Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

I get a come on man for this.,pointing out positives? I feel some of the others pain.

 

Wasn't the shut down the reason NY and NJ tailed off? UK shut down late and has the highest per cap death rate 635/mill., Spain dallied as well and was 606/mill. Germany shut down quickly and has the lowest by far 107/million. France and Italy 455/ and 573/ million are closer to the USA rate of 376/mill. Compared to these 5 biggest Europeans our death rate is 79% of their avg. I wish our leadership had acted prudently like Germany , using this data our deaths would be 40k instead of 120k ( Data from Worldometer 6/24)

 

I've been saying this for a while now. Starting to see some scientists back it up. This is not the same strand of Covid-19 that China was dealing with. And it makes perfect sense how they could go to near zero spread and we're struggling so much with it:

https://www.newsweek.com/florida-re...-becoming-more-infectious-mutant-form-1513164

Scientists at a research institute in Florida said studies they have conducted into the novel coronavirus reveal a mutated strain of the virus is more infectious than the version that first began spreading across the globe in late 2019.

The Scripps Research Institute team's findings were published online earlier this month as the paper detailing their studies was going through a standard peer-review process.

"Our study shows that the mutant virus infects cells much more efficiently in a cell-culture system, because the mutation stabilizes the spike protein and increases the number of spike proteins on the virus," Hyeryun Choe, the paper's senior author, told Newsweek. "Because the spike protein is essential to attach to the target cells, higher numbers of more stable spike protein naturally enable the mutant virus to attach and infect the target cells more easily."

 

For all we know, we could be dealing with a different strand than Germany. We just don't know. It is becoming very apparent though the strand Asia was dealing with is not what we're dealing with here. See the article I posted in the previous post.

 

Correct. Required everyone to fly home and then had no plan so massive crowds of people queued up in close proximity and spread the virus waiting on customs. No plan, no prep, massive spread

 

EU current per capita death rate: about 297 per million people
US current per capita death rate: about 376 per million people

Only one country with more than 100K people has more than double our death rate: Belgium.

 

Right, our strain was mostly from Europe. People need to forget the notion that you can completely stop this virus. Even if we did a very strict travel ban some cases would have slipped through, and even with a few cases, it would've snowballed without adequate containment measures.

What we needed, was containment measures. I think that's part of the failure of public officials including healthcare experts e.g. Fauci in explaining this to the American public.

People incorrectly understood the logic of lockdowns as flattening the curve, prevent overwhelming of hospitals, and then you're done. That's not really the full purpose of the lockdown, because in order to maintain the flat curve you need to maintain the lockdown, which is obviously not sustainable.

The full purpose of the lockdown is to buy time. It was supposed to drive numbers back down to February levels, giving us a re-do so to speak, allowing us to take measures that we should've taken early on when it was spreading like wildfire in China and Iran. These measures would include massive testing, contact tracing, and isolating positive cases. These are very labor intensive measures which can be done when case numbers are small, and they would keep the numbers small, but they're not realistic when you have 30+k cases a day.

We only had one shot at this, and we failed. Now lockdown fatigue has set in before we even had a real lockdown and there's no will anywhere for a second and stricter lockdown. It's sad that we couldn't have had a science-based pandemic response, but it is what it is. Failing containment, we have only mitigation left. Mask-wearing will be a key component of mitigation measures, let's try not to fail that as well.

 

Belgium made a decision to count suspected deaths at a far greater rate than other countries are doing. That is a factor, not the only factor, in why their rate is so high.

An article from April.

Why Belgium's Death Rate Is So High: It Counts Lots Of Suspected COVID-19 Cases

 

You get a come on man because you are going to need to see a chiro trying to spin this goat rope into something positive. By pretty much every measure, we are handling this horribly. One of the worst days for cases reported and you think that is a positive? Mortality rate down could be because we are getting so much practice dealing with the victims as our numbers are horrible. We keep this up, the rest of the world will be open and thriving and the US will be banned from every other country in the world. That is pathetic.

 

I don’t think posting facts deserve a come on man. Lower death rates, while only a fraction of the pie, is a positive stat.

 

Lower death rates are good. But his painting of the facts seemed so blatantly "sunshine pumping" is was just silly.
For the record, I was not the one to give the "come on man".

 

There are several countries that have pretty well contained the virus. The United States has been one of the worst.

I don’t think the issue was with the scientific messaging, though that wasn’t perfect (particularly in the very early stage). The real problem is Americans (on the whole) lack discipline, and unfortunately much of our society and discourse devolved to the point of degeneracy.

Look at that other thread about the folks in FL who showed up to protest a mask ordinance, calling it “the devils law”. How does a civil society “message” to cultists like this?

 

A little help from the cult leader would go a long way.

 

I agree. A decreasing fatality rate is fantastic. Interesting, it partially serves as a positive metric for our understanding of treatment methodologies. It also creates an avenue of research in light of the increasing positive cases.

Unfortunately, it provides little comfort in our efforts to contain this outbreak. If your goal is to limit the spread, fatality rate is somewhat meaningless.

"falling fatality rate means we're doing a better job of treatment" - I'm not sure but possibly
"falling fatality rate means we're doing a better job of containment" - deductively false

If your goal is to minimize deaths, the daily deaths is the best metric to look at.

 

This is it. Temporary shut downs to drive cases to traceable levels and slow spread. Then quarantine where there are cases and spread risks. We quit that, unlike countries that succeeded. Pure science based and it would have worked. And now we will deal with the health and economic consequences of a pandemic running through the country while we are open in various forms. Meanwhile, with a national and targeted response with clear policy, we would be open almost everywhere now. With low numbers. But, open where the numbers aren’t low and traceable, and we get the curve we are seeing

 

Several people called this a “worst case scenario”, opening too soon. They warned against it, hell I believe even Trump was on tape saying it. Yet...almost on a dime the guy started pushing states to re-open. Pretty transparently over politics. I’m not sure the calculation there, I guess in the hopes if the virus magically went away for the summer he fancied selling himself the savior of the economy. Instead, most likely he brought the doomsday scenario.

The countries that succeeded stayed shut for ~3 months. New York’s curve approximates a bell shaped curve, like some of the more successful countries, because they were forced (by dire circumstance) to have discipline. Other places in the country opened up when they had barely flattened the curve, there was only partial discipline and then a total dereliction of duty by certain political leaders. Basically instead of sticking with the guidelines, which probably required a good 3 months, they flipped the switch after about 6-8 weeks, and never got it to where you could trace outbreaks.

 

Well, it still originated in China. But the theory is direct flight travel from China seeded Italy, and then Italy was the main source for NYC.

So for even those earliest cases it was probably the 3rd or 4th human to human transmission by the time it came to the U.S. Though of course in an opened and global economy there isn’t just one rule,I’m sure some of ours also came from China as well as other countries.

 

Classic finger pointing at Trump for a problem he didn't create. There is nothing standing in the way of the governor of California from shutting it all down again. Ultra blue state with exploding new case numbers. Why hasn't Newsom shut it back down? None of the governors want to shut it back down. It's not Trump. It's already been established he has no power to make them shut down or not shut down. Stop blaming Trump for everything.