A Thanksgiving Warning

Hi, friends —

I want to put some charts and images together to urge you to either stay home this Thanksgiving or to take a lot of precautions in the run-up to Thanksgiving and beyond.

Things are quickly spiraling out of control at the macro level. Our current national positivity rate (9%) means we need to be doing more tests than the amount of tests we’re currently doing in order to get a sense of who has the virus and where it is.

The upper-left image indicates the percentage risk of encountering at least one person with Covid in a group of ten. The numbers on the right indicate which states currently have an estimated R value over 1 — that is, its reproduction value, i.e., the fact that the virus is capable of spreading to at least one other person.

This is why hearing reports of how Covid is spreading through ice hockey games or at house parties or is only ‘really’ relegated to a place like Staten Island might not matter, because — as the R value indicates; as the macro maps indicate — the…