I am curious what people consider “normal” rates to be. According to the tests we had, they were very consistent at 2.2% and that was from a large swath of Iowa and the US. So that would say that out of 30k students there should be 660 that will have positive tests on any day. Where this gets difficult is how much of the contact tracing and other non symptom testing is just hitting people who had it and never knew. The CDC is saying that people can test positive up to 3 months after having had COVID. That may mean that you may have had it on July 4th and did not know, but your co-worker gets it and you get tested and guess what, you just got two weeks of quarantine. Good chance your whole family gets told to hunker down even though you haven’t actually had it for a couple months.
It gets so hard to know the correct answers, they more who get it, the more undetected ones we will find also. I am not as surprised as others with a spike this last week, I expected it before the reports is the parties happened. Situations like this always become self-fulfilling prophecies. If there are 3x as many cases as there are positives, that would throw us around 2000-2500 probably. I believe the numbers will drop after this week. Then things will start to even out. Just my thoughts.
But there were 60,000-ish people in Story County prior to the students coming, and we were at 247 cases on 8/14. You would expect to only see the rate go up by an additional 50% of that number if you were adding in people acting similarly (or roughly 124 additional positives). But it's not, it's gone up now to 1197 just yesterday, which is an increase of about 485% over the 247. Considering those students were all tested when they came onsite and there were only ~130 positives at the time, I don't think that the part about potentially being positive up to three months after is relevant other than for maybe 130 of them.
I don't think anyone should have been surprised by this, either. Even if there weren't parties (which is laughable), students by nature live in close quarters and have more community spaces. Most students interact with the community in some nature, so there is going to be community spread from them that will be trickling down coming up. Combined with the football game and Labor Day, if we use the increases around Memorial Day and the 4th as predictive (which would be a fair assessment), I think we'll see spikes again in about 2.5 to 3 weeks.
I totally get the desire for optimism, but again - the NYT numbers are not arguable by Wintersteen. They're just flat-out not about ISU.
Self-edit - up to 1214 today, per the Iowa COVID tracker that has been fluctuating pretty wildly lately.