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By 
October 01, 2020 at 04:33 PM
If a wave of COVID-19 cases were a hurricane, maybe this would be a good time to stock up on water, and to put the lawn furniture inside.
Public health researchers at the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia say a spike is already occurring in the Upper Midwest and in the Mountain States, and that it looks as if cold weather is helping the spike roll toward New York and other parts of the Northeast.
Resources
- A collection of CHOP PolicyLab COVID-19 resources is available here.
- An article about how the 1918 flu pandemic affected U.S. gross domestic product is available here.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) is a major teaching hospital.
The PolicyLab researchers say that one way to gauge the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak is to look at the percentage of people tested for the virus that causes the disease who actually have the virus.
Positivity rates have been increasing rapidly, the researchers say.
The increase could be due partly to cooler temperatures, and partly due to “community fatigue with mitigation strategies such as masking and distancing.”
Forecasts for New England are stable, but forecasts for Seattle and the entire Midwest look worse, and new outbreaks in places like central Pennsylvania and Ocean City, New Jersey, appear to be likely to lead to widespread community transmission, the researchers say.
