Lux Absio Bervatum

Saturday, September 18, 2021

COVID-19 case rate stuff

Here's a short post about COVID-19. A lot of people I know, even people I normally consider very rational, get angry and upset when talking about the pandemic. Go ahead and skip this if the topic causes you distress.

Anecdotally, there's a lot of non-essential travel going on right now and I don't understand it. I'm talking about otherwise-sane folks. People that are vaccinated, people that mask up appropriately. But this is a bad time for doing stuff that might contribute to spread or increase the likelihood of needing to visit a hospital. Case rate (cases per 100K population) is almost at its all-time high in WA.

WA case rate (Dept of Health data dashboard)

And currently at a record-high in our county:

Local county only (still DOH)

A little better in the U.S. as a whole, but still fairly high (this is 7-day, CDC doesn't do 14-day automatically for some reason):

CDC data tracker

Non-essential travel and large gatherings aren't a great idea during a pandemic, but if you're going to do it, wouldn't it make sense to at least try to aim for periods of lower risk? Maybe I'm overcautious. In our area, the vaccine became widely available in Spring 2021. It doesn't make someone invulnerable though. It's good to consider how your actions affect community spread and add load to healthcare resources even if your personal risk is small.