Return to Spokane in Jeopardy... a Fourth Time!

When I want to travel somewhere and can't for whatever reason I rarely get frustrated. I simply put the destination back on the list, confident that I'll get there eventually. "I SHALL RETURN." It's getting ridiculous with Spokane and the Inland Northwest, though.

After an enjoyable trip to the Inland Northwest in May we planned to return a few weeks later... but that trip was canceled due to airline snafu. We planned our return a second time but that got canceled due to extreme heat. Our third attempt to return got canceled due to the craziness that is the rental car business right now (rates were $250+/day).



Now we're on our fourth return plan. We're due to leave Thursday evening this week... but we may have to cancel that because of the epic fire season burning in western Washington and Oregon and the Idaho panhandle. Potentially four plans in a row canceled. It's like the fates do not want us to return to Spokane!

Pandemic Coming Back Around

The Coronavirus pandemic is coming back around. ...Not that it really ever went away, but now we're seeing a resurgence that destroys any notion people might have had that it's pretty much beat, that we've got it on the ropes. New case rates have increased 5x in the last month. See the recent uptrend in the curve in this chart from the New York Times's Coronavirus in the US page [retrieved 27 Jul 2021]:



We're back to infection numbers we last saw April. Three months ago. We've lost three months of progress. And that's despite the vaccine become more accessible since then.

And those are just nationwide numbers. Some states are getting hit harder. In California the new case rate is 12x what it was a month ago. This chart is from the NY Times's California tracking page:



You can see in the shape of the curve it's not so much that California is worse today than the US as a whole, it's that California was better than most of the country earlier this year (indeed I wrote about that as recently as May 25) so rising to merely average now looks bad. California's infection rates are back to where they were 5 months ago, in February, back before the vaccine was widely available.

We're in Purple (There is no Purple)

An article I read today in the L.A. Times noted that infection rates are high enough again in California that if the state still had its color-tier risk model (link to my last "Tier Tuesday" update, May 25) most of the state would be in Purple Tier, the highest risk category. While that news article didn't provide any numbers to substantiate that claim I can reconstruct it myself.

On the New York Times California tracking page (same as cited above) there's a table of new cases per 100k averaged over the past week. This benchmark is widely used in Coronavirus studies and is the one I've been comparing for months in my blog. It's also a key stat the state used in assigning its risk tiers. California's figure is currently 18 per 100k.

How does 18 per 100k compare to where the state was when we had color tiers? Well, here's what the map looked like on Tier Tuesday five months ago, when the rate was only 15.2 per 100k:



Yeah, that's a lot of purple.

And that's basically what our map would look like today— lots of purple, meaning indoors dining and recreation closed and masks required indoors everywhere else— if we still had the former system in place.

And I'll say this again, to be clear: California's rate of 18 per 100k is not the worst in the country. This is the national average.