Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Agree, but they likely have little idea if their instance is anecdotal or widespread.
At the local level they would have little idea of a widespread issue.

 

They know if they're testing people who died. And if they're not, they know they aren't being included in the count. Right?

 

The question will be if you have an individual who is dying, say within two weeks, from some type of ailment but before they die they become infected do you count that as a COVID-19 death? Some of these types who have died are probably not being tested because they were dying from something else to begin with.

 

Perhaps, but there has also been a question of deaths being attributed to Corona, that might not actually be.
(ie, the man that had two heart attacks the week that he dies after a history of even more heart attacks. No way to know if he indeed died of Corona or just another heart attack, but it was attributed to Covid-19.

My *guess is their are flawed numbers, but likely very minute.

*emphasis on "guess".

 

use the ignore feature. you can thank me later

 

If the virus is the cause, yes, you count it.

Well, if having the virus caused a heart attack, I'd say it's properly counted.

 

Sure - we can base that assumption on the close quarters of a cruise ship. It's like a floating petri dish, right? But a population of that size and under those conditions does not necessarily represent or generalize to the greater population under consideration (be it national or global). We don't know to what extent their age & personal health variables correlate with those outside the ship. To my knowledge, we are also not considering the potential effect of the timeline on the ship, in terms of when isolation practices went into effect. That information is probably available, but it's not being considered in the current discussion. Again, I won't argue one way or the other about the ship being a good case. I'm arguing that we don't know if it's a good case.

 

To me that is like saying someone, who was fatally shot, fell into the water and drowned so they ruled it a drowning.

 

Well, that would be how he died. They would obviously name the shooting as a contributing cause.

 

To me its like saying, ISIS has infiltrated America. Only 70,000 people have been radicalized and, thank God, they have only killed 1,000 people (reportedly). Sure we had the case of that teen posting pro ISIS tweets before he shot up his school, but he had underlying mental health issues.

Only the old (can't make that argument anymore) and mentally unstable are susceptible to ISIS radicalization. Not a big deal. How many people died in a car crash today...

You can make a dumb analogy for either side, but just use common sense.

 

No he actually died as he hit the water while he gasped for his final breath

 

Then, he didn't die by drowning.

 

If a terminal cancer patient dies in a car crash how would you expect the cause of death to be recorded? What do you think they do with the seasonal flu in their models? You think they should treat COVID-19 any differently?

 

13 Deaths in a Day: An ‘Apocalyptic’ Coronavirus Surge at an N.Y.C. Hospital

NYC being overwhelmed as expected. A key thing mentioned in the article is that many of these patients stay weeks in the ICU. Those beds are not being vacated by recovery or death. Another key thing mentioned in the article is that patients coming in now are sicker, because many were told to try to ride it out at home. With the exponential growth rate we're experiencing, expect mortality rate to climb rapidly in NYC within a week, and that's a conservative estimate.

It's also not so simple to convert a regular room to an ICU room as putting a ventilator in there. You need ICU nurses, critical care trained physicians, and respiratory therapists. You can't just "surge" those. Outcome will suffer when untrained personnel is tapped to take care of ICU level patients.

Final stats for today: 13k new cases, 248 deaths. We're following a 20% daily increase in mortality quite well. Expect 400+ daily mortality by the end of this week. If social distancing and lockdowns are working, the curve can be gentler by next week, but if not you're looking at full on pandemonium and widespread overwhelming of hospitals by the end of next week.

Some don't seem to understand how exponential growth works. Scientists and doctors don't pay attention to the absolute numbers because they understand with exponential growth these can change dramatically extremely quickly. One week, and this country could look very different.

 

Running Matt Bevin out of office already paying huge dividends for Kentucky residents.....many lives being saved. Tennessee currently following the very flawed Con model.

 

Maybe this makes up for that cracker of a victory party that Kentuckians missed out on.

 

Not all missed it.

 

Good point. There's always going to be some error in the numbers. The debate above reflects one of the reasons why.

Some context that supports your point, for yearly influenza, the CDC statistics are estimates that include a 95% CI (low and high).

I should add that most of this debate is due to not having good data beyond basic positive tests and deaths related to Covid-19. This is partly because we're in the middle of the outbreak and because we don't have the system in place to get the kind of data we need.

So basically, we are spitballing about the future because the data we have shows a rapid spread. Yet, as I mentioned earlier in this thread to you, we don't know where it will end or even how widespread it is right now.

A pretty terrible situation all around, imo.

 

Yet instead our leader comes out every day in a briefing with the same message: "We're (I'm) doing an incredible job." No mention of the latest figures, no mention of hospitals across the country being overwhelmed, just that Donald Trump is doing an incredible job. So incredible, in fact, that he wants the economy reopened and the churches packed at Easter. Based on what? Based on Easter being a "special day." Oh, and based also on the fact that there are sections of the country where there's "no problem." Do you hear him? There are sections of the country that can just secede from the pandemic and reopen. Incredible is certainly the right word for this sorry excuse for a president.

 

Probably true for Alaska and Montana. Beyond that, not really sure what he is talking about when he says that.