Coincidence? I think not.

So, I was trying to understand the huge increase in coronavirus hospitalizations in Texas. And thought I would try to set up a timeline.

We know when and about how many people were involved in the George Floyd protests in Texas.  In Houston it was about 60,000 . If you included all the other cities, we're looking at maybe 65,000-70,000 total protesters along with thousands of police and sheriffs across the state.  Wikipedia did the yeoman's work of cataloging the numbers with dates.

There are a couple of things we can say about all of this from looking at the photos of the protesters: 1) not all were practicing safe distances and 2) not all were wearing masks.  So, you have a veritable viral minestrone soup mix with the coronavirus the chicken broth.  

Under normal situations, I wouldn't have thought twice about the consequences of such actions. And I'm sure many people who attended didn't really care.  It was the moment.  You had to live in the moment.  I completely understand.  But regardless of our feelings, the coronavirus doesn't give a rat's rear end. 

Viruses will do...what viruses will do.

So, to set up the timeline, this is what we know:

Statewide demonstrations started on or around June 2.  We use this date since this was the date of the gigantic protest in Houston.  There were others a few days earlier, some later. But Houston was Ground Zero.

Now we set up the timeline for the development of the coronavirus once infected:

a. June 2. Infections begin on day 0

b. June 6 Symptoms begin on day 4

c. June 12. Person with severe symptoms is hospitalized on day 10. 

The progress looks to be fairly rapid.

The data I am using is directly from the Texas government website that is tracking the spread of the virus. They conveniently have an updated spreadsheet that anyone can access and do their own analysis.

But here are the results.  And it is plain for everyone to see. The dates match up fairly closely to the inflection point of when the disease spread really started to take off in Texas.

 

Many protests started as early as May 30.  But it wasn't my objective to track all protests.  Just the major one here in Houston. 

I won't go into the other issues that this brings up.  My only objective is to show you that the protests were most assuredly the cause of the gigantic surge (dare I say wave?) of hospitalizations in Texas.

If there is one saving grace in this, it is that the protesting has most likely accelerated herd immunity in the state.