Despite the Forecast(s)

So New Orleans dodged the Hurricane Laura bullet last week, which instead slammed into Cameron and Lake Charles pretty hard. At least it was mostly wind damage rather than extended flooding. Of course, when a hurricane skirts to the west of you, you'd better prepare for rain, and lots of it. Also, you'd best stay flexible because depending whether you happen to be under one of the leftover rain bands or not, it could be torrential rain, or sunny blue sky. Either way, though, there will be wind. Having looked at the weather forecast for Thursday, I was expecting it to be raining heavily that morning, but when I awoke to find the street outside dry and the radar pretty clear, I figured I'd go ride, despite the forecast. So I got in a nice ride, which was kind of a surprise. The 17-20 mph wind was still mostly out of the south and southwest, so a some of it was blocked by the batture trees, and where it wasn't it was at least partially crosswind. Granted, there were a few miles where I struggled to hold, sometimes unsuccessfully, 15 mph, but then again, since nobody else showed up to ride, I wasn't inclined to push too hard anyway. Friday was kind of more of the same except that the wind was down to more reasonable levels. The thing about Friday's ride was my Garmin. When I turned it on to start the ride it seemed like it took longer than usual. I should have known. I got a couple of miles out and it just shut down completely. I thought it should have a fair amount of battery power left, so I started it up again - and it promptly died again. That's happened a couple of times now. I think that for whatever reason it doesn't shut down completely and it just drains the battery overnight. Anyway, I just used the Strava app on my phone to track the ride.

On Friday, Tulane sent out a COVID-19 update, announcing that for the August 19-26 period they ran 2,470 screening tests for students, faculty, and staff, of which 73 were positive, which would be a 2.96% (they "rounded" to 2.9%) positivity rate. 

Last week, we announced the final numbers from our COVID-19 return screening program: from July 27 through August 18, we administered 12,051 tests and identified 82 positive cases (47 positives from our testing centers and 35 from outside testing), indicating a positive testing rate of .68 percent. Since last week (August 19-26)*, Campus Health has administered 2,470 screening tests** for students, faculty and staff from which 73 positive cases have been identified, representing a 2.9 percent testing positivity rate. The current 7-day average positivity rate for New Orleans is 1.9 percent, Louisiana 4.9 percent. Since the testing program was launched, Tulane has conducted 14,521 screening tests and identified 155 positive cases in our community, representing a 1.06 percent testing positivity rate. 

I say "would be" because these were "screening tests" only, which is to say that it probably didn't include people who were actually symptomatic and/or were tested outside of Tulane's Clinical Pathology Lab. They didn't explain what "screening" means, which they should have. They also essentially compared the 2.9% rate with the City's 7-day average rate of 1.9%, which was really a case of comparing apples to bananas for the aforementioned reasons. Still, it's good that we were able to run so many tests and may actually be able to handle testing all of the students weekly (faculty and staff are supposed to be tested monthly under the screening plan). All of these numbers need to be taken with more than one grain of salt, of course, and I'm including the numbers from the Louisiana Department of Health, which by the way hasn't yet managed to update the hospitalization data for today and has been taking Saturdays off for the past month or so. Today the LDH reported 10,210 tests for New Orleans since Friday, which of course doesn't mean that that many tests were actually conducted since Friday, just that they were reported since Friday. There was a little footnote that said, "This includes a backlog of 532 cases with specimen collection dates as far back as 7/1/2020," without saying how many of the tests were backlogged, but I'd guess from the numbers that most of them were from somewhere in New Orleans (possibly Tulane??). It's all very frustrating if you're trying to use the most recently available data to keep on top of trends.

The weekend Giro Rides were fairly tame this weekend. Saturday's ride got shortened for me when Pat and Jeff both flatted while near the back of the group along Hayne. A few of us turned back to help, so we had a nice smooth little paceline all the way out to almost Venetian Isles, albeit and a significantly slower speed than the group.

This morning I noticed lightning over on the horizon as I rode out to Starbucks. Looking up at the sky at 6 am I could seen Venus and Mars and what I think must have been the ISS transiting across the sky. The streets were a little damp from some overnight rain, and once I arrived and there was a little more light in the sky I could see some ominous clouds. It was about as humid as it gets, but the ride went smoothly all the way out. As we headed back I could see a big, big black cloud ahead of us and figured we were about to get wet, which turned out to be true except that I'd use the term "drenched" instead of simply "wet." The ride back down Chef and pretty much all the way to Bullard was in pouring rain, but by the time we were back to Lakeshore Drive it had all moved on, leaving just some wet streets.