Coronavirus General Discussion

[Libertarian666]

Rudy Giuliani has a very simple rule: As soon as the first bottle or rock is thrown at a protest, start the arrests.
That calms things down very quickly.
As for looters, they need to be shot. Then it doesn't take long for them to figure out it's not a good idea.

They were talking about Giuliani last night (back in the good old days when he was sane) and how he arrested everyone on the bridge. 700 people was the number given. I don't know if it's accurate, but it was every last person. They did not come back.

I heard Giuliani himself on TV recently, I believe this weekend, and he explained that same event in the same way.
He seemed perfectly sane to me.

[dualstow]

Rudy Giuliani has a very simple rule: As soon as the first bottle or rock is thrown at a protest, start the arrests.
That calms things down very quickly.
As for looters, they need to be shot. Then it doesn't take long for them to figure out it's not a good idea.

They were talking about Giuliani last night (back in the good old days when he was sane) and how he arrested everyone on the bridge. 700 people was the number given. I don't know if it's accurate, but it was every last person. They did not come back.

I heard Giuliani himself on TV recently, I believe this weekend, and he explained that same event in the same way.
He seemed perfectly sane to me.

He still has his moments. :-)

[yankees60]

At least a lot of the protesters were wearing masks!

However, that IS a major difference between this current civil unrest compared to prior. Now it is accepted practice for perpetrators of violence to cover their faces while they do what they do.

VInny

[pmward]

For anyone interested, in follow up to how our early reopening in AZ has been going, our daily new cases are now double than what they were prior to the reopening. Our deaths and hospital bed metrics have also been trending badly. In Maricopa county we are currently at a 4.25% death rate. Not looking good so far. I imagine with the protests congregating people in public every day that things are only going to continue to get worse, and it is likely that we max out our available hospital beds in the next couple of weeks.

[Tyler]

This is horrifying from a scientific perspective, but it’s looking increasingly likely that the Lancet paper that concluded hydroxychloroquine harms Covid-19 patients and precipitated the end of further studies was based on fraudulent data by a scam company.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... hloroquine

[Kriegsspiel]

Our deaths and hospital bed metrics have also been trending badly. In Maricopa county we are currently at a 4.25% death rate. Not looking good so far.

Where are you getting hospitalization stats from?

[pmward]

Our deaths and hospital bed metrics have also been trending badly. In Maricopa county we are currently at a 4.25% death rate. Not looking good so far.

Where are you getting hospitalization stats from?

Our state department of health website.

[Kriegsspiel]

Hospitalizations look like they're trending down. I'm looking here.

1654.png (69.71 KiB) Viewed 5410 times

[pmward]

Hospitalizations look like they're trending down. I'm looking here.

1654.png

You're looking at percent of cases hospitalized, not percent of ICU beds taken. We are currently at 83% of ICU beds taken, and with increasing cases and the protests that's not a good thing. Also, that website does have a few day lag sometimes, it's the only one I can find the hospitalization stats, but the actual case stats always seem to populate on other sites first. They tend to show lower than others on that site, then a few days later bump up to the levels reported everywhere else.

[WiseOne]

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.

[pmward]

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...

Screen Shot 2020-06-03 at 2.20.29 PM.png (206.74 KiB) Viewed 5388 times

[WiseOne]

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.

[pmward]

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.

[pp4me]

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.

[dualstow]

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.

[pmward]

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.

Screen Shot 2020-06-08 at 5.02.56 PM.png (106.32 KiB) Viewed 5562 times

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"

[dualstow]

Sounds pretty bad.

[Xan]

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...

[pmward]

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.

[I Shrugged]

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

[Xan]

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

[Libertarian666]

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.

[pmward]

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.

[yankees60]

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

[pmward]

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.