Thread by @Dierenbach

Interesting to compare Colorado and Ireland.

Ireland 5 million
Colorado 5.8 million

Ireland 1,917 C19 deaths
Colorado 2,292 C19 deaths

But the most intriguing part is comparing their Covid curves.

Read on.

1/12

First look at cases. Ireland's cases started growing in early September and they seemed to have peaked on about Oct 20 (remember this date).

Colorado turned upward about about a week later, paused and then had fast growth.

2/12

Next look at deaths. Both Colorado and Ireland had peak fatalities in late April.

Note that Ireland, like Colorado, hasn't seen a spike in deaths comparable to the April spike. This seems to be a common occurrence.

3/12

In Ireland, why did cases turn downward on October 20?

I would argue the natural course of the disease. Others argue it's the harsher lockdowns imposed by Ireland on - you guessed it - October 20.

4/12

https://twitter.com/GuyAl10/status/1323321978988756995?s=20

But infections have a median 5 day delay between infection and symptoms, so an instant biological effect seems unlikely.

Also, in Ireland testing did not immediately wane due to lockdown, so it doesn't seem to be a testing artifact.

5/12

And Positivity in Ireland plateaued a couple of days before lockdown.

6/12

My point is: Colorado needs to hold on & NOT lockdown. Ireland is real world evidence out there that Covid doesn't race uncontrolled for long. Ireland saw its peak at about 1,200 cases/day after about 2 months of growth. If CO follows suit, we could see a peak very soon.

7/12

Covid-19 Modeling Group predicts we'll hit 30,000 infections/day (15x current level!). I value observations over modeling & Ireland tells us peak may be close. We need to urge @GovofCO & @CDPHE to not lockdown. CO hosp capacity is manageable & we're not seeing April-like deaths.

A nightmare scenario is we enter lockdown, cases turn downward as part of the natural process, but people become convinced the lockdowns caused the downturn, and we remain too afraid to open back up. This is what happened to CO over the summer when we could have opened more. 9/12

In June in Colorado, Covid hospitalizations and deaths went down, not because of lockdowns, but because of seasonality. We could have spent the summer freer and building resistance that would have lowered the intensity of the spike we're seeing now.

10/12

@GovofCO @CDPHE and Colorado modelers think any change in Covid is solely due to our behavior.

They never speak of the virus's behavior changing.

But pattern of changing with seasons is seen worldwide, whether you lockdown hard (Peru, Italy) or soft (Sweden). Virus gonna virus.

A lockdown now would do far more harm than good. It would compound the tragedy of Covid with the tragedy of another lockdown and the additional deaths, despair, loss of quality of life, and loss of education of our children that lockdowns bring.

Tell @GovofCO No More Lockdowns!