141–150 of 167 posts
I've found it helpful to view this data as time series (so that trends are more apparent). This site uses this same dataset but shows historical trends per country/region: https://www.covidstats.com
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The market and the current administration both benefit from a low count of confirmed cases. The administration has already been criticized for repeatedly attempting to slash the CDC budget[1] and terminating the epidemic response team[2]. Trump also keeps attempting to downplay the severity of the virus so it would not be a good look if the true spread of the disease was widely known. Knowledge of the spread would al…
That just doesn’t make sense to me. Uncontained, this disease will grow exponentially until tens of millions are infected at once, and it eventually burns itself out. But by then, the disaster will be obvious and we will have the same result. Only with more casualties. Certainly anyone who had that sort of ulterior motive would understand this.
They’re already refusing to test people, and I’m guessing they’ll start to blame the flu and/or fake news at some point.
They’ll probably somehow exceed my expectations, and come up with even more cynical tactics than this. For instance, I’ve seen users in other forums blame liberal china lovers for bringing the disease to the US. I wonder if they’re paid trolls or not.
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Nope this was misinformation sowed for political purposes: https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
The budget proposal included cuts to it, though, and some of the response teams that were in place in the government were cut. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/
This map seems effectively useless in the US, given absence of meaningful testing. Frontline nurses, treating COVID-19 patients , are having their tests stonewalled and delayed by the CDC: https://act.nationalnursesunited.org/page/-/files/graphics/N... I’ve seen multiple people referencing it to prove the absence of real threat in the US, which seems beyond absurd at this point.
The problem with wide scale testing is that it makes the CFR incomparable to seasonal flu or previous outbreaks. CFR is by definition deaths/confirmed cases. It's not a measure of infection lethality or mortality rate, even though that's what most of us think it is and what we're most curious about. For crisis management and planning, you want a CFR that is comparable to something like the seasonal flu or previous ou…
There was also not a “temporary delay” with the kits, there is still nowhere near the necessary testing capacity and they’re throwing out absurd, false numbers like “1 million test kits” that then have to be walked back. And the whole absence of testing is because they rejected the WHO’s test kit and donations of them! We could have began testing immediately.
I’m not sure where you’re getting all this nonsense about the absence of testing being “good for the data”. Every epidemiologist I’ve seen is saying the exact opposite, e.g.:
Michael Mina, Asst Professor of Epidemiology & Immunology & physician @ Harvard School of Public Health/Medicine
> 1 in 6 positive samples in China were asymptomatic and choice was made to not report those. This information is crucial for epidemiological modeling and developing appropriate mitigating strategies. Reporting all positives as symptomatic or not should be standard reporting.
https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/12343556205575454...
Why are epidemiologists saying that testing and reporting asymptomatic cases is necessary for responding appropriately, counter to what you claim?
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It's not just Oregon; that's just a number I saw this morning in the local paper, but I suspect it's similar everywhere. The US did not use the advance warning we had to prepare.
Yesterday, I read the US had 100 confirmed cases, and had tested 500 people. Trump fired the a big part of the CDC that deals with pandemics back in 2018 and hasn’t replaced them. I don’t think the US government will make any serious effort to contain it, despite the recent theatrics from congress. Not testing sick people will inflate the official mortality rate. If the disease hits 70% of the population (projection…
The stuff blaming it on Trump firing the part of the CDC that deals with pandemics is untrue too. (Though sadly, the testing might have rolled out more smoothly if he had culled the CDC a bit... their in-house facilities seem to have really screwed things up.)
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The budget proposal included cuts to it, though, and some of the response teams that were in place in the government were cut. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/
And yet that's not what you insinuated. There were no cuts no matter how you characterize it-your source confirms that. Certainly no "reaping" what was "sowed".
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Well sure, but we could say that exact thing about the common flu too. If you're sick enough to go to the doctor and be diagnosed with the flu, there's likely an increased chance of it being fatal (in that your symptoms are extreme or you're already high-risk, ie. elderly or in poor health). Otherwise, like most folks, you just get better on your own in a few days. With the flu killing 10's of thousands every year, a…
A case fatality rate (CFR) is calculated based on confirmed cases. The CFR for the flu[1] or any other disease is roughly based on the number of people who present to the hospital and are diagnosed, with or without serological testing. Therefore, in places with drive-by testing the CFR will be artificially lower. Likewise, using total infected as the denominator makes it a totally useless figure for comparison. Knowi…
This is not true[1]. CDC projects the numbers and estimates total number of cases, because almost all of the actual cases are undiagnosed. So no, COVID-19 is not "more-or-less 10x deadlier" than the common Flu.
Let's be clear. The media frenzy around COVID-19 is not grounded in science, and it purely designed to get panic people, resulting in clicks and eye-balls. Nothing more.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm
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This is just a straw man. No one is suggesting that they test everyone in the US, but at the level that epidemiologists and the WHO says is absolutely necessary to understand and respond to the spread of the disease. That they’re not doing testing at anywhere near the necessary levels, while countries like South Korea are, is not “debatable,” but evidence of their failure. Also your supposition about tracking actual…
It's not a straw man, the spectrum goes from no testing to testing everyone, and _measuring_ "actual cases" accurately (especially after community transmission stage) requires one to be on the latter end of the spectrum. I did say that it's unrealistic to go that far, and you're right that more aggressive testing will obviously lead to better visibility. My point merely was that the rationale for not ramping up testi…
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-06/chaos-at-ho...
If the US isn’t deploying anywhere near the response of countries with demonstrably curbed spreads in places like Seattle and California, what do you think, explicitly, justifies this? You can’t keep appealing to some greater wisdom without providing some concrete example of it.
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That's interesting! Thanks for the link. It only proves my point further. From your link, 34,200 people died from the Flu in the US last year - and not a single person is panicked about those numbers.
> and not a single person is panicked about those numbers. That's for a very obvious reason. If 40 million people in the US get Covid, as with the flu, it will probably kill between 500k and 1m people. That's unlikely to happen based on what we know so far. However if two million people get it, that will kill as many as the flu and produce ~200,000 ICU cases. That's far beyond what the US healthcare system can handle…
This is a greatly, greatly exaggerated number based on incomplete reporting.
We cannot yet estimate the number of unconfirmed COVID-19 cases in the US. In healthy adults, the COVID-19 symptoms are no worse than the flu. The CDC uses projections to estimate the fatality rate of the flu every year, since actual hard stats are impossible to generate. Time will tell, but this so far seems nothing more than a media frenzy.
Does anyone remember the Swine Flu? How about the West Nile Virus? What was the outcome of those media frenzies? How'd it turn out for all the people hoarding toilet paper and water bottles back then?
> It swamps healthcare systems, as we saw so dramatically in China
I don't think it's even remotely relatable to the US healthcare system, and the general health of the US population.
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It's not just Oregon; that's just a number I saw this morning in the local paper, but I suspect it's similar everywhere. The US did not use the advance warning we had to prepare.
Georgia ran 50 tests yesterday. And that's after only 3 positive results so far. All states not equally dysfunctional.
Georgia, with 50 tests/day and 10,000,000 people is at 0.005 per 1K people.
Oregon, with 40 tests/day and 4,200,000 people, is at 0.0095 per 1K people.
Italy, with about 2500 tests/day and about 60,000,000 people, is doing around 0.04 per thousand people. It's about an order of magnitude more.
The point isn't a pissing match between states, it's that the entire US has not responded well so far. Hopefully things ramp up, so that we stop seeing these situations where people get exposed and have no idea what's going on.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-...
I do not know why this is, just that it's not going well so far.