Hawaii… so sad. There is an active outbreak in a (large) nursing home. 
What state has gobs of well people lining for testing? Really, who is going to get tested voluntarily? We see asymptomatic positives only in populations that are required to be tested by their workplace. I don’t know a single person who has been tested.
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I know loads of people in NJ who have done so. We don’t want to get burned again. YMMV.
I know one thing for sure. I will be skipping the “ensemble of death predictions” by the CDC. I’m sure it is super useful and predictive.
It’s just a phrase and process I never imagined would become part of the lexicon.
I wish we could skip the deaths.
I would have posted this in the Covid in Medicine thread, but I couldn’t find it. Listened today to a report from the Montefiore Hospitals in NY. A whopping 42% of their residents had Covid (determined either through tests or classic symptoms). Their peak was about two weeks before NYS’s peak and their first case appears to have been February 29 - 11 days before their first admitted case. The numbers went down sharply once they realized everyone needed to wear N95 masks all the time and not under the original CDC guidelines. I didn’t take notes, but I think they said 36% of all hospital workers have tested positive for antibodies.
They also talked about what they have learned about steroids - it looks to them from the numbers they have so far that it’s very much the case that certain kinds of cases benefit a lot, but others not at all.
Several people on the streets downtown that I saw today were wearing face shields. I like that you can see their mouths and they look fairly comfortable. I’d love to see some research about how effective they are in the wild as opposed to hospital settings. One guy even had one that attached to his baseball cap.
@“Cardinal Fang” yes. That’s a fact. Covid 19 and all the rest.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765525
People I know have been looking at this article on face shields. Maybe you have all already read it.
Whoaa… What state? This is the first I’ve heard of saliva tests being used in the wild. Is this NY?
@suzyQ7 - no, not NY, New Orleans. “Self administered oral swab tests” brought by the city health department and Core response (not sure what that is).
I tried to link to the tweet but that must not be allowed. You could look for AvenuePubNOLA to find it.
I’m not sure what is going on with our state’s results lately. The state health department said they wouldn’t be releasing numbers today because they are reevaluating their data. Tomorrow should be interesting! The states numbers have been going up slightly, but not in the city. The percent positive lately in the state has been 4-5%, with New Orleans more like 2%.
Seems to me that we are still in the middle of testing confusion. The elusive spit tests, the DIY tests that rely on laypersons luck or commitment, the brain scrubber swab where you are exposed to HCPs doing that all day.
Very sad, but not surprising https://www.newsweek.com/multiple-florida-hospitals-run-out-icu-beds-coronavirus-cases-spike-1511934?ut
If you look at the Florida report, overall there are about 22% of ICU beds in Florida still available. If they continue to have more cases each day, they’ll be in trouble, but they’re not in trouble right now.
You have to drill down further than just the state level to really say nobody’s in trouble, though. If Palm Beach County’s supply of beds is exceeded, sure, they may be able to export some cases to surrounding counties, but if all of South Florida’s (or even just Southeast Florida’s) beds fill up? Then it doesn’t matter if, say, Escambia and Walton Counties up in the Panhandle have a huge excess capacity, because it isn’t going to help.
Grrr. HUGE spike in cases, visible even in the worldometer graph for the country, all in ONE meat processing plant.
All the recent outbreaks had several things in common: somewhat marginalized immigrant communities, adhering to marginalized religions, living in dense housing situations. The media are very circumspect to avoid accusations of stigmarizing, but it is very easy to read between the lines.
I don’t think it is the language aspect or the poverty so much as a cultural disconnect: these are all immigrants from countries where a healthy distrust of government is the norm (Russian baptists, Roma Pentecostals from Rumania, Middle Eastern muslims). It must be hard to shift to "getting with the program“ if the program is being prescribed by an alien government you don’t trust any better. Contact tracers report they have a hard time even getting people in for testing.
All but the religious aspect is true for the meat processing plant, which relies on migrant workers sharing houses (not dorms, but multi occupancy family dwellings in the community).
However, they’re now trying to find out whether it’s the work conditions rather than the housing, specifically, whether coronavirus simply loves air conditioning. Would tally with the spikes in hot US states going into air conditioned summer.
@Tigerle Sounds like the common denominator among the cases in your country in the immigrant populations and the meat packing plant is the close proximity in housing/working conditions, which is kindling for contagious viruses. That density often reflects poverty and cultural aspects (multi-generational households) more than immigrant or religious status unless their religious status means they are congregating for services despite a pandemic.
Actually, yes it did. Services with and Eid celebrations, many households together without distancing. Many families in the infectedistancing d clusters eho are large, but dont actually live together or close.
Huh, what happened there? “In the infected clusters”.
Meant to add that they looked at what the “established”, very “top down” churches (in our case, Catholic and Lutheran) did, and found that they both very careful at observing top down rules and have the space for it (large, airy Gothic naves, where they put a soloist on the balcony with the organ and request the distantly spaced worshippers to hum or mumble behind their masks) whereas the newly established denominations and religious have worse worshipper to space ratios and did not follow the rules, either.
Most poor immigrant communities in high density living haven’t any cases either, just like rest of the country. All outbreaks are specifically associated with high risk behaviour or situations, some of them religious, but also (immigrant and non immigrant) indoor parties.
They also find that agricultural workers in communal housing arent affected much either. It appears to be, specifically, meat plants. Which is why they are looking at conditions in the shop, as it were, and are looking at air conditioning.
Apologies if this npr interview has already been posted, but it’s excellent https://www.npr.org/2020/06/17/879255417/amid-confusion-about-reopening-an-expert-explains-how-to-assess-covid-risk
Sorry for never finishing anything properly, it’s lunchtime here and I am running around!
Poverty and crowded housing do not make an outbreak. It can make you more likely to have a frontline job that cannot be done from home, it can make you more likely to pass it on to your family, but if you were socially distancing, it would just peter out, which is after all the point. For an outbreak, you need people from many households congregating in close quarters indoors, singing or shouting or both. Happens with religious celebrations, happens in meatpacking plants, happens with large parties and bars. There is a reason all of it is still against the rules.
They are about to crack down on the meatpacking plants. Not sure what they can do about religion…
@catahoula — I had also noticed declining death rates in the US, and think it’s really interesting. Presumably it’s a combination of us identifying more cases, having a better idea of how to treat those cases, and not having completely overrun hospitals. I have no idea what you meant by “Seems significant, since we shouldn’t a high fatality rate from that cohort, but there’s probably a dark lining to the cloud for those who continue to look to the dim side.”
Also have noticed that (so far) states with rapidly increasing cases do not have very high death rates. Of course the deaths lag onset of cases, often by about 4 weeks.
We certainly are not seeing what we were in March, with cases and hospitalizations doubling every 3-5 days ( (and that with missing probably 9 out of 10 cases). I think we are unlikely to see that again in most places. I confess that am fascinated by which states have rapidly growing caseloads and which do not (e.g. Florida, with its huge retiree population and masses of spring breakers not having major problems till now). My state (CT) started reopening a month ago, the neighbors are throwing wild parties, and cases have only continued to go down. I think that several factors are combining to push the Rt below 1: more outdoor activity, continued mask wearing, and a majority of the population taking the virus seriously and practicing social distancing. I have the impression that mask wearing works at the population level more than the individual level: my mask may not prevent me OR you from getting COVID, but if 75% of people wearing masks drops transmission by 20%, that may be enough to push Rt below 1. Same logic as applies to the not-very-effective flu vaccine.