State health chief said the state appeared not be seeing as big a post-Christmas surge as it had expected.
Source: Sacramento region’s COVID-19 stay-at-home order being lifted | The Sacramento Bee
Reality – the CA “surge” started in early October. As the epicurve blasted upwards through Thanksgiving and in to December, its slope remained unchanged. There was no surge.
Lazy thinking caused people to say – well, more new cases overlapped with the holiday, therefore … correlation without causation.
How do you explain other states in sharp decline throughout this period? North Dakota? Nebraska?
There are many states that without even a hint of a holiday blip.
They peaked a month or two earlier – CA, as some in CA now believe – had restrictions so strict and for so long that they successfully delayed the virus’s big wave until the middle of winter time. Which by coincidence overlaps with some well known holidays.
Lazy thinking leads to concluding this correlation is meaningful. But it is not.
For one thing, CA’s daily new cases peaked a couple of weeks ago. But don’t tell anyone. It ruins the preferred narrative.
CA was once the state “that did everything right”. Until it wasn’t right.
It is as if the virus does what the virus does, in spite of, not because of public health mitigation steps.
[…] California today lifted its stay at home orders across the entire state. Peaks in new cases were just narrowly before Christmas. They’ve admitted there was no holiday surge in the Sacramento metro area. […]