Interesting that numbers are falling in Wisconsin despite their clear premature opening. Are the numbers not accurate. Or is the fact that Wisconsin finally got nice weather recently pushing people outside a factor. Vs Arizona where it’s now too hot to go outside.
Throwing this out there. Is it possible that a first wave in any given state is nearly inevitable? That the virus will run through vulnerable populations first – say, prisons, meatpacking plants, high density housing, high density essential work places, long term care facilities – and this will happen regardless of whether the general businesses are “open” or not?
IDK…
First waves have been evitable in other countries.
I fully believe that increases in cases have nothing to do with businesses being open and more to do with social distancing relaxing . one can keep “non essential” retail open as much as “essential retail” and likely has less patrons. With precautions, nail and hair salons should be able to operate . Outdoor dining should be fine. Indoor space should have mask wearing and Social distancing
disney should be interesting and should be similar in most cases to the crowds at protests in that except for certain rides, most attractions are outdoors.
the Bar that the 16 friends went to. Was it indoors only?
Yeah, I’m sure you will, including this response.?
The problem is that we have no way of predicting whether any individual case of covid-19 will go badly—there haven’t been a massive number of cases where previously healthy people with no preexisting health conditions got quite sick from the novel coronavirus, but there have been a solid number.
Couple that with the fact that we don’t yet have a solid idea for how to treat the progress of the disease, and your suggestion raises a lot of ethical concerns.
(Once we have an established treatment protocol, though, and particularly if the vaccine candidates they’re working on are unsuccessful, it may need to be something we discuss.)
The US is one big experiment as it is opened up, you can certainly cite the current red open states with escalating numbers of positive tests as an experiment. If the hospitalization rate indicates the young and well are getting very sick, we will know soon enough. Texas has some interesting numbers on young positives (Austin area). Really it is only the hospitalization rates that you can rely on as useful in these states where testing has been so sloppy. .
Maryland is a “blue” open state with great declining numbers.
I whole-heartedly agree that hospitalization numbers are a much better indicator of where a state stands. I would not just limit it to a certain color state though.
Agree. Many residents of states are essentially behaving as volunteers in Coronavirus “studies” - hopefully researchers are tracking and asking questions and putting that information together so we can use it later.
The spikes in hot weather areas, and not in cooler ones where people are now outside more, make me really wonder about this virus. The “flu” is really short for influenza di freddo, or “influence of the cold”, because Italians figured out hundreds of years ago that the virus is more contagious and deadly in cold weather.
But we don’t have spikes of the flu in Arizona and Florida once people move into air conditioned interiors, do we? Of course, something else completely different could be going on, but this is one capricious and deadly bug. Just so hard to pin down!
Outside of those with pre-existing conditions and those on the obese scale that are “healthy”, what are the numbers that have had gotten quite sick? It would be interesting to look closely at that data. I’m sure there are some healthcare workers that got massive doses and succumbed but that goes back to my thinking a reduced dose might prove beneficial.
I agree it’s a controversial subject that’s why I had a lot of “ifs” in there.
Are you talking about retail stores, or other businesses? We know that around the world, bars have been sites of superspreading events. It’s no surprise, then, that there was a superspreading event at one bar in Jacksonville FL at least, and perhaps two others. If more bars are open, more bars will be the sites of superspreading events.
Moreover, I’m betting that the Mardi Gras outbreak in New Orleans was powered by bars. We don’t know, but it’s a good guess.
In my area, awhile ago construction was allowed to reopen. Now we’ve had clusters at construction sites, which doesn’t surprise me because when I see construction workers working, they’re not taking any measures to limit disease spread.
If those bars and those construction sites weren’t open, they wouldn’t have been sites of spreading.
I don’t mind “occasional forays” but the number of mask posts exceeded that. It’s when we start getting multiple reports from different users that I start looking at it.
Believe me, this thread is “light moderation” to the max.
Speaking of New Orleans, I listened to the podcast Johns Hopkins Public Health On Call, Episode 95, “How New Orleans Averted Disaster from COVID-19”.
It’s short, about 15 minutes.
I live in Wisconsin, and I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about the COVID-19 situation here. I don’t know the reasons for the situation; I hope they can be determined, and I hope that what is learned is helpful for other places. And obviously, I hope the good trends continue.
The only things I can think of off the top of my head that might not be true in all other states are the following:
- Our major metropolitan areas (Milwaukee and Madison) have lots of health-care providers and hospitals (maybe too many under “normal” circumstances). I never heard or read that the hospitals in these areas were overwhelmed, despite these areas having a large share of the cases in the state.
- We shut down relatively quickly and relatively broadly.
Exactly. The hope that the virus would wane in the summer was just wishful thinking, especially since there were outbreaks in places like Singapore in February/March when the avg temp there is something like 90.
The flu does go away in the summer everywhere, even in states where you can barely be outside because it’s too hot, or humid, or both.
The reason it’s not happing with CV-19 is because this virus is not the flu.
It’s much more contagious and deadly, also.
This was done historically with smallpox (called “variolation”) and somewhat more recently with things like chicken pox (before the vaccines for those viruses became available).
I mentioned it previously in some of these COVID-19 threads as a suggestion for those confident about how low the risk is for them, but got a lot of pushback on it, with no one here saying that they would do that themselves. That suggests that no one here is really that confident about themselves being low enough risk and/or getting immunity through infection to do that.
I think it’s directly related to reopening businesses.
What I believe happened is that many states reopened much too soon - before getting their numbers down low enough regarding rate of transmission. Then, once they opened up, because the virus was still circulating at rates that were too high to open safely - the virus is now having a field day.
Someone who feels confident to go out to dinner - even outside, is also going to go to the hair salon, over maybe over to friends for a party, shopping at the mall, workout at the gym, etc., etc., etc. And they are doing a lot of these things without doing the things you need to do when you engage in these types of that we know helps control the spread, one of which shall remain nameless.
Whoa. That is a very broad generalization and does not reflect reality. A few will be careless… Most will do what we do: even though we ate a couple of meals outdoors and one of us had a much needed haircut, no gym visits or parties of any kind are planned for the near future. Most of the folks we communicate with do the same.
“Cardinal Fang;c-22855441”]
If many things don’t open for a long time they can’t cause cases. The question is, how long do we keep things locked down, unopened? What things should stay locked down? How much spread is acceptable? I think as long as hospitals aren’t overwhelmed a little bit of opening is not a bad thing. Our economy needs to open up sooner to save many parts of it.
You aren’t in a state that reopened too early and your numbers aren’t going through the roof. People in your state seem to get the seriousness of this virus.
Remember, people in those states I am talking about, were basically told everything was great. No worries anymore. Virus had run its course. We even had a few people from some of those states say exactly that on this thread.