July 2020: Where We Are At
What follows are several thoughts about where I, the Bay Area, and the country are at with this pandemic.
What the Numbers Say
This graph represents the rate of infections in the SF Bay Area and compares this rate to New York City (for reference). It is normalized by the size of both region’s populations to allow you to compare them one atop the other. The graph is on a logarithmic scale, so higher numbers represent a bigger jump than a typical graph. The shaded triangles represent possible trajectories for the future with the dashed line representing the most likely trajectory.
The graph above gives us a sense of where the Bay Area is at, and where we are currently heading. If you don’t live in either the Bay Area or New York City, visit the website covid19-compare to see where your own county is at. It was put up by one of my partners in crime. (Be patient it is slow to load. We’ll try to bring it over to this site in the near future.)
Bad News: Objectively the numbers in the Bay Area are much worse than they were at the start of the pandemic:
Now: For every million persons, 100 new people will get infected each day.
Early March: For every million persons, less that 10 new people were getting infected each day.
Better News: The one big difference between the start of the pandemic and now is the rate of growth. In both regions the numbers of new cases were growing insanely quickly back in March (see the left side), right now the rate of growth is much lower and it looks like New York City is continuing its downward trajectory.
Social Justice Issues Must be Addressed
The social justice issues that I pointed out in this post SF Demographics Presented Effectively have only gotten worse. The Bay Area cannot shake off COVID-19 unless these issues get addressed. As an illustration of the impact of these issues, I recently learned of a situation in which an undocumented woman who had been exposed to COVID-19 didn’t want to get tested for fear of risking her tenuous status. If there is a hidden reservoir of people getting COVID-19, then this epidemic will linger.
Similarly it can be easy to think of the massive outbreak in San Quentin as far removed from most of our everyday lives, but it isn’t. Apart from the injustice of the conditions within this prison, sick inmates are crowding hospitals in and out of Marin county. The outbreak in this prison is affecting the Bay Area’s ability to weather a surge of new COVID-19 cases.
Complacency
I have become much more accustomed to living under the shadow of COVID-19, but I realize that I need to watch against complacency.
I take wearing a mask as routine; going to the grocery store doesn’t seem as scary as it did in March; it has been nice to visit friends in a socially distant manner and to connect with my parents and sister in an integrated pod.
However, just because I have not yet caught COVID-19 from these interactions does not mean that I can relax my precautions. The pressure to ease up on protective protocols is always there. I need to continually remind myself to be just as careful visiting people now as I was the first time.
San Francisco Love
As much as I would love even more detailed data, I am proud that San Francisco has a page up with all the right metrics Data SF- Key Health Indicators on Containing COVID-19. Even more importantly, a lot of those metrics are in relatively solid territory. I am also proud that San Francisco’s testing is as good as it is. San Francisco’s contact tracing is also looking relatively strong too.
If San Francisco was an island, I am fairly confident that it could get its own epidemic under control in a couple of months. But of course, it isn’t & we really are all in this together.
Get Tested
Go get tested.
For any community to have any hope of returning to any state close to normal, testing needs to be as easy as falling off of a greased log in a pool of water.
Getting tested helps to create the right amount of demand, it helps to push your region’s metrics in the right direction, and it helps familiarize you with how to get tested,. Don’t take this advice if you are in part of the country slammed with cases, where testing is hard to come by. Otherwise, google your county’s name along with the words county covid testing. In the Bay Area, this typically takes you to a page that explains how to get free testing.
Anyone should be able to get tested so that they can visit with older people who are more vulnerable. Anyone should be able to get tested so that they can go to the dentist without endangering the dentist. I have very strong feelings that everyone should be able to get a test whenever they want and need, and if that is not the case in your community (yet!), I still recommend you try your best to get tested (more ranting on this subject in an upcoming post perhaps.)
Deaths Will Climb
I am sad that I expect the death rates in the US in general, and the hardest hit states in particular, to start climbing. Since COVID-19 takes a long time to kill someone (if you call two to three weeks a long time), the number of deaths will lag the number of new cases by several weeks. The case count cannot go up the way it has without an increase in the death rate, especially since in some regions, the hospitals are starting to triage patients (which means they have to decide who gets scarce treatment & facilities, and who does not.)
While I am pessimistic about the death rate, I do see that there seems to be some fundamental shift since March in the connection between the new case rate and the new death rate: While case counts are climbing rapidly, the fatality rate is not climbing as rapidly.
No-one should politicize this shift. People on the right shouldn’t think just because deaths are declining they always will. People on the left shouldn’t dismiss this shift either, because we will miss an opportunity to learn from what might be a real beneficial effect. The following article does a great job of explaining many possible contributing factors underlying this shift, The Atlantic- Why COVID death rate is down.
Where We’re At
Things aren’t going well on the national level in particular. I’m really sad to say that a lot more people are going to die, and many of these deaths could have been avoided. I take some slight solace in the fact that San Francisco and the Bay Area are on better footing for the monitoring of and reaction to COVID-19. In the end we are all in this together, and San Francisco, the Bay Area, and the country need to do a much better job of addressing social justice disparities.
I also urge everyone to resist complacency, get tested if you can, and keep taking this shit seriously. Because it is.