Hello My Fellow Californians:
It continues to be a rough week if you are a being that needs to breathe. We need to take care of each other; many of our fellow California Kossaks are fleeing with the shirts on their back from the fires everywhere in the state.
Stay safe.
BY THE NUMBERS
We are kind of in a holding pattern right now. Cases have finally declined as the second shut-down has finally taken hold. The fires have disrupted everyone’s lives and of course all the reporting.
We will know in a few weeks whether the second reopening can be managed this time without an uncontrolled COVID outbreak. It will take a steady hand, Governor.
- Total Cases: 751,861 (+4,061 Thursday)
- Total Deaths: 14,096 (+ 106 Thursday)
- Positivity Rate: 4%. Good.
- Hospitalizations: 24% decline over two week period.
www.latimes.com/...
Here is Your Pretty Chart of the Day — The New Tier System.
The New Tier System. 1= terrible 2= awful 3=improving 4=good
- Tier 4 (1st place): Modoc and Alpine. Congrats!
- Tier 3 (2nd place): State of Jefferson: Del Norte, Siskiyou, Humboldt, Trinity, Shasta, Plumas
- Tier 2 (next to last place):
- SoCal: San Diego, the OC
- Coastal/Norcal: Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Lake, Napa
- State of Jefferson: Lassen
- Gold Country: Sierra, Nevada, Placer, El Dorado, Amador (not yet on map)
- Tier 1 (last place): everyone else.
New Cases
The lockdown on July 13, combined with all the other measures, has finally brought the new case rates down.
It took at least a month for cases to decline after the second state shutdown on July 13.
The state has dropped below 4,000 cases per day on average for a week — the first time that has happened since June 21. www.latimes.com/… Good.
What will happen now that the state is opening up again? Can we contract trace the cases now? Can we avoid the mistakes of May and June?
Actually, what happened to contact tracing? Answer: Demoted. It gets a vague passing nod in the state’s new system as a “health equity measure” of some sort.
Perhaps it is too human an activity to be noticed by the number crunchers who create the complex metrics that drive the new ranking system. You would think that it would be even more important now.
Mortality
Mortality: flattening out — the state is averaging 93.1 deaths a day over the last 7 days. That is a vast improvement, even though the state passed the grim milestone of 14,000 deaths on Thursday.
Deaths are decreasing, but slowly. The recent spike is possibly due to late reporting from the holiday weekend and the fires.
How is Your County Doing?
Since I spend so much ink on the big population centers, I decided to take a quick look at two of the Sierra counties that just escaped the worst tier and are now “Tier 2”.
- Placer County got into Tier 2 and promptly voted to end the County’s COVID health emergency, after which the county’s chief health officer resigned in protest. In other words, the county is a hotbed of increasing Republican stupidity in the state.
The county says it will not enforce the state’s rules because it “mischaracterizes the effects of the disease in the county” and harms the community’s economic, health, mental, and social well-being. What?
Translation: we hate the governor and we want to open our restaurants.
Placer County is not doing so great compared to some of its neighbors, possibly because of the constant Lake Tahoe tourist influx. Still, it’s understandably desperate to get its tourist economy going again. Here’s some unsolicited advice: there’s nothing that harms your community’s health -- mental, economic, and otherwise --than dying. And it’s not appealing for tourists either.
- Amador County, a tiny sliver of a county east of Sacramento, has had only 254 COVID and 14 deaths during the entire pandemic. Virtually all of the deaths and 40% of the cases come from a single for-profit nursing home, with a terrible track record of health violations. This is a state responsibility, and it cannot seem to get its nursing home catastrophe under control. www.sacbee.com/…
Bay Area
DOING BETTER.
Every county in the Bay has seen its case numbers decline. Good.
Conclusion: Quite a few counties will move from terrible (Tier 4) to awful (Tier 3) in the next week. Then we wait and see.
TESTING NEWS
- In the About-Time Department: California’s typical turnaround time for coronavirus tests has dropped to less than two days, according to DPH. Two-thirds of the test results are now available within one day, and nearly 90% within two days. That's a big change from as many as seven business days last month. Maybe tracing and quarantining can resume in earnest now.
- All schools in California are expected to come up with a testing plan in order to reopen. How often? Which tests? Who administers them? Who pays for them? No one knows. What a mess.
Private schools have the resources to take care of it; public schools are on their own. The state made the requirement and then took a flyer on how to implement it. School districts are on their own. That’s just flat-out ridiculous. It will certainly exacerbate the already enormous gap between the haves and have-nots even in public education. This needs to get fixed.
- We have now entered the era of Dark Testing: Millions of rapid antigen tests have been flooding the market in the past few weeks… but the number of test results reported by the CDC is down by 100,000 a day. What gives?
No one actually knows what has happened to millions of test results. One possibility is that the antigen tests are being done in small clinics and physician offices which are not reporting them because of the paperwork hassles. Another is that since positive tests are usually confirmed by a PCR test, reporting a positive test could cause confusing duplication so they are not reporting it.
I’m sorry, I thought that computers were, you know, able to sort out that kind of thing. I mean, I have a program on my computer that can find all the duplicate copies of my kid’s graduation videos (trust me: gigabites). So how come these smart computers haven’t figured out how to eliminate duplicates?
The problem is predicted to get worse as many more millions of the tests hit the market. So instead of helping solve the problem, they will make it worse. Cities and states can’t trace cases they don’t know about. It was always a danger that the results of these sorts of tests would not get reported, particularly when an incompetent Federal Government doesn’t have a way to track them.
IN THE NEWS
- What-exactly-happened-to-the-science Department: As California counties move from the highest “God-awful” Tier 1 into “really-terrible” Tier 2, they get to reopen indoor dining, gyms, and movie theaters. All of which are automatic hot spots. In fact, just about everything you can imagine gets to open except bars, theme parks, concert venues, and schools, and even those can eventually reopen. Here are the main worries that keep public health people up at night:
1. Indoor Dining. You can indoor distance in dining all you want, but you can’t wear masks when you’re eating, and you can’t control how the ventilation system deposits COVID-laced air right on top of your diners’ heads. At least two outbreaks in dining linked to HVAC have been documented in China, carried by the HVAC system.
Here’s a completely unscientific thought: There are ultraviolet sanitation systems that are pretty easy to install in an existing HVAC system. UV-C light light kills coronaviruses, depending of course on intensity and dose of the UV exposure. Some nursing homes are already doing it without waiting for the research results.
2. Theaters: What exactly is the difference between an indoor church service and a movie theater?One difference is that movies last longer. If we are banning indoor church services, why do theaters get to open?
3. Gyms: Sweat. heavy breathing. Touching and dripping on multiple surfaces. So many ways to transmit COVID. All the cleaning in the world won’t do anything about contaminated air. They are trying to deal with this by only allowing 10% occupancy. Maybe that will help.
All three of the above can spread COVID. The state seems to have given up on contact tracing. Couldn’t the counties just open one of these three things and see what happens? or two? Prediction: large outbreaks. I hope not, but even New York City hasn’t reopened indoor dining yet.
- Speaking of UVC light: An Arkansas National Guard unit has installed FAR UVC lights in its facilities as part of a strategy to contain COVID. FAR-UVC light is a sliver of the UV spectrum that is both virucidal and safe for people. I have been keeping my eye on this for some time; research is still ongoing, but it could be a real thing in the future. Ordinary lights that kill COVID. That would be awesome. www.defense.gov/…
- San Diego, which for a minute was the only SoCal county in the “substantial” or “awful” tier, is predictably regressing in its fight against COVID, barreling towards being kicked backwards into the “widespread” or “terrible” purple tier. Once San Diego slips to 7 or more cases per 100k (the county came in at 6.9 today) and an 8% positive test rate (now at 4.2%) for 14 consecutive days, businesses close again. There is a lot of fighting with the state about adjustments to these numbers and it takes a genius to understand it. Bottom line: San Diego is in trouble.
The most likely culprit: universities opening up. Of the 216 new cases reported on Tuesday, 110 came from students at San Diego State. Tourists have been flocking to San Diego with its loosened restrictions; tourists usually mean COVID outbreaks. Argh. Stay tuned.
- The OC is such a gem. Somehow, despite have suspiciously high case rates, the OC moved into the “substantial” category this week and immediately reopened indoor dining. Since indoor dining was linked to the last COVID spike in the county, Newport Beach’s city council promptly voted to indefinitely table an emergency measure enforcing social distancing, mask wearing for restaurant employees, and restrictions on walk-up bars. Now you know why it is so hard to beat the virus. Because: stupidity.
- Contact tracing on my mind: LA County has partnered with SafePass, a mobile app that anonymously tracks people who may be exposed to coronavirus and provides phone notifications to those who had close contact to get tested. There are certainly privacy concerns with the technology, but the app is voluntary and uses anonymized data to send you a text message if you have been exposed to a person testing positive.
- COVID could have been circulating in Los Angeles as early as December, around the same time it was spreading in Wuhan. A study found higher than expected numbers of patients with coughs and respiratory complaints in late December, both in Los Angeles and in Washington State. Interesting.
- Alta Bates Hospital in Oakland was just one of many hospitals that failed to isolate COVID patients in COVID wards, putting patients and staff at risk and resulting in unnecessary cases and deaths. 32% of nurses nationwide report that they work in a facility where that is still happening. It is shocking that so far into the pandemic, so many hospitals in this state are failing in the most obvious steps to protect their patients and their health care workers.
- Why does Alameda county have such enthusiasm for shutting down pop-up restaurants? The county that let TESLA walk all over them by keeping its factory open in blatant violation of health regulations is “cracking down” on unemployed chefs who are trying to make a living running “pop-up” food stands. Yes, they operate in a legal ”grey” area, but it’s grey only because Alameda County is so legally backwards. In 2018, the state passed the Microenterprise Home Kitchens Operations Act, which legalized small cooking operations out of homes. Individual counties have to first adopt regulations for such businesses and Alameda County has not yet done so.
Meanwhile, Alameda’s unemployment rate continues to skyrocket.
- Meanwhile, down in Palo Alto, nearly 100 Stanford Medical School faculty members signed an open letter denouncing Dr. Scott Atlas, a former compatriot now advising Donald Trump to deal with COVID by letting all the old people die. In what can only be described as epic understatement, the nearly 100 signers of the letter remind the world that “Failure to follow the science — or deliberately misrepresenting the science — will lead to immense avoidable harm”.
- Yes, the young can get COVID: The New York TImes has a sobering story on the impact of COVID on young adults. I wish this news would penetrate their party-obsessed skulls. It’s not happy news, but it’s something the young people in your life should know, and if you are a young people, that you should know:
The research letter from Harvard found that among 3,222 young adults hospitalized with Covid-19, 88 died — about 2.7 percent. One in five required intensive care, and one in 10 needed a ventilator to assist with breathing.
Among those who survived, 99 patients, or 3 percent, could not be sent home from the hospital and were transferred to facilities for ongoing care or rehabilitation.
The study “establishes that Covid-19 is a life-threatening disease in people of all ages,” wrote Dr. Mitchell Katz, a deputy editor at JAMA Internal Medicine, in an accompanying editorial.
“Social distancing, facial coverings and other approaches to prevent transmission are as important in young adults as in older people,” it said.
Nearly 60 percent of younger patients hospitalized with Covid-19 were men, and a similar percentage were Black or Hispanic. Men were more likely to need a ventilator than women, and more likely to die. Extreme obesity and hypertension were also linked to a greater risk of mechanical ventilation or death.
Stay safe out there.
AND FINALLY….
Naked unrest is stirring among voters in New Hampshire.
A woman in Exeter, NH was banned from voting in a local primary on Tuesday because she was wearing a “McCain Hero, Trump Zero” T-shirt. Because: Politicking in a polling place is a no-no.
What happened next is most instructive, as poll moderator, Paul Scafidi, explained:
So the woman asked if he wanted her to take her shirt off. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
“I said I’d rather she not,” Scafidi said. “But she took it off so fast, no one had time to react. So the whole place just went, ‘whoa,’ and she walked away, and I let her vote.”
He noted that she could have just gone into the hallway and turned it inside out.
After voting, Scafidi said, the woman put her shirt back on and left.
….
Scafidi could have had her removed for violating the state indecency law, he said, but he didn’t want to inflame the situation further, and “we had more important things to worry about; we had to get 2,000 people to vote safely, and check in and count 2,000 absentee ballots.”
Message to Repub vote suppressors: we will not only walk over broken glass to vote, we will also strip and vote naked if that’s what it takes. In fact, because this is California, we just might make it a thing.
Have a great weekend, stay safe, wear a mask, stay strong.