May, 2020
Berlin, Washington, and Lincoln – This is another look at how the battle against Covid-19 is going in the three capitals that I follow in particular. These are the cities of many of my friends and family.
• Berlin: Germany is having considerable success and starting the second phase of re-opening its economy. The primary indicator Germany uses to measure success is R, the reproduction rate of the virus. Below 1.0 means the virus is diminishing. Today's number is .57, compared to a world number of 1.0 and a U.S. number of .95. Germany moved early and decisively to put testing, contact tracing, social-distancing and, importantly, stay-home orders in place. It is paying off, hugely.
• Washington: In the Maryland suburbs the effort is not going well. Maryland as a state has an R of .92 today, but Montgomery County has been particularly hard hit, with over 300 deaths already. This is embarrassing, as the county is the home of both NIH and FDA. Although Maryland's Governor Hogan has tried to put into effect the same techniques that Germany used successfully, lack of testing and PPE are continuing problems. Maryland and Virginia, across the river, are both losing the cooperation of many residents who are hearing a message out of the White House that it's more important to open the economy than to beat back the virus first.
• Lincoln: Nebraska is in a precarious position with an R of 1.06; it has had the highest R values in nation for three weeks running. Governor Ricketts chose not to issue any shelter-in-place orders, ignoring the pleas of doctors and mayors in the hardest-hit cities. There appears to be a strong correlation between high R values and failure to keep people from traveling through stay-home orders. Today, three of the top four (and 6 of the top 10) R values in the nation are held by states whose governors rejected the option. Yesterday, Lincoln was identified in the local newspaper as a potential hot-spot for an outbreak, although this has seemed inevitable for weeks.
R is not the only measure to assess success or failure. Today's New York Times looks at states that are re-opening their economies to determine how ready they are to do so under the CDC's two re-opening guidelines: a "downward trajectory" of either documented virus cases or the percentage of positive tests. Nebraska fails both options. Other experts recommend holding off on re-opening where the rate of positive tests is more than 10%, or where testing fails to meet minimum a threshold of about 152 tests per 100,000 people daily. Nebraska also falls short on these measures.
Governor Ricketts, however, appeared this week in the Washington Post holding out Nebraska as a "model" that other states should follow. He and his co-authors, governors of four other states, made the statement that their states "ranked low in terms of infection rates." This is a dubious claim, if not an outright lie. On the five measures described above, the Nebraska governor has nothing to back up his claim. Nebraska's per capita cases also rank at or above all six surrounding states, and the trend is only getting worse.
Meanwhile, the White House is revising the CDC guidelines for re-opening, moving the goalposts to fit the kick, so to speak.
There is an actual model for success against the pandemic: elect competent leaders who deal in truth, who work well with others, and who inspire their citizens. How many more deaths will it take to discover it?
