Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In Massachusetts (where we have been hit pretty hard by C19) we're trending downwards in a significant way and have been for a few weeks now. Same in California - corona is a health care non-issue here, aside from our governor running for President soon, so it's a political issue. So we'll be the last to leave lockdown, and it's looking like Jan. 2022 now. By non-issue, I mean hospitalizations and deaths according…
I'm not sure if you're talking about daily deaths, or in total, but California has had 5,286 deaths as of today, not 58. We also had 81 deaths today specifically. In a perfect world, the point of a lockdown is to arrest the spread of a disease entirely. Unfortunately, we're well past that point in the US. Having failed at that, the goal is not just to keep health care utilization below capacity, but also to buy time…
https://i.imgur.com/zZ7UGVW.png
Deaths has a few problems. One is that once SARS-CoV-2 finds a nursing home, it's a lot of at-risk people in once place, so it gets hit hard. If deaths is the metric you care about, it's best to put a lot of effort into testing workers at care facilities and putting those facilities strict lockdowns. Once we learned this, we started "gaming" the metric a bit. The other problem is it's a lagging indicator.
Positive tests are problematic because early on, there was a shortage, presumed positive people weren't being tested because it wouldn't change anything, people without symptoms aren't being tested, etc. It's the flakier metric, for sure.
For how many tests are coming back negative, I wish we were doing random testing and random antibody testing. If we're not doing those, we're still being reactive.