The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve

time.com

47 pointscheeew45 comments

I have to say, living in NYC I'm pretty thankful for the quarantine requirement from anyone coming in from outside the tri-state area. I like to at least think we're on the downswing, although who really knows.

It's not like anyone will listen anyway, but it's a nice thought...

FYI, only applies if coming from high-risk states. This included nine states originally. Not sure if further states have been added.

Wear a mask and do social distancing ... jeepers it is not difficult.

Give us liberty, and give us death!

This explains it: https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1276172320965636099/...

Jokes aside, I'm afraid this is truly the administration and leadership that will take down the US for good. We somehow made it through Bush Jr and Clinton but by golly, this administration cannot do anything constructive.

I really don’t understand why we’re not doing full contract tracing right now, especially in for example my state where there are only 50 new cases a day. Are we really going to wait till it’s 5000 to do something? It’s like there’s just literally nobody in a position of power with any initiative whatsoever.

Are they really not doing contact tracing? In this country we've been contact tracing all cases since they fell to manageable numbers. It's expensive, but not all _that_ expensive in the scheme of things.

Jeez the protests really took their toll

If that were the case wouldn't we see a surge in places like NYC as well?

It's not apparent that the protest caused this sort of growth in infection. Plus you'd expect to see growth occuring simultaneously in places like New York and Seattle, which just isn't the case like Florida, Arizona, and Texas.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

Still flat in Calif., same for months.

Nope; CA is one of the highest-growing states.

The Bay Area was flat, but it just spiked yesterday and reopening is now paused.

Nope, just checked the data on the Santa Clara hospitalizations link - only the number of tests is increasing, not admissions or mortality. Same for months.

The press is saying one thing, but the official stats say flat - month after month.

I guess newspapers value outrage over public service.

You would need a magnifying glass to see anything significant. Only 72 hospitalized patients today (2,278 more available), historical average is a little less.

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx

Shame on HN for letting non-technical people dictate public policy with a false narrative. If anybody told me that a technical group the size of HN in 2019 was this oblivious, I would have been skeptical. But here we are - the center of SV refuses to actually read a graph, month after month.

Can somebody explain that to me? Is everybody else incapacitated with fear, virtue signalling, mass hysteria, or what is behind that?

Dr. VDH, who noticed the above in parallel with me, said something like, "[We're captive to 1%'ers who have a nice life and feel it's unfair they could lose that.]"

Is that it? Destroy our economy for individual selfishness?

Do I need to make a video on how to read the graphs?

Hopefully this undermines your belief that technical people are in some way immune to all the biases, emotions, fears, hopes and general humanity of people at large. Frequently, they're worse; they believe themselves to be hyper-rational cyborgs driven purely by evidence, giving themselves carte blanche to assume they're unaffected and thus don't even need to examine their own thinking.

Yes, I too am a mental mess and use reasoning and convenient choice of evidence to justify decisions and opinions I already formed.

The person you are approvingly replying to is overconfident and wrong.

The person you replied to deserves for you to reread their comment if you think they are "approvingly replying".

I gave you the official stats link. I check it twice per week, including today.

Wrong how? Or do you mean, "not-SJW enough for my taste"?

Wrong how you ask? Wrong in the way that hospitalizations in SANTA CLARA only are a woefully inappropriate way to "support" your original contention that CASES in CALIFORNIA were flat.

Are you serious? You seem dangerously self-absorbed and misinformed. Your original comment referred to CALIFORNIA. Now you are arguing about Santa Clara hospitalizations (a very lagging indicator), which is many levels different from your original (and incredibly incorrect) point.

As always with the types of people who are in denial about environmental risks: They are constantly moving the goal posts when you try to argue with them. Not a psychologist but I think this is some sort of defense mechanism of the brain.

Santa Clara plus SF is 4 million people, and represents most of NorCal.

If what I said is incorrect, why don't you provide some actual data?

I'll just put the data in front of you and let you decide:

https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en/test

Go to the chart for California. Percent positive tests and hospitalizations are the most important factors here. Hospitalizations have gone up, undoubtedly (from 4,500 to now almost 6,000). That said, percent positive tests has remained flat. Deaths in CA also continue to trend down.

What conclusion do you draw from that? To me, it appears that the concentration of Covid in the population of California has not increased. At the same time, there are more hospitalizations. Perhaps Covid is not getting worse in CA, but more people are finding out that they have it due to increased testing and are then going to the hospital out of an abundance of caution.

As an aside, you and the guy you're replying to are obviously extremely emotional about this. Learn to recognize that and realize that if you're feeling emotional when looking at data, some part of your brain cares way too much to remain objective. Both of you are clearly biased.

Your own data shows that you are just plain wrong. Percent positives at the beginning of the month are 4%. Number of tests have skyrocketed, if true cases are flat, then percent positive would plummet. Instead they have almost doubled to 7%. Your supposed lack of emotion is BS. You obviously have some internal or external motivation to believe there isn't a problem when there clearly is one. I live in the mountains in NorCal, there ain't a case around. However, as a one-time virologist (it's been almost two decades since I published a peer reviewed paper on SARS-1), I can assure you there is no chance that you are correct in your "hypothesis" that "Covid is not getting worse in CA."

"California coronavirus hospitalizations jump 32% in two weeks"

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-25/newsom-c...

We. Shut. Down. Too. Early. In. Most. Places.

For the love of God. Texas didn't have an outbreak when they shutdown! Nor did Oregon, or California. That is the difference. All of Europe shut down _after the virus had already grown exponentially_ in most places. We shut down Oregon when there were fewer than 100 cases. After three months of being shut down in Oregon the curve had nowhere to go but up!

What in the hell did people expect? We shut down before there is spread, wait three months and then reopen. How is that a plan? Did anyone really expect that places where shutdowns were early and strong would somehow come out unscathed?

It has been true since day 1. You either need to shut down HARD until there is a vaccine (not possible, not sustainable, more deaths caused by this) or you deal with the surge of cases and do your best to protect the elderly/vulnerable.

What you don't do is panic, shut down too early, burn through all your money and political capital, reopen and then be all "golly gee there are cases now!". If we had waited until there was growth in cases, we could shutdown and actually flatten the curve enough to handle the shock to the system.

It is so. damn. frustrating. that this isn't more obvious to people. What materially changed between today and March 1?

Lockdowns where a bad idea from there start as there is no way to continue them until there is a vaccine.

I am very curious to see if NY and the other early hot spots avoid a resurgence like Europe has. That is what I am most interested now. If they do, perhaps the folks who are talking about cross-reactive immunity are on to something.

I think the intent from the chief medical advisors (Fauci et al) was to slow the spread to the point where people would continue to get sick, but at a constant and manageable rate. But it's a very tricky thing, turning an exponential process into a linear one; especially when you don't actually know what the exponential is. Of course they couldn't come out and say this without being crucified, but I can't imagine that they simply didn't think ahead towards an outcome; doctors and researches are very much outcome-conscious. Unfortunately, our lovely politicians are, for the most part, math illiterate, and PR-conscious. So here we are.

By and large, places that weren't hit as hard as NY and western Europe assumed that they had some inherent privilege or immunity, and many of them are being proved wrong. It's a basic human behavioral characteristic. Even if you don't understand why you are better off than someone else, the default assumption is that you are intrinsically better. It might be true! But it's dangerous to assume it when you don't know the reason why.

So I think it's more of a tragic flaw of human nature than a particularly unlucky failure of timing.

The other issue with human nature is that people need feedback, so when you have 2-4 weeks of delay in the loop, things get out of control. You have weeks of believing falsehoods before reality starts to kick in.

47341 new cases yesterday. Skyrocketing fast. But you know, gotta reopen everything to keep the stock market happy.

No, we have to reopen so people can have jobs and feed their children and pay their housing bills.

They don’t mention hospitalization or deaths. Those are the two to keep track of. I’m guessing far more people are getting tested than previously, hence the larger numbers.

> I’m guessing far more people are getting tested than previously, hence the larger numbers.

Nationally that may be a contributing factor, but in hotspot states, the % of tests which are positive has actually gone up significantly: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states and select Florida or Arizona

The deaths are increasing too. 2500+ people passed away yesterday (June 25) in the US.

From all causes? Covid number is lower

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

That can't be from all causes, there are around 8,000 deaths per day in the US from all causes.

The % of tests that are coming back positive is increasing, which is a good indication that the growth we're seeing is due to a growth in infections, and not just growth in testing

Those are immune to the sampling rate bias, but they are lagging indicators. Based on the recent widespread failures to socially distance (e.g. George Floyd protests, campaign rallys, etc), I suspect those lagging charts will start trending upwards.

You can also correct for the sampling rate bias by looking at the number of cases per 100,000 tests (or similar). Does anyone have a link tracking that? EDIT: percentage positive tests: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states

Areas with BLM actions have not seen an increase in rates of infection.

https://www.popsci.com/story/health/black-lives-matter-prote...

That seems... very suspicious. I doubt that the virus cares what the reason for a large gathering is. I don't think the BLM actions were using proper social distancing. But what does that leave? People who went haven't bothered to get tested since? Everybody wore masks, and that's way more effective than we thought? The gatherings were outside, and the Vitamin D is saving everyone?

There have been epi efforts to oversample people in the blm protests specifically to examine its impact on infection rates and find it didn't matter. They didn't have an explanation but suspected it had to do with the protests mostly being outdoors.

I suspect being outdoors makes a huge difference.

If the protests were a hotspot for new infections the states that are doing contract tracing should show that. I haven’t seen any evidence of it.

It took me 10 minutes to get over my shock at your comment. Information entirely refuting your "guess" that the larger numbers are due to more people being tested is available at your fingertips. It takes about a second to google, click and read this information. I think you may be the victim of propaganda. You would do well to rethink your information sources and implicit biases.

Daily covid hospitalizations have doubled over the past month in Texas.

https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-updates/tmc-daily-new-covid-...

Need both raw and averages. But not ease for reporter. Stat telling “lies” and the truth at the same time. And said you have to dig in. Like % of test positive per test, death and hospitalised vs recovery. The fundamental is you want to use a number to say it all, but one number cannot tell the truth in many situation. One might not work, even simple like average vs median and mode. And a random bell shaped curve need two parameters.

Multiple angles are hard.

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