Looks like we've got ourselves a nice little outbreak in Tuscaloosa. This is probably from the university restart. It appears that by trying to marginaliza concerns and refusing to report data, the university may have encouraged bad behavior. Note that classes at the university only started on Wednesday and in-person classes at the schools in the county (outside the city) started on Thursday. There hasn't been enough time for either of those to even show up here and our rate is already pretty clearly headed up into an outbreak that will probably be worse than what happened in July. Finally on Friday they instituted a moratorium on all non-class student events after 15/50 students attending one event tested positive. Next week is likely to be rough.

Currently slow declines in the rate of new infections continue. I'm worried about how school reopenings will change this from here. Many Alabama schools open this week, as does the university here. Would be terrible to lose these hard-won improvements. Still nobody below 10, which is the threshold for modest indoor gatherings with masks and distancing.

Progress over the last week appears to confirm that rates of new infections appear to have leveled off or peaked in Alabama and Florida and are coming down a bit. Alabama is coming down very slowly, with Florida coming down more quickly but having been higher at the top. I'm worried that now that things are finally improving school openings will push it right back up over the next few weeks.

If you need evidence that mask orders make a difference, it's right here. Tuscaloosa's mask order went into effect on July 5, and we started to flatten off within a week. Alabama's statewide mask order went into effect on July 15, and again within a week, the increasing rate had started flattening off.

The threshold for even small to moderate size indoor meetings with masks and distancing (like a classroom) is to be less than 10 on this scale.

Here is a plot of history since the end of April. New cases per day per 100k population. Shown are states and counties where I have family. Data is as recorded by me each evening from the Alabama public health dashboard and from the Florida "community" dashboard, and from Wikipedia articles for the United States, Germany, and France. France and Germany are between 0.5 and 1 almost the whole time. That is what successful test-and-trace looks like. Slow, sporadic spread from contained local outbreaks.

Just put this in an email, and thought it might be useful to post here:

The current rate of new infections in Tuscaloosa county is about 30 new per day per 100,000 people, Alabama is at about 37. The peak rate in New York state back in April was about 50 and in New York City about 75. It does appear from the last week that we have plateaued a little, and hopefully the fact that a mask mandate has been put in place in Alabama about a week and a half ago will start to at least keep things from getting worse. But that is not clear yet. I am hopeful that we will come back from the brink, but it is quite tenuous right now. Guidelines (https://covidlocal.org/metrics/) specify a new infection rate generally falling and below 25 for backing off from stay-at-home, and an indoor activity like classes at the university (even with masks and distancing) is only recommended with an infection rate below 10.

Guess I should say something to start, before turning on the twitter plugin.

This is my test site for my foray out from the cloistered land of a mostly private Friendica server and into the bigger world. The main point is to test twitter integration within friendica. So far I've created a twitter account, applied and become a twitter developer (wohoo!... I guess.) and gotten my app keys. At some point should set it up the rest of the way.