Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

I know a firm in Seattle, Washington that had a paralegal go home this Tuesday with flu-like symptoms. She told the firm she tested negative for the flu and they expected her back at work Wednesday. She didn’t show or call on Wednesday or Thursday so they good a welfare check and found her dead on Thursday afternoon. More, they don’t know yet if it was COVID-19 but everyone assumes it was until confirmed. It wouldn’t surprise me since we’ve heard a testing nurse was on a ventilator two days after treating the NY patient in FL.

 

The Kirkland Washington hospital treating COVID-19 cases has already had to remodel the hospital to accommodate patients from that outbreak.

Maybe you should read about what they’re going through before cavalierly dismissing the issue?
A Rare Look Inside the Hospital Where 15 Coronavirus Patients Have Died

 

Nope I stand by my point hospitals many times have to make changes during big flu outbreaks etc. I do wonder if ERs wont get swamped by people freaking over all this media hype however.

 

I saw an interview with the doctor who served as Ebola Czar during that outbreak a few years ago. He said there are about a million hospital beds in the US, give or take, with 700-800k are in use on any given day. Now it sounds great that there are 250k beds available on average. With coronavirus, 10% to as many as 20% of infected globally have required hospitalization. Let's go with the lower 10%. If 2.5 million Americans are infected, the 10% needed hospital care will fill available beds. I'm sure there's surge capacity available, 2 beds in a room, beds in hallways, etc. How far does that go? Are there enough ventilators to cover the increased beds? There'd going to be a limit, and if pushed beyond that, we'll go to a wartime triage method of providing care to only those most likely to recover. Thus is already happening in Italy.

I've deliberately overlooked one minor detail. Everything above assumes infections are geographically distributed across the country, aligning infecteds with hospital locations. The reality is that hot spots will create local shortages in some areas, while others sit unused.

Realistically, if we let this virus go unchecked, how long would it take to get to 2.5m infected? From 2k today... (checks calculator). With a doubling every 2.5 days (about what we've seen) we need 10-11 doublings. At 2.5 days each doubling, that's under 30 days. Oh, and another 2.5m could be infected the next few days after that. That's how exponential growth works if you can't put a stop to it.

Anybody who willfully chooses to ignore the potential for disaster here needs to pull their head out of the sand. This isn't a political issue. I hope the above is wrong, and it turns out to be less virulent than what the early data is suggesting. But I'm going to do what I can to limit its opportunity to spread.

 

What’s today’s US count?

 

Don't know, we don't have an adequate testing program by which to estimate them.

 

Yeah, got that. Isn’t there an official live graph of worldwide counts?

 

Sure, and in some places, those numbers are reasonably accurate. For example, South Korea has a pretty good handle on how many people have this. We don't in the US. We still aren't testing huge numbers of people with symptoms consistent with coronavirus.

 

Good grief. Got a link to it?

 

Reuters has a by country daily count
yesterday 3/13 145,000, 3/14 156,000 cases

Business & Financial News, U.S & International Breaking News | Reuters

 

This is one of the sites I've been using:

Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS

 

1281 on the 11th
1663 on the 12th
2179 on the 13th
2723 on the 15th

That looks different from flattening out to me.

 

That’s it. Thanks.

 

Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS

 

Seems like those large clusters in the Southern Hemisphere would give people pause instead of cavalierly claiming warm weather will stop this virus in its tracks. Maybe it will but who can say for certain?

 

The best site is the one most major media outlets use:

Coronavirus Update (Live): 162,933 Cases and 6,069 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Outbreak - Worldometer

 

And the numbers would most likely be considerably higher if we had the capability of widespread testing.

 

This one is easy to read

Italy Coronavirus: 21,157 Cases and 1,441 Deaths - Worldometer

 

TRANSLATION: don’t look at the official numbers; it’s way worse, because we say so