26 ms·

California sets Covid-19 daily record, Bay Area cumulative total passes 20k

• blakesterz 6y ago
  "The number of deaths per day and hospitalized patients, however, has remained flat for weeks, down from their peaks in mid-April. That is beginning to change, as hospitalization levels creep back up. Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Monday that hospitalizations had increased 16% in the past two weeks." I always thought, based on what I've read/heard, that one of the big reasons, maybe the biggest reason we're doing all this is to flatten the curb so hospitals don't get overwhelmed. For some reason headlines always seem to be number of cases or positive test results, and maybe then the number in the hospital is mentioned. The article does say "hospitalization and deaths are also believed to be a lagging indicator." so maybe that's why, but I don't get why (from what I've seen) hospitalizations don't seem to be all that important when reporting on COVID numbers in general. Could it be the people getting the virus now are less likely to end up in the hospital so that number won't keep going up to the point of causing trouble? Another headline on the site says "17+ students test positive for COVID-19 after beach trip".
  • danhak 6y ago
    Of course cases will go up as testing becomes more widespread. As you point out, headlines mention case numbers as those are the high, eye-catching numbers. The more important numbers to watch are positivity and hospitalization, which are starting to tick up after several flat weeks.
    • taborj 6y ago
      This article goes so far as to flirt with the testing numbers without actually siting them. I really don't see what's so hard for news outlets to throw the total number of tests alongside the total number of positive results.
  • kop316 6y ago
    > I always thought, based on what I've read/heard, that one of the big reasons, maybe the biggest reason we're doing all this is to flatten the curb so hospitals don't get overwhelmed. This was my understanding as well, and it is what is shown in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatten_the_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatten_the_curve The bigger thing that I have chatted about with several other is that the area under the curve is the same, i.e. the same amount of inidividuals will still get sick.
    • snug 6y ago
      Exactly this, in fact we did such a good job, that people who were sick for other reasons didn't seek medical help and health care professionals have been laid off https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2020/05/health-care-workers-layoffs-california-coronavirus-nurses-furloughs-pay-cuts-hospitals/ https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2020/05/health-car...
    • zzleeper 6y ago
      afaik not true; google for "epidemic overshoot"
      • arcticfox 6y ago
        that's in the case that we even have to arrive at herd immunity through infections. By far the bigger factor here are the dozens of vaccines and treatments (eg monoclonal antibodies) in development, if any of them work in time, the "area under the curve is the same" idea is blown out of the water to the tune of millions of preventable deaths.
        • noobaccount 6y ago
          Millions of preventable deaths? Do you have a source handy? I’m wondering how that aligns with the latest data.
          • lllr_finger 6y ago
  • djohnston 6y ago
    Gotta get those clicks
    • mikeyouse 6y ago
      I love how reporting on the increasing number of cases in a pandemic that has caused over 120,000 American deaths can somehow be "for the clicks".
      • taborj 6y ago
        Any news article that mentions the number of new positive cases without mentioning the number of new tests is doing it for the clicks. One is fairly useless without the other. 150 cases out of 150 tests? Yikes! 150 cases out of 150,000 tests? Yawn.
        • mikeyouse 6y ago
          The second metric is obviously more important, but when a pandemic as an Ro of more than 1, any increasing number of cases is a huge issue. Hence why the hospitalizations are on the way up, which is also reported in that article..
        • jiveturkey 6y ago
          you've actually got it backwards. 150 cases out of 150 tests mean that testing isn't indicative of the infection rate, and is a yawner because the test itself is telling us almost nothing.
        • ihumanable 6y ago
          This tool is useful https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states California has been increasing raw number of tests but the positive tests percentage has been holding relatively steady around 4.5% https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/california https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/califo... Florida is a much different story, as their cases have increased the testing has not kept up, and the positive test rate has gone from 2.3% at the end of May to 12.2% https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/florida https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/florid... One thing that everyone should keep in mind, even if you could attribute all of the increase in confirmed cases to testing, tests don't give anyone the coronavirus. The only thing increased testing can do is give you a more accurate picture of how bad the situation is, it can't make the situation worse.
  • devalgo 6y ago
    Flatten the curve was meant to spread the infections across time to decrease stress on the healthcare system. Our lockdown was ineffectual because of lax enforcement and the public's apathy. So it achieved none of its goals. Places like Italy, Spain, New Zealand have "won" against the virus using lockdowns and are now on track to be back to normal. In NZs case they are already back to normal. Without another lockdown it's almost assured at this point that we will reach the breaking point of our healthcare system. It's inevitable unless a miracle vaccine arrives very soon.
    • rlt 6y ago
      But... we did flatten the curve enough to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system. To suggest it wasn't enough now is moving the goalposts.
      • mnm1 6y ago
        To revise science and drop ideas not proven to work while adopting ideas proven to work can also be called "changing the goalposts" by people who simply don't understand how science works.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • JungleGymSam 6y ago
          I, for one, welcome our science-understanding overlords.
        • thrown2020 6y ago
          you are fucking stupid
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        > But... we did flatten the curve enough to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system Well, the curve had somewhat flattened (but was still trending upward among the noise) before reaching the point of overwhelming the system before we started reopening and it unflattened. I think it was premature to say that it had been flattened enough to avoid rather than delay that outcome, though it's kind of immaterial anyway since we abandoned the effort to keep it flat and are heading straight for overwhelming the system.
  • DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    > we're doing all this is to flatten the curb Different people have different goals. One goal would be to reduce the rate of new infections to a level that hospitals can handle. A different strategy is to reduce the rate of new infections to a much lower level, so that contact tracing and containment is possible, and then open things back up. If a vaccine is available at some point in the next year, the latter strategy saves many lives. It requires a sharp, relatively short (4-6 weeks) shutdown. Afterwards, it requires a high level of testing, quarantine for infected people, widespread use of fever checks in public places, a ban on large events, and extensive contact tracing. Many countries have now successfully deployed this strategy. The US is stuck in limbo. Some states locked down hard, others didn't lock down enough. Things opened up too quickly, without the systems in place to contain the epidemic, and people are largely acting as if SARS-CoV-2 didn't exist any more. The consequence is that new infections never went down to a level where contact tracing is possible, and the rate of new infections is on the rise again.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Different people have different goals, but it's pointless to measure California's status against goals it's not trying to meet.
    • parliament32 6y ago
      >widespread use of fever checks I've never understood this fascination with fever checks. I've never had a fever where I couldn't tell I had a fever -- everyone with a fever perfectly well knows they have a fever. The problem is people trying to hide it, I guess? And if they suppress it with medication, your forehead scanner will be useless anyway. The solution for that is to make quarantine less painful. Here's a list of grocery delivery services, here's a guarantee your employer can't punish you for taking time off work, here's a nursing service that'll call you to check in daily, etc. Enjoy your vacation.
      • barneygale 6y ago
        I've never seen a toupée that I couldn't tell was fake.
  • pbreit 6y ago
    The obsession with total cases is maddening. First, they are driven significantly by amount of testing. Secondly, whether they lead to complications is significantly impacted by age and health. The recent article routinely fail to acknowledge that age of infection has fallen drastically (from 65 to 35 in Florida, for example). The people getting infected now, the out-and-abouters, are much, much lower risk of complications. Which is why death rates continue down (lowest in US since March).
    • buhhh 6y ago
      > The obsession with total cases is maddening. First, they are driven significantly by amount of testing. I think more significantly they're driven by total cases. Are you suggesting we test less? Also you seem to have a very black and white view of outcomes. It's not clear cut between alive or dead. There's many things that we still don't know about this virus and the harm it causes. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-effects-of-covid-19-infection https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-ef...
      • catawbasam 6y ago
        Cuts on the confirmed cases by age group and to some extent race/gender will help understand upcoming hospitalization and death.
      • pbreit 6y ago
        There have been 10 million confirmed cases and probably 10x that many infections with very few reports of longer term adverse impacts.
        • bluGill 6y ago
          Long term effects can take a long time to show up. We don't know what they might be. Of course this is a case where no long term effects are something we are only sure of after currently young people die of old age.
        • piva00 6y ago
  • chiefalchemist 6y ago
    Yes, flatten the curve is to prevent chaos. In that context, total cases is close to meaningless. Active case would be a far better metric. Cases that have "completed the process" have no value - other than fear-mongering. Then you break active cases down by area (read: hospital) and carrier profile (e.g., age, pre-existing conditions, etc.). The point is, not everyone who tests positive is high risk. Not everyone who shows symptons will end up at hospital. Not everyone who ends up at hospital will need a ventilator. And so on. As it is, this whole event has been a text book case of how not to use data and statistics properly.
  • sesuximo 6y ago
    Will be interesting to see what happens in the next two weeks. Certainly most places have handled the bumps well so far, but some have not e.g. Texas hospitalizations are up
    • tunesmith 6y ago
      They say a 28-day lag between infection and death. So I'm curious about the last two weeks of July, if we'll have more deaths in that period than we've had over the last two weeks. I currently suspect we will, but I've been wrong about the south before.
  • rsynnott 6y ago
    > but I don't get why (from what I've seen) hospitalizations don't seem to be all that important when reporting on COVID numbers in general. To an extent, by the time the hospital numbers are going up sharply, it's too late, and the hospitals will inevitably be overwhelmed, so it's not a good guide of policy. New case count is the only vaguely timely indicator we have.
    • catawbasam 6y ago
      "inevitably be overwhelmed" now looks less likely than it did in March. There is less use of ventilators and ICU usage has been less than initially anticipated.
      • mehrdadn 6y ago
        Was that not precisely because of the stay-at-home orders?
        • austhrow743 6y ago
          At one point ventilators had a 90% fatality rate or something like that. I think they found that in a lot of cases they either weren't helping or were hurting.
      • rsynnott 6y ago
        To be clear, I mean that hospitals will inevitably be overwhelmed once you see a sharp upswing in hospitalisations; by the time you see that the pipeline is likely already primed and nothing you can do will change the trajectory of the upswing much for days. If you see a sharp upswing in cases, though, swift action can maybe deal with that (assuming you have decent observability). Most the the cases will never see the inside of a hospital, but they provide a somewhat useful proxy for the future of hospitalization. If you need to pick a metric on which to reinstitute lockdowns, hospitalization isn't really very useful; it's better than nothing but if you use it you're probably going to overshoot.
      • kaitai 6y ago
        One difficulty is that while there have been improvements in treatment resulting in less ventilator and ICU usage, and we've substantially increased number of ICU beds in many areas, we're still seeing staff attrition. In my metro, major hospitals have been diverting cases to further-out hospitals not because of equipment shortages but because of staff shortages. Staff are getting sick, and then they're out for a while. Their training can't easily be replaced -- you can train other medical folks to do sort of a half-assed job in an emergency, but you'll see higher mortality in that situation.
  • ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
    Exactly, if we want to achieve herd immunity then increasing the number of infected is a goal we want to achieve, keeping hospitalization levels steady is needed to not increase the amount of death (covid related or not).
    • buhhh 6y ago
      herd immunity in the way that you're advocating for is akin to genocide.
      • ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
        unfortunately that's the current implied strategy, that people like it or not.
        • buhhh 6y ago
          guess we have no choice but to advocate for it then! /s
    • SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
      Never understood the point of herd immunity through deliberate infection with a potentially deadly disorder. I mean what the point of getting sick now, instead of later. I can kinda get a point that second could be potentially deadlier, but what if it never happens? SARS-CoV from 2003 never gave a second wave.
      • ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
        > but what if it never happens The problem is that if covid doesn't kill you, stopping the economy will (or at least will make it worse for a large part of the population). There might be a right trade-off of making heavy use of masks and preventative measures, but this is not currently the implied strategy of the government (as masks are not really enforced). The difference with SARS-CoV-1 from 2002-2004 was that symptoms were much more aggressive and quick, and thus it was much more easy to trace and quarantine people. With the current one we have a mix of issues: lots of asymptomatic people or symptoms take time to develop.
  • adamjcook 6y ago
    > maybe the biggest reason we're doing all this is to flatten the curb so hospitals don't get overwhelmed. I think the other, possibly just as important, reason to lower the infection count is that medical professionals are yet unsure of the long-term, chronic health impacts of this disease and that there appear to be some preliminary signs of significant respiratory and pulmonary issues that can effect many age groups - perhaps even in those not necessarily requiring hospitalization. It would appear that medical science has a few additional treatments in their toolbox now (as compared to, say, March or April) that lower the severity of the disease and helps prevent death in some populations, but still, many concerning unknowns remain. At least that is what I have seen here and there from several medical professionals that I have seen on Twitter over the past few weeks...
    • erik_seaberg 6y ago
      They say any vaccine would take at least a year, and I don't think we have the fear and determination to protect the majority from this for so long.
      • zwily 6y ago
        If everything goes perfectly, there are a couple vaccines that could start being given out in Q4 this year. Experts are being realistic and conservative though and not playing those timelines up.
  • vmception 6y ago
    COVID Articles start with a random selection of cases, tests or deaths over a random selection of time frames and areas. Then halfway through the article it randomly changes to a different combination of cases, tests or deaths or a different time frame and different larger or smaller area. And then finally it switches again, but about a totally different country or worldwide statistics. Now you can procedurally generate multiple articles all day! "Wow engagement is so high", said the Product Manager. "Our KPIs are through the roof, keep doing more of that our customers must love us."
  • logicNSci 6y ago
    There was an NYT article saying ventilators only give a 12% additional survival rate. This is the service hospitals provide. Sure oxygen can be given at a hospital, but if we are overwhelmed, you can easily do oxygen at home. Anyone have a different understanding?
    • pas 6y ago
      My understanding is that just the most severe cases are put on ventilation, and understandably alas a lot of those people die. But the overall effectiveness of intensive care and general hospitalization is likely much higher, but I haven't seen a chart about this.
    • jhayward 6y ago
      There are many more therapies than just oxygen that hospitalized patients receive. Lots of monitoring of e.g., blood values that indicate stress on one organ or another, or danger of crisis due to many different processes. Drug therapy and supportive treatments are varied in response to those. It's not as simple as "welcome to Wendy's, would you like the oxygen today, or can we supersize you to a ventilator?"
    • jschwartzi 6y ago
      I'm not sure what you're arguing for here. There's a very short period of time between when a patient starts drowning in their own fluids and when they die. So you need to be oxygenating in a clinical setting because you need people immediately available to intubate in case your oxygenated patient starts drowning in their own fluids, which they do often. That's why it confers a 12% survival rate. If you've progressed to the point where supplemental oxygen doesn't work then you're pretty close to dying. I'll take 12% over 0% any day of the week. As always you should look past the statistics to what actually needs to happen in those situations. Statistics provide very little assistance in determining whether an individual patient needs to be hospitalized or not. You can't look at someone and go "oh this guy is one of the X% that will eventually need a ventilator." You have to assume that any one patient that needs supplemental oxygen may be one of that X%. So sending people home with supplemental oxygen should be a last-ditch effort if the hospitals become completely overwhelmed, not a routine activity. And to facilitate that, we should absolutely be trying to keep people from getting sick so our hospitals remain open for the unavoidable cases.
  • baxtr 6y ago
    Great observation. I see the same pattern in other countries, too. One reason for this I believe is the lack of “goal clarity”. What’s the goal we’re aiming for? I see several options: 1) we want to eradicate the virus from our population => total cases matter and should be 0 sometime soon, I think that was and is China’s goal 2) we don’t try to eradicate the virus, but we want to keep the stress on the health system manageable => total cases don’t matter that much, bed capacity is the relevant indicator. This seems to be the goal of the “flatten the curve” thinking 3) we don’t care that much, let the virus spread like wildfire so we will have herd immunity asap => I am not sure, but from outside it seems like Brazil is trying to do this I think the reason you and I are confused is because it’s seems to be unclear if we are trying to achieve 1) or 2). It’s not communicated. Maybe it’s unclear to policy makers, too.
    • kelnos 6y ago
      I think the goal a couple/few months ago was #2, but in the meantime we've learned that there might be some bad long-term consequences to contracting the disease that weren't previously known, like possible permanent respiratory damage. Without that, then we shouldn't be too worried about getting the disease as long as we keep transmission rates low enough so hospitals don't get overwhelmed. But if some people end up with long-term respiratory issues after contracting the disease, now there's a reason to keep people from getting it, period, regardless of hospital capacity. But it would be nice to hear these goals actually articulated by public health officials. I'm not sure if my above paragraph is actually what any public health officials are thinking or are worried about (I'm just guessing), but it would be nice to know, because I agree with you that there seems to be a lack of "goal clarity" at this point.
      • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        All American public health officials I've heard have been pretty clear about their goals: we're trying to titrate our social distancing, finding the least severe restrictions necessary to keep cases from spiraling out of control and then staying there until a vaccine. There were some early proposals to drive the pandemic extinct before reopening, but they've been uniformly abandoned in the US because they weren't working.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    For some reason headlines always seem to be number of cases or positive test results, and maybe then the number in the hospital is mentioned The problem is that in a lot of places, the information about hospital use isn't available, isn't timely, or isn't reliable. Hospital owners and their lobbying groups have blocked some states and county health departments from reporting such information, claiming it's "proprietary information." One of the Las Vegas newspapers had a series of articles about it. The hospital lobbying group actually somehow "prohibited" the state from releasing the information, as if hospitals have some kind of authority over the government.
  • dnprock 6y ago
    Hospitalized Increase is being tracked. The good news is it hasn't increased with positive cases. That is likely because the younger infected cases. https://vida.io/dashboards/ckbk04mht00000ul63lr6m53w https://vida.io/dashboards/ckbk04mht00000ul63lr6m53w
  • kaitai 6y ago
    I think it's purely a media thing. When the public health folks I know have been modeling, they've been modeling with a primary eye toward number of ICU beds needed and number of ventilators needed. For instance if you look at https://mn.gov/covid19/data/modeling/index.jsp https://mn.gov/covid19/data/modeling/index.jsp which has a pretty decent model (on Github at https://github.com/MN-COVID19-Model https://github.com/MN-COVID19-Model) you can see all their pdf slides predict peak infection, number of ICUs/vents needed, and then mortality. But that's not what gets headlines, as you observe. It is certainly true that survival rates have improved as treatments have changed based on experience. I think folks know better how to manage things at home, to some extent. Earlier testing also allows earlier intervention, which allows treatment that may avoid ventilator usage. Vent usage corresponds with pretty poor outcomes, although that too is improving.
  • newacct583 6y ago
    > Could it be the people getting the virus now are less likely to end up in the hospital so that number won't keep going up to the point of causing trouble? It could. Or it could be simply getting out of control (though specifically California is in much less trouble than Texas, Florida or especially Arizona at the moment). The point is that (1) it's fundamentally impossible to tell the difference until the bodies are counted and (2) the boundary between "well under capacity, we're fine" and "well over capacity, tens of thousands needlessly dead" represents just a week or two of growth. We don't have time to wait and see, we need an answer now. And we can't get it until the demographics is done postmortem. So what is supposed to happen is that we all behave conservatively until the outbreak shrinks to the point where it can be contained via contact tracing. And... that almost worked. It worked in Asia and Europe, It almost worked here, at least in the hardest hit areas with the early outbreaks. But... it didn't take. Half the population decided they didn't need to bother with this stuff (largely because of reasoning like yours) and walked back into enclosed indoor spaces. And now we're right back where we were in March. Effectively no progress. While the rest of the industrialized world is finishing this off and coming back to life, we're having to talk about new lockdowns. It's so deeply frustrating.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      You have a mistaken perception of what the rest of the industrialized world is doing. South Korea is talking about new lockdowns, China has imposed them, and much of Europe still hasn't really opened up. Only a very few countries believe they're "finishing this off".
      • newacct583 6y ago
        Rolling lockdowns are part of control. No one's expecting miracles until a vaccine is available. Still, Europe is clearly winning this battle. Italy and Belgium had BY FAR the worst outbreaks in the world in March. Now they have a lower new case rate than any state in the US. Any of them, including Hawaii. They are sitting at about 10% of the new case rate of Oregon. Arizona has them beat by more than two orders of magnitude. And again, a month and a half ago we were on the same trajectory. And we gave it all up, because MAGA, I guess.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• fossuser 6y ago
  I live in Palo Alto - last weekend I cycled past some sort of art festival in downtown Los Altos. There were hundreds of people packed together looking at and touching art. There was a big sign that 'we'd get through this together'. They're also opening up farmers markets. I think we're going to see the number of cases rise again.
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    Farmers' markets never closed here in Alameda County which is a lot more densely populated than Los Altos. I think the risk of transmitting respiratory diseases in the outdoors is wildly overstated. Also, people gotta eat.
    • SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
      Nah, it is not overstated. Last time I checked, Wuhan marke was outdoors.
      • jeffbee 6y ago
        When did you check last? Nothing about the photographs I have seen of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market suggests "outdoors".
        • SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
          No doors, roof only. I consider it outdoors. Anyways, in my country open markets get disenfected twice a week, and yet they still find infections through contact tracing, originated from the sellers at these markets.
      • user_50123890 6y ago
        https://images.says.com/uploads/story_source/source_image/751547/ba95.jpeg https://images.says.com/uploads/story_source/source_image/75... Looks like prime batcave-like conditions for coronavirus spread.
  • 6y ago
• anonymousiam 6y ago
  How many are symptomatic?
  • buhhh 6y ago
    asymptomatic =/= free of harm caused by the virus
    • matz1 6y ago
      ok then how many are positive but free or minimal of harm caused by the virus ?
    • jiveturkey 6y ago
      The question was 'symptomatic'. Lest you think it's a typo, the number of symptomatic tests is a critical number to know. It's not about whether the individuals beings tested have been harmed, it's about whether testing shows us the infection rate in the population or not. If 100% of tests were of symptomatic patients, the numbers tell us almost nothing.
  • kpennell 6y ago
    In some Italian villages that tested extensively, they found 50-70% asymptomatic https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-asymptomatic/ https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-a...
• thrown2020 6y ago
  FUCK LIBERALS! Eat shit and die!
• babesh 6y ago
  It is spreading fast amongst the Latino population and more slowly amongst other populations. In SF, Latinos are over 50% of the cases now. In San Mateo, it is closing in on 50% of the cases as well. A couple of weeks ago, the number of Latino cases in San Mateo was about the same as the Asian and white groups. It is now over triple. https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/fjki-2fab https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/fjki-2fab https://www.smchealth.org/san-mateo-county-covid-19-and-other-health-data https://www.smchealth.org/san-mateo-county-covid-19-and-othe...
  • sandeeps_ 6y ago
    why is the latino population seeing large number of cases?
    • rabidrat 6y ago
      I would venture, insular communities and bad luck. Maybe also something to do with cultural mores around visiting family when sick, or insufficient "how to mask/distance/etc" materials in Spanish. I think it's like Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID, before it was AIDS). There's no inherent reason that it showed up predominantly in the gay male population, except a) the first superspreader was a gay airline steward (so he had lots of contacts with the gay community all over the country), and b) gay men were enjoying the fruits of their sexual revolution. If you think about it, monogamy is basically an extreme form of "sexual distancing", and so a non-monogamous community is much more likely to have an outbreak of an STD. Other non-monogamous communities heavily promote wearing masks (condoms), but as this had been viewed primarily as a way to prevent pregnancy, the gay community did not think it was necessary.
      • adeledeweylopez 6y ago
        I think it's just because hispanic people are poorer and thus more likely to be essential workers.
    • spoopyskelly 6y ago
      Because the virus is racist.
• lxe 6y ago
  I'm wondering if this can be attributed to large gatherings associated with protests and demonstrations as well as the "reopening" that's currently on-going?
  • ruddct 6y ago
    Re: protests, NYC has had large, extremely dense protests for weeks now. Mask compliance is near 100% at them, and testing is easy, ubiquitous and free. We have not seen a spike in cases.
    • SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
      Masks are only partially efficient. There is actually a spike all over US. The issue of protests is political, and no one wants to kick the wasps nest, because Republicans want unsafe Trump rallies to keep going.
      • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        Why specifically call out Republicans? Pretty sure that Democrats/liberals/BLM/antifa want the protests to keep going. Or are you saying that the ones who would normally call that out are the Republicans, and they won't because they want Trump's rallies to happen? That's quite plausibly true. But putting it the way you did makes your view sound quite slanted.
        • SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
          Yes, the second statement.
    • pmoriarty 6y ago
      Don't count your chickens before they hatch. It can take weeks after infection to start showing symptoms, weeks more to be sick enough to need hospitalization, weeks after that to die. These days, many people won't even go to hospitals, even when they're dying, and when they die at home they may never be tested for the virus at all, so won't necessarily be counted as having died from COVID-19. The direct repercussions of the highly irresponsible mass gatherings that have been taking place over the last few weeks may not be evident for some time. All this doesn't even take in to account all the people who did not attend any gathering but got infected by someone who did, and yet further infections from the first-order indirect infections, and so on. Those later, indirect cases (which will still be the result of infections spread during these gatherings) will take even longer to be noticed.
• ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
  I just want to point out that the government has not clearly outlined its strategy, and the reason is that the end-goal is to reach herd immunity in 12-18 month. Infections are OK, what's not OK is too-high rates of hospitalization which leads to death that can be prevented.
• gregwebs 6y ago
  A lot of commenters here are stating that this is because of increased testing. Which is true compared to April. But I want to point out that at least in southern Callifornia the positive test percentage is actually going up now. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/6-000-plus-California-shatters-its-single-day-15358857.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/6-000-plus-Calif...
• gregwebs 6y ago
  There are a lot of comments here essentially saying this is not a problem an we are properly reaching herd immunity. I am wondering if these commenters are discounting the possibility of a vaccine? There is a strong possibility that we will have a vaccine before we can safely reach herd immunity.
  • matz1 6y ago
    Not a problem in the sense that, tested positive doesn't mean you are sick, tested positive doesn't mean you are having severe symptom.
  • nradov 6y ago
    The timing and effectiveness of a potential vaccine are still unknown. Hopefully some of the vaccines being tested now will work, but it's quite possible that all will prove to be ineffective or unsafe. So from a public policy standpoint we have to proceed on the assumption that a vaccine isn't going to save us.
  • tunesmith 6y ago
    Natural herd immunity is a non-starter anyway. If we reach herd immunity before a vaccine arrives, the economic damage would be far worse than any shutdown. If the R0 is 5.7, you need 82.5% (4.7/5.7) of the population either immune or quarantined/locked-down. If everyone stops the lockdown, that means 82.5% of the population infected. No matter how much we want to argue down the IFR, that's catastrophic. Semi-related note, I think we haven't properly socialized the basic numbers behind the disease. I hear that Covid-19 is more contagious than first thought, with a "natural" R0 of 5.7. I also hear that it has a doubling time of around three days, originally thought to be more like 5-6. I also hear that the contagion period is 8-10 days. These three numbers do not make sense together. The R0 number needs to be reached during the contagion period. The average contagion period is likely far longer, or, it's way more contagious than 5.7 (which would mean the herd immunity threshold goes higher). Also, if the illness is more contagious than we first thought, it means that the lockdown was even more effective than we first thought. Here's a fun mental exercise for whoever's reading this. Say that you have a bubble of 100 people, and released a disease that infected 50 people and killed all of them; 100% fatality. Then say you discovered that it actually infected all 100 people, but only 50% of them died. Is the disease less dangerous than you first thought?
• mrfusion 6y ago
  In other news .. https://outkick.com/media-ignores-90-coronavirus-death-collapse-in-country/ https://outkick.com/media-ignores-90-coronavirus-death-colla...
  • user_50123890 6y ago
    Coronavirus deaths lag new cases by about 3 weeks
    • jeffdavis 6y ago
      But it seems like a decline in deaths marks the end of a "wave", which is a good thing. We could face another wave, which of course would be bad. Lockdown fatigue and protests could easily bring it back. But if we've brought one wave under control, at least we know what it takes to do it and we can try to react a little faster for the next one.
  • subsubzero 6y ago
    Good article, reading the news the past few months makes it seem like the apocalypse had landed in the US and we are faring worse off than any other nation on the planet wrt covid-19. The reality is quite different, this article from the economist states such[1]*stats taken from May 27th: "But seven EU countries (including Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain) currently rank above America in their mortality rate. So does Britain, where the official rate is a shocking 559 per million" [1] - https://beta.trimread.com/articles/22723 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/22723.
  • elsonrodriguez 6y ago
    In other news social distancing caused a dip in deaths, so we should all go mingle again so we can cause a rise in deaths? This article is ridiculous, the author is simply upset that many sports are closed for a season, and is looking for any justification to reopen. Yes the media blows things out of proportion, but the author even has a graph in the article that shows covid19 kills old people more effectively than flu and pneumonia! The last few days have seen global upticks in infections, maybe they'll get their chance to write another article about the media being fearmongers once a few hundred thousand more people die and the death curve hits another flat spot. Absolutely absurd.
• subsubzero 6y ago
  Paywall free article: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/22708 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/22708. Somewhat related to the OP's post, what really drives me crazy is focusing on cases since beginning of time. California has 174k cases in this case. What really should be looked at is week over week increases and number of new cases, and only of active cases, old cases shouldn't really be included but newspapers love sensationalism. In addition states are combining antibody test positives(person had covid, recovered) with active positive tests(nose swabs, person is infected with covid) [1]. Basically testing and presenting digestible results have been a disaster. In addition finding decent dashboards for this info is surprisingly hard. Local ones like santa clara counties one are good [2], but step up the state and national level and its hit or miss. [1] - https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/this-is-a-mess-cdc-4-states-combine-viral-and-antibody-results-skewing-covid-19-data.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/this-is-... [2] - https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx
  • alwaysdoit 6y ago
    Agreed. The news functions like a monitoring system with an extremely bad alert configuration.
• blackrock 6y ago
  People are getting quarantine fatigue. I think at some point soon, people are just going to give up. We could’ve bit the bullet, and did a hard lock down for 4 weeks. This would’ve killed the virus in its tracks. But instead, we didn’t take the hard actions. And now, this virus is going to take its toll. But, no worries. The stock market is doing all time highs.
  • rsweeney21 6y ago
    Yep. At first it was SHOCKING to see the new cases rise. Then the death tally started rising fast. Then the videos from Italian and US hospitals. But like most things, once you are accustomed to it, the amount of fear people feel declines. As fear declines, apathy increases. It's like gang violence, child trafficking, or casualties of war. At first it is shocking, but then people get used to it and go on with their lives.
• jeffdavis 6y ago
  Is there any evidence that the virus is evolving to change its deadliness?
• jeffdavis 6y ago
  From a pandemic standpoint, it seems confusing to group together all of California. The article seems to be saying most of the outbreak is in LA and Riverside counties.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    >The article seems to be saying most of the outbreak is in LA and Riverside counties. LA and Riverside Counties are about 1/3 of California by population, so while it is somewhat disproportional for most of (whatever) to be there, it's not anywhere close to what it might seem when you name 2 out of 58 counties.
• jeffdavis 6y ago
  Is there any sign that summer in the northern hemisphere will help us out? UV, heat, outdoors, or other factors?
  • kpennell 6y ago
    Major spread is happening in Florida, Arizona, and Texas.
    • reaperducer 6y ago
      Places where people concentrate inside during the summer. The virus doesn't hang around outside at the open bus stop. It goes with the people.
    • glofish 6y ago
      yeah but in those states it is way too hot to be outside thus people spend even far more time inside than during the winter. then Americans like their rooms numbingly cold so the AC goes full blast so there, it actually makes perfect sense these states got few cases in the winter because the weather was warm and sunny and they spent more time outside, now they are inside all the time in the cold, you get more cases
• reissbaker 6y ago
  The Johns Hopkins database implies that California's overall positivity rate (i.e. the percent of COVID-19 tests of Californians that are positive) remains roughly flat at just under 5%. [1] While that's still a concerning number (and it seems like LA in particular is not doing as well as the rest of CA), California overall is doing reasonably well, as it has been throughout the outbreak, despite our dense cities and massive population. More tests mean more positive results, but doesn't necessarily indicate worsening conditions. Cumulative totals are especially meaningless; of course an area with a large population (e.g. the Bay Area) will have large cumulative totals. The focus on absolute numbers of positive cases (without normalizing by testing rate or population) pretty dramatically distorts the national discourse on COVID-19. California has been slow to reopen — although it is reopening — and has been criticized by the right as experiencing surging cases regardless. But that's largely inaccurate: CA is just much, much larger than any other state, and it's been reliably ramping up testing. As counterexamples, Florida and Arizona are places where the surge in cases is actually reflective of significantly worsening community spread: Arizona's positivity rate has tripled from a low of 6.5% in May to nearly 20% today [2], and Florida's positivity rate has grown 5x from a low of 2.3% in May to over 12% today [3]. Texas, another state that reopened quickly, had its positivity rate double from a low of 4.7% — approximately similar to the rate CA has managed to keep itself at — to 11% today. [4] 1: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/california https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/califo... 2: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/arizona https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/arizon... 3: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/florida https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/florid... 4: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/texas https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/texas
  • Barrin92 6y ago
    >despite our dense cities Californian cities are actually not dense at all, which may explain why it isn't even worse. LA at 7.5k /mi2, San Diego 4.4k/mi2 etc.. compare that to New York at 27k/mi2, or even Paris 54k/mi2, Barcelona 41k/mi2
    • reissbaker 6y ago
• christkv 6y ago
  Does anyone know how many health care personnel in percentage of f.ex nyc hospitals that have had the illness. I’ve been wondering if institutional immunity in centers of spread would slow down resurgence as hospitals and health care centers get more immune workers.
  • m4rtink 6y ago
    From what I've read, it is still far from certain infection gives a usable immunity. So rather than that, it might as well kill off medical personal due to repeated exposure in huge amounts.
• GhostVII 6y ago
  Could this be due to an increase in testing or better testing strategy rather than an increase in cases? Daily COVID cases have been rising significantly over the last couple months in California, while deaths have been flat or slightly declining. Deaths are probably a more accurate indicator than positive tests, so it seems like positive test results do not match the actual case count very well.
  • usaar333 6y ago
    It's both. Hospitalization is up, so it's really unlikely infections aren't also up.
• Animats 6y ago
  Only the US and Brazil, and some of the small Gulf states, seem totally unable to get their coronavirus epidemics under control.[1] Remember when Italy had a huge problem? That's over. China? Over. [1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=chn&areas=ita&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnj&cumulative=0&logScale=0&perMillion=0&values=cases https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=chn&are...
  • meddlepal 6y ago
    When mainstream and social media turned the public health crisis into a political issue it ruined any chance of ending well. Politics destroys everything it touches in this country. Or put more simply: We would be a lot better off if everyone would just shut the fuck up for 10 minutes.
    • untog 6y ago
      So the current administration botches the response to a pandemic but the media is blame because they politicized it? Healthcare is a political issue. Pretty much everything is a political issue. To pretend otherwise is to bury your head in the sand.
    • archagon 6y ago
      Sure, let's just take politics out of things that affect people.
    • K0SM0S 6y ago
      There is a popular expression in French that explicits a worthy distinction: “Politique politicienne”. It literally means politician politics, or politicians' politics (a politician is a political figure, like an elected official), and it very derogatorily qualifies all the noise, the blablabla, the unimportant chatter in politics — Wherein politics speaks of egos, not ideas; the part that seldom leads to actual or worthwhile "policy". When a leader is said to be making “de la politique politicienne”, it basically means that's degree zero of intelligent discourse, and solely aimed at tackling political opponents. Cue false claims, supporting opinions you provably don't believe yourself (but party line prevails), etc. It's an old expression, before my time (1980s). It's fallen out of flavor. Probably because 99% of politics has now become de la politique politicienne...
• SllX 6y ago
  Most Bay Area counties still aren’t reporting recoveries distorting the Active Case number, unless you believe 0 people who have had COVID-19 in San Francisco have recovered since the SFDPH started tracking cases. EDIT: Additional context: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/california/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/california/ If a county’s active case number equals Total Cases Minus Deaths, then they’re not reporting recoveries. Los Angeles is the largest county not reporting recoveries. In just the Bay Area, Alameda, Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Mateo are the 4 of the 5 largest counties in the Bay Area by population and are not tracking recoveries. Contra Costa and all the North Bay counties appear to be tracking recoveries.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• salmon30salmon 6y ago
  We locked down _too soon_ in many places. Hear me out. In my state, Oregon, we locked down when there were only a handful of cases, and not much community spread. Most spread was either in long-term care or familial. But we locked down _hard_ and had pretty good compliance. I am talking, standing in the middle of I-5 at noon compliance. Sure you'd have to keep an eye out for trucks from time to time. But still. We set up surge capacity. Hospitals in Portland set up triage tents and cleared out other beds for a surge...... that never came. A few weeks in, the tents were taken down, the staff was laid off. We sat in our cocoon waiting for something, not sure what. Eventually the pain of being closed started to tick away, and we started reopening... But nothing materially _changed_ between then and now. We just stopped community spread of an infection nobody really had. We've had less than 6k infections in Oregon. Now we are opening up and guess what? Cases are increasing! We didn't flatten the curve we crushed the curve. So there was no controlled spread, it was just us all feeling proud of ourselves for three months while the poor suffered. The sneaky lie was that, in a country as big as the US, a flatten the curve strategy was never going to work at a national level. We need community level response. We locked down Oregon over what was happening in NYC. That is akin to Northern Ireland locking down because of Moscow. That isn't an exaggeration. If anything, it is an understatement. All of the European countries that we are saying "why can't we be more like them?" all had orders of magnitude more cases than Oregon. So if Oregon quadruples in cases over the next month we are still better off than a lot of nations. To flatten the curve, there needs to be a damn curve to flatten. Had we waited until there was known, uncontrolled community spread and _then_ shut down, we would have a lot more political will. Now if it gets to that point after three months of being shut down, I doubt anyone will give a shit what the Governor says. Goodwill has been burned through and then some.
  • somewhereoutth 6y ago
    You make a good point. See Croatia for a similar example in the EU. However we have the advantage of final control over our borders (sovereignty is pooled upwards, not flowed downwards here) - so we are better able to tailor our response and deal with problem areas (Sweden, greater Lisbon).
    • 6y ago
• wiseleo 6y ago
  California is still not doing enough. The original criteria for phase II were not met and yet the state decided to reopen anyway. Bay Area is thankfully staying stricter. I was at a sit-down restaurant packed at capacity with live music a week ago about 100 miles from Bay Area. That should not be possible. Close the state border to all interstate traffic. Test truck drivers at weigh stations near the state border. There should be sufficient capacity of the 5-minute Abbott test for this. Test other interstate travelers at mandatory checkpoints with a test that shows results no later than 60 minutes. Close county borders. Mandatory testing at each county border. Issue a photo + ID card to each person tested. Mandatory verification of negative result before public transit boarding. Mandatory door to door testing in resisting areas. Deny all walk-in service to anyone not able to verify current test results with at-door scanner. Assume they are infected and serve them curbside. Have them scanned by a mobile dispatched unit at their if unable to travel to a testing location. Annoying? That's what "essential" activity means. We are not making it inconvenient enough to not do non-essential activities. Sounds extreme? That's what EU did to contain Italy and Spain. They closed internal borders and localized efforts. Sounds expensive? Abbott will make a lot of money. Lives will be saved. The entire state could reopen and resume operations once strict testing protocols are in place and the curve is properly slammed. We do not have an effective CDC to set national policy. Compare the real guidelines [1] leaked to press to the softened guidelines[2]. There is a reason why schools are rejecting[3] the official guidelines. Finally. Want to host a church gathering? Your entire congregation is welcome to stay quarantined for 14 days on your premises. P.S. The current CDC document has been updated. It was far less prescriptive earlier. Some sense prevailed. The entire section related to churches has been deleted. Counties with zero infections should be allowed to open, but border protocols must be enforced. [1]https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6889330-Guidance-for-Opening-Up-America-Again-Framework.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6889330-Guidance-for... [2]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/php/CDC-Activities-Initiatives-for-COVID-19-Response.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/php/CDC-... [3]https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2020-05-15/school-superintendents-dismiss-white-house-will-follow-leaked-cdc-guidance-on-reopening-schools https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2020-05-...
  • m4rtink 6y ago
• wonderwonder 6y ago
  The absolute fascinating thing about this is that for much of the country, they just got bored of Corona virus. Federal leadership is fading away to almost nothing, with getting the economy rolling prior to the election being the main focus. Then on top of that we have people who for whatever reason just want to go back to normal, thinking that its no big deal. There are many more who agree that the sickness is a big deal but it really only kills the elderly or weak and that's not a big deal, the sacrifice is worth it. We decided that staying home and socially isolating was just to hard. The rest of the world must be looking at us in horror.
  • dillondoyle 6y ago
    I think a lot of us inside our country are looking on in horror too. I for sure am - and terrified. I have lost all confidence and don't know if we can 'right the ship' (beyond just Covid I'm talking about basically everything all of our values)
    • wonderwonder 6y ago
      Honestly have never seen anything like it. I am in shock that so many people are applauding whats going on here. If it happens again, I am not sure what to think.
• tamaharbor 6y ago
  A good virus does not kill its host. It is becoming less of a death threat.
• zaroth 6y ago
  We know now — definitively — those populations who are at risk from COVID, and those populations which are not. In general the world is too connected, and populations too mobile, for a virus like SARS-CoV-2 to be contained, save for special case island nations that are willing to keep borders closed or visitors quarantined and ensure compliance until a vaccine becomes available. For the rest of the world, what is abundantly clear in countries that are willing and able to perform the requisite testing, is that this is a virus that spreads easily and rapidly but thankfully in those under 50 is vanishingly unlikely to kill if it is symptomatic at all. With over 10 million confirmed cases worldwide, likely in excess of 100 million actual infections, COVID could burn out in it’s own before widespread vaccination is available. Not due to containment measures, but due to enough people gaining immunity. In my non-expert estimation, the public health response to COVID will ultimately result in about an order of magnitude more deaths, or roughly an order of magnitude more years of life lost, than due to COVID itself. The longer we continue lockdown-type policies, the greater the damage done. COVID spread anyway, COVID continues to spread, although now it seems to be mostly in less risky populations as case counts surge and hospitalization and death rates remain constant. Some of this is of course simply sampling bias now that testing is more available for lower risk populations. We also see people who know they aren’t at any real risk willing to be exposed in order to live their lives. Most inexcusably is that the most vulnerable populations (e.g. in nursing homes) were not adequately protected and even directly harmed by policies while the general masses bore the economic and social brunt of the involuntary enforcement measures. In general every person who gets COVID and is asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic is basically someone getting an early access vaccine, and this can only be regarded as a positive in exerting a downward effect on R. I think that speculating about long term effects in largely asymptomatic populations is an academic exercise which misses the forest for the trees. We need to reopen emergency rooms for the cardiac patients, reopen oncology departments for the chemo patients, reopen primary care clinics for health screenings, and reopen gyms, all to reduce/prevent well known and proven morbidities that cost millions of lives a year, not just continue to incur increase death in our most prevalent causes of death out of fear or politics.
• pvaldes 6y ago
  It seems that nobody dare to say this, so I will do, because I'm an idiot. This is the expected outcome by the recent "black lives matter" events. Right actions but really bad time choice. I wonder why people expected other results.