“We’ll start to see the impact of Labor Day on COVID-19 sometime in the next two weeks," said Erin Smiley, Butler County General Health District’s Health Promotion director. "We know that this virus has an incubation period of up to 14 days, which means that it may take two weeks for individuals to start showing symptoms after they are infected. It may take them more time to go to the hospital or doctor’s office to get tested.”
While it will be several days before the impact of Labor Day on COVID-19 numbers is known, Mercy Health-Cincinnati Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Steve Feagins said things happening near Labor Day — such as the return of primary and secondary schools and college and more events happening indoors — could have an even bigger impact.
“The exposure also has to do with where you are, whether you are indoors or outdoors, especially indoors with low ventilation,” said Feagins, who is also Hamilton County’s public health medical director. “So it’s the party that’s at a place with minimal ventilation with a lot of people, and possibly with more than one who is COVID-positive and results in the more likely transmission of enough virus to cause a virus in another person.”
Feagins said that the return to school may have more of an impact than Labor Day gatherings.
“We expect that we will see an increase in a number of things, including flu if we have very much flu, because of those trends,” said Feagins.
Miami Valley Hospital Associate Chief Medical Officer Dr. Roberto Colon said people celebrating at lakes, beaches, pools and other areas raised concerns and could lead to more community spread.
“The fact that this was the last hoorah of the summer ... that’s still driving people together," he said.
Colon said the disease activity was low heading into Memorial Day ― which he said in part was artificially low due to the small amounts of testing ― but now the disease activity “is in a higher place.”
“It appears that we have more people around the community with COVID, and now when we have those gatherings, there’s a potential that we have more people that were infectious out and interacting,” he said. "But fortunately because we were doing this for a while, I’m hopeful that people were heeding the advice of wearing a mask, that they were more cognizant of who they were in contact with.”
There are seven leading indicators medical professionals monitor when determining the severity of the COVID-19 coronavirus, but Feagins said the first indicator he reviews “very closely” is hospitalizations.
“It tells you the severity,” he said. “If you’re in the hospital with COVID-19, it’s confirmed and you know it’s the real thing.”
Officials also watch the reproductive rate, which represents the average number of people who could catch the virus from an infected person. Colon added that positivity rate and new cases per capita tell medical professionals “a lot about the disease burden” in the community, he said.
“The positivity rate for us is a very good indicator of how many people are actually out there with the disease who are just now being picked up,” he said. “It’s that conversion rate, the rate of new cases.”
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