The Michigan outbreak is now being characterized in national news as being driven by school children, and in particular, by school sports. That’s what showed up when I opened up the Google News website today.
Source: Google news, accessed 9 AM 3/26/2021.
That’s not implausible. If you look at college COVID-19 re-opening guidelines, student athletes have always been considered a high-risk class of individuals. They are a “high contact” population, in the jargon. (That’s not as in “contact sport”, but as in, they are going to have a lot of close contact with a lot of people. Probably maskless and breathing hard.) They are to be given particular attention in any college re-opening plan, including frequent testing.
Michigan was already reported as requiring weekly testing of student athletes. It doesn’t look as if they would even consider suspending high school athletics. So I guess they’ll just have to deal with it. Their rate of reported new case growth is high enough that it’s driving up the average for the entire Midwest.
Source: Calculated from: The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 3/26/2021, https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data. Their U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html.
But there are couple of odd things about this Michigan outbreak. Both in general, and in relation to school sports, which seems to have been chosen as the culprit. Continue reading Post #1077: Michigan school-sports outbreak.