D&D Coronavirus thread

Models in this instance are incredibly unreliable, and (as a huge skeptic initially) social distancing of course isn't fool proof but it really is blunting it on a crazy level. I get the daily stats/#s for our hospital. There are a lot of factors that go into spreading something like this , level of exposure, period of shedding, etc.

The number would be far higher, but compared to anything we've seen in modern medicine 60K americans dead in a month while practicing safety measures unlike anything we've done is still crazy.

 

I hope you are correct.

 

Perhaps, Americans are really bad about following social distancing directions. Or better said, 5-10% Americans flaunt the rules because that is the way they roll.

I am really curious how 25K American are testing CV+ everyday. There are probably another 75K per day that are CV+ but asymptomatic.

 

boils down to what “anytime soon” can mean, I’d say.

 

Some people seems to have magically forgotten that we have been under a moderate lockdown.

 

I can't imagine the pain people are going through right now who can't even have a proper funeral for their loved ones. My heart goes out to each and everyone suffering a loss at this time. May God help get you through this time of suffering and pain. May you find strength knowing your loved one is in a better place now, and free from suffering. God bless.

 

this thing is so infectious and asymptomatic in most people, the idea that you are going to contain it with some sophisticated testing/tracking system is ridiculous

 

Test, trace and isolate itself probably won’t do the job. You have to also have strong buy in to physical distancing, masking, ban large group....

At the end of this, you MAY ultimately be right, but that is exactly what’s happening in Taiwan and South Korea.... as two example of successful containment. Remember also that Taiwan was never locked down to the level of the US... you can have your cake and eat it too.

Even if you can’t contain, that along with other policies such as masking help slow down the spread, critically important for both health and wallet.

what do you think the US should be doing?

 

Best effort mitigation attempts, let people manage their own risk and businesses set their own policies, but no lockdowns, school closures, etc.

 

This idea that we should leave it to people to manage their own risk isn't working. We see that with the crowded beaches. Heck when I'm out running I still see basketball courts packed. As much as the Coronavirus kid was made fun of there are still people who feel that way even a month and a half later after 60K dead.

To paraphrase John Locke, freedom only exist where there are laws to guarantee rights. Freedom doesn't exist without responsibility and where people fail to act responsibly is where the law is in place. With a contagious disease this is very much the case. While absolute liberty might say that you are solely responsibly for your own safety we live in a society where our actions affect many others.

 

The problem with reopening the US based off the numbers we're seeing is we have no idea what the accuracy of them are. Saying we're flattening the curve...are we actually flattening it? Guess we'll find out in a few weeks.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/accurate-us-coronavirus-death-count-experts-off-tens/story?id=70385359

How accurate is the US coronavirus death count? Some experts say it's off by 'tens of thousands'

Ongoing testing kit shortages in cities and states nationwide means that only clearly symptomatic patients are currently being tested in many places. There also is no uniform national system in the U.S. for investigating deaths, and until two weeks ago, the U.S. was only counting Americans who lab-tested positive, before or after death, for COVID-19.

Left out of the tally are people who died without being tested and those who died at home or some other non-healthcare facilities before they could seek medical care.

“It is an extraordinary challenge,” said Dr. Sally Aiken, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME). “There just isn't really the infrastructure.”

Further undermining an accurate national count are new analyses that suggest the virus was spreading in the U.S. much earlier than previously believed, likely playing a role in more deaths than currently known.

California’s first known COVID-19 death to date was Patricia Cabello Dowd, 57, in Santa Clara County. Dowd died on Feb. 6 of heart complications, which were later determined to have been unleashed by the COVID-19 virus. Dowd's death — in which an autopsy obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle listed a heart rupture “due to Covid-19 infection” — came three weeks before the earliest previously identified American coronavirus-related death.

New data on cardiac arrest emergency calls reviewed by ABC News suggests that New York City’s catastrophic outbreak likely began in close-knit neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn as far back as mid-February.

Finally, as the cardiac arrest data suggested, scientists are contending with an ever-evolving understanding of how COVID-19 attacks the body. Initially, it was believed to primarily attack the lungs, but new research suggests it’s a danger to nearly every organ.

Experts say that many people like Dowd, who died of a non-respiratory COVID-19 complication early in the outbreak -- before the pandemic’s impact became apparent -- may never be accurately counted.

The confusion and complications inherent in tracking pandemics have left a weary nation wondering just how high the actual U.S. death count may be – and how bad things really are.

Less than 2% of all Americans have been tested for the coronavirus to date, according to White House figures – nearly 5.5 million people. It's a figure that experts say is both higher than most nations and far lower per capita than where the U.S. should be at this point.

U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health and White House “testing czar” Admiral Brett Giroir told George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” on Tuesday that the Trump administration doesn’t concur with a Harvard University study which concluded last week that the U.S. needs to be testing 5 million people a day in June and up to 20 million by July in order to safely re-open the country.

“We don’t believe those estimates are accurate, nor are they reasonable, “ Giroir said.

Yet either way, that testing is still mostly focused on the living. Experts told ABC News that an accurate death toll is not only important to later get a better picture of what happened, but if possible, real-time or near real-time death counts can also help public health officials in their battle to contain the virus now.

History: A chilling guide

Researchers retrospectively calculate overall deaths from a pandemic by studying excess deaths year-to-year in a given region. But that’s a difficult figure to gauge until a pandemic is over.

Previous studies of other recent virus outbreaks suggest the actual number of COVID-19 deaths to date is very likely dramatically higher than the more than 58,000 deaths currently reported.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analysis of the H1N1 swine flu virus outbreak in the U.S. in 2009 and 2010 concluded two years later that the actual tally was likely 15 times higher than the officially recorded figures. A 2013 study by the U.S. National Institutes of Health determined the figure was seven times higher than the official count.

“I’ve never – none of us have ever – seen an infection like COVID-19, that literally stopped the world,” said Williamson.

While most news organizations rely on the Johns Hopkins University figures, which are pulled directly from state and local government websites and is considered more timely picture of the problem, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a branch of the CDC, is the primary agency responsible for U.S. health statistics, which are compiled by collecting data on births, deaths and health surveys.

Due to the lack of a uniform U.S. system, the NCHS system lags about two weeks behind in reporting said, Dr. Robert Anderson, chief of mortality statistics.

Daniel Weinberger, an epidemiologist from the Yale School of Public Health, analyzed NCHS death count data to estimate how many COVID-19 deaths may have gone uncounted during the five-week period from March 1 to April 3.

He concluded the official death toll in the U.S., currently closing in on 60,000, is “probably a substantial underestimate of the true number by tens of thousands.”

The actual figure, he said, may be “in the ballpark of double the reported cases.“

Given the still-looming threat to the U.S., researchers are urging municipalities to maintain as much detailed data about COVID-19 records as possible.

With patchwork of reporting protocols, a 'pipe dream' to gauge actual death toll

As the pandemic rages across all 50 states and around the globe with no uniform reporting protocol in place, experts said the official death count is hard to even estimate.

“One of the difficulties is that every state does things differently,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “When I look at the data, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Okay, this is Oklahoma. What kind of modifier am I adding to that to figure out what’s going on here?’ It would be incredibly helpful not to have to do that.”

He’s doubtful that a uniform national death count reporting process is possible anytime soon.

“It’s a bit of pipe dream," he said.​

(More at the Link above)

 

‘A phantom plague’: Evangelical fundamentalists who openly defied social distancing guidelines are dying of coronavirus in frightening numbers

Countless non-fundamentalist churches in the United States, from Catholic to Lutheran and Episcopalian, have embraced social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic and temporarily moved their activities online. But many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals have been irresponsibly downplaying the dangers of COVID-19 and doing so with deadly results: journalist Alex Woodward, in the U.K.-based Independent, reports that the pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 30 pastors in the Bible Belt.

“Dozens of pastors across the Bible Belt have succumbed to coronavirus after churches and televangelists played down the pandemic and actively encouraged churchgoers to flout self-distancing guidelines,” Woodward reports. “As many as 30 church leaders from the nation’s largest African-American Pentecostal denomination have now been confirmed to have died in the outbreak, as members defied public health warnings to avoid large gatherings to prevent transmitting the virus.”

Within Christianity, there are major differences between non-fundamentalist Mainline Protestant denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and fundamentalist Pentecostals. And Woodward, in The Independent, discusses the Pentecostals who have openly defied social distancing.

“The virus has had a wildly disproportionate impact among black congregations, many of which have relied on group worship,” Woodward explains. “Yet despite the climbing death toll, many US church leaders throughout the Bible Belt have not only continued to hold services, but have urged worshippers to continue paying tithes — including recent stimulus checks — to support their mission.”

One of the fundamentalists who defied social distancing, according to Woodward, was Bishop Gerald Glenn, founder of the New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Chesterfield, Virginia. While other pastors were moving their sermons online, Glenn preached at a March 15 service that was attended by almost 200 people — and on April 14, CNN reported that Glenn had died of coronavirus.

Woodward points out that according to a recent poll by Religion News Service, 90% of congregations have suspended their in-person gatherings. But Woodward also notes that the survey “found that evangelicals were more likely to report worshipping in person.”

One of the far-right evangelical extremists who has encouraged worshippers to defy social distancing is Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, a Pentecostal fundamentalist in Florida. Howard-Browne has irresponsibly described coronavirus as a “phantom plague” and was arrested for his blatant defiance of social distancing rules.

 

Zero evidence of contracting COVID-19 from outdoor activities, close proximity or otherwise.

I probably wouldn't play basketball, but I would definitely go to the beach. People should be free to manage their own risk.

States are opening up partly because more and more people are starting to violate the constitutionally dubious shelter-in-place orders. Human beings (especially Americans) were not built to be confined for a prolonged period of time.

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Says 'Guaranteed Income' Is Worth Considering For Coronavirus Recovery

 

Zero evidence of not contracting COVID-19 from outdoor activities, close proximity or otherwise.