New England's COVID confusion

Maine Gov. Janet Mills

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Most of us are getting pretty claustrophobic these days and can’t travel long distances. But at least we New Englanders have plenty to see in our compact region – beautiful mountains and coasts,  lovely lakes, innumerable historic sites, great food, bucolic empty COVIDized college campuses….

The biggest regional travel hurdle at this point: Maine Gov. Janet Mills fears people from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Citing the high percentage of people from those two states who have tested positive for COVID-19, she has ordered that Rhode Islanders and Bay Staters must quarantine for two weeks or present proof of a recent negative virus test to be legally in the Pine Tree State. The effect is to discourage many, perhaps most, of these people from going to Maine – a big blow to its tourist industry, though many ignore the order, with some anxious “illegals’’ sneaking into the state via back roads from its deeply rural western side.

Vermont also has tough rules, but somewhat different – they want to know what county you come from, not just the state, in determining whether you need to quarantine.

Has there been a lot of sneaking across state lines? Complex times indeed. Maybe we need a special meeting of New England governors – three un-Trumpian Republicans, three garden-variety Democrats -- to sort out the confusion and come up with a truly regional plan. All the region’s governors are calm, competent and respectful of science.  It’s curious that the most liberal part of the country has three GOP governors, though they would hardly be considered  in the mainstream of the party, though New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu comes rather close.

Anyway:

Harvard’s Dr. Ashish Jha, incoming dean of Brown's School of Public Health, has famously praised Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo’s tough response to the pandemic: "Rhode Island has done a fabulous job -- I would say one of the kind of standouts in the country, a model for how we should be doing this," Dr. Jha told WPRI TV. "If the rest of the country had done what Rhode Island has done, we'd been in a very different place as a nation."  And yet Rhode Island testing data led Governor Mills to her rather draconian order. Without a unified and coordinated federal response to the pandemic, including how to conduct and promptly report test results and do speedy contact tracing, the policy confusions will continue as everybody tries to interpret the latest data,  based on different states’ practices.

To read Dr. Jha’s remarks, please hit this link.

For a good review of America’s COVID-19 testing failures, please hit this Bloomberg link

The article notes:

“Test results, to be useful, should arrive in less than two days. If they take longer, opportunities to isolate infected people and trace their contacts with others wither, undermining broader containment efforts. So why can’t the wealthiest and most innovative country in the world have more rapid-fire testing during a pandemic?’’