by James A. Bacon

July is the hottest month of the year in Virginia, and Virginia public health officials are warning that a tendency for people to seek cooler temperatures indoors will boost their exposure to the COVID-19 virus.

“We went through a period where we really saw great decline,” Heather Harmon-Sloan, chief of the Virginia Department of Health’s COVID-19 unit, told WRIC-TV. “And now, we’re starting to see those diagnosed cases of COVID-19 start to creep back up slowly.”

Public health officials don’t sound terribly worried, though, and you shouldn’t be either. The uptick in COVID cases is what you might call a dead cat bounce. The rate of COVID incidence in the population, according to the state’s COVID tracker, is less than one in 100,000, way down from this winter.

And infections and deaths this winter were waaaaay down since the peak of the COVID epidemic, as can be seen in this graph showing Virginia COVID-related mortality.

Obviously, the numbers for infections and hospitalizations are much higher than the mortality numbers showed here. But the virus is less deadly and the healthcare sector much better at treating it than early in the epidemic.

Indeed, we may be in a zone where the side effects of COVID vaccinations pose a greater risk than the virus itself. Sadly, the Virginia Health Department doesn’t track vaccination side effects, so state-level data won’t help us draw a firm conclusion.

For the perennial worry warts out there, here’s another epidemiological question: What are the comparative risks of staying outdoors on the 4th of July and getting heat stroke versus staying inside and contracting COVID?

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