COVID-19 expert: Centre County in better shape than a week ago — but ‘worrisome’ trends remain
Centre County appears to be in slightly better shape than it was a week ago with the COVID-19 pandemic — but based on trends, data and projections, any celebration could still be short-lived.
Dr. David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, last week gave the Centre Daily Times a “bellwether” date of Oct. 1 for when the county would know whether it was trending in the right direction. But, based on precedent from colleges that started before Penn State and his COVID-19 study that touched on the impact of changing temperatures, Rubin believes he can already better project the county’s pandemic path.
His educated projection at this point? With the county’s decreasing positivity rate — it was down to 9.3% Sunday, based on seven-day averages, compared to 12.6% a week prior — Penn State is likely following the path of other universities in that it will finally, temporarily see the virus spread start to level off. However, between transmission and cold weather observed to increase the infection rate, he believes any decrease will likely be short-lived.
“I want to take the good news where it is,” Rubin told the Centre Daily Times on Thursday. “But, to me, I’m looking at the long game here. And the long game to me is still very worrisome.”
There could be many reasons for a decrease in testing positivity, or a potential decrease in cases. But, Rubin said, it could partially be as simple as those who were most likely to get the virus already got it — and can’t get it again in the short term. “I don’t think it’s because of anything that Penn State is doing, per se,” he added.
The main risk to Centre County still remains: Mount Nittany Medical Center reaching capacity. Rubin, who’s consulted with the state Department of Health, previously said hospitalizations often lag behind coronavirus spikes by about three weeks; other experts have said that lag can be about six weeks in younger communities.
Last weekend, a Mount Nittany spokesperson told the CDT it saw just four total hospitalizations in the month of September. But on Friday, according to the state DOH’s hospital preparedness dashboard, five patients were simultaneously hospitalized — all of whom were over the age of 80, a spokesperson said Friday.
“You have to be really mindful of hospital capacity,” Amesh Adalja, an infectious-diseases expert from Johns Hopkins, told the CDT last week.
Rubin wasn’t alone in his warning about the cold weather. And many experts — though not all — paint a grim picture for what could lie ahead for northern states like Pennsylvania.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a global health research center at the University of Washington, projects Pennsylvania will run out of ICU beds by mid-December.
“It’s not as bad now as what you will see in November or December,” Dr. Ali Mokdad, the IMHE’s chief strategy officer of population health, told the CDT last week.
Added Rubin: “I agree. When I look at the map of Pennsylvania, we are setting ourselves up for a very difficult winter in many locations.”
Rubin speaks with some authority on the matter of seasonality and COVID-19. He co-authored an original investigation in the Journal of the American Medical Association in July, which observed a correlation between the infection rate of COVID-19 and every degree cooler it was between 55-60 degrees and 20-25 degrees.
Mokdad said the seasonality trends have been observed in the Southern Hemisphere, and Rubin has already spotted an uptick in some areas of New England such as Maine and New Hampshire, along with mountainous areas across the U.S. He doesn’t expect Pennsylvania, or Centre County, to fare any differently. (Part of the reason is simply because people stay indoors when it’s colder, and indoors is where the virus spreads easiest.)
“Since March, that has singularly been what we’ve been worried about and why we wanted people to eliminate as much of the virus by the end of the summer,” Rubin said.
Still, Rubin said, it’s OK to be somewhat pleased with Centre County’s modest improvement over last week — “It’s better; it’s still terrible,” he added — as long as it doesn’t lead to complacency. The county still has a long way to go before it’s “safe” to return to normal.
So the same advice remains: Be cautious. Wear a mask. Social distance. Wash your hands.
“There’s a difference between 10% testing positivity and 3% testing positivity,” Rubin said. “You want to feel really safe, like New York, you’d like to see yourself under a percent or between 1% and 2% and stably there.
“So, in terms of absolute safety, that’s what it looks like. So, yeah, things are a little better — but people should be very careful.”
