shoshin

This study was for "cloth mask use for HCWs was conducted in 14 hospitals in Hanoi, Vietnam." Hardly surprising that in that setting cloth masks didn't protect the HCWs as well as surgical masks is it? And at this point, most people shouldn't be wearing crappy scarfs. You can get a decent fitting medical mask from lots of places (not necessarily the N95). If the patients had been wearing masks AND the HCWs were wearing them too..., then you'd have a study that makes an interesting point that would kind of replicate the real world. Being upset about hot and itchy masks remains no excuse not to wear them indoors with strangers.

I live in a county with about 1M people, so admittedly a large population. I found this interesting and wonder what other people see in their counties. The average age of a Covid death in my county is 80.9, call it 81. That’s more than the average age of death in the US by 2+ years. Crazy.

I don't trust anyone screaming right now, though they are the ones making the most noise. The majority of people fall into two reasonable groups, whose positions I can sympathize with. One group looking to delay opening up quickly because they want more assurance that this has passed and can still be controlled, or they want to make sure this shutdown is a one-time thing. And there is a group that wants to open faster and trust people to social distance as best they can because they are worried about the long-term consequences of tanking the economy being worse than continued shutdown. Both of the above seem reasonable and reasonable people can differ on how to enact policies to achieve them. Then there are people who think masks and closures are a slippery slope to a dream of Big Brother utopia. And there are people who think that one death is too many because reopening is driven by corp greed/Trump re-election. Those two positions take the oxygen out of this thread.

Interesting tool from the RAND corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/tools/TLA173-1/tool.html

This is a good piece talking about some of the overoptimism on vaccines. The priorities above make sense. Healthcare, then older...probably after that come certain frontline job-holders and after that, the rest (minus the anti-vaxxers who we can only hope are so small in number that we can avoid them making a mess of things). I worked for a few years for Merck building some of their vaccine production facilities and also some other drug producing buildings. The amount of time it took to build those--for much smaller volumes--was staggering. Just building the facilities took 2-3 years on a CRUSHINGLY FAST timeline. I am incredibly impressed with the way Gates and others are considering the vaccine incubators to try to get the C-19 drugs out faster. It's very smart and hugely risky. A lot of waste may occur if trials take long or changes are necessary before production can start.

Can you share that video of Fauci? The testing point billsfan1959 is that once this achieved uncontrolled community spread, testing was never going to be adequate until we either dropped actual cases to be so low as to be minimal (that's not happening) or rapid-tests were widely available (not yet available in numbers needed). So as we reopen and cases increase, the shutdown did not get us to control but only gave us a couple months to increase PPE supplies. That makes the shutdown look like something we could have avoided with better planning. If the shutdown remained until we could really follow the Trump guidelines, it would have accomplished something really good. As it stands, we shut down with a very limited health benefit and to great harm to the economy. The shutdown is looking more and more like a terrible decision.

That's about all they can do in the current situation because we don't have the testing we need yet.

Until you have confidence that you're identifying outbreaks in near-real-time and tracing the contacts of those infected people, testing is inadequate. When someone feels sick and schedules a test, and gets those results a few days later, you're 8 days late. If you cut that to 3 days too late, you might be able to control outbreaks. As it is, governors are giving up on meeting the Trump guidelines track/test requirements. We will have to accept the increased cases and deaths that will inevitably follow.

The Order didn't force them to stay open so of course they are closing. People are getting sick in droves. It will take a few weeks for this to get back up and running. We will enjoy some vegetarian cooking for a while and look forward to full shelves again in the future. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-delegating-authority-dpa-respect-food-supply-chain-resources-national-emergency-caused-outbreak-covid-19/

What a story! You're uncomfortable. Say no and think of the power you have over the steely-eyed woman and the taser-men. You're like a superhero. You're No-man!

Canvassed volunteers and doctors offices take away the critical component of randomness. A study to watch. A similar one is being done in Germany. I hope it shows widespread prevalence but I doubt it will be higher than 1-2% in a place like Atlanta.

You don’t really care about this story, do you?

Say no then. It isn’t hard to do. It’s a critical study. Happy to give my blood.

That’s why I said DNA Specifically in my post talking about mammals and a bird. I was simplifying the analogy. 20% difference in a genome is huge (and I haven’t verified your 20% number because your argument is weak already). And you ignored the entire second half of my post where I pointed out the past promise and then failure of chloroquine vs other viruses, which Fauci would be well aware of and which Trump who thinks injecting surface disinfectants into people should be looked into because science may have overlooked it, would be ignorant of.

You keep quoting that study like it's relevant to SARS-COV-2. That the SARS-Cov and SARS CoV-2 share 79% of their genomes doesn't mean a lot. We share 98% of the chimp DNA, 80% with a dog, and 65% with a friggin' chicken. Fauci would well know that many applications of chloroquine have proven INEFFECTIVE after promising initial studies. Chloroquine has been, many times, studied as a possible miracle cure for a virus (look at some of the early ebola studies and also HIV) only to have it fail miserably. So every time a scientist hears an anecdote about it, or a test tube study, their skepticism is the result of them having seen this story before. It is still being used widely if stories are right but if it was really effective, there would be solid studies to show it by now, and there aren't. That's a bummer because we could use any help we can get, especially from a cheap and well-known drug.

No one ever pays attention to the uncertainty interval, they just want exact data. Hard to get that from a BRAND NEW virus with unknown mortality and contagion data.

You and I agree, though it may be more than just the press disrespecting the office at times. You missed the magnetic vibrations silver doctor cited here yesterday!

This is a non-Covid observation but I note this: I wouldn't lay the blame for this image manipulation necessarily on someone with a leftist agenda. It could be either side or another actor who did this. The sign wouldn't make the left as triggered as an image showing manipulation will make the right. Consider the outcome and you might find a different bad actor than you think.

Take away the trolls and the bully-personas and a dialog is possible. The name-calling brigade usually shows about about now.

That article has them a long ways from anything like phased trials even so they are far behind other trials. I'm not putting down any efforts here but there are a ton of teams in progress on treatments and vaccines. You can track them on Statnews at their tracker. ... The vaccine tracker has 4 phase 1 candidates, which would put practical applications still a long ways off. There's no way we will have a vaccine ready for enough people by the October/November rise.

NY’s reopening criteria seem sensible and mostly follow the Trump guidelines. I suspect he will be flexible if a single one of these proves very hard to meet. Cuomo continues to do a good job through this, even after he killed all the upstate people by taking their ventilators. . The criteria, heavily influenced by guidelines issued last month by the White House and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, include: Net hospitalizations for cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, must either show a continuous 14-day decline or total no more than 15 new hospitalizations a day on average over three days. The latter would probably be a realistic goal only in less populated areas. A 14-day decline in virus-related hospital deaths, or fewer than five a day, averaged over three days. New York City and many other parts of the state have reached that benchmark, but Long Island and the Hudson Valley have not. A three-day rate of new hospitalizations below two per 100,000 residents a day, something that was well beyond the grasp of New York City and its suburbs on Monday. A hospital-bed vacancy rate of at least 30 percent, which Mr. Cuomo has said is necessary to be prepared for possible new waves of the disease in the future. Most parts of New York have met the threshold, despite more than 9,600 coronavirus patients still being hospitalized. An availability rate of at least 30 percent for intensive care unit beds; 3,330 people remain in such units, often on ventilators, which are needed in severe cases of the disease. A weekly average of 30 virus tests per 1,000 residents a month. This category could be the most challenging one to meet in many rural or more remote areas, where testing, and thus positive results, has lagged far behind major cities, like New York, which already is surpassing this goal. Finally, the governor also wants at least 30 working contact tracers per 100,000 residents as part of a program led by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, who has given $10.5 million for the effort. Mr. Cuomo has described the initiative as “a monumental undertaking,” requiring “an army” of tracers, some of whom will be public employees who have been redeployed.

The conjunction for those folks might be AND not OR. MA is one of the few states where case counts are still trending up.

The bigger news to me is that it's another data point on asymptomatic positives. Meatpacking plants are cold, damp, and humans work closely with lots of bio material. Seems like a spot where this thing would be happy.

I agree with your projection here. I don't think that model will turn out to be right for May, but I would not be surprised if we level out for a long time this summer once we establish a baseline after the drop I'd anticipate in the 2nd or third week this month.

The IHME model overestimated then underestimated. The CDC model, as you can see in that image, had the model deaths (red line) underestimated from the actuals (blue dots) to date.