Yesterday Andy Slavitt, a high-ranking health official in the Obama administration, presented a brilliant thread on Twitter about the danger of relaxing social distancing rules in May. Below I've copied in screenshots of what Slavitt said.
It's a well-reasoned, and also disturbing, counterpoint to the small number of strident demonstrators against stay-at-home orders in Oregon and elsewhere who are getting way more attention from the media than they deserve.
l'll also take this opportunity to mention something that deserves more attention from public health authorities here in Oregon. Why the heck does the county where I live, Marion County, have such a high number of coronavirus cases? Click on the Demographics section of this web page to see the data.
Lane County (pop. 382,000) and Marion County (pop. 348,000) are Willamette Valley counties that are about the same size. But to date Lane County has 54 confirmed COVID-19 cases and Marion County has 544, ten times more. Wow.
Anyway, check out Slavitt's series of tweets about May being 30 days of (ignorant) bliss nationally.
NOTE: The text in the chart below is difficult to read. It shows cumulative COVID-19 deaths from April 1 to April 30, 2020 for New York (blue at bottom), New Jersey (green in middle), and rest of the United States minus New York and New Jersey (yellow at top).
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