Rural Virginia county officials pass resolution rejecting ‘tyranny’ of governor’s coronavirus restrictions

[webster]

As I said, the County Board are ignoramuses. They should remember that this is the 70th anniversary of the "summer without children" in Wytheville VA. Who would have thought that a small town in VA would be slammed by polio and an especially deadly strain of it (polio usually did not kill). Out of a population of 5,500 they had an infection rate of over 3%.

https://dalebrumfield.medium.com/the...n-d700c956c8b9

[ersatz]

Originally Posted by ersatz

I have noticed that people feel that if they live in a rural conservative county, that COVID won't be that bad and they are entitled to ignore basic COVID spread precautions.

I found this map of COVID spread in Virginia fascinating.

https://usafacts.org/visualizations/...state/virginia

{snip}

Campbell County recently voted to ignore COVID countermeasures. They currently have an infection rate of 2241 per 100,000. It will be interesting to check their infection rate two weeks after Christmas!

Out of curiosity, I went back to the usafacts website to check current cases per 100,000 after the holidays

County 12/4/20 1/24/21 % increase

Greenville County 8275 10268 24%

Fairfax County 2871 4857 69%

Prince Edward County 3886 6600 70%

City of Roanoke 4211 6375 51%

Campbell County 2241 5936 165%

[nm9stheham]

Clearly establishing cause-and-effect for a single factor is quite hard. Look back in the spring, when Fairfax County infections were raging and Campbell County was not... there were a LOT of stricter statewide restrictions in place. So a strong spread can take hold even with lots of restrictions. And what were the effects of the holiday gatherings on this matter? We don't know. Some other reasons for the above to not be an adequate case for 'A causes B':

1. The CDC has written up a good bit of info on the timing for a change in policy or behavior to produce a large increase in cases in an area. They cite 6-8 weeks typically for this to take place, simply due to the fact that it takes many successive 'generations' of infection to grow the case numbers. So one would not expect a decision made in early Dec to cause a clear case increase until about now, not in the weeks immediately after the decision. It is almost certain that this case rise in Campbell County started with factors going back into Nov or even Oct.

2. The likelihood of a strong spread starting at a given point in time will logically be more severe in areas that have lower penetration of the virus in the population to date. As of 12/4, the spread numbers to that time were higher or much higher in all the other municipalities used for the above comparison. Thus, the likelihood of a strong spread was already going to be higher in Campbell County, simply due to the lower rate of overall population exposure to that date. By similarity, Virgnia's overall cases are now more quickly rising than many other states. If one looks at the present case rates in VA versus the other states, VA is near the lower end. So it is to be expected that the spread in VA will be stronger right now.

So the timing of when an infection spreads strongly in a given area is highly variable, and has to do with a lot of different factors. Take any snapshot of any set of municipalities' numbers in various time frames and some will be higher and some will be lower. But that is too simplified for reasonable proof of cause and effect; that takes more examination of a number of factors, understanding timing of spreads, etc. Great examples are Maine and Vermont; they thought they were doing a great job with some very restrictive policies on visitors, etc....... until about 2 months ago... ooops. Spreads took off in late fall and the result was a sharp increase in spreads a couple of months later. (IMHO, most probably due to schools and colleges going back in session in Sep). The most likely reason that Maine and Vermont had very low spread rates before the late fall is not their restrictions but the fact that they are by far the least urbanized states in terms of % of their populations living in built-up areas. They tend to have lots and lots of tiny villages, and people simply don't mix as often.

[nm9stheham]

And BTW, not trying to criticize anyone with the above.. just trying to point our how this is a multi-faceted problem and almost impossible to assign to one cause in any particular case. I have been running stats and spreadsheets on this thing since last April, testing my own theories, and have found my ideas have been inadequate at least half the time!

The 3 most important factors for spread, in no particular order, seem to be:
1. Personal behavior
2. Local 'cultural and operational' behavior (with 'cultural and operational' being a very broad, catch-all term!)
3. Level of urbanization

Gov't mandates can directly influence the 2nd factor above to some degree (bar closures and restaurant limits for examples), but can't change #3 at all, and can only appeal to #1 unless you start issuing fines to individuals.

[ersatz]

Appreciate your thoughtful response, nm9stheham. Tried to rep you but CD says I need to spread more reps around.

I'm sure the risk is higher in more urbanized areas, where people are unavoidably closer together. The recently announced COVID mutations are likely a factor too. According to media reports, they are more infectious. Initially reported overseas in places like the UK, South Africa, and Brazil, those variants have been reported in the US as well. There also seem to be some US-generated mutations in the mix. Unfortunately, genetic sequencing of test results is not as robust in the US as in many other countries.

[nm9stheham]

Well, I read you say that you like to run numbers, ersatz. So I hoped you would appreciate the input from a fellow 'numbers junkie' LOL. If you like numbers, see if you think that North and South Dakota have reached herd immunity... it looks like they have to me.

As you probably well know, the trick is to take the confirmed case rates (what we see as case numbers) per fixed amount of population, and convert it into an actual (estimated) infection rate. There have been a couple of good study results in Nov 2020 putting the actual to confirmed case ratios at 6 to 7 on average, taken across a decent number of countries. Here is one of them:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/d...98/rsos.200909

If those numbers are approximately correct, then North and South Dakota have hit the 70% or higher mark for the % of their populations that have been infected. And you can see that in the strongly dropping case rates in those 2 states. It looks like some other states are closing in on that also.

You can also use those ratios of actual to confirmed cases to perhaps draw some reasonable conclusions on how deadly this actually now is compared to flu. I took overall US number of confirmed cases over 4 weeks, from late Nov to late Dec, and then took the death number for the same length of time, but 20 days later (to account for the time lag). If you convert the confirmed cases to estimated actual cases (multiply by 6 or 7), then the fatality rate end up being about 0.2%... which is roughly only 1.5 times the 10 year average rate for flu (at 0.13%). I was wondering if the advances in treatment and better care to avoid infections would get this bug's deadliness down close to flu, and it kinda looks that way.

And long term, I would think that this is about the level of death rate we will see from this thing. The population won't be caught be surprise, nor the medical community, etc., and sudden big outbreaks will not be occurring, That 'surprise' and lack of experience with this is what made the situation so deadly early on, in NYC, NJ and much of the NE USA.

As for the new strains, IMHO the jury is very definitely still out on the infectiousness. Any new strain is going to probably be more infectious simply because, even if there is some level of immunity to it in the general population from COVID-19, that immunity will probably not be complete, and so there is relatively more fertile ground for a new strain.

Spanish flu was done and gone in about 3 years. With our advanced transportation and our more 'locationally active' life that we have in the USA now with all of our cars and such, the spread is going to be faster but the recovery will come sooner as a consequence. (Hiding from this long enough will work for a few, but not if you have to get out to make a living, hence a fair basis for conflicting policy ideas.)

I just hope the vaccine effort will move along faster. There is just so much production rate to have, and honestly, reaching herd immunity through direct infection looks like it is going to outpace the vaccine in many regions. The vaccine may become more important to put the 'last nail in the coffin' of this thing, and really get it suppressed.