I’m pretty sure if we tried to think of a way to help stop spread in nursing homes we could at least reduce the risk to those who live there. I think it is worth trying to do that. I do not agree that there isn’t anything that can be done. Lots of outside the box thinking has resulted in all sorts of innovative ideas throughout human history.
I am privileged. One of the things that I’m choosing to do with my privilege is to avoid going to places where I could infect other people, if I am an asymptomatic carrier of COVID-19. Other things I’m choosing to do because I am privileged: giving my stimulus check money to my children, one of whom is now unemployed because of the shutdowns; donating more money than usual, to organizations helping people affected by the illness and by the shutdowns; giving large tips when the delivery people can accept tips (e.g., Whole Foods); reminding myself many times every day that anything I can do to contribute to the health and well-being of other people will likely also eventually help the economy get back going.
I don’
a lot of people don’t have hand sanitizer. If he is very careful, he might be able to take off the gloves at the end of his shift and have clean hands underneath.
Could it be they are more likely to be able to afford to be in nursing homes and those are particularly hard hit?
2020 EAA convention has been cancelled.
Did anyone see this? If flu deaths were counted like Covid 19 deaths. It talks about flu deaths not being certified flu deaths based on testing and that they are calculated by an algorithm that estimates how many deaths there were from flu. This makes it sound like Covid 19 is not just more deadly than flu but a lot more deadly than flu. Anyone have a good read on it who might have more of a science-related background than I do?
https://news.yahoo.com/flu-deaths-were-counted-covid-053449918.html
That page refers to this page:
Thank you. This is the stand out quote to me, ‘If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.’
The Governor of Massachusetts recently issued an executive order (Massachusetts is #3 in the list of states with the highest number of COVID-19 cases) requiring everyone over the age of 2 yrs. to wear masks in public. In my area, (Central MA) I’ve not been out except to go to a local, independent market to pick-up groceries and the majority of people I’ve seen are wearing masks although there are a few who aren’t.
I’ll try.
People have been comparing known covid-19 deaths with deaths from the flu in 2017-18, a bad flu year where 61,000 died.
You might imagine that we count flu deaths by surveying hospitals and counting how many people tested positive for the flu and then died in the hospital. But we don’t. If that’s how we counted, we would have come up with some 15,620 flu deaths in the worst recent flu year, much worse than the 65,000 and counting we’ve seen with covid-19 already.
Instead, flu deaths are estimated, with statistical modeling that looks at deaths from things like pneumonia, and hospitalizations where the patient was not tested for flu, but where researchers believe some percentage of those hospitalizations were because of underlying.
If we wanted to accurately, apples to apples, compare covid deaths to flu deaths, we could compare tested verified covid deaths to tested verified flu deaths, in which case covid is already four times worse than the worst recent flu year. Or, we could estimate the total covid deaths, as we estimate the total flu deaths. We don’t have the data yet to do that calculation as of today, because death certificates lag, but I’m confident that when we do, we will discover that as of May 1, we were already well into the six figures of death.
Could be the camera angle, but the 5 of them (looks like thats Dr. Birx obscured in the corner) do NOT look to be 6 feet apart. And who knows where the camera and sound crew are or who else is in the room. Doubt anyone really measured 6 feet. And they look to be closer together than 6 feet.
And all but one we can see are male— and males always overestimate measurements 
But we don’t actually have to do the numerical calculations to know this is worse that the flu. All we have to do is look at the bodies. When do you remember hospitals have to get extra refrigerated trucks to hold excess bodies? When do you remember stories of a nursing home piling up bodies in a storeroom because they simply didn’t have anywhere to put them? When do you remember hearing of a funeral home sticking bodies in a U Haul, with ice, because it didn’t have enough room to store all of them? This is not like a bad flu year; this is enormous excess mortality.
When I read people advocating for fully opening up, I wonder what they are envisioning.
For those of you who think we ought to open up fully, what do you think will happen if we do? What fraction of the public do you think is vulnerable or living/working with the vulnerable and thus would continue to need to stay home? What rise in infections would you expect? What rise in deaths? Would there be an infection/death rate that would make you want to resume lockdown, or would you not want to consider such a step? How would you protect people who are vulnerable, but who must be exposed to members of the public who are not themselves vulnerable (e.g. people in nursing homes who have young caretakers)?
and mass graves
Crossposted…
Agree with CF… Look at body count.
Apparently over 7 million Americans are over 80. So maybe 7 million is the tolerable number? There are 70 million obese Americans, so maybe 77 million? It depends if you are the us or the them in these stats.
The current belief seems to be that in Italy anyway, the spread happened in a bar in the ski areas, not really on the mountains. They’ve even been able to trace many of the cases to one particular bar. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/europe/austria-ski-resort-ischgl-coronavirus-intl/index.html
That makes sense given what we know about transmission - more likely in enclosed areas and areas where people are touching common surfaces and are close to each other. Getting infected while actually skiing on the mountain seems less likely.
Not sure about CA or CO, but in Florida the bars are closed. The beaches shouldn’t be.
New study out of Woods Hole. They compared lockdown to lesser measures among European countries and found no difference in the rise of cases. I have no idea on the validity the study. I’ll leave that to the statisticians. OMG if all this makes no difference.
Can you please post a link? We are ok to post links here now given the new rules.
Closed in CA too.
we already know how this spreads - enclosed spaces - how is it possible there could be no difference in transmission if everyone (most) is home. Link?