Coronavirus General Discussion

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WiseOne
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by WiseOne » Wed Jun 03, 2020 3:55 pm

Are you and Kriegspiel looking at the same data? I don't see a recent spike in cases in the plot that Kriegspiel posted, either.

Deaths tend to lag hospital admissions by a few weeks, since obviously dying of COVID can take a bit of time. Similarly, ICU cases can lag new cases. This lag can cause the #s to be misleading if you're using it to gauge the effect of reopening.

btw regarding hydroxychloroquine - there was an NEJM article that I posted that was written by physicians at a New York hospital using its own data. No shady companies involved. It was an observational study showing no difference in outcomes between HC treated vs non-treated cases, after correcting for things like initial case severity. From that you conclude that if there is a benefit to hydroxychloroquine it was too small to detect. By the same token though, if hydroxychloroquine had an adverse effect it was also too small to detect - either that, or it balanced any positive effects.

Shame on WHO for ignoring that study.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pmward » Wed Jun 03, 2020 4:23 pm

WiseOne wrote:
Wed Jun 03, 2020 3:55 pm
Are you and Kriegspiel looking at the same data? I don't see a recent spike in cases in the plot that Kriegspiel posted, either.

Deaths tend to lag hospital admissions by a few weeks, since obviously dying of COVID can take a bit of time. Similarly, ICU cases can lag new cases. This lag can cause the #s to be misleading if you're using it to gauge the effect of reopening.
See below for new cases graph for AZ. And this doesn't account for the +~900 we had reported today. So yeah, my main point is that at 83% ICU capacity, with cases increasing like this, and the protests we have had here every single day lately, I do have some concerns of that case count jumping even higher in the next 2 weeks. This spike in cases shown on the graph haven't made their way into ICU bed or death statistics yet, as there is that lag you mentioned. We have been opened for 3 weeks now, so this week, and that spike on the graph, are basically the new infections that happened just in the very first week we opened up. We've also been consistently over 100 degree temps here, so the hope of heat killing the virus are kind of dashed... We will see how it plays out. At what point does a state have to consider lockdown round 2? I don't know the answer myself, but AZ may be a state to watch as that debate could happen in the near future.

* should also mention that the native population in AZ is not accounted for in this data, and they have been having a real hard time with the virus...

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WiseOne
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by WiseOne » Wed Jun 03, 2020 5:44 pm

Yes, I see, that is possibly a spike in new cases recently.

You have to realize though, that new cases will also increase with more testing. In New York, that became so obvious that the governor stopped looking at new cases and focused on new hospitalizations, which is about the only measure that could be expected to stay consistent. If you can find that in the Arizona data it would be much more reliable indicator.

Also, Arizona started reopening May 8, but the increase in cases is just the past few days. I would expect a 2 week lag, but it's been a month.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pmward » Wed Jun 03, 2020 6:09 pm

WiseOne wrote:
Wed Jun 03, 2020 5:44 pm
Yes, I see, that is possibly a spike in new cases recently.

You have to realize though, that new cases will also increase with more testing. In New York, that became so obvious that the governor stopped looking at new cases and focused on new hospitalizations, which is about the only measure that could be expected to stay consistent. If you can find that in the Arizona data it would be much more reliable indicator.

Also, Arizona started reopening May 8, but the increase in cases is just the past few days. I would expect a 2 week lag, but it's been a month.
May 8th was not the date we reopened. If you go back in this thread the discussion we had on this topic originally was Wed May 13th. We reopened that Friday, on May 15th. May 9th was the day he opened barbershops, which was originally supposed to be the first step. If you recall, the following week on May 13th was when he got impatient and just said we were punting his phased plan he announced days earlier and instead doing the full reopen on the 15th. So it's been 2 1/2 weeks exactly since full re-open, and if you look in the data we have a spike that started really about a week ago (coinciding with 2 weeks since barbershops open not ironically), but really picked up steam about 4 days ago (coinciding with the full open date). I see no reason why this last week testing would suddenly be much higher than any point prior. Data seems legit enough to me (there is no such thing as a perfect dataset after all). We will have to wait to see how it pans out.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pp4me » Thu Jun 04, 2020 9:00 am

Stats from Pinellas county Florida, population about 1 million people.
Free testing with or without symptoms even began a couple of weeks ago and there has been no spike except for a few days on that graph which aren't that significant.
Male vs Female and Black vs White statistics don't seem to square with what I've been hearing from other places.
I think we will be an interesting county to watch because the summer weather with heat and humidity is fast approaching with highs now near 90. "Experts" keep telling us this won't make it go away which tends to make me think it probably will.

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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by dualstow » Thu Jun 04, 2020 9:03 am

Autopsy report says George Floyd had coronavirus (and a slew of drugs in his system 🤔).
Disclaimer: I’m not trying to excuse or support Chauvin.
RIP Marcello Gandini
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pmward » Mon Jun 08, 2020 7:06 pm

Yeah things are not looking good here in AZ. The spike in cases is looking like the spike in the stock market lately. Also see the excerpt from the news story posted today. So far our grand reopening is looking like it may be turning into a grand failure.


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https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/lo ... 0ZTpQ6IkzI
"As COVID-19 numbers in Arizona climbed last week, the state health director sent a letter to hospitals urging them to "fully activate" emergency plans.

Hospitals are also being asked to prepare for crisis care, and to suspend elective surgeries if they are experiencing a shortage of staff or bed capacity, Dr. Cara Christ, Arizona Department of Health Services director, says in the June 6 letter.

The letter was sent on the day after the chief clinical officer of Arizona's largest health system — Banner Health — said ICU bed occupancy was growing, and that if current trends continued would exceed capacity.

One day later, Banner Health said it had reached capacity for its nine ECMO machines. ECMO stands for stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation — it works like an external lung and is for patients whose lungs get so damaged that they don't work, even with the assistance of a ventilator.

Overall, COVID-19 numbers in Arizona have jumped, hospitalizations have increased and as the percentage of positive COVID-19 tests showed increases, too. Some experts say Arizona is experiencing a spike in community spread of COVID-19"
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by dualstow » Mon Jun 08, 2020 7:36 pm

Sounds pretty bad.
RIP Marcello Gandini
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Xan » Mon Jun 08, 2020 7:40 pm

On the VERY good news front, there's this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asympto ... -says.html

Meaning that it may be sufficient for healthy people to avoid sick people rather than all people. What a difference that would make. Frustratingly, it would also mean that all this bother achieved very little...
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pmward » Mon Jun 08, 2020 7:57 pm

Xan wrote:
Mon Jun 08, 2020 7:40 pm
On the VERY good news front, there's this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asympto ... -says.html

Meaning that it may be sufficient for healthy people to avoid sick people rather than all people. What a difference that would make. Frustratingly, it would also mean that all this bother achieved very little...
That is interesting. If something like checking for fever in public places could be an effective mitigation strategy, that would change everything.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by I Shrugged » Mon Jun 08, 2020 8:05 pm

So what is going wrong in Arizona?
I see that on a per capita basis, the Native American counties are off the charts.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Xan » Mon Jun 08, 2020 8:39 pm

I Shrugged wrote:
Mon Jun 08, 2020 8:05 pm
So what is going wrong in Arizona?
I see that on a per capita basis, the Native American counties are off the charts.
Saw a WSJ article the other day (it was free then, now it's paywalled) saying that a lot of rural cases strike houses where a whole lot of family, particularly multigenerational, live together. Often that's in close quarters.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-h ... 1591553896
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Libertarian666 » Mon Jun 08, 2020 8:48 pm

Xan wrote:
Mon Jun 08, 2020 7:40 pm
On the VERY good news front, there's this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asympto ... -says.html

Meaning that it may be sufficient for healthy people to avoid sick people rather than all people. What a difference that would make. Frustratingly, it would also mean that all this bother achieved very little...
I guess the WHO's plan to take down the economy of the Western world didn't work, so now they are changing their tune.
I don't believe ANYTHING they say.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pmward » Mon Jun 08, 2020 8:59 pm

I Shrugged wrote:
Mon Jun 08, 2020 8:05 pm
So what is going wrong in Arizona?
I see that on a per capita basis, the Native American counties are off the charts.
The native populations are getting absolutely decimated. But the numbers in AZ I shared don't include those. They count the natives separately.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by vnatale » Mon Jun 08, 2020 9:12 pm

pmward wrote:
Mon Jun 08, 2020 7:06 pm
Yeah things are not looking good here in AZ. The spike in cases is looking like the spike in the stock market lately. Also see the excerpt from the news story posted today. So far our grand reopening is looking like it may be turning into a grand failure.

It was even mentioned on my local sports talk radio show tonight!

Vinny
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pmward » Mon Jun 08, 2020 9:46 pm

vnatale wrote:
Mon Jun 08, 2020 9:12 pm
pmward wrote:
Mon Jun 08, 2020 7:06 pm
Yeah things are not looking good here in AZ. The spike in cases is looking like the spike in the stock market lately. Also see the excerpt from the news story posted today. So far our grand reopening is looking like it may be turning into a grand failure.

It was even mentioned on my local sports talk radio show tonight!

Vinny
Yeah people are starting to talk and get nervous about it again here. For the first couple weeks after we opened up the general public seemed to forget about it. People went back to their normal routines and mostly shrugged it off. But now that the data is getting bad really fast, people are starting to worry again.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by I Shrugged » Tue Jun 09, 2020 6:59 am

People I know in Arizona told me that during the whole time of stay at home, if you went into a Home Depot or Lowes, only 1 in 20 people were wearing masks. Including store personnel. And the stores were very busy. So I can imagine that once general society actually opened up, people were not going to be taking any precautions.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by WiseOne » Tue Jun 09, 2020 7:39 am

It appears COVID may have been spreading in China as early as last August:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/heal ... jem10point

If that's true, then it had to be in Europe, NY, and all international travel hubs by last fall at the latest. It occurs to me that last fall was a particularly bad flu season, attributed to the vaccine being a wrong guess as to the dominant type of flu. I bet it was actually a mix of COVID and flu.

It looks like NYC cases have continued to decrease (see https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page) despite the combination of Memorial Day, 2 weeks of mass protests/riots, yesterday's reopening which was preceded by many businesses stepping up their game without the state's blessing, and a general increase in the numbers of people who are just over it and are heading outside to enjoy the early summer weather.

I'm not surprised that the disease will continue to spread slowly, finding pockets of vulnerable populations here and there - and it has nothing to do with the reopenings. I bet Arizona's problem is the large number of Hispanic migrants. They are uniquely vulnerable to COVID, along with black populations, for reasons that can be guessed at but aren't really known. They may also not be doing enough to protect their nursing homes. You might want to see if a breakdown by race/ethnicity/age of hospitalized cases is available. Also make sure it's hospital cases as that's the only reliable measure given the effect of increased testing.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Libertarian666 » Tue Jun 09, 2020 7:57 am

WiseOne wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 7:39 am
It appears COVID may have been spreading in China as early as last August:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/heal ... jem10point

If that's true, then it had to be in Europe, NY, and all international travel hubs by last fall at the latest. It occurs to me that last fall was a particularly bad flu season, attributed to the vaccine being a wrong guess as to the dominant type of flu. I bet it was actually a mix of COVID and flu.

It looks like NYC cases have continued to decrease (see https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page) despite the combination of Memorial Day, 2 weeks of mass protests/riots, yesterday's reopening which was preceded by many businesses stepping up their game without the state's blessing, and a general increase in the numbers of people who are just over it and are heading outside to enjoy the early summer weather.

I'm not surprised that the disease will continue to spread slowly, finding pockets of vulnerable populations here and there - and it has nothing to do with the reopenings. I bet Arizona's problem is the large number of Hispanic migrants. They are uniquely vulnerable to COVID, along with black populations, for reasons that can be guessed at but aren't really known. They may also not be doing enough to protect their nursing homes. You might want to see if a breakdown by race/ethnicity/age of hospitalized cases is available. Also make sure it's hospital cases as that's the only reliable measure given the effect of increased testing.
Aren't deaths a fairly reliable measure? I realize they have an average lag of two or three weeks.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Kriegsspiel » Tue Jun 09, 2020 8:47 am

WiseOne wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 7:39 am
It occurs to me that last fall was a particularly bad flu season, attributed to the vaccine being a wrong guess as to the dominant type of flu. I bet it was actually a mix of COVID and flu.
I'd bet you're right.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Kriegsspiel » Tue Jun 09, 2020 8:47 am

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Heh
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Xan » Tue Jun 09, 2020 8:52 am

WiseOne wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 7:39 am
If that's true, then it had to be in Europe, NY, and all international travel hubs by last fall at the latest. It occurs to me that last fall was a particularly bad flu season, attributed to the vaccine being a wrong guess as to the dominant type of flu. I bet it was actually a mix of COVID and flu.
It very well may be true, but they seem to be determining that COVID started earlier by examining how busy Wuhan hospitals were. That fact could also be explained by a particularly bad flu season. Unless the hospital busy-ness were only in Wuhan and not in other cities. I haven't seen an analysis of non-Wuhan hospitals. So who knows.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by vnatale » Tue Jun 09, 2020 9:02 am

I Shrugged wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 6:59 am
People I know in Arizona told me that during the whole time of stay at home, if you went into a Home Depot or Lowes, only 1 in 20 people were wearing masks. Including store personnel. And the stores were very busy. So I can imagine that once general society actually opened up, people were not going to be taking any precautions.
Still here in Massachusetts wherever I've been in the public I've been seeing 100% mask compliance (last Friday I went to Stop & Shop, only my third time out in the public since mid-March).

Vinny
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by Cortopassi » Tue Jun 09, 2020 10:11 am

Study abroad at all sites have been cancelled by Notre Dame. My daughter was supposed to go to Dublin.

So many ripple effects from this damn lockdown. Now they have to figure out how to fit 400 more students that were going to be away -- in grad dorms, off campus housing, etc. And my daughter is part of this shit.

And who knows how much football revenue Notre Dame and these other big time sports programs are going to lose.
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Re: Coronavirus General Discussion

Post by pmward » Tue Jun 09, 2020 11:20 am

AND the WHO was real quick to walk back that statement that asymptomatic spreading was rare... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/worl ... dates.html
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