Category: COVID through 2022

Source:  The Daily Beast, from an article on the demonization of masks in Trump world.

Yep, we did.  We had a national mask initiative in the works.  It’s just that the President killed it.  As you can read in this famously not-liberal publication, Business Insider.  You can also see the same information buried inside this Washington Post article.  You can also see that the bare bones of this story were reported back in April, when the mask initiative was killed.

I just wanted to document this here, as it really didn’t get much play on its own and it’s already slipping out of the news. Continue reading Post #816: We actually did have a rational, national plan for mask use?

Source:  Radford University COVID-19 dashboard.

Edit:  And, when they finally published the data, there were just 40 new COVID-19 positive cases on campus, down from 64 the prior “week” (6-day period).

I’ve been a health care data analyst for more-or-less all of my professional life.  And one thing I have noticed is that when an organization is obliged to report information, but has some discretion as to timing, the better the news, the quicker it gets published.

And, vice-versa.

So when I see a university pledge to update their COVID-19 case counts weekly, what I want to see is that they update their COVID-19 case counts weekly.  Not, sometimes weekly.  Not, weekly if they can get around to it.  But, weekly, on the dot.  The way the Commonwealth reports the daily counts by 10 AM, full stop.

I say this because I’ve been tracking the situation at Radford University.  Not because of any personal connection.  But because they were the first Virginia University to report a serious COVID-19 outbreak, and because it looked like they were going to be able to pull through, despite a surge of cases traced to three large student parties.

(I’m also tracking William and Mary, where I do have a personal interest.  Thankfully, their COVID-19 dashboard remains roughly as exciting as watching paint dry.  This week, they are 99.86 percent uninfected.)

Last week’s update from Radford was good news.  It showed cases reported through 9/6/2020, posted to their website on 9/7/2020.  Which means that should have been updated yesterday.  But it wasn’t.  And hasn’t been updated yet today.

Looking at the Commonwealth of Virginia data for Radford City, unless something truly odd has happened, Radford University should once again report about 60 new cases in the past week.  But I also note that, based on the Commonwealth’s data, two people in Radford City were hospitalized for COVID-19 in the past few days.

And then there’s this.  Which, at first, I thought had to be a hoax.  And that’s not a commentary on the subject of the rally.  It’s a commentary on urging your student body to attend a mass public rally, of any sort, in the middle of an on-campus outbreak of COVID-19.

Am I really that more serious about this than most people?  So that this strikes me as a ludicrously unnecessary additional risk?  I mean, I was floored when I read that.  Perhaps I am far, far out of the mainstream with regard to taking unnecessary risks.  And in particular, on asking others to take risks.

So, Radford can’t seem to report their own infection data in a timely fashion.  But they did ban student gatherings of more than ten persons.  Before they urged their students to attend a mass rally this weekend.

That’s a set of some seriously mixed messages there.

Source:  Clipart-library.com

One remarkable aspect of this epidemic is that you can’t get any good information on what actions are risky, or not, for catching COVID-19.  How much does, say, going to the gym regularly raise your risk of COVID-19 infection, if at all? In other words, what are the odds that a trip to the gym will get you infected?

That question — what are the odds — turns out to be remarkably difficult to answer.  I laid that out fairly well in Post #716.  In a nutshell, even if they could accurately identify the  activity that got an individual infected, typically, nobody has the data on how many individuals engage in that activity.  You might know that (e.g.) 20 people in Virginia were infected in the course of routine dental care, but you don’t know if that’s 20 times in 20,000 visits, or 20 times in 2,000,000 visits.

For now, the bottom line takeaway from Post #716 is that you aren’t going to see any good, systematic information on your odds of being infected by doing X.  All you are going to see is more-or-less what anybody can cobble together.  Targets of opportunity.  And whatever has been analyzed in the scholarly literature.

Keep that in mind when you see studies that seem to be talking about the risk of catching COVID-19, from various activities.  What you are going to see published is probably better than nothing. And probably, no matter how it gets written up, almost none of it is actually going to tell you the odds of infection associated with any particular activity.

With that as background, yesterday the US CDC announced the results of one small-scale, sample-of-convenience study of individuals who had COVID-19 symptoms.  About half actually had COVID-19, the other half did not.  They contrasted those two halves in terms of what activities they had done in the prior two weeks.  Click here to see the study.  Or read a plain-language writeup of the results in the Miami Herald.

The CDC’s bottom line is that restaurant dining of any sort — indoor or outdoor — was about twice as common among those who had COVID-19, compared to those who didn’t.  And they found a weaker result for going to bars/coffee shops does as well.

The implication is that restaurant dining (and bar/coffee shop use) raises your risk of infection.  And that seems plausible enough.  But you still have no clue what the odds are.  Does it raise your risk from infinitesimally small to merely incredibly small?  Or is restaurant dining in the COVID-19 era the equivalent of drunk driving?

So I decided to compile what I could find, about who says what is risky, and why.  It ain’t much, but it’s all we’ve got.  This is the first of two postings, comparing various lists of what’s risky and not.  Detail follows. Continue reading Post #811: Qualitative rankings of activities by risk of COVID-19 infection

Source:  Radford University.  Data are for the week ending 9/6/2020.

The newspapers will surely tell you when any local college has an outbreak of COVID-19.  But they aren’t very good at telling you when a college seems to be getting that outbreak under control.  So I thought I’d do a quick update on Radford University.

Radford University reported 64 new cases for the week ending September 7, 2020.  That’s about a third the rate of new cases that they had in the prior week, and works out to about 115 cases / 100,000 persons/ day.  Still high, but a lot better than it was.

The Commonwealth of Virginia still reports no new hospitalizations for COVID-19 for Radford City residents.  That’s a pretty good indication that none of those infected students has been hospitalized.

The Commonwealth also reported just 14 new cases from 9/6/2020 to 9/9/2020 in the City of Radford.  So, presumably, the rate of new infections within Radford University has remained low.

I think the lesson here is that an outbreak on a college campus does not necessarily translate to “game over” for the school year.  Most remarkably, Radford University seems to have gotten this under control simply by stopping students from being irresponsible with respect to large parties.  At least, that’s how I read the last three messages from the Radford administration.

I found this part of one recent message to be well worth quoting (emphasis mine):

“… an overwhelming majority of positive cases was attributed to students attending two unrecognized fraternity parties and one large gathering, all of which occurred off campus. Students following public health measures and engaging in on-campus activities, such as attending in-person classes while wearing face coverings and exercising physical distancing, have very minimal exposure to COVID-19.”