4 ms·

Agreed. Seems like people in Oregon choose to mostly ignore the issue

davidw 7y ago
It's not just Oregon; that's just a number I saw this morning in the local paper, but I suspect it's similar everywhere. The US did not use the advance warning we had to prepare.
- ethbro 7y ago
  Georgia ran 50 tests yesterday. And that's after only 3 positive results so far. All states not equally dysfunctional.
  - davidw 7y ago
    Let's do some numbers: Georgia, with 50 tests/day and 10,000,000 people is at 0.005 per 1K people. Oregon, with 40 tests/day and 4,200,000 people, is at 0.0095 per 1K people. Italy, with about 2500 tests/day and about 60,000,000 people, is doing around 0.04 per thousand people. It's about an order of magnitude more. The point isn't a pissing match between states, it's that the entire US has not responded well so far. Hopefully things ramp up, so that we stop seeing these situations where people get exposed and have no idea what's going on. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-have-been-tested-coronavirus/607597/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-... I do not know why this is, just that it's not going well so far.
    - davidw 7y ago
      Oh, and Italy went back to a higher number. Today they ran almost 4,000 tests. https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/coronavirus/ https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/coronavirus/
    - ethbro 7y ago
      More testing != useful testing. The fact that Georgia and Oregon are testing at virtually equivalent rates is what's wrong. I feel like ~50/day is an appropriate number for GA. I feel like ~50/day is not an appropriate number for Oregon (sandwiched in-between Washington and California). The federal goverent should be doing a stronger job of quarterbacking this to allocate scarce resources. If Oregon needs surge capacity of testing labs across the Midwest, then by god make that happen. Some amount of testing likely needs to happen in every state in order to prevent panic, but the most resources should flow towards the places with the most known infections.
      - davidw 7y ago
        This is a decent article explaining how things have gone wrong in various ways: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/what-went-wrong-with-the-coronavirus-tests/2020/03/07/915f5dea-5d82-11ea-b29b-9db42f7803a7_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/what-went-wrong-with-t...
- hedora 7y ago
  Yesterday, I read the US had 100 confirmed cases, and had tested 500 people. Trump fired the a big part of the CDC that deals with pandemics back in 2018 and hasn’t replaced them. I don’t think the US government will make any serious effort to contain it, despite the recent theatrics from congress. Not testing sick people will inflate the official mortality rate. If the disease hits 70% of the population (projection from yesterday), there will be more panic than there should be. Last I heard, WHO (poor testing on average) estimated 3.4%, but in areas with thorough testing, it looks closer to 0.6%.
  - makomk 7y ago
    I've seen comparisons like that doing the rounds. They're just plain wrong. The 500 number is the number of patients that had been tested by the CDC about a week ago, excluding state and local labs, whereas the 100 confirmed cases is a newer figure and a lot of those cases were diagnosed by the very state and local lab tests that aren't being counted. From looking at an old version of the CDC web page, at the point when diagnosed cases hit 100 the CDC alone had tested about 1,500 patients. At one point the CDC pulled the number of tests from their web page to try and stop people making this error, but everyone just started comparing the old and increasingly outdated number from before they did this to the number of confirmed cases in the latest news headlines. The stuff blaming it on Trump firing the part of the CDC that deals with pandemics is untrue too. (Though sadly, the testing might have rolled out more smoothly if he had culled the CDC a bit... their in-house facilities seem to have really screwed things up.)
    - davidw 7y ago
      The CDC stopped posting the numbers of tests they'd run a few days back. I don't know if they started again. It's not confidence inspiring. I don't know if this has anything at all to do with firing the pandemic team, but you have to figure that didn't help, either. Any administration has a lot of competent career professionals working for them. Events like this are the time to let them do their thing without hindrance, and without random commentary from uninformed leaders.
    - craftinator 7y ago

It's not just Oregon; that's just a number I saw this morning in the local paper, but I suspect it's similar everywhere. The US did not use the advance warning we had to prepare.

ethbro 7y ago
Georgia ran 50 tests yesterday. And that's after only 3 positive results so far. All states not equally dysfunctional.
- davidw 7y ago
  Let's do some numbers: Georgia, with 50 tests/day and 10,000,000 people is at 0.005 per 1K people. Oregon, with 40 tests/day and 4,200,000 people, is at 0.0095 per 1K people. Italy, with about 2500 tests/day and about 60,000,000 people, is doing around 0.04 per thousand people. It's about an order of magnitude more. The point isn't a pissing match between states, it's that the entire US has not responded well so far. Hopefully things ramp up, so that we stop seeing these situations where people get exposed and have no idea what's going on. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-have-been-tested-coronavirus/607597/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-... I do not know why this is, just that it's not going well so far.
  - davidw 7y ago
    Oh, and Italy went back to a higher number. Today they ran almost 4,000 tests. https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/coronavirus/ https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/coronavirus/
  - ethbro 7y ago
    More testing != useful testing. The fact that Georgia and Oregon are testing at virtually equivalent rates is what's wrong. I feel like ~50/day is an appropriate number for GA. I feel like ~50/day is not an appropriate number for Oregon (sandwiched in-between Washington and California). The federal goverent should be doing a stronger job of quarterbacking this to allocate scarce resources. If Oregon needs surge capacity of testing labs across the Midwest, then by god make that happen. Some amount of testing likely needs to happen in every state in order to prevent panic, but the most resources should flow towards the places with the most known infections.
    - davidw 7y ago
      This is a decent article explaining how things have gone wrong in various ways: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/what-went-wrong-with-the-coronavirus-tests/2020/03/07/915f5dea-5d82-11ea-b29b-9db42f7803a7_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/what-went-wrong-with-t...
hedora 7y ago
Yesterday, I read the US had 100 confirmed cases, and had tested 500 people. Trump fired the a big part of the CDC that deals with pandemics back in 2018 and hasn’t replaced them. I don’t think the US government will make any serious effort to contain it, despite the recent theatrics from congress. Not testing sick people will inflate the official mortality rate. If the disease hits 70% of the population (projection from yesterday), there will be more panic than there should be. Last I heard, WHO (poor testing on average) estimated 3.4%, but in areas with thorough testing, it looks closer to 0.6%.
- makomk 7y ago
  I've seen comparisons like that doing the rounds. They're just plain wrong. The 500 number is the number of patients that had been tested by the CDC about a week ago, excluding state and local labs, whereas the 100 confirmed cases is a newer figure and a lot of those cases were diagnosed by the very state and local lab tests that aren't being counted. From looking at an old version of the CDC web page, at the point when diagnosed cases hit 100 the CDC alone had tested about 1,500 patients. At one point the CDC pulled the number of tests from their web page to try and stop people making this error, but everyone just started comparing the old and increasingly outdated number from before they did this to the number of confirmed cases in the latest news headlines. The stuff blaming it on Trump firing the part of the CDC that deals with pandemics is untrue too. (Though sadly, the testing might have rolled out more smoothly if he had culled the CDC a bit... their in-house facilities seem to have really screwed things up.)
  - davidw 7y ago
    The CDC stopped posting the numbers of tests they'd run a few days back. I don't know if they started again. It's not confidence inspiring. I don't know if this has anything at all to do with firing the pandemic team, but you have to figure that didn't help, either. Any administration has a lot of competent career professionals working for them. Events like this are the time to let them do their thing without hindrance, and without random commentary from uninformed leaders.
  - craftinator 7y ago