Coronavirus in the US

Parent Cafe
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For anyone wanting good news… med school lad tells me today’s update has a section saying something to the effect of, “Whatever the cause, the flu rate is going down considerably compared to last year.”

Last year (a light flu year) had approx 400-500 positive cases per week at this time. This year there’s 125 - 175. Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to say if this is in the state or his county (gives Covid updates for both). Covid cases for his county are increasing at a more linear (not exponential) rate now. We like to think this mean social distancing is helping.

The current death rate in his county is approx 3% though with more in the ICU (sigh). This is of those tested, of course. As with the flu, one doesn’t know true numbers due to those who don’t get tested. The flu is still far more rampant and a bit less deadly though.

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@Creekland Very true.

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@Creekland That’s good news and I’d speculate it would directly be tied to social distancing and the large percentage of the country in some sort of stay at home measures. The flu season actually started out as a worse one. I’d think extra people might be getting flu tests because I do know many who weren’t feeling well over the past week and could get tested for flu to rule that out while Covid-19 tests haven’t been available to them.

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Social distancing and self isolation must work on all of these viruses.

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I’m surprised someone as educated as you are @privatebanker, would consider saving disposable paper masks to be more important than saving lives.
Sorry, that is just the way I read your comment. If you can’t understand that I dont know what to say.

My Rheumatologist says I must wear a mask whenever I go outside, becasue I, like others on this thread, am severely immune compromised. I would not like anyone who is in a similar situation as I am to fall ill or die due to to this virus because someone thought having enough masks for every US citizen is a “waste”.
I too am entitled to my opinion.

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See my link and article above. I think that shows what I have been thinking all along. There doesn’t seem to be data to support what the CDC is saying - that masks don’t work, and now they are pivoting their position that masks might be a good idea (Dr. Fauci just did an interview on this). There was a serious shortage and I think that is the reason for their earlier claims. Masks are going to catch up with need and I think once they do, there will be a push to get the general public to wear them.

I think that all along the advice from the CDC has clearly stated masks are essential for health care workers and their pages for them on their website detailed why this was so. While ordinary people are not intubating others, if we are around those coughing, particularly at home, we can be exposed to a lot of virus if that person has Covid 19 and no mask and we don’t have a mask. I just read today that most transmission takes place within the home setting from one family member to another. That this is the #1 type of spread. When my husband was sick in January he coughed all over our house despite my please for him to cover his mouth. My son got sick with the same thing (cough, fever, extreme exhaustion) 2 weeks later. I got sick 2-3 weeks later. None of us could keep our cough completely to ourselves. A surgeon’s mask on the cougher would have gone a long way. And the CDC site did say, ‘masks won’t protect you, they will only stop you from spreading the disease to others.’ If we all wore them, we could protect each other by not spreading the disease to others. We should not take them from medical professionals who need them most of all. But I sure wish delivery people, those in grocery stores, police, etc who have high contact with people had them at the very least. I also wish our country used them. The Chezh Republic along with Taiwan, maybe Japan, China and other places seem to show that having the public in masks greatly slows transmission. The video someone suggested above said data from a study showed it slowed the spread by more half or something like that.

We should listen to what experts say. We should not mindlessly follow anyone, though. I’m not going to mindlessly listen to the CDC, which usually is a great source of info but at the start of this was obviously trying to present the number of cases in the USA in a way that hid their rise and said that masks don’t work. Too simplistic a declaration for me to believe that. Masks do work or doctors wouldn’t wear them. Do masks protect a person 100%? no. That was true but urging the public to not use them at all I don’t think was done because they don’t work 100% but because they knew we had a severe shortage of masks. Now I think you will see them once we have a surplus want to get people to wear them and turn and give a 180 message on masks by the end of the year (assuming we have a surplus by then) and try to get everyone to wear them. I think we are starting to see that now with the GMA piece this morning that included Dr. Fauci saying they may be a good idea after all.

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Between 10:30 am and 4:30 pm today (6 hours), 124 people died of Covid-19 in NYC. Seems the worst of it right now is in Queens and Brooklyn.

https://nypost.com/2020/03/30/nyc-sees-a-coronavirus-death-every-2-9-minutes-in-horrific-six-hour-stretch/

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Also, what I described above about my thoughts on masks also comes from having lived in several Asian countries where masks are widely used to prevent the spread of illness and reading about disease transmission and masks at those times. It also comes from my reading various sources and thinking about the topic in detail. Trump deciding the disease would poof away, that it was less deadly than the flu, that it would disappear, that it was under control in the USA, no big deal, etc was not what disease experts were saying. That’s a big difference. There are disease experts who have been saying what I have thought and said about masks all along. There were not those saying what Trump claiming. Too bad he wasn’t right, though. It would be nice if he had been.

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Yes, wearing masks they go to work.

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Yes, that’s what I read, too. They were singing a song that required them to breath in deeply and exhale more forcefully. they tried to spread apart but not enough, sadly.

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https://chicago.suntimes.com/coronavirus/2020/3/30/21199848/cps-remote-learning-plan-laptops-chromebooks-ipads

Lots of cps schools already do this but I guess this is for those that don’t have access. I think this is great
Our new Mayor is making things happen

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/30/coronavirus-latest-news/#link-L7CHJUVKHBAZTONMPW4XR5I7DA

Should we all be wearing masks? That simple question is under review by officials in the U.S. government and has sparked a grass-roots pro-mask movement. But there’s still no consensus on whether widespread use of facial coverings would make a significant difference, and some infectious disease experts worry that masks could lull people into a false sense of security and make them less disciplined about social distancing.

In recent days, more people have taken to covering their faces, although it remains a scattershot strategy driven by personal choice. The government does not recommend it.

That may change. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are considering altering the official guidance to encourage people to take measures to cover their faces amid the coronavirus pandemic, The Washington Post has learned.

CDC guidance on masks remains under development, according to a federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is an ongoing matter of internal discussion and nothing has been finalized. The official said the new guidance would make clear that the general public should not use medical masks — including surgical and N95 masks — that are in desperately short supply and needed by health-care workers.

Instead, the recommendation under consideration calls for using do-it-yourself cloth coverings, according to a second official who shared that thinking on a personal Facebook account. It would be a way to help “flatten the curve,” the official noted.

Such DIY cloth masks would potentially lower the risk that the wearer, if infected, would transmit the virus to other people. Current CDC guidance is that healthy people don’t need masks or face coverings.

At the daily White House briefing Monday, President Trump was asked if everyone should wear nonmedical fabric masks. “That’s certainly something we could discuss,” Trump said, adding, “it could be something like that for a limited period of time.”

In recent days, an assortment of scientists, health experts, pundits and influencers has vigorously advanced their position that everyone venturing into public or crowded places should wear a mask or face shield — even a homemade one — to lower the rate of transmission of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

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Read this quote, it’s not hard to read between the lines. And also I think it’s a bit Western-centric to assume all the “medical experts” are North American and European. There’s plenty of medical experts in Asia that support wearing masks.

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the WHO, also said at Monday’s briefing that it is important “we prioritize the use of masks for those who need it most,” which would be frontline health care workers.
“In the community, we do not recommend the use of wearing masks unless you yourself are sick and as a measure to prevent onward spread from you if you are ill,” Van Kerkhove said.
“The masks that we recommend are for people who are at home and who are sick and for those individuals who are caring for those people who are home that are sick,” she said.

World Health Organization officials warned at a media briefing last week that globally there is a “significant shortage” of medical supplies, including personal protective gear or PPE, for doctors.
“We need to be clear,” Van Kerkhove said last week. “The world is facing a significant shortage of PPE for our frontline workers – including masks and gloves and gowns and face shields – and protecting our health care workers must be the top priority for use of this PPE.”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html

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For the general public, the answer to the mask question is not necessarily “always” or “never”. Some circumstances are higher or lower risk, so when there is a mask shortage, using a mask only in higher risk situations can make sense.

But then maybe many people have difficulty with risk assessment, so an “always” or “never” answer may be easier for them to follow.

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Interesting article comparing Covid19 to the flu, with charts.

Not only is Covid more contagious, and more deadly, it sends 19-20% of patients to the hospital compared to 2% for the flu. Of course, we have vaccines for the flu, and some antibodies built up, and we have the flu around anyway (+ Covid). I’m glad this is a light year for the seasonal flu.

https://www.nola.com/news/coronavirus/article_e33c0cf0-7090-11ea-b3da-53f5ab31dd4b.html

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@MaineLonghorn I don’t know if anyone replied to your question about your parents’ caregiver not receiving the flu test. This happened in our family last winter. They assumed our D had the flu but didn’t bother to test because we’d missed the 48-hour window for Tamiflu, which was all they would have done to treat the flu. Fingers crossed that it is only strep in her case!

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@menloparkmom I don’t necessarily agree with his one post.

I just think people really respect you here and you can disagree without taking it to that level. The concept of 330mm Americans looking for masks when there is critical need is worthy of a discussion. The waste is secondary.

And we sometimes just think out loud here. It should be a safe space to share ideas and course correct if they are wrong.

It’s just I felt he’s been swarmed on a little bit and questioning someone’s humanity was just a bridge too far for me.

But I’m not saying your premise that lives over material at this time doesn’t make good sense. Not at all.

He’s a nice person and that counts. Especially if the question is about humanity, our little world here has always erred on protecting the concept of being welcoming.

at times the intensity of the thread seems to have move us off our axis a bit.

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Wow, I left this thread for about twenty minutes to look for the article I remembered seeing about changing advice on masks and came back to find all sorts of sniping going on regarding this issue. Here is the article I was looking for, it may also have been linked once already above: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/cdc-considering-recommending-general-public-wear-face-coverings-in-public/2020/03/30/6a3e495c-7280-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
I live in Asia, in a country where people wear masks routinely for all sorts of reasons. I’ve always felt weird about it, because it does create a barrier, social as well as physical, and the only place I’ve worn a mask “in public” before is on a plane, where they help me with some chemical sensitivities and combat dry air. Now, though, I am having to get over that. I realized that when I see people wearing masks I feel more relaxed that they are not going to make me sick and also that I owe them the same courtesy. The situation is more complicated in the US because of the shortages, and I would agree that the surgical mask supply (let alone the N95 supply) should be directed to healthcare workers so long as they need them. But people can use bandanas or homemade masks or something until the shortages clear.

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@privatebanker, I interpreted what @bluebayou wrote differently from the way I think you did. I don’t think they were questioning anyone’s humanity, and certainly not another poster’s.

@bluebayou wrote:

What I saw them saying was this:

“Do the people who are advocating for masks think the US Public Health Service and WHO are simply being callous in their recommendation that the general public not wear masks? Do they think those organizations think masks work but are so cruel and inhumane that they don’t want to save lives?”

I’m not sure where I come down on the mask/no mask question but I think we have to be careful about how we interpret each others’ posts. That goes for both sides of any debate.

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**USA - 20,353 new cases totaling 163,844 and 573 new deaths totaling 3,156.

ITALY - 4,050 new cases totaling 101,739 and 812 new deaths totaling 11,591.
Lowest number of new cases in the last 13 days (since March 17).Highest number of new recoveries (1,590) since the beginning of the epidemic. 61 doctors who caught the coronavirus have died. In all, 8,358 health workers have tested positive. Out of the 61 deceased doctors, 40 were working in Lombardy. The death toll climbed by 812, reversing two days of declines in the daily rate. Of those originally infected nationwide, 14,620 had fully recovered on Monday, compared with 13,030 the day before. There were 3,981 people in intensive care, up from a previous 3,906. The lockdown imposed upon Italians is being extend at least until Easter,. Italy’s been under lockdown for three weeks and the restrictions were due to end on Friday.

SPAIN - 7,846 new cases totaling 87,956 and 913 new deaths totaling 7,716.
Spain’s health emergency chief Fernando Simon, who leads the country’s response to the coronavirus epidemic and maintains regular contact with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, has tested positive for the virus. The trend in daily infections had changed since the introduction of lockdown measures, with new infections now rising at roughly 12% a day, compared with around 20% before March 25. —Reuters The daily government tally only accounts for those dying in hospital but authorities say they will very soon be able to compile data on deaths in retirement homes, which is likely to result in a big increase in registered fatalities. 5,107 people are in a serious condition needing life support, up 10%, an increase speeding up again after slowing for two days.

CHINA - 79 new cases totaling 81,518 and 5 new deaths totaling 3,305.

GERMANY - 4,450 new cases totaling 66,885 and 104 new deaths totaling 645.
Germany’s death rate remains lower than most but it is ticking up and is close to 1% now. Germany is a country where heavy testing is taking place, reportedly. Germany is currently treating about 7,000 Covid-19 patients in hospitals. Of these patients, 1,500 are in intensive care units and roughly 1,100 patients in the ICU units require ventilation. The available number of ventilation places in intensive care have now increased from 20,000 to 30,000, adding that ''in the medium-term we expect to double the original 20,000 ventilation places." Cases rose by 9% in the last 24 hours.

FRANCE - 4,376 new cases totaling 44,550 and 418 new deaths totaling 3,024.

IRAN - 3,186 new cases totaling 41,495 and 117 new deaths totaling 2,757.

UK - 2,619 new cases totaling 22,141 and 180 new deaths totaling 1,408.
As of 9am 30 March, a total of 134,946 have been tested.

SWITZERLAND - 1,093 new cases totaling 15,922 and 59 new deaths totaling 359.

BELGIUM - 1,063 new cases totaling 11,899 and 82 new deaths totaling 513.

NETHERLANDS - 884 new cases totaling 11,750 and 93 new deaths totaling 864.

TURKEY - 1,610 new cases totaling 10,827 and 37 new deaths totaling 168.

S. KOREA - 125 new cases totaling 9,786 and 4 new deaths totaling 162.

AUSTRIA - 830 new cases totaling 9,618 and 22 new deaths totaling 108.

*CANADA - 1,128 new cases totaling 7,448 and 24 new deaths totaling 89.

PORTUGAL - 446 new cases totaling 6,408 and 21 new deaths totaling 140.

ISRAEL - 448 new cases totaling 4,695 and 1 new death totaling 16.

BRAZIL - 374 new cases totaling 4,630 and 27 new deaths totaling 163.

AUSTRALIA - 297 new cases totaling 4,460 and 2 new deaths totaling 19.
The rate of daily increase in new coronavirus cases has halved in recent days in Australia, Reuters reported, citing the country’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
NORWAY - 161 new cases totaling 4,445 and 6 new deaths totaling 32.

SWEDEN - 328 new cases totaling 4,028 and 36 new deaths totaling 146.

CZECH REPUBLIC - 184 new cases totaling 3,001 and 7 new deaths totaling 23.

IRELAND - 295 new cases totaling 2,910 and 8 new deaths totaling 54.

MALAYSIA - 156 new cases totaling 2,626 and 2 new deaths totaling 37.

DENMARK - 182 new cases totaling 2,577 and 5 new deaths totaling 77.

CHILE - 310 new cases totaling 2,449 and 1 new death totaling 8.

*ROMANIA - 294 new cases totaling 2,105 and 22 new deaths totaling 65.

POLAND - 193 new cases totaling 2,055 and 9 new deaths totaling 31.

LUXEMBOURG - 38 new cases totaling 1,988 and 1 new death totaling 22.

ECUADOR - 42 new cases totaling 1,966 and 4 new deaths totaling 62.

JAPAN - 87 new cases totaling 1,953 and 2 new deaths totaling 56.

*RUSSIA - 302 new cases totaling 1,836 and 1 new deaths totaling 9.

PAKISTAN - 120 new cases totaling 1,717 and 7 new deaths totaling 21.

PHILIPPINES - 128 new cases totaling 1,546 and 7 new deaths totaling 78.

THAILAND - 136 new cases totaling 1,524 and 2 new deaths totaling 79.

SAUDI ARABIA - 154 new cases totaling 1,453 and no new deaths totaling 8.

INDONESIA - 129 new cases totaling 1,414 and 8 new deaths totaling 122.

SOUTH AFRICA - 46 new cases totaling 1,326 and 1 new death totaling 3.

*INDIA - 227 new cases totaling 1,251 and 5 new deaths totaling 32.

ICELAND - 66 new cases totaling 1,086 and no new deaths totaling 2.

PANAMA - 86 new cases totaling 1,075 and 3 new deaths totaling 27.

MEXICO - 145 new cases totaling 993 and 4 new deaths totaling 20.

PERU - 98 new cases totaling 950 and 6 new deaths totaling 24.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - 42 new cases totaling 901 and 3 new deaths totaling 42.

COLOMBIA - 96 new cases totaling 798 and 4 new deaths totaling 14.

HONG KONG - 41 new cases totaling 683.

EGYPT - 47 new cases totaling 656 and 1 new death totaling 41.

UAE - 41 new cases totaling 611 and 2 new deaths totaling 5.

NEW ZEALAND - 75 new cases totaling 589.

MOROCCO - 77 new cases totaling 556 and 7 new deaths totaling 33.

*UKRAINE - 73 new cases totaling 548 and 3 new deaths totaling 13.