A group of researchers from the Harvard Institute of Global Health said the chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was wrong earlier this week when he suggested that an increase in COVID-19 cases in the southern states It was caused by people driving there from the northern states to vacations. .
CDC chief Robert Redfield said people driving south after the Memorial Day holiday weekend were to blame for an explosion in the June 12-16 cases.
“This is not what the data says,” the HGHI said in a report. Infections in states like Nevada and Florida actually seemed to increase on June 1.
“Remember that there is always a delay between the time infections occur and the time they begin to be diagnosed,” the report says. “This means that the increase in confirmed cases around June 1 comes from infections that occur around May 24, just around Memorial Day weekend (and well before mid-June, as Dr. Redfield suggests So the data shows that these outbreaks started earlier. Tourists from the north allegedly traveled south. “
The most likely explanation is that infections are on the rise because states reopened too soon, the researchers wrote.
Further undermining Redfield’s argument, cases also began to increase in Alaska, Idaho and Oregon around June 1, similar to the increase in infection in the south. “Those states also opened early, but don’t see many northern travelers in late May or June,” the report says.
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If Redfield was correct, visitors from the north should have somehow avoided Virginia, which has shown a declining count of cases in the weeks after Memorial Day, he said.
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“As long as we allow the data to guide us, the answers are clear: the northerners are not the cause of large outbreaks in the south,” the researchers wrote.
States that are seeing large outbreaks have in common that they lifted movement restrictions at around the same time in May, causing the increase in cases seen in early June.
“Virginia, on the other hand, remained in Phase 1 of its reopening until the end of May and has fared significantly better than its neighbors,” they wrote.
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The HGHI tracking tool currently shows 11 states that blink red, led by Florida, which now has a seven-day average rate of 51.8 cases per 100,000 people. Harvard researchers say those states, the other 10 are Arizona, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Georgia, Nevada, Tennessee, Mississippi and Idaho, need to reimpose orders to stay home.
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