I knew it. The moment that I saw it, I knew what was happening and what was going to happen. It was transparently manipulative and disingenuous, and it was going to backfire.
One week ago, Andrew Cuomo presented data at his press conference that indicated that 74% of COVID transmissions could be traced to ‘Household/Social Gatherings”. The only other known transmissions that featured data points above 2% were healthcare settings and higher education. It fit his narrative … the same narrative that he has been (rightly) repeating for months: Don’t congregate.
There was a glaring problem, however: his data didn’t add up.
Firstly, it was disingenuous to combine the transmissions of household spread and social gatherings. We already had data on household spread when the virus wasn’t at it’s peak: throughout the summer and early fall, Onondaga County consistently provided information about how the virus was being transmitted and 20-40% of the the time, it was being attributed to household spread. Now it gets combined with “social gatherings”?
Come on man.
The coronavirus is VERY difficult to track and trace. It is so difficult to track that only 46,000 of the 200,000+ cases throughout New York were traced at all. Just 23% of the cases of COVID-19 have a known source of infection. TWENTY-THREE PERCENT. And what about that 74% of people in his data set? They are necessarily going to be the easiest to trace, because when one person in a household gets sick, it is easier to trace the infection within a household than if that individual were to spread the infection while exercising at the local gym or eating out at a local eatery. The 46,000 people who can be traced are a convenience sample.
For crying out-loud, someone only needs to go to Wikipedia to read the disadvantages of a convenience sample:
The results of the convenience sampling cannot be generalized to the target population because of the potential bias of the sampling technique due to under-representation of subgroups in the sample in comparison to the population of interest. The bias of the sample cannot be measured. Therefore, inferences based on the convenience sampling should be made only about the sample itself
What that means is that the data can ONLY show us that if someone gets sick in New York, there is a 17% (74% of 23%) chance that their infection can be traced back to a family member or social gathering. That leaves another 83% of COVID-positive patients who will NOT be able to trace back their infection to a household or gathering.
And that is without even mentioning how disingenuous it is to over-sample from a data set that likely includes senior living communities (retirement communities, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities), which are NOT representative of typical community engagement/interaction and necessarily skew toward the governor’s preferred narrative.
So, what we REALLY know is that approximately 70-75% of the cases of COVID-19 in the community are likely being spread outside of households, despite mitigation strategies. This is not old news. It is something that we have known since the summer. I wish it weren’t true, but we simply don’t know ANYTHING else.
Still, Cuomo tried to pretend that the numbers show something that they don’t and now we have people in the community believing that the numbers tell them things that they can’t. Case in point: this blog post from a local radio host.
In the post Mr Lonsberry writes:
None of the sectors of the economy targeted by the government played any significant role whatsoever in covid spread, and government quarantine policy seemed to play a dominant role in the large majority of transmissions.
This cannot be true. If 83% of cases cannot be traced back to households, then the overwhelming majority of infections are somehow occurring in the community. I wouldn’t hazard a guess to say how or where. We do have a few good ideas of the types of environments that are more likely than others to be conducive to community spread without mitigation, but most businesses locally have been doing their damnedest to do everything that they could to stop spread inside their doors and keep their businesses open.
Restaurants and bars, long reviled as the focus of covid transmission, long the target of government restrictions and shutdowns, accounted for just 1.43% of all the covid cases in New York during the dramatic so-called “second surge.”
No, they accounted for 1.43% of cases in NY that could be traced. Nothing more.
And the governor, having this data, still imposed a color-coded scheme that further burdened and restricted both bars and restaurants. … He knew they were innocent, and he buried them some more.
I’ll play the role of the pedantic. The very-large majority of restaurant and bar-owners are most certainly not complicit; we don’t know that their businesses are innocent.
And yet orange zone barbershops and salons were completely closed down by the governor’s order. They had nothing to do with spreading covid, as his own numbers showed …
We can’t say that barbershops and salons had nothing to do with COVID spread. The data is resoundingly ambiguous.
Gyms in New York were connected with the transmission of .06% of cases of covid. Six one-hundredths of one percent.
Again, no.
Mr. Lonsberry continues:
… these are almost exclusively in-home, in-family transmissions.
And quarantines play a big part in that.
One member of a family gets covid, that person is quarantined at home, and the whole family gets covid.
At home, conditions for spreading the virus are good. Outside the home, conditions for spreading the virus are bad.
New York has found every conceivable way to crack down on activities outside the home, where covid transmission is very rare. And it has used its power to keep infected families inside the home, where almost three-quarters of covid transmission is taking place.
What is better than quarantine?
Statistically, everything.
This isn’t an argument against quarantine, it’s just an honest assessment of where covid is coming from.
I believe that Mr. Lonsberry is being forthright. I have no reason to think he is being disingenuous. On the contrary, I just don’t think that his (and my) governor gave him a clear picture of what the data really does, and – more importantly – does not say about COVID-19 transmission.
Statistically, approximately 83% of individuals who test positive for COVID will NOT be able to trace it back to their home. Contrary to Mr. Lonsberry’s statement, COVID transmission is not rare outside the home; COVID transmission is happening outside the home more than it is happening inside it.
This doesn’t fit anyone’s narrative. The data is remarkably unclear – we don’t know where it is spreading in the community the most. Therefore we don’t know where our mitigation strategies are proving to be most effective, and we don’t know where we can be more or less lenient/careful.
All we have is data that suggests that masks are very effective at reducing spread. We can have confidence that the farther you are from someone who is sick, the less likely you are to become sick yourself. We are quite certain that being distanced from someone outdoors is a healthier choice than distancing indoors. After that, the data gets pretty muddy. pretty quickly. Things blurred further still when we start viewing and distorting the same data through our respective political lenses.