I continue to try to make 1 main post per day...
A 9-year-old girl from Putnam County is the youngest person to have died in Florida from coronavirus complications, according to the state department of health.
www.cnn.com
A 9-year-old in Florida died from Covid, the fifth minor to die in the state. All during an extended period where schools have been closed.
Yes, the mortality rate among children is extremely low. They are much lower risk than elderly populations. But the death of a 9-year-old is much more painful for society than the death of a 90-year-old.
If schools open without proper infection precautions... It's very easy to imagine those 5 deaths becoming 50 deaths or more.
Yes, that's a very very low percentage of all the children. But it's still a very high death rate for children.
Imagine, there was a highly credible threat that there would be an active shooter terrorizing an elementary school in Florida tomorrow, but we didn't know which school. Would we still just open all the schools without additional precautions? Would we just say, "well... the active shooter will probably only kill about 50 kids, that's a very small percentage, so who cares."
Florida is insistent that their schools re-open physically. As a parent, I strongly prefer schools re-open for in-person learning. But with caveats: Serious infection control measures must be enforced. Which further means that areas with wide uncontrolled community spread, simply cannot open for in-person learning. (a proper precaution would be a shut down of the classroom or school whenever a student tests positive for infection. If there is wide community spread, that would mean classrooms and schools getting shut down daily).
So how are things in Florida now? Is community spread under control?
Before looking at the data, I find it interesting: A month ago, as cases were quickly rising, the "truthers" were saying, "it's not a big deal, deaths are still low."
Now that deaths are blowing up, the "truthers" are saying, "oh.. the number of cares are starting to decline, so it's well controlled."
The ever shifting goal posts.
So where are things?
View attachment 486023
Most recent data as of last night. Cases have started to decline over the last few days, but testing has also declined by nearly the exact same margins. Thus, it's premature to conclude whether cases are truly starting to decline, or have simply plateaued. What you want to see is cases dropping while testing increases.
I previously explained why hospitalizations might be the best real-time measure of the state of the covid situation. Here we see the 7-day average continues to increase in Florida, though there has been a slight decline over the last 3-4 days.
Thus, it's still too early to tell. But it appears this wave in Florida may have peaked and may be starting to decline.
But that brings us to the bigger danger. Many people, experts and laypeople, excepted Covid might have seasonality like the flu -- On one extreme there was, "it will magically disappear in April," but even many experts were hoping the transmission might be noticeably reduced during the summer. The same factors that reduce flu transmission during the summer are also at play for Covid.
I remember as cases declined in May, there was chatter to the effect of, "we may be ok for a while, but we have to watch out for another wave in the fall."
Well.. it turns out we didn't get the summer off. But *if* this was the "low season" period for Covid, then how bad might things get in the fall?!?
And the danger for places like Florida and other areas with currently high numbers... even if the numbers start to decline now, there is the danger they will be starting the fall with already high amounts of community spread.
The whole point... "hot spots" that are trying to stay open, including Disney World, are really on very thin ice. The *best* case scenario is that they are at a high level plateau now... and then they have to hope and pray that September-November aren't seasonally more favorable to Covid spread.
