Trump’s statements where he minimized things and then suddenly ‘no one could have foreseen this’ and ‘this is a pandemic’ and ‘we acted early’ and ‘I take no responsibility’ on one video.
I was watching this happen, knowing how bad China was and in disbelief that we were not doing more the whole time. And here we are with an out of control pandemic that could have been impacting us far less had the situation been understood by the people/person who needed to understand it back in late December and very early January.
I live in Westchester Country, which was one of the first epicenters of the outbreak in the US. The latest statistics I could find say there have been nearly 6K positive diagnoses in the county but only 8 deaths. Unfortunately, I expect the number of deaths to increase, possibly dramatically. Still, I was surprised that there have been only 8 deaths so far - especially given what is going on elsewhere. I wonder what could account for this?
My wife’s best friend, who is an ER nurse, was exposed to coronavirus yesterday - two patients she treated tested positive. Luckily, she tested negative, as did the other medical staff who came in contact with the patients, but this isn’t going to be the last time this will happen.
Taking precautions and washing your hands also works for health workers, so remember to do it people!
So before this virus (remember just a few months ago) there are so many homeless so many people in need financially. So if the administration can “find)” all this money to help all of us now… Why not try to help the people in need during the good times?
Can’t find housing… Convert closed down hotels or hospitals. Or in Chicago instead human beings sleeping under the viaduct on off ramps in sleeping bags how about setting up tent sites with warmers and social services. How about mandating large corporations that get tax breaks that they have to hire and train a segment of the unemployed or /and homeless… I am looking at you Amazon!!
Westchester County was the starting point in NYS which lead to significant amount of testing being done around here. Milder cases, that may be ignored in other places, might have been picked up by the testing. This definitely was not the case in NYC.
There is also another part. 8 days ago there were 798 cases in Westchester. The additional 5,000+ cases are from the last week. It takes time for people to get bad enough to require hospitalization and die.
I believe the mortality rate should be calculated based on number of cases a week or two back instead of the current situation.
A very low death rate would do it. The virus may also be much more widespread than believed, and many people testing negative could already have had it. At this point, everyone is simply guessing.
The increases in case numbers are likely driven primarily by increased testing. The curve of actual deaths can be explained by many different models of this disease.
For a useful very recent draft paper on this, google “Fundamental principles of epidemic spread highlight the immediate need for large-scale serological surveys to assess the stage of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic” and look for the dropbox link to the actual paper (I cannot link to it here). You need some basic facility with mathematics (nothing more advanced than basic calculus and an understanding of Gaussians.) Look carefully at the model fits and you can see that we have little understanding yet of this virus, its prevalence, its fatality rate, and its spread.
@TheBigChef It takes a while for the illness to develop to kill people. Roughly 5-6 days to show symptoms then another 9 days to get really sick or get better. Another week or two to get really sick or cured. So about a month. NY is not there yet.
BTW the links here from https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections seem to be off, at least for MA. It says we’re already out of ICU beds but that is not correct per my doctor relatives. (Thank God)
“There is also another part. 8 days ago there were 798 cases in Westchester. The additional 5,000+ cases are from the last week. It takes time for people to get bad enough to require hospitalization and die.“
There were 798 diagnosed cases 8 days ago. Actual number of positives was much higher. Agree that it takes time for a case to progress to death, but if Westchester was the first place hit, shouldn’t that mean more deaths?
@fretfulmother, I’m not sure if you’re reading it correctly. The projections show MA running out of ICU beds on March 30th and general beds on April 5th.
In any case they’re only projections based on a model with a range of results.
We were told our state has many times more cases than the official #, almost 100 times as many as of 1 1/2 weeks ago. I can only imagine what the real number is now as they are still not testing here. They are focusing testing on those who are the sickest and medical practitioners in this state it seems. The numbers are almost meaningless because of this. We are clearly told that we should assume anyone could have it and act as if that is true. It is quickly spreading around here.
Well, Robert Redfield said that there are deaths that have been attributed to pneumonia that were from Covid 19 because we weren’t and still are not testing for it all the time. So, I don’t think we even have accurate fatality rate data.
Potentially part of the problem was GM wanting to get paid upfront (not a bad idea when dealing with someone known for not paying the bill once everything’s done).