There is not a state, county, and town in America that is going to be safe enough to do anything but hunker down for at least the next several weeks.
It was only 3 days ago that Washington Governor Jay Inslee issued a stay at home order, after a few weeks of school closings and strongly encouaged social distancing. And Washington was looking good, and Snohomish County where I live was only adding a few cases each day. Governor Inslee even noted how the increase in cases was decreasing, a signal of a critical inflection point that suggests a flattening of the curve, In the little graph there, the purple line there is Washington, right next to California.
Gov. Jay Inslee said Thursday morning that the infection rate from the coronavirus in Washington state is slowing compared to other states.
Using data from other states, with a starting point of when each state had 20 infections, Washington has seen at least a "slight reduction" in the rate of acceleration.
"It's a small reduction in the rate of increase, but a glimmer of hope," Inslee said.
Today was a different story. Washington State reported a large uptick in Covid-19 cases today, jumping by 619 reported cases, from 2588 to 3207. This is a nearly 25% daily increase, after several days of 10% growth each day, and a clearly flat curve. Here’s Snohomish County in the next graph.l Notice the last few days?
Dang it.
So, what’s going on? The truth is it’s hard to tell, because testing selection is not random, nor is it consistent even between days in any single community much less between communities. Also, the testing results today are picking up infections that could have happened 14 days ago, or more, so it’s hard to pintpoint if the spike is sort of a return to the mean, more testing, or picking up a bunch of Saint Patricks days parties. That’s really the problem with numbers being used to explain a systematic response to a large and messy set of underlying variables.
But there is one thing these numbers do tell us. There is not nearly enough information available to start making predictions about when or how the trajectory of the Covid-19 virus is going to die down. It might die down by Easter, and yet it might not pass over all of those Easter church-goers at all (in fact it almost certainly will be still raging by then). This is such a virulant strain that as soon as it starts finding vectors again, it’s going to simply follow the same laws of math it is designed to follow from that point in the infection curve.
There are not “safe” counties or states. On March 22nd, just 3 days ago, that graph in Snohomish County looked an awful lot like a flattening curve, taking a week to go from 300-500 cases, but now it has jumped from 500 to 800 in the last three days.
I think I’ll go ahead and stay inside as much as I can. I hope you all do too.