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A group of researchers at the Harvard Global Health Institute said the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was wrong earlier this week when he suggested a spike in COVID-19 cases in southern states was caused by people driving there from northern states to vacation.
Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, said people driving south after the Memorial Day holiday weekend were to blame for a pop in cases around June 12 to 16.
“This is not what the data say,” the HGHI said in a report. Infections in states including Nevada and Florida actually stared rising on June 1.
“Remember that there is always a lag between when infections occur and when they begin to be diagnosed,” said the report. “This means that the increase in confirmed cases around June 1 comes from infections occurring around May 24, right around the Memorial Day weekend (and well before mid-June, as Dr. Redfield suggests.) So the data show that these outbreaks started before Northern vacationers supposedly traveled South.”
The more likely explanation is that infections are spiking because states reopened far too early, the researchers wrote.
Further undermining Redfield’s argument, cases also started rising in Alaska, Idaho and Oregon around June 1, similar to the infection increase in the South. “Those states also opened up early – but they don’t see a lot of travelers from the North in late May or June,” said the report.
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If Redfield were correct, northern visitors would have to have somehow bypassed Virginia, which has shown declining case counts in the weeks after Memorial Day, it said.
“As long as we let the data guide us, the answers are clear: Northerners are not the cause of big outbreaks in the south,” the researchers wrote.
States that are seeing large outbreaks have in common that they lifted restrictions on movement around the same time in May, causing the surge of cases seen in early June.
“Virginia, on the other hand, remained in phase 1 of its reopening through the end of May and has fared significantly better than its neighbors,” they wrote.
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The HGHI’s tracking tool is currently showing 11 states flashing red, led by Florida, which now has a seven-day average rate of 51.8 cases per 100,000 people. Harvard researchers say those states — the other 10 are Arizona, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Georgia, Nevada, Tennessee, Mississippi and Idaho —need to reimpose stay-at-home orders.
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