Sundancer

Not easy to model something that has never happened, with data from one dubious source. I hope the modelers can get the part where we lessen distancing right and also predict second wave right and make good recommendations.

Look at the most dense cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density NYC Manhatten is 2.5 as dense as Philly with 3.5X the number of people and in NYC, EVERYONE takes mass transit. In Philly, it's not the same culture.

Gov Wolf deserves a lot of credit for shutting down early (I think only WA shut down sooner). Plus Philadelphia is not as densely populated as many other places. It's #95 on the most densely populated cities--with more row home housing than high rises. (NYC Metro is all 8 of the top 8.) The deaths tally for all of PA has been over 20 a single day, and it's been at 10-15 most days. I think you can look at California and PA and do a long look to figure out why they got this so right thus far. I don't have all the answers but it's real, especially in PA given that it's an urban center and so close to NYC. No need to crow yet but something is working there so far. The other stat to look at in PA is new hospitalizations. Here is that number in the last bunch of days: That is really amazing. Source

Why the cynicism? Good news today from NYS. Still more possible flattening numbers: Deaths in New York State: 4,758, up by 599 from 4,159 on Sunday morning. This is a slight increase from Saturday, when 594 people were reported dead, and a drop from Friday, when the state’s daily death toll peaked at 630. Confirmed cases: 130,689, up from 122,031. In New York City, 72,181, up from 67,551. Hospitalized in New York State: 16,837, up by 2 percent from 16,479 on Sunday. This was the third straight day of single-digit percentage growth, after a long period when hospitalizations were growing by 20 or 30 percent per day. In intensive care: 4,504, up by 2 percent from 4,376 on Sunday. The day-over-day increase was the smallest in at least two weeks.

I had massive racing heart when I took it. Like I was playing the 40th Minute in a full court game of basketball. And also sweating and headache like a vice. It was the only drug I was on and when I stopped it went away right away. That’s just me but for sure, it’s not like popping a Tylenol. My wife and daughter took it with no side effects except some stomach upset. This was a few years ago when I traveled to India a lot.

Locally, funeral homes are now forbidden from embalming bodies, I assume, because of fear of transmission. You're either getting frozen for later or cremated if you die right now.

No. It's something to watch and I am sure we can all agree that we should make sure that doesn't happen. In 4 years, some journalist is going to show a photo of a warehouse full of PPE and ventilators that looks like the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You have to push on for a minute.

The administration seems to be most influenced by the IHME model. We are definitely doing better than that model predicted so far and hopefully we keep that up. No one has a model that I’ve seen for a semi-distanced reopening in June. It’s the next wave that we should be concerned about. This wave affected only a few people.

Anecdotally getting a sense that #3 won't happen because people think it's the first step in an Orwellian plan.

Changing up the data reports a bit. In Spain and Italy, cases have leveled off or dropped, and deaths are level (not yet dropped). UK and France on the rise still. The NY Times really has some great resources now for tracking numbers. They have resources like the below graphs, which show many cities except NYC and Detroit trending inside of Lombardy (the curving toward an asymptote is really what you want here), and also you can click into any state to see details. The NYC Metro (NYC and north NJ are almost all of the states' cases) is still a whopping % of all US cases and deaths. Snapshotting yesterday, 830 out of 1330 deaths in the US were from NY and NJ and if you dive into NJ, only 10 were from Camden county, which is a big county right across from Philadelphia. Similarly 15K out of 34K cases were from that NYC Metro area. So the US still has a NYC Metro problem and less of a problem elsewhere, not to minimize things, but it's just the numbers. Rising issues are coming in NO and Detroit. Philadelphia remains an impressive outlier with proximity to NYC but only 28 deaths TO DATE (and 75 if you count surrounding counties). It's really a head-scratcher compared to NYC with 2300 and NYC metro with about 4000. PA also had its hospitalizations drop yesterday to 50% of the day before after holding steady for many days, and its death rate dropped to its steady rate of about 14/day after a one day pop on Friday. If you want to look at outliers both good and bad, look to Philadelphia with those 28 cases vs NYC. And look to Tokyo with its 37 million people...and Japan as a country hasn't had a day with more than 8 deaths. Japan is doing something different and right. And Philadelphia did something NYC didn't do or hasn't done or can't do.

here is the article. I actually didn’t find it enlightening except further evidence that the patchwork solution sucks. Where orders were issued, people stayed home. No kidding. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-social-distancing.html

As a business owner, I really want to see what the plan is to come out of this initial small wave of cases. We can only do this a single time or it’s going to be really bad long term for the economy, much worse than this ripple of cases. We can’t get a timeline because as the good doctor Fauci has said, we are on the virus’s timeline, but I’d like to see the plan. And yes it needs to be a national one. This is currently my biggest frustration with this.

Really good resource for metro data in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/coronavirus-metro-area-tracker.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage I will discuss this in the discussion thread when I have time. Looks like Detroit, Atlanta, and NO are the places to watch now. [Edit: promising that NY cases have gone from doubling every 6 days to doubling every 3, but I wish I felt confident that isn't an artifact of inadequate testing. Deaths, on the other hand, are on the "doubling every 3 days" trajectory]

Hapless posted about the BCG vaccine before (the vaccine for TB). Sounds like there is some correlation between countries that still give it and lower infection rates of CV-19. Something to keep watching. I do keep wondering why the cases in India are not just exploding. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/fewer-coronavirus-deaths-seen-in-countries-that-mandate-tb-vaccine Here is Hapless's post. [Edit: Interesting find, Sundancer. It seems worth pointing out that many of the countries with high BCG vaccination rates and early covid-19 exposure so that we get a better feel for how the epidemic is progressing there (eg Singapore, Taiwan, S. Korea, Japan) are also countries that have a strong tradition of public mask-wearing, and which advised citizens to wear masks early on in the outbreak. There's the old "correlation is not causation" thing. Here's the actual article in .pdf form: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.24.20042937v1.full.pdf Here's the data on which countries have BCG vaccination policies: http://www.bcgatlas.org/ Keep in mind the disease originated and had quite a play in China, which does have mandatory BCG vaccination, and that Spain (stopped 1981), UK (stopped 2005) and France (stopped 2007) are quite hard-hit. But certainly Italy and the US have never had widespread BCG vaccination. India really doesn't have much in the way of testing and not necessarily much in the way of public health tracking and data collection, either. I'm not sure what's going on. If the "warm weather stops it" theory is correct, that might be in play. Or it might be simmering and have not blown up yet.]

Case counting is useful for prevention but it’s a bad stat as a measure of progress given how incomplete it is. Deaths and hospitalizations are better measures. They lag behind cases in time but they are more objective.

NY State just jumped up again with today's data from Cuomo. 50% increase over the data posted just this morning (400 to 600 deaths in one day). That's why 1-3 day trends are not trends. Need 7-10 days before it looks like a pattern.

Some are rising like UK, where they were very late to the distancing party. The thing to watch for is when the decline comes. Because of our geography and also the staggered timing of quarantines, I think different regions of the US will hit peaks at different times. Not exactly the most insightful conclusion! Italy should see declines first. That's the place to watch the most. I share this concern but I also know that Fauci and other smart people are telling Trump what needs to happen (massive testing and tracing). Trump has been shrewd in spooling out a mixture of hope, pessimism, and plans bit by bit so we don't freak anyone out or understate things. He's playing by the virus's rules as Fauci put it a few days ago. I have reserved opinions about Trump but overall his actions post late Feb are following the right course for the most part. I question the lack of federal response, for example, but nothing since March has yet to really bite us in the ass too much. The plan for coming out of this--which is still a ways off--is coming. I don't think there's any chance the administration risks multiple waves if it can help it.

NYC deaths: Hospitalizations (the first significant drop in these...we would need to see this trend continue to draw a conclusion but as above, it's better to see a drop in a day than a spike)

Changing this update up a little. Here is yesterday's data for the top countries by cases compared with the day before Most countries relatively level in deaths day over day...Spain about 3-4 days in a row, Italy now going on 12 days level, and US only 3 so no trend here yet but 3 is better than 0. The big jump in France is due to a whole bunch of deaths being reclassified as COVID-19 related so that's not a true one day increase. Take China and Iran with the silo of road salt you see at the Cheektowaga Thruway exit. USA daily deaths over time. Pulling NYC out of this data from here, it may be leveling in deaths and hospitalizations...I will paste the charts once someone else replies in this thread and my image pasting ability is reset.

To fulfill my duty as an American, I will do my part.

Good luck to her. She is amazing. My brother, his gf, and a cousin are doing nursing on dedicated Covid-19 floors.

Here is the US fatality chart. Tough last couple of days.

The world update today. Adding this summary that shows what happened through yesterday. Italy still relatively level. All driven by Lombardy (Italy's NYC-like region that includes their Italy's most metropolitan city Milan). US had an increase in cases (still a bad measure but indicative of something) and a spike in deaths (an accurate measure) to over 1000/day...doubling in just 2 days. Note: I am at some kind of limit on size of pastes so I'll have to paste more later. I continue to watch the US fatality rates outside of NYC, and while maybe NYC is ahead of the curve in time for other cities, we have only one city that operates like it with people in such proximity in all aspects of life. It is too early to say if other big cities are lagging in time and will spike or if they are just different but PA was an early outbreak center and its deaths per day has been steady around 12 for 5 days running compared to NYC at 400 yesterday (Pa shut down a week before NY). NYC: 1374 (a few hundred more in nearest burbs) Philadelphia: 74 (Tens more in nearest burbs) Seattle: 166 (first major outbreak) SF: 7 LA: 65 Miami: 11 Chicago: 95 (Tens more in nearest burbs) Boston: 13 Spain continues to increase as well but still looking like some kind of leveling in the last few days. UK leapt up, and Germany a bit of a marked increase yesterday as well, though totals in Germany are still low. US is the place with the big spike in recent days.

This NYT site has really good numbers by state and county (with a click cases per 100K). The disparity between NYC and anywhere but the populous Italy Lombardy region is striking. 40% of America’s fatalities so far are in NYC. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronavirus-cases.html It is too early to say if other big cities are lagging in time and will spike or if they are just different but PA was an early outbreak center and its deaths per day has been steady around 12 for 5 days running compared to NYC at 400 yesterday (Pa shut down a week before NY). NYC: 1374 (a few hundred more in nearest burbs) Philadelphia: 74 (Tens more in nearest burbs) Seattle: 166 (first major outbreak) SF: 7 LA: 65 Miami: 11 Chicago: 95 (Tens more in nearest burbs) Boston: 13