"Coronavirus and the US" or "We are all going to die!!!!"

[blastula]

After it's all over, we should have good data on how effective were the different government approaches, depending.



The graphic isn't exactly accurate since some of those white states have local stay-at-home orders. Florida especially with their older population is taking a big risk.

 

[George S]

I'm in FL. The attitude among the older here in a 55+ community is to hunker down. Some are hyper-vigilant. The local Publix has 7:30-8:00 a.m. seniors only. A few are 'Oh, well, I gotta go soon anyhow. No worries.'
The worldwide death toll -- unless hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin+zinc works -- will be huge. Mostly due to lack of hospital beds/ventilators because all are in use.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

By the time a person needs a ventilator they have very poor odds, right?

Not necessarily. Lots of patients need to be temporarily ventilated for all kinds of reasons, but still survive following treatment. When there is a shortage of ventilators, medical professionals will have to decide who has the best chances of surviving and let the rest die. The problem is that medical professionals aren't perfect and sometimes those that appear likely to survive will die, while some who were denied treatment might have survived if they had access to effective treatment. This is what Italy has been doing over the last several weeks.

I think he was referring to the specific case of needing a ventilator for Covid-19 vs needing a ventilator for any reason.

 

[southernhybrid]

By the time a person needs a ventilator they have very poor odds, right?

Not necessarily. Lots of patients need to be temporarily ventilated for all kinds of reasons, but still survive following treatment. When there is a shortage of ventilators, medical professionals will have to decide who has the best chances of surviving and let the rest die. The problem is that medical professionals aren't perfect and sometimes those that appear likely to survive will die, while some who were denied treatment might have survived if they had access to effective treatment. This is what Italy has been doing over the last several weeks.

I think he was referring to the specific case of needing a ventilator for Covid-19 vs needing a ventilator for any reason.

It doesn't matter. There have already been people who have recovered after being ventilated for COVID-19. If someone is in their 80s or 90s, it's doubtful they would survive being ventilated for most any reason, but a healthy person who is younger is likely has a decent change of surviving ventilation.

I read about two young health care professionals in China, who both required mechanical ventilation. One died and the other one recovered. The weird thing was that the one who died was expected to recover and the one who recovered wasn't expected to make it. There are so many things that we don't fully understand about this virus, which makes it hard to predict who will have mild symptoms and who will die. The two health care professionals I mentioned were each 27 years old. It no longer appears as if age is a predictor of who will have mild symptoms. Perhaps it's more a matter of how intensely one is exposed to the virus?

They found a 42 year old respiratory therapist dead in her home due to the virus, in Georgia, about 30 miles from where I live.

And, a 25 year old woman, who recovered, wrote an editorial in the NYTimes the other day about how horrible the disease was for her. She didn't need ventilation, but she did need a high level of O2 and was hospitalized for over a week. She wrote the editorial in hopes of making other people her age realize how important it is to social distance themselves. Scary shit.

 

[Jokodo]

Congratulation, you reached number 1 in active cases today (that's cases that have neither died nor are considered recovered), overtaking Spain and Italy since yesterday! USA! USA #1! Trump is handling this so great!

Yeah, it's not funny at all. For what it's worth, with ~6000 confirmed cases to ~9 million inhabitants, we're still way above your rates relative to the population in this country where, apparently (I swear I never knew) "oral beer pong" is a thing: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/24/europe/austria-ski-resort-ischgl-coronavirus-intl/index.html

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Congratulation, you reached number 1 in active cases today (that's cases that have neither died nor are considered recovered), overtaking Spain and Italy since yesterday! USA! USA #1! Trump is handling this so great!

MAGA! We're #1!

 

[barbos]

Congratulation, you reached number 1 in active cases today (that's cases that have neither died nor are considered recovered), overtaking Spain and Italy since yesterday! USA! USA #1! Trump is handling this so great!

Yeah, it's not funny at all. For what it's worth, with ~6000 confirmed cases to ~9 million inhabitants, we're still way above your rates relative to the population in this country where, apparently (I swear I never knew) "oral beer pong" is a thing: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/24/europe/austria-ski-resort-ischgl-coronavirus-intl/index.html

Known active cases.

We realized that they exchanged saliva because they were playing beer pong," using their mouths, he said, although he did not single out any specific bars where the game took place. The game involved spitting ping pong balls out of their mouths into beer glasses, and those balls were then reused by other people.

That's disgusting and really got me thinking. How likely is to get infected if you do everything right. Could it be that most of infected people are really careless or simply filthy?

 

[Jokodo]

Congratulation, you reached number 1 in active cases today (that's cases that have neither died nor are considered recovered), overtaking Spain and Italy since yesterday! USA! USA #1! Trump is handling this so great!

Yeah, it's not funny at all. For what it's worth, with ~6000 confirmed cases to ~9 million inhabitants, we're still way above your rates relative to the population in this country where, apparently (I swear I never knew) "oral beer pong" is a thing: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/24/europe/austria-ski-resort-ischgl-coronavirus-intl/index.html

Known active cases.

sure, however they lag in testing, so they have a high number of unknown cases too.

We realized that they exchanged saliva because they were playing beer pong," using their mouths, he said, although he did not single out any specific bars where the game took place. The game involved spitting ping pong balls out of their mouths into beer glasses, and those balls were then reused by other people.

That's disgusting and really got me thinking. How likely is to get infected if you do everything right. Could it be that most of infected people are really careless or simply filthy?

No, not as an individual.

Behaviour like this surely helps the virus spread, but the people engaging it don't only endanger themselves, they endanger everyone near them too. If you are in a crowded bar where a handful of people played oral beer pong three nights earlier, at a different bar you would never enter, you're still out of luck.

If you have a community where people do that (or even just pass around bottles and joints), and another where that's not the case, then the virus will spread faster in one than the other, and in some cases that's decide whether its reproduction rate drops below 0, but simply not doing that isn't going to protect you given a high prevalence around you.

 

[barbos]

sure, however they lag in testing, so they have a high number of unknown cases too.

We realized that they exchanged saliva because they were playing beer pong," using their mouths, he said, although he did not single out any specific bars where the game took place. The game involved spitting ping pong balls out of their mouths into beer glasses, and those balls were then reused by other people.

That's disgusting and really got me thinking. How likely is to get infected if you do everything right. Could it be that most of infected people are really careless or simply filthy?

No, not as an individual.

Behaviour like this surely helps the virus spread, but the people engaging it don't only endanger themselves, they endanger everyone near them too. If you are in a crowded bar where a handful of people played oral beer pong three nights earlier, at a different bar you would never enter, you're still out of luck.

If you have a community where people do that (or even just pass around bottles and joints), and another where that's not the case, then the virus will spread faster in one than the other, and in some cases that's decide whether its reproduction rate drops below 0, but simply not doing that isn't going to protect you given a high prevalence around you.

My point is, it could be possible that reported high rate of spread is due to small percentage of people who infect dis-proportionally large number of each other. Oral beer ponging and sharing whistles is just dumb even without epidemics.
I mean it's like that alcohol use statistics, they report average consumption numbers but in reality when you see that 20% of people consume 80% of alcohol it paints very different view.

 

[Jokodo]

sure, however they lag in testing, so they have a high number of unknown cases too.



No, not as an individual.

Behaviour like this surely helps the virus spread, but the people engaging it don't only endanger themselves, they endanger everyone near them too. If you are in a crowded bar where a handful of people played oral beer pong three nights earlier, at a different bar you would never enter, you're still out of luck.

If you have a community where people do that (or even just pass around bottles and joints), and another where that's not the case, then the virus will spread faster in one than the other, and in some cases that's decide whether its reproduction rate drops below 0, but simply not doing that isn't going to protect you given a high prevalence around you.

My point is, it could be possible that reported high rate of spread is due to small percentage of people who infect dis-proportionally large number of each other. Oral beer ponging and sharing whistles is just dumb even without epidemics.

I understand your point, but those people don't only infect each other, but potentially also everyone else, people who did everything right except being physically to close to one of them (or someone they infected, or someone who got infected by someone they infected).

It's a bit like drunk driving - while most drunk drivers die alone hitting a tree or wall, a significant minority take someone down with them, such that the prevalence of drunk driving makes the roads a more dangerous place even for teetotalers. Only worse because, while car crashes kill indiscriminately, a young and healthy super-spreader might actually come out unscathed while inadvertantly, directly or indirectly, causing the death of dozens of people in less good health.

 

[barbos]

sure, however they lag in testing, so they have a high number of unknown cases too.



No, not as an individual.

Behaviour like this surely helps the virus spread, but the people engaging it don't only endanger themselves, they endanger everyone near them too. If you are in a crowded bar where a handful of people played oral beer pong three nights earlier, at a different bar you would never enter, you're still out of luck.

If you have a community where people do that (or even just pass around bottles and joints), and another where that's not the case, then the virus will spread faster in one than the other, and in some cases that's decide whether its reproduction rate drops below 0, but simply not doing that isn't going to protect you given a high prevalence around you.

My point is, it could be possible that reported high rate of spread is due to small percentage of people who infect dis-proportionally large number of each other. Oral beer ponging and sharing whistles is just dumb even without epidemics.

I understand your point, but those people don't only infect each other, but potentially also everyone else, people who did everything right except being physically to close to one of them (or someone they infected, or someone who got infected by someone they infected).

It's a bit like drunk driving - while most drunk drivers die alone hitting a tree or wall, a significant minority take someone down with them, such that the prevalence of drunk driving makes the roads a more dangerous place even for teetotalers. Only worse because, while car crashes kill indiscriminately, a young and healthy super-spreader might actually come out unscathed while inadvertantly, directly or indirectly, causing the death of dozens of people in less good health.

Yes, these people are on occasion would infect innocent bystanders but for the most part they infect people like them - the ones who go to bars and exchange saliva during plague.

 

[lpetrich]

Brian M. Rosenthal on Twitter: "The New York Times worked with a doctor to film 72 hours at Elmhurst, the hospital that's been hardest hit by the coronavirus outbreak in NY. The result is an extraordinary piece of video journalism
Everybody should watch this: [url]https://t.co/AnaBqSwK81 (by @robinnyc7/@rarecanary)" / Twitter[/url]
noting
‘People Are Dying’: 72 Hours Inside a N.Y.C. Hospital Battling Coronavirus - The New York Times

An emergency room doctor in Elmhurst, Queens, gives a rare look inside a hospital at the center of the coronavirus pandemic. “We don’t have the tools that we need.”

What a crunch it is, with supplies promised but not delivered.

 

[Jokodo]

I understand your point, but those people don't only infect each other, but potentially also everyone else, people who did everything right except being physically to close to one of them (or someone they infected, or someone who got infected by someone they infected).

It's a bit like drunk driving - while most drunk drivers die alone hitting a tree or wall, a significant minority take someone down with them, such that the prevalence of drunk driving makes the roads a more dangerous place even for teetotalers. Only worse because, while car crashes kill indiscriminately, a young and healthy super-spreader might actually come out unscathed while inadvertantly, directly or indirectly, causing the death of dozens of people in less good health.

Yes, these people are on occasion would infect innocent bystanders but for the most part they infect people like them - the ones who go to bars and exchange saliva during plague.

Without quantifying "on occasion" or "for the most part", that's a pretty meaningless statement.

 

[blastula]

Grim forecast here.

New COVID-19 Forecasts: US Hospitals Could Be Overwhelmed in the Second Week of April by Demand for ICU Beds, and US Deaths Could Total 81,000 by July - IHME

SEATTLE – In a forecast based on new data analyses, researchers find demand for ventilators and beds in US hospital intensive care units (ICUs) will far exceed capacity for COVID-19 patients as early as the second week of April. Deaths related to the current wave of COVID-19 in the US are likely to persist into July, even assuming people protect themselves and their communities by strongly adhering to social distancing measures and by taking other precautions advised by public health officials.

“Our estimated trajectory of COVID-19 deaths assumes continued and uninterrupted vigilance by the general public, hospital and health workers, and government agencies,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine. “The trajectory of the pandemic will change – and dramatically for the worse – if people ease up on social distancing or relax with other precautions. We encourage everyone to adhere to those precautions to help save lives.”

 

[James Brown]

Imagine being turned away at a hospital because they don't have the resources to help you, not because you have COVID-19, but because you were in a car accident, or had an appendicitis attack, or were shot.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Thoughts and prayers for next month's typical ER patients... cyz there's fuck all else we can give 'em.

 

[blastula]

The good news in that forecast is that, although April will be the most difficult, the case load does peak then and so wanes after to manageable levels. Of course this is assuming continued mitigation efforts.

 

[Jokodo]

Globally in the last 24h, more new deaths were officially recorded in one day than the accumulated total as of March 1.

 

[Tharmas]

Brian M. Rosenthal on Twitter: "The New York Times worked with a doctor to film 72 hours at Elmhurst, the hospital that's been hardest hit by the coronavirus outbreak in NY. The result is an extraordinary piece of video journalism
Everybody should watch this: [url]https://t.co/AnaBqSwK81 (by @robinnyc7/@rarecanary)" / Twitter[/url]
noting
‘People Are Dying’: 72 Hours Inside a N.Y.C. Hospital Battling Coronavirus - The New York Times

An emergency room doctor in Elmhurst, Queens, gives a rare look inside a hospital at the center of the coronavirus pandemic. “We don’t have the tools that we need.”

What a crunch it is, with supplies promised but not delivered.

My daughter lives in East Elmhurst, Queens. So far she and her family are OK.

 

[barbos]

I understand your point, but those people don't only infect each other, but potentially also everyone else, people who did everything right except being physically to close to one of them (or someone they infected, or someone who got infected by someone they infected).

It's a bit like drunk driving - while most drunk drivers die alone hitting a tree or wall, a significant minority take someone down with them, such that the prevalence of drunk driving makes the roads a more dangerous place even for teetotalers. Only worse because, while car crashes kill indiscriminately, a young and healthy super-spreader might actually come out unscathed while inadvertantly, directly or indirectly, causing the death of dozens of people in less good health.

Yes, these people are on occasion would infect innocent bystanders but for the most part they infect people like them - the ones who go to bars and exchange saliva during plague.

Without quantifying "on occasion" or "for the most part", that's a pretty meaningless statement.

I believe I quantified it. "20% of the people cause 80% of the problems" rule is nearly universally applicable.