There were just 2 cases detected at the gym down the street from me. I'm in a medium town of about 40k in upstate NY. Not podunk, but hardly bustling.
I'm considering the USA fully seeded at this point.
I'm considering the USA fully seeded at this point.
Even if you think you have it, there's still not enough test kits available yet - even if you're swabbed it can be days for a result(Saying this from west michigan).
To be clear I'm not saying more infections are a good thing, simply that if there are a lot more cases that already exist, knowing they exist and having more accurate data that shows us COVID19 is less harmful than currently perceived/projected would be good for everyone.
The president did claim that some criticisms about his handling of the situation were a "new hoax" in the same way he has labeled previous unfounded criticism and accusations as hoaxes.
Huh?
He called Fox News and said on air ""So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people [with COVID-19] that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better,""
His whole schtick until just about a few hours ago was that the risks were all hugely overblown.
I am also curious to know exactly which "previous unfounded criticisms" you are referring to.
Yes. Yes it is. How many times has Trump tweeted about the stock market and how it proves he is a great president? Hundreds. Literally. His NEA chair has explicitly stated "I have long believed that stock markets are the best barometer of the health, wealth and security of a nation. And today's stock market message is an unmistakable vote of confidence for the president." His entire political argument for reelection is premised on his "business acumen." His down playing of coronavirus (to what end? why?) was a blatantly partisan attempt to gamble that this whole thing would blow over rather than risk spooking the markets.
It matches this article on restrictive testing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavir...
Long distance travel and exposure to those who have been (e.g. hugging your wife got off a plane from Spain 2 days ago) is still a top predictor for exposure.
Which is exactly why everyone with those symptoms needs to be tested. One of the most important things we need to do right now is detect the people who got the virus through community transmission.
> Long distance travel and exposure to those who have been (e.g. hugging your wife got off a plane from Spain 2 days ago) is still a top predictor for exposure.
I'd say that testing those people should be lower priority, since an assumption they're infected is more likely to be accurate, so they can take preventative measures without needing a test.
This. I'm in my twenties so it's very possible for me to get COVID and only experience cold like symptoms (or less!). I'm sorry to everyone, but I won't self-quarantine myself for 14 days just because I have a stuffy nose (it's likely a cold right?). I'm fortunate enough to have the ability to take time off/work remote - but what if it's a cold this week and COVID in two weeks? I can't take a month off.
I'm from West Michigan - ATM there's very little testing available, and I'd only be tested if I had recently traveled. But we're past the point where recently traveling is such a big indicator - we're seeing plenty of community transmission for me to believe it's very likely everywhere already, and any lack of cases is because of a lack of testing.
Overpay for an extreme case rather than adapt your system around it.
Now, I have other complaints about our system and how it is unsustainable, but this is a poor argument as to why.
The messaging on this has been pathetic. The other day UW in Seattle announced they had a capacity to test 1,000/day. Not adequate for the nation, but for the PNW, sure.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/rt-pcr-detecti...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/rt-pcr-panel-p...
ETA: I'm having trouble locating positive control template sequences.
I am happy for S. Korea running 100,000+ tests, and embarrassed that the US has maybe run 1000s at this point. I also think that the virus is widely dispersed in the US and the best we can hope for is to keep the case load at a level manageable by our health care system. I'm pretty worried about that though.
Thankfully all of us seemed to get over it without much complication, and it doesn't seem like very many of the people we've since interacted with have come down with it. We might very well have just been lucky, though.
Los Angeles → Catalina Islands → Ensenada → Los Angeles
> and were there lots of mainland Chinese people on it?
I mean, I didn't exactly go around asking people "are you from China?", but based on the number of people who sounded like they were speaking Mandarin I'd tentatively answer "yes".
> Sadly the symptoms for CoVid-19 are pretty common across a variety of diseases, so “flu-like but not flu” doesn’t necessarily point to this.
Indeed, which is why I'm still at least somewhat skeptical. Still, it's hard to rule it out, especially given the relatively-severe symptoms (not the absolute worst I've felt, but it was pretty bad).
That said, you'd be surprised what draws tourists from mainland China; Las Vegas and Reno (for example) both get plenty of Chinese tourists looking specifically to gamble, and I'd imagine the ship's onboard casino to have a similar appeal. Plus, there were plenty of other tourists from long distances, too, both from within the US (East Coast) and from Europe and Australia (from what I gathered from the people whom I did talk to). So evidently there were at least some non-Chinese tourists flying thousands of miles for it; seems reasonable that some mainland Chinese tourists might, too.
We are unlikely to ever find out, because we won't have a reason to give everyone antibody tests
No "massive uptick" yet, but there are quite a few every week, so it could be that it's still blending in with non-COVID pneumonia cases.
Indeed. There are typically above 3000 deaths/week due to Pneumonia and 200/week due to influenza at this time of year. We had a smallish spike in mid-late January, where for 3 consecutive weeks, deaths were above trend at nearly 4000 & 400 per week.
If you assume a 1% mortality rate for COVID, and you assume all deaths are due to pneumonia, and you assume the entire late-January spike is due to COVID, that could be hiding 300,000-400,000 US cases. (To be clear, those are all questionable assumptions! The mortality rate could easily be either lower or higher, a meaningful fraction of deaths might not show as pneumonia or influenza, and it is normal for there to be a moderate spike above trend at some point in the flu season)
That doesn't mean that there were or weren't a few hundred thousand cases in that time -- it just means that some significant number of cases could easily hide in "routine-looking" spikes in the graph.
This does mean, though, that it is unlikely that everybody who got "the really bad flu" that's been going around this year actually had COVID -- but, especially if you live in a place with lots of people who travel to China regularly (like I do!), it isn't unreasonable to wonder if that "really bad flu followed by a lower-respiratory-tract infection that tested negative for influenza" you got in late January/early February wasn't really COVID.
(Remember, though, that while the rapid influenza test has a pretty low false-positive rate, it's got about a 50% false negative rate -- so testing negative shouldn't lead you to assume it isn't influenza)
Critical cases and fatal cases are way more likely to be detected for this reason -- but during the 3 weeks I was talking about, it was believed that there was no COVID in the US, except for folks evacuated from China to quarantine sites.
During that time unexplained pneumonia leading to death -- especially in an older individual -- would likely not have been thought to be COVID, and would just have gone on the books as pneumonia.
"In fact, officials would later discover through testing, the virus had already contributed to the deaths of two people, and it would go on to kill 20 more in the Seattle region over the following days." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...
Akin to how securing a network is more than setting up a firewall at the perimeter.
At this point, the only rational thing to do is to try to slow the spread. The good news is that this is a very mild virus, and the vast majority of infected people will have minor symptoms. The fatality rate in Korea is currently 0.6%, and becuase of the comprehensive nature of their testing, this should be considered the upper bound on CFR.
Regarding the rise in CFR: it will naturally go up as cases decline, because fatalities stem from a time when the case rate was more rapidly increasing. Korea’s case rate had been declining for several days:
https://mobile.twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/12297080012...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/heal...
At some point, this scary story is going to have to be adjusted to reflect reality.
Buy a stool for crying out loud, they're like $10
In comparison, Korea's response was disastrously wrong. Their "Let's test everyone" policy sent lots of people into medical limbo ("We can’t let you go because you're COVID-19 positive ... but meanwhile we have particularly nothing to do for you because you're not that ill") and got their hospitals flooded with mild cases.
But more importantly, you’re not dying and not clogging up a hospital. That’s what’s relevant to this discussion.
It will be a big problem both in Europe and in the US, because they are starting to take measures only now.
The vast majority of cases are mild, like a head cold. This is a fact, and has been reported around the world.
You’re arguing about relative hospitalization rates, but that has nothing to do with the discussion here. Mild cases aren’t clogging up ICU wards at all, because they’re quite mild.
That's the exact opposite of what the WHO said when they made the pandemic declarations:
"We cannot say this loudly enough, or clearly enough, or often enough: all countries can still change the course of this pandemic," reads a statement from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO.[1]
South Korea has shown this to be correct.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/11/corona...
I think you mean that this should be considered the goal upper bound on CFR. It's really the lower bound on CFR if you do everything right. If you do everything wrong, like the US is heading towards, you get overloaded health systems, critical shortages, and a 12% CFR or higher.
I think the true measure will be the year over year total mortality.
If we overload our hospitals then CFR will go towards the number of cases that require hospitalization. Which is around 20%. Italy is currently far over hospital capacity and has a CFR today of 8% and rising.
Media and government keep making this claim, yet where are the recovery numbers of people? It drags on for weeks and weeks with no end in sight, correct? And current case fatality rate in Italy is 8%, was 7% this morning, was 6% yesterday - because they do not have hospital resources for the number of serious cases they have.
Serious, critical, and dead outcomes are said to be over 20% of case. This being described as "very low, a very small number" by certain people. That is not a low number at all.
YES! Restricting US<=>EU travel is just about the least useful thing we need to be doing right now.