In the US, we're "opening back up" while many states are hitting daily records. Our lockdowns were a disaster and "opening back up" is going to cause an explosion in cases.
If our lockdowns had been done right we would be able to reopen the economy now with little risk
That was in fact the prediction for Georgia, see for example the expert predictions here: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/infectious-disease-expe...
Of course it turns out not to have actually happened: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/georgia-coronavi...
With that said, my own reading prior to this point has suggested we'd see the uptick starting in this coming week, through the next two weeks.
The panel of experts estimated about 1k/day during the week ending May 16, ranging 579/day to 2292/day.
And while so far there aren't that many cases reported today, the data isn't complete due to the lag in testing results. In fact the lag is for 14 days. So we're still in a wait and see point.
NYC is about the only hospital system that came close to being overwhelmed and even they made almost no use of the temporary hospitals.
The record numbers of cases we see now coincides with record levels of testing- with such limited availability of testing prior to the lockdown, the majority of cases- those not needing hospitalization- were never counted.
Comparing it to someplace like Taiwan or Singapore doesn't make any sense.
Comparing to those countries doesn't make much sense either because US is much wealthier. We should be doing far better than both, and we're not.
In the US, any and every death of someone who had the virus, and many who did not, are still counted among the death tolls. The recent case of the guy who died from alcohol poisoning comes to mind, though I personally know of others who died from other causes, and were counted even though they hadnt been tested.
Conversely, there is good reason to be skeptical of China's accounting as well- both due to government interference and the simple fact that they were not able to reliably test the majority of cases.
If US has twice the test positive rate as another, they're only testing half the cases.
The fact is no matter what metric you look at, the US is doing worse with our response than almost anywhere else.
And we don’t know how China is really ever doing about anything. We need to stop confusing statements from China with transparency.
Not to mention the human toll of quarantine- I live surrounded by a few hundred acres of forest, my cousin in a studio apartment. My daily life has hardly changed since I also work from home. She lives in or near paris, I think, and couldn't go 10 feet past her apartment door without a permit, and mostly got that only for groceries. Even still, she managed to catch it (or a similar disease, since she was refused testing).
Some people on HN love to hate on rural life, but I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.
I'm a broken record talking about how nytimes/etc. will always pick the more sensational data to sell ads, and how it doesn't matter for them if they're wrong (and how they actually have a financial incentive to be wrong). Maybe it is all just an accident though.
It’s one of the things that public health officials have been warning about pretty consistently: as testing increases, positive cases will go up, but that shouldn’t be looked at as a bad thing.
Number of new cases per day is steadily increasing every week! A month ago the daily new cases were half what they are this week
I said this elsewhere but this is something health officials have specifically warned against. Yes case counts are going up, but that is because testing is increasing. The metric that matters is the testing positive rate.
Basically by following absolute numbers, and commenting on them as if there's a failure on the state's part, you're punishing states for increasing testing.
Is it any wonder? Look at the comments here. Look at guys like Elon Musk breaking quarantine for economic reasons and getting praised for it. Conspiracies abound.
This didn't happen in less partisan countries. Like absolutely everything else in the US, the lockdown became a political issue, for and against it.
Where I'm from, everyone took it seriously and in a matter of weeks we got down to ZERO active cases. Then again, we don't hate people who have different politics.
When your president is one of the richest men in the world its hard to convince leadership to shut down the economy.
And the US is pretty much unique with the whole "corporation is a person" nonsense