Fun with MA COVID-19 reporting 22-Aug-2020 edition

So... apparently the alarms that started going off a couple weeks back were sufficient to snap people back into realizing that we weren't actually done with our struggles with COVID-19... we've seen the rise in daily cases pause at a daily average of about 275 (up from 156 at the end of June). So... good news: we don't appear to be continuing to increase in daily new cases dramatically anymore but... bad news... oh, did you think everything was fine again? please just stop deluding yourself.

1) We still have about 275 new "confirmed" cases every day. I put "confirmed" in quotes because of the fact that the number for a given day still sometimes decrease even though we no longer are listing "probable" cases and instead only identifying the cases that the state lists as "confirmed". We're not driving down the cases or anything. While this may not sound bad, essentially it means we've given up on making things better and are ok with the also stagnant average of 12-15 people dying per day that we've seen mid-July. Oh, and with that, we're likely to reach 9,000 deaths by around this time next week.

2) While we've accepted the current levels, keep in mind that we're about to re-open multiple networks of people (and networks of people is how diseases spread).

2a) Movie theaters are reopening... you know, where people sit in a big room for a couple hours. Here's hoping they all wear masks and the air flow is in their favor.

2b) Elementary and high schools, in some districts are re-opening. I don't care if you're doing hybrid or full in-person, either one is adding networks of kids and teachers who are meeting in person and, being in MA, means those classes are going to need to be indoors pretty soon. If you think kids don't spread this thing, you haven't been paying attention.

2c) Colleges are returning. Do I really need to say anything more about that?

3) Common cold and common flu season are both coming up. Why is this concerning?

3a) People with the common cold and flu will make diagnosing harder which means we'll need a ton more testing capacity... and to make testing work for preventing the spread (especially with school networks) that testing needs to have fast results... faster than a day or two. What have we been lacking? Fast testing. So, yeah, needing substantially more is a concern.

3b) More people needing to be hospitalized means we will need space in our hospitals for an increasing number of people outside of what we do now... and we're still using approximately the same number of beds as we were at the end of July (rather than getting our hospitals cleared for increase needs this fall/winter). On July 23, we had 351 people hospitalized, 59 in the ICU and 30 intubated. Today those numbers are 315, 50, and 20. There has been a decline but it has been very small, especially in comparison to what we could have seen given how we drove it down in the previous month (a decrease of 414 hospitalizations, 131 ICU occupants, 78 people intubated).

With all of this said, the Baker administration is pushing as many networks to re-open as possible and making it as hard as possible for our schools to operate in a safe manner (ie remotely for most of their staff and students). The Baker administration is doing nothing to actively fight this disease anymore and has been on image control for the last couple months rather than on residents' safety. It's efforts to get people to take the flu vaccine is great and while it helps prevent deaths and helps keep our hospitals able to manage the coming overflow, it does nothing to reduce the number of COVID-19 cases that we're about to see ourselves in the midst of and the damage we're about to see to our children's educations when schools that are re-opening for any form of in-person education find that they have to scramble to find a way to do full-remote, just as they did last spring when we saw fewer than 30 new cases per day state-wide (remember, we're already at 275 today, before we re-open all these networks).

Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed. Stay acknowledging we're in trouble and furious that our state administration doesn't care.