https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFU...
It varies region to region. I'm in Orange County, CA. (You may remember us from such recent news events as...)
This was Huntington Beach weekend before last (probably much the same this weekend, too):
https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusOC/comments/h9max3/ny_ti...
This was a photo posted to Reddit this past weekend:
https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/hczes1/pirozz...
It's hard not to see this as the decadent end of a powerful empire (sound like the most famous case), where the people just want to party and they don't care that it will be killing them and greatly reducing their future prospects and their descendants also. They have lost trust in the institutions around them. Let's just go ahead and break up and let the west coast join Canada already.
We also went to Longhorn for dinner yesterday and they had everyone pretty spaced out (every other booth, no seating at center tables). All the restaurant employees were wearing masks. I'm not sure we were at more risk than getting takeout.
It has been really great mentally to go to the beach and have dinner outside the house.
I am trying to keep our distance and not expose ourselves or others to anything unnecessary... we would have definitely left the beach and/or the restaurant if it was anything like the pictures you posted.
I guess my point is I feel like it's possible to go out and not be too risky. I don't think every area reopening is getting crazy.
The thing that would worry me most about the Huntington Beach photo (being familiar with that spot) is not being on the beach. It would be getting too and from the beach. You're going to be shoulder to shoulder with others once your ascend from the sand and get back on PCH.
The other part of the risk equation is the consequences of catching COVID-19. It reminds me of Taleb's Black Swan characterization: small risks predominate but potentially catastrophic consequences in the event. And an accumulation of lots of small risks as people ellide long-tail risks and treat them as no risk at all.
I get the impression from online chatter (mainly Reddit) that most people around here are catching it working in hospitals or restaurants. I recognize it's an unreliable sampling. I wonder if it would help keep people safe if local health officials categorized sources of infection. I suspect they couldn't do so in most the US right now even if they wanted to.
Vox, by the way, put out a nice simple guide on the topic:
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/22/21266756/coronavirus-pandemic-...
1. Death is a lagging indicator. Based on new cases here, I'd predict an upswing shortly:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFU...
2. Some reports indicate younger people are starting to get it more frequently. Data and common sense suggests they will have a higher survival rate. But this does not mean they will not suffer serious ongoing health and economic consequences as result. They also risk infecting others close to them.
How is this downvoted? If you have evidence showing all of the new cases are from younger people or totally asymptomatic carriers go ahead and show it otherwise its literally a tautology, more cases = more deaths.
There is no "less deadly version of the virus". Treatment protocols have improved but that has not dramatically changed the odds of at-risk folks dying.
Georgia now has about 1,200 new cases daily compared to ~700 in New York. Only a month ago, New York had more like 2,000 per day.
Is it controversial that it takes about a month for new cases to turn into new deaths? Do you believe that isn't happening or won't happen in Georgia?
https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1257825352660877313
"Both Korber et al and our analysis show no measurable effect on patient outcome. Hence, the hypothesis at this point is entirely in terms of transmissibility rather than severity. 14/16"
The conclusion that mortality is higher comes from the higher death rates in European countries. However, there's a major confounder: when the epidemic exceeds testing capacity, only the most severe cases are tested and counted, and so the denominator in mortality rates (total cases) is inaccurately small. We know this is the case in much of Europe (and NYC): follow-up antibody tests put the number of total infections at ~10x the number of detected cases. That brings the mortality rate back in line with the ~0.5-1% that's been found in populations where everyone was tested.
As a result, it will appear from this graph that deaths are always declining whether they are or not - the more recent deaths have not yet been reported, so they're not anywhere on the graph. They do the same thing with their daily cases map, but they're a little more transparent there about noting that numbers for the past few weeks are basically meaningless.
Reported deaths in GA have been fairly flat, but hospitalizations are rising slowly:
https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-georgia-covid-dashboard...
Most deaths are reported relatively quickly. If there were, as an example, a 2x increase in deaths it would show on the graph within a few days. It would show as something like a 1.8x increase before trickling up to the full 2x over the following weeks.
We should be seeing increased deaths from this in places that have reopened weeks ago.
The problem is, we accelerated deaths drastically due to insane public policies like housing the sick in close quarters with the elderly. In engineering, overengineering like this wastes time. In public health, it kills people.
My expectation is that we'll see an increase in infection rate, a decrease in new deaths per day, and we'll have spikes associated with pockets of the elderly who were previously not impacted being exposed.
* A certain percentage of infections lead to death
* Death usually only occurs one or two weeks in
* Pandemics follow a logistic curve in their spread (and this curve has an exponential part)
* Most infectious transmissions happen before one gets symptoms (otherwise staying at home once you cough would solve everything)
This is why a sudden rise in deaths would indicate that a few weeks ago something went terribly wrong. This also means that a decline in deaths does not mean you are doing just fine right now — if anything, it means you did fine 1-2 weeks ago.
“The severity of what we are getting has declined,” said Gino Santorio, chief executive officer of Broward Health, the four-hospital system that serves most of Broward County. “The average length of stay is six days versus 10. Initially, Broward Health had the really sick COVID patients, those from nursing homes and cruise ships. Now, that has changed, as the demographics have shifted.”
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-coronavirus-f...
Wisconsin has seen a spike come and go and death rates have remained about the same https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/wisconsin-corona...
It just feels odd that this isn't spoken about enough, and I think its because the media narrative is a bit too invested in the "danger" part of this virus ... to feel they can't point out that simple observation for fear of undoing their reporting about the virus, which is a shame. I mean deaths are down nationally ... by a lot, even as the cases have ticked back up.
My hunch is that the folks who are most at risk are taking drastic precautions, which is what is keeping the death rates down. I guess we'll just have to see for sure in 2-3 more weeks.
It feels odd that you blame the "media narrative" and then post two links to the New York Times.
Please point to the incidence of these cripplingly disabled healthy young people?
We have no reason to assume reinfection is possible prior to functional mutation. Functional mutation is likely, but at a much slower rate than the flu. However, what we know from other novel viruses is that mortality rate will usually trend down over time in successive, functionally different mutations.
Stop fearmongering.
The main take away is the infection rate is not linearly correlated to the death rate.
High probability that selection has already begun. It seems the strain that primarily hit New York City acts slightly differently than the one from Wuhan, and Chicago has a mix of them and others:
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/health-care/chicago-has-uniq...
1. At the start of the pandemic, the older and more vulnerable were affected disproportionately. These patients had a high viral load.
2. Patients with more severe symptoms are now isolating at home or at hospitals. Previously they may have been contributing to serious super-spreader like situations.
3. PPE/Mask usage is more common now and these are possibly protecting most people against high exposure
4. Antivirals could be reducing the length of stay at hospitals and protecting workers from higher exposure
In other words, the virus is spreading but in a less severe form. However, I don't think fundamentally different (less virulent) mutations are the contributing to the lower death rate.
What I really want to see is general case severity. There's a whole range from "testing positive with no symptoms" to "bad flu" to "severe effects but not hospitalized, may have long-term damage." That last group is the scary one that, as far as I know, isn't being counted.