Some States are Planning to Re-Open in May

Governor Mike DeWine announced on April 16th that he wants to re-open Ohio (OH) for business on May 1st, but it looks dangerous.  May 1st would make OH the first state to re-open, while other states such as New York (NY) and Pennsylvania (PA) just extended their lockdowns to May 15th.  He says he will do so cautiously in phases which is the right approach but the latest upsurge in newly confirmed cases should cause him to re-think his strategy.  The OH governor has received praise for his early recognition and response to the pandemic, but his initial response was tepid and he only imposed a strong lockdown and stay-at-home policy four days after CA on Mar 23rd when his state was about 1.5 (±0.1) times more infected than California (CA).  By then OH had 38 cases per million population whereas CA had 25 cases per million four days earlier (of course both states are much better than NY). 

Until recently OH had followed an infection record as controlled as CA (see figure below where the left axis for CA and right axis for OH have been adjusted for their differing populations; the horizontal axis tracks real-time for CA and has been shifted back 4 days for OH’s delayed start).  However, over the last 2 days, OH has experienced a renewed surge.  OH did update its definition for COVID-19 on April 8th to include probable cases, but that should not have produced an upsurge on April 15th unless there was a delay in implementation.  Another reason may be OH has lots of infected neighbors.   


If any state can re-open early it would be CA because it was the first state to lockdown and its major cities and metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) are self-contained - with the Rockies and the Pacific serving as very effective shields for the state.  However, Governor Newsom has said that he may extend the CA lockdown into June or at least until he can get more thorough testing.  OH is in a much tougher position to control its pandemic or re-open by itself.  It is part of 2 large MSAs: one in Cincinnati with Kentucky and Indiana and the other with Pittsburgh in PA.  OH also borders West Virginia, and heavily infected Michigan.  This means that Governor DeWine should not re-open without close coordination with all these 5 states.  If he re-opens earlier than his neighbors he can infect his neighboring states.  Complex MSAs like NYC and Cincinnati should have been managed as a unit with full cooperation between federal, state and local governments.  This is why the lack of Federal government coordination in testing and lockdown has had such as a disastrous impact on the US war against COVID-19. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sweden Continues to Go Its Own Way in the Pandemic

Image
Sweden’s response to the COVID-19 Pandemic has been very unusual and it’s justification for continuing the policy is magical thinking.   They have relied on voluntary social distancing and “herd immunity” to solve their pandemic problem.   There are few words to adequately describe the tragedy unfolding in Sweden so I’ll just let these tables and graphs speak for themselves. The figure above shows the progress of the infection in Sweden since the first case was confirmed on Feb 25 th .   Since then the number of confirmed cases per day (brown squares) has increased steadily with no signs of stabilization.   The first death was reported on March 13 th and with about a 10-day lag, it has tracked steadily upward every day since then.   The death count (shown as blue diamonds) is plotted on the right axis scaled to 16% of the case count on the left axis.   That means the fatality rate is roughly 16...
Read more

NYC is now Worse than China 2 days after Wuhan Quarantine

Image
China announced plans to quarantine Wuhan on January 22 when the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases was near 500 and threatened to go exponential or out of control.   The number of confirmed cases in NY state has now passed that threshold by 3 days and it is growing exponentially. Most of the confirmed cases in NY, NJ, and CT are located in the metro-NYC area.   If the US wants to adopt China’s successful, albeit painful, quarantine program they must do so NOW.   Many people with the benefit of hindsight criticized China for such draconic measures while others criticized them for doing it too late.   WHO seemed to be the only major organization that had praised China for its decisive action at that time.   Now is the time for Governor Cuomo, or really President Trump to adopt a strategy similar to China’s before the virus escapes the hot zones such as metro-NYC, Seattle, and San Franciso and...
Read more

COVID-19 Infection and Mortality Rates as a Function of Age and Gender

Image
With over 2.4 million COVID-19 cases and over 160,000 deaths globally, there is a lot of data that can be analyzed to better understand this virus as a function of age, co-morbidities, medical history (such as prior exposure to coronaviruses like SARS, and other vaccines like BCG), etc.   The two important factors that have been noted since the early days of this pandemic are age and gender and they continue to be the most important factors.   We look at the age and gender dependencies with the best single data set provided by the Spanish Health Department containing over 200,000 cases (or 0.4% of the total population) and over 20,000 deaths.   Spain has tested over 2.0% of its population which while short of a comprehensive sample does begin to give us some ideas about how the disease has affected the entire country.   We look at the probability of a random person acquiring the disease as a function of age.   We know that this sample is not truly random no...
Read more