7 ms·

It's amazing how so many people/entities want to pretend that somehow the pandemic is less dangerous now than it was in March when we started all of the isolati

It's amazing how so many people/entities want to pretend that somehow the pandemic is less dangerous now than it was in March when we started all of the isolating/WFH. When in fact we have a lot more cases now, high levels of new cases and more than half the states have R0 > 1.0. https://rt.live/ https://rt.live/

chrisco255 6y ago
Yes, but if you actually look at the death count, it has dropped in the past month and a half, despite re-openings: https://ga-covid19.ondemand.sas.com/ https://ga-covid19.ondemand.sas.com/ Georgia being one of the earliest states to re-open, continue to see their deaths plummet even as their case count increases. What's the reason for this? I don't know. Better testing, maybe. Maybe a less deadly version of the virus is propagating now. Not sure.
- klenwell 6y ago
  I would posit a couple reasons: 1. Death is a lagging indicator. Based on new cases here, I'd predict an upswing shortly: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFUtHvw_u1vZCjuz7-ezC3YZYr6qE72qHvbAi8cXoQE54oc1tbvHqWi-lMjH_m8lrbAAfM/pubhtml https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFU... 2. Some reports indicate younger people are starting to get it more frequently. Data and common sense suggests they will have a higher survival rate. But this does not mean they will not suffer serious ongoing health and economic consequences as result. They also risk infecting others close to them.
- devalgo 6y ago
  As klenwell said, deaths are very lagging. It could take weeks for a person admitted to a hospital to die so it shouldn't at all be reassuring that those numbers are going down. They are bound to rebound. How is this downvoted? If you have evidence showing all of the new cases are from younger people or totally asymptomatic carriers go ahead and show it otherwise its literally a tautology, more cases = more deaths.
- aedocw 6y ago
  It takes a while for people to die after infection. Give states like Georgia time to catch up. Their hospitals will be overwhelmed and the numbers of deaths will get there. There is no "less deadly version of the virus". Treatment protocols have improved but that has not dramatically changed the odds of at-risk folks dying.
  - joshuahughes 6y ago
    Honestly curious... what is there to gain from pessimistic fear-mongering if the data is stubbornly telling a different story?
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    People have been saying that now for almost two months. Georgia started to reopen April 24th. It's not registering in the data.
    - eanzenberg 6y ago
      They’ll keep saying it all the way to November.
      - Loughla 6y ago
        Are you really making a global pandemic into an american political issue? Seriously? How far in the sand is your head? It's right there in the title global pandemic.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      What isn't registering in what data? Reopening takes time to result in new cases recorded, and new cases take time to result in new deaths recorded. Reasonable estimates for the latter are about a month, and maybe the first part also took a month. Georgia now has about 1,200 new cases daily compared to ~700 in New York. Only a month ago, New York had more like 2,000 per day. Is it controversial that it takes about a month for new cases to turn into new deaths? Do you believe that isn't happening or won't happen in Georgia?
  - 6y ago
- CommieBobDole 6y ago
  The Georgia death rate graph that you link to is sort of an odd case; there's apparently a variable lag between the occurrence and reporting of a death, sometimes up to a month - When a death is reported, they place it on its occurrence date on the graph, not on the reported date. As a result, it will appear from this graph that deaths are always declining whether they are or not - the more recent deaths have not yet been reported, so they're not anywhere on the graph. They do the same thing with their daily cases map, but they're a little more transparent there about noting that numbers for the past few weeks are basically meaningless. Reported deaths in GA have been fairly flat, but hospitalizations are rising slowly: https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-georgia-covid-dashboard/jvoLBozRtBSVSNQDDAuZxH/ https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-georgia-covid-dashboard...
  - treis 6y ago
    >As a result, it will appear from this graph that deaths are always declining whether they are or not Most deaths are reported relatively quickly. If there were, as an example, a 2x increase in deaths it would show on the graph within a few days. It would show as something like a 1.8x increase before trickling up to the full 2x over the following weeks.
    - peterwoerner 6y ago
      Death lags new case by as much as a month (due to time from infection to death). So we won't really know if there is an increase an death due to the new cases for a number of weeks after we see a rise in cases.
      - nostrebored 6y ago
        The death rate absolutely does respond more quickly than a month, and in a time series with this distribution the tail of the data is not the most important factor. We should be seeing increased deaths from this in places that have reopened weeks ago. The problem is, we accelerated deaths drastically due to insane public policies like housing the sick in close quarters with the elderly. In engineering, overengineering like this wastes time. In public health, it kills people. My expectation is that we'll see an increase in infection rate, a decrease in new deaths per day, and we'll have spikes associated with pockets of the elderly who were previously not impacted being exposed.
- chasd00 6y ago
  median age of infection is plummeting. Covid19 doesn't kill younger people at the same rate as the elderly. “The severity of what we are getting has declined,” said Gino Santorio, chief executive officer of Broward Health, the four-hospital system that serves most of Broward County. “The average length of stay is six days versus 10. Initially, Broward Health had the really sick COVID patients, those from nursing homes and cruise ships. Now, that has changed, as the demographics have shifted.” https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-coronavirus-florida-younger-20200620-zdbyrk6h25cwxak5h74cchirke-story.html https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-coronavirus-f...
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  Deaths lag new cases by 2 to 3 weeks.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    Reporting the deaths also takes time and some say the total is closer to a month.
- trustfundbaby 6y ago
  Been saying this for a while now ... since the Georgia Reopening, I've been monitoring a lot of state data daily, lots of places that started seeing spikes 3-4 weeks ago haven't even had as much as a slight trend upwards in deaths (Here's South Carolina for example https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/south-carolina-coronavirus-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/south-carolina-c...) Wisconsin has seen a spike come and go and death rates have remained about the same https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/wisconsin-coronavirus-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/wisconsin-corona... It just feels odd that this isn't spoken about enough, and I think its because the media narrative is a bit too invested in the "danger" part of this virus ... to feel they can't point out that simple observation for fear of undoing their reporting about the virus, which is a shame. I mean deaths are down nationally ... by a lot, even as the cases have ticked back up. My hunch is that the folks who are most at risk are taking drastic precautions, which is what is keeping the death rates down. I guess we'll just have to see for sure in 2-3 more weeks.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    It just feels odd that this isn't spoken about enough, and I think its because the media narrative is a bit too invested in the "danger" part of this virus It feels odd that you blame the "media narrative" and then post two links to the New York Times.
  - jeromegv 6y ago
    Death rate is down because the average age of people getting COVID is younger, it’s already been documented and talked about quite a bit. Doesn’t mean they won’t get lifetime lung damage and that they won’t eventually re-infect the older folks at risk.
    - nostrebored 6y ago
      The lifetime of lung damage myth is absolutely one of the most ridiculous pieces of modern folklore about covid. Please point to the incidence of these cripplingly disabled healthy young people? We have no reason to assume reinfection is possible prior to functional mutation. Functional mutation is likely, but at a much slower rate than the flu. However, what we know from other novel viruses is that mortality rate will usually trend down over time in successive, functionally different mutations. Stop fearmongering.
- jayd16 6y ago
  When you can have an ICU bed your chances are much better. There's a very steep inflection point when the hospitals reach capacity. Right now we're highly provisioned so it makes sense that the numbers show as less deadly. The main take away is the infection rate is not linearly correlated to the death rate.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > Maybe a less deadly version of the virus is propagating now. High probability that selection has already begun. It seems the strain that primarily hit New York City acts slightly differently than the one from Wuhan, and Chicago has a mix of them and others: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/health-care/chicago-has-unique-covid-strain-research https://www.chicagobusiness.com/health-care/chicago-has-uniq...
- tinmandespot 6y ago
  If we proceed on the assumption that exposure to higher viral load correlates to more severe symptoms and fatality, I think the trend can be attributed to the drop in viral load averaged over those being infected. 1. At the start of the pandemic, the older and more vulnerable were affected disproportionately. These patients had a high viral load. 2. Patients with more severe symptoms are now isolating at home or at hospitals. Previously they may have been contributing to serious super-spreader like situations. 3. PPE/Mask usage is more common now and these are possibly protecting most people against high exposure 4. Antivirals could be reducing the length of stay at hospitals and protecting workers from higher exposure In other words, the virus is spreading but in a less severe form. However, I don't think fundamentally different (less virulent) mutations are the contributing to the lower death rate.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  Likely people who believe they are high risk, especially older populations that aren't under any pressure to go to work, are still not taking many chances. What I really want to see is general case severity. There's a whole range from "testing positive with no symptoms" to "bad flu" to "severe effects but not hospitalized, may have long-term damage." That last group is the scary one that, as far as I know, isn't being counted.
klenwell 6y ago
This is the part that gets me, too. Here's a summary I put together of where the US stands on the latest "reopen" benchmarks: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFUtHvw_u1vZCjuz7-ezC3YZYr6qE72qHvbAi8cXoQE54oc1tbvHqWi-lMjH_m8lrbAAfM/pubhtml?gid=2022544454 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFU... It varies region to region. I'm in Orange County, CA. (You may remember us from such recent news events as...) This was Huntington Beach weekend before last (probably much the same this weekend, too): https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusOC/comments/h9max3/ny_times_photo_of_huntington_beach_this_weekend/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusOC/comments/h9max3/ny_ti... This was a photo posted to Reddit this past weekend: https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/hczes1/pirozzis_is_on_the_shit_list_packed_in_like/ https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/hczes1/pirozz...
- devalgo 6y ago
  It's definitely concerning how people are acting but that being said I think the initial research is showing that outdoor spread during the day is very unlikely. UV light seems to be devastating to Covid and Vitamin D seems to be protective. So a crowded beach is probably not all that bad. Packed bars and restaurants? That's a near worst case scenario
  - standardUser 6y ago
    I have been pro-lockdowns and have not indulged in any conspiratorial nonsense. But at a certain point, if states and localities don't accept the mounting evidence that outdoor transmission is not a significant threat, it will start to feel a little tyrannical.
    - devalgo 6y ago
      It's probably a question of awareness. How many of these people are reading e.g arxiv preprints to see this kind of research in the first place? There's also a rebound/face saving effect: if the CDC, State Health Officials, etc. got it wrong at first why should we believe them about anything? I just really doubt there are secret totalitarian Mayors and Governors out there intentionally locking people in their homes despite all evidence. Given politicians obsession with reelection and the unpopularity of these lockdowns it doesn't make sense they would do it for no reason and basically guarantee they lose their next election.
mehrdadn 6y ago
That site looks amazing. It only seems to be state-level though. Do you know if it (or any other site) has aggregated local (city- or county-level) data?

chrisco255 6y ago

Yes, but if you actually look at the death count, it has dropped in the past month and a half, despite re-openings: https://ga-covid19.ondemand.sas.com/ https://ga-covid19.ondemand.sas.com/ Georgia being one of the earliest states to re-open, continue to see their deaths plummet even as their case count increases. What's the reason for this? I don't know. Better testing, maybe. Maybe a less deadly version of the virus is propagating now. Not sure.

klenwell 6y ago
I would posit a couple reasons: 1. Death is a lagging indicator. Based on new cases here, I'd predict an upswing shortly: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFUtHvw_u1vZCjuz7-ezC3YZYr6qE72qHvbAi8cXoQE54oc1tbvHqWi-lMjH_m8lrbAAfM/pubhtml https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFU... 2. Some reports indicate younger people are starting to get it more frequently. Data and common sense suggests they will have a higher survival rate. But this does not mean they will not suffer serious ongoing health and economic consequences as result. They also risk infecting others close to them.
devalgo 6y ago
As klenwell said, deaths are very lagging. It could take weeks for a person admitted to a hospital to die so it shouldn't at all be reassuring that those numbers are going down. They are bound to rebound. How is this downvoted? If you have evidence showing all of the new cases are from younger people or totally asymptomatic carriers go ahead and show it otherwise its literally a tautology, more cases = more deaths.
aedocw 6y ago
It takes a while for people to die after infection. Give states like Georgia time to catch up. Their hospitals will be overwhelmed and the numbers of deaths will get there. There is no "less deadly version of the virus". Treatment protocols have improved but that has not dramatically changed the odds of at-risk folks dying.
- joshuahughes 6y ago
  Honestly curious... what is there to gain from pessimistic fear-mongering if the data is stubbornly telling a different story?
- chrisco255 6y ago
  People have been saying that now for almost two months. Georgia started to reopen April 24th. It's not registering in the data.
  - eanzenberg 6y ago
    They’ll keep saying it all the way to November.
    - Loughla 6y ago
      Are you really making a global pandemic into an american political issue? Seriously? How far in the sand is your head? It's right there in the title global pandemic.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    What isn't registering in what data? Reopening takes time to result in new cases recorded, and new cases take time to result in new deaths recorded. Reasonable estimates for the latter are about a month, and maybe the first part also took a month. Georgia now has about 1,200 new cases daily compared to ~700 in New York. Only a month ago, New York had more like 2,000 per day. Is it controversial that it takes about a month for new cases to turn into new deaths? Do you believe that isn't happening or won't happen in Georgia?
- 6y ago
CommieBobDole 6y ago
The Georgia death rate graph that you link to is sort of an odd case; there's apparently a variable lag between the occurrence and reporting of a death, sometimes up to a month - When a death is reported, they place it on its occurrence date on the graph, not on the reported date. As a result, it will appear from this graph that deaths are always declining whether they are or not - the more recent deaths have not yet been reported, so they're not anywhere on the graph. They do the same thing with their daily cases map, but they're a little more transparent there about noting that numbers for the past few weeks are basically meaningless. Reported deaths in GA have been fairly flat, but hospitalizations are rising slowly: https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-georgia-covid-dashboard/jvoLBozRtBSVSNQDDAuZxH/ https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-georgia-covid-dashboard...
- treis 6y ago
  >As a result, it will appear from this graph that deaths are always declining whether they are or not Most deaths are reported relatively quickly. If there were, as an example, a 2x increase in deaths it would show on the graph within a few days. It would show as something like a 1.8x increase before trickling up to the full 2x over the following weeks.
  - peterwoerner 6y ago
    Death lags new case by as much as a month (due to time from infection to death). So we won't really know if there is an increase an death due to the new cases for a number of weeks after we see a rise in cases.
    - nostrebored 6y ago
      The death rate absolutely does respond more quickly than a month, and in a time series with this distribution the tail of the data is not the most important factor. We should be seeing increased deaths from this in places that have reopened weeks ago. The problem is, we accelerated deaths drastically due to insane public policies like housing the sick in close quarters with the elderly. In engineering, overengineering like this wastes time. In public health, it kills people. My expectation is that we'll see an increase in infection rate, a decrease in new deaths per day, and we'll have spikes associated with pockets of the elderly who were previously not impacted being exposed.
chasd00 6y ago
median age of infection is plummeting. Covid19 doesn't kill younger people at the same rate as the elderly. “The severity of what we are getting has declined,” said Gino Santorio, chief executive officer of Broward Health, the four-hospital system that serves most of Broward County. “The average length of stay is six days versus 10. Initially, Broward Health had the really sick COVID patients, those from nursing homes and cruise ships. Now, that has changed, as the demographics have shifted.” https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-coronavirus-florida-younger-20200620-zdbyrk6h25cwxak5h74cchirke-story.html https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-coronavirus-f...
UncleOxidant 6y ago
Deaths lag new cases by 2 to 3 weeks.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  Reporting the deaths also takes time and some say the total is closer to a month.
trustfundbaby 6y ago
Been saying this for a while now ... since the Georgia Reopening, I've been monitoring a lot of state data daily, lots of places that started seeing spikes 3-4 weeks ago haven't even had as much as a slight trend upwards in deaths (Here's South Carolina for example https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/south-carolina-coronavirus-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/south-carolina-c...) Wisconsin has seen a spike come and go and death rates have remained about the same https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/wisconsin-coronavirus-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/wisconsin-corona... It just feels odd that this isn't spoken about enough, and I think its because the media narrative is a bit too invested in the "danger" part of this virus ... to feel they can't point out that simple observation for fear of undoing their reporting about the virus, which is a shame. I mean deaths are down nationally ... by a lot, even as the cases have ticked back up. My hunch is that the folks who are most at risk are taking drastic precautions, which is what is keeping the death rates down. I guess we'll just have to see for sure in 2-3 more weeks.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  It just feels odd that this isn't spoken about enough, and I think its because the media narrative is a bit too invested in the "danger" part of this virus It feels odd that you blame the "media narrative" and then post two links to the New York Times.
- jeromegv 6y ago
  Death rate is down because the average age of people getting COVID is younger, it’s already been documented and talked about quite a bit. Doesn’t mean they won’t get lifetime lung damage and that they won’t eventually re-infect the older folks at risk.
  - nostrebored 6y ago
    The lifetime of lung damage myth is absolutely one of the most ridiculous pieces of modern folklore about covid. Please point to the incidence of these cripplingly disabled healthy young people? We have no reason to assume reinfection is possible prior to functional mutation. Functional mutation is likely, but at a much slower rate than the flu. However, what we know from other novel viruses is that mortality rate will usually trend down over time in successive, functionally different mutations. Stop fearmongering.
jayd16 6y ago
When you can have an ICU bed your chances are much better. There's a very steep inflection point when the hospitals reach capacity. Right now we're highly provisioned so it makes sense that the numbers show as less deadly. The main take away is the infection rate is not linearly correlated to the death rate.
Izkata 6y ago
> Maybe a less deadly version of the virus is propagating now. High probability that selection has already begun. It seems the strain that primarily hit New York City acts slightly differently than the one from Wuhan, and Chicago has a mix of them and others: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/health-care/chicago-has-unique-covid-strain-research https://www.chicagobusiness.com/health-care/chicago-has-uniq...
tinmandespot 6y ago
If we proceed on the assumption that exposure to higher viral load correlates to more severe symptoms and fatality, I think the trend can be attributed to the drop in viral load averaged over those being infected. 1. At the start of the pandemic, the older and more vulnerable were affected disproportionately. These patients had a high viral load. 2. Patients with more severe symptoms are now isolating at home or at hospitals. Previously they may have been contributing to serious super-spreader like situations. 3. PPE/Mask usage is more common now and these are possibly protecting most people against high exposure 4. Antivirals could be reducing the length of stay at hospitals and protecting workers from higher exposure In other words, the virus is spreading but in a less severe form. However, I don't think fundamentally different (less virulent) mutations are the contributing to the lower death rate.
coffeefirst 6y ago
Likely people who believe they are high risk, especially older populations that aren't under any pressure to go to work, are still not taking many chances. What I really want to see is general case severity. There's a whole range from "testing positive with no symptoms" to "bad flu" to "severe effects but not hospitalized, may have long-term damage." That last group is the scary one that, as far as I know, isn't being counted.

klenwell 6y ago

This is the part that gets me, too. Here's a summary I put together of where the US stands on the latest "reopen" benchmarks: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFUtHvw_u1vZCjuz7-ezC3YZYr6qE72qHvbAi8cXoQE54oc1tbvHqWi-lMjH_m8lrbAAfM/pubhtml?gid=2022544454 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFU... It varies region to region. I'm in Orange County, CA. (You may remember us from such recent news events as...) This was Huntington Beach weekend before last (probably much the same this weekend, too): https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusOC/comments/h9max3/ny_times_photo_of_huntington_beach_this_weekend/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusOC/comments/h9max3/ny_ti... This was a photo posted to Reddit this past weekend: https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/hczes1/pirozzis_is_on_the_shit_list_packed_in_like/ https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/hczes1/pirozz...

devalgo 6y ago
It's definitely concerning how people are acting but that being said I think the initial research is showing that outdoor spread during the day is very unlikely. UV light seems to be devastating to Covid and Vitamin D seems to be protective. So a crowded beach is probably not all that bad. Packed bars and restaurants? That's a near worst case scenario
- standardUser 6y ago
  I have been pro-lockdowns and have not indulged in any conspiratorial nonsense. But at a certain point, if states and localities don't accept the mounting evidence that outdoor transmission is not a significant threat, it will start to feel a little tyrannical.
  - devalgo 6y ago
    It's probably a question of awareness. How many of these people are reading e.g arxiv preprints to see this kind of research in the first place? There's also a rebound/face saving effect: if the CDC, State Health Officials, etc. got it wrong at first why should we believe them about anything? I just really doubt there are secret totalitarian Mayors and Governors out there intentionally locking people in their homes despite all evidence. Given politicians obsession with reelection and the unpopularity of these lockdowns it doesn't make sense they would do it for no reason and basically guarantee they lose their next election.

mehrdadn 6y ago

That site looks amazing. It only seems to be state-level though. Do you know if it (or any other site) has aggregated local (city- or county-level) data?