More interesting data regarding Covid

[Guest]

I found this site, which compares different states and their "closing" and "opening" dates along with Covid diagnoses instructive. It certainly doesn't seem that opening up the economy causes a spike in Covid cases. And bear in mind, that much of the extra diagnosis comes due to the increased availability of testing, not because of an actual increase in cases. We are making far more diagnoses now in asymptomatic people, such as the Missouri meatpacking plant where fewer than 1 in 10 were symptomatic. I don't see how anyone could look at these graphs and be horrified at the thought of a gradual re-opening:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html

Well, each week we learn something new. We'll see what happens next week!

[+ bigjoey]

I found this site, which compares different states and their "closing" and "opening" dates along with Covid diagnoses instructive. It certainly doesn't seem that opening up the economy causes a spike in Covid cases. And bear in mind, that much of the extra diagnosis comes due to the increased availability of testing, not because of an actual increase in cases. We are making far more diagnoses now in asymptomatic people, such as the Missouri meatpacking plant where fewer than 1 in 10 were symptomatic. I don't see how anyone could look at these graphs and be horrified at the thought of a gradual re-opening:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html

Well, each week we learn something new. We'll see what happens next week!

Any spike in cases (factoring out increased testing which will find more cases) will only be seen at the end of the incubation period. For the states just opening today, we need to wait to see the results.

[+ bigjoey]

While this was already posted in another thread, it is an important read: how do pandemics end.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/us/coronavirus-deaths-cases.amp.html

 

It seems pandemics end when people decide they end. The opening up of the lockdowns is being forced on the various governments. People wanting to go to the beaches or out to bars or casinos.

 

Watch for changes in a few different indexes such as the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (which has started rising) and different economic indexes. These changes will give numbers reflecting people deciding the pandemic is over.

 

Ending lockdowns does not mean no longer protecting the vulnerable and elderly. It does not mean that you can not make personal decisions on your own behavior.

 

This does not mean that people will stop dying. It means that people will decide to live with the risk of something that will be part of our lives like the annual flu which kills tens of thousands of people per year or high speeds on our interstate highways that kills tens of thousands of people. People acting jointly will balance the risk of dying with the collateral lockdown damage to physical health, emotional well being and the economy.

 

Every life is important and every death is tragic but living involves risk balancing. For better or worse, people are voting with their feet for the risk balance they want and how they want to live.

[thickornotatall]

I believe the stats are undercounted. When I go to Publix or Target barely 50% are using any sort of protection. Our mayor goes on CNN and congratulated our city for the "great" job done. A truck load of BS...Skewed down to make the whole deal look almost over and done.

[EZEtoGRU]

I found this site, which compares different states and their "closing" and "opening" dates along with Covid diagnoses instructive. It certainly doesn't seem that opening up the economy causes a spike in Covid cases. And bear in mind, that much of the extra diagnosis comes due to the increased availability of testing, not because of an actual increase in cases. We are making far more diagnoses now in asymptomatic people, such as the Missouri meatpacking plant where fewer than 1 in 10 were symptomatic. I don't see how anyone could look at these graphs and be horrified at the thought of a gradual re-opening:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html

Well, each week we learn something new. We'll see what happens next week!

I think its too soon to know what the impact of states re-opening will be. I would wait 4 more weeks to see how states like GA/FL/TX are doing in terms of hospitalizations and deaths.

 

Let's also remember that, like other viruses, this one may transmit less effectively in warmer months. There may be a natural decline in infections during the summer due to the warmer weather. How do you tell if an improvement in the COVID situation in June/July/August is due to re-opening more cautiously versus merely being the result of warmer weather impeding transmission?

[MscleLovr]

like other viruses, this one may transmit less effectively in warmer months. There may be a natural decline in infections during the summer due to the warmer weather.

 

I agree with the sentiments expressed by @EZEtoGRU

 

But I quoted the part above as I’ve seen that comment before, and I wonder what is the evidence for it. During a period of hot and humid weather in Ecuador, there has been a large outbreak of Covid19 and many related deaths. The city of Guayaquil has even been described as “Latin America’s Wuhan”. There is much to see if you Google ‘Ecuador Coronavirus‘ but here’s one report https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8292391/Bodies-Covid-19-victims-lie-streets-Ecuadorian-city.html

[EZEtoGRU]

I agree with the sentiments expressed by @EZEtoGRU

 

But I quoted the part above as I’ve seen that comment before, and I wonder what is the evidence for it. During a period of hot and humid weather in Ecuador, there has been a large outbreak of Covid19 and many related deaths. The city of Guayaquil has even been described as “Latin America’s Wuhan”. There is much to see if you Google ‘Ecuador Coronavirus‘ but here’s one report https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8292391/Bodies-Covid-19-victims-lie-streets-Ecuadorian-city.html

I agree with you. We don’t know if warmer weather impacts transmissibility. It’s just a theory which is as of yet unproven.

 

BTW, during my working years, I travelled to Guayaquil 10-15 times. You’re right. It’s very hot and humid year round...yet they have had a heavy impact from COVID.

 

It’s likely that many factors explain why some areas get hit very hard and others don’t. It seems pre-existing health conditions, obesity, housing density, social norms/habits, precautions taken could all be factors. Weather might be a factor...or not. We just don’t know enough.

[MscleLovr]

It may be of some interest to mention Sweden, which has been an outlier in Europe in regard to its policies (following the advice of the Swedish state epidemiologist).

 

There’s a good article in The Spectator (a UK magazine) which I’ve set out below (as it has a paywall but I could not copy in 3 interesting graphs). The essence is Confinement is not a good way to manage uncertainty.

 

Sweden has pioneered an alternative to lockdown – and it works

17 May 2020, 12:15pm

 

 

Uppsala

 

The culture of social distancing does strange things to us. A few weeks ago I got an invitation to an offline work dinner, and I can’t remember the last time I had such a sudden rush of joy. Even if life in Sweden over the past two months have been surprisingly normal, the truth is that we all have hunkered down a bit. Many of us have worked from home. The first two weeks, I admit, felt as life in remission – like a sudden gift of time. But then we all sunk into the apathy of having our life on hold. It felt pointless to plan for the future. A reunion with the colleagues became a distant wish. Meeting a work contact for lunch? Surely that’s only something for the privileged few. So getting that invite to a work dinner felt like I had secretly been given the password to attend a Roman bacchanal.

 

The Swedish economy has finally started to un-Zoom itself. Bicycling lanes in Stockholm now feature the morning pelotons of commuters again. Carmakers like Volvo have opened up their factories and white-collar workers are gradually returning to their offices. Most workplaces have developed their own routines and protocols for Covid-19 safety – and, frankly, most of it is common sense: make it easy for staff to keep good hygiene and avoid having many people showing up at the same place at the same time.

 

So there’s no hot desking. Those who cannot bike to work are allowed to come in or leave early so they can avoid crowded buses and tubes. Lunch boxes are delivered by restaurants to the workplace. Meeting rooms and common spaces are closed or furnitured around protective acrylic glass. Colleagues that have had coronavirus get additional responsibilities. At the Stockholm accountancy I use, one of the bosses who got infected in early March now manages the afternoon cake trolley. They call him ‘Mr. Antibody’ because he doesn’t relish the corporate fitness programme as much as the cakes he serve.

 

It’s common sense attitudes like these that have made foreign observers to take a second look at the ‘Swedish experiment’. We’re no longer just the bad boy of corona – the jumped-up little country that refused to accept lockdown. Yes, we have observed social distancing, but individuals and firms have been allowed to figure out on their own how to practically organize things without having to shut everything down. So the real Swedish experiment has been about ‘behavioural change’: getting individuals to voluntary change their behaviour to avoid getting infected or spreading the virus to others. And it has worked.

 

All this means quite a lot now. Swedes have had ten weeks of training themselves in how to live together with the virus. 'Sweden represents a future model if we want to return to a society that we do not have to close', says the WHO’s Mike Ryan. Most people in Sweden aren’t generally afraid of meeting other people or being in environments where the virus could spread: they manage the risks by keeping a social distance. Polls show that more than 50 per cent think they have had coronavirus or that they will get it; only 15 per cent think it’s improbable. Perhaps it is this attitude that have prompted so many around the world to think of us as reckless and foolish: we have, in our normalcy, become an ethnographic study object. But all the training we’ve had in sharing the society with coronavirus has taught us that it isn’t dangerous to leave your home or send your kids to school. People don’t have to fearful of living their life in a pretty normal way. Remarkably, seven out of ten Swedes think the future actually looks bright.

 

Trusting people that they’ll take advice and change their behaviour have also had the desired result. Mobility declined, but not to a level that crushed the economy. The epidemic modelling did not factor in that people would react to a request.

 

Swedish Covid-19 trends are pointing in the right direction. Fewer ICU beds are nowoccupied, especially in Stockholm where the number of patients in intensive care has dropped by almost 40 per cent since the peak. The daily intake of new intensive care patients is now in the low double digits. Thedaily death toll flatlined in the second half of April and, mercifully, has since been on a declining trend. And then we have the reproduction rate of the virus – the famous R number that now seems to command much of the British exit strategy. We’ve been warned by Neil Ferguson and others that Sweden’s R number is still in the region of 1.3-1.4 – meaning that the virus still spreads exponentially. However, the Swedish Public Health Agency gives a very differentestimate: the R has been below 1 since mid-April or so, and now stands at about 0.85.

 

Excess mortality is still the bugbear for foreign observers who want to learn from Sweden. It’s also an issue for Swedes. Even if the time for comparing and making judgements about coronavirus mortality is a few years into the future, it is obvious that Sweden has a big scandal on its hands: it has failed to protect nursing homes against the virus. More than 50 per cent of all nursing homes in Stockholm have had infected residents. For the country as a whole, almost75 per cent of all Covid-19 deaths were residents at nursing homes or elderly with home care. Something has gone badly wrong.

 

What’s going on here? Obviously, the Public Health Agency – along with other agencies – failed to understand the risk that staff could spread the virus in care homes. For a long time, nursing home and home care staff had no access to personal protective equipment (PPE), and once they got advanced equipment, few had been trained in how to use them. Swedish nursing homes also have many residents, and they come there at a very late point in life – so when a virus gets into the nursing home, it can infect many ‘elderly-elderly’ who are frail and have a poor immune system. Add to that failures of centralized medical procurement, for instance, or government complacency in building up capacity to test care workers. It’s no consolation that we share all these problems with other countries. It took us weeks and weeks to fix all these problems, and some of them still haven’t been adequately resolved.

 

Boris Johnson doesn’t need a warning from Sweden about the risks of care-home deaths: Britain’s experience is actually worse. But he can learn from the Swedish example that people will respond to advice about social distance and change their behaviour. Boosting testing capacity is necessary, as is keeping track of the reproduction rate. But at some point Britain needs to take the plunge and encourage people to go about their lives. It’s understandable that many Brits don’t want to end the lockdown and expose themselves to greater risks of getting infected. There is so much that we don’t know about the virus. But confinement is not a good way to manage uncertainty. Just as people with opposing ideas can become political creeps when safe-space culture protects us from them, the world out there gets scary when we shelter in our homes for months.

[+ bigjoey]

It may be of some interest to mention Sweden, which has been an outlier in Europe in regard to its policies (following the advice of the Swedish state epidemiologist).

 

There’s a good article in The Spectator (a UK magazine) which I’ve set out below (as it has a paywall but I could not copy in 3 interesting graphs). The essence is Confinement is not a good way to manage uncertainty.

 

Sweden has pioneered an alternative to lockdown – and it works

17 May 2020, 12:15pm

 

 

Uppsala

 

The culture of social distancing does strange things to us. A few weeks ago I got an invitation to an offline work dinner, and I can’t remember the last time I had such a sudden rush of joy. Even if life in Sweden over the past two months have been surprisingly normal, the truth is that we all have hunkered down a bit. Many of us have worked from home. The first two weeks, I admit, felt as life in remission – like a sudden gift of time. But then we all sunk into the apathy of having our life on hold. It felt pointless to plan for the future. A reunion with the colleagues became a distant wish. Meeting a work contact for lunch? Surely that’s only something for the privileged few. So getting that invite to a work dinner felt like I had secretly been given the password to attend a Roman bacchanal.

 

The Swedish economy has finally started to un-Zoom itself. Bicycling lanes in Stockholm now feature the morning pelotons of commuters again. Carmakers like Volvo have opened up their factories and white-collar workers are gradually returning to their offices. Most workplaces have developed their own routines and protocols for Covid-19 safety – and, frankly, most of it is common sense: make it easy for staff to keep good hygiene and avoid having many people showing up at the same place at the same time.

 

So there’s no hot desking. Those who cannot bike to work are allowed to come in or leave early so they can avoid crowded buses and tubes. Lunch boxes are delivered by restaurants to the workplace. Meeting rooms and common spaces are closed or furnitured around protective acrylic glass. Colleagues that have had coronavirus get additional responsibilities. At the Stockholm accountancy I use, one of the bosses who got infected in early March now manages the afternoon cake trolley. They call him ‘Mr. Antibody’ because he doesn’t relish the corporate fitness programme as much as the cakes he serve.

 

It’s common sense attitudes like these that have made foreign observers to take a second look at the ‘Swedish experiment’. We’re no longer just the bad boy of corona – the jumped-up little country that refused to accept lockdown. Yes, we have observed social distancing, but individuals and firms have been allowed to figure out on their own how to practically organize things without having to shut everything down. So the real Swedish experiment has been about ‘behavioural change’: getting individuals to voluntary change their behaviour to avoid getting infected or spreading the virus to others. And it has worked.

 

All this means quite a lot now. Swedes have had ten weeks of training themselves in how to live together with the virus. 'Sweden represents a future model if we want to return to a society that we do not have to close', says the WHO’s Mike Ryan. Most people in Sweden aren’t generally afraid of meeting other people or being in environments where the virus could spread: they manage the risks by keeping a social distance. Polls show that more than 50 per cent think they have had coronavirus or that they will get it; only 15 per cent think it’s improbable. Perhaps it is this attitude that have prompted so many around the world to think of us as reckless and foolish: we have, in our normalcy, become an ethnographic study object. But all the training we’ve had in sharing the society with coronavirus has taught us that it isn’t dangerous to leave your home or send your kids to school. People don’t have to fearful of living their life in a pretty normal way. Remarkably, seven out of ten Swedes think the future actually looks bright.

 

Trusting people that they’ll take advice and change their behaviour have also had the desired result. Mobility declined, but not to a level that crushed the economy. The epidemic modelling did not factor in that people would react to a request.

 

Swedish Covid-19 trends are pointing in the right direction. Fewer ICU beds are nowoccupied, especially in Stockholm where the number of patients in intensive care has dropped by almost 40 per cent since the peak. The daily intake of new intensive care patients is now in the low double digits. Thedaily death toll flatlined in the second half of April and, mercifully, has since been on a declining trend. And then we have the reproduction rate of the virus – the famous R number that now seems to command much of the British exit strategy. We’ve been warned by Neil Ferguson and others that Sweden’s R number is still in the region of 1.3-1.4 – meaning that the virus still spreads exponentially. However, the Swedish Public Health Agency gives a very differentestimate: the R has been below 1 since mid-April or so, and now stands at about 0.85.

 

Excess mortality is still the bugbear for foreign observers who want to learn from Sweden. It’s also an issue for Swedes. Even if the time for comparing and making judgements about coronavirus mortality is a few years into the future, it is obvious that Sweden has a big scandal on its hands: it has failed to protect nursing homes against the virus. More than 50 per cent of all nursing homes in Stockholm have had infected residents. For the country as a whole, almost75 per cent of all Covid-19 deaths were residents at nursing homes or elderly with home care. Something has gone badly wrong.

 

What’s going on here? Obviously, the Public Health Agency – along with other agencies – failed to understand the risk that staff could spread the virus in care homes. For a long time, nursing home and home care staff had no access to personal protective equipment (PPE), and once they got advanced equipment, few had been trained in how to use them. Swedish nursing homes also have many residents, and they come there at a very late point in life – so when a virus gets into the nursing home, it can infect many ‘elderly-elderly’ who are frail and have a poor immune system. Add to that failures of centralized medical procurement, for instance, or government complacency in building up capacity to test care workers. It’s no consolation that we share all these problems with other countries. It took us weeks and weeks to fix all these problems, and some of them still haven’t been adequately resolved.

 

Boris Johnson doesn’t need a warning from Sweden about the risks of care-home deaths: Britain’s experience is actually worse. But he can learn from the Swedish example that people will respond to advice about social distance and change their behaviour. Boosting testing capacity is necessary, as is keeping track of the reproduction rate. But at some point Britain needs to take the plunge and encourage people to go about their lives. It’s understandable that many Brits don’t want to end the lockdown and expose themselves to greater risks of getting infected. There is so much that we don’t know about the virus. But confinement is not a good way to manage uncertainty. Just as people with opposing ideas can become political creeps when safe-space culture protects us from them, the world out there gets scary when we shelter in our homes for months.

 

Interesting statistic that 75% of deaths were in nursing homes and seniors with home care. That shows that if the vulnerable population had been properly protected, the death rate would have been substantially lower. With that lower death rate, the fear generated about the virus would have been less and most likely, we would not have seen the extreme government measures taken.

 

Even factoring in the “elderly-elderly” deaths, Sweden is sort of in the middle of the pack of European death rates behind Spain and Italy. As the article notes, the final numbers will be determined in the future but one thing is currently clear: Sweden kept its death rate in the middle of Europe’s countries BUT they did so without the physical, emotional and economic damage that other European countries suffered. The key was “balance”.

[SirBillybob]

Here is a weather study that may be a bit premature due to its coverage of earlier months, up to end of March, so about 16% of current case tally:

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7195330/pdf/main.pdf

Edited May 18, 2020 by SirBIllybob

[SirBillybob]

And a more theoretical piece:

 

https://ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/will-covid-19-go-away-on-its-own-in-warmer-weather/

[+ stevenkesslar]

It certainly doesn't seem that opening up the economy causes a spike in Covid cases.

 

Really? So 20,000 to 30,000 new infections a day and 1,000 to 2,000 deaths due to COVID-19 EVERY DAY - mostly of people over 65 - is just the new normal? Is this now the idea?

Any spike in cases (factoring out increased testing which will find more cases) will only be seen at the end of the incubation period. For the states just opening today, we need to wait to see the results.

 

Or, to quote Dr. Fauci, "death lags."

 

So there were very few deaths in New York from COVID-19 around the middle of March, when the virus was silently spreading. Since then, New York became a morgue. The mass death and collapse of hospitals has subsided. But the economy of New York won't reopen quickly or effectively. That's regardless of any government plan. It's simply because seniors don't wish to die. They won't go to malls, or restaurants, or plays. Funny how that works, isn't it?

 

So the idea that we can judge the impact of a plane crash before it occurs - or simply pretend that it won't occur - is an interesting and magical idea. Under normal circumstances, we board planes everyday because everybody knows the chances of dying in a plane crash are almost zero.

 

There is a lot of magical thinking about COVID-19 still. Most people get that the chances of dying of COVID-19 are way worse than dying in a plane crash. Especially if you are over 65. Some people still haven't grasped this idea, though.

 

It is magic to think that a month from now, the virus won't have the same impact it did two months ago. It will. How broadly it spreads will be a matter of how the economy is reopened, and what precautions people take.

 

That said, the US is committed to not having a simple and effective national plan: TEST, TRACE, TREAT. Some states, like California and Ohio, are aggressively ramping up test, trace, treat. Others are not. It's pretty likely that the states that ignore what has been effective everywhere else in the world are simply asking to be morgues. That's the thing about a viruses like COVID-19. They are very scientific, and mathematical. They are smart little buggers.

 

Here's some interesting comparisons of other countries that have reopened, in terms of the numbers of deaths reported yesterday:

 

Australia - 1 death

Austria - 1 death

China - 7 deaths

France - 131 deaths

Iceland - 0 deaths

Japan - 5 deaths

South Korea - 1 death

Spain - 59 deaths

Thailand - 0 deaths

 

Meanwhile, the United States had 1,003 deaths yesterday. That's five times more than all those other countries combined. Which of these ones is not like the others?

 

The more important question is: WHY is the United States not like the others? The basic answer is simple: test, trace, treat. Other countries are using it nationally, and aggressively. The US is not. They are stopping the mass death of seniors citizens. We are not. It's pretty much that simple.

 

In past iterations of this discussion about numbers, what has been effective in reducing mass senior citizen death in every other nations has been dismissed: they are an island, or not an island; they are a big country, or a small country; they are Madagscar, or they are not Madagscar.

 

So @Unicorn and @bigjoey will believe whatever they wish to believe. But all these countries embraced variations of the same idea: shut down, then reopen with a very aggressive program of test, trace, and treat in place. So far, it is mostly working everywhere it has been tried.

 

Since it has not really been tried in the US yet, that would explain why we are losing 1000 people a day, mainly seniors. The scientists are all saying that that 1000 will go back up to 2000 and higher when the impact of reopening occurs weeks from now. Time will tell.

 

Most states have not met the minimal guidelines set by Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. Those two people are among the most highly respected experts in the country. Yet one wonders why their ideas aren't as respected. especially since their ideas seem to actually be working everywhere except the US. Maybe this is part of the multivariate "American personality" model @bigjoey posited. Does this have something to do with "the American personality", @bigjoey? I guess I don't understand that part of the American personality. Please explain.

 

I included France and Spain as two examples of countries that were hit by the mass slaughter first, and were also morgues not that long ago. They are two examples of how countries have used test, trace, treat to stop the mass death of senior citizens. Which, to me, seems like a pretty awesome goal. Why should we want 1000 or 2000 seniors to die of COVID-19 in the US every day? It makes no sense to me. None whatsoever.

 

Spain went from a peak of 8,271 new cases in one day in late March to 469 new cases yesterday. That's a 94 % reduction.

 

France went from a peak of 17,355 new cases in one day in early April to 358 new cases yesterday. That's a 98 % reduction.

 

The US went from a peak of 38,958 new cases in late April to 22,630 yesterday. That's a 42 % reduction. Again, which of these countries is not like the other? And why? The blunt instrument of a national shutdown stopped the bleeding, like it was supposed to and like it did everywhere. Other countries seem to have figured out how to actually contain the virus, drive the numbers down to next to nothing, and stop the mass death of senior citizens. In the US, we haven't really tried that yet.

 

This is as good as it gets for the US, probably. Because deaths lags. So we know that the 190 deaths that occurred in France and Spain yesterday will be lower a month from now. That's because the number of new daily cases has been dramatically cut by an effective nationwide test, trace, treat program in countries that were morgues.

 

The same thing could probably work in the US - notwithstanding "the American personality" - if it were tried. Why aren't we trying it? I don't get it. It seems like we are saying we would prefer the plane to be able to crash. Again, time will tell.

 

California and Ohio and some other states are ramping up small armies of contact tracers. So maybe what works in China, or Austria, or Iceland, or Australia could work here, of course. Or maybe somehow mass senior citizen death is just in the cards in the US. Like I said, time will tell.

[+ stevenkesslar]

There's important part of the numbers problems with reopening: workers.

 

Some people like to say it's mostly seniors dying. That's true, which is the nature of flu-like viral disease. But that doesn't mean lots of workers who are not seniors don't get very sick.

 

Some people also like to say most of these deaths are in and around New York or New England. That's not true. That's like saying because the last plane crash was in New York, planes can only crash in New York. Actually, planes can crash anywhere. And pandemics can and do eventually spread everywhere.

 

Case in point: South Dakota. Which is pretty much the opposite of New York in every way.

 

COVID-19 IN SOUTH DAKOTA

 

I've been keeping my eye on Minnehaha County, South Dakota. That's where Smithfield Foods had to close down a meat packing plant because hundreds of their workers tested positive for COVID-19. If you want to understand how work places in every part of the US will become hospitals and morgues, that state's data is comprehensive and helpful. Absent something like "test, trace, treat", it is likely where the US is headed.

 

South Dakota is overwhelmingly White. But only 30 % of people with COVID-19 in South Dakota are White. And about 9 in 10 of those with the disease are under the age of 65. So in South Dakota, COVID-19 isn't a nursing home disease, like it was at first in Washington state. It is a work force disease.

 

The numbers are staggering for anyone who thinks we can just reopen and work our way through this. While most of the original cases in Minehaha County were meat packing factory workers, there are now 3,150 cases in the county. So COVID-19 did exactly what Dr. Fauci is warning it can do anywhere . It jumped the factory wall and got outside, into broad community spread. Not only did it force a factory to shut down. That whole community is now living under a cloud of disease and death. If it could happen in South Dakota, it could happen anywhere.

 

Of the 3150 people infected in Minehaha County, 233 had to be hospitalized, and 39 died. So that's a 7.4 % hospitalization rate. And 1.2 % of those infected ended up dead. How do you run a work force when you are faced with 7 % of them needing to be hospitalized, and 1 % of them dying?

 

This is going to be a huge numbers problem in every state in America. Which is probably why California, which alone is the 5th largest economy in the world, has business community support for the idea that we'd better have this figured out before the economy reopens. There's no way any office or church or restaurant or retail store can function when you work force is largely sick, and maybe 7 % of them are so sick they need to go to the hospital. That's not work. That's a plane crash.

 

The good news from Minehaha County is they figured it out better late than never. As that state website shows, the number of new cases went from a peak of about 300 a day in late March to 11 yesterday. They got on on the "test, trace, treat" bandwagon. They had to. Because COVID-19 sickened and killed an unacceptable number of workers and seniors. Of the total of 44 deaths in the entire state, 39 were in that one county. Only two of the dead were under 50 years old. 24 of the 44 dead were over 80.

 

So the pattern is clear, and a potential disaster in the making. Lots of workers get sick, all at once. The hospital and ICU fills to 100 % of capacity. It spreads out into the community, and many senior citizens die. That plan could happen anywhere.

 

It is magical thinking to hope and wish that the virus will go away. Just like in March, magical thinking simply invites the mass death of senior citizens. And in the US, the mass daily death of seniors from COVID-19 still hasn't even stopped. States like California and Ohio, among others, will be able to demonstrate whether we can actually avoid every other county in America being like Minehaha County.

[+ stevenkesslar]

Interesting statistic that 75% of deaths were in nursing homes and seniors with home care. That shows that if the vulnerable population had been properly protected, the death rate would have been substantially lower.

 

Or, it shows the idea that you can "properly protect" seniors in the middle of a massive viral wildfire just totally sucked to begin with.

 

It's an interesting concept to say that we'll expose most of the population to a lethal and highly contagious virus, and yet somehow magically bubble wrap the most vulnerable people for a year or so. How was that ever supposed to work? Other than by magic?

 

The author of the policy, Anders Tegnall, has admitted repeatedly that the idea of keeping seniors safe - which was at the core of the policy from Day One - simply did not work. So it was not a bug in the software. It was that the entire idea was just wrong.

 

I lived this for close to a decade with my Mom and Dad in a nursing home. My Dad died of pneumonia a few years ago. It could easily have been COVID-19 were he still alive today. Many of the workers in the nursing home were local college students (the entry level jobs with close contact, like they put the plate of food on your table), or Moms with kids (the professional nurses, social workers, rehab therapists).

 

They were all wonderful, caring people. And they would all make fantastic virus spreaders. So the idea that you could somehow let a virus run amok in a community but magically keep it out of nursing homes is just a stupid idea.

 

I mean, it is just bat shit crazy stupid. Anybody who has ever cared for a loved one in a nursing home would know this immediately.

 

Except, of course, for the Tom Friedman types. He calls this plan "harmonious balance". Let the virus hit everybody else - as if having lots of sick and hospitalized workers doesn't fuck everything up - and "harmoniously" shelter seniors.

 

Frankly, I think of it as the mass slaughter of senior citizens, based on stupid ideas that were never going to work in practice. Not that anything that elitists like Friedman have ever thought up has actually worked in practice.

 

Sweden had no lockdown but its economy is expected to suffer just as badly as its European neighbors

 

And that's the really bat shit crazy part. Sweden managed to maximize the mass death of senior citizens relative to their neighbors. But its economy is no better for it.

 

Again, call me bat shit crazy. But I am a proud and stubborn capitalist. And being a capitalist, this makes total sense to me. Capitalism works based on markets, and demand. When you have a lethal virus, it fucks up markets, and demand. It did that in 1918 and 1919. It is doing it again in 2019 and 2020. Seniors don't want to die. Workers don't want to get sick or be hospitalized. The only difference, THANK GOD, is that unlike the 1918 virus this one does not particularly prey on young adults.

 

The scientists and the economists agree. The driver of this crisis is a lethal virus. Until we get that under control, the economy is fucked. Period. That's how capitalism works. That's why all these other countries figured out, correctly, that they had to try to use lock downs and "test, trace, treat" to first get the virus under control.

 

Since the virus is now not running amok in Austria or Australia, and dozens of other capitalist nations, now they can gradually and somewhat safely reopen. And the risk to seniors in nursing homes is far lower - simply because the virus is not being allowed to run amok everywhere.

 

Maybe it doesn't sound as nice as "harmonious balance". But the idea of avoiding the mass death of senior citizens still sounds pretty good to me.

Edited May 19, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[Guest]

... And about 9 in 10 of those with the disease are under the age of 65. So in South Dakota, COVID-19 isn't a nursing home disease, like it was at first in Washington state. It is a work force disease.

...

 

Of the 3150 people infected in Minehaha County, 233 had to be hospitalized, and 39 died. So that's a 7.4 % hospitalization rate. And 1.2 % of those infected ended up dead. How do you run a work force when you are faced with 7 % of them needing to be hospitalized, and 1 % of them dying?

 

...They got on on the "test, trace, treat" bandwagon. They had to. Because COVID-19 sickened and killed an unacceptable number of workers and seniors. Of the total of 44 deaths in the entire state, 39 were in that one county. Only two of the dead were under 50 years old. 24 of the 44 dead were over 80.

 

... The hospital and ICU fills to 100 % of capacity. It spreads out into the community, and many senior citizens die. That plan could happen anywhere.

 

It is magical thinking to hope and wish that the virus will go away...

 

Sometimes you get a bit nutty, SK. First of all, when you say "test, trace, treat" what on God's earth are you talking about? Do you know about a highly effective treatment no one else on this planet knows about? No one thinks the virus will go away. The question is the wisest way of facing the challenge. Test, trace, treat hasn't worked for any illness, even those with highly effective treatments, and low transmissibility, like gonorrhea and syphilis. And Covid-19 is almost infinitely more contagious, and there's really no effective treatment (remdesivir seems to maybe cut mortality by a quarter). The reason Washington's outbreak was first identified in nursing homes, is that this is where people were dying. When one person got sick in the SD meat packing plant, they tested everyone in the place, and that's why they found all of those cases.

In the recent outbreak in the Missouri plant, a month later in May, almost none of the workers even had symptoms, and none of those few that did even had to be hospitalized. Good bet that the difference in weather had something to do with it. As for SD, you don't know that there's a 1.2% mortality from contracting the virus. You only know that it's 1.2% of those tested. We now know that the vast majority of those infected don't even have any symptoms.

Even if what you meant to say was "test, trace, quarantine," which at least makes a little more sense, how do you expect to do that when most people with the virus are asymptomatic? The survey of NYC showed 20% of the entire city had antibodies to the virus. That's over 1 million people in NYC alone. With millions infected in a country the size of the US, you'd have to somehow simultaneously get a nasal swab from just about everyone. This is a virus that can be contracted just by touching a grocery cart or elevator button.

I suspect that the best way to reduce the total number of deaths in the long run is to (1) take special measures to protect those at risk (nursing home residents, assisted living facilities, etc.) by only allowing those who are either antibody positive or who test negative daily for infection to have contact with this vulnerable population, and (2) gradually open things up to develop a herd immunity during a time when the virus has been shown to be less virulent--in hotter weather.

The plain reality is that this virus is too widespread in the US to contain it at this time. The best we can do is to mitigate the damage.

Edited May 20, 2020 by Unicorn

[+ sync]

What is particularly chilling about raging infectious diseases is the way they prey upon the mindset as well as the body. It must be pure hell for individuals who experience heightened anxiety from isolation or suffer from germaphobia. My anxiety is fueled by the federal government's slapstick-like approach to C19. If the vaccine for this is created in the United States, believe you me, I'm in no way going to be among the first to get it. This administration would push any old covfefe to spike the economy.

[Guest]

Well @stevenkesslar welcome back and thank you for making your presence known in traditional fashion. My words will be brief and I will quote someone I think you respect:

“If you notice, 18% of the people came from nursing homes, less than 1% came from jail or prison, 2% came from the homeless population, 2% from other congregate facilities,

but 66% of the people were at home

, which is shocking to us,” [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo said.

“

This is a surprise: Overwhelmingly, the people were at home

,” he added. “We thought maybe they were taking public transportation, and we’ve taken special precautions on public transportation,

but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”

Cuomo said nearly 84% of the hospitalized cases were people who were not commuting to work through car services, personal cars, public transit or walking. He said a majority of those people were either retired or unemployed.

 

so, yes...sometimes stuff just happens. People get sick. People die. The only certainty life contains is death...but that fact seems very disconcerting to you but as Patricia Briggs said “Fear makes idiots of us all, at some time or other”

 

BTW - 1,000/day is 1/10th of 1% annualized in the US

Edited May 19, 2020 by BnaC

[+ bigjoey]

Or, it shows the idea that you can "properly protect" seniors in the middle of a massive viral wildfire just totally sucked to begin with.

 

It's an interesting concept to say that we'll expose most of the population to a lethal and highly contagious virus, and yet somehow magically bubble wrap the most vulnerable people for a year or so. How was that ever supposed to work? Other than by magic?

 

The author of the policy, Anders Tegnall, has admitted repeatedly that the idea of keeping seniors safe - which was at the core of the policy from Day One - simply did not work. So it was not a bug in the software. It was that the entire idea was just wrong.

 

I lived this for close to a decade with my Mom and Dad in a nursing home. My Dad died of pneumonia a few years ago. It could easily have been COVID-19 were he still alive today. Many of the workers in the nursing home were local college students (the entry level jobs with close contact, like they put the plate of food on your table), or Moms with kids (the professional nurses, social workers, rehab therapists).

 

They were all wonderful, caring people. And they would all make fantastic virus spreaders. So the idea that you could somehow let a virus run amok in a community but magically keep it out of nursing homes is just a stupid idea.

 

I mean, it is just bat shit crazy stupid. Anybody who has ever cared for a loved one in a nursing home would know this immediately.

 

Except, of course, for the Tom Friedman types. He calls this plan "harmonious balance". Let the virus hit everybody else - as if having lots of sick and hospitalized workers doesn't fuck everything up - and "harmoniously" shelter seniors.

 

Frankly, I think of it as the mass slaughter of senior citizens, based on stupid ideas that were never going to work in practice. Not that anything that elitists like Friedman have ever thought up has actually worked in practice.

 

Sweden had no lockdown but its economy is expected to suffer just as badly as its European neighbors

 

And that's the really bat shit crazy part. Sweden managed to maximize the mass death of senior citizens relative to their neighbors. But its economy is no better for it.

 

Again, call me bat shit crazy. But I am a proud and stubborn capitalist. And being a capitalist, this makes total sense to me. Capitalism works based on markets, and demand. When you have a lethal virus, it fucks up markets, and demand. It did that in 1918 and 1919. It is doing it again in 2019 and 2020. Seniors don't want to die. Workers don't want to get sick or be hospitalized. The only difference, THANK GOD, is that unlike the 1918 virus this one does not particularly prey on young adults.

 

The scientists and the economists agree. The driver of this crisis is a lethal virus. Until we get that under control, the economy is fucked. Period. That's how capitalism works. That's why all these other countries figured out, correctly, that they had to try to use lock downs and "test, trace, treat" to first get the virus under control.

 

Since the virus is now not running amok in Austria or Australia, and dozens of other capitalist nations, now they can gradually and somewhat safely reopen. And the risk to seniors in nursing homes is far lower - simply because the virus is not being allowed to run amok everywhere.

 

Maybe it doesn't sound as nice as "harmonious balance". But the idea of avoiding the mass death of senior citizens still sounds pretty good to me.

 

Typical Steven post that is verbose, repetitive and misleading. For example, Sweden’s Anders Tegnall did not say that his policy was wrong as Steven implies in his cleverly worded post to give that impression He has admitted errors in execution:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8273237/amp/Swedens-virologist-admits-little-protect-elderly.html

 

Steven fails to point out why Sweden’s economy is being hard hit like other European countries: the global economy is affecting its exports as well as its manufacturing supply chain. The global economy is affecting tourism. However, the small local businesses like stores, restaurants, bars, etc are not taking the wipe-out hit that other places with a total lock down have seen.

 

Economic, physical and emotional health as well as education are important and that is what Sweden is recognizing. If Tegnall is correct, in the long term if Sweden avoids the second and third waves of the virus due to herd immunity, the way Sweden is handling this will be successful. That assessment will need to wait until history is written looking backwards.

Edited May 19, 2020 by bigjoey

[Populist Fury]

Sweden took the correct + courageous science-based approach in dealing with the SARS-CoV-2 virus ?

 

Those of us not brainwashed by our hysterical "news" media have been saying it since day 1.

[+ WilliamM]

Sweden took the correct + courageous science-based approach in dealing with the SARS-CoV-2 virus ?

 

Those of us not brainwashed by our hysterical "news" media have been saying it since day 1.

 

CNN is not "hysterical," like Fox News. It is time to stop reading when someone writes "those of us" at least for me.

[Guest]

CNN is not "hysterical," like Fox News. It is time to stop reading when someone writes "those of us" at least for me.

 

Lemon and Cuomo...the Hysterical Duo! Wasn’t it Lemon who suggested that a plane disappeared because of a UFO or a black hole??

 

Hint...YES!!!

 

https://www.businessinsider.com/ridiculous-malaysia-plane-theories-cnn-has-considered-2014-3

[+ WilliamM]

Lemon and Cuomo...the Hysterical Duo! Wasn’t it Lemon who suggested that a plane disappeared because of a UFO or a black hole??

 

Hint...YES!!!

 

https://www.businessinsider.com/ridiculous-malaysia-plane-theories-cnn-has-considered-2014-3

 

Fox News has Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and several part-time loonies. Enough said.

[Guest]

CNN is not "hysterical," like Fox News. It is time to stop reading when someone writes "those of us" at least for me.

I'm not sure "hysterical" is the right word, but the press sure has been inflammatory often. Just yesterday on the local news, the reporters were saying that "deaths are increasing," even though the number of daily deaths was decreasing. Yes, technically, as long as there is at least one death, the total number of deaths has increased. The total number of deaths cannot decrease. But to say that "deaths are increasing" when the total number of deaths per day has been decreasing steadily is misleading at best. So far, I'm not hearing the press say things such as "hospitals have been mostly empty, ICU beds are as empty as they've been in years, and serious Covid cases have been falling," although this is often the case. Keeping the public on edge and glued to their TV sets seems to be the priority, rather than putting things into perspective.

[+ stevenkesslar]

 

Another chart I stumbled on that tells the story of Sweden in a particularly clear way.

 

Obviously whoever did that chart did it to make a point about Sweden. If you added Spain or Italy or France, it would look very different.

 

That said, the headline on Reddit that I found that chart in said this:

 

Sweden shows the world what "herd immunity" looks like: Hint: They're fucked

 

I don't disagree with that sentiment. This is a global science experiment in which nobody really wants to be the control group.

 

Note that the chart is a month old. What has happened since then actually reinforces the point.

 

Sweden is now at 3,743 deaths - even further ahead of the pack. Of that group of nations in the chart, Poland is now in second place, at 948 deaths. Denmark is at 551 deaths. Finland is at 301. Norway has 233 deaths. The most amazing example is South Korea. They have barely moved in the last month. They have 263 deaths.

 

What makes South Korea an even more inspiring example is that they have a population five times greater than Sweden. So adjusted for that, South Korea has 5 deaths per million citizens. Sweden has 371 deaths per millions citizens.

 

Anders Tegnell was 100 % wrong about how Sweden was going to stop the mass death of senior citizens. The "let's try herd immunity" approach actually induced the mass death of seniors in Sweden, by allowing the virus to run amok. I suspect he is also wrong about "herd immunity". He says that Sweden will achieve it relatively soon. Except, there is no evidence that suggests even a substantial minority of Swedes has been infected. Or that prior infection confers future immunity for any known period of time. So all we know for a fact is that the plan Sweden is following clearly results in a maximization of death, especially for senior citizens. Who wants that?

 

Meanwhile, there is no evidence that Sweden's economy fared better than others that endured harsher lock downs. That's because it makes sense that this virus is what is causing the economy to suffer. The lock downs are simply a response to it.

 

What seems unfathomable to me is that the approach that clearly prevents the most death is not always the most popular one. The closest brush I've has with death so far is one of my brothers, who I spent a year helping care for as he died of pancreatic cancer. If there were two treatments for pancreatic cancer, and one led to a 50 % reduction in death and the other led to no reduction in death, it's an easy guess which one him and his wife would choose. Right?

 

So the way I look at these numbers is that it is actually a pretty simple idea, even though it takes a huge amount of unity and discipline to implement it. The countries that have reduced or prevented death the most had one basic thing in common: they decided to stop death. Other countries, like Sweden, that have suffered the most deaths just have not tried. In the case of Sweden, they actually decided it was better to let things run their course.

 

There are, of course, big exceptions: France, Italy, and Spain in particular. They got hit hard, and have death rates relative to their population that are as much as double Sweden's. That said, they have also proved the point about how this is a choice that every country will make. They initiated some of the harshest lock downs. In some cases, you had to fill out a piece of paper just to leave your home for a month or so. The message was clear, and intensely enforced. And in every case, they cut the number of cases and the number of deaths by somewhere in the ballpark of 90 percent. Who would not want 90 less death?

 

Germany was never as bad off as its neighbors, because it was ahead of the curve. They seem to have the most aggressive testing, tracing, and treatment program of any of the large EU countries. Which is probably one of reasons why they've suffered a relatively low 98 deaths per 1 million residents, which is roughly one quarter of what Sweden has endured.

 

The final thing is that the countries that have really excelled at testing, tracing, and treating actually have not had to endure the kind of lock downs other countries have. So you can argue that Iceland or South Korea are excellence by exception, or islands, or whatever. But the whole point of the lock down was to quickly suppress the virus, so that after the lock down it could be controlled. In the countries that moved quickly, broad lock downs were not even needed. Or they were over quicker, as the nation got some sort of system to control the virus in place. And, at least so far, those systems are mostly working.

 

So those countries can have their economy, and their health, too. And the problem with that is .............?

 

I'm hopeful that some version of this will work in the United States.

 

The states that have really been off the chart in the US are New York - 1,472 deaths per million - and New Jersey - 1,192. They both had the misfortune of being the control group in the US. They got to be our herd immunity experiment, even though they obviously did not choose that experiment.

 

I honestly think it was just bad luck. It seems like it could have been California, where we now know the first deaths from COVID-19 actually occurred. That said, it may have helped that California was also ahead of the curve on shutting the state down temporarily to suppress the virus's spread early on.

 

The four other states that I think will be interesting to watch, with the number of deaths per million residents, are: Ohio (147 deaths per million), Florida (95 deaths per million), California (87 deaths per million), and Texas (48 deaths per million). Note that all four of those states are right in the ballpark of Germany. Meaning they have way fewer deaths than what happened in Spain or France or Italy, and fewer still than what happened in New York or New Jersey. This is good news. This is strong reason for hope.

 

I'll save any political comments for the political forum. But the reason I even mention politics here is I think that this is fundamentally pretty apolitical. These states all have very different political cultures. But the outcomes are still roughly equivalent. Compared to New York or New Jersey, the number of deaths have been small. Relative to population, Texas has had 30 times fewer deaths than New York.

 

Here's another interesting and relevant statistic about those four states. In all for cases, they have had no more death than than have from the season flu. Florida (2000 flu deaths a year) and Ohio (1700 flu deaths a year) have both has just about the same number of deaths from COVID-19 every year. California and Texas are still well below the number of flu deaths they experience every year. Of course, that's apples to oranges. W're only two months into the COVID-19 pandemic. And it took extraordinary lock down to avoid what happened in New York and New Jersey, which have both had about 10 times as many deaths as they suffer from the flu every year. My point is that I don't think we have to question why people approve of these lock downs. 90 % less death is always a good thing to most people.

 

I see this as having way more to do with human nature than politics. The simple fact about human nature is that people don't want to die. Nobody likes the idea of herd immunity when they are the part of the herd most likely to end up dead. And the best theory I've read about why Florida has fared relatively well is that it is chock full of well educated and resourceful senior citizens who simply would rather not die.

 

In each of those four states, somewhere right around 2 to 3 % of the population has been tested for COVID-19. I don't read or hear anything about resistance to testing or tracing here in California, where the state is well into building an army of contact tracers. The people I know don't particularly want to leave their home, and would be perfectly happy to be tested. Nobody I know wants to gamble on herd immunity. They'll take the vaccine as soon as possible, or a mask and social distancing for now, thank you.

 

So the notion that what is happening in Sweden is somehow inevitable seems like: 1) nonsense, and 2) a veiled death wish which is unpopular in most places, because it is contrary to human nature. Maybe we will all learn, sadly, that the patience of people in all these other countries that seem to have beat the virus, and are going back to work, has just worn out. Maybe the virus will beat us in the long run.

 

In the short run, it sure seems like other nations are beating the virus where ever they have actually tried. As a happy bonus, it also seems like beating the virus is actually better for the economy.

Edited May 20, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[xyz48B]

It seems pandemics end when people decide they end.

Snarky alternative hypothesis: election is over in November, regardless of outcome, and it’s all over.

 

It’s also interesting to see folks who normally lambast Sweden as a socialist dystopia hold it up now as a paradigm for the world.

 

Hypocrisy- n.the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.