But it’s going to be the “wrong” people dying, so… maybe not?
wahoo
3175
Slavitt is contradicting Pelosi/Steyer and other reporters. He’s a political partisan and anything you read through him you need to read through that lens. Slavitt’s desire on twitter is to bash the GOP, which is fine.
But it’s not exactly an honest discussion of what is going on.
… they’re all in the high risk groups. Old.
spiffy
3177
Whelp, some good friends of ours around the street corner have said they have all the symptoms, their children as well with dry cough etc. One of them goes to a school that half the neighborhood attends, the other to the nursery where our son goes, and is still. Dipshit Boris could have closed those school yesterday. We keep getting emails from the head teacher at my daughter’s school that they will continue to follow governemt guidance.
Yep, I’ll probably have it anytime now if I don’t already. Is that lump in my throat anger, stress, or coronavirus? My one consolation is that my mom is living alone so there isn’t a risk we inadvertently infect her. But if she gets ill, she’s an ocean away from our help.
Matt_W
3178
Another daily reminder that, given infection rates, unless they’re high risk for another reason like travel to or residence an infected area, it’s far more likely that someone who is sick has normal seasonal flu and not COVID-19. That may not be true for much longer, but probably still is.
newbrof
3179
Schools are closed in many federal states in Germany like Bavaria, until after Easter holidays. Hope it helps to delay the spread. Social distancing is the slogan of the day. I have no problem with social distancing, I am a gamer. I am prepared for this. Finally. Finally time has come to work on the backlog.
KevinC
3181
Hallelujah. The state Department of Health urged all businesses to allow workers to telecommute where possible, which finally made our management relent. Starting Monday I can finally stop touching communal door handles, gas pumps, or share a room with people coughing their lungs out.
My work right now is sticking to our established remote work policies, which is 2 days a week. They are exploring options, but since we work in public safety we can’t all go remote anyway. I am remote until Tuesday at least.
It’s the other parts of my life I am trying to figure out. I belong to a train club and I went up last night. Attendance was about the norm (around 15 of us). I just kept washing my hands and made sure I cleaned the controller I was using to run my train.
I am planning on going up Saturday when it will likely be just 2-3 of us. I can’t tell if I am in denial going, or giving in to panic by not going. I can bring my lunch and not need to leave the facility.
Edit: people telling me “the flu kills more people” is turning into a triggered event.
Matt_W
3183
More perspective:
There is a suspicious inflection point in January of this year, and it does look like this season is on track to be an especially bad flu season given current trends, part of which may be due to undiagnosed COVID cases. But in a normal year, without the novel coronavirus strain, we would expect to have a couple of million people currently sick with flu. Without diagnostic testing, it’s like trying to identify a needle in a needle stack.
Matt_W
3184
See, that’s a statistic I’d like to see, and one that we should be able to see: what are the chances that someone with flu symptoms has COVID-19. Hard to glean from available stats because many people being tested have only been exposed and are asymptomatic. I’m curious what the infection rate is among community-acquired flu cases presenting with symptoms.
A statement that could be said at any point in the last 60 years, though at least this time around, they’ve got an excellent plan in place to make sure it happens.
Guys! It’s fine. Trump’s got this.
Menzo
3187
Is it November yet? So tired of the finger pointing and blaming with this guy.
Absolutely not. All of the strategies are predicated on the assumption that a significant amount of the population will eventually catch corona virus. The difference is that every other country thinks the best thing to do is to flatten the peak out over a long(er) time-frame, in order to allow the health services to cope with the burden (seriously - this has been mentioned repeatedly in this thread).
All the real-life evidence we have indicates that containment works to achieve this. The UK government is basically trading away people’s lives, in order to reduce the economic cost to society. Which is inevitable, of course - all governments are making that assessment right now, trying to determine where the morally right line is to tread. But most other governments are basing their decision-making on medical capacity and statistics, not nudge theory (which is basically the argument they’re putting forward for not doing anything)
And frankly - if they’re so confident that all of the other experts are wrong, and they are right, they should publish their numbers. The Danish parallel to the NHS has done exactly that - anyone who wishes to, can peruse their risk assessment and strategies for Corona. Here are the brutal facts: at a 10% infection rate in a ~5,8 million population, they estimate ~11,200 hospitalized patients, 2.9K of those critical patients, and 1680-5600 people dead. This is why every focus is on keeping the concurrent infection rate down, to keep mortality on the lower end of the scale rather than the higher. Denmark has ~15,000 hospital beds total. The math is not hard.
Here’s what those numbers mean, when plugged into the numbers that your Chief Scientific Advisor Vallance has given as the UK strategy of 40 million infected people before autumn. That means 800K people needing to be hospitalized, 200K of those critically ill, and somewhere between 120K to 400K people dead. The UK has less than 170K hospital beds. No matter how you twist and turn this, the numbers do not add up - at least not if your focus is on keeping people alive.
The UK seems so far in the same trajectory as everybody else with about 30% increase in cases daily. Seems to be lagging 5-6 days before Spain at this point.
The seattle flu study feels like the best bet to start generating those numbers as they were testing for both. It would be nice if they were able to test all of their samples. The only problem is that the data they generate will be a snapshot over the time they gathered data, and seasonal flu should be declining as covid-19 rates are increasing.
What happened to the numbers? The Johns Hopkins map is now at 90,000+. It was 120K+ yesterday?
Did cases get reevaluated?
Are you clicked on a particular area? It’s up to 137K confirmed today from 120K+ yesterday.
There is something funky going on in this plot though:
Weird. I don’t think I’m clicked-in to any one region.
