Tokyo Blue

August 29th, 2020 at 1:40 PM ^

A little late to the party here but 97 likes is a truckload. Can someone put together a spreadsheet of what the rate per 100K is divided by age demographics etc.?  /s

Hats off lilpenny. That's the most likes I've seen in a while or maybe ever. Even more fitting that it's about our little brother.

boliver46

August 28th, 2020 at 11:46 AM ^

Cases does not equal symptoms, does not equal actual illness, does not equal hospitalizations, does not equal ICU stays, does not equal deaths.

Cases are gonna happen, and the constant freak out that OMG!!!  PEOPLE TESTED POSITIVE!!! is stupid.

It's a virus.  People are going to get it, including (surprise!) College Students.

TrueBlue2003

August 28th, 2020 at 2:00 PM ^

I mean, I agree with the sentiment here.  We were ticking along at 70,000 (!!!) positive cases a day in the US during July and we basically shrugged.  I don't know why people are surprised or freaking out that a population that is probably the most likely to get it, is now getting it. 

When schools decided to open up, and parents and kids decided they'd take the risk of attending, they all accepted that yes, I'm going to get this virus, I'm probably going to be fine and it's worth it for them.  They're safer on campus being quarantined and away from parents and elderly than if they were getting it at home which is what they've been doing the past 5 months.

jmblue

August 28th, 2020 at 2:34 PM ^

And that was the logic behind "flattening the curve" - that the virus would gradually pass through the population, at a pace that does not overwhelm the health system. 

At some point a lot of people changed their viewpoint to "Every infection is a catastrophe" which is just not a rational viewpoint to take from a societal standpoint.

I Like Burgers

August 28th, 2020 at 3:23 PM ^

Except you know, we never actually flattened the curve because people keep using this dipshit logic of "oh its just one case derp derp". The whole reason where in the mess we're in when the rest of the world has mostly gone back to a sense of normalcy is no one is taking any positive case seriously.  Which is why our society is currently hamstrung with this problem.  All the chucklefucks that keep using the "its just not a rational viewpoint" is why we're no better off today than when this all started.

TrueBlue2003

August 28th, 2020 at 3:47 PM ^

We did flatten the curve.  Daily deaths were in the 2,000s in April.  They haven't come close to approaching that since.  They've basically, and literally flattened around 1,000 a day since then. Have there been some fluctuations? Of course. Is that a depressingly high number?  Yes. But it has been far lower than March and April and effectively "flat" since then.

When Europe and most of the rest of the world went basically down to zero, there was some frustration that something similar didn't happen here so we can argue about failing to do that but it is false to say we didn't flatten the curve.

The only reason the case curve was higher in June and July than March and April is widespread testing.

Jonesy

August 28th, 2020 at 8:26 PM ^

We flattened the curve...but every other country then waited until the curve went down and bottomed out before opening up while we just opened right up with our very high but flat curve.

The only reason there are less deaths now are because doctors learned and have improved their care.

TrueBlue2003

August 29th, 2020 at 7:41 PM ^

Yes, that's what I said.  We flattened it, and they waited and crushed it.  Argue all you want about which was the right way to do it, but no one can say we didn't flatten it at a level that our health system could reasonably sustain.

You're wrong that the only reason there are fewer deaths now is that doctors have improved their care.  That's a small contributor since they've learned not ventilate so quickly, etc., but it's been a pretty small effect given there are no good treatments.  The primary reason is that far fewer vulnerable people are getting it in recent months than in February, March and April.

crom80

August 29th, 2020 at 2:46 PM ^

"But it has been far lower than March and April and effectively "flat" since then."

Flattening the curve as I understood it was always about cases, not deaths.

confirmed U.S. new cases per day by July 2020 50k cases

https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/wellness-prevention/covid-19-curve-has-unflattened-fast-now-what#:~:text=Back%20in%20early%20March%2C%20experts,virus%20from%20person%20to%20person.

TrueBlue2003

August 29th, 2020 at 7:32 PM ^

First, no, it's not about cases, it's really about hospitalizations because the goal of "flattening" the curve is not to overwhelm the health systems ability to care for those that need it.  And deaths and hospitalizations have tracked essentially evenly.  So if you must, just replace what I said above about "deaths" with "hospitalizations" and everything still applies identically.

And secondly, this graph you're using for cases is not at all an accurate reflections of actual cases.  It's only confirmed cases which is heavily dependent on who we're testing and hence largely arbitrary (deaths and hospitalizations is a better indicator of actual cases).  There were WAY MORE cases in March and April than this graph depicts.  Far more than there were cases in June and July.  But we were mostly only testing hospitalized people in the early stages of this thing because we didn't have the capacity to test anyone else.  That's changed a lot. And who we've been willing to test has changed multiple times over the course of the pandemic.  Contributing to the arbitrary nature of case counts.

crom80

August 30th, 2020 at 5:26 PM ^

says in this article and the image from CDC that flattening the curve has been about cases/infected individuals as seen on the y axis of the graphs. it doesn't say deaths or hospitalization. as explained in the article and graph image, it is literally flattening the curve of the cases/infected individuals is it not?

https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-flatten-the-curve.html

ndscott50

August 28th, 2020 at 12:23 AM ^

That’s nice. Sounds like they are implementing their plan to contain it. Does anybody have a plan that does something more than keeping important segments of our society closed while also not really containing and diminishing Covid. California has remained pretty aggressive with keeping things closed yet it still had 5,280 cases and 141 deaths today. 
 

I know it’s fun to endlessly argue about what’s open and not open but once we’re done we are still left with this shit plan. Anybody have a plan for the end game here? 

kookie

August 28th, 2020 at 12:34 AM ^

Part of the plan should not be to reopen buildings designed for interaction, not distancing, during a pandemic.

I'm all for reopening society, but we have made deliberate (bad) choices that have allowed the virus to spread uncontrolled. Get the damn virus under control. Pretty much the rest of the industrialized world has been able to get it under control and start reopening up. We can do the same, if we choose to.

ndscott50

August 28th, 2020 at 12:52 AM ^

California does not seem to be opening buildings designed for interaction, has not had them open for months, and yet this shit continues there.  Also was looking at the numbers in places like Israel (per capita daily case rate 56% higher than the US) and France (per capita daily case rate rising rapidly now only 33% below US while their per capita testing rate is 2.6 times less than ours) and wondering how much the rest of the world really has this under control or did they just delay things a bit.

We have been trying the the keep schools closed thing in a lot of places for months as well as bunch of other measures.  We still have thousands of new cases daily and around a 1,000 deaths a day. This shit is not working.  It does not seem to be getting us any closer to having this under control. This plan is ineffective and seems to have no path to an end.  

chunkums

August 28th, 2020 at 1:10 AM ^

California actually allowed bars and a number of other indoor venues to reopen on June 8. About two weeks later their daily new cases exploded and they closed them again. Regarding Israel, they essentially had it beaten and cases exploded when they reopened schools. At this point it's extremely frustrating that this thing is so damn stubborn. The good news is that it sounds like there will be numerous realistic vaccine candidates by early 2021 (Here's an interesting piece of vaccines). Hopefully we can quickly innoculate the most vulnerable members of our population.

ndscott50

August 28th, 2020 at 1:31 AM ^

Seems like we are betting an awful lot on a vaccine that may be far from 90 plus percent effective, take a good deal of time to get out into the population and in the end may result in the virus still active in the population just at a lower level (think New York for the last three months as opposed to Texas or Califorina)  Realistically you are looking at schools and many businesses shut until fall 2021 with this approach with fair amount of uncertainty about the outcome.

This all brings me back to, is this really the best we can do?

NittanyFan

August 28th, 2020 at 1:34 AM ^

I agree with you 100%.

The problem is, our response to CV has become more emotional than calculated.

When the post-mortems on CV are finally written --- in the latter part of this decade, when we look at it more objectively and less emotionally --- I don't think they are going to look kindly upon our reaction from July 2020 onward.

It's time to switch gears, and start moving forward.

chunkums

August 28th, 2020 at 1:44 AM ^

We certainly can do better, but we won't. There was never a national plan to deal with the virus. As a result, there was no coordination between states and no consistency regarding which businesses got to be open and which got to be closed. Even when some states locked down hard and fast and avoided nasty outbreaks (see Oregon and Ohio), others didn't take it seriously and are now dealing with the consequences. The time to crush this thing was early on when we could have locked down hard. After that, we had to test and trace. Instead, we had 50 different lockdowns, most of which were half-assed measures. Now this thing is too rampant to effectively test and trace. People don't have the patience to do it again and congress doesn't have the ability to pass laws that would make it feasible.

Regarding a vaccine, even if it's only 60% effective that would do wonders to reduce the spread if we could get people to take it. This shit sucks.

LV Sports Bettor

August 28th, 2020 at 5:13 AM ^

Hahaha..... No way in hell state governors would have followed some national controversial protocol set forth. What world do you live in? This is such a lame talking point by the left now but this seems to be their entire campaign strategy going forward. Zero doubt in my mind if the white house came out tomorrow and said here's exactly how this will be done it would be met with tons of 2nd guessing and statements about that's not what the science says etc .. No matter what he says you're fooling yourself if you actually think other side would comply.

We've seen million examples of this last few few months. Just look at the schools debate when president said let's go back to school this fall half the country was up in arms about it saying he's killing our kids. Now you think some protocol would have everyone on same page? Hell he can't even send in the much needed national guard to decimated areas being outright neglected by certain leadership without people throwing a fit about peaceful protesters having rights despite tons of evidence these protests quit being peaceful or haven't been about racial injustice months ago. 

If you honestly think the other side of this would have just got on board with ANYTHING the white house said then you've not been paying attention during this.