Commentary: Fresno should not reopen yet, as data show its COVID-19 cases keep rising

Numbers don’t lie, but they can mislead. It’s not time to reopen Fresno. Not yet.

So far, Fresno has not suffered the fate of cities like New York, where six weeks erased one in every 300 citizens despite efforts taken to control the outbreak. Fortunately, New York appears to be past its peak, and “the curve” seems to have flattened somewhat nationwide. This has led some to call for Fresno to be reopened quickly. Considering the data, the science, and the policy implications, this would be premature.

It seems many factors have contributed to our good fortune, though no one is certain what they all are. Are we protected because of our unique geography or climate? Or are we benefiting from the early and aggressive protections put in place by local and state officials? Where are we on the Valley’s curve that we’ve all worked so hard to flatten? It’s easy to respond to these questions with wishful thinking, but actual policy needs to be fact-based.

Perhaps the Valley miraculously would be spared from the virus regardless, but the fact is that Fresno was shut down before the virus was allowed to run wild. While this is good for our public health, it makes it harder to see what might have been. It means the nature of our outbreak is different from those where it took hold before it was stopped. At the moment, we don’t have a citywide outbreak, where cases must be measured as a fraction of the population and deaths must be measured by comparison to seasonal norms.

We have a discreet outbreak, a “tree of cases” that has had little room to grow. Our small-seeming outbreak is trying desperately to take root and break through, and numbers show that it has had some success despite all the measures taken to contain it.

Based on data published by the Fresno County Health Department, COVID cases have grown by 31% over the past week, the 10th-highest growth rate of 137 counties with populations greater than 500,000 nationally and the highest growth rate of 16 such counties in California.

Going back a little further, Fresno’s cases have grown by 88% in the past two weeks, good for 8th-highest in the country. If you expand the comparison to counties with a population of 250,000 or greater, Fresno is 20th of 272 nationally and third behind only Santa Barbara and Tulare Counties in California.

Some might take comfort in the fact that Fresno’s overall rates of infection and death resulting from COVID-19 are still relatively small — just 1,000 confirmed cases and 13 deaths at the time of this writing. But note that our outbreak is still growing at a time when it is supposed to be choked off by measures already taken. Worldwide, even places that have stymied it more than us have struggled to keep it from growing again as restrictions are eased.

Obviously people want to get back to work and normalcy, but opening up too quickly risks giving our outbreak the air it needs to change from a discrete problem into a city-scale problem — which may not only greatly increase the death count, but may take substantially longer to eliminate. The blunt tools of stay-at-home orders and social distancing may not be perfect, but this is a delicate situation that virtually no place on the planet has solved fully. And we shouldn’t even be thinking about getting ahead of the timetable until we get our own house in order.