Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Interesting study on the shutdown and it's impact. I briefly read it, I know a few in here have a background in research and maybe can add some thoughts. I imagine some will dismiss it because it doesn't fit their narrative. US could have been much worse off without the shutdown. The part about school closures is interesting and unexpected.
Study: Shutdowns prevented 60 milllion coronavirus cases in US

 

If true, that's a lot of lives saved. Even at just 1%, that's 600K.

With overwhelmed health care facilities, it may have been closer to the 5% we're seeing on known cases... or 3 million people. Which is an estimate I heard early on from an MD I know.

 

I think we are slowly finding the middle ground that works.
But I was thinking last night that the ncaa and nba ending their seasons when they did likely saved thousands, if not tens of thousands of lives. The exponential spread and domino effects that would have come from those events Is really hard to imagine if even one or two arenas had a bad spread, given what happened in Italy from just one sporting event.

 

Coronavirus: Plasma therapy for COVID-19, what it is and how it works

I hope this is a useful alternative as well as other drugs they are trying.

 

It is a decent study on first glance but I would certainly have a couple of questions: 1. Why did they utilize data from unreliable sources like China and Iran? Now, that shouldn't have much effect on their US estimates given the panel structure of their data, but still seems like a questionable decision. 2. Why not exploit variation between local areas in the US? The issue with doing that might be variance in testing that would be difficult to control for. You would need to do some sort of endogenous selection control to deal with issues of non-randomly assigned testing and then exploit the local differences. Difficult model to do considering all of the other moving parts, but that is probably better than just utilizing a fixed-effects regression.

Still, it likely gets us into the ballpark. 60 million cases likely means the shutdowns saved something like 300,000-600,000 lives.

 

Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is 'very rare,' WHO says

 

took 41 days for new cases to double from 1 million to 2 million, also 41 days for deaths to double from 55,000 to 110,000. seems there was a awful lot of talk about much faster doubling of both of these, so,. where are those people now that the rapid explosion predicted did not happen, especially since they said opening up states would lead to those increases?

 

Who quoted a much faster doubling?
Seems like 55,000 more dead Americans is a lot.

 

Sobering update for any North Carolinian from the weekend. The governor has finally noticed that we may have a problem!!

The state is advocating that anyone who has attended church in the past few weeks and/or any other mass gathering (this is you protesters and race car fans....wow, there is a pair) to immediately be tested. State officials are fearful that tracers may have discovered "super spreaders" linked to protests and.....yep....church attendance. Well done North Carolina.....even my team in China is asking me "What in the hell is wrong with you people"?

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article243353621.html

 

Florida's seeing a surge in coronavirus cases. But there's good news, too - CNN

 

Again with those graphs?
An overwhelming majority of those filling hospital rooms and ICU's are NOT COVID related. Thus the reason we are barely touching our ventilators. If our ICU's are full of COVID patients, it would seem we would be venting many of them. Yet the ventilators are barely touched.

Sorry man. We just don't see this eye to eye.

I think as we push into our 4th week of reopening, having barely touched our ventilators is a pretty encouraging sign.

Do you have a link to our states request that all church goers be tested?
Is that statewide or isolated?

Also the N&O says the healthcare system is fine:

 

Which people are you referring to? Devoid of any specific quote, you appear to be manufacturing an argument.

 

Quoted for emphasis.
Good news in that this will help with tracking.

 

Are you willing to admit that it appears the infection is spreading in North Carolina at this point as the percentage of positive tests and the number of tests increase?

 

The most important stats probably relate to hospitalization and fatality. Case numbers continue to increase and while problematic, increased cases does not necessarily indicate the disease's danger. Hospitalization in NC are increasing, but is the rate of hospitalizations increasing? Is the case fatality rate increasing?

Obviously, Covid is not disappearing . . . at all. What we can hope is that it becomes less and less lethal.

 

Will be interesting to watch hospitalizations this week. The trend has been favorable since late April. The last report indicated 7,280 new cases over the last 6 days. Estimated active hospitalizations are down 30% since late April despite an almost 120% increase in cases.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

Pretty easy to see where the modeling was about 41 days ago. You can look up the models from 4/27. They did not systematically overestimate deaths at this point in time. In fact, if anything they were, on average, a bit lower on their death count totals than what we saw.

Where The Latest COVID-19 Models Think We're Headed — And Why They Disagree

 

I have said all along that the increase in cases and testing coincide. I have no other real claims beside that.
Deaths have been declining as has respirator need.

 

I think that is why @ncargat1 and I can look at the same numbers and both be right to an extent.
On one hand testing/cases are up, and Hospitalizations seem to be increasing a bit, meanwhile hardly any covid patients are on vents and the death rate has slowly declined outside of the memorial day anomaly. And that is with us 3 weeks into phase two.

 

You mean our governor marching with his mask off?