The COVID-19 Re-Opening Experiment: Setting a Baseline

As Fairfax County begins its re-opening following the COVID-driven shutdown of the last two months, we thought it would be important to track the impact of that partial re-opening over time. 

Available data for Reston and Fairfax County as of yesterday—the day before the re-opening began—shows a significant decline in the rate of growth of CV-19 cases over the previous six days as pointed out in RestonNow yesterday.  

•  For Reston, that decline was more than 40% from a growth rate of 3.1% to 1.8% per day over the last six day period.

• For the county, the decline was an even more dramatic 57% from 3.8% to 1.6% per day over the same timeframe.

Those growth rates are both slightly less than Virginia’s rate of CV-19 case growth (2.0%) over the same timeframe,  but double the rate of case growth (0.8%) for the whole country.  Whether those local reductions are sufficient to justify the re-opening only time will tell, but we will be there to track to growth of CV-19 cases.  

COVID-19 Case and Testing Data:  Reston and Beyond

One glaring gap in the county’s CV-19 data is the absence of published testing data.  The state publishes the testing counts by ZIP code (which is how we figured out Reston’s situation), but we are not in a position to track down those sums for the county.  In theory, the Northern Virginia Regional Commission publishes the testing count (and other CV-19) data, but we have been unable to access it—just the whirling tornado indicating it is attempting to load the data. 

Regrettably, we are left to suspect that the county testing efforts are poor—Reston has only tested 3% of its population, same as the state—and the county is too embarrassed to publish the information.   Nationwide, testing rates have been at five percent.  So, we are re-opening the county in nearly total ignorance of the full case level in the county.