What is a cluster? A hotspot? A zone?

Last Tuesday, October 6th, I wrote about the city’s early experiments with targeting zip codes for covid-restrictions was going over in relation to the school I run.

On October 8th, borough president Gale Brewer’s newsletter noted (again) an increase in cases then added a note that experts are advising using seven-day averages, which that day put Manhattan at a .7% positivity rate and the city at a 1.7% rate. (There’s still folks posting about difficulty getting tests and delays in getting counts…) She then noted that the governor rejected the mayor’s use of zip codes to address concentrated new cases, so he released a map of color-coded zones around hotspots. She went on to talk about how researchers concerned about the CDC downplaying the impact of aerosol spread have made their own document of public guidance. This is normal now, but news from other countries is a reminder that it’s…not normal.

On the 10th I got a notice from the DOH about a new executive order that schools in yellow zones were to randomly test 20% of staff and students weekly, while schools in orange and red zones are to go fully remote. We’ve been all remote and mostly virtual, but we decided staff in orange or red zones should be fully virtual. Our school is in the clear(-ish), but since we’re scattered across the city, making choices based on where folks live and would meet up is safer than just going based on the situation around the school.

As we ended the week today (10.16), I started trying to figure out how to update our school plan to reflect the new approach and rules from the local government. I had been looking at daily numbers at https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page to make school choices, and I wondered at what point an area’s case count made it a cluster. And how the shape and size of the ring of the “orange zone” around it and the “yellow zone” around that were determined. I found lots of information about what the new rules are for each zone on city government sites and state government sites and abc7ny and fast company and msn. Finally on wgrz, I found “However, Cuomo did not give specific metrics about how the state will determine if an area is deemed a cluster.” Listening to his October 6th press conference, I decided that I will just have to make the best with the limited information that I have. Hotspots appear to have positivity between 5-5.5% as their threshold, and the zones supposedly extend for about a mile out from the edges of the hotspot but their shapes and sizes on the new mapping website seem to suggest there are other considerations, too.

Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? -Shoshana Zuboff (Surveillance Capitalism)

What will adjusting our plan look like? I still think there is a point where the city’s rate as a whole needs to be our baseline. With households spread out so much with where they live, work, and shop, targeting specific neighborhoods or blocks with restrictions will only be helpful to a point. What this new rate should be is TBD…The new Google Maps feature that color-codes regions seems to have thresholds at 10, 20, 30, etc tracking 7 day averages of new cases per 100,000 people. I need to read more to know if that could be helpful in informing a new baseline. Of course, and as legally we must, if the school ends up in a zone that’s a concern then we go all remote [if we were not already all remote…] Families and staff who are in orange and red zones should definitely stay home. The city’s guidance for yellow zones is to begin testing…I may track how that goes for schools in yellow zones next week. If it’s easy and affordable to get lots of folks tested, maybe that changes what’s possible for us. And meet-ups off-site shouldn’t happen in zones. And I don’t know what this means for when we can gather indoors, though the newer info on aerosol spread, how kids can transmit, and the role of super spreaders is…not encouraging. There are other logistical complexities for us — where families are concentrated, where staff live, needing more staff in a season when we can afford fewer — but ideally we’ll put our plan together based on what the science and ever-evolving new regulations indicate is safest for everyone involved…and then find a way to make it actually work. We shall see…