This is a short report from Wilmington North Carolina. The beaches are open this weekend and the main road to Carolina Beach was as busy as it had been this year Friday and Thursday. At the bank, the teller they told me the roads out of Carolina Beach was backed up about 30 minutes Thursday evening. On Friday I went to a couple of stores, both of which were busy with, at best, 25% of us wearing masks. When I asked woman checking me out about how people were doing with social distance, she told me “people are treating it like it is over.” There was talk about a parade of boats with Trump banners at Wrightsville Beach on the waterway (unconfirmed).
It is not that I am worried about people going to the beach; the beaches here are such that outside of a few places you can normally maintain distance from others. Wilmington has not been a hot spot and I think the shut down seemed to work effectively with some notable exceptions. However, we are now mixing in people from other parts of NC and the community seems to be, at least in part, quickly walking away from social distancing.
The trend in NC is growing at an increasing rate without any slow down, but New Hanover county has remained very low for reported cases. Of course, more testing naturally will make it look like there is a more rapid increase, when really it was just a dramatically under reported statistic to start with. Pick your poison as neither story is good.
I am not pretending to know was is right for the Wilmington community. We got take out food from one of the restaurants that had been shut down and I was thankful for that. I am skeptical about numbers of people testing positive as a great measure of the disease, because that seems likely pretty subject to bias related who has been tested, availability of tests, and willingness to report. For instance, It may be Europe is just most honest and complete in its reporting and the virus has done lots of unreported damage in other countries. I think systematic (random) antibody testing combined with an assessment of overall average deaths versus previous years and increased in medical care use will tell us the story just how bad COVID-19 really was/is (I could not locate the link the blog, but someone had posted on a comparison of average deaths per 100,000 from 2014-2018 versus now). Systematic screening and current hospitalizations can tell us where it is.
Back to Wilmington and New Hanover county: in general, with my very non-random sample, the community did shut down pretty effectively and social distancing was reasonably practiced (if not mask wearing that much). For a while all sorts of families were out together. This is a pretty politically conservative area, but I mostly just heard doubts about the “cure being worse than the disease” and grumbling from that direction.
In the end, I just cannot stop believing I am watching a traffic accident occurring in slow motion this weekend. An influx of visitors from across the state, relaxed restrictions, and people acting “treating it like it was over” seems so premature. The vast majority of Americans have not been exposed so far, but we have lost at least 100,000 people (that seems a likely big underestimate to me) and we are not close to doing wide scale testing and contact tracing. Time will tell in Wilmington and I’ll be more than happy to be wrong though.
We do all need a psychological break — so I hope as many people as possible get to enjoy the Memorial Day weekend. It is Memorial Day, so I put out my flag and to remember those who sacrificed for the country. How terrible that we now have 100,000 deaths in just a few months and how many more unnecessary deaths to come to “save the economy.”
Stay safe.