Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs
nature.com
nature.com
Well, I read today we have a problem like that in Belgium: it seems small bio labs aren't allowed to test even though they adapted their equipment and workflow. Only big pharma are lined up.
Contrast this with nyc where the virus is outta control, few tests are being done outside the hospital system, and there is no sense of a comprehensive presence of government effort other than the police harassing people who quarantine together when they take walks in public.
America is finished if this is the best we got.
That's at least three people per day watching over the comings and goings of a building. You can only do that when you have a near police-state.
We could’ve used more competence and seriousness about this threat for the sake of everyone, not petty indulgences of performative outrage about a concept of freedom that feels hollow as we all are forced to hide.
Speak for yourself, the "concept of freedom" that you talk about is one of the many reasons the U.S is what it is. The freedoms we have do have costs at times like these but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs.
It killed that many with an unprecedented shutdown of the entire global economy to mitigate it.
If 100 people drown in lakes, that's not really odd. If 100 people drown in the middle of the Sahara a thousand miles from the nearest water, that's weird.
No, probably not. The seasonal flu infects a billion people a year, and still doesn't do things like collapse Italy's healthcare system.
The CDC estimates somewhere between 24k and 63k flu deaths since October. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
The previous season was estimated at 34,200. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
COVID-19 has killed at least 16k in the US, starting on Feb 29, with significant mitigation efforts that are not done for flu. Almost all of that is in the last week - the death toll stood at only 1.8k on 4/4. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
Comparing the two is like claiming a bicycle is winning a 10 mile race versus a Ferrari because it got a head start and got to mile #1 faster. (It's also likely some estimated flu deaths are actually COVID deaths.)
No, actually, I don't need to reconcile anything. I'd prefer to stick to the OP assertion. If flu deaths are similar to C19 deaths during mitigation, it is abundantly obvious that we've made a terrible mistake. You seem to want to litigate something. I want to do a t-test.
Of course if C19 deaths are 10x what the flu is during mitigation, and overall pneumonia deaths are much higher (aka we're not mistaking flu for C19), then shutting down the world economy was a good idea. I have no idea which thing is true. Your statements above indicate you don't either.
Are total pneumonia deaths (aka flu and covid19 summed up) bigger or smaller than in previous years? Presumably someone's tracking this?
You're asking for data we won't have yet. As I noted, COVID deaths are only just ramping up; 90% of them in the USA are in the last week or so.
There are early indications the lockdowns have impacted flu, as is fairly obvious. Local to me:
https://www.rochesterregional.org/news/2020/01/flu-season-20...
> New York State is reporting 157,426 positive cases. The latest data (ending March 28) shows a 77% decrease in reported cases from the previous week.
Anyway, let's agree that these numbers are worth tracking. I'm sure someone's tracking them!
Note that the lockdowns are not just to avoid spreading the disease, they are to avoid spreading it so quickly that it overflows the hospital system. The theory of "flattening the curve" is that you keep the peak hospitalization number under hospital capacity but spread the infection out over a longer period of time. The area under the curve (total hospitalizations due to infections) remains the same either way. Although it means at no time will someone needing hospitalization be turned away due to lack of capacity -- resulting in fewer overall deaths.
Put another way, let's agree that the number of flu deaths this season of 24k – 62k and 410k – 740k hospitalizations is acceptable from an economic perspective. We can lose and hospitalize that many people and operate as a society. How would it change if those deaths and infections occurred in the span of a month instead of 5 months?
Well if you mean now now and not just annual totals or totals over the 2019-2020 flu season, they aren't the same or comparable, Covid-19 is the leading US cause of daily death, flu is way back in the pack.
A = set of top 5 disease killers in the U.S (hypertension, obesity, cancer, diabetes, etc)
B = set of corona deaths in the U.S
The intersection between B and A is over 90% of set B's numbers. So basic counting shows that in order to get the proper amount of deaths you'd have to perform the following calculation of:
A + B - ( intersection of A and B)
Unfortunately most people are counting by adding A+B which results in double counting as person X who died in set B is also in set A.
Now compare to coronavirus, where we were late to start but eventually locked everything down, and we still have 17k deaths in less than a month, and we know that's a lower bound. We're not even a month past the first 100 deaths. The death rate now represents infections 2 weeks ago, which we measured at 14k. After that we started measuring 30k+ new infections daily, so the death rate is likely to get worse by the time we hit 1 month.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
We're past the seasonal flu peak and coronavirus is still on the upswing and hasn't peaked, it's not only killing more people per day than the flu, but it's actually now reached the status of leading cause of death in the US.[0]
Even with countermeasures, covid-19 is, short of a literal miracle, going to kill far more people in the US than the flu this year.
And it's also going already contributing more to deaths by other direct causes by clogging hospital systems, consuming resources like ventilators, etc.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/coronavirus-bec...
That's a thought terminating cliche, not a response, as well as a complete misinterpretation of Ben Franklin's intent[0], thus not even a valid argument from authority.
[0]https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
For example in CA: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-24/l-a-coun...
Temporarily closing gun shops, like shops for anything else not required for daily life, is absolutely reasonable.
If you claim that guns are required for daily life, that says more about your country than any other point here (and not in a good way).
Thats a terrible analogy as it’s not a partial limit that’s being applied here. It is an absolute removal. If a citizen is not allowed to create their own firearms or order them by mail, closing local stores is a total elimination of that right.
> Temporarily closing gun shops, like shops for anything else not required for daily life, is absolutely reasonable.
Says you. Your personal opinion of which constitutional rights are required for daily life does not dictate which ones others enjoy.
> If you claim that guns are required for daily life, that says more about your country than any other point here (and not in a good way).
You could make the same facetious statements about the 1st, 4th or 8th amendments as well.
1. Police taking biological samples as a matter of course, even after the crisis. A sneaky politician or official manages to turn this in to DNA sample collection, maybe by sequencing swabs on the side to "catch criminals." Nobody stops it because everyone is focused on the virus.
2. Local governments end up with expanded power to shut down businesses, this eventually gets abused for some kind of extortion in a small town somewhere.
3. Police gain generalized "indefinite detention" powers instead of specific "court-ordered quarantine" powers in some jurisdictions, creating a ticking time bomb set to explode the first time a mayor wants to get rid of a protester.
4. Efforts to stamp out counterproductive conspiracy theories result in legal and bureaucratic infrastructure which sits around and is eventually used to suppress a very productive conspiracy theory.
5. Playing on the above, Google builds a system to delete every video that says 5G and COVID-19 are linked. This is eventually used to delete every video that suggests Darkriver Mercenaries Inc. and the scandal in Kumran are linked.
All of these cases share one thing in common: a bad, over-generalized law gets passed because legislators are panicking and not taking the time to think about civil liberties. The virus spreads fast, but not so fast that you can't take the time to legislate effectively.
That's the kind of thinking that leads people to believe in FEMA death camps.
History does not support the most hyperbolic speculations, but it does support the idea that the USG files away at the base of lady liberty every time the public's back is turned. Remember the Patriot Act and 9-11?
Maybe, but I've yet to see any plausible proposals. Do you have one?
So, this doesn't seem like an approach that has a materially different desired effect from what we're already doing. The policy's goal is to achieve temporary shutdown of businesses and prevent transmission of the virus. You're just using a more convoluted, less effective route to get there. As an added drawback, limited liability almost guarantees that many companies would cease respecting the rules (since their value will be zero if they respect the rules, due to bankruptcy, it costs nothing to go about business as usual and just shut down if you get unlucky).
I guess what I was asking was whether you have any ideas that have any likelihood of being more effective than current approaches. I can think of dozens of things that would be less effective than what we are currently doing. That doesn't really help us very much, though.
Well, what we're talking about is how to keep civil liberties while also effecting a quarantine. I think if we came up with a solution that was as good as the current solution but that had less risk of giving the government abusable and sticky power, that would satisfy the goal of the discussion.
I could offer some changes to the idea I proposed that would address some of your concerns (as well as argue that there are some effectiveness benefits over the current policy to balance out the downsides), and we could have an insightful discussion going over it, but that would distract from the broader point of "if we put our heads to it we might be able to avoid an expansion in government power while not making any unacceptable sacrifices."
And I guess my point is that I admit that possibility, but I consider the likelihood very low.
But you just said that the tort scheme would do the same thing in a more inconvenient way! Surely inconvenience is not an unacceptable sacrifice.
And atop all that I don't consider the libertarian ideal to be a goal worthy of pursuit. So yeah. Not a fan.
What you are describing is a way to handle flare ups and it only works in police states. At the current time the only way to fight viruses is with vaccines. It is extremely unfortunate that even during this pandemic our experts keep avoiding repeating this.
We need drugs before vaccines, to be able to treat the disease and/or its sympthoms and hopefully make sure patients don't end up in ICUs.
That's not the point I am making. The only solution to virus spreading is immunity. It can either come from a vaccine or it can come from infections themselves. This virus falls within a virus category.
Should the population not be immune to the virus, the flare ups will occur.
> We need drugs before vaccines, to be able to treat the disease and/or its sympthoms and hopefully make sure patients don't end up in ICUs
That's managing flare ups. Look at measles in non-vaccinated pockets of NYS:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/09/us-measl...
The immunity rate (mostly via vaccination) for measles in the US is over 91%. The immunity rate for COVID-19 in the US would be a percentage of people who were infected since there's no vaccine.
It is unclear whether Covid-19 confers SARS-CoV-2 immunity. There are conflicting data, with some for future immunity out of China and Germany and some against out of Korea [1].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/coronavir...
Asking people to undergo testing and voluntary quarantine is perfectly within democratic bounds of civic duty and anyone with a iota of ethic is more than willing to collaborate. It’s also fair for a democratic society to compensate for any economic loss incurred.
It’s not necessary to use the iron fist except for the most egregiously anti-social deniers, but that’s the same as with the neighbors that refuse to turn down the volume of their music after 24:00
Vietnam is a police state. Singapore is a police state. South Korea is a police state. China is a police state. HK is a police state.
> Asking people to undergo testing and voluntary quarantine is perfectly within democratic bounds of civic duty and anyone with a iota of ethic is more than willing to collaborate.
Asking for a voluntary quarantine is different from quarantining people. US states have asked people to voluntarily quarantine. The argument that is being offered is that voluntary quarantine is not enough.
> It’s not necessary to use the iron fist except for the most egregiously anti-social deniers, but that’s the same as with the neighbors that refuse to turn down the volume of their music after 24:00
It is a civil and not a criminal violation.
Taiwan is not.
I'm not Taiwanese but one sentence I used to hear when I was little was:
"The extent of your personal freedom goes as far as it starts endangering other peoples personal liberties"
The reason why the US and Germany are resorting to police state techniques is because:
1. The countries have been pushing there boundaries for at least a decade now and this is the perfect opportunity to use.
2. Even though Germans are happy to police you crossing a red light in the middle of the night, there is no sense of communal unity in society and there is even less trust in Government because there is zero transparency in communication. Basically the Government assumes everyone besides them is an idiot. Social shaming is the weapon of choice in Taiwan.
Neither US nor Germany resorted to police state techniques. In a set of the Western democracies only France is getting close to it.
Thank goodness NYC isn't America, or even the best America's got.
(That said, I don’t endorse GP’s flippant dismissal of NYC either.)
I think very old, classic measures like economic activity, the number of great works of art that come out of a place, the influence of a city on its surrounding region and its world, and the progress toward better public health and safety measures (highly relevant here) are a lot more quantifiable than one might at first believe.
I mean, if you don't think a city's economic output is an important objective measure, congratulations on never having lived in an area with a serious economic contraction (or read about one, apparently). If you don't think a city's rate of cholera cases (to use a classic example) or, more to the point, COVID 19 cases, is important, I don't even...
(I wouldn't want to live in NYC either, but I think that's uninteresting and not what any of this is about.)
The top ten metro areas have about 25% of the total population.
So, not a majority, but an absolutely massive number of people.
And that myopia goes both ways.
Undeniably true, but honestly, what's your point? The OP's words were "the best America's got." I think in the context of the conversation we were engaged in, a suggestion as to what is the greatest city we have in general, or the greatest city we have in terms of public health, might both be interesting. I'm surprised by these "who cares about how good a city is, mannnn?" comments.
(I have some suspicions about that, like cases in the homeless population being underrepresented in the data at this stage, but we'll see)
It's as if the heavy infrastructure and "modern" tech blinded the common sense..
I am 100% sure the Donald Trump administration's nation-scale coordination is not the best we've got.
For example, see the CDC's Ebola response in 2014 https://www.cdc.gov/about/ebola/timeline.html .