Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

We all want to see things open back up. And soon. But if we act in haste, we'll end up right back where we are today, only with more people sick and dying. That's something I think we all want to avoid.

Start planning now to reopen, but that plan has to include waiting until the number of new cases is on the decline. It should also include testing, both for antibodies for those who have already had the virus, and testing for those who are sick, so they can be isolated. The key is avoid another big outbreak like we've seen in NY/NJ.

And sure, walking down the street in NYC, I'll pass a lot more people than walking down the street in Gilbert, AZ. But the number people I come in contact with in Gilbert while grocery shopping, going to Target, or eating at a restaurant isn't much different than the number of people I'd pass on the street in NYC. Rural areas are certainly different, but even suburbs with significantly lower population density as NYC are just as susceptible to a major outbreak because we congregate in large numbers in a few areas at a similar density at times than what exists in New York.

Nobody is against opening up the economy. It just needs to be done correctly with assurances that everything we've done to socially distance won't be all for naught because we were too quick to reopen.

 

There is little doubt that will happen based on political pressure alone.

My beef the entire time has been “For what?”

We get lots of info about the illness itself. What is the status on the prep? Seems to me that the actual goal is lost, and that ship has sailed.

My guess is that in August, we have a nationwide hotspot, and there will still be the same shortages except in the spots that were forced to deal with it “off the bat” hehe...

It’s a shame that the only way to “understand” an issue is to be directly affected. Which in this case could mean goodbye grandma.

Maybe the stockpiling is happening behind the scenes, but I doubt it. It seems to me that the “it’ll disappear” idea is running the show, and that was silly from the start.

 

I think one way to make people feel comfortable about going back to work is to allow them to continue to collect at least half of unemployment for at least a month or 2 after reemployment. So if for some reason the business has to close due to a spike, they are still on the roll and do not have to reapply for benefits.

 

My Grandma is 94 and nobody is going near her without an N95 mask, which we are lucky to have a handful of. These are the folks people have to be extra careful with. I don't see that changing, and no this virus isn't going away. We are going to have to live with it until we have a vaccine or very reliable treatment. That is the point, we can't stay on lock down until that time. Have to reopen well before then.

I can tell you one thing though, she isn't taking this well. She would rather live her final years seeing her grandkids and great grandkids than be locked up for a year of what she has remaining. Tough situation for sure.

 

Agreed, and no one disagrees. I have an old granny too. I myself am as social as it gets. I play competitive cornhole and that environment is the poster child for Bad Idea right now. Right down to picking up a disease-addled sack of cloth in a room with a couple hundred (mostly) drunk dudes bro-hugging. I myself am JONESING to “get back.” It’s more than just a hobby, I make money (not a lot) from it.

But I know with >99% certainty that it’ll pop up at our tournies almost immediately, and I very much doubt the local (VA) capacity to treat us will have appreciably improved over these two months. I hope I’m wrong, but pretty sure our governor would be crowing about these improvements. No news is bad news in this case.

 

That may motivate some, but I really don't think people who are advocating a partial reopen care about their stocks. I think they can see the massive damage it is causing to the nations economy and they are trying to come up with a reasoned approach to mitigate a total collapse. The treasury can't just keep cutting checks forever. (many don't even qualify for the stimulus).

 

Left unstated in the article but true if you buy the Stanford paper, which I don't due to the elementary-level statistical issues, the rate of transmission is high enough that, no matter what, we lose hundreds of thousands of people. If they are wrong and this has a high but not that high transmission rate, and we take this person's advice, we lose hundreds of thousands of people that didn't need to die. So how much faith should we have in a paper that extrapolated an opt-in sample to an entire population and failed to account for the false positive rate?

People need to get contact tracing in place, set up programs to ensure safe re-openings of businesses, set up programs to account for the fact that many of these businesses could lose more money by reopening with social distancing than they are closed, and work out far more testing than we currently have to find hotspots and shut them down before things get out of control.

 

So you think we stay shut down and we have a Depression that will be worse than the Great Depression? Because those are the options, whether you like them or not. If we don't open back up soon we will have 50+ million out of work. The deaths that will come from that will make the Coronavirus deaths seem small.

 

The data isn’t in. It’s amazing how much one study gets quoted, While ignoring other studies.

New York antibody study estimates 13.9% of residents have had the coronavirus, Cuomo says

addtionally, when the USS Theodore Roosevelt tested the entire ship, about half were asymptotic who tested positive. And that was a young healthy group.

But that NY number would give a mortality rate of around .75%. If half the country were infected that would mean around 1.2 million dead.
Don’t care what age they are, you can’t hide them from the world, look at what’s already happening in nursing homes.

 

posted elsewhere..will add here for discussion.

New Study - NYC Legit Numbers for discussion

88% on ventilators died
Hypertension, obesity, diabetes major pre-exisiting conditions.

death rate (20% of admissions) same as pre-covid death rate of those admitted with respiratory virus......see, I told you it was just like the flu crowd cheers wildly.....go team

apparently we need a new way to introduce O2 other than ventilators for those that crash

In New York’s largest hospital system, 88 percent of coronavirus patients on ventilators didn’t make it

Now five weeks into the crisis, a paper published in the journal JAMA about New York State’s largest health system suggests a reality that like so much else about the novel coronavirus, confounds our early expectations.

Researchers found that 20 percent of all those hospitalized died — a finding that’s similar to the percentage who perish in normal times among those who are admitted for respiratory distress.

But the numbers diverge more for the critically ill put on ventilators. Eighty-eight percent of the 320 covid-19 patients on ventilators who were tracked in the study died. That compares with the roughly 80 percent of patients who died on ventilators before the pandemic, according to previous studies — and with the roughly 50 percent death rate some critical care doctors had optimistically hoped when the first cases were diagnosed.

The analysis is the largest and most comprehensive look at outcomes in the United States to be published so far. Researchers looked at the electronic medical records of 5,700 patients infected with covid-19 between Mar. 1 and Apr. 4 who were treated at Northwell Health’s 12 hospitals located in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County — all epicenters of the outbreak. Sixty percent were male, 40 percent female and the average age was 63.

“It’s important to look to American data as we have different resources in our health care system and different demographics in our populations,” Davidson said.

 

A "reasoned approach" involves gathering medical experts and listening to their counsel. It involves getting a grasp on our national/local capacity to test, track and treat patients. It involves attempting to put low risk industries into motion first and then open the economy in a measured way that is as expedient as possible.

What it does not involve is:
- Idiots not wearing masks or practicing social distancing protesting in state capitals. Trump said this is a "war" and when the country is at war you expect people to "pitch in." Not these clowns. They will gladly risk lives so they can chant on the streets and complain about their "rights."
- It is not opening up tattoo parlors like that idiot in Georgia. Glad Trump said Kemp is irresponsible.
- It is not muzzling medical professionals like Trump has been doing.

I didn't get a check and will not. My portfolio has been hit and I care, like most. But the WORST thing we can do after tanking the economy, is reopen too soon and have to shut it down again. This calls for considered, rational, and patient moves, not stoking idiots with "Liberate Michigan" pablum.

 

That's how I felt about it when this all started, but then Trump had his big first press conference with all the CEOS and I felt reassured that they really had been planning and preparing behind the scenes while projecting calm and assurance in public. Fast forward a month an we found that it really had been thrown together that morning, there hadn't been any planning, and "it'll disappear" really was running the show the whole time.

I don't have any confidence in this administration.

 

Elizabeth Warren’s oldest brother dies of coronavirus in Oklahoma

Senator Warrens older brother,86, in Oklahoma dies of covid

 

New York antibody study estimates 13.9% of residents have had the coronavirus, Gov. Cuomo says

An estimated 13.9% of the New Yorkers have likely had Covid-19, according to preliminary results of coronavirus antibody testing released by Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday.

The state randomly tested 3,000 people at grocery stores and shopping locations across 19 counties in 40 localities, Cuomo said.


“What we found so far is that the state-wide number is 13.9% tested positive for having the antibodies. What does that mean? It means these were people who were infected and who developed the antibodies to fight the infection,” he said. “They were infected three weeks ago, four weeks ago, five weeks ago, six weeks ago, but they had the virus, they developed the antibodies and they are now recovered.’”

 

Glad to see we are finally doing some random testing so we can get good numbers on where we are.

To get herd immunity we need about 5 times that (somewhere in the 60-70% range). That would give us about 100,000 death in New York. 250,000-ish across the United States. But that is assuming the rest of the places with infections have a similar infection rate. We can be pretty sure their infection rate is lower, so we'll call 250,000 a lower bound on fatalities by the time we are through with things. The longer we slow the spread, the more time we buy for developing effective treatments and working on a vaccine and the lower that final number will be.

 

Personally, I'm already fed up with the ultra-presumptuous Open-Now crowd telling me what my life is or isn't worth... makes one wonder if they'd be so bold face-to-face, no pun intended.

 

I was mostly interested in Louisville's response since his plan was to open things widely and strictly isolate the 65+ crowd. With that in mind you'd see an explosion of cases which would make the elderly that you see out and about more at risk. We are talking about 50 million people so I don't believe grocery deliveries could keep up for quite a while. I'm not saying it's insurmountable but I still think a better plan is to test, test, test & isolate as needed. Also determining who has antibodies and how long they last are paramount. Until people feel reasonably safe I don't think opening things up would help much anyway.

 

Where about are you?

 

Put that on the list of sentences I thought I would never see.