This is a headline that has been going around different news organizations, as exemplified by The Hill:

Kentucky sees highest spike in coronavirus cases after protests against lockdown

Note the implied causality.  They don’t come out exactly and say the protests caused the spike.  They are just heavily hinting at it.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) announced in a press conference Sunday that 273 new cases of COVID-19 had emerged, the highest Beshear has announced so far. This brings the current state case count to 2,960, per the Kentucky Department of Health. And 148 fatalities have been reported.

Out of 4.5 million people in the state.  As reported that is 0.06% of the population.

In response to this figure, Beshear determined that the state will not reopen economic sectors or relax restrictions until there is a downward trajectory of reported cases for 14 days, in accordance with White House guidelines.

“We’re still in the midst of the fight,” Beshear said.  

The governor is maintaining the lockdown.

This comes after protests surged in Frankfort last week against Beshear’s restrictions, disrupting an evening news conference. The Lexington Herald-Leader noted that about 100 Kentuckians joined the protest, arguing that businesses needed to reopen after more than 500,000 Kentuckians filed for unemployment in March.

One hundred people protested that they want to go back to work.  The governor is ignoring this.

At this point, it should be noted that we’ve been told that incubation period for Coronavirus is up to 14 days.  This spike occurred two days after the protests.  The likelihood of these newly confirmed people all being infected and becoming sufficiently symptomatic for testing from this protest is nil.

Local outlets report that at least 13 percent, or roughly 385, of COVID-19 cases have been recorded in nursing home residents. Beshear also told reporters Sunday that 33 additional residents have tested positive for the virus, as well as eight nursing home staffers.

This is paragraph four of the article.  Finally we are getting some details and it shows that one of the most affected groups is people associated with nursing care, either residents or workers.  People who are or work with the immunocompromised and infirm in close quarters.

This is consistent with what we’ve seen in other states.  Traping people together in confined spaces is the problem.

Having healthy people work an appropriate distance apart doesn’t seem to be a major vector for infection.

There are many people who are out of work who could go back to work if companies took only minor precautions such as extending break time so people could go outside instead of a break room and going to split shifts so only half the employees are in the facility at one time.

That would be a reasonable start.  Instead, the Governor decided to stamp the boot down even harder.

Beshear’s office put out a press release stating that anyone attending an in-person religious service during the coronavirus pandemic will be notified that it is a misdemeanor violation. 

He needs to be notified that this is a First Amendment violation.

That is not where this story ends.

Kentucky had been lagging behind other states in testing but is finally starting to test more people starting last week.

So the spike in cases wich the media implied was due to the protest actually coincided with the increase in testing.  This means we have no idea if there was an increase or decrease in the number of cases, only that there was an increase in the number of confirmed cases because more testing was done.

This feels like that scene in Chernobyl where the government reported the radiation level as 3 Rontgen because that was as high as the meter went.

The number of cases in Kentucky could be going down but the number of reported cases could be going up simply because of the increased availability of testing.

As someone who has lived and breathed statistical analysis and design of experiments, trying to interpret a trend from this sort of testing hysteresis is infuriating.

If the standard for going back to work is when testing shows new cases going down, we are not going to get there for months as we keep identifying cases only because we have more available tests, regardless if the disease is continuing to spread.

Given that, I’m almost willing to say “screw it” and forget about testing and only go by the numbers of people who end up in the hospital.  Counting COVID hospitalizations is a much more real-time data trend than ever-expanding testing.

Nevertheless, the facts remain that there are a lot of reasons why the new cases of Coronavirus recorded in Kentucky had anything to do with the protest, or that the premise of the protest was in nay way wrong.

But the implication of every media outlet that reported on it was that the protest caused the spike and the government locked down further accordingly.

This is bad statistical analysis, bad reporting, and bad governance all rolled up into one shitshow.