An Aristotelian Looks For Causes

I was surfing the COVID charts yesterday when I ran into the one above on the LA County health department site. The bottom line is that, as of a week ago, the 7-day average county COVID testing positivity rate was 1.60%. But putting this in the context of Gov Newsom's lockdown tiers, if the system were reimposed today with these statistics, the county would not be in the "red" tier, which is only a little less restrictive than the horrible "purple" tier. With a testing positivity rate of less than 2%, it would be in the lowest, "yellow" or "minimal" tier.

As it is, the county is still in the three-week waiting period to move down from the red, "substantial" tier to the orange, "moderate" tier. I assume that once it reaches the orange tier in a week or so, the waiting clock in orange will restart, and we'll have to wait another three weeks to move from orange to yellow, when, however, masks, social distancing, and capacity limits will still be in force. The Newsom scheme, as I've noted, never provided for a "green" tier, where we're back to the old normal, but the tendency indicates we ought to be getting there sooner than anyone realizes.

But as an Aristotelian, I have to ask what the cause is. The easy answer would be vaccinations. The charts I've been uploading here have been showing an Everest-style pattern of "cases", starting a sharp increase last November, peaking in mid to late January, and since then showing an equivalent rapid decline, to the point where the current rate falls within the official "minimal" range. But the fall that began in January was well before widespread vaccinations were made available. But also, here's the official LA County take on when vaccinations are complete, from an e-mail we got yesterday:

If it has been less than 2 weeks since your shot or you still need to get your second dose, you are NOT fully vaccinated.

Only recently has the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine been available, so most people in the county have been on the two-shot regimen. My wife and I, in the over-65 priority group, have so far not received our second shots, since we have to wait four weeks between the two. To be fully vaccinated, we'll have to wait two weeks from the time we get that second shot. So as far as I can see, even if about 10% of the population in the county has had at least one shot, a much smaller number, even now, have been "fully vaccinated".

Yet the testing positivity rate, a key indicator for reopening, has been falling precipitously, even if quite a small proportion of the population is "fully vaccinated" -- and it' been falling precipitously since before many vaccinations were being done. There must be other causes working in combination, and the best that can be said is that not even Dr Fauci actually knows what they are.

But it goes beyond that. A Canadian visitor reports that the situation over much of Canada is actually the opposite of the LA trend. Alberta is in especially bad shape. Here's the data there as of yesterday:

In other words, the situation was very similar to that in California up to March, when things began to reverse again. This simply hasn't been happening in places like Florida and Texas, which have effectively ended mask and other restrictions but have seen a continuing decline in statistics. Is it climate, maybe? But here's the same chart for Alberta's US neighbor to the south, Montana:

Montana, allowing for a smaller and more rural population, nevertheless looks much more like LA County, much less like Alberta. But Alberta has Calgary, a major city with 1.3 million, nothing like Montana. Is that the problem? But Arizona has Phoenix, a city of 1.6 million, and Arizona has also effectively dropped restrictions, while its chart is consistent with LA County and Montana.

The Canadian visitor, as well as Canadian news reports, suggests Canada is doing much more poorly with vaccine distribution, but the LA County statistics suggest vaccine isn't the only cause for its decline in cases and positivity.

The only conclusion I can draw for now is that we actually know much less about COVID than Dr Fauci lets on, and official opinions aren't worth much. Commentators worldwide are suggesting the real emerging crisis is in fact the credibility of governments.