The New Color Coding for MA Neighborhoods and What it Tells Us About Baker

The other day, I wrote a post about how Baker had done real harm to MA in relation to his handling of COVID-19. As if on cue, Baker's team rolled out a new color-coding for their neighborhood spread map.

The new color coding says that a city/town's color coding will no longer be based solely on the rate of infection in that location.  Instead, a location with 50k or fewer people can have up 10 cases and be grey and a location with over 50k can have up to 15 cases and be grey, meaning that to be green, a location with under 10k people would need more than 5 times as high an infection rate as a location with 50k people.  That seems strange that a smaller population would need to see a much higher infection rate to be considered the same risk... and that measure continues throughout the new color coding.  For yellow, a population of <10k needs 16-25 total cases, which, if you have 9,999 people (to make for the smallest avg cases with 25 cases), you would have an average of 150 per 100k and still be green.  Contrast that to a population of 10k or more which needs an average case count great than 10 per 100k (or reaching a certain positive test rate... we'll come back to that in a moment.  That means that a small population can have 15 times the infection rate of a larger population and not be classified the same way.

Ok, next up, testing rate.  Note, this is the test rate for total tests, including repeats.  This is the indicator that epidemiologists have told us downplay anything test percentages might be telling us because people who get tested negative more often get a repeat tests than someone who gets a positive... and by the way, on weekdays, there are 3-4 times as many tests as first-time-per-individual tests and on weekends it's 2-4 times.  As a state, we didn't see a single day of positive test rate as high as 4% from 11-Jun through ~checks data file~ potentially now but we'll find out later since the test rate fluctuates a bit and typically goes down the very next day.  In fact, from July 5 through October 9 we never saw a single day reaching 2% and from August 22 through September 24 we saw 4 days where the positive test rate was above 1% and all of those days were below 1.1%, August 22 through September being a period during which we were seeing a steady increase in cases mind you, so maybe test percentages aren't actually any kind of good indicator?  Anyway, the test rate is now a criteria for what a city/town is color-coded as.  You now need both a high case count AND a higher positive test rate than the state has had in months and, in fact, more than two times the rate the state than the state saw for most of July through today (2% from earlier).  Coming back to how many days have seen a rate higher than 2% since July 4, there have been, not counting yesterday, 9.  9 out of 124 days.  So you can see that 4% is a pretty high bar for this test rate.  That bar gets even higher if you're a city or town with 10k-50k people because you need to reach 5%.  No doubt the difference is because more testing takes place in larger cities so the expectation is that more people who will get negatives back are likely to get tested there, so I guess that makes sense?

Ok, so, testing rate has been introduced as a condition for reaching "red"... but reaching "yellow" is also harder now because you need to reach 10 cases per 100k per day now, as opposed to the 4 that we had up till now.  At this point, I'd like to say "Holy moving goalposts, Batman".

So, to summarize,

• to reach green, smaller cities/towns need to reach a much higher rate of infection than larger locales
• to reach yellow, even the larger cities/towns the goalpost has shifted out to 10 and smaller cities and towns need to reach an infection rate of at least 11.4 cases per day per 100,000 instead of 4.
• to reach red, 
• smaller locales need to reach a much higher infection rate.  18.5+ per day per 100,000 instead of 8.  I.e. 2.3 times as high as the old goalpost.
• larger locales now need to have an infection rate higher than red used to require (10 instead of 8) but also now need a pretty high positive test rate.

The new report, at least this first week (and I expect going forward) remove the overall state map.  The reason to not include a state map image, I think, is because the news media was using the image to clearly indicate how the situation was getting worse and worse.  So, not only did we switch most of the cities and towns from red down to yellow (and some that would have been yellow down to green) because they don't reach the new high thresholds we're using, but we also want to avoid the visual representation.

Additionally, at the start of the week, we also saw a change to the daily report. My analysis of those changes can be found in my post from Monday (https://funwithmacovid-19reporting.blogspot.com/2020/11/fun-with-ma-covid-19-reporting-02-nov.html).

Both updates point toward the governor's interest in hiding how bad things are getting. Both updates point toward an over-reliance in percent of positive tests, which experts have told us downplay the true situation due to repeat tests coming back negative.  

All of this with the intent to downplay how bad we're doing.  All of this while we've returned to early May-level spread.  

At best, the reason for these shifts are just to further press the school districts to re-open.  State officials have even pointed to this being a big reason for why the change is being made, because they feel there is next to no spread from school districts.  Ok, let's check the state's reporting on clusters.  The clusters can be ranked into a few grandaunts.  There's the groups of people who live together, ie, Household, Long Term Care Facilities, Corrections, and Senior Living.  Not surprisingly, these all are part of the top 2 gradients with the first two making up the first gradient with 8,972 and 1,140 cases respectively and the next two being part of the gradient that is 100-130 cases and also includes 24/7 Congregate Settings, Places Of Worship, and Child Care.  The third gradient, I would say is 70-99 and includes Hospitals, Industrial Settings, K-12 Schools, Organized Athletics/Camps, Restaurants & Food Courts, and Social Gatherings.  I would split the rest of the classifications as containing 3 more gradients: 5-12 cases (containing 4 settings), and 25-39 containing 3 settings), and 59-61 (containing 2 settings, including Colleges & Universities).

The state has long claimed that social gatherings are the main driving factor of increased cases, but with 84 cases in the last couple weeks coming from Social Gatherings clusters and 75 coming from K-12 Schools, this tale doesn't really hold water.  The number of new clusters in the last month for K-12 Schools is higher, at 19, than the number for Social Gatherings, 13.  The risk of K-12 Schools has always been that it is yet another network for the virus to move through, where it transmit between workers and between students and work its way back to their households where it would infect even more people.  The simple facts that K-12 Schools is in the 3rd highest of 6 gradients, and in order of confirmed cases in the last month is 11th of 22 settings and in terms of number of new clusters in the last month is 7th of the same 22 settings suggests that the story that K-12 Schools is not a source of spread is simply a lie the state is telling us.  

So... the best possible explanation is that the state is misleading the populace into thinking that we're in a better situation than we are because they REALLY want school districts to get back to in-person schooling (even though there is little to no evidence that those schools won't spread COVID-19).  The more likely scenario is that they want to limit the government oversight of the situation and claim that they're doing a good job and the ability to apply even greater pressure on schools is just a super-happy coincidence.  The result, however, is that people will see the situation as less critical and therefore engage in more risky behavior and therefore will likely further spread this disease.  This came the same week as the state increased the strictness of their mask mandate (yes, we had one before but we didn't enforce it... and it's still something to watch whether we will enforce it now) and gave something of a curfew (because people eating at restaurants before 9:30pm spread COVID-19 less than those eating in restaurants after 9:30pm?).  These actions can be seen as pretending to do something while actively engaging in a misinformation campaign.

And the misinformation campaign results not only in the spread increasing but also increasing the political pressure to not do anything to protect people and, in fact, to re-open further, making it harder for anyone that might actually want to prevent the spread from enacting anything to do so.

Make no mistake about it, Gov Baker is intentionally misleading the public and actively engaging in some b.s. that shows he does not have his constituents health and well-being as his top priority.