shoshin

FL has had 3 straight Tuesdays at about 60 deaths, today at 130.

Nothing clinical. An in vitro study did not show success for that particular steroid. https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/inhaled-corticosteroids-a-rapid-review-of-the-evidence-for-treatment-or-prevention-of-covid-19/ Other steroids have shown promise.

The federalists and antifederalists fought the fight and the antifederalists lost. The states bend the knee to the feds on a lot of issues and national emergency is one, and the feds could have exercised authority either: overtly by mandate, through direct pressure by funding withholding, or indirectly through political pressure/leadership. The federal government went 0 for 3. NYS got hit early when we were still thinking ventilators and laying patients on their backs were a good idea...and also got hit in a single metro area that includes 8 of the 12 most population dense areas of the country, where people live in a way they don't live in any other part of the US. NYC didn't fail. It just was way more prone to something like this. You can second guess executives in a lot of places--I certainly second guess my governor's handling--but there were few winning moves on the board in March/April. .

The source aside (Jesus really?), that goes against what they are seeing elsewhere with kids and transmission. Today will an interesting catchup day. I expect us to be well back above 1000 deaths, which is just a number but it was nice to be below it for so long.

Asked this before. Most people who post here aren't interested in taking the vaccine.

We've been talking about this for a few months but this is a nice Atlantic on Herd immunity: In a pandemic, the heterogeneity of the infectious process also makes forecasting difficult. When you flip a coin, the outcome is not affected by the flips prior. But in dynamic systems, the outcomes are more like those in chess: The next play is influenced by the previous one. Differences in outcome can grow exponentially, reinforcing one another until the situation becomes, through a series of individually predictable moves, radically different from other possible scenarios. You have some chance of being able to predict the first move in a game of chess, but good luck predicting the last. That’s exactly what Gomes’s work attempts to do. She describes a model in which everyone is equally susceptible to coronavirus infection (a homogeneous model), and a model in which some people are more susceptible than others (a heterogeneous model). Even if the two populations start out with the same average susceptibility to infection, you don’t get the same epidemics. “The outbreaks look similar at the beginning. But in the heterogeneous population, individuals are not infected at random,” she told me. “The highly susceptible people are more likely to get infected first. As a result, the average susceptibility gets lower and lower over time.” Effects like this—“selective depletion” of people who are more susceptible—can quickly decelerate a virus’s spread. When Gomes uses this sort of pattern to model the coronavirus’s spread, the compounding effects of heterogeneity seem to show that the onslaught of cases and deaths seen in initial spikes around the world are unlikely to happen a second time. Based on data from several countries in Europe, she said, her results show a herd-immunity threshold much lower than that of other models. “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” Gomes said. “It’s very striking.”

I've been watching this too but I wonder how much their lag is on this given this warning. Weekly mortality surveillance data include a combination of machine coded and manually coded causes of death collected from death certificates. Percentages of deaths due to PIC are higher among manually coded records than more rapidly available machine coded records. Due to the additional time needed for manual coding, the initially reported PIC percentages may be lower than percentages calculated from final data.

It’s a really inspiring story in the end. I’ll send you a link. He’s been written up, interviewed, and even had some writers start to reach out. Who knows: Maybe my little brother will go Hollywood! But it was a long 7 years and his story is the far extreme end of the bell curve outcome.

Spending the month in Saratoga Springs for a bunch of reasons. Driving on Saturday morning, I saw a bunch of people outside an apartment building on lawn chairs facing the building. I thought it looked odd until I realized it was a nursing home and they were talking to loved ones through the windows. I got choked up once I realized. I used to visit my brother in prison for 7 years. Our visits seemed better than that setup. I hope it doesn't last much longer.

Excited to go from burbs to city. Sounds like the price will be right.

In a long list of dumb things Trump said, that's up there. No data. Some sporadic reports. Safe to put that concern well on the backburner.

I said this before but only for myself, I had a really severe reaction to it when I took it. Like, so bad that if I was out of shape or older, I worry to think what might have happened. I'm not sharing this as anti-Trump HCQ talk but just to say that I know it's a widely used drug but I think it's under Rx for a reason.

Can't paste this map (too big) but it's interesting...shows cases per million in all US counties. https://globalepidemics.org/key-metrics-for-covid-suppression/

Take a breath man. You're locked in some narrative cycle. Watch the numbers and see what happens.

40 deaths per million, 3 dead today. So far so good. Shalom brother. I'm not worried about Israel.

Agree on the states with multiple population centers. You have to go deeper on the state data for those. I look at it like this: If AZ begins to drop off in the next week in hospitalizations, deaths will surely follow over a couple weeks. And they never shut down through this rise (they probably did a lot of staying inside, mask wearing, voluntary shutdowns, etc but not the full mandated magilla). That would be a truly fantastic piece of news.

I know you like to call me a dick (kidding, kidding) but I appreciate this. I've been buried in work and life and not able to dig out the actual numbers enough in the last 10 days...and remain astonished by how hard they are to get at. If AZ is indeed peaking and drops, that's a good sign for a lot of places because they were first into this current crest. Your point on large metros by state is a good one: TX and FL (and CA for that matter) are different in that they all have several large metro areas but AZ is a good bellweather with just one--a little easier to just watch one place and get the feel for what other cities will go through. I do see that AZ ICU availability has been steady for a couple weeks at 9-11% (down from its 40% availability in April). Could indicate a peak as well. And you have to ignore the extreme tail of this chart because this data is slow to update but total hospitalizations in AZ also appear to be trending lower. AZ data for those interested. One of the better state repositories. By the way, imagine the outcry...if this thing is just moving from place to place.. when it hits SF/Silicon Valley! Biden has got to be hoping they don't get hit there until October 25th.

If all that's true, then hospitals are in good shape.

Regarding CV-19 testing delays, there's this in the WAPO today: Test results for the novel coronavirus are taking so long to come back that experts say the results across the United States are often proving useless in the campaign to control the deadly disease. Some testing sites are struggling to provide results in five to seven days. Others are taking even longer. Outbreaks across the Sun Belt have strained labs beyond capacity. That rising demand, in turn, has caused shortages of swabs, chemical reagents and equipment as far away as New York. The long testing turnaround times are making it impossible for the United States to replicate the central strategy used by other countries to effectively contain the virus — test, trace and isolate. Like catching any killer, speed is of the essence when it comes to the coronavirus. Anecdotally, friends of ours got tested before traveling to Maine as that's the only way to avoid a 14-day quarantine. They've been in Maine for 10 days, results not yet back. (No, they are not quarantining though they are also not eating out or going to places with people except to get groceries.) Both times I got tested, I had the results in 3 days but that was a little while ago. So. We are still not getting it done.

Thanks for the deep dive on Florida. I am not as invested in it--I hope there's a burnout soon and a decline in actual cases (not just positives). The hospital numbers you linked from your guy Berenson aren't lining up with other hospital data that's being published but this is just starting to be an issue now so time will tell what's happening in the ICUs.

Cases accurately forecast where the deaths are coming and in rough magnitudes but yes, noting is as important as hospitalizations and deaths in terms of measuring. There were people here 3 weeks ago downplaying the case rise in Florida. Cases mean something.

Yeah, because treating the flu is just like treating covid in the hospital. Do people think before they write these stories? I guess the headline got its clickbait.

What they have in common: They are viruses that can kill someone. In 40 years, about 675K have died from AIDS. In 5 months, we're at 130K. Anyone can get Covid. People engaging in certain behaviors can get AIDS. AIDS for a long time was 100% fatal. Covid is not even close to that. I don't know what population of non-condom folks in the AIDS epidemic overlaps with mask-wearers. You can do a study I guess but I'm not sure what valuable point you think it would make. People having sex in 1981 are pretty old today.

Why? The height of the AIDS epidemic was about 35 years ago and nothing like this.

FL 15,000 cases reported today. New record by a lot. Could easily be cracking 100K well before when Fauci predicted if TX and CA follow FL into numbers like that. I've got to think CA is destined to spike way higher since right now only SoCal is putting up big numbers. https://www.boston25news.com/news/national/florida-reports/YMEQ3LCIYKONVLQVHIV6ST42GE/