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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll update some local COVID numbers now in the context of the complicated moment that we're in with vaccine numbers increasing, but the so-called New York City variant also spreading, and questions so far unanswered about whether that variant can evade the vaccine's defenses, and also about whether the governor is reopening the state too quickly right now for the amount of spread that there is?

Back with us is Gothamist co-founder Jake Dobkin, who spent the last year watching the data closely and tracking the epidemic in New York City. Many of you have been following the daily and even really, updated multiple times daily, in many cases, Gothamist COVID tracker. Hi, Jake.

Jake Dobkin: Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me again.

Brian Lehrer: First, so we understand what numbers we're looking at, I see that the city hasn't updated its stats since Saturday, do I have that right? Is that unusual? Is that a cause for suspicion for any reason?

Jake Dobkin: It is very unusual. This is the longest period we've gone without new stats. I just saw the note today, that we're not going to get new stats on Tuesday, so not until tomorrow.

Our sources are saying that this is due to some kind of update in the system between New York State and New York City and as usual, both sides are blaming each other for the data problem, but it's a long time to go without fresh data. The numbers I'm going to talk about today come from Saturday.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Saturday is still very recent, so this is going to be fresh data in the context of the policy and personal choice conversation that we need to have, but do you get the sense that it's just a technical problem with the data, or are they, for the moment, withholding some bad news?

Jake Dobkin: I don't think that they're withholding bad news, because that's what we're going to discuss. Most of the numbers are trending in the right direction. I think this is genuinely a New York City-New York State conflict between the health departments.

Brian Lehrer: Good. Saturday's data, still very recent. I keep hearing the word plateau. Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths had been going down in our area, but have now stopped going down and hit a plateau. Can you give us some numbers that show the decline and what kind of plateau we've landed on for the moment?

Jake Dobkin: I'm not really seeing a huge plateau. [crosstalk] Basically, our positives and our hospitalizations and our deaths, they're still going downward, maybe slower than we would like. The one number that has been trending actually upward is our positivity average. The number of positive cases divided by the number of tests that we do each day has risen slightly from around 6.5% to about 7 and a little higher percent.

What we think is happening, is that less people are getting tested. It tends to be the sicker people that are really going to stand in line to get a test. There's a slight tendency for the positivity rate to rise as the number of tests fall, but it's not necessarily a cause for alarm if the other trends that we look closely at like hospitalizations and deaths are heading in the right direction.

Brian Lehrer: Right. If there are only two people with symptoms that seem like COVID, and they get tested, and they both get tested positive, that's 100% positivity rate, but it doesn't mean there's a lot of cases out there-

Jake Dobkin: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: -to take that extreme example, just to clarify the thing. What kinds of declines are we seeing?

Jake Dobkin: We're seeing declines in basically all of our major statistics. I can start with cases. Back, new cases were above 8,000 per day in early January, during the peak of the second wave, and they've gone down to around 2,500 per day, at least last week when we had good numbers, but of course, you have to bear in mind that 2,500 is still a lot of cases. Think back to early March last year when just one case was cause for alarm.

Comparatively, compared to how we were doing earlier, a couple of months ago, we're definitely doing better. Caveat that with what I said about testing, because we really have seen a decline in testing from like 70,000 per day in January to less than 50,000 today, and maybe substantially less than that once we see the new data.

The other trends that-- Because positives really serve depending on the number of people that are getting tested, but hospitalizations are something that don't depend on that. That's a pretty real number.

Brian Lehrer: The real numbers to look at are hospitalizations and deaths, right?

Jake Dobkin: Right, and those have both declined. Back in December, we were seeing 230 new hospitalizations per day, it went up to around 400 in early January, and now we're down to around 168 new hospitalizations per day. That's pretty encouraging. Deaths also have declined substantially.

We basically, on average, in the middle of February, about 80 people were dying in the city each day, and this week, that number has fallen to about 55. Since we expect to see the decline in deaths follow the decline in hospitalizations, which as I said, have fallen from about 400 the first week of February to around 200 today. We expect to see the number of deaths decline even more soon.

Brian Lehrer: Good. What variants are spreading, and how is that changing in recent days or weeks, particularly with respect to what they're calling the New York City variant, which, despite the optimistic picture that you're painting here, it's very easy to turn on cable television and hear a lot of doom and gloom or at least concern about potential doom and gloom from the New York City variant spreading and being more contagious than the original variant and unknown with respect to vaccine defenses?

Jake Dobkin: It's true. One thing that I would just mention, is that we don't have a ton of data on variants in the city, because only a small fraction of the detected cases are actually getting sequenced, according to The Times this week. Less than 1,000 out of like 18,000 or so cases detected each week were getting sequenced. We are seeing different variants, especially that B117 variant from the UK, that's been detected hundreds of times already.

We've had a handful of detections of that B1351 from South Africa. Then, as you said, there are these local variants that are showing up in the data, but it's a small sample and even though the numbers are rising in the sample, I think it's still a little early to become overly alarmed, especially if we see the major numbers, hospitalizations and deaths continuing to decline.

That, to me, indicates that, though the variance may be important, they're not outweighing the other factors, like the number of people getting vaccinated, seasonality as we exit from cold and flu season, as people are more outdoors. Those factors might be continuing to outweigh any danger that these variants pose.

Now, of course, if we suddenly see hospitalizations begin to go back up, then, yes, I think we would really want to ask which of these variants were driving that increase, but so far, we haven't seen that.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we have time for a few phone calls for Jake Dobkin from Gothamist, who keeps track of the COVID numbers, at least in New York City, and they kind of represent the area in general. There's going to be some variation from county to county, of course, but generally, our area moves in a unified direction. The city, boroughs, and the nearby counties.

If you have a question, 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280. I am seeing that New York and New Jersey seem to, right now, still be relative hotspots in the context of the United States. Does your data back that up? Can you explain that to any degree or is anybody explaining that well?

Jake Dobkin: I think that some of this is just local factors. The number of people that we test may be higher than the number of people getting tested elsewhere. We're certainly continuing to see declines and large declines if you look at just the actual numbers of cases that we're detecting. It's possible that because of the size of our city and the intrinsic factors, like our density, the living conditions, the jobs our people work, there may be more inertia, so to speak, in slowing the decline versus places around the country that don't have that.

Though it might seem, compared to other places, that we're like a hotspot, that doesn't mean the same thing as it did back during the first wave when we were a hotspot with all of our numbers shooting upwards in the wrong direction. Now we stand out mainly, I think, because percentage-wise we may be falling a little bit more slowly than some of the other places.

Brian Lehrer: What about inequities from place to place? For example, Congresswoman Grace Meng from Queens was on the show yesterday and said that in some parts of her district, there are case positivity rates upwards of 15%. I was looking at, I think it was the New York times COVID tracker where Nassau County and Morris County, and Monmouth County all seem to have denser cases per a hundred thousand population than the city itself. Have you been looking at those disparities and what are you seeing?

Jake Dobkin: Yes, we have. If you look at the COVID map on the Gothamist tracker which covers the last couple of weeks, you are seeing some neighborhoods like Richmond Hill and Flushing in Queens that are getting close to positivity rates of 15%. There are other neighborhoods around the five boroughs, Great Kills and Staten Island, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, for example. This goes back to what we were saying at the top which is that we could be seeing some data problems.

When my colleague, our Science Editor, Nsikan Akpan looked at the Great Kills number and Staten Island, he found that the number of tests had declined by half versus the previous week. While there's no doubt that some of these areas are detecting relatively high levels of cases, I think, particularly because of the data problems over the last week, we should take that information as a starting place and then really dig in to see what's going on. Is this a real outbreak or is this just a phenomenon due to the data quality?

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. There was a theory that the National County Executive Laura Curran put out as to why Nassau County has a higher test positivity rate right now than some other places or maybe than it did just recently. I'm not sure exactly what the comparison is, but Nassau has a bit of a breakout County at the moment.

Her theory is that they just started routine testing of student-athletes as part of the system to help them get back to school sports. They're detecting a lot of cases. That's a concentrated population that wasn't getting tested before and now they're getting tested and cases are popping up. A lot of them asymptomatic, probably overwhelmingly asymptomatic would be my guess, but all of a sudden here are these student-athletes and some positive tests because they weren't asking the question before or testing them before. When you take all those student-athletes from all the high schools across the county, it's popping the case positivity rate. I don't know if that's right but it's something I heard she said.

Jake Dobkin: It really goes to show that you should never look at just one stat, positivity. You always want to look at as many stats as you can, hospitalizations, deaths, vaccination numbers, to get a full picture of what's going on and that's what we do each day.

Brian Lehrer: What will you be looking at over the course of the coming weeks as we try to answer this New York City variant question?

Jake Dobkin: I think that my number one number is always hospitalizations because that's really a sign that somebody is sick. Especially if they've been admitted to the hospitals, certainly if the death numbers which would follow the hospitalization numbers by a few weeks went up, that would be a sign that variants were starting to be important.

I think overall, I just want to say that the picture is looking brighter. Because as someone who's looked at these numbers every day for the last year, I'm feeling more optimistic than I felt before. You have the federal government saying we'll be getting 1.4 million doses per week, which is about twice what we've averaged before during the past weeks, by the end of April and you see the state government expanding eligibility to those over 50 today.

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Jake Dobkin: Things are looking good.

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Jake Dobkin: According to Cuomo, 12.2 million New Yorkers out of 15 million New Yorkers over the age of 16 are now eligible, and thousands of appointments at pharmacies are opening this week. Those are all really positive signs. Now, of course, a lot remains unknown. These variants, these changes to social distancing rules the state has been making, for instance, with the group exercise, classes at gyms, this question whether people will continue to wear masks. All of that will make a difference with what happens. At least for my part, I hope to go mask-less at a barbecue on July 4th with all my vaccinated friends.

Brian Lehrer: With you and Joe Biden.

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Jake Dobkin: I'd love to see him.

Brian Lehrer: Then, just as a follow-up and then we're out of time, what do you make of the back and forth between Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo? I may be asking you to take off your science data analysis hat, Jake, and put on your co-founder of Gothamist political analysis hat.

Do you think the mayor is just being too breathless because he wants to criticize the governor right now? Because the mayor seems genuinely alarmed about some of these openings that have been done by the state.

Jake Dobkin: We do know that if you don't want to get coronavirus, you should avoid the three Cs, Crowds, Close contact, and Closed spaces. Crowded restaurants where people are speaking loudly, that does not seem smart in a city with as many daily cases as we have. I wouldn't go to a spinning class in a crowded room without good air circulation. That does not seem smart to me.

Whether de Blasio is taking the opportunity to kick Cuomo while he's down in other ways or whether he's actually concerned about this stuff for valid reasons, I leave to the political analysis. We're not completely out of the woods yet, and I do think that some amount of caution is warranted. We want these numbers, these trends that I've been talking about to continue to move in the right direction and not suddenly turn around.

Brian Lehrer: Jake Dobkin, co-founder of Gothamist where among other things, he's been the de-facto numbers cruncher in chief for all things COVID-19 for a year. Jake, thanks as always.

Jake Dobkin: Thanks, Brian. Talk to you soon.

 

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