Effectiveness of COVID policies

[Stephenk53]

TL;DR Summary

Effectiveness of Covid policies

I was wondering if anyone had any data on the effectiveness of Covid policies on Covid transmission. Ill start, keep in mind my information comes from an email I was sent by the college and their site not a research paper, at Merrimack college masks are currently required in "certain indoor locations until the end of the semester in locations including: All classrooms and laboratories, All indoor athletic games and events. This includes all athletic competitions, admission events and other large scale indoor events".

In addition vaccination is mandatory on campus unless you have a religious or medical reason to refuse a vaccine. Keep in mind if your religious exemption is refused you are not allowed on campus. This led to a vaccination rate of 99%. In addition everyone is required to get tested once a week unless you caught Covid in the last 90 days.

In addition it went on to state "Over the last 14 days the College had 6 positives (all breakthrough cases), a positivity rate of 0.177%, still below the state average of 1.02% for positive breakthrough cases. In total, the College has conducted more than 21,000 COVID-19 surveillance tests this semester, with 53 total positive cases (all breakthrough cases), a rate of 0.25%.". For reference the college uses the rapid PCR test allowing for results within 24 hours.

From what I read it seems the college's policies are effective in preventing Covid transmission. Also I have not been able to find any information on false positives or negatives on campus.

 

[jim mcnamara]

This is a discussion based on evidence (lots of data) that discusses the effectiveness of prevention policies.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7030e2.htm
You can download huge volumes of data, but because each reporting entity seems to have unique data strategies it has been distilled down to human readable in the above report. FWIW the best single policy so far is vaccination.
Public Data: https://data.cdc.gov/ (good luck :) )

You can get usable US data graphed by county (sometimes), and state or province at
www.worldometers.info.
Take a look. Any country you want as well. With regard to divergent reporting example:

India reports deaths per million at rates far below any large country. Probably due to under-reporting.
Currently the death rate is 323/million. Most countries with large report about 8-10 times as much mortality.
Texas reports details by county Georgia does not.
New Mexico almost daily reports some few fatalities from >30 days ago, but counts them for yesterday. Other states apparently have different procedures.

New Zealand has one of the best track records. Tonga just got its first case this week.
https://nz.usembassy.gov/covid-19-information/ discussion in detail.

The point is what countries, locales, and businesses say they do may or may not reflect what is in actual practice.
So you should be somewhat leery of a golden track record.