took from January to March to start “getting real” after landing in the country and that’s before masks and social distancing.
Anyone know of any real “spikes”? Or are we just talking statistical noise that people are gossiping over?
Today the Memphis City Council passed an ordinance requiring everyone over 2 years old to wear a mask in public (with a few exceptions). Not wearing a mask will be considered public nuisance. The first offense is a warning, the second is community service. We were supposed to start Phase 3 today but that’s on hold now. Confirmed cases are going up and hospitalizations are steadily increasing. A large number of the hospitalizations are in the 20 - 30 years range. That’s not surprising since that group was probably the biggest to throw caution to the wind. But if my Nextdoor.com feed is any indication, this is not going to go over well with a whole lot of people. I can already hear the “but my FREEDOMS!” coming. I really wish everyone would get on board but I’m not hopeful.
Here’s just a couple that I noticed in a fast look at the news this morning, without doing any particular searching (and I’m not logged in to anything except message boards, and those not in that browser; and I clear cookies frequently; in part to decrease the extent to which I get news tailored to things I already know about):
Texas Governor Says ‘No Reason Today To Be Alarmed’ As Coronavirus Cases Set Record
Florida Officials Spar Over Rising COVID-19 Cases
Are you possibly looking at death rates? Those are going to lag new cases by at least a couple of weeks, probably somewhat longer.
We are not in the second wave.
Although there were the beginnings of “ripples” in the Pac NW, the first wave began in the East and is now moving Westerly across the United States.
Cases seem to be slowing in the Midwest, but I don’t think COVID has crested there.
Instead of trying to guess what is going on, read some of the many books available on plagues through history.
Epidemiology, fascinating subject.
~VOW
I don’t know if I’d call this a second wave, and we may not ever have one. We may just get stuck in a holding pattern until the fall, which is when the virus could explode into a raging public health inferno.
South Korea and Singapore have shown that even when you do everything right, you still have occasional outbreaks and resurgence of cases. The difference is that their case loads will be more manageable. The danger the US faces is that we could be running into the flu season without having made any gains in controlling COVID-19 while simultaneously feeling intense pressure to stave off a second wave of recession or worse.
Second wave of the 1918 “Spanish” flu epidemic was about a year after it first rolled through the US, if I recall correctly. It seems to have originated in the Plains states, then found its way into troop garrisons preparing to go to war in Europe. It flooded Europe, then the returning troops seemed to carry it back to the US where it settled in urban areas and decimated populations.
Of course, we won’t have the definitive story on COVID-19 for another hundred years or so.
I can hardly wait to read that book. I’m sure it will be on Kindle.
THE single most important point that people need to get is this: make damned sure you get your flu shot this fall. Admittedly, the flu shot won’t do a thing about COVID, one way or the other. But getting that flu shot could protect you from suffering from flu and COVID at the same time.
~VOW
Anyone who thinks we may be in a second wave now: Kindly point me to the date on the calendar where the first wave ended. (You’ll have to look forward on your calendar from today, not back.)
Several states are showing record high number of cases. California has leapt to second most cases next to NY on Worldometer.
I’ve seen a lot of articles like the above discussing the states that are doing really poorly (most of which are expected because of history or population). Are there any that are doing well with their reopening, either particularly or surprisingly? Overall, are the states reopening in general doing poorly or expected?
Here’s a video from 6 days ago. 15 states are going down. 1 is going down by more than 50%, Vermont. I don’t know enough about the states to know why or when they reopened.
I live in Mississippi, and I’m not sure it really belongs on that list. If you don’t count the day when the state’s health department finally released four days’ worth of case numbers at once after not reporting for several days, the numbers have mostly been pretty flat. There has been a little bit of an uptick over the past week, apparently due to a bunch of fraternities holding illicit parties, and I guess the insidious thing about this is that everywhere looks like it’s doing OK until all of a sudden it isn’t. But for now, there’s no AZ or TX-style surge.
Well, damn. Just looked at today’s numbers for MS, and clearly I should NOT post stuff like that because it jinxes things. Ugh.
Plus that former health official in Florida has directly accused the government there of lying about numbers to justify reopening.
Sorry to hear it. ~sad face~ (with all the emojis, you’d think there would be a sad face)
Yesterday’s new case numbers in the US have exceeded 40,000 for the first time, making this the new record for new cases in a single day. The 7-day moving average of new cases has steadily increased since about June 13th.
This seems to be nearly unique—most other countries that have managed to slow their initial spread have pretty much managed to keep new daily case numbers low, so far, the exception being Sweden.
ISTM the emerging pattern is that the harder you were hit at first, the safer it is to reopen.
Where I live, there has been virtually no trace of SD for the past few weeks (the only trace of covid I can think of is that a visible minority of people wear masks in stores, and I see some old people wearing them in social situations), and there was very little for several weeks before that. To my knowledge, the number of new cases over the past month and a half is minuscule. But we were very hard hit in the early stages of the US outbreak, as discussed earlier in this thread.
So that’s my (tentative) thinking. Once you get to about 30% actually infected, then that number plus any number who have a natural tendency to resist the infection is enough. The problem these other states had is that they closed down at an earlier point, such that relatively few people had been infected. In that situation, once you reopen you’re virtually where you started at the outset, and it breaks out all over again.
Unfortunately, the implication is that the whole social distancing was just deferring the inevitable, for the most part.