That’s where the Navajo Nation is. It sprawls across the border to Arizona, which is also slammed with covid-19.
The Pueblo people are also being hit hard. There are 10 Pueblos in NM. Six of them are in Sandoval County.
Add Dauphin County to Lebanon County for counties defying SAH orders from our governor.
"Lebanon’s move was especially stunning because until now, no counties had so directly challenged Wolf’s authority to close businesses and limit public life during the current public health emergency declaration, and also because Lebanon County still has a relatively high new case count, with 156.6 cases diagnosed per 100,000 residents over the last two weeks.
The Wolf’s Administration’s threshold for reopening is new 50 cases per 100,000. Lebanon County’s current incidence rate, meanwhile, ranks as the 11th highest of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.
Dauphin County - home to the state Capitol - is well over the threshold as well, with a current rate of 106.4 cases per 100,000."
Perry and Cumberland sheriffs have said they won’t enforce the order.
I’m beginning to regret settling in PA wishing we had chosen HI instead. I’m never fond of anarchy. I’m wondering if there’s any enforcement option or if it’s now just everyone out for themselves - more of a true anarchy. And all of this because of a vocal minority of voters!
So… go ahead folks, come to the open infected counties of PA! Survival of the fittest (strongest, smartest, and luckiest). Tough luck to all others. Your lives simply aren’t important enough to even try to do things in a smart way as was planned.
We’re definitely staying home and letting the wave wash over. There are too many unknown ticking time bombs with this virus. Anyone opting to go out can be the guinea pigs. We’ll venture out when more is known about it.
Don’t remember exactly how it goes, but there’s something along the lines of… ‘not attributing to intent what stupidity can adequately explain’.
In other words: No, it didn’t work out so well in NY but we’ll do it right in CA!
You do know that no one is is a lockdown in the U.S. and anyone , barring people with CV, are allowed to leave their house at any time. If you wear a mask and stand farther than 6 feet from a person you can talk to anyone you want. There is also technology like phones and computers to FaceTime or Zoom friends and family. There is lots of socializing one can do if they actually seek it out.
Can we all agree to call it by its real name “safe at home” or “shelter in place” restrictions not “lockdowns” which is not what any state is in.
https://navajotimes.com/coronavirus-updates/covid-19-across-the-navajo-nation/ has some information on COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe (whose territory is surrounded by the Navajo Nation).
I was just going to say that @socaldad2002 No one is, or has been in lockdown in the US except for people in our prisons. Nursing homes may feel close but families can still remove their loved ones if they are able to. Even apart from essential workers, we know from comments on this site that many people were out and about simply going shopping on a daily basis. Most states also were careful not to use the Shelter in Place language because it has a specific meaning. So Stay at Home or Safer at Home are the appropriate terms.
@“Cardinal Fang”
I owe you ten bucks. lol.
“Sharp increase” to me can be viewed as exponentially (my word) in the vernacular sense. Here’s the exchange below.
Parsing his words doesn’t change the basic thought, imho
Case counts increase with sharp increases in testing. Leaving this fact out creates a different “narrative”. His words not mine. It makes people afraid. (My words)
Also by Nate answering in the affirmative and then unpacks it more broadly, one has to believe he accepts the premise.
Nate Silver responds to James -
“Not providing context on the increase in testing is such a basic error, and has been so widespread, that it’s revealing about the media’s goals. It’s more interested in telling plausibly-true stories (“narratives”) that sound smart to its audience than in accuracy/truth per se.”
James suroweiki - New Yorker/slate
“Axios does a piece highlighting the growth in cases outside NY, and, just like the NYT, doesn’t even mention the fact that at least some of that growth in recent weeks is the result of the sharp increase in testing. Just unbelievable.“
Sigh. The “vernacular” misuse of exponential is a pet peeve of mine. I’ve been hoping that people would stop saying things are exponential when they are not exponential, particularly in the context of things that actually do go up exponentially, like unconstrained infection.
I actually had to go back and check to see if in fact the rate of testing was going up exponentially. No, of course not, you were just saying words.
Providing misleading context about the increase in testing is worse than not providing any. (Nate Silver is not doing this.) If testing is ramping up greatly, but the positivity rate is high and is not dropping, that’s an ominous sign.
@“Cardinal Fang”
It’s Friday night on CC. After another week like the movie Groundhog Day. Please forgive the faux pas. ??
However the increase in case count is not an increase in positivity rates. They are not necessarily new cases either. Which is also part of the story to reviewed.
What do you think he was trying to say?
Now, we’re arguing over semantics. Tom Brady was cited for working out in an empty park. What good is being allowed to leave your house, if there’s no place you’re allowed to go?
https://www.nbc-2.com/story/42030041/tom-brady-cited-for-working-out-in-closed-tampa-park-mayor-says
@roethlisburger Tom Brady was actually charged for being a loose GOAT in a public park.
The question we want to know is, what is happening in the real world? Is the increase in identified cases due to an increase in real cases, or are we just testing more and therefore finding more of the real cases that already existed?
If we test people who we suspect to have covid (because, for example, they showed up at the hospital in an ambulance) we should expect to have a higher positivity rate.
If we then also do random testing out in the world, we expect to have a lower positivity rate in the random group, and thus overall. Most people don’t have covid, and we’ve already tested the most suspicious cases, so we should be seeing fewer cases in our random testing than in our testing of suspicious cases.
So, if you see more new cases each day than the new cases the previous day, and your explanation is that we’re finding more cases because we’re doing random testing out in the world, then you should expect testing positivity rates to drop. If they’re not dropping, we’re not testing randomly out in the world, we just have a growing number of suspicious cases because we have a growing number of cases.
@fretfulmother , Jerusalem artichokes are the roots of a plant related to sunflowers and the Jerusalem bit is folk etymology, stemming from the Italian word for sunflower, girasole. No idea where the artichoke bit came from. They are nothing like artichokes, looking a bit like knotty scaly potatoes or ginger roots. You can prepare them like potatoes. Like others have warned, they are very high in prebiotics and are very healthy but only once the bacterial flora in your colon has gotten used to them. Think of it as farming the good bacteria in your guts, you have to feed them up a bit.
Someone in the food industry came up with combining sunflower, the biological reality, with the folk etymology name Jerusalem artichokes, which is how they ended up as sunchokes, even more random…
And on another note, about your big strong young man complaining about how unpleasant the test was: my father, a retired doctor, used to say it was always the big strong young men who moaned the most and fainted on him when he had to do painful or uncomfortable things to them. The frail little old ladies, on the other hand, he said he could do anything to them and they wouldn’t bat an eyelid!
Actually in places this isn’t true. A gentleman that I work with had an issue regarding his wife’s grandmother. She was 93 and in a nursing home. The family got concerned when this all started and wanted to bring her home and take care of her to keep her safe. They had taken care of her before she went in a few years ago and had the family resources to do it. They were denied the ability to remove her from the facility. They were told she was safer in there than she would be at home with the general population. The family was not able to visit. She went downhill not understanding why as before she has daily visitors. She contacted and then died of covid two weeks ago. I hope the family gets to sue whomever is ultimately responsible for this travesty.
@“Cardinal Fang”
The precious tests that we have are overwhelmingly going to test potential positive cases. Even as testing Ramos up there are still way more potential positive cases being tested than random sampling. Obviously more people that think they have it should have a priority in being tested. We should want to know who actually has it. Therefore the more we to up testing the more positive cases we will identify. If we took all our tests and did random population sampling the number of new cases would be less but we’re not there yet. Yes, in very small doses we are, but not in numbers big enough to make a real difference in the data.
It’s important to look at hospitalization rates – because those give a picture of the overall seriousness of the impact. The problem is we get test results numbers & we get deaths reported, but not good reporting of how many people are getting sick enough to need hospitalization. My county does give those numbers very clearly - I can easily tell you how many Covid patients are in ICU’s, how many are on ventilators, and how many are in the hospital overall – but unfortunately I can’t track it over time. The website only shows the most recent 6 days for hospital data – I can tell it is holding steady, but no way to compare it to 3 weeks or a month ago. And I am in one of the SF Bay Area counties that shut down back in mid-March and has stayed shut down. So I can see that the hospital numbers are holding steady. I can see overall case counts going back at least 3 months – so I can see we had something of a dip in reported cases in mid-April, but for the last half of April until now those numbers also seem to be pretty steady.
What is worrisome is that they aren’t going down and I don’t see any sign of a mismatch between overall testing numbers and hospitalizations. That is, there are a lot more people who have been infected than those who have been hospitalized, but there doesn’t seem to be a local trend toward a widening gap between numbers identified and numbers hospitalized. But California falls pretty far down the list in terms of testing rate (around 22,000 tests per million – less than half the rate of testing in New York).
But New York also has much greater death rate than California- so if anything, they still aren’t testing enough. That is, in NY the death rate per million is 20 times higher than in California.
It would be very helpful to know overall infection rates from a public health standpoint – it certainly would give a lot better information to use in assessing when and how to start opening up. It makes a difference in terms of planning to know whether the percentage of infected people who are going to need resource-intensive hospital treatment is 5% or 10% or 30%. And to start to get a handle on the demographics that can make those predictions.
But absent that data, then I think we have to focus on hospitalization rates. If they are level in my county after 8 weeks of stay-at-home… I’m not ready to go back to “normal” anytime soon.
H went to Costco today—everyone had masks and was social distancing and polite. He said though there were lines at checkout, it went pretty quickly.
I made lots and lots of cotton cloth masks today, adding to my growing collection and may be giving some away to loved ones and friends who may be interested. D somehow believes we won’t have to be wearing masks much longer—H and I wish she were right but don’t believe it.
We get all those numbers every day in NYS - with charts from the beginning back in March. We also get numbers of incubated patients. Cuomo announces them every day at the top of his presser.
Our number of cases and deaths from the beginning are also broken out by demographics (race and age) and what percentage of the population a particular demographic is.
We can also get the numbers broken out by region and county. In his presser he doesn’t go into detail about those - he would be there all day if he did.
Every metric for NYS, including new cases, has been going down for several weeks now. But slowly and after plateauing for awhile.
Cuomo will tell you that if you tell him what behaviors people are doing today (going to restaurants, shops, church, etc.) he can tell what the numbers will be in a few weeks. IOW, what effect loosening of SAH policies will have on these numbers.
It’s not magic that the numbers here are going down. They are going down because of SAH policies. That is the only thing that stops new cases from occurring rapidly.
We definitely still aren’t testing enough because not everyone can be tested who wants one - a person like me for instance (never had any symptoms to suggest infection.) They are doing random sampling of people across the state for antibodies.
Also, I haven’t heard of any state that is doing random sampling using the test for Covid-19. I can’t see that being done until a saliva test is in use widely.
Offering free Covid 19 tests to anyone who wants one is great, but it isn’t a random sample then. We know many won’t get tested because the don’t want a swab up their nose.
This is an interesting article comparing Maine’s outcome so far to its Canadian neighbor’s (New Brunswick). The province is similar to our state in a lot of ways. They have had ZERO deaths related to COVID-19 and are down to two active cases! They attribute their success in controlling the virus’s spread to several factors, but the most important one seems to be quickly closing their borders.
https://www.pressherald.com/2020/05/09/how-new-brunswick-stopped-covid-19/