If there is no spike in infections within two weeks, from areas which had large public protests in the past week, can millions of Americans be helped by restarting the economy?
Daily new infections have more than doubled here in North Carolina in the last two weeks since "reopening" [0]. We have had more new cases in the last two weeks (2200) than in the entire length of lockdown from March until then (2000). The death rate has massively spiked beginning May 24th, exactly two weeks (the median time from infection to death) from May 9th, the day the governor relaxed restrictions [1]. The dream of this thing just magically going away is absolutely delusional.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/north-carolina-c...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/north-carolina-c...
With increased (including employment-related) testing, case count should be increasing everywhere, but some of those could be recovered or asymptomatic.
We know that most hospitals were well below capacity, so new cases can be treated.
Here's the best resource Ive found for comparing all the relevant data:
http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Playing around with the data there, it looks like yes NC has had an increase in cases recently, but it tracks an increase in testing. Test positivity rates are about flat. It really is completely pointless to discuss increases in cases without also comparing to increases in testing and positivity rates.
Deaths are up, but as another poster pointed out it's hardly statistically significant. The rolling 7 day average is 2.2/1m now, vs 1.7/1m on May 1st.
How is a 34% increase not statistically significant?
Because going from a daily death rate of 0.00017% to 0.00022% is still such a very small number, what might be called statistical noise.
If one person in my town is murdered this year, and 2 are murdered next year, that's a 100% year over year increase in the homicide rate. But it's obviously a meaningless increase.
2.2 out of a million is a small number. More people in NC are dying every day from cancer or heart disease.
I know you're not debating NC, but looking again at the state, it was mostly the last few weeks that looked flat. If you compare to the peak in positivity 42 days ago, they've gone from 16% positive to to 7% positive, using rolling 7 day averages. So, if I were in NC I wouldn't be overly concerned.
NC has only seen a slight uptick in hospitalizations: https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard and it's been flat for the past week.
The government failed badly at communicating this.
So now you have half the people saying the shutdowns were useless (cause the virus still exists) and another half saying they have to continue (cause the virus still exists, also)!
If we had realistically wanted to squash this thing, the examples of other countries suggest we would've needed much more aggressive tracing and isolating of people, widespread early mask distribution and wearing, and more tracking.
I fear that the government also may have failed miserably at taking advantage of them to bring more capacity online. Maybe the minimum stuff like masks and clothes and ventilators are taken care of, but we still seem in a very precarious place.
Voluntary changes in behavior persist, though, which will make things very hard to untangle "effect of shutdown" from "effect of people being cautious about high-risk environments."
I see friends (US and 2 countries in Europe) who are not affected by job losses booking vacations like crazy to take advantage of low prices to visit places they always wanted. So I suspect there will be a lot of travel again in the near future.
So it's all right for deaths to spike if the hospitals don't expend their resources dealing with it? What are the hospitals for, then?
Figuring out how to mitigate the virus, and thus making people feel more confident about economic activity, is what the economy needs.
Like good luck with it, but if 95% of Americans started wearing masks in the next couple of weeks, it's pretty clear that this would be a big boost to the economy over the next 6 months. But we don't do group oriented statistical mitigations here.
Also the increase in deaths you link to is not statistically significant, given it is in the rage of 10-30 over the course of several months in a state with 10 million people.
Those numbers don't prove your point.
A penny doubled daily is $0.64 after a week, $81.92 after two, $10,485.76 after three, and $1,342,177.28 after four.
Upwards movement in cases and deaths in something that spreads exponentially is... not great.
Daily deaths across pretty much all nations are decreasing even as lockdowns are removed. Nit pick all you'd like, be as afraid as you like, but the numbers you supplied don't support your assertions.
Exponential growth of the disease isn't tied to an arbitrary "week" timeline. It's delayed because of a 0.25 - 4.0 weeks. Different environment and behaviors will cause it to spread at different time intervals (not just a different number of recipients per spreader).
> Daily deaths across pretty much all nations are decreasing even as lockdowns are removed.
And COVID death doesn't happen within days of new exposure. It's delayed 3.5 - 5+ weeks after exposure and the people most likely to die aren't the ones walking around in public on the first day of end of SiP.
Your parent comment wasn't as outrageous as you make it seem.
Parent didn't account for vastly increased testing capacity in their assertions, and characterized a statistically insignificant increase in deaths as "massive". I objected to that.
I grant that this is not over and needs to be closely watched. I object to the exaggeration of the threat.
I grant that the worst might not be behind us, but I also keep in mind that the experts said from the beginning that most likely outcomes are that this will become another variant of the common cold or flare up some years similar to a bad flue season [0]
I also agree that this needs to be watched, and I appreciate your realistic appraisal of lockdowns despite the possible remaining danger.
[0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-cor...
From the linked article [0], quoting a number of infectious disease experts, coronavirus researchers, epidemiologist, etc:
>OC43 and 229E are more prevalent than other endemic human coronaviruses, especially in children and the elderly. Together, the four are responsible for an estimated one-quarter of all colds. “For the most part they cause common-cold-type symptoms,” said Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “Maybe that is the most likely end scenario if this thing becomes entrenched.”
>Odds: Moderate. “I think there is a reasonable probability that this becomes the fifth community-acquired coronavirus,” Adalja said, something he expanded on in his blog. Webby agreed: “I have a little bit of hope that, OK, we’ll put up with a couple of years of heightened [2019-nCoV] activity before settling down to something like the other four coronaviruses.”
>Odds: Pretty good. What we may be seeing “is the emergence of a new coronavirus … that could very well become another seasonal pathogen that causes pneumonia,” said infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota. It would be “more than a cold” and less than SARS: “The only other pathogen I can compare it to is seasonal influenza.”
(The article had a lot of other interesting and relevant information.)
[0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-cor...
Maybe deaths being down means something positive, but it also could be a lagging indicator to some extent. It could reflect different record-keeping in the areas that are becoming more prominent in new cases.
But, as I originally stated, there are a lot more tests being done now, and that could explain why the number of confirmed cases is increasing. Some weeks ago they only tested those requiring hospitalization, and as time went on now anyone can get a test.
It would be nice if there were weekly samples of 20k people to serve as a valid week-to-week measure of the population infection rate.
Conversely, the places that were hardest hit in the first wave are also having more tests done than previously, and at least before full reopening, are not yet having cases jump up.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/strange-symptoms-flar...
Regardless, your second sentence is true.
Confirmed cases, not infections. The hospitalization numbers are about 30% higher or so which is about-ish how much new deaths have increased. Which is bad, but not 2x bad.
All said, NC may have one of the highest spike of any state (reopened or not). Texas and Florida have flat hospitalizations; Georgia is slightly decreasing.
Since we don't really know what's going on yet, almost anything that happens is going to seem kind of magical. Right now we're operating on guesswork and superstition.
That's already happening. The current slow reopening is restarting the economy in order to help millions of Americans get back to work. For example, the jewelry store in my neighborhood in CA is now open, but for 1 customer at a time (OK in their case because even before the pandemic they controlled the number of people inside). However, the breakfast diner nearby with closely packed tables is still shut down. Even if they could open, the owner has to figure out how to run that business with appropriate social distancing.
An additional problem is that the economy was fragile even before the lockdown. Many employers likely won't rehire nearly as many people as they let go. Those who are still hiring have slowed down their hiring rate.
And until people feel safe consuming services and gathering in public like they did before, the main street economy can't recover fast enough to employ everyone who was laid off during the lockdown.
This is why government support for laid off workers must continue until enough confidence exists that things are safe, even without the lockdowns, and that might take years for some sectors of the economy.
However...it appears that new infections have been rising again globally since May-ish. It looks to me like it is becoming exponential again, although the slope on a log scale is considerably less than the first time.
This is my interpretation of the charts at: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
...titled Daily New Cases and Daily Deaths.
Deaths still seem to be declining, but you would expect that to lag regardless.
There seems to be a pattern where the larger countries that weren't hit so hard at first are picking up as developed Europe gets things under control. For instance, India, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan etc.
And within the US, as NY and NJ have fewer new cases, Texas, California, Illinois, and Arizona are starting to take the lead. Over 90% of new cases are outside NY and NJ now.
[1]: https://kubrick.htvapps.com/htv-prod-media.s3.amazonaws.com/...
[2]: https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/06/02/george-floyd-protests...
[3]: https://www.wcvb.com/article/new-group-of-watchdogs-begins-i...