Coronavirus Cases Started Rising Before Labor Day

I keep hearing people in city government talk about the “post Labor Day” spike in cases, and it’s becoming a growing and ever more aggravating peeve because the people saying this are flat out wrong. Cases started rising at the end of August, markedly before Labor day.

Back in July, there was a bump in numbers that one could reasonably attribute to the 4th of July weekend. The 7 day running average reached a high of 14 on 07/26 and then slowly declined until it hit a low point of 5 on 08/17. At that point, it started rising consistently and by 08/31–an entire week before Labor day–was already 14.57, slightly higher than the peak from the 4th of July spike.

Starting August 26, we had 6 days in a row of double digit daily new cases. In fact, in the two weeks leading up to Labor Day, we had 11 days with double digit numbers. To put that in perspective, during the 5 months between March 18 (when we had our first known case) and August 23 we only had 14 days of double digit new cases. Then between August 24 and September 7 (Labor Day) we had 11 days with double digit new cases.

Clearly cases were spiking before Labor Day. It’s absolutely preposterous to pretend that they weren’t. Perhaps Labor Day marginally accelerated things, but clearly the numbers were already in the early stages of exploding before then. And it’s ridiculous to talk as if cases didn’t start spiking until after Labor Day.

In the words of Mayor Woodford, “Rant over.”

Follow All Things Appleton:

Be the first to reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *