🦠 The definition of an outbreak
We know we are in trouble. When do we commit to some sort of action?
August 26, 2020 | Letter No. 9
You’ll recall in the spring when Gov. Kim Reynolds was having daily press conferences. The pandemic was still relatively new. Other states were beginning to issue shelter-in-place orders. And the press tried to get Reynolds and the Iowa Dept. of Public Health to go on the record for two points:
What would a shelter-in-place look like in Iowa?
What would it take for the state to trigger it?
For weeks, these questions were rebuffed with a kind of non-answer. The metrics the state and IDPH were using included those that reporters were asking about but also there were others and they were all in service of responding to the particularity of Iowa’s pandemic conditions and they had it handled.
Suffice to say, Polly Carver-Kimm never got back to me on these before taking off. But because a Johnson County official didn’t think the public should be kept in the dark on it, the Press-Citizen went live April 1 with the first look into a document that defined a shelter in place and laid out the metrics being used to reach it.
It was a big day because suddenly the public had clarity into what the government planned to do and what conditions they would wait for to do it. You can quibble with the metrics used (and you should). You can argue about the thresholds used to assign a lower or higher value (AND YOU SHOULD). But at least we had a road map. This was the state’s plan, and now we have some context for their response. We may think it isn’t enough, but there is accountability here when we know what they are looking for.
In this way, transparency and discretion can be at odds. It is important to know how our government is approaching its response and what informs its actions. On the other hand, this could commit those government actors to a course of action they don’t want to do for any number of reasons.
On Monday, Dan Diekema, Dan Diekema, the director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at UIHC, tweeted, "We have a COVID-19 outbreak in Iowa City." He told the Press-Citizen, the CDC definition is “an increase, often sudden, in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected in that population in that area."
On Tuesday, IDPH showed Johnson County with an increase of 78 cases since 10 a.m. Monday — and nearly 33% of the 238 tests conducted in the last 24 hours. This accompanied reports of bars filling up over the weekend with maskless UI students. Now the students are the only group represented in these numbers, but the UI does have discretionary power to manage this behavior.
The Critical Incident Management Team at the UI is the board with the discretion to bring classes online. Last night, President Bruce Harreld told the student government bodies that the only reason he would say no is if the decision is “illegal or not aligned with our values,” reported Rylee Wilson of the Daily Iowan. However, we haven’t gotten a clear idea of what metrics they are using to guide their decisions or what would have to happen for them to pull the trigger on bringing classes online.
One member wrote in an email to a student about this: “Deciding on how to act on the data will depend on numerous factors. One issue would be what is driving the change. There could be an increase in infections that is understood to be contained and not pose a threat. Another big factor is how we understand the virus is changing, so how we interpret the data will change. So emerging information could make us more or less concerned about the data we track. Emerging data and consensus opinion could also make us more or less concerned about whether the practices we put into place are sufficient.”
This response makes sense. We don’t shut down county building because we had 30% more infections today than yesterday. We shut it down because spread is likely to continue in that direction infecting more people and we need to do what we can to limit that spread. We don’t act because there are infections today. We act because of what infection rates today (and in the past) tell us about infection rates in the future.
However, given the continued increases, I’m not sure what we are waiting on. I understand not wanting to commit to a course of action when it could turn out to not be the best option. My concern is when we wait for a course of action how much suffering we allow. The UI has the ability to go online tomorrow. But it’s not clear what it would take for them do so.
Always your friendly neighborhood reporter,
Zachary Oren Smith
My friend is better than yours
Isaac LaRoy Hamlet is low key doing a really cool twitter thread that you should be following. He’s a multiracial arts reporter writing for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. He’s just been daily building a list of Black artists that impacted him. The other day he hit the creator of Static Shock and I lost my shit. Well worth your time.
Take 5
🚓 “A story of walking while black” – A U.S. judge threw out a ton of evidence in a felony possession case after determining that police violated a Black man’s Fourth Amendment rights using illegal force against him.
😷 UI President Bruce Harreld scolded downtown businesses for letting the students congregate in groups without masks. But it’s not so simple. I talked with an employee at Pancheros — a late-night mainstay in downtown — and he said it’s been difficult, particularly with drunk customers, to get them to listen.
👮 On Monday night, Iowa City got a look at three police chief candidates. Jason Lando of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Dustin Liston of El Paso, Texas; and Jeremy Logan of Oelwein, Iowa spoke about their experience building relationships with their communities, their qualifications and why they want the job.
🐘 Eric Branstad, son of former Iowa governor and current U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad, was in SpoCo hosting a Trump campaign meetup. A dozen showed up. None wanted to talk to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
📹 On the first day of class, the UI’s video conferencing software crashed. Womp womp. There were 300 classes believed to be planned during that time.
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Zachary Oren Smith writes about government, growth and development for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. Reach him at zsmith@press-citizen.com, at 319 -339-7354 or on Twitter via @Zacharyos.