Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

If you think any part of that vid was tongue in cheek, there's no hope for you; even asserting that is utterly ridiculous... we've all watched it repeatedly (primarily because it's so hard to believe it's almost impossible no to), and know exactly what he was suggesting. Even if it wasn't a command, who cares; he still thought it was feasible to realize those things as cures... making him not only our dumbest POTUS ever, but also one of the more dangerous ones because of that stupidity.

 

See post 8939. New York was seeded with the strain of virus from Italy

 

They didn't tell me there would be math on the test.

 

New York is a vertical city. It's highrise after highrise, with people living literally on top of each other. Los Angeles is a horizontal city. I once heard a longtime LA resident describing the city as a giant suburb looking for it's center.

Public transportation is also a major difference. You can't get around without a car in LA. In NYC, it's better without a car. It's a matter of when the city began it's growth. NYC has been a hub of activity in the US since its founding. LA only began to grow real big in the 1930s with Hollywood, followed by huge growth after WWII after many servicemen were stationed in California and liked it so much, they stayed. NYC was built by public transportation with trolley cars and subway. LA was built after the invention of the car.

Seattle and San Francisco are the two west coast cities that were built up before the proliferation of the automobile. In comparison, Phoenix is often called the west most suburb of LA, and is extremely car centric. I live in metro Phoenix and have an hour commute by car. My public transportation option? Three hours, three busses, and still over a mile I'd need to walk on a daily basis.

 

Sounds a lot like Orlando, although that is changing according to one of my tailgate buddies who happens to be *cough cough* a RE Developer. He just finished an awesome project downtown and it is kicking a**. I lived on a lake in Clermont and it was 45 minutes into the office until I discovered the Magic (pun intended) of the home office alternative.

 

It appears residents in red states have done a much better job mitigating than those in blue states. Perhaps we should go to a more strict quarantine for the blue states and let the red states open back up (all sectors).

 

I lived there for 2.5 years. Anyone who has lived there understands why it spread much more in that setting.

 

Didn't question or dispute your New York numbers. Nor did I say anything about adding rivers and oceans and reducing the NY average. You said that.

My point was that you were way off in your conclusions about Los Angeles County because your assumptions were fatally flawed. There are parts of LA County that are as dense as Bronx or Brooklyn, and they are in cities.

And equating Los Angeles County, which is part of the most dense urban area in the nation, to El Paso or Colorado Springs is bigly wrong. That's all. When you are talking about the potential transmission of disease, population density matters. Facts matter.

LA County has the largest population of any county in the US by a factor of 2, and is part of the most densely populated urban area in America. That is all.

 

that's the ticket. he was referring to any medicine that would disinfect the body of the virus. not using the bright light to get into the body, that is a whole different level of genius that we just aren't prepared to handle yet.

 

By bright light he meant skittles.

 

try and tell that to the mayor of Albany Ga. That is one small town that is a test case for what can go wrong in small towns, even in red states.

 

And while this is ranked per capita, you can’t ignore the total figures in column 3.

8.2mm in NYC versus 27k in whatever section of LA is most dense. That is a lot more potential patient zeros to start the spread.

And while your math is solid, I don’t understand how anyone who has been to both cities could make an intellectually honest argument LA is close to NYC in density. It’s not even close and math isn’t needed to prove it.

 

Troubling trend: Coronavirus deaths doubled in LA County over last week

LOS ANGELES — The number of coronavirus deaths in Los Angeles County doubled in the last week amid new evidence that the poor are being hardest hit, according to the county health department.
……….
“Because we are still seeing a significant increase in new cases and deaths, we ask that you continue to stay home as much as possible,” Barbara Ferrer, the county’s public health director, said over the weekend.

After appearing to level off for a time, the number of COVID-19 cases reported in Los Angeles County rose at a rapid clip over the past week.

Some of that is because of increased testing, as well as the clearing of a backlog of pending test results, officials said.

Nursing homes alone account for 40% of coronavirus deaths in the county, and there have been new efforts to increase testing and health regulations at the facilities. The California National Guard is now assisting with staffing at some homes.
………………………………………...
Overall, black people continue to be among the highest COVID-19 fatalities in L.A. County, with 13 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with 9.5 for Latinos, 7.5 for Asians and 5.5 for whites, public health officials said.

Officials also revealed that those who live in lower-income communities in L.A. County are three times more likely to die of COVID-19 than those in wealthier communities. Neighborhoods where 30% to 100% of the residents live in poverty have seen about 16.5 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with 5.3 deaths per 100,000 in communities where less than 10% of residents live in poverty, they said.

 

Whatever. Have a nice day!

 

I think that was his point. He mentioned population density and mass transit has factors, just few posts earlier

 

more confirmation that the system did its job and POTUS lack of leadership failed the country

President’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat

U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

 

Until they start listing the tests they are using and we can accurately understand the number of false positives the numbers are somewhat meaningless. The great majority of the antibody tests seem to reveal a lot of false positives (over 5% of total tests)

Coronavirus 'serosurvey' results are coming. Here's how to kick their tires

Those estimates are especially important when the rate of infection in an area is likely low. Even a small over-estimate — say a 5% false positive rate — can vastly increase the final projection of how many people in a location had been infected.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, drew up a chart to explain how different rates of sensitivity and specificity will impact a serology study in an area with 1 million people, using a test that had 95% sensitivity (caught all but 5% of true positives) and 95% specificity (designated as positive only 5% of people who were actually negative).

If 5% of the population had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, there would have been 50,000 infected people. This test would find 47,500 (the true positives) but it would miss 2,500 (the false negatives). And it would detect 47,500 false positives — as many false positives as true positives. If the rate of infection in the community was smaller, the percentage of wrong results would rise. If the rate of infection in the community increased, the errors become less substantial. If 15% of the community — 150,000 — had been infected, this test would find 142,500 true positives, 42,500 false positives, and would miss 7,500 cases — the false negatives.

Applying this knowledge to Thursday’s results from New York puts the picture in sharper focus. The release from the state doesn’t disclose the sensitivity of the test used, but it does note the specificity is between 93% and 100%, a “huge range,” Ashish Jha, head of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, noted on Twitter. If the test performed at the low end of that range, New York’s infection rate would be closer to 7% — half the figure Cuomo announced — and nearly one out of every two positives would have been a false positive, Jha said.