I’m going to continue to track Omicron for a while longer yet, at William and Mary. William and Mary is only updating their data weekly so I guess I’ll post once a week, if there’s anything to write about.
I doubt that many will read these posts. Most W&M parents found out about this blog via a W&M-moderated Facebook group. The moderators of that group have banned discussion of COVID-19, so I suspect that most on that group will never get back to this blog.
Enough said. Most of the value-added here is that I keep track of the historical data. That’s not available on the W&M COVID dashboard.
Based on two weeks of data, the new case rate at William and Mary seems fairly steady at 5 to 7 newly-diagnosed COVID-19 cases per day.
That most recent rate of 7-per-day translates to roughly 100 new cases per 100K students per day.
Contrast to Virginia as a whole: That’s just a touch higher than the rate for 18-24 year olds in Virginia as a whole, which I estimate to be 77 / 100K / day, for the seven days ending 2/7/2022, based on Virginia Department of Health data.
Contrast to last semester: That’s maybe four times higher than the peak post-move-in rate last semester. After the initial post-return-to-campus wave had died off, the highest rate observed was 11 new cases in the week ending 12/10/2021. That’s under 2 per day on average:
That said, Omicron has a much lower average severity than the Delta variant that was prevalent at the end of last semester. For example, looking at the Virginia data, if I date the start of the Omicron wave to roughly 12/17/2021, then so far there have been zero deaths in the 18-24 age bracket, from Omicron, in the whole of Virginia.
If I had to sum it up, I would say two things.
First, there does appear to be some need for further vigilance. COVID-19 has not disappeared from the campus. That 100 cases per 100K per day rate is high by historical standards. And I need to remind myself that these numbers didn’t just happen. The relatively high new case rate occurred in an environment with fairly stringent COVID-19 hygiene in place.
That said, the rate at William and Mary isn’t much different from the rate for Virginians age 18-24 as a whole. And once you factor in the much lower average severity per case, the health impact of the current case rate probably isn’t much different from the impact of Delta at the end of last semester.
In any case, the numbers are up from last year. I see that as no cause for alarm, but no clear justification to relax, either.
Finally, I should note the obvious: Pre-return testing seems to work pretty well at preventing a big return-to-campus outbreak. This isn’t exactly a controlled experiment, but the one semester when W&M didn’t do pre-return testing, they ended up with a large number of active cases on campus, as shown in the last chart above. The semesters when pre-return testing was required, that didn’t happen.
