former lurker

I never bought that claim, either. It was a Trump assertion that summer weather would cause the virus to "go away".

The news is scant and preliminary, but MLB is now having some form of spring training, and at least 11 players in Florida and Arizona have tested positive.

This is alarming. And instructive. It sort of puts to rest the idea that warm weather will kill of the virus.

Your reading comp skills are lacking. I'm not admitting to being wrong. I'm pointing out that your broad-brush invocation of the Swedish model is unavailing as a critique of the U.S.'s approach. I like how you reach back into April to compare Britain and Sweden. Of course, Britain is a major stop over for international flights and had a much bigger influx of carriers from outside the UK, then passed it along to other countries including the U.S. Apples and oranges. I suppose you consider a picture or two to constitute "hard data" as you've said you're not persuaded by anecdotal accounts. How does the picture you posted differ from an anecdote? I guess if it's a picture or a graph it carries more weight in your eyes. Or are you still cherry picking facts to fit your assertion that the lockdowns in the US have been counterproductive. (And weren't you arguing that Sweden proved the efficacy of herd immunity? It seems the Swedish experts disagree based on their testing data -- that's in the article I posted earlier.)

http://www.iafd.com/person.rme/perfid=rockbottom/gender=m/rock-bottom.htm

And it appears, based on their limited testing, that the "herd immunity" did not develop. Yet it's being assumed by people pointing to Sweden as an exemplar, and then used as a basis to argue other countries (the U.S. in particular) should have allowed mass indoor gatherings to promote herd immunity. Oops.

You're not considering the other guidance -- using masks, not gathering in places with 50+, avoiding non-essential travel, seniors staying home, etc. No, Sweden didn't close bars, restaurants, etc. Do you have data that shows how populated those establishments were without the shutdowns by government? Here's the article I was quoting from/paraphrasing in my last post. You would have seen it by googling "Sweden Covid". I guess we are guilty of the opposite sins -- you post a chart that shows nothing of consequence and make broad claims about what it reflects. I provide facts and detail, but fail to post the source. I'll remedy my failing: https://www.livescience.com/results-of-sweden-covid19-response.html. Will you remedy yours? Or will you continue to offer up pretty graphs that are the equivalent of muzak.

Sweden used it's universal health care system, made testing available wide scale, issued guidance on the use of masks and social distancing (which you're dismissing because they weren't ordered, but they were observed). Sweden also banned gatherings of more than 50 people, advised seniors to stay home, and recommended that Swedes avoid all non-essential travel. In late March, after the virus had begun to appear in nursing homes, Sweden banned visitors to nursing homes, but the virus still spread in those facilities. The person who designed the response now believes Sweden did too little to combat Covid and contain it. While he thinks the scale of lockdowns we've experienced are too far reaching for Sweden, he now favors an approach between their lassez-faire approach and ours. We also need to consider the fabric of health care in Sweden as compared to the U.S. Finally, the centerpiece of the Swedish strategy was to promote "herd immunity". That appears not to have borne out.

Perhaps you don't read the other posts. See any number of them outlining all of the pertinent differences between Sweden and the U.S. that explain why the approach in Sweden does not compare to what would have happened in the U.S. had we followed their approach. For one, few if any Swedes would espouse the view that lockdowns, if ordered, were "draconian". They followed the guidance voluntarily. They don't harbor the same paranoid view of their government that you do.

How does this chart fit your criteria for "hard data"? It's worldwide, and doesn't say which countries (and which approaches) correlate to lower vs. higher death rates. More important, the chart is labelled as being "challenged" by the inability to assign causes of death -- that's a fairly big hole in the data.

No, it's not. You may have convinced yourself of that, but what you've done is pick apart the sufficiency of the data you don't like while cherry picking partial data you do. As for the prevalence of cases in some states and not others, you've either deliberately forgotten or failed to notice that the disease has developed regionally, and that we lack any thorough national response. There is going to be variation among the states as they have taken different approaches.

I agree. I've seen this play out with my father and my uncle, with mixed results. The financial incentives can be perverse. Hospitals are loath to admit elderly patients because they often take longer to get well enough to discharge, and because Medicare adopted reforms to rein in costs that are often counterproductive. For example, Medicare wanted to discourage sending patients home prematurely, so they it won't reimburse hospitals for readmission to treat the same condition within a certain time period. The result is hospitals resist those readmissions. A nurse who saw my father when he was home, told us her father was prematurely discharged when he had pneumonia. When it recurred, they wouldn't take him back, insisting he was fine. She took him to a different hospital which admitted him. Hospitals look to shuttle older patients to rehab, then the rehabs look to hand them off to nursing homes or back home after how ever many weeks Medicare will cover before agitating for discharge or tangible evidence of progression. Longer term rehab cases pose real challenges for families. I'm an attorney, and comfortable arguing with hospital personnel. I can't tell you the number of times they wanted to send my father home rather than admit him, or send him to a rehab, when he medical attention in the hospital. Fortunately, I was able to convince them he belonged in the hospital. The first time, he had an internal bleed that required admission after he lost a lot of blood through his stool. They sent him home, the problem recurred that night, we brought him back and they resisted. The blood levels were borderline for admission. I convinced them to admit him. He lost more blood that night and required two rounds of transfusions. Decades later, he was quite frail due to kidney failure. He developed a persistent infection. They want to divert him to a rehab. I convinced the doctors that rehab wasn't an option -- either he needed medical attention, in the hospital, or he could be at home. They admitted him. They then wanted him to go to a rehab, and we'd been through that before. The rehab didn't help, in fact it broke his spirit, so we insisted they keep him until he could come directly home. That meant an extra day in the hospital, but avoided a month in a rehab. The rehabs and nursing homes are their own cottage industry. Some are better run than others, and often it's trial and error. If the senior has family that's close by and attentive, they can advocate relocation. If the senior is more on his/her own, s/he's often at the mercy of happenstance.

In general, I'd say elder care facilities have been an area of weakness/challenge in the U.S. Some places have had more trouble than others, so they may be special situations and not generically true of the system as a whole. For example, on facility in Massachusetts for older Veterans had a slew of cases and deaths. Some of the issue there was staffing, and some was lingering problems with the VA systems that have been papered over to make it appear they've made progress in dealing with failures that have been highlighted for years. More broadly, the division of care into different types of facilities needs better rationalization. A lot of it is driven by efforts to restrain the growth in Medicare costs as the U.S. population ages. It's standard here to try and move people out of hospitals as soon as possible and send them to less expensive facilities, like rehab centers, rather than keep them in the hospital until they are well enough to go home. If people are not able to rehab enough to live independently, they are often sent to long term facilities (assisting living if their semi-independent, nursing homes if they need more continuous care). When Covid hit, it threw this system into a bit of disarray. Some nursing homes had Covid cases spread rapidly and a lot of resultant deaths. Nursing homes stopped accepting new patients from hospitals and rehabs, and some rehabs stopped taking patients from hospitals. My uncle was living in assisted living, but took a sharp decline. He had lived with cancer for years, and treatment of the cancer was no longer effective, so it was a matter of months he was expected to live. Still, he plugged along. Then Covid hit, and when he did take a turn for the worse, it was touch and go for a few days. The assisted living facility wanted to send him to the hospital, his cancer doctor said if he was admitted to the hospital he'd never be allowed in rehab or the hospice facility. They treated him at the assisting living place for a few days while they arranged transfer to hospice. His daughter was very engaged with his medical care, and because of her field, has lots of contacts in the elder care universe. She was able to get the arrangements made. Someone less engaged or aware would have likely been stuck with a bad situation made worse.

Sit back and await data provided by others, then, because the "data" you cite is cherry picked, partial and mischaracterized by your usage. You're treating the graphs you posted as if they provide detail they don't, reading your own assumptions into them and then reasoning from the facts you imagined were behind the graphs. As to the efficacy of the lockdowns argument you are making, your again making unwarranted assumptions. Increases in areas with previous declines may be the result of restrictions being eased following an abatement, meaning the baseline from which the new cases are measured is lower because of the efficacy of lockdowns. Meanwhile, focusing on Alameda and ignoring Austin & Houston, both Carolinas, Florida, etc., certainly helps with your mantra that lockdowns are ineffective or counterproductive, but that's accomplished by ignoring the counterevidence. It appears from your posts you're not really all too interested in the facts and the data, only in finding and filtering them to fit a view you've decided upon in advance of such data.

I wonder what the demographics are in Washington State vs. BC. Although Seattle has the rep of a younger city, I suspect a lot of the population in Wa. State is older than in BC. That's not an informed opinion, just an impression. The travel restriction circumvention, and failure to observe the quarantine period, is troubling. The former reminds me of how U.S. citizens wanting to travel to Cuba used to stay in Canada for a bit -- not sure how that worked given they still were using US passports. As to the 14 day quarantines, my cousin's son is in grad school at Virginia and was going to work in programs in India this summer. The programs were cancelled, but the classes are still happening online. He moved up to live for the summer with my cousin/his aunt, and the family are anxious to see him, but we're all abiding by the 14 day quarantine.

The 1% threshold was discussed this am on the news in the U.S. The states with the new outbreaks (Texas, the Carolinas, Florida, and a few others) all are above the 1.1% transmission rate in the areas with the outbreaks.

Young folk refers to college and recent post college aged young professions in the Austin, TX area. Fairly crowded is more than 50% of capacity pre-Covid.

But they are evidence nonetheless, and can and should inform the approach taken. They're sufficient for Texas to be imposing limits on the number of people allowed in bars (50% or less of capacity) and for Florida to re-close some establishments. With a virus that spreads so easily, and without extensive tracing, how else are we supposed to proceed. We look at the information available.

A doctor on tv this am said the areas experiences what he said was undeniably an outbreak were southern and/or rural areas where the initial wave of the virus didn't hit hard, and where people are not following the advice to wear masks, limit going to crowded spaces, and observe social distancing. That's still anedotal, but it's a correlation that makes sense. In Texas, for example, a lot of the people who've contracted the virus in the Austin area are younger folks and they've been going to local bars that have been fairly crowded.

Pot, meet kettle. Your national chart of new deaths fits your criteria for hard data and facts how? It's a snapshot of one metric nationally when the virus keeps impacting regionally. Some of the businesses reopened (restaurants and bars, in particular) have had to close again as employees and patrons contract the virus. The virus is "rolling", picking up in the locations that didn't initially face large outbreaks and have been less vigilant about mitigation. Several studies have shown that the rate of infection is continuing to be positive (as in increasing), but that in areas where there is widespread use of masks and observance of distancing there is a decline in the numbers of new cases. Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Texas (Houston and Austin areas), Alabama, South Carolina all reporting an outbreak of new cases. Nationally,150,000 new cases diagnosed a day are being diagnosed. This is occurring as some states tentatively open up restaurants, bars, theaters, and other indoor gathering places, but before we hit traditional flu season and face the potential reopening of schools, etc.

Agree with your last sentence, but you do so with partial bits all the time and have on this point. No, it's not one state, and yes it's not national as I said. The increases in cases in Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, all are in states that were less rigorous with social distancing and other mitigation measures. Some of those measures were adopted slowly and removed too soon. Florida is now seeing the need to close down bars, etc, that they had allowed to reopen. It's a sure sign that you've got nothing of substance to say when you start telling others to be quiet.

It seems Alam has a type -- muscle guys. His former bf was Aaron Savvy/Ajay of SC.

I too prefer to see real data. Why, if that's your preference, do you present partial data when it suits your point of view?

Two problems with your point. Deaths are a lagging indicator. The spike is in new cases of people contracting the virus. Second, the spikes are regional not nation wide.

Or someone who is less than (sub) massive?