WHO says Covid-19 pandemic is 'one big wave', not seasonal
reuters.com
reuters.com
Disclaimer: I am not an expert. I believe in science, and its conclusions. All I wanted to know is if there's enough data points to plot a long-term trend.
I can't figure out who the target audience is for - the people who have written off COVID also seem to have written off the WHO, and those who haven't see that there's still a major ongoing problem.
I don't know if its seasonal or not yet although I could see experts could start making predictions already. To me though it is not one big wave. Watching the numbers in the USA and other countries it appears that as restrictions are lifted cases rise. When they rise we add restrictions and they go down at a much slower rate. Its many smaller waves.
And based upon your assessment, you'd seem to agree with her point - "It’s going to be one big wave. It’s going to go up and down a bit. The best thing is to flatten it and turn it into just something lapping at your feet"
"many smaller waves" does not seem relevant to understanding the virus and in fact is what they are warning against. Where I live, if you dig down, "waves" appear to be simple thing, super spreader events at essential businesses and churches.
> WHO officials have been at pains to avoid describing a resurgence of COVID-19 cases like those in Hong Kong as “waves” as this suggests the virus is behaving in ways beyond human control, when in fact concerted action can slow its spread.
The reason the UK locked down was to "protect the NHS". The lockdown worked - dramatically, spread was cut to almost zero overnight, the extra hospitals that were built weren't needed.
Right, but the point is: Australia etc. are in winter. Right now. We have that data; there's more to the world than just the top half.
(Incidentally, COVID precautions appear to be working well on flu, too. https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-measures-have-all-but-...)
Sydney's temperature tomorrow is a high of 17, low of 10.
Glasgow's temperature tomorrow is a high of 19, low of 10.
It's plenty chilly in southern Chile.
NZ - Christchurch 12C, Wellington 15C, Aukland 16C.
South Africa, Cape Town high of 19, Joburg high of 18, similar to Glasgow in Summer.
South America? Yes it's chilly in Southern Chilie. There's barely anybody living there. Same in Argentina - Ushuaia has a population of 130k and a high of 6C today. Arkangel is 3 times the size and has an average high of -9C in winter. Fairbanks population about 100k and high of -17 in the winter.
The population south of Viedma, Neuquén and Valdivia (highs today of around 13) is well under 3 million, with towns mostly less than 100k.
Santiago's high today is 33. BA has a high of 15. That's not the same as a northern winter.
Compare with Beijing, population 20 million, average highs of 2C in winter. Chicago, 1C, 9 million. Moscow -4C, 12 million.
Comparing a Southern winter with a Northern winter is disingenuous - it's milder, there's far fewer people, and far smaller cities with far lower density.
Instead, the replication of rhinovirus depends on if the air temperature in the nasal cavity is above or below 33-35C[1]. The winter in most temperate regions gets low enough to trigger that.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/02/1411030112
The key point is this: Australia's winters get cool enough to have a distinct cold/flu season every year.
Seems clear it's not heat related though - In Europe when people socially distanced there were few cases. As people are more blasé about it cases start to tick back up.
So it has died down, but that’s due to the measures we have enforced. The fact that localised spikes are happening I think proves that it’s not “run its course”.
However high density mass transit in cities is still empty on the most part (there's always exceptions) - most "knowledge workers" (the ones that cram into cities on overcrowded peak trains every day) are remaining at home. Those working in factories, warehouses and shops tend to drive there, so there's less opportunity to spread. Johnson is trying to get people back to offices to save share prices of Starbucks and Pret. I get the feeling it's that, combined with fewer people out at pubs, that's keeping it at bay.
We've expected to see increases ever since the VE Day conga lines, the Bournemouth Beaches, the BLM protests, and the pubs reopening, and on the whole we haven't seen it. I certainly don't think it's run it's course, but aside from local outbreaks which seem linked to poor factory conditions (the meat packing industry especially seems vulnerable), Leicester sweat shops) it does seem to be rumbling on without the exponential growth we saw in March.
I expect the winter being worse for the countries that weren't hit that hard in the summer.
It spread through Winter 2019, Spring 2020, and is spreading during Summer 2020 when trying to “re-open.”
Pretty sure measurable science to support the idea exists. Oh sure that trend may change, but come on, RIGHT NOW it’s literally showing no signs of fading away if we “live normally.”
Why do you need 18 more months of plotting data to decide on what’s literally happening right before your eyes?
The modeling from IMHE claims that in March the number of daily new infections were above 250K whereas today are about 120K.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
see the tab called Infections and Testing
It just that we were measuring a lot many more people now. But it is true that in June there were fewer cases than today, but by far the most cases were in the Winter.
How else would be in the situation where 10% of population is already seropostive and at least as many don't develop antibodies since their symptoms are mild, thus we are probably over 20% of people having had the disease.
Yeah, but the IHME model is also extremely bad. It consists almost entirely of fitting a Gaussian to the number of cases over time. It’s mathematically impossible in their model for the case count to not go down.
Instead of 10s of millions on ventilators, and millions dead it’s millions on ventilators and hundreds of thousands dead?
Statistics are great for science but awful for social policy.
For the same reason that you don’t want someone deciding what religion you should regurgitate. You could end up in the wrong cohort someday.
I'm no scientist but that was the end of Winter and there were very few people with it at the time.
Isn't it possible that it is indeed seasonal and it's now in its "weak phase"?
Politicians are load balancing the healthcare system, not the infection rates.
That doesn’t mean the virus got weaker. Rates go up as soon as distance is removed? Doesn’t seem like the virus wants to slow down as a matter of its “real” physical properties
For, Pro, Against, Anti, WHO, CDC, vaccine, masks, orders... etc etc etc... I’ve been thinking this same thing since March. I’m absolutely fine being cautious and doing the right thing, but I think everyone pretends “the science is settled” on these things and it changes weekly - and it should because a lot of it is new - but now that’s used as a weapon by everyone invoked. Kinda sick of it.
It should be totally OK to say “we don’t know, so we won’t guess”.
The problem with that is that policy changing every week is not something that western populations can deal with, so policy changes have to be dampened somewhat.
The WHO saying it’s one big wave, is a guess though.
(It is seasonal in the sense that the R0 is higher in the winter when people are cooped together, but once you've got sufficient exposure in the community a second wave won't happen regardless)
Citation, please. Any credible sources that I could find say that protection correlation with SARS is not clearly established and antibody levels to SARS fall off between 2-3 years after infection.
> there won’t be a second wave of any significance
There will or will not be but certainly not for the reasons you mention. Unlike flu and older coronaviruses, SARS-Cov-2 R_t seems to be driven exclusively by containment measures, not by seasonality, at least not at the present.
> once you've got sufficient exposure in the community a second wave won't happen regardless
We are nowhere near the "sufficient exposure" and it is already the most impactful pandemic in the last 100 years.
It was T-cell immunity, not humoral immunity like with antibodies. Absence of antibodies != absence of immunity.
And here's the citation: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z
What's depressing is how politicized the virus has become. How someone feels about the job the WHO has done is probably tied more to their political beliefs than to reality.
If we can't say that the WHO dropped the ball with their mask recommendations then we really can't say anything at all.
You seem certain of this.
Please post a link to the high quality evidence that you think WHO should have used to recommend mask wearing in the general public.
This should be either a meta-analysis or RCT that shows a clear benefit.
We have plenty of RCTs of masks to prevent spread of respiratory disease.
It should be very easy to find one -- you're so certain you must have already read the research, and if the effect is so clear it'd be obvious to people doing the research.
Not cloth, but melt-blown (and to some extent spun-bond) non-woven polypropylene. This is the fabric used to make surgical masks, surgical gowns, bouffant caps, and disposable bedding for hospitals. All of these things were in shortage in March and April.
The shortage of melt-blown non-woven fabric itself is now mostly over. Still in shortage are N95 respirators, which use melt-blown electret non-wovens — material given an electrostatic charge so that it attracts particles in the air. International N95-equivalent respirators are available to the public at inflated prices, but genuine (American standard) N95 masks are still difficult to find at any price.
The WHO guidance against mask-wearing was a desperate attempt to mitigate N95 shortages. Even when all major health authorities were telling the public not to use masks of any kind, N95 respirators were widely purchased by people who had no idea how to use them. (I've been in NYC throughout the pandemic. It's extremely common to see N95's worn with facial hair, with un-pinched nose strips, or even with the lower head-strap dangling. N95's have little value if not properly sealed.) The WHO believed advising the public to wear any mask at all would exacerbate N95 hoarding and ultimately cost lives by making them unavailable to hospitals.
[Edit:]
Not sure why I'm getting downvotes for this. This isn't controversial information. Dr. Fauci has given this same explanation for why mask guidance changed:
> [Fauci] also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE.
> He explained that public health experts "were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”
> [...]
> “We wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected,” Fauci concluded.
See: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
I'm having trouble unpacking this statement.
Are you saying that a person's political ideology influences their judgment about what's objectively true regarding the WHO?
Or are you saying that even when two persons agree on the objective details of WHO's behavior, their different political ideologies lead them to different sentiments regarding how well WHO performed?
Or something else?
On the seasonality: at a seminar on the epidemiology of this disease at my institution right today, the evidence on the impact of experimental factors was described as "inconsistent" but not enough to rule out one possibility or the other.
Ironically, a WHO staffer in Italy actually made a claim (or so the media said) about a "second wave" just two weeks ago.
I really don't understand why it is hard for many (not necessarily just the WHO) to say "we don't know".
In particular, if we close everything down, get infections down to a nice low level, then declare victory and throw away all our masks and precautions, you better bet there'll be a "second wave" that has nothing to do with the weather.
How will most people interpret "we don't know"? You and I might understand the wisdom behind admitting to not having enough information, but the average person won't, and the media can easily mock this form of honesty.
Being knowingly wrong or inconsistent seems to be a better strategy since the attention span of the average person is rather short, and appeal to authority is a pretty effective mind trick.
Appeal to authority may work, but authority can fail. And when that happens, the trust is lost.
https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/sars-gives-china-lesson-...
This is where the saying "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice same on me" comes into play. The below source shows the PRC covering up the COVID-19 outbreak:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382
I peronsally feel like the WHO should have been a lot more suspicious of the PRC and how they were reporting. However, it appeared like they took information from the PRC at face value in January, where containment could have spared much of this pandemic. Was it political? Much like someone else pointed out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM
A senior WHO offical praises the PRC, even after it is come out the the PRC covered up the initial outbreak. It is very hard to not view that is political.
To me, a lot of the mistrust of the WHO based on these sources are well founded.
You can only blame the PRC's poor response in January and February for some of our failures. Everything that we did wrong in mid-March and onward is squarely on our heads. Unsurprisingly, this failure gets politicized, by the people responsible deflecting their failures on another country.
Vietnam and South Korea and Australia and New Zealand somehow managed to get the epidemic more or less under control - probably because they were actually busy solving the problem, instead of pointing fingers at China and the WHO.
Why were they not dependent on the PRC and the WHO in making the correct response, but we were?
And before someone mentions that Vietnam, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand are islands (Well... Maybe not Vietnam!), I would also like to point out that Hawaii is an island, and currently has 400 times the per-capita cases of Vietnam... And 4 times the per-capita cases of South Korea - despite us knowing a lot more about how to stop the virus when it had its first case.
>You can only blame the PRC's poor response in January and February for some of our failures.
....what? Did you actually read the BBC article I sourced? They punished a doctor for trying to raise the flag on this. You are telling me they handled that better than the US? And how would the US actually be to blame for that?
I don't agree this was a "cover-up" in the sense of a government attempt to hide something they knew was going on.
As your own article says "What Dr Li didn't know then was that the disease that had been discovered was an entirely new coronavirus."
He was warned about spreading rumors. While I don't agree with the way they warn people for things like that in China, it isn't uncommon for this to happen to anyone who disturbs "social cohesion".
Additionally, it was done by the regional government, not the central one. In contemporary news coverage of the outbreak they note how the regional government tried to minimize the severity of the outbreak and it was the central government who intervened to lock the place down.
Could China have done better? Yes - I've run the timeline, and I think it was realistic for them to have known and acted about 2 or 3 days earlier than they Wuhan lockdown in the absolute best case. Do I think this would have made a difference for the rest of the world? Not really - the places that dealt with it well acted when the lock down occurred, and the places that didn't deal with it well ignored that.
It's worth noting that most of the world couldn't believe the Wuhan lockdown when it happened. I don't think places that ignored that news would have acted on any kind of WHO warning.
The WHO is funded primarily by the United States (despite Trump's recent threats), the United Kingdom, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. China contributes less than a tenth of what the US does. The idea that WHO is permanently beholden to China just doesn't add up. Now that China is no longer the center of the outbreak, WHO's praise of the PRC has (as far as I can tell) completely stopped.
In my personal belief, if the WHO had any intregity, they would have not played ball and warned every other country about what China is doing. They did the same exact thing back in 2002-2004 (per the article I sourced).
WHO needs a leadership change at the least for getting back any sort of the authority they used to have.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China"
14 January 2020 • 5:40pm
> While clear information about the mysterious virus remains hazy, the WHO said on Tuesday that transmission between humans has not been ruled out.
“From the information that we have it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission, potentially among families"
The WHO report findings, and on Dec 14th there was limited evidence that it was spreading from human to human. All of that is true.
0. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
1. https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...
They have been conservative in their statements. I don’t recall them ever saying “it doesn’t spread person-to-person” - I do recall them saying “there is no conclusive evidence of person-to-person transmission”. At the time, given the evidence they had, that was true. From their perspective saying that it did in fact spread person-to-person and later concluding it didn’t would have been much worse; I assume they take this approach to protect their reputation of being certain before making a public statement.
The problem seems to be that lay people seem to expect WHO to be on the bleeding edge and providing comprehensive information on the latest investigation and data. That’s not what they do. They report the findings, and that’s very different.
I feel like a trend I see is folks say to go out on their own to find some document that proves their point. There are several statements by the WHO on those dates, and I do not know which one you mean.
I have unfortunately seen the trend also where someone does link a source that is very lengthy and same thing. In one case, the source actually contradicted the person citing it.
I am not accusing you of that, merely it makes your argument much more credible when it is easy to see where you cited your sources.
The WHO further said
"It is still early days, we don’t have a clear clinical picture."
I only found two WHO statements, and they are discussing the minutes of emergency meetongs on COVID in January. Are those what they are referring to? If so, which one?
https://web.archive.org/web/20200115194156/https://www.who.i...
"Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses with some causing less-severe disease, such as the common cold, and others more severe disease such as MERS and SARS. Some transmit easily from person to person, while others do not. According to Chinese authorities, the virus in question can cause severe illness in some patients and does not transmit readily between people"
That seems very responsible reporting given that only 10 days after being made aware of it, WHO wouldn't have been able to gather any independent evidence. They said it could transmit easily from person to person, but it might not.
Statement on Jan 13th
https://web.archive.org/web/20200115230651/https://www.who.i...
Certainly doesn't say anything along the lines of "there will be no human-human transmission", just calls (which were mostly unheeded in the west) for active monitoring and preparedness
Taiwan didn't get a first case until Jan 21st, which was someone who travelled from Wuhan. It wasn't until Jan 28th they had a domestic case which wasn't linked to Wuhan, so expecting the WHO to have independent evidence in mid January isn't realistic. They reported the evidence they had and pleaded with the world to take it seriously. Taiwan listened, Europe and America didn't.
Here's what it looks in action, with senior leadership at WHO following the orders from China (video interview)
https://twitter.com/ezracheungtoto/status/124386977441046937...?
It was first diagnosed in late December and the earliest the WHO became aware was 30th/31st December (depending on timezone). WHO issued a statement saying there had been limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus on Jan 14th.
COVID-19 is pretty clearly not subsiding in any meaningful way.
For US data and projection based on models for each state: https://cv19.report/
We have to stop this narrative that we aren't going to listen to people until they are infallible. That's not how crisis management works. Or war, football, basketball, card games...
Hedging your bets is the act of wasting resources constructively, so that if your worst case scenario happens, you aren't doomed. Faulting people for hedging their bets is going to get us all killed.
It's been happening to scientists (first climate, now everybody) for years, and 'getting us all killed' was more figurative. Now we're doing it to doctors, and people are in fact dying. Of Covid (655k so far). Of measles (140k in 2018).
Do you want a dark age? Because this is how you get a dark age.
Just a few weeks ago, the Guardian quoted a study on Nature saying that asymptomatics were more infectious than symptomatic people. Except that the paper did not state anything like that, and even warned against using the results for policy reasons.
On the same camp, a Wired article saying that "the press must watch on science" to avoid pushing untested vaccines on the population, yet omitting the fact that some side effects of the Moderna vaccine were on a dose no longer used for trials.
And on the other side, we have conspiracy theorists and "skeptics" which only quote part of the studies which benefit their agenda, such as reporting only the more optimistic bound for the infection fatality rate. Or those who only quote negative bits about vaccines.
And scientists (I'm one of them) are to blame, too. A lot of those reporting to the media gave predictions, talked in absolutes (at least speaking for my country). Few actually said "we don't know". I'm not aware of anyone saying "we got something wrong".
Admitting there's bias leads to where, exactly? Slowing down and taking stock? That's right out of the playbook of the Other Side. It's called Teaching the Controversy, they are winning, oceans are rising and people are dying.
You cannot bring openness and flexibility to a conversation with manipulative people. To them, it's just a weakness they can exploit. Perhaps we have forgotten why scientists had 'safe spaces' before and we are learning very slowly why that was.
Telling things how they are, for a start, at least for the mainstream press. No matter if they go against one's narrative. We're not talking about politics or differing views, we're talking about scientific findings.
> You cannot bring openness and flexibility to a conversation with manipulative people.
That's how science is: open discourse. If you go for absolutes, eventually there are going to be contradictions, which will likely hamper getting important messages across. In my country, due to this, trust in scientific people is actually lowering, according to polls.
It really isn't. And hasn't been. You can get burned at the stake or put under house arrest if you go back far enough.
I don't think it's an accident at all that science uses its own thick jargon instead of a simple approachable vocabulary. It filters out some of the people who will willfully misinterpret the results. Only later when things are pretty set did someone come along and explain it in layspeak.
I fear that a lot of the policy failings of late are caused in part by our attempts to democratize science.
At least in my field of research, such views are held by few, if any. This is, IMO, an extremely bad faith argument. I think many in the field would love if the right information got out - even if incomplete, or with many unknowns.
At least that would spare us by the media getting things totally wrong and pushing disinformation on people (and that's a bipartisan problem).
These measures are currently seen as temporary. I wonder how long covid-19 needs to be a major threat before these "temporary" measures become permanent cultural / legal fixtures. E.g., updates to building codes, or conversion of executive emergency orders into permanent law.
For example, modifying building codes for retail/office space to reduce risk of person-to-person transmission via bio-aerosol.
The fact you didn't understand a simple statistic isn't the WHO's fault.
That is the mother of all misleading comparisons. He, Ferguson and the other quacks must be held responsible. They are the ones who caused all this chaos.
> "Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died.
REPORTED.
From that speech
> There is now a total of 90,893 reported cases of COVID-19 globally, and 3110 deaths.
3110 as a percentage of 90,893 is 3.42%
> By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected"
Why are you quoting this? How many people do you think die of seasonal flu each year?
Flu is serious, which is why we have internationally coordinated campaigns to monitor circulating strains, develop vaccines, and get vulnerable people vaccinated.
So far, covid-19 has been more severe than most flu years.
Look at the numbers:
We see that deaths are down and that illnesses are less severe (ICUs are not overwhelmed), even though daily infections are at all-time-highs in some regions. Coincidence, or perhaps due to seasonality?
We also see that the virus can not be brought under control without permanent lockdowns. As soon as you open up, the virus starts spreading again. Countries that now have the virus "under control" have had a significant amount of uncontrolled spread beforehand.
I've read several headlines along the lines of "resurgence of cases after opening up" or "second wave under way" in Europe. Then I look at the graphs and it's just not true. Cases are stable, you just have some daily variance.
Do all pandemics work that way more or less?
The other aspect the lackadaisical are ignoring is that the morbidity rate is only where it is because the number of critical patients is hovering around the carrying capacity of our medical infrastructure. More cases means a dog-leg in deaths because they will have to give up on people to save others. There will be no more heroic actions to save mom or dad once you can fill the ICU entirely with people with far better prognoses. Mom isn't going into the ICU because it's already full of athletes and people under 30. She's going on morphine and you can say goodbye over a phone.
I think this is the point. They are not saying it could get worse in winter months, they are saying that summer is not a "low season" and that it will spread just fine without controls. The data supports that.
edit: In fact, take a look at Brazil or India, places that are hot year round. They have very few instances of the flu no matter the time of year. This shows that it doesn't spread much in warm weather. We already know that covid-19 does spread in warm weather.
I would argue that it doesn't show that. Nobody is testing for Influenza if it's just a "mild" case. What is being tracked is deaths from pneumonia that are attributed to Influenza.
If you look at the mortality in India or Brazil, it's way lower than in countries further from the equator. You also would expect testing capacity to be lower, so there's likely more unknown cases there.
As a matter of experimental practice, however, there should be sufficient information to infer whether or not to expect much seasonal variation in COVID-19 infections. The pandemic emerged at the end of winter in the northern hemisphere. It is now full-on summer. In the southern hemisphere, however, the sign is flipped. It is now full-on winter.
Unfortunately, the Covid pandemic is now a high-statistics event. There are oodles of cases in locations that span the full gamut of humidity and temperature distributions. Societal variations (policy, economics, politics, etc.) complicate the experiment, but the opportunity to make a reasonable quantitative statement on the impact of seasonal climatic variation on Covid transmission is surely there.
There isn't really a "full-on winter" in the southern hemisphere except in the southernmost parts of Chile/Argentina/Australia or in New Zealand. That makes it difficult to compare.
The cross-society systematic uncertainties are the major challenge, as every country and culture is attacking this thing differently (and NZ is crushing it). If there is a strong seasonal effect, it should be apparent throughout global datasets, both from a latitude-dependent dynamic in the northern hemisphere and variation with opposite sign for locations with equal and opposite latitude.
It is my continued guess that meaningful bounds on any seasonal effect are not inaccessable.
From US data alone, it is clear that R_0 is not impacted by a factor of ~2-5 by summertime climate. We're still losing.
This is false. Deaths were down, but they have been climbing again for the last three weeks. Mortality is a lagging indicator to infections, so what we're seeing right now is mortality from the earliest stages of reopening.
> illnesses are less severe
This is also false. There may be some factors that are combating more severe symptoms (e.g. greater vitamin D, if that turns out to be a real effect), but the virus hasn't recently become somehow less potent.
> ICUs are not overwhelmed
False again. In the current hotspot states -- Florida, Arizona, and Texas -- ICU capacity in many areas is strained or overwhelmed as is the rest of the hospital infrastructure:
"ICU beds, ventilators in use hit new records as Arizona reports 1,357 new COVID-19 cases": https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/20...
"Florida coronavirus: 52 hospitals max out ICU capacity as cases increase": https://www.wfla.com/8-on-your-side/investigations/florida-c...
"Texas hospitals are running out of drugs, beds, ventilators and even staff": https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/14/texas-hospitals-coro...
Note that all of these articles are over a week old. The situation hasn't improved since then.
Deaths are rising in counties that hadn't had significant exposure to covid19 before, and already the trend is heading down across the board. Deaths will be climbing in a couple of hotspots for the next 2 weeks, but total deaths in the entirety of the USA shouldn't exceed 280k.
I agree the virus hasn't become less potent, but hospitals have gotten much, much better at treatment. Remdesivir in particular makes a big difference. Spread in long term care facilities are now tracked nationwide, with terrific results. So the CFR is down by a lot, even though the virus hasn't changed.
Nobody in the US is being denied care because the ICUs are full. Yes, some hospitals are strained but this is not at all unusual. You'll find similar articles about maxed out ICUs from 2018, 2016, etc. First hit on google from jan 2018: "Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents" (https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...). Moving patients to hospitals with spare capacity isn't that big of a deal. Bear in mind that Hospitals are for profit and ICU beds are extremely expensive. As a consequence hospitals target 85%+ ICU utilization throughout the year, otherwise they're losing money.
Didn't the Texas Tribune just misreport the data? https://twitter.com/VanceGinn/status/1287940050752286721
You mean the rate of increase of the increase in deaths is heading down...across the board?
Even if we don't have a solid treatment plan, we have more knowledge now than we did before. Triage is about saving as many people as you can by not allocating resources on those who are too far gone, or not far enough. Surely we have better bounds on those conditions now.
We probably also have fewer people suffering from side effects of treatments that have been proven ineffective. Those complications could push some patients from critical condition to dead.
> This is also false.
I agree it's false. One reason people think it's true is that very much more testing is happening, so we're seeing people with milder symptoms getting tested positive. Before they just wouldn't have been tested.
But the same thing is just not happening everywhere. People don't seem to accept that. You average in declining cases and deaths in NY, say, and it obscures what's happening in Texas. Same on an international scale.
I am not. Look at the rate of change in daily deaths in NY versus Texas. It's a big difference.
Deaths relative to cases are down...
> Mortality is a lagging indicator to infections, so what we're seeing right now is mortality from the earliest stages of reopening.
...even accounting for lag.
> There may be some factors that are combating more severe symptoms (e.g. greater vitamin D, if that turns out to be a real effect), but the virus hasn't recently become somehow less potent.
Then why are deaths down? Why is no other state repeating anything close to what New York went through?
> False again. In the current hotspot states -- Florida, Arizona, and Texas -- ICU capacity in many areas is strained or overwhelmed
Nowhere does it say "overwhelmed". At or near capacity is not "overwhelmed". It's better to ring the alarms sooner than later, of course.
Based on everything we know about infectious disease transmission and illness severity in general, infection rate indicators and case severity are likely to worsen throughout fall and become particularly nasty during the depths of winter. Seasonal reduction in sunlight exposure suppresses immunity (it's not just an issue of vitamin-D), bacteria and mold exposure upticks dramatically as cool, damp days predominate in much of the northern hemisphere.
Air pollution increases as old weather reduces dispersal rates and people burn more fuel to heat their homes while driving more to avoid trudging through rain and snow in the gloom. And if they're not driving, then they're using public transport, and as we know, buses and trains are petri dishes. Some other infectious diseases are likely to play well with SARS2, as is observed with a variety of bacterial infections and common cold associated coronaviruses.
On top of all this, populations are much more likely to huddle together indoors, often in poorly ventilated spaces which allows bioaerosols to concentrate, making a physical distancing impractical for many and multiplying viral exposure load. This can be mitigated by taking steps to upgrade ventilation, adding air cleaning and sterilization countermeasures, and at an individual level, wearing the best available masks and sealed eye protection while indoors with people outside of your quarantine bubble.
Let's hope for the best while preparing for the worst.