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Re-posting the most informative visualization I have found on this topic so far: https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus-testing-by-state-chart-o

by m0zg 7y ago

Re-posting the most informative visualization I have found on this topic so far: https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus-testing-by-state-chart-of-new-cases/ https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus-testi... See dramatic ramp-up in testing, and where the number of tests administered is significant, a reasonable approximation of the infection rate can be established. So the recent blow-out in NY was actually a good thing and it does not reflect the true daily infection rate: they just didn't know how many cases they had. They still don't in fact, asymptomatic cases don't get tests, and those who had the virus and now have immunity (of which Cuomo's advisors suspect there's at least 100K) can't be tested without the new serological test currently under development. The only reliable metric of severity remains the number of deaths, and until that gets into tens of thousands (i.e. exceeds that of flu), any panic is premature. We're not Italy. We're not Spain. The current level of response to this is unprecedented.

wool_gather 7y ago
Thank you! I've been wanting to see exactly this: tests administered vs. positives, over time. I've just been doing it in my head for my state by checking the health authority website.
- m0zg 7y ago
  I wonder what happened to USDS? Does it still exist? A need for an "official" version of such a thing is pretty obvious, yet the CDC website is pretty much worse than nothing at all, because people go there, and whatever data they have is not only incomplete, it's also a few days behind. They also don't update it over the weekend, as far as I can tell.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    The situation is not great, to be sure. Check out covidtracking.com, which is aggregating data from state health department sites. I think that's the best going at the moment.
hcknwscommenter 7y ago
"The only reliable metric of severity remains the number of deaths" Completely agree. "until that gets into tens of thousands (i.e. exceeds that of flu), any panic is premature" I completely and totally disagree with this statement. By the time you get to >10s of thousands of deaths (e.g., about 20 days ahead of the actual infection rate) before you implement severe social distancing and Wuhan-style lockdown, you are set up for a guaranteed million deaths by the time it's over. 10's of thousands of deaths is too damn late. The time to act was a month ago. We are already chasing the dragon, and a number of miracles will need to happen to get this thing under control without 100,000 deaths.
- m0zg 7y ago
  You're ignoring the economic damage. That has non-zero fatality rate as well. As cynical as that sounds, you have to balance the two. You can't shut down the economy for more than a few weeks before supply chains fall apart and you start running out of food and necessities, not to mention anything more complicated. Any given widget typically relies on hundreds, if not thousands of suppliers upstream, to manufacture, and if you shut down some of those suppliers, you lose the ability to make the widget, or at least do so quickly. That "global economy" everyone was so proud of a few months back? It got a swift kick to the nuts in all this. Moreover, Europe will have to restart production also, for the same reasons, within no more than a month. Also, you're making decisions based on pure panic in the absence of reliable information, and you're making them country-wide even though the country is not uniformly affected. The reality on the ground is some parts of the country need to remain more operational than others for us to pull through this, and aiming for sub-flu levels of fatalities is an unrealistic goal, no matter how much fear mongering you see from the press. It's simply not going to happen, even if COVID19 is cured entirely, if for no other reason that we can't cure the flu. 60K people die every winter, nobody gives a shit. 1K people die of coronavirus - everyone loses their mind. Now granted, it could get much worse very fast, but that's why we're ramping up testing so massively: to be able to offer a more adaptive, more localized response that doesn't shut everything down.
  - hcknwscommenter 7y ago

by m0zg 7y ago

wool_gather 7y ago

Thank you! I've been wanting to see exactly this: tests administered vs. positives, over time. I've just been doing it in my head for my state by checking the health authority website.

m0zg 7y ago
I wonder what happened to USDS? Does it still exist? A need for an "official" version of such a thing is pretty obvious, yet the CDC website is pretty much worse than nothing at all, because people go there, and whatever data they have is not only incomplete, it's also a few days behind. They also don't update it over the weekend, as far as I can tell.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  The situation is not great, to be sure. Check out covidtracking.com, which is aggregating data from state health department sites. I think that's the best going at the moment.

hcknwscommenter 7y ago

"The only reliable metric of severity remains the number of deaths" Completely agree. "until that gets into tens of thousands (i.e. exceeds that of flu), any panic is premature" I completely and totally disagree with this statement. By the time you get to >10s of thousands of deaths (e.g., about 20 days ahead of the actual infection rate) before you implement severe social distancing and Wuhan-style lockdown, you are set up for a guaranteed million deaths by the time it's over. 10's of thousands of deaths is too damn late. The time to act was a month ago. We are already chasing the dragon, and a number of miracles will need to happen to get this thing under control without 100,000 deaths.

m0zg 7y ago
You're ignoring the economic damage. That has non-zero fatality rate as well. As cynical as that sounds, you have to balance the two. You can't shut down the economy for more than a few weeks before supply chains fall apart and you start running out of food and necessities, not to mention anything more complicated. Any given widget typically relies on hundreds, if not thousands of suppliers upstream, to manufacture, and if you shut down some of those suppliers, you lose the ability to make the widget, or at least do so quickly. That "global economy" everyone was so proud of a few months back? It got a swift kick to the nuts in all this. Moreover, Europe will have to restart production also, for the same reasons, within no more than a month. Also, you're making decisions based on pure panic in the absence of reliable information, and you're making them country-wide even though the country is not uniformly affected. The reality on the ground is some parts of the country need to remain more operational than others for us to pull through this, and aiming for sub-flu levels of fatalities is an unrealistic goal, no matter how much fear mongering you see from the press. It's simply not going to happen, even if COVID19 is cured entirely, if for no other reason that we can't cure the flu. 60K people die every winter, nobody gives a shit. 1K people die of coronavirus - everyone loses their mind. Now granted, it could get much worse very fast, but that's why we're ramping up testing so massively: to be able to offer a more adaptive, more localized response that doesn't shut everything down.
- hcknwscommenter 7y ago