Middle America is still racking up a ton of new coronavirus cases
axios.com
axios.com
Take South Dakota.
South Dakota has 19 (out of 66) counties with daily cases per 100k over 100. Here are their populations in units of 1000 people: 5.9, 2.8, 7.1, 1.9, 23, 2.1, 5.4, 5.4, 5.4, 28, 9.3, 6.4, 2.9, 2.9, 2.2, 2.2, 4.4, 3.8, 8.4. The first 5 of those have daily cases over 150 (and the top 3 are 560, 244, 217).
57 counties have daily cases over 50.
One county (population 0.9k) has 0. Here are the rest under 50: 20.8, 24.0, 25.6, 31.3, 31.9, 43.0, 44.8, 49.7. Populations in k are 1.4, 2.4, 1.3, 3.2, 6.7, 4.2, 5.6, 2.3.
Their biggest counties are in the middle. The 10 counties with population of 20k or more have daily cases of 99.4, 87.4, 84.8, 85.7, 64.8, 71.6, 123.9, 90.1, 189.1, and 68.6. (Populations in k: 190, 110, 61, 39, 35, 28, 28, 26, 23, 20).
Compare to Washington (picked because I live there, so use it as a reference). We've got 9 counties under 20 new cases per 100k, 17 from 20 to 50, and 13 from 50 to 94.1.
Our biggest counties (pop. in k: 2300, 900, 820) have daily cases of 22.5, 34.9, and 31.1. I'm in a county with 270k people, and we are hitting new highs now of 19.6 daily cases per 100k, which would make us the second best county in the state if we were in South Dakota.
Rural areas are supposed to be where you go to escape a pandemic. How do you turn rural areas into places that are hardest hit?
By acting like it isn't a big deal and not taking it seriously at all and therefore taking little to no precautions.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-ma...
Density doesn't matter much for a virus as infectious as SARS-CoV-2. Very few people live in the mountains or on farms and only come into town every six months.
In retrospect I think everyone should have taken the Swedish approach (the one the UK was following until the scary Imperial College projection came out), and plan on everyone catching the disease sooner or later.
Sweden is now backing out of that plan.
Also, there’s a gradient of response to the virus: some people die, some people survive but suffer long term symptoms/damage and some people appear to simply go back to normal. These survivors are not distributed (by age, other comorbidities) the way fatalities are.
If you read Hacker News for any length of time, each week there will be multiple "Sweden proves its strategy worked" articles competing with multiple "Sweden's strategy proven to have failed" articles.
>Also, there’s a gradient of response to the virus: some people die, some people survive but suffer long term symptoms/damage and some people appear to simply go back to normal. These survivors are not distributed (by age, other comorbidities) the way fatalities are.
One thing I have not yet seen on Hacker News or anywhere else is convincing evidence that such "long-term symptoms/damage" are substantially greater in number or intensity[1] than for any other respiratory disease that can occasionally kill, especially given how novel (wording intentional) SARS-CoV-19 is.
[1] Except a somewhat higher percentage of fatalities than the flu, depending on whether you define death as a long-term symptom
I'm sorry the only articles I could find for you are behind a paywall or from secondary sources, but here's a WSJ article on the topic https://archive.is/OGN9Q#selection-2811.75-2811.130 and FT: https://archive.is/56yQu
Schools are closed, and the PM gave an address telling people how dangerous the virus is that was deliberately scheduled at the same time as Tegnell's regular address.
I don't have hard data on the consequential tail of infection and would be interested to see it. What I commented on is the false binary characterization of "it kills old people, everyone else is fine." Even if that were true, pushing grannie out on the ice floe has rarely been an acceptable strategy and if it does become an accepted decision criterion I look forward to the many other optimizations it would unlock.
Not sure why Axios feels the need to try and pin the whole thing on the Midwest.
That just means whoever wants to prove natural herd immunity theory right has to act now, before it's mooted. /s
> If we had delayed the second (third?) wave a couple more months or flattened its peak a little bit the vaccine would have saved us.
But that kind of success would have proven so many people wrong, people who really want to be right.
How are they doing that exactly?
It looks like the big coastal states are about 1.5 to 2x better in terms of cases per capita than the interior states. That's a Big majority of the US population. I would imagine it's also more impactful due to sparser ICU capacity.
I didn’t read it that way; I read “previously safer regions are now suffering, and at a greater rate than earlier zones”
It's pretty much the whole world that got screwed by this, and China itself hasn't exactly escaped unscathed.
It isn’t a problem only applicable to China, but the scale of the problem there dwarves most of the rest of the planet and ultimately needs to be addressed one way or another.
But authoritarian China has done far, far better than most of the rest of the world (and especially better than the US, the supposed standard-bearer of liberty and freedom). If you actually care about liberty, one of your priorities should be making sure it actually performs better than the alternatives. Acting foolishly and using liberty as an excuse just soils the reputation of the latter. If that pattern continues, I expect liberty will end up on the retreat worldwide.
I'm not so sure the cold war would have turned out the way it did, if the USSR, for all its oppression, managed to consistently provide comparable or superior material living standards to its citizens. It certainly wouldn't have had such a problem with defectors.
If CCP handled the Virus at the start of it quickly and not lied to the last minute, then the virus would have been contained. I think China's CCP is very much responsible for a lot of dead people all over the world, but I understand that not everyone shares this opinion. I mean on the other hand the west didn't take this seriously and the good thing is that the virus is not that deadly and we hopefully be ready for the next one. As a foreigner I see: 9/11 in USA -> USA invades Afganistan. Wuhan Virus -> USA doesn't seem to care, even if more people died, some even don't believe it exists(please fix your education system) I mean as a CCP member I would think: ok now lets make another virus with long incubation and more deadly and let it loose somewhere in the western country or in Taiwan and then we invite ourselves there as a peace protectors...
I think we have to make Chinese people care about their government and we can do it buy using Sanctions so that CCP will lose money and chinese people will stop spewing nationalistic bullshit start caring about economy and by extension how the government does things.