With Florida testing so much more in the last two weeks, beginning really on June 3rd, I would certainly expect to see many more positive cases showing up these days. And with results taking days to over a week to come back this would easily correlate to the increasing numbers.
I don’t see that on your link. If you click 30 days in the top graph, the testing seems consistent over the last 30 days, not elevated in the last 2 weeks. If I take the data and average it, 6/1-6/15 = ~17K average tests per day, 5/15-5/31 = ~26K average tests per day. Not a big difference.
% positive per case (not % positive of tests) is a better number, but I don’t see that here, still looking.
My H was on a call this morning with people from his company in Europe. One of the people on the call said his 13 year old S tested positive and is isolating in his bedroom where he has his own bathroom. The colleague has tested negative 3 times, but continues to go into the office in Denmark to work. I asked H why this person was not quarantining for 14 days and his answer was the guy thinks he’s too important not to be in the office.
Alaska has low Ns as a result of its small population, so an analysis of trends is always going to be a bit shaky, but after making good use of the fact that (with the Canadian border mostly closed) it was basically an island for a while, things are starting to look fairly grim in the wake of the governor declaring everything open with no restrictions, the second wave looking to be bigger than the first wave: https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2020/06/13/29-new-alaskan-cases-state-sees-highest-daily-count-yet-as-active-cases-continue-to-rise/
@suzyQ7, It seems to me that cases are rising in general, which is unfortunate, but doesn’t surprise me, given the reopening happening. The percent positivity for new cases has averaged 5.62% over the past week, whereas for the week before that, it averaged only 3.50%.
The only good news is that the hospitalizations have increased at a much lower rate than the overall case count. Possibly that means the increased availability of testing is causing more of the mild or asymptomatic cases to be found.
I’ve been busy with some other things, but I’ll be taking a closer look at the data soon to see if any particular causes jump out at me.
I found the following quote on the CDC cite but not the one you posted. I do not interpret the following to mean 45% of people with preexisting conditions end up in the hospital. Am I reading it wrong?
'Hospitalizations were six times higher among patients with a reported underlying condition (45.4%) than those without reported underlying conditions (7.6%). Deaths were 12 times higher among patients with reported underlying conditions (19.5%) compared with those without reported underlying conditions (1.6%). ’
@suteiki77 , I read that as of those 1.3 million or so who were not excluded were sorted int underlying conditions (287,320) and no underlying conditions. Of those with underlying conditions, 45.4% (so about 130,400) were admitted to the hospital; of those without, only 7.6% were admitted. Total hospitalizations were 184,673.
I am not happy about this and do not appreciate being lied to by my government during a pandemic (or any time, but especially during a pandemic). @suteiki77 has been saying this all along since January - masks help stop the spread, yet our goverment - Attorney General, Dr Fauci, Dr Birx, VP Pence, all told us masks wouldn’t protect us (during February and March).
They should have been straight with us and told us to use cloth masks when out in public. They could have lied and said cloth masks were almost as good as surgical, so don’t get surgical/N95 because we need them for healthcare workers. But they shouldn’t have told us they don’t work.
I understand that the government and scientists don’t have all the answers, so the answer should be “I don’t know” if that is the answer. But it should be a lie.
U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams also initially recommended against the public wearing masks, calling them “not effective” at preventing the spread of the coronavirus.
“They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” Adams wrote in a February 29 tweet.
But I believed my government and their expert scientists and propagated that misinformation to my parents and others. I didn’t believe China or other Asian countries- who have been using masks forever, instead I looked down on them as paranoid. I’m sorry that I did.
I believed this:
US officials including Surgeon General Jerome Adams and Vice President Mike Pence have urged people against buying and wearing masks to protect themselves from the new coronavirus.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on Monday, Adams said wearing face masks could actually increase a person’s risk of contracting the coronavirus.
I agree. Plus, up until last week, WHO had listed on its website that healthy individuals should not wear masks unless they were caring for an individual with COVID.
I also read an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine that said that, " We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic."
Frankly, I don’t trust our government at all. Up until I had a discussion on this thread a few weeks ago, I believed that the government was telling all of us to wear cloth masks to help alleviate our fears so we would go out and help our economy recover. The last line of the NEJM article reinforced my perception.
Very few people in my area wear masks. It is a wrong assumption to assume that someone who doesn’t wear a mask is affiliated with a particular party and cable news network and are science illiterates.
I don’t think you can characterize this as a lie, and in fact I think it’s a disservice to do so.
Cloth masks, after all, are minimally protective for the wearer—they primarily protect against transmission, not catching it. Back in February, the suggestion was to not wear masks because the worry was that they’d lead to a false sense of security.
In March, we learned that there are lots (lots!) more asymptomatic carriers than we had thought, and that those asymptomatic carriers are more efficient at spreading the disease than had been thought, and so mask-wearing was recommended at that point to prevent transmission.
So it’s not a lie, it’s changing recommendations based on new evidence—or in other words, it’s science. It’s dangerous that there’s this pop-culture idea that science simply states facts and those are immutable laws—science is actually the process of getting progressively closer to what reality is, and that means that sometimes things like medical recommendations will change in reaction to newly discovered information.
Failing to grasp the importance of the help that was provided by families when visitors were allowed, and failing to increase the support provided/allowed by the facility once visitors were banned.
My mom and others had aids come in anywhere from 2-8 hours/day to help with household tasks and also for company. Plus families regularly took residents out to lunch, shopping, hair salons and such.
With the shutdown all outside aides were prohibited, families prohibited, residents can’t leave the campus except for short shopping trips and doctor appointments. The in-apartment aid was replaced with maybe 1/2-1 hour visits daily, most days. The dining room was shut down, the hair salon was shut down. Residents spend all day alone in their apartments.
Residents are wasting away, lonely, confused, unmoored. It’s a disaster.
We offered my mom the chance to move to another city temporarily to be with one of us, but the thought was overwhelming to her. But if there isn’t something on the horizon in the next week or so we may resort to the VRBO solution rather than have her fade away alone.
I’m probably 90% in agreement with you, @dfbdfb . Certainly about science and the anti-science nature of some of this “oh, it will change anyway” attitude.
But I think the “no masks” advice was disingenuous (due to low availability of masks, which was also a major problem with government policy in terms of stockpiles).
When I went back to seek any data about masks and efficacy, it turns out that there was data as far back as the 1930s supporting their use (even “gauze masks”) as a public health measure. Maybe even earlier?
Like others, I admit to assuming that when people wore masks in other countries, they were just paranoid. I felt that way, no doubt, due to news sources and peer pressure here in the US.
In fact, on March 3rd, I went to a play with my son. Walking home, we saw two guys of apparent Asian descent in cloth masks, and thought to each other that this seemed like real overkill since masks won’t help with anything. I now feel completely differently, wear a mask whenever leaving my house - and in fact I spent hundreds of hours sewing masks to donate.
I think we are missing the rationale around the mask guidence.
The epidemiologists seem to indicate it’s much more about social distancing and separation than masks to keep you from getting Coronavirus. For non medical professionals. Or other communicable disease.
I saw a study today that inside of 4ft that masks don’t stop transmission.
The sd. Hygiene. And no contact with vulnerable were critical at that time. Also there was a global Ppe shortage.
Plus lock down phase was actually a good time to not give people the false sense of protection of masks. People were just being exposed to these protocols.
We were told not to wear masks because there was a shortage of masks and those on the frontlines needed them first. Those of us who had surgical masks in hand were made to feel guilty and asked to donate them to hospitals. I knew the line about not protecting us was hogwash. If it was, why did my surgeon tell me to use one when flying home from CA just a week before major surgery so I wouldn’t get sick?
So telling us they weren’t effective was the best way to keep us from stockpiling them. ?
Around here, we were asked to donate N95 masks, not plain surgical masks. There is a difference. Initially, health care workers and first responders could not get sufficient N95 masks. And yes, there was a shortage of surgical masks, too.
Surgical paper masks have never been portrayed as something that can prevent you from catching the coronavirus. At last I never heard that.
That rural county in Oregon with an outbreak at a Pentecostal church? Up over 200 cases now. It only takes presence of the virus and the right setting.