An unexpected upswing in positive tests at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign showed how even the most comprehensive approaches to limiting the virus’s spread can break down.
I read this far, and my immediate thought was that even though they had a good plan, the surrounding community probably still high a high transmission rate. That mingling between the university and the community was defeating the plan.
Then, I got to this part.....
Enough students continued to go to parties even after testing positive, showing how even the best thought-out plans to keep college education moving can fail when humans do not heed common sense or the commands from public health officials.
I'm not even sure what to think here. We shouldn't need to arrest people and force quarantine when they are infectious. But, this isn't the first, and likely not the last, story about infectious people ignoring quarantine restrictions and causing infections.
The vaccine itself shouldn't really have an impact on the restrictions, it should still be based on the statistics we are currently using, case count, death rate, positivity rate, etc. The vaccine is just one more tool to help reduce these numbers.
Which is also why we don't need a vaccine to improve conditions. All the metrics measure the community spread currently going on, and we're taking actions to reduce or eliminate community spread.
The obvious first way to do this is find all the infected people and contain them so they cannot infect anyone else.
The opposite way is to vaccinate everyone so that if they come in contact with an infectious person, they do not catch the infection.
Either one reduces community spread by reducing interactions between infected people and people who can be infected.
Positive news out of Texas but still lots of work left..
One key COVID-19 metric is trending downward, but experts worry that Labor Day gatherings and school reopenings could cause cases to spike again.
www.texastribune.org
I feel like our bar for "positive" is getting low. They went from 24.5% down to 7.58% positivity. Yes it's an improvement, but it's still completely blind to how community spread is happening. It's like a lifeguard at an indoor pool with no windows or lights, completely in the dark unable to see flailing swimmers. Now they have candle and can see a few feet right next to them, but largely still have no idea what's going on. Let's see it get below 1%.
Cases continue to decline throughout the US. What other path should we choose as a country at this point?
We should choose to accelerate the decline, get it under control and contain it. We probably will not do that though, instead will flatten out at some ongoing rate where we've slowed the spread but are not containing it. A strategy where we grow numb to hundreds or thousands of deaths every week. Where we also adjust to the new normal, a new normal that doesn't support the current economy we have in place. The transition to a new one that works with the new normal is going to be rough.
:watermark(cdn.texastribune.org/media/watermarks/2020.png,-0,30,0)/static.texastribune.org/media/files/2619d3afd2cfb79a22be5f1f8688de60/North%20Texas%20COVID%20Testing%20SL%20TT%2018.jpg)
