Fun with COVID-19 reporting in MA (and elsewhere)

Barely a week in and we've already got a couple classes going into quarantine. Meanwhile, Baker's decision is that, since vaccinations are available for 12+, we should just let COVID-19 run its course. This is pointing to wanting to cause enough harm that those still holding off on getting the vaccine end up getting it due to the harm.... much like the lottery, this seems unlikely to work. All you have to do is look at other states to find that the rate hasn't ticked up much despite 100 cases per 100k people per day. It also ignores those that can't yet get vaccinated or are immunocompromised. https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/09/08/melrose-quarantine-baker-remote-school?fbclid=IwAR3EVBQudtaem7GOeOD4yARJUbO5MFd5w_HeWs8zm48AO0uHObKi03SI-N0

In case you were thinking that the 1,626 average daily cases from the week of Mar 14 was an aberration and that we were actually still seeing lower case counts, Monday through Wednesday of this past week each had over 2,000 cases, single-day count that we had seen reached only once before going back through Feb 12... and this past week's numbers are still increasing.  And even counting Thursday's count which is absolutely not where it will end up, the first 5 days currently have an average of 1,804 cases per day, bringing us back to where we were in early February.  I fully expect the past week to end up being a 3rd straight week of increased cases.  We likely won't reach the 2,366 average from the week of Jan 31, but I predict we'll be over the 1,793 average from the week of Feb 7. Deaths are also looking likely to be on the rise again.  After slowing the decrease in daily deaths for weeks, going from 47.6 to 43.7 to 38.9 to 32.7 the weeks of Feb 14 through Mar 7, w...

Just saw an FB ad by the state of MA to people in Lowell saying they're at high risk for COVID-19 and telling them not to travel out of state unless absolutely necessary and not to visit with friends and family outside their households .... but yeah, you should absolutely go to restaurants and stuff like that, right? No, seriously, this is all on the Baker administration. Btw, based on last week's weekly cities/towns report, Lawrence had seen 2.87% of their population catch COVID-19 in the preceding 2 weeks! So, yeah, they're a pretty high risk community. Oh, also, at 68 cases per day per 100k, traveling WITHIN MA is a risky scenario, why bother mentioning don't travel out of state unless necessary, just don't travel.  Don't go anywhere in MA because you're so much more likely to catch it here than many other states. Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed.

Gov. Baker announced today that we will be scaling back to Phase 3 Step 1 of the re-opening plan.  Let me be perfectly clear in my response to this.  In response to a huge increase in cases and hospitalizations, Baker has decided that the proper thing to do is to scale back to a re-opening phase under which we had already been increasing our cases and hospitalizations.  We saw our fewest cases back at the end of June and then started increasing immediately in July after we had moved forward to Phase 2 Step 2 AND BEFORE we moved to Phase 3 Step 1. Make no mistake, Gov Baker's setting us back to Phase 3 Step 1 is not an effort to reduce the spread since in order to do that you would need to return to a reopening phase here the spread was, you know, being reduced.  Instead, this is an effort to pretend he's doing something about the spread when he very much isn't. Oh, and today we know that last week had an average daily increase of 4,092 cases per day (and that number ...

The Baker administration continues to insist that the driving factor in cases is people holding social gatherings irresponsibly... Let's take another look at this idea. (order of settings by cluster and by case-count can be found after my review) From the cluster information the state provided, we see that Child Care is by far the greater spreader of COVID-19... BY FAR.  Seriously, there are nearly twice as many clusters within Childcare (156) as the next highest (Restaurants & Food Courts at 79) and 1.38 times as many cases (295) as the second highest case count (Hospitals at 213) and more than twice as many as from where Gov Baker is highly focused (Social Gatherings at 140). This 100% contradicts the concept that kids don't spread COVID-19 as much as adults do... but it also doesn't matter because there is absolutely no way we're going to do anything to make child care more difficult / expensive to obtain because that would impact our ability to have workers doin...

(sorry for the foul language later but... well, to be sincere for a moment, if my language disturbs you more than the story it's painting, I don't want to know you) "PLEASE NOTE: Today's case numbers include 680 tested by one Massachusetts-based laboratory prior to December 1..." oh stop... just stop....  I don't care, I so very much don't care... but the fact that you care enough to have a full-page note for 3 lines of text about how today's reported cases includes 680 cases suggests to me that you are trying to distract from a few things.... hmmm, I wonder what those could be... Perhaps it's the case count from Monday which is already 3,804... last Thursday, the previous Monday's case count had been 1,967.  Today, that same Monday is sitting at 3,585.  This Monday is ALREADY the highest case count day of any bar none... Yes, last week's Monday's count nearly doubled in the week since last Thursday but this past Monday is ALREADY highe...

MA has added VT to its list of "high risk" for COVID-19 states... VT which has 12.5 cases per 100,000 people per day for the last week vs MA's 36.8 cases per 100,000 people per day for the week of Nov 15... are you kidding me with this? Like, I get it, you can be high risk and call someone else high risk but perhaps DO SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR OWN RISK STATUS AT THAT POINT?!?

The week before this past week now sits with an ave rage fo  2,573  cases per day, compared to the week before with 2,414 and the next highest week back in April of 2,177.  The spread seemed to have slowed, which is great, but, well, Thanksgiving and all... Until Nov 9, we had not seen any single day with more than 2,990 cases.... In the 3 weeks since, we've already seen 3 and, given that this past week has Monday already at 2,895 and Tuesday already at 2,704, I think it's safe to say we'll have seen 2 or 3 more by this time next week. We've reached the death rate we last saw the week of June 14 (average was  26.14 that week, 27 last week and  27.5  rom this week's Sun-Wed counts, Thurs is still too soon to know). Hospitalizations yesterday grew more than any day since April 21.  The average increase over the last 7 days was 22 and the average increase for the preceding 7 days (including 2 days of decreases) was 29.7...  just for compari...

So... let me get this straight, we're launching the first phase of our state-led COVID-19 testing initiative in schools NOW ? I mean, better late than never but... it's November and Gov Baker's administration has been doing a full-court press to get EVERYBODY to go back to in-person schooling ~checks calendar~ over 3 months? Also, Gov Baker, not for nothing but downplaying COVID-19 and your own responsibility to govern is also the kind of activity that will lead to heightened risk of the disease spreading this holiday season. Gov Baker's inability to grasp the psychology of the situation is mind blowing.   And lastly, I like that the administration keeps saying that there's been limited spread within schools AND that we're doing really well with contract tracing and yet, if you discount places of residence, schools are in the top tier of locations where clusters are taking place and where people are getting sick. Luckily they aren't sharing where 89% of the...

@#$%.... just @#$%.... no, I take that back... @#$@ing $@#%-ton of @#$@^$%$ Ok, because, you know... Last week is now up to 1772 cases per day which is greater than the week of April 5, so we're down to 3 weeks in April that saw cases as high and only 19 days that started 7-day periods of such high cases. There have been 21 days so far with 2000+ cases... 3 of them being last week and 2 of them being this week.  There have been 3 days with 2900+ cases, one of them was this past Monday.... Monday which is still seeing increases to the tally... yes, that Monday... which now has a total of 3098, jumping past the previous single-day high of 2990 from April 17.  Oh, and there have been only 7 days that reached what Tuesday currently stands at (2414), and you guessed it, 2 of those were this week and 5 of them were at the peak of the first wave back in April. This week, where multiple days will still see triple digit increases for days to come, already has more cases than any other ...

Baker's reluctance to shut anything down, even as we re-open field hospitals and see case counts higher than we have ever previously and work on re-opening field hospitals, is exactly in line with his political leanings.  If you're surprised by this, it is only because you haven't paid attention to what he believes the role of government is in society. Baker, for those not paying close enough attention, does not believe that government is there to support the populace and small businesses.  This can be demonstrated by his general effort to damage public transportation.  During the years of the Big Dig, Baker was the architect of the financing of the high way project and placed billions of dollars of debt on the MBTA's shoulders.  After this was done, he has been a proponent for the MBTA being self-sufficient instead of a government service.   This idea should not be surprising to anybody.  One of the main differences between the parties is this perspective ...

Well @#$%  That's all.  Have a good rest of the week. Ok, you know that's not all I've got to say so let's dig into it, shall we? Last week inches closer and closer to the April 26 threshold of 1774.7 average daily cases.  We now stand at 1714.4.  We may see last week go higher than the April 5 threshold of 1736.7, narrowing the Sun-Sat weeks that have seen higher cases (currently 4, likely 3 soon enough). Oh, and you know how we hadn't seen 1800+ cases on a single day from May 5 through the start of last week (or 1600+ if you start that time period just a few days later on May 8 but again, go until the start of last week)... Just 2 days later, with plenty of days of triple digit and double digit increases to come, Monday sites at 1853! Deaths for last week broke the average 20 per day threshold which we had been approaching but hadn't quite committed to over the last month.  That means we saw more deaths last week than any other week since Jun 21 (23.8 that wee...

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 ...

I've read several people arguing that Baker is doing the best he can and that he's doing everything that he thinks will be permitted.  I would argue that he is not.   I would argue that public messaging is important and that the fact that he has been saying that the entirety of the issue is house parties is a problem.  By downplaying the situation, he has contributed to the confusion among many who struggle to understand that we're still in the midst of a global mess where relaxing will cause many more cases, many more adverse health situations, and many more deaths than if we all kept up our guard.  Furthermore, if he truly did wish that he could do more, his downplaying of the situation and pushing the house-party narrative is causing the issues he's facing.  By promoting this idea, business owners who feel that everything should be fine now for them to re-open see their feelings confirmed by his statements and push all the stronger.  By promoting this i...