A positive trend
The mayor of Tuscaloosa is letting bars near the University of Alabama reopen on Tuesday, even though the school just reported more than 800 new cases.
800 new cases – hooray, that means it’s time to open up the bars! So that we can try for 8 thousand new cases!
In a press release, Mayor Walt Maddox citied a “positive trend” in results, saying an overall decline in community positivity rates “provides an opportunity for a limited reopening of bars which have sacrificed a great deal to protect our healthcare system and economy.” At the same time, the university reported 846 new cases over the last week—the largest increase in a single week since classes began.
Which Maddox is defining as a decline. Isn’t epidemiology fun!
Even some students were outraged with the decision. One who identifies himself as a freshman at the university tweeted that the mayor was making a “huge mistake” and that the decision made him feel less safe on campus.
Despite being alcoholics. Why is there such an entrenched idea that university students are all chronic drunks? Some university students are actually there to learn things.
Anyway – bars are open, kids, get out there and spread that covid.
Yeah, I didn’t become a pseudo-alcoholic until after I got a degree.
I was a solid drinker before I arrived at college. But I have always preferred drinking at “home” with a few friends to going out to bars. And I was not a reckless idiot. So I’m pretty confident that I would have been touting COVID as another reason to do socially distant dorm drinking rather than hit some crowded, overpriced bar again.
“You know when I drink alone, I prefer to be by myself”.– George Thorogood
Oh god I miss my bar so much… I find I’m drinking more by volume than I did when the bars were closed but without the social activity. The plague has much to answer for, big and small.
BKiSA, with all this hand sanitisising, my hands get more alcohol than my kidneys these days.
I’m working for the US Census and the sanitizer they provide is basically moonshine and smells just as harsh.
It depends how you interpret “positive trend”.
(On a more serious note…not the best journalism by the Daily Beast. The mayor is referring to cases in the community as a whole going down, which the Daily Beast is comparing to cases going up in the school subset. There’s still plenty of room to criticize that move without resorting to the slight of hand they do to make it appear the mayor is confused or lying about cases going down.)
Well, maybe it identifies as a decline. Trans declines are declines!
On a more serious note, cases here have been on the rise ever since UNL opened up for classes, and our governor has announced he is lifting all restrictions on the 14th. Is there some requirement in the Republican party that you must be a callous incompetent to be in political leadership positions? Or is it just that the voters prefer callous incompetents?
Most COVID cases in Tokyo, and probably in other cities here, appear to derive from frequenting bars – and favourite Japanese bars are mostly tiny, cramped places.
You might recall that NZ has been experiencing a renewed outbreak of community transmission. Following a rapid lock down for a month of our largest city and a milder lock down of the rest of the country, things are doing ok. We still haven’t identified the route that Covid re-entered the country through but almost certainly some sort of failure at the border (maybe an asymptomatic person who got two false negatives or a security or transportation worker inadvertently exposed). The resulting cluster has branched into two – the main cluster, originally centered around the South Auckland community – and a sub-cluster – centered around an evangelical church. The main cluster appears to be coming under good control. It’s some days since new cases have been identified and those who have were already in isolation. By contrast every day there are new cases linked to the church cluster. Today it was announced that this sub-cluster is proving harder to wrap around because of the nature of the community. Apparently there are denialist elements associated with evangelical churches (no surprise) and these people and those they influence do not take warnings, precautions and instructions seriously. Worse, some of them do not co-operate with contact tracers even when they get sick.
The lesson seems to be that it’s hard keeping this disease out of the country and if you get even a small number of people refusing to co-operate, very hard to eradicate.
As an interesting aside, about the same time as the main cluster breakout occurred, an entirely separate breakout occurred associated with an isolation hotel (where incoming travelers are held for two weeks – tested twice). Genetic testing linked the maintenance workers infection to a guest in the hotel, but it was known for a fact they had never come into contact. Detailed retracing of movements apparently suggests the worker used a lift shortly after the guest. Hard to control, but not impossible if there is the will.
Skeletor and Iknklast seem to have formed a psychic link! How else can they have posted with a one-line joke, followed by a four line paragraph starting with “on a more serious note” at almost the same time?