Cases rising or dropping by you?

[Kitty 34]

Pretty much everything is open here to some degree, except movie theatres and a few other entertainment venues that open this weekend. But the vast majority of our new cases are related to colleges at this point.

I think things are going to get ugly, quickly, though, following the state supreme court ruling. For months I've seen very few people in stores without masks, but this weekend it has been more like 50/50 and there are a ton of calls to "demand" local businesses take down their masks-required signs and encouraging people to "throw off the masks" in "celebration" of the court ruling. So unless Whitmer finds another way to impose an enforceable order, I think we're heading into a Wisconsin/Dakotas situation where people will just pretend the pandemic is over and spread the virus all over the place.

Colleen, I thought we still have time to keep things the way they are......guess I haven't read up on some of the latest situations for our state.

 

[HeatherC]

Just read that NYC is shutting down around 300 schools in Brooklyn and Queens because of the numbers increasing. Gonna be a long winter.

 

[EACarlson]

I think most of the large companies will continue to require masks. In MN and WI, almost all of the large stores started requiring masks before the mandates were put in place. Menards was the first and arguably the strictest. I expect the WI Supreme Court to squash our Gov's latest emergency declaration shortly. MN can't because of the way their law was written, it gives the Gov authority to extend states of emergency indefinitely unless both chambers of the legislature end it.

 

[Colleen27]

I thought we still have time to keep things the way they are......guess I haven't read up on some of the latest situations for our state.

I had been reading that too, but the speaker of the house came out and said masks are a non-negotiable NO from the legislature and the attorney general said she will not be enforcing any of the public health orders until the legal issues are resolved, so a lot of people are taking that to mean it is a free-for-all starting right now. Court cases are already pending to establish that the MI department of public health has no authority to impose restrictions without the state of emergency, so probably within the month it will be well settled and it doesn't sound like it is going to come down in favor of any restrictions at all.

Oakland County imposed a mask mandate of their own, but Macomb has already signaled that they will not do so. I expect a handful of other more educated, affluent, urban counties to follow Oakland's lead but I think most of the state is just going to pretend covid never happened and hope for the best.

 

[JimMIA]

...the attorney general said she will not be enforcing any of the public health orders until the legal issues are resolved

We had a kinda similar thing in Miami and Miami Beach.

Originally, our country commission made mask and other covid regulations misdemeanor violations of county code -- criminal violations. Prosecutors understandably refused to clog up the courts with minor stuff, so the police refused to enforce the violations. They weren't going to put themselves and their careers at risk for something they knew was going nowhere.

The solution was changing the violations to civil zoning and health code violations. That gave many other departments jurisdiction, which increased enforcement, and really turned the enforcement part of the problem around.

But our biggest plus has been voluntary compliance. Mask compliance is very high.

 

[Simba's Mom]

Just read that NYC is shutting down around 300 schools in Brooklyn and Queens because of the numbers increasing. Gonna be a long winter.

That's not good news. DS lives in Queens, and due to Covid, he's been unemployed freelance musician (jazz trumpet) and a bartender in Times Square since March. With the way things are going, doesn't look like he'll be working anytime soon.

Meanwhile, DH read an article that only 3 states have Covid #s trending downward this week-one was our state-Texas-and another was South Carolina. I was glad to hear that SC was one, since we've gone there for the last 15 Thanksgivings, and really hope to this year. I forget the 3rd state.

 

[Pyotr]

This is why why we Instacart or Amazon Fresh only. Even with mask mandates some people just don't follow rules in our country. Our state had a few weeks at "green" but it seems to be heading back to "yellow" now.

It really doesn’t bother me. Interactions at the grocery store are brief. The CDC defines close contact as being within 6 feet of someone 15 minutes or more. That simply doesn’t happen walking down the isle next to someone.

Today my county reported 19 new cases with a positively rate of 3%. We had been phase 3 for over a week now without any increase of cases.

Deaths in Florida continue to be a mess. The average reporting time has ballooned to 33 days. On Saturday 15 deaths in June and 10 in July were removed. I don’t understand how this happens. How can two months later a death can be determined not to to be COVID related?

 

[EACarlson]

Today my county reported over 300 new cases. Or 20% of the states total. I'm guessing it's bars since the university seems to be under control and schools are all virtual only.

 

[RamblingMad]

Looks like a tale of two cities. The cold region is seeing a second wave. The warm states are coming off their first wave, which went up in the summer months. The cold states saw their cases fall in the summer. Super interesting difference.

 

[HeatherC]

Looks like a tale of two cities. The cold region is seeing a second wave. The warm states are coming off their first wave, which went up in the summer months. The cold states saw their cases fall in the summer. Super interesting difference.

I think this also has to do with the fact that all the people from cold places who were home in their houses for months finally got out and went to those warm places. Ow they are all home again and the COVID Crockpot just keeps simmering.

 

[Pyotr]

Looks like a tale of two cities. The cold region is seeing a second wave. The warm states are coming off their first wave, which went up in the summer months. The cold states saw their cases fall in the summer. Super interesting difference.

The areas that are getting hit now never really got hit the first time. Wisconsin, North Dakota......

 

[*DisneyDreamer]

I’m really hoping Wisconsin can get over their peak soon but I’m not optimistic. Hospitalizations continue to skyrocket.

 

[LuvOrlando]

Anyone else noticing state data missing from Worldometer? I was watching some counties, numbers were going up then test volume in that county was decreasing & now I can't see the county data, hope it's just a reporting blip but curious if other states have the same oddity.

 

[quandrea]

Rising. And it’s so depressing to me. Our population is now deaf to the pleas of our leaders to maintain public health guidelines. We’ve been asked not to gather with people outside our households for the upcoming thanksgiving weekend. From everything I’ve read, no one intends to listen. Our second surge is looking worse than our first. No one gets that we could see a better, faster return to normality of some kind if we’d heed the public health guidelines. People are either too stupid or too stubborn to listen. An epidemiologist here said last week that he’s amazed how terribly our education system has failed in the areas of critical thinking and science education. Have to say he’s absolutely right and that my faith in people is at an all time low. I’m pretty down today.

 

[Colleen27]

The areas that are getting hit now never really got hit the first time. Wisconsin, North Dakota......

And that trend is holding within states too.

Michigan was one of the harder hit states in the first wave, though well behind NY/NJ levels, and is now seeing a clear upward trend in case numbers... but the places getting hit now are not the places that were bad in March/April. Early in the year, the Detroit area was the epicenter of the state's outbreak and the outlying areas fought the business restrictions which were imposed on counties and regions that had few or even zero cases all spring. Now, it is the Upper Peninsula that is seeing really out of control spread (driven largely, it seems, by college students returning to campus - a whole summer of tourism only produced steady low numbers, but when the schools reopened cases escalated quickly) while the Detroit area counties are seeing much smaller rebound increases. Which doesn't bode well for my county - we never saw much of a first wave and so far haven't seen much of a second either so far, but I suspect that's only a matter of time - but is somewhat encouraging overall.

 

[LuvOrlando]

Rising. And it’s so depressing to me. Our population is now deaf to the pleas of our leaders to maintain public health guidelines. We’ve been asked not to gather with people outside our households for the upcoming thanksgiving weekend. From everything I’ve read, no one intends to listen. Our second surge is looking worse than our first. No one gets that we could see a better, faster return to normality of some kind if we’d heed the public health guidelines. People are either too stupid or too stubborn to listen. An epidemiologist here said last week that he’s amazed how terribly our education system has failed in the areas of critical thinking and science education. Have to say he’s absolutely right and that my faith in people is at an all time low. I’m pretty down today.

I've been saying the same about the state of our STEM education, if there ever was a banner to fight for educational funding making headway into the STEM disciplines this is it. I get there are some odd dividing lines out and about on some issues but microbiology does not fall into any of those buckets and yet here we are. Seems there are a few humans trying to drag everyone else to safety, thank goodness for their persistence and tenacity.

Try not to be too upset, humanity has survived much worse with fewer tools. Humans only started sterilizing medical equipment in the late 1800's https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Lister-Baron-Lister-of-Lyme-Regis
and when I was a kid in the 80's I was still getting vaccines and blood drawn with reusable glass and metal cleaned in an autoclave which would not happen today thanks to the efforts of Scientists and Dr's. We didn't have antibiotics to help us during the 1918 Flu but we do now https://microbiologysociety.org/mem...ic-resistance/the-history-of-antibiotics.html
Humans didn't even have antivirals until recently, it's messy right now but we'll be ok.

 

[*DisneyDreamer]

And that trend is holding within states too.

Michigan was one of the harder hit states in the first wave, though well behind NY/NJ levels, and is now seeing a clear upward trend in case numbers... but the places getting hit now are not the places that were bad in March/April. Early in the year, the Detroit area was the epicenter of the state's outbreak and the outlying areas fought the business restrictions which were imposed on counties and regions that had few or even zero cases all spring. Now, it is the Upper Peninsula that is seeing really out of control spread (driven largely, it seems, by college students returning to campus - a whole summer of tourism only produced steady low numbers, but when the schools reopened cases escalated quickly) while the Detroit area counties are seeing much smaller rebound increases. Which doesn't bode well for my county - we never saw much of a first wave and so far haven't seen much of a second either so far, but I suspect that's only a matter of time - but is somewhat encouraging overall.

This is true in Wisconsin too. Cases in the spring were concentrated in Milwaukee, and other areas of the state protested the safer at home orders because the rural counties were “fine.” Now it’s northern Wisconsin that is getting hit hardest. Milwaukee has seen increases, but while state hospitalizations are at an all-time high, hospitalizations in southeast Wisconsin are for now lower than the peak.

 

[Pyotr]

Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1312437371460173825

 

[LuvOrlando]

Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1312437371460173825

Yes, I agree that going out to eat is a terrible idea.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1312437371460173825

I think it's gross because of all the contamination your mask is getting...ewww.

Certainly the longer you're in a place with your mask off and talking is an issue and that's what they are getting at but other issues arise with what they are trying to do. I think if you were sitting around long enough after your meal put on your mask. Various mask ordinances cover that aspect. Now getting up from the table you're supposed to put your mask on but at least it's not in between bites every time you're taking a bite.