(I just heard that Dr. Fauci is going into quarantine because of possible Covid-19 exposure at a White House task force meeting where nobody wore a mask because Trump doesn’t like them. I hope like hell he’s fine, but if he dies, that’s murder, IMO.)
Washington state, and specifically the Seattle metropolitan area, had the first serious outbreak in the US since the first 2 cases reported on February 27th. Daily new cases peaked in late March, but have since been in a gentle decline….. except for the past couple weeks which show a troubling increase.
Here’s the daily new cases for King County (which is most of Seattle):
(I’m not big on logarithmic scales, especially for a daily count like the lower blue bars, but it’s what I could find.)
The progression for King County is what we see for a lot of places: quickly increasing, plateauing as social distancing and other mitigation efforts kick in, usually progressing to a total lockdown and/or stay-at-home order, then a gentle decline that just never seems to keep going down to zero.
Here’s the graph for Italy, which was the first country in the ‘west’ that got hit hard:
France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands are all similar, and so is Spain:
Iran has the same trajectory:
So what are we seeing here? It’s hard to give a definitive answer to this important question, but these countries, as well as Seattle and other areas with the same trajectory, have some commonalities, including:
- Covid-19 got established in the community and was able to reproduce beyond the community’s ability to contain it before significant mitigation efforts were established
- Mask-wearing was not established as mandatory early in the cycle, and/or masks not readily available
- Contact tracing was either nonexistent or unable to keep pace with the onslaught of infections and never caught up
- Lack of fever screening, testing and isolation of new cases has enabled the undetected infected people — which may be 5 or 10 times as many of the official count — to spread the virus at will
These commonalities also differentiate them from the set of countries that have successfully beaten down Covid-19, like China, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea and New Zealand:
Here we can see that while the upward trajectory is also quite steep, it never gets out of control (and out of containment) and gets beaten down quite quickly. Finally, let’s take a look at China, where this all got started:
(Don’t get fixated on those two days of spikes in the middle — those were changes in the way new cases were reported, which never got spread over the full period.)
Quickly up, quickly down. For more on how China did this, read my previous diary.
So if a country can’t contain Covid-19, it is forced to try to beat it down using mitigation efforts (lockdowns, social distancing, etc.). Does that work? Has any country actually been successful at mitigation?
Maybe Switzerland?
Austria and Israel have similar trajectories.
That looks promising, but can they close the deal? Here’s a great visualization on how well the Swiss have done at abiding by their national lock-down — compare it to how well we are doing in the USA.
Now we come to the real conflict: how long can a local or national lock-down keep going against the pressure to re-open?
Italy, Iran and Spain have reached their breaking points and have started to re-open, as has Germany and some other countries… slowly, cautiously, fearfully.
Conclusion: We really don’t know if mitigation can enable a country to beat the virus down enough to get back into containment and re-open — we’ll have to watch what each of these countries does and how it affects each one’s case count.
Wait, speak up, what did you just ask?
Oh, yeah, where does the USA fit into this? OK, here you go:
We never really shut down, and we’re not exactly re-opening slowly, cautiously or fearfully. I mean seriously, Georgia started the re-opening by getting massage parlors and tattoo parlors back in business, and now 47 states are rushing to get open.
Contact tracing is sporadic to non-existent, mask-wearing is spotty (and rarely done properly), fever screening is rare, testing is still way below where it needs to be, and our Dear Leader thinks this virus is just going to magically go away, so why have a task force to deal with it?
What could possibly go wrong?
Cheers.