As COVID spirals out of control in Indiana and with re-election secured, Governor Holcomb is apparently revamping the COVID restriction system for Indiana. Instead of the five stage re-opening plan announced earlier this year, there will be a county-by-county set of restrictions based on whether the counties have a red, orange, yellow, or blue coding on the State’s dashboard. The color coding is based on the county’s number of weekly cases per capita and its positivity rate. According to news reports, social events in orange counties will be 50 or fewer (unless there is a health department approved plan) and extracurricular school events will be limited to 25%. Red counties will be limited to social events with 25 or fewer (unless there is a health department approved plan), senior care activities are suspended, and school events are limited to participants and parents. I haven’t seen the actual order from the Governor yet, so this is me paraphrasing the newspaper summary — omitting the “ought to” provisions and descriptions of things that are already permitted. (For example, “Local officials can consider limiting hours at bars, nightclubs and restaurants” — they can already do that.)
The mask mandate will remain in place. I don’t see it in the material I’ve linked above, but I thought I read something about the State making money available to communities that enforce the mask mandate. I’ll be interested to see what that’s about.
The number of new cases per day were holding relatively steady until about the beginning of October when things went screaming upward. Our death rates are up, our new cases are up, the hospitals are starting to feel the strain. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Gov. Holcomb would have felt more freedom to act sooner if the election had been earlier. The right wing of his party is howling that having to wear a mask is tyranny and the Democrats weren’t likely to give him much credit regardless of what he did. I would have liked to see more political courage from him. But the hell of it is that it shouldn’t require that much courage. Rather than fighting him on this, Hoosiers should welcome guidance on how to get past a pandemic that’s cost 4,500 lives in our state alone. Instead, a shocking number of Hoosiers can’t manage to keep a mask over their nose.
There’s encouraging news about a vaccine, but it’s far from a sure thing and it’s going to take awhile to roll out even if things go perfectly — which they won’t, because our federal government is an incompetent shit show at the moment. So, this winter is going to be tough.
There’s also therapeutics on the way that, hopefully, will help to some degree.
But I think people are just tired to the point of making poor choices.
I think that’s part of it. Some of them were never making good choices to start with. My biggest beef during the first lock down was that no end game was articulated. It was something like:
Step 1 – Lock down
Step 2 – ???
Step 3 – ???
I guess, to be fair, back then — while community spread was nothing compared to what it is now — we didn’t have a very good testing regime in place yet and treatments weren’t as good as they are now.
Using some rough calculations, almost 500 more Hoosiers died during “Stage 5” than would have if the death rate had remained where it was at the end of September. Even if we put the brakes on today, the script for the next couple of weeks has already been written.
I didn’t get the sense that Holcomb’s changes are meaningfully different in practice. I don’t know how well people who would have otherwise held large gatherings will abide by the new restrictions (especially since they may change from week-to-week). The signage requirements for businesses seem new. If the state holds businesses responsible for compliance, then that might make a difference. Otherwise, most businesses (and the front-line workers who bear the brunt of it) are unwilling to enforce their policies on customers.
My sense is that the regulations are more effective in terms of setting social expectations than in terms of actually compelling behavior. If we can get public officials singing from the same book, I think that will help create social pressure for people to put on their masks, not host public events, think twice about going out, limit the number of people who go into stores and all of those other things we did somewhat better at the beginning of the pandemic.
Stage 4.5 and 5 gave the message that things were mostly better. And now a lot of people are getting sick and dying as a result.