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The new normal: Massachusetts above 1,000 coronavirus cases for fourth day in a row
By adamg on Tue, 10/27/2020 - 8:26pm
Latest state stats show 1,025 new Covid-19 cases in Massachusetts, compared to 367 on Sept. 28.
Hospitalizations were at 552, compared to under 400 a month ago.
The number of individuals testing positive for the virus is now consistently above 5%, compared to under 2% a month ago.
New York State is now advising its residents to stay out of Massachusetts if they can - and to quarantine for 14 days after they return home should they come here anyway.
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Comments
Connecticut has also
https://www.wcvb.com/article/connecticut-adds-massachusetts-to-travel-ad...
Context
https://www.dcreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Baker-graphic.png
Most of the states on the left side have Republican governors. MA is one of the few on the right side that do.
And by "one of the few"
You mean that a third of the governors on the right side are Republicans, right?
Is four not a few?
Would you say it's many?
Let me put it this way
10% of Americans are gay.
13% of Americans are black.
Would you say that America has few blacks or few gay people?
Stupid
No, I would not. 10% of 330,000,000 is not a few.
Duh.
Interesting math
4% of the world's population is in the United States, which is the third most populous nation on earth. Would you say that there are only a few Americans in the world? I mean, if 4 out of 10 of governors being Republicans means that there's only a few, 4% must mean there's even fewer.
Curious. What is your definition of "few", anyway?
Less than five
Not a percentage of a huge number. You're being ridiculous.
In short
If we were talking 4 out of 6 governors in a theoretical universe being considered, you'd still refer to him as "one of the few," as it would be less than 5?
Misleading at best.
If I'm not mistaken...
...most of the Massachusetts dead were probably Democrats. Remember, about one third of this state voted for Trump in 2016.
I'm not sure the virus seeks people out by political party.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Still looks like NJ is #1, followed by NY, MA, Connecticut, Louisiana(? Oh, the Nawlins thing), RI, Mississippi.
I bet you're mistaken
You're misinterpreting the meaning of Republican-governed states tending to have higher infection rates. It's not that the virus seeks out Republicans; it's that those governors are less effective at protecting their constituents from it.
Right.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Ya, it's not a Republican seeking missile.
It just killed a shitload of Democrats.
Like NY, NJ, Conn? Check the kill rates. It's a Democrat hat trick.
What
You think those states are homogeneously Democratic? It looks like you do. Here's some interesting information: Trump’s campaign made stops nationwide. Coronavirus cases surged in his wake in at least five places.
COVID Donald is a regular Typhoid Mary, but he's doing it on purpose.
What’s the death rate tho?
Just kidding!
1000s of people are sick and that’s bad.
Ouch!
This has to be brought under control before it gets worse!
That ship likely sailed
Europe is done again now too, just will lockdown faster and starting from a better base. Grim winter locked in at this point, virus seems likely to have a seasonal element to it and we half assed the summer
I hate to make the pun, but...
...shit's getting real. We're not testing many people, but the MWRA is. They're practically testing the entire metro Boston population by proxy. Here's last week:
Things are looking like the population is getting near the numbers from last April/May in the MA dashboard.
Here's the current death rate, three day average (bottom graph):
Looks almost flat lined for the last two months. Taking April 21 just for the hell of it, the deaths on that date were 152.
So, the million dollar question...will we be seeing death rates of 130-150 per day in a week or two? If not, why? Have we learned a few things? Are we taking care of the 'comorbidity' people better? Are we doing things differently in nursing homes and other type of vulnerable care facilities? Those places accounted for a significant percentage of the deaths, in the mid sixties.
Nursing homes
Nursing homes are not enough to account for the sewage numbers. That's a marker for widespread community transmission.
The best way to protect elders is to prevent widespread community transmission. Period. There are two ways to do this: a vaccine or by preventing community spread with masks, distancing, and restrictions on interactions. Letting a virus rip through a community will NOT protect vulnerable people. It just doesn't work that way.
Same goes for influenza - check out the very nicely controlled Hutterite studies where they vaccinated people at low risk of flu complications (school kids) but high risk of flu transmission in a double blind experiment, and found that it spared the lives of elderly members of their communities by preventing community transmission. That's because of the superspreading role that children have in a community.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5157992/
I agree.
"Nursing homes are not enough to account for the sewage numbers. That's a marker for widespread community transmission."
Those numbers were way up in April. Tanked during the summer. Kicking back up again. People have, generally, maybe, not been too bad about wearing masks and stuff. I wear one, no problem, but the real issue is how effective are they really.
If the virus is really transmitted by aerosol as well as droplets, then as has been said, indoors, there's not much protection without a real N95.
Now...substitute the word 'asymptomatic' for 'school kids' in your comment.
I fear that Elvis is really out of the bag on this one.
This isn't for lack of trying
Sadly, this is the way of airborne respiratory pandemics. There always are and always will be seasonal components to these pandemics. When people go inside more, the rates will start heading up. We have known that for a while. Melbourne only recently ended their stay at home order because it is now springtime there and rates have dropped enough to do so. It isn't the heat that ends them but the end of school and spending time outdoors that helps. (The region where the virus jumped to humans is legendary for extreme heat index values so I wasn't pinning hope on that doing much).
Massachusetts did a great job during the summer keeping a lid on this, but we can't control what the rest of the country does and we can't lock down our borders and the state apparently has no authority to order colleges to close. I recently traveled out of state, testing negative before leaving and upon return, but not everyone is so diligent. You are supposed to file a form with the state for such things (I was in a gray area because the state I travelled to has flipped three times) but who does that unless they 1) know to do so, and 2) believe that they have to? I don't find the two weeks of daily nag texts to be compelling, either (especially with no way to reply that I tested negative within 12 hours of arrival).
Intermission is over. We are now in the situation that we were in Late October of 1918, but without the latent immunity from similar bugs 30 years prior. Stock up, and get ready to stay at home if you aren't already doing so.
Clarification...
I think the 5% test positivity rate is City of Boston, not Commonwealth.
Not just Boston
The entire state is consistently trending upward toward 6% of all tests (2% of all molecular PCR testing) due to Boston and to high infection rates in further flung counties like Hamden.
https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-october-27-2020/download
If you scroll down on the .pdf to page 8, you may notice that the statewide percent positive of ALL tests is close to 6% in the graph of all vs. molecular tests.
Given that some of the non-molecular tests are false positives, that still means that between 2 and 6% are positive. More to the point, all the trends are upward.
It's complicated
If you go to page 8 of the document Adam cites, you see that on the 26th, 1.2% of all tests were negative, but 5.9% of persons tested were negative.
My takeaway is that I don't understand these things. I would imagine that those who want things to look good look to the first number, while those who want things to look bad look to the second number. How do public health officials look at the numbers? Ask them.
Almost there ...
There are two lines in that graph. Both lines are for the percent of tests that are positive for SARS-CoV-2.
The upper line is "all tests". This line includes rapid tests, known to be less accurate but still very useful for screening people with likely high exposure.
The other is "molecular" testing - these tests use PCR to flag infection, a vastly more accurate method, but one that involves a laboratory. Mine have been analyzed at the Broad Institute.
See my above comment - this chart means that between 2 and 6 percent of people being tested get a positive result. Some of those 6% are false positives, but very very few of the 2% are.
The real concern for public health is the overall persistent upward trend in both lines.
It's fine though, there are
It's fine though, there are no negative trends, if you see a number heading in a bad direction it is just "in progress" (?).
Critical Mass
The concern is that a persistent upward trend portends escalating spread, particularly when the entire country seems to be blowing up.
The underlying problem is that transmission rates are not linear - they go exponential like we saw in the spring.
What happened in the Spring
What happened in the Spring though happened with close to zero mask usage. Masks clearly make some difference and high risk people are more isolated than they were in March. Cases and deaths will probably grow more slowly.
Do they
"clearly" make a difference though? We're almost back to where we were in the spring with extremely high mask usage. There have to be some other variables at play here.
I was being sarcastic :) It
I was being sarcastic :) It is not clear what "In progress" and "Negative trend" are even supposed to mean on the Covid dashboard when trends that any average person would consider negative are always marked as being in progress.
Or, somehow, "Positive trend"
Or, somehow, "Positive trend". I don't think the red-yellow-green indicators are updated regularly, if ever. They never seem to match the data on the graphs on the very next page of the report; see yesterday's report, which says "COVID-19 positive test rate" is somehow a green "Positive trend" on page 1, but the first graph on page 2 shows that "7 Day Weighted Average of Positive Molecular Test Rate" has been steadily increasing for over a month and is up 122% from the lowest-ever observed value of 0.8%.
I actually know pretty much for a fact that they just copy-paste that stuff from one report to the next, because at some point in late July I noticed that the text above the indicators box in the lower right of page 1 said "Below is the status as of June 5, 2020" and I sent a message to the state about it. On Aug 3rd they... changed the text to "Below is the current status."
Aug 2nd, says "as of June 5": https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-august-2-2020/download
Aug 3rd, says "current status": https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-august-3-2020/download
Same exact colors. Here's June 5th's report: https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-june-5-2020/download
ALSO THE SAME EXACT COLORS. Here's yesterday's: https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-october-27-2020/download
...and here's the first one to include the indicators, from May 18th: https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-may-18-2020/download
The only "indicators" that have changed at all, ever, are "Number of patients with COVID-19 in hospitals" and "Contact tracing capabilities", which of course the state thinks got better and both went from yellow to green over the summer. Look at any report you want and you'll see the same thing: the indicators never get worse. They seem to have simply started at GYYYGY and copy-pasted the indicators from one report to the next, only making a change if an indicator improved. The colors stay the same no matter how bad the graphs on page 2 are.
Honestly I have no idea why the media hasn't picked up on this and pressed Baker about it. At the very least, the indicators should no longer be reported in the news, because they're absolutely 100% made-up.
The charts show that cases
The charts show that cases are going up, but deaths are level. That's good.
Time lags
You need to understand that deaths lag cases by as much as a month.
So the deaths we see now are from cases identified as much as a month ago.
Hospitalizations are currently picking up again, deaths are next.
That correlation is not as
That correlation is not as strong now as it was in spring. Cases have been rising steadily for months, but deaths have not kept up. Clearly it's because of a combination of more testing, younger and healthier people catching it, and better treatment.
It's not a sure thing that deaths will spike.