Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

He was just saying that to poke the hive and see what would happen. Kind of like most of his comments. I don't know what he actually believes, but I'm pretty certain most of his comments don't contain his actual beliefs.

 

COVID-19 expert: Coronavirus will rage 'until it infects everybody it possibly can'

Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the initial wave of outbreaks in cities such as New York City, where one in five people have been infected, represent a fraction of the illness and death yet to come.

"This damn virus is going to keep going until it infects everybody it possibly can," Osterholm said Monday during a meeting with the USA TODAY Editorial Board. "It surely won’t slow down until it hits 60 to 70%" of the population, the number that would create herd immunity and halt the spread of the virus.
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"It’s the big peak that’s really going to do us in," he said. "As much pain, suffering, death and economic disruption we’ve had, there’s been 5 to 20% of the people infected, ... That’s a long ways to get to 60 to 70%."
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0.7 * 340M * 1% = 2.38M

 

Is it really that? Not saying you're wrong but do the numbers extrapolate out that way? What if far less old and at risk get it? Then the mortality rate drops. So the math changes.
Certainly if a higher % of the at risk the numbers would be worse.
For Discussion sake at risk= over 65 and people with multiple chronic medical issues.. HTN/DM/Obesity/COPD? CAD

 

well if you want to ramp up the testing to 2 or 3 times what it is now, guess what, you stand the chance of more positive tests, thus making it hard to meet a 14 decline to re-open. how about using the % of positive tests after each day, if florida is at a 4% daily positive, watch it over 7-10 days and see if it remains stable or goes down, even with more testing.

 

Lol no, it's not even close. The bubonic plague once wiped out a quarter of human population. Now it kills no one in any place with access to antibiotics. In 1918 most people died of secondary pneumonia, today we have antibiotics for that, not to mention ventilators, dialysis, transfusions that are matched for blood type, etc. etc.

To give you a comparison using things that are easily comparable, infant mortality rate dropped >10x from 1935 to now. In 1918 even without the pandemic it was probably ~15x higher. This is likely an underestimation in the improvement in medicine because a lot of neonatal mortality these days is due to genetic disorders that medicine can't help much. If you compare maternal mortality rate, from 1915 to now it's dropped about 50 times.

United States: infant mortality rate 1935-2020 | Statista

https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/ourstories/mchb75th/mchb75maternalmortality.pdf

 

I think he actually believed that one at the time. You can't really blame him though. His president, whom he really really likes, was telling him that the virus was no big deal. He believed it.

 

The interesting part of that underlying this would be that there are people out there that should be getting tests that aren't. The problem with exclusively using % positive is that smart policy, i.e., proper test allocation, would naturally increase that percentage while improper allocation would decrease that ratio.

 

Yeah, the Dems are trying to help people and at the same time help Republicans avoid electoral disaster. The Repubs are too dumb to take it though.

 

Lot's of abouts and guesses in there. Medicine is much better now no doubt, but even in the 1968 Flu Pandemic where 1 Million people died worldwide, I doubt that Covid-19 gets there. I sincerely hope it doesn't. Since we know Covid-19 has been around since late Dec/Early Jan at least, hopefully we can get accurate death totals sometime soon.

 

Guidelines. If they meet the guidelines, let’s go. If the guidelines are wrong, change them. But let’s not publish guidelines and ignore them. Pretty simple concepts.

 

you cannot, imo, meet the current guidelines of 14 day decline in positive tests if you test 3x what was in place when the guideline was given. i still think a stable or slightly lower daily % would work. if you have 10,000 daily tests and 400 are positive that is 4%, 20,000 test with 700 positive is 3,5% positive, more positive due to more tests, but a lower% positive, which is the overall goal to re-open, just a thought.

 

Got it. Change them. The question is either why have they not changed them if they don’t make sense. How are governors supposed to know what to ignore and what to follow?

It’s on the administration to update the guidelines if needed. They’re not doing that according to your reasoning.

 

The "abouts" are because I rounded the numbers. Read the links if you want the exact numbers. For example, the maternal mortality rate in 1915 was 47.87 times that of 2007's.

Covid-19 will kill a lot more than a million. The 1 million estimate are a post-hoc analysis number, the actual confirmed flu-related deaths, which the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths are world wide are, are only a small fraction of it. For example, do you remember the study that estimated flu mortality in Italy was 68,000 in 3 years? Do you know how many actually confirmed flu deaths in Italy there is each year? Up until the end January this year, Italy has only recorded 240 confirmed flu-related deaths. 240. From an estimate of over 20,000 a year. We test for the flu much more rigorously in the US, and in recent years the highest confirmed flu-related deaths was 15,620, while the estimate was 69,000 or over 4x the confirmed number.

With some 250,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths already worldwide, it's likely that post-hoc analysis will estimate COVID-19 deaths worldwide at over 1 million AT THIS DATE.

 

obviously it is to late to change given the number of states that are, or will be re-opening, i think it is up to 40 if i am not mistaken, really hard to say, opps, our bad, close-up again.

 

Help me out with how the numbers mesh. If we have 82,000 deaths at "5% to 20% of the people infected." then wouldn't we be looking at between 3x and 14x "to get to 60 to 70%?"

5% x 14 = 70%
20% x 3 = 60%

3x current deaths = 246,000
14x current deaths = 1,148,000

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If we change the variables around to arrive at the death totals (let's add an additional 20,000 for deaths of known cases that we can't count yet)...

0.6 * 340M * x = 306,000 (x = .15%)
0.7 * 340M * x = 1,428,000 (x = .60%)

If I'm reading the first quoted comment right, it looks like they are projecting the IFR to be around .15% to .6% rather than 1%.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

I think it depends on what happens in the fall and winter. How bad the signs are of any new outbreak. Obviously once you look at a certain level of illness and death, there is no choice but to close schools, sports, bars, etc.

I'm hopeful the summer months give some level of reprieve to at least slow the spread, but as the experts are basically warning us it will come back, I would almost resign to idea of more hotspots - and if various areas "opening up" aren't cautious, they are going to be ramping up their infections all throughout the summer all around the country. Maybe it will be a slow spread, then "boom" when the traditional flu season hits it will really hit us. Some of those new "hotspots" might make NYC look like a warmup - and they will probably be more dispersed as many places never really had their 1st peak before they shut it down (some places were shut down very early in their localized curves). On a national level we might not have even scratched the surface yet. That is what this article previously posted above suggests.

COVID-19 expert: Coronavirus will rage 'until it infects everybody it possibly can'


I wouldn't even rule out a resurgence in NYC itself, since that place is like an incubator, and they basically have no idea how long the immunity lasts or the actual level of people that may even have antibodies (big difference for future risk depending on whether the existing spread was 10% or 20% or 40% or 60%). The problem is also this: even if a person was infected in February, their antibodies might not still be effective the following January/February. The idea that a person would have an easier time fighting off the virus or even immune to reinfection is an assumption. It may or may not prove correct depending on mutations and how the antibodies work.

 

Thats crazy.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...pear-without-vaccine-fauci-has-said-opposite/

 

Tests? We don't need no stinking tests!

Vaccines? We don't need no stinking vaccines!

 

I haven't been following Cali but that seems crazy. We do a lot of business out there (we are in GA) and the big orders turned back on a month ago in Cali.
Maybe LA is getting hit particularly hard, I am just surprised.