Covid is about to get bad in the hospitals.: Columbus | Hacker News Reader

Covid is about to get bad in the hospitals.: Columbus

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35 pointslightlyused17 comments

I feel like the timing of the election couldn't have been worse - it has taken so much focus off of Covid (and continues to do so as Republicans claim it's not over) at the worst possible time. The whole Midwest is in terrible shape and rapidly getting worse, but they're still slow to implement serious restrictions. Meanwhile, unlike the earlier surge in NY (and the one in AZ that came later), these are nationwide, so doctors and nurses can't be brought in from elsewhere. It feels like we're at the point where no one's going to declare a lockdown until people start dying while they wait in line for a hospital bed, and by that point it's going to be way too late and cost thousands and thousands of lives.

Re election, so true. I had been expecting to see a spike from the in person voting, I wonder how much of a driver that is right now. So many factors conspiring against us at the moment, pandemic fatigue, changing weather, malicious leadership. Vaccines can't come soon enough.

Seems to me it’s consistently been 3-4 weeks from event to death surge. That was true in Feb and March on the coasts, it held for the Sturgis rally, and I’d expect it for voting and the post-voting street celebrations as well.

I live in a city and county with a very strict mask order. I rarely if ever see anyone without a mask. Even people outside alone on a walk wear masks here. We are experiencing a massive spike and my friend at the ICU said they are out of beds. There must be other factors at play for this spike. I am NOT saying masks are ineffective. Only that there almost has to be other factors in this November spike that we all knew was coming months ago. I know it feels good to rage online about how your life is on the line because of the selfish Other, but it's really not helping much. Let's try to understand what's going on with as much good data as possible.

Same in Denver. For the most part everyone I see is wearing masks. Even a lot of people jogging and biking outside, which seems excessive to me. Yet the numbers are getting so bad, like Florida and New York early on bad. Seems it's the same story in a lot of places. Looking forward to this wave receading.

I've wondered about exercising and masks. They seem onerous, as you're breathing hard. But maybe more necessary, as you, well, breathing hard.

Generally you are able to maintain distance pretty well. And you are moving quickly in open air. Some people keep a mask under their chin and pull it up while passing, which seems more reasonable. I also see people wearing masks while driving alone in their cars. I advocate for masks, and have given away thosands of KN95's that I imported, but I think in some cases the masks are serving mostly as a way to feel some control in this out of control world that we inhabit

It depends on the exercise. They certainly make cardio harder, but when I lift I’m not breathing so rapidly that masks are a noticeable issue.

Isn’t this just exponential growth catching up to us? As long as the exponent > 1 the curve eventually gets “vertical.” It just takes longer. Discounting herd immunity, etc. which we’re clearly not at. (I am also interested in the data and don’t mean this as an argument.)

(Edit) An article positing some causes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/11/12/covid-socia...

A couple of weeks ago, the rural areas outside of my city were hit super hard which caused our big city hospital to be at full capacity despite the city being relatively calm. Small county hospitals around where I live are not equipped for this kind of situation and the big hospitals are the fallback.

Many are pointing to the impact of small in-person gatherings between friends/family. These are people who mostly wear masks in public but it only takes one person at one of these gatherings to spread it to others. [1]

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/11/12/covid-socia...

right, because masks are performative. that's why you see them so much out in public where they do little, but not much in private spaces where they could help in specific instances.

that limited context is when two people are facing each other, one infected, in relatively calm air, and within direct exhaust inhalation distance (~1m/3ft). yet we've been sold by the political media machine that they prevent spread everywhere, so "just wear a mask!" it's become the #1 policy prescription all over the world, because it's seen as doing something visible (political win) but not too much (more political win!).

distancing among non-household members when indoors is a much better first mitigation, but it keeps getting lumped in with masks (and the even less useful hand-washing/sanitizing) and drowned out because it's not as visibly performative. if the virus doesn't land on mucus membranes it's overwhelmingly likely to die.

I find these graphs from Vanderbilt to be particularly compelling (page 2) evidence of the effectiveness of mask mandates on general public wellbeing. What do you think? Anything I should be reconsidering?

https://www.vumc.org/health-policy/sites/default/files/publi...

while the report is clearly written to support masking mandates, they do provide the (counter-)explanation on page 3:

> "As in our August report, we stress that areas with masking requirements also have seen greater changes in other community behavior (e.g., lower mobility to higher-risk points of interest) and may also have other virus mitigation strategies in place, so the observed relationship is likely not just about masking."

the mitigative effects of the masking order is drowned out by concurrent, confounding mitigations, which aren't detailed unfortunately. i'd contend that the concurrent effects of a masking order is likely very minor (<10% of the overall effect), because distancing and reduced social interaction does the overwhelming bulk of the work, but that data is left out of the report.

that's not to say masks are always useless; they have a critical role in (health-)care settings and for essential workers who interact closely with many other people daily. but that's a tiny slice of daily interactions and a nuance that gets drowned out by the mediopolitical machine incentivized by conspicous credit, not solution (biden is already doubling-down, talking about a national mask mandate as his first order of business).

the report includes some other interesting (counter-)information (like the counter-effectiveness of "Safer At Home" orders as exhibited in figure 2), but i'll leave it there for now.

Did your country allow opening schools?

I'm in a similar type of place (Boston surburb) with extremely high mask adherence outdoors when walking by. But studies show that walking briefly by people outdoors isn't actually how you get it in the vast vast majority of cases. So it's a little bit of covid theatre.

I've been wondering the same thing as you. In general I tend to believe the adage of you don't get covid from strangers, you get it from people you know explains some of it[0]

Also the people you see on the street are probably (at least somewhat) responsible adults and not college students packing into football mash pits [1]

[0] https://www.dailynews.com/2020/05/15/coronavirus-who-gave-yo... [1] https://twitter.com/ematthemoment/status/1325299966961659911

Speculative crap from the braingang over at Reddit.

Hey what happened to South Dakota's hospitals that were in the news a few weeks ago? Isn't Florida supposed to be wiped out - they re-opened months ago! Remember a few weeks ago when Alabama made headlines for almost being at capacity? What happened with that? You forgot about it alraedy, didn't you?

Where are the death and hospital surges that were supposed to happen after Easter, spring break, Memorial Day, July 4th, Sturgis, and on and on? Georgia's schools have been open for months how are they doing?

You are simply scared of whatever the media tells you to be scared about that day. It's a mix of funny, fun, scary, and frightening to watch the media drag people around by the nose like this.

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