Week in review: August 16, 2021

And, a note about schools again

This 4th wave continues to climb. This week we hit more than 100,000+ daily cases. Remember when we hit that number in the 2020 winter wave? This wave climbed from 100,000 to yesterday’s case count of 130,000 VERY quickly. Hospitalizations and deaths continue to climb too.

(Source of above and below data)

The hotspots are in the South - again. Mostly in states with low vaccination rates.

The positivity rates continue to climb too. I sorted all states according to positivity rates for you to see how high they are. This is an indication that are not tested enough at all to catch all infections - meaning the risk of COVID is much higher and not contained in these states. Also look at the daily new cases per 100k in the data. You can see all states here. As an example, look at Oklahoma. The positivity rates in 24% (the ideal rate for containment is 5%) and daily new cases person 100k people is 53.6. Look also at Florida, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi - and the others on this first picture. We want daily new cases to be below 10.

LET’S TALK SCHOOLS AGAIN:

The frustrating thing for me is that LOTS of these states/counties are not requiring masks in schools. I wrote about that last week here. But it makes no sense for school districts to not require masks. Some of the biggest districts in Texas are defying the governor’s orders (and rightly so!), but I wish other districts (including mine in Central Texas) would require masks for teachers and students. For some school districts that have already opened in Florida, they have had to shut down because cases spread so quickly. If we want schools to remain open, we need masks. Hospitals in Texas and other southern states are already full. Y’all this is preventable!

If you haven’t done so, email/call/write your school district, county judges, school boards, principals, superintendents, mayors, etc to ask for them to follow the science (not opinion or preference or comfort of people around them). Join forces with others in your communities. We all know there are LOUD voices asking for no masks for schools based on pseudo-conspiracy-theories that are viral on the internet right now. That’s not science though. One example is Dr. Stock’s presentation to the Indiana School Board which is filled with dis-and-mis information. Here’s a great rebuttal to that with the real science from Your Local Epidemiologist’s substack. (If you haven’t signed up for her substack, subscribe! You can also support as a paid subscriber for her work too.)

If you are a school administrator, mayor, judge, etc, please do the right thing for our schools, children, teachers, and communities. Mandate masks. Delta is worse than the other variants due to the R(0) being higher (meaning 1 infected kid/teacher can spread to 6-10 others).

-FNE

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