Thread by @AF632

The latest CDC hoopla over sudden spiking cases in the U.S. pointed to Providencetown, MA as a reason to lock down again and force masks on everyone, vaccinated or not. Alex here is the town manager of Providencetown. Read through his short thread and we'll talk a bit about it.

https://twitter.com/AlexBMorse/status/1421139894257266691

Providencetown, MA is a sleepy little New England town right on the coast. It has a permanent population of about 3,000 people, so when you look at the numbers, they might seem alarming. After all, 900 people in a town of only 3,000 falling ill with a deadly virus is a lot!

But those little coastal New England towns have this phenomenon that happens in the summer they like to call "summer folk." The weather turns nice and all of the sudden their sleepy little town of 3,000 swells to about 60,000. The "summer folk" have come back.

You read about it now and then in Stephen King novels: those barely-tolerated out-of-towners nobody really knows too well, who barrel in for the summer, stay a few weeks to a few months in their summer homes, and then vanish when the weather turns cold again.

So Providencetown, like all the other coastal New England towns suddenly gets an influx of "summer folk" that swells their sleepy little village to a bustling town twenty times its normal size. All from various places elsewhere. All bringing their sniffles and sneezes.

So now, instead of 900 cases out of 3,000 people, we have 900 cases out of 60,000, or about 0.015 the total population, right smack in the middle of tourist season there. And out of all those people, a whopping *seven* had to go to the hospital. And of course, no one at all died.

Any other year with those numbers smack in the middle of tourist season, it would have been shrugged off. Any other year, and it would be summed up as "There's some flu bug going around making everyone sick. Probably them damned summer folk coming in from God-knows-where."

Instead, we have this sort of reporting scaring people away from getting vaccinated. Like has oft been said, there's lies, damned lies, and statistics. And when you throw out a statistic without fully clarifying it, it's pretty much the same as propaganda.

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1421156015563759621

Oh, and remember these graphs we used to see? Now that it's been a while, we're seeing that no matter what measures we enact, the spikes look more like the one on the left than the one on the right. And we've gone from "Don't overrun hospitals" to "Can't let a single soul die!"

And then there are dingbats like this guy who spews pseudoscience using "Doctor" as a platform for his fearmongering. (He's talking about the same town we've been talking about above.)

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1421179048936488962

And oh but doesn't this thread put that Providencetown outbreak into perspective!

https://twitter.com/peterstaley/status/1421215604481142785