Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

I wouldn’t go near that place.

Too bad they dont feel the same way about Florida.

 

Well before I can call it stupid I’d have to understand why he went. Beyond that, aren’t you one of the people here encouraging lessening restrictions and living your life? Didn’t you also complain that your county was too strict? Sounds like you want tighter regulations about travel in and out of your area.

 

Oh I agree, that would be a poor decision, just seems like it goes against everything you’ve been arguing since March though. I really just wanted to see you type it.

 

i am against stricter regulations if, in the case of alachua county up until the 78 positive count, you have shown you are able to handle the situation w/o a problem. alachua county, even with lots of mask-less people was doing that. there was a reason south florida was locked down longer and opened up slower than the state, that being of course the high rate of infection.just like there was a ban on air travel into florida from ny/nj, known hot spots. alachua county has 511 cases, the 3 south florida counties have over 30,000, so, where do you think you should stay?

 

Sure. But the positive rate is going up too. And with 2600 new cases in Florida today, I would hope that everyone now understands that increase in cases is being primarily driven by increased transmission and not by increased testing.

 

People are traveling all over the place and going out all the time now. And from what I can tell based on your past posting, you are fine with that. Why are you singling out one migrant worker for doing what everyone else is doing?

 

more good news on the death rate front. so far in june there have been 10,393 deaths, average of 866 a day. in may there were 42,414 deaths, average of 1414 a day.

 

How do you propose they keep people from other areas out of Alachua county while easing state wide restrictions? You’re now making the case that many of us have been pointing out to you specifically for the past 3 plus months and I don’t think you even realize it.

 

so, if we only tested half of what we are testing now, you still do not think less positive cases would result, or do you think only positive cases would get tested by some luck of the draw? if you test 2 times as many people, it would be almost impossible not to have more positives cases, you could not only test non-infected.

 

people should know the risks of travelling to other counties, states, countries that are hot spots for the virus. people would not travel to leper colonies, or areas of smallpox and measles and return knowing what awaited them when they travelled,

 

I agree about the fatality counts being down and that is a very good thing. There are, however, 31 days in May .

 

picky, picky, picky. next you will tell me each day has 24 hours...

 

Yes, but the positive test rate is going up as well. By my calculations, in May the positive test rate in Florida was 3.5%. In June so far it is 5.0%. Why do you think that is?

 

because you are testing twice as many people, again, you cannot test more people and have them all be positive or all negative, the ratio will, imop, remain the same.

 

sigh

 

Do you understand what the positive rate is? It's the percentage of all who are tested who test positive. Why do you think that rate is going up?

 

The % positive is independent of number of tests.

 

The idea that more testing would turn up more positive cases is perfectly valid, but if that were the only reason the number of reported cases were going up, the positive test rate would be going down.

Here's a simplification of the issue:

Let's say we have 100 people and 20% of them are positive, but only 10% of them are showing symptoms. And let's say that all of the people who are showing symptoms get tested first (because they are sick and they ask to be tested). So we have 10 people tested and the positive rate is 100%. But now we want to test more people to see if there are more positives out there. So we test 30 of the remaining 90 and that turns up 3 more positives. Now we have 13 cases, but the positive test rate has dropped from 10/10 (100%) to 13/40 (32.5%).

This is how it would work in the real world if the increased testing was the reason for the increase in the number of positive cases. The number of cases would go up, but the positive rate would go down. But instead we are seeing a significant increase in the positive test rate. That can't happen unless the actual number of cases is rising (and in Florida's case, rising by a lot).

 

Even in places it doesn't. And where it stays the same, it confirms that the virus is not under control.

 

Meanwhile, in the sports threads, note the advocacy for packing stadiums.

This is why we cannot and why there will not be crowds in the stands.

And why the virus numbers have to be driven down to be controlled. Because people move around.

Even in So. Fla. Which is reopening. With the governors blessing.