COVID-19 Daily Update: Utah Status Report

Utah is a good data point for the impact of school openings on COVID-19 case spread. 

Utah opened schools in person mid August. At the time there was debate about whether opening schools would actually increase the spread of COVID-19 because children have more mild symptoms, and it was hoped that this also meant that they didn't spread the virus as well as adults. 

We knew that this was likely true for children under 10, but we also knew that children over this age spread the virus as well as adults. Therefore, opening schools for older children, as well as colleges, should cause an increase in spread. 

This is in fact what we can clear see in the Utah data:

This is not a single one day noise spike. This trend is clearly visible in the average, over several days. Notice also that cases are rising faster than tests, so this is not the result of increased testing. Cases are now above tests in my figure. The scale is set such that when cases are above tests, that means that the percent positive rate is larger than the danger threshold of 10%. 

When we use this data to estimate the actual number of infections (which is always larger than the number of confirmed cases) we get the following:

Daily new infections in Utah are now higher than they have ever been. 

Estimates of Rt for Utah are 1.18, which means that the rate of infections is accelerating at an ever faster rate.

There is always a delay between cases and deaths. Right now daily deaths in Utah are still falling:

This is not unexpected or surprising. The majority of the new cases are young people who are far less likely to die from COVID-19. But the rise in cases is still dangerous, because these youth will eventually spread the disease to their older and more vulnerable family members. And older staff at the schools are already vulnerable. 

This is the impact of opening schools in person. There is no real doubt that it can cause a rapid rise in cases, and that has happened already in Utah. 

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