The World-O-Meter Thread

[Politesse]

Black Friday madness is going to kill vast swathes of people about week or two before Christmas this year, isn't it? Ho-ho-ho...

 

[Elixir]

Black Friday madness is going to kill vast swathes of people about week or two before Christmas this year, isn't it? Ho-ho-ho...

Not if Trump has his way. Black Friday is in November, right? (I'm not good with holidays).
Before then, everyone will have been exposed and either shrugged it off, gotten sick or died.
</my version of Happy Talk>

 

[Derec]

Black Friday madness is going to kill vast swathes of people about week or two before Christmas this year, isn't it? Ho-ho-ho...

Not if Trump has his way. Black Friday is in November, right? (I'm not good with holidays).
Before then, everyone will have been exposed and either shrugged it off, gotten sick or died.
</my version of Happy Talk>

What's wichu and Trump anyway?

By the way, I saw this interesting approach to treatment - low-dose radiation therapy. It would not destroy the virus, as the dose is too low, but would reduce inflammation, which is the cause of severe lung damage in some patients.
Low-Dose Radiation Therapy May Help COVID Patients

 

[Elixir]

Black Friday madness is going to kill vast swathes of people about week or two before Christmas this year, isn't it? Ho-ho-ho...

Not if Trump has his way. Black Friday is in November, right? (I'm not good with holidays).
Before then, everyone will have been exposed and either shrugged it off, gotten sick or died.
</my version of Happy Talk>

What's wichu and Trump anyway?

There is no "me and Trump".
There is me and America, what it was, what it was becoming and what it has become.
Then there is Trump... a lifeless lump of symbolism binding to the place of a president, comforting the stupid, the racist and the malevolent, much as opiates bind to pain receptors in the brains of junkies.

 

[James Brown]

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

 

[lpetrich]

New Zealand goes 100 days with no coronavirus community spread - Axios

New Zealand has now gone 100 days with no detected community spread of COVID-19, the Ministry of Health confirmed in an emailed statement Sunday afternoon local time.

...
By the numbers: New Zealand has 23 active coronavirus cases. All are NZ residents newly returned from abroad, who are staying in managed isolation facilities.

Of note: The border remains closed to non-residents and all newly returned Kiwis must undergo a two-week isolation program managed by the country's defense force. All travelers tested three times before they leave.

So NZ is back to normal except for quarantines for visitors.

 

[bleubird]

https://www.sturgis-sd.gov/webcams-in-and-around-sturgis
And.... there is this,Brilliant !

 

[ZiprHead]

Speaking of Sturgis, this was a question posted in a covid support facebook group.

So my ex husband is in Sturgis right now for the bike rally. Is it wrong for me to insist he either self quarantine for 14 days or show a negative covid test upon returning home before I allow my kids to spend any time with him???

 

[crazyfingers]

Speaking of Sturgis, this was a question posted in a covid support facebook group.

So my ex husband is in Sturgis right now for the bike rally. Is it wrong for me to insist he either self quarantine for 14 days or show a negative covid test upon returning home before I allow my kids to spend any time with him???

It a reasonable requirement.

 

[ZiprHead]

Speaking of Sturgis, this was a question posted in a covid support facebook group.

So my ex husband is in Sturgis right now for the bike rally. Is it wrong for me to insist he either self quarantine for 14 days or show a negative covid test upon returning home before I allow my kids to spend any time with him???

It a reasonable requirement.

I agree. But I think statements from the kids doctor and her lawyer would be helpful.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Speaking of Sturgis, this was a question posted in a covid support facebook group.

So my ex husband is in Sturgis right now for the bike rally. Is it wrong for me to insist he either self quarantine for 14 days or show a negative covid test upon returning home before I allow my kids to spend any time with him???

Quite sensible.

 

[ronburgundy]

Speaking of Sturgis, this was a question posted in a covid support facebook group.

So my ex husband is in Sturgis right now for the bike rally. Is it wrong for me to insist he either self quarantine for 14 days or show a negative covid test upon returning home before I allow my kids to spend any time with him???

Reasonable and in fact highly immoral of the husband to have gone without planning to do so. Sadly, smart money would bet that if she made that demand, she'd get a good beating. Yes, I am suggesting that any man who'd attend the Sturgis motorcycle rally against his wife's wishes and return home to her and two kids is more likely than not to be a spousal abuser. I'd draw the Venn diagram, but I'm busy drinking.

 

[Derec]

What if ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Closer Than Scientists Thought?

But in parts of New York, London and Mumbai, for example, it is not inconceivable that there is already substantial immunity to the coronavirus, scientists said.
“I’m quite prepared to believe that there are pockets in New York City and London which have substantial immunity,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “What happens this winter will reflect that.”

That's exactly what I have been saying here to counter the pessimists.

The initial calculations for the herd immunity threshold assumed that each community member had the same susceptibility to the virus and mixed randomly with everyone else in the community. “That doesn’t happen in real life,” said Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. “Herd immunity could vary from group to group, and subpopulation to subpopulation,” and even by postal codes, he said.

This is also something I have argued here, specifically in post #553.

Assuming the virus ferrets out the most outgoing and most susceptible in the first wave, immunity following a wave of infection is distributed more efficiently than with a vaccination campaign that seeks to protect everyone, said Tom Britton, a mathematician at Stockholm University.
His model puts the threshold for herd immunity at 43 percent — that is, the virus cannot hang on in a community after that percentage of residents has been infected and recovered.

Note that communities are already past that threshold. Corona, Queens, NY [ironic, I know!] is already at >50%!
1.5 Million Antibody Tests Show What Parts of N.Y.C. Were Hit Hardest

Still, the relatively high prevalence of antibodies may partly explain why New York has not seen a significant uptick in cases over the past several months, even as the city has begun to reopen and some New Yorkers have begun to relax their social distancing. In interviews, epidemiologists have generally expressed surprise and relief at the relatively low rate of new infections in New York City, chalking it up to a variety of measures: widespread use of face coverings, adherence to social distancing recommendations and the continued ban on indoor dining and bars.
“If antibody tests are accurately identifying those who have been infected and if these antibodies are protective, are some communities in N.Y.C. close to achieving herd immunity, like Corona in Queens, for example,” Professor El-Sadr wrote in an email. “That is an intriguing thought.”

Another think I have pointed out. It is not just the social distancing and other protective measures NY(C) has adopted, but also the fact that NY(C) suffered a horrible Spring during which a sizable portion of the population had already been infected.

Back to the original article:

But models like Dr. Britton’s hint that it’s not impossible. Other researchers have suggested, controversially, that herd immunity can be achieved at rates of immunity as low as 10 or 20 percent — and that entire countries may already have achieved that goal.
Criticism trailed Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist at Oxford University, after a widely circulated interview in which she said that London and New York may already have reached herd immunity because of variability among people, combined with a theoretical immunity to common cold coronaviruses that may protect against the new one.
“That could be the explanation for why you don’t see a resurgence in places like New York,” she said.
Most experts reject that notion. Several studies have shown that certain immune cells produced following infection with seasonal coronaviruses may also recognize the new coronavirus.

Not sure how that last sentence relates, but anyway, I can understand why the experts do want to tread lightly and express themselves cautiously. And 10-20% may be too optimistic. But the fact that partial herd immunity exists to a high extent in NY(C) is most definitely an explanation of why their current new infection rates are so low. I do not think it can adequately be explained with public health measures (social distancing, mask-wearing, still some businesses closed) alone.
Not that NYC should ditch these measures just yet! Only a handful of zip-codes are above the 43% threshold (if that model holds) and a minority are even close. Yet, it is clearly the partial herd immunity that works in concert with the measures that makes NYC a relatively safe place COVID wise right now.

 

[Derec]

And while I am here, here is the current US snapshot.


We are certainly trending in the right direction!

 

[Elixir]

And while I am here, here is the current US snapshot.
View attachment 29043

We are certainly trending in the right direction!

Yup ...at the moment.
Still killing 1000+ people every day. That should trend down in a few weeks too. But there are still too many FOXwashed morons out there who "don't believe in" pandemics to assure that another peak (possibly even worse than this most recent one, even as this one is much worse than the one in April) isn't lurking around the corner. With no encouragement of vigilance coming from the Trump Crime Family and their minions, it seems almost inevitable.

The most encouraging thing is the NY map - it shows that antibodies are enduring long enough in large fractions of the population to confer a degree of "herd immunity", and that exposure to the Trump Virus is far more widespread than reports would indicate (so mortality rates are much lower than shown by report-based calculus).

 

[ZiprHead]

I'm wondering how the numbers can be trusted since the feds have placed handling those numbers into the hands of political flunkies.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What if ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Closer Than Scientists Thought?

Anything to justify sacrificing a million people on the altar of the DOW.

Even if a few of the hardest hit spots are at herd immunity that doesn't mean the rest of the nation is.

 

[Harry Bosch]

What if ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Closer Than Scientists Thought?

Anything to justify sacrificing a million people on the altar of the DOW.

Even if a few of the hardest hit spots are at herd immunity that doesn't mean the rest of the nation is.

There is a growing group of scientists who warn that we may never able to develop herd immunity. IOW, the upcoming vaccine will only be around 30% effective, and that it will need to be adjusted every year, similar to the flu vaccine. This means that unless you become a complete hermit, most likely all of us are going to get it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And while I am here, here is the current US snapshot.
View attachment 29043

We are certainly trending in the right direction!

Amazing how the curve turned down when it was turned over to a crony rather than the CDC.

 

[Elixir]

And while I am here, here is the current US snapshot.
View attachment 29043

We are certainly trending in the right direction!

Amazing how the curve turned down when it was turned over to a crony rather than the CDC.

I think "the numbers" were already bent to Trump's will at the State level, so taking the accounting away from the CDC was more to prevent the discovery and rectification of the suppression that was already going on than to institute more ways to lower the counts without addressing the problem. Could be both, though.

About 30% of COVID deaths may not be classified as such

Early on, "In several states, the deaths occurred before the availability of COVID-19 diagnostic tests and thus weren't counted as coronavirus deaths. The estimated number of excess deaths varied significantly among states."
Since that time, there has been pressure to assign cause of death to comorbidity factors in states like FL and TX, but the overall variance between "excess deaths" and COVID-reported deaths hasn't greatly expanded.