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It’s a key question as New Jersey seeks to prevent the coronavirus from spreading further in the community: where do residents get the disease?
Does the virus spread between coaches and athletes during youth sports? Or between employees who come to the office? Do diners catch the disease in restaurants and bars or gamblers in casinos? Knowing which of these restrictions is most prevalent could prove essential for policy makers as they consider whether to implement new restrictions or ease existing ones.
Earlier this month, the Department of Health offered a statistical snapshot of the types of places it thinks COVID-19 is being transmitted. During Gov. Phil Murphy’s regular press briefing, the government presented two charts that broke down the areas of the disease spread in the community, with 33% of outbreaks during the month of October being attributed to sports teams, and locations and child care centers also held double the percentages in numbers.
The New Jersey Department of Health created this slide to show where the coronavirus is spreading in the community.
But the strength of this data is uncertain. In a month that averaged over 975 new cases per day, stats were based on 51 outbreaks and didn’t describe how far they exceeded their criteria to list: at least three related infections that didn’t involve limbs family or other roommates. .
In defining what constitutes a community-based epidemic, the state has also ruled out some well-known potential hot spots – schools, healthcare, and communities living like nursing homes – which would likely change the picture.
Offering the breakdowns on November 12, Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli signaled their limits, saying they were based on the results of contact tracing, which officials complain that only 4 in 10 residents cooperate.
The data “would be more complete if members of the public answered the call for contact tracers and shared information about who they have been, who they have been in contact with and where they have been,” Persichilli said. “This information is vital to protect the health of others and contain the spread of the virus.”
Hurdles point to data glitches that continue eight months after the start of the pandemic as a second wave breaks: Even though New Jersey releases tons of contagion figures every day, some of that data is flawed or are difficult to synchronize with the bigger picture. .
Still, those numbers are valuable, even if they’re not statistically the strongest, said Henry Raymond, an epidemiologist at the Rutgers School of Public Health. It is not surprising that sport is a place of transmission, given the contact between players and the limitations of wearing a mask, he said. As a parent of a 4-year-old, Raymond said he was interested in seeing child care centers on the graph.
“From a public health perspective, I would say that’s what we have; it’s the best we have, so let’s use it to guide us, ”Raymond said. “If this is what we have to work with to make decisions, this is what we have to work with.”
In a written statement on Friday, the health ministry stressed that it is not always possible to identify the source of a given infection.
“We know if a person has tested positive, but even for that person it may not be known when or how they were exposed,” said spokesperson Dawn Thomas. “We know that these identified outbreaks represent a small percentage of the reported cases. This is both because there is a lot of community spread that would not meet the criteria for an outbreak and because outbreaks are often not always recognized and therefore reported.
In recent days, the state has announced new restrictions on social life, including additional limits on the size of indoor and outdoor gatherings, a ban on interstate sports for indoor youth, and new restrictions on bars and clubs. the restaurants. It comes as cases, hospitalizations and the number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care have increased, with officials warning that it could get worse as the weather gets colder and Thanksgiving and the winter holidays approach.
The pandemic has forced governments across the country to build large information platforms almost from scratch amid a public health crisis unprecedented in a century. Murphy regularly insists that data drives his decisions, and the COVID Tracking Project, a coronavirus clearinghouse, gives the state an A grade in the quality of the data it present to the public.
But New Jersey has also been criticized for being transparent, especially at the start of the contagion. It took a month after the start of the pandemic before the state released a list of nursing homes with outbreaks, although facilities accounted for nearly half of the deaths recorded by the state. Then, in July, the Department of Health began tearing down that list by removing all facilities that were coronavirus-free for 28 days, which critics accuse of preventing residents from having a full picture of care homes. nurses with a high death toll.
In late September, the state unveiled a dashboard to track epidemics in schools a few weeks after the start of the new school year. But the data is only broken down by county and does not name schools or school districts, nor does it identify when the outbreaks occurred or their circumstances.
Eric Forgoston is a professor of applied mathematics at Montclair State University who builds models to predict the magnitude and spread of the virus. He said he and his associates had long been frustrated with New Jersey’s data gaps, although he called it a national problem in which some states are doing worse.
Accurate numbers that are readily available to the layman are essential, especially given the amount of misinformation circulating about the coronavirus, Forgoston said.
“It is very important that any individual in the public can view the data and make a reasoned statement about what they are seeing,” Forgoston said.
He added: “In the end, data is everything, right? This is where the story is. “
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Riley Yates can be reached at [email protected].
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