Confusion aside, COVID campaign shows results
Connecticut has followed its nation-leading performance in controlling COVID-19 in June with even better numbers in July.
That’s partly the result of an ad campaign that includes geo-coded ads telling people in cities to get tested, and mobile vehicles that pull up to churches in urban neighborhoods, ready to swab the deep nasal passages of faithful residents.
The result, whatever the reason: The number of people in hospitals with COVID-19 fell under 100 on June 29, kept dropping and shows no sign of rising again, as other states sweat out their hospital ICU capacity.
Total new cases have leveled off at about 2 per day for every 100,000 Connecticut residents for the last four weeks. By comparison, states with 10 per 100,000 per day land on the quarantine list and there are many of those.
And that’s with sharply higher testing numbers in Connecticut — 72,000 per week this month, up from 46,000 in June.
Florida? A sickly 9,942 new cases a day this month, or 46 per day for every 100,000 Sunshine State residents. And to think they reopened Disney World, and still hope to mount a Republican National Convention. Thanks but no thanks, boss, I’ll pass on that plum politics assignment.
There are lots of reasons for Connecticut’s recent success including the obvious fact that we were hit brutally hard early on. Florida just passed us in total deaths on Tuesday and it’s six times bigger than Connecticut. So we can hold off on the smugness.
Still, Connecticut’s marketing campaign, formally launched in a very low-key way on July 2 and rolled out gradually for weeks, has been a factor. Dubbed Connecticut Respect, it’s a broad, multimillion-dollar push.
Broad, that is, when it comes to mask-wearing and social distancing, with video ads and other mass outreach. I think we all get the message by now, whether or not we want to heed it. Good numbers breed confidence, which can lead to disaster as Gov. Ned Lamont says every single day.
When it comes to testing, the state’s outreach narrows sharply because not everyone should get tested. That’s where this outreach business gets tricky and where the state’s message has been a bit confusing.
Here are the people Lamont wants to be tested: Anyone living in congregate housing such as a prison, nursing home or state hospital. Anyone with symptoms, even just a persistent cough or a lowgrade fever. Anyone who’s been exposed to a person with COVID-19, such as front-line workers. Anyone living in a densely populated city, especially Black and Hispanic residents, whose incidence of the disease has been higher.
That’s it. If you live in a house in the suburbs, feel fine and haven’t been exposed to a known coronavirus carrier — you don’t need to submit to the swab. If you’ve traveled to a hotspot state like Florida, stay home for 14 days. Get a test if and only if you start to feel symptoms or find out the old school pal you stayed with in Sarasota now has COVID.
That’s a tough message to send out, however, because the “worried well” remain, well, worried. Rather than send out a signal that you shouldn’t be tested, the state’s strategy has been to aim at those who should.
It’s working well, Lamont told my colleague Ken Dixon on Wednesday, as the numbers of tests rise and those that reveal illness fall.
“We’re going to the churches, and we’re paying to put the mobile van in the church parking lot, and having the ministers encourage people why it’s really important to get tested,” the governor told Dixon. “So we’re doing a lot of unorthodox ways of reaching people, and right now our testing is near the top, according to most of the reports I’ve seen.”
He added, “Can we always do better? Yeah.”
One problem is that many of us, probably most, can’t say who, exactly, should be tested. At various times Lamont and others have said everyone should be tested, or only those who are in certain groups.
And the availability of tests rises and falls depending on conditions here and across the nation. These days it takes as long as a week to get results back.
Why not a broad, statewide campaign aimed at letting everyone know who should and who should not head on down to the testing site, sign a form and lean back?
The answer is money and market psychology.
“In terms of where we’re investing our scarce marketing budget, we’re really focusing on trying to reach those people that are in the high risk categories that should be tested,” sad Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer. “The message of singling someone out and saying ‘We don’t want you to be tested’ could be easily misinterpreted.”
Besides, he said, the testing sites aren’t reporting a huge number of the wrong people getting tested.
Lamont, Mounds, Geballe & Co. proclaimed the Connecticut Respect campaign on the afternoon of July 2, as everyone was chomping to start the holiday weekend. And it didn’t even have its own press event, it was just part of the day’s news.
Too low-key? Too much confusion in the general population about who should seek out a COVID test? Yes to both, with two caveats.
First, as to masking and distancing, not to mention guidelines for reopening, Lamont has been clearer sooner than most of his fellow governors.
And second, it’s hard to knock success.
One more set of numbers here to punctuate the point: Connecticut’s percentage of tests that come up positive for coronavirus stands at 0.8 percent in July, down from 8.8 percent in May, even though we’re testing more people, even though we’re targeting the tests.
Florida? After three days of declines on Sunday, the health department there was pleased to announce the ratio was just over 11 percent.
We felt their pain — in April.