COVID-19 Megathread 3: Third time's a charm

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

China has 1.4 billion people, most of whom are crammed into an area the size of the Atlantic-Mississippi. The number of infected and risk of transmission both far exceeded what the US will likely see. The politics are different for sure, but the country has begun to open back up and normalcy has slowly returned for most Chinese cities.

Yes, after two months of lockdown, most of which featured very aggressive testing, social tracing, and quarantining.

There is no question the virus has spread across the US, but this is not news. A bunch of angry red dots on the map say nothing about the prognosis for the country and nor does a comprehensive spread preclude a recovery. Suggesting millions of people might die because the virus is in every state is irresponsible and alarmist.

You realize that many metro hospitals are currently operating at or near capacity and that the virus is still spreading into rural areas with understaffed and under-resourced health care... right?

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I think the worst aspect of this is nobody can say how long it takes and how it ends. My biggest fear is that we will reach a point where it's either total economic crash through ongoing lockdowns in an effort to keep the numbers down, or basically "sacrifice" those who don't recover by themselves. Would be a terrible, terrible choice to make. We need vaccine as fast as possible.

Keeping the country/world shut down into the middle of next year when a vaccine will be ready is just not a viable option. The people in leadership need to view that as unacceptable and figure something else out.

The obstacle to ending a lockdown is lack of testing. If you reopen public spaces (including restaurants, non-essential stores, etc.) without any idea who may have the virus, it's just going to spread through the public again.

We should end shut downs when the following are in place:

1) Massive testing capabilities - know who has the virus
2) Trace any people who have contact with an infected person - prioritize testing these people
3) Quarantine anybody who has tested positive - lower their rate of transmission

That way people who aren't infected can freely and safely interact with people who won't infect them. One of the advantages of keeping shelters in place in the meanwhile is it lowers the number of infected individuals who will need to be quarantined when testing is available, and consequently means more people will be able to resume some semblance of normal life.

Also I don't really know why Mr. Reactionary is posting in this thread and why people are engaging with him. Honestly he is acting as hysterically if not more than most people concerned about the virus. People should just ignore him. He's either here to get a rise or to cosplay a liberterrorist. That's just not interesting to me and would like it if people did me a solid and stopped indulging him.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

for the fans of testing and not lock down
in US you are around 330 millions, to 2 tests a week, are 660 millions of tests a week at 30 $ each are around 20 billion at week,
ever if there is a capability to do 100 million of tests a day...

IDK what the max. capability for testing is, but:

1) This is an argument for why the "reemergence" phase after social distancing should be slow - slow the demand for tests. If you let people re-enter public spaces slowly then you have fewer tests to give and, for the people you are testing, you (at first) have high confidence that they won't be infected.
2) Do targeted testing (related to point 1, because targeted testing is easier if the number of people re-entering public spaces at a given time is small). You are also more likely to catch positive cases if you use a branching test policy ("breadth-first search" if you're into algorithms) where you test people in contact with confirmed cases. You can use some clever sampling to try to get the highest yield of positive cases if you are facing a shortage of tests.

I also wonder if, as the number of positive cases grows, the number of recovered (and therefore plausibly immune) people would grow reducing the number of people that would need to be tested. Likewise if people under a certain age are less likely to acquire the virus then they also wouldn't need testing.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The alarmist report from Imperial College has been revised way down.  20,000 dead in UK is their newest prediction, down for hundreds of thousands.

Because of the steps that have been taken.

UK imposed a lockdown 2 days ago...

Dawg, the author himself acknowledged that it was due to the social controls (which many people and localities adopted before the lockdown)

https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294819952230402

Even the original study acknowledged that with social control and low-enough transmission that only 20K cases was plausible.



(h/t this tweet: https://twitter.com/zackbeauchamp/status/1243260980999708672/photo/1)

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/1243668002949730310?s=21

That should go over well with the voters in Michigan.

Withholding federal assistance because the recipient wouldn't do him a personal favor is literally what he was impeached for.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

We are going into a recession and car sales are plummeting. Getting DPAed is probably the best thing that could have happened for GM, because now they can at least make something and have a sure buyer for it. Even if they end up not being needed, then we will have them on hand.

One would think these ventilators would be new and state of the art models. If they can't be sold internationally surely either the fed could purchase them to replenish decade-old ventilators in the stockpile or, if they have enough money, privately run hospitals could do the same.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Survey shows that economists think that loosening lockdowns before the virus is contained will lead to more economic damage than the lockdowns themselves.

Question B: Abandoning severe lockdowns at a time when the likelihood of a resurgence in infections remains high will lead to greater total economic damage than sustaining the lockdowns to eliminate the resurgence risk.

Strongly agree: 41%
Agree: 39%
Uncertain: 14%
Disagree: 0%
Strongly disagree: 0%
No opinion: 0%

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/JohnPrineMusic/status/1244374068226293761

John Prine is in critical condition with CoViD.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

For what it's worth, the number of new U.S. cases on Worldometer dropped today, and is less than what it was even 2 days ago.

Even using a 2-day rolling total, it's dropped for the first time since at least March 3, maybe earlier.

Less testing today.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1244388003780235264

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Estimates Show Wuhan Death Toll Far Higher Than Official Figure - Radio Free Asia

As authorities lifted a two-month coronavirus lockdown in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, residents said they were growing increasingly skeptical that the figure of some 2,500 deaths in the city to date was accurate.

Since the start of the week, seven large funeral homes in Wuhan have been handing out the cremated remains of around 500 people to their families every day, suggesting that far more people died than ever made the official statistics.

"It can't be right ... because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?" an Wuhan resident surnamed Zhang told RFA on Friday.

Coarse estimates based on the distribution of cremated remains from seven funeral homes have deaths in Wuhan between 42,000 and 46,000.

There is no reason to believe the official Chinese death counts.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The latest talking point from the Trumpists seems to be that impeachment kept the government from paying attention to the developing pandemic.  Apart from the fact that this implies that (a) unrelated agencies like the CDC were also consumed by impeachment, which makes no sense, and/or (b) that the executive branch can't do two things at once (either false or demonstrates disqualifying incompetence), here are a few dates:

https://twitter.com/4everNeverTrump/status/1244736442565197824

The President could have also avoided spending time on defending himself from removal from office if he didn't commit impeachable offenses.

"Trump was too distracted paying the consequences for his prior mistakes to handle the coronavirus" isn't the own that conservatives think it is.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Whole Foods workers are going on a nationwide strike today to protest the lack of security measures against the Coronavirus. It’s the first time there’s been a nationwide protest against the company since 1980 and the first since it was bought by Amazon.

Whole Foods workers will call in sick tomorrow to demand paid medical leave for employees who are in self-quarantine, free testing for employees, and hazard pay of twice the current hourly wage for those who report to work during the pandemic. As part of Amazon, workers at the grocery giant also received a $2 per hour increase, but are demanding a raise of twice that amount given the risks involved in being on the frontlines.

I urge you all to spread the word about this to support these strikers, and I urge you and your own social groups to please be respectful to these workers and not cross the picket line by purchasing from either Amazon nor Whole Foods.

Thanks for the tip. I will be placing an Amazon order tomorrow in solidarity with the company.

We are all very impressed.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The updated numbers for COVID-19 in the U.S. are in for 4/1 per: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

I'll be keeping track of these updates daily and updating at the end of the day, whenever all states finish reporting for that day. The percentages represent the daily increase from the last report.

3/26:

• Cases: 85,390
• Deaths: ±1,200

3/27:

• Cases: 103,798 (+18,408 | ↑21.56%)
• Deaths: 1,693 (+493 | ↑41.03%)

3/28:

• Cases: 123,428 (+19,630 | ↑18.91%)
• Deaths: 2,211 (+518 | ↑30.60%)

3/29:

• Cases: 142,178 (+18,750 | ↑15.20%)
• Deaths: 2,484 (+273 | ↑12.35%)

3/30:

• Cases: 163,490 (+21,312 | ↑14.99%)
• Deaths: 3,148 (+664 | ↑26.73%)

3/31 (Yesterday):

• Cases: 187,917 (+24,427 | ↑14.94%)
• Deaths: 3,867 (+749 | ↑22.84%)

4/1 (Today):

• Cases: 215,003 (+27,086 | ↑14.41%)
• Deaths: 5,102 (+1,235 | ↑31.94%)

Yet another day that the percentage increase was less than the day before.  I think there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic that we'll be over the worst of this sooner than many of y'all do.

Trends in the number of confirmed cases isn't incredibly informative because it's confounded by the number of tests, and we know we're running up against the limits of how much testing we can do right now.

A better (although still biased) metric is the number of deaths. Still imperfect because there are people who may die and won't get tested retroactively but it's still less susceptible to shortcomings in testing capability.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I wish that were true, but unfortunately the decrease is more likely an artifact of a testing bottleneck, as shown by:

https://twitter.com/COVID19Tracking/status/1245465267028684802

I usually look at a rolling average of new cases over the past 2 or 3 days. It's not good now, but things were many times worse around March 17-19.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but if the lag in testing lasts for more than 2-3 days then the rolling average will still be biased-low.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1245852517474295809

This is outrageous for a number of reasons but this is probably the type of stuff WH advisors have been saying the entire time and Kushner is the only one there dumb enough to say it in front of cameras.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

This is outrageous for a number of reasons but this is probably the type of stuff WH advisors have been saying the entire time and Kushner is the only one there dumb enough to say it in front of cameras.

What Jared said was there were examples where the States had no idea about their inventory levels, and that he had asked them to have their data on:

1. Inventory of Respirators/Ventilators.
2. Current patient use.
3. Anticipated patient use.

before requesting these items.

He went on to say that some states who had very few COVID-19 patients were asking for 100 ventilators just to be safe.

Whereas other states had a direct need right now, and the Federal Government would send the ventilators were required based on ranking of requirement. That was something each state could not determine.

And after that conversation, your comment came out.

Ventilator shortages are imminent in a number of states, and the number of cases is going to increase (possibly dramatically) in all fifty states. Of course states are going to be requesting extras in a case of extreme shortages.

Even still the statement in the tweet shows Kushner's sentiment as well as prior statements by Trump make it clear they think it's not their responsibility to grant states the rights to use federal hospital resources, which is... crazy. The federal stockpile exists for a reason. It's much easier (and wieldy in a smaller-scale crisis) for the federal government to have a stockpile which distributes supplies to the states than it is for each individual state to have its own stockpile; this is why the federal stockpile exists in the first place.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Here is some important context, isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert



2016 USDA map. According to the Medley Food Desert Project,[6] nearly 24 million Americans live in food deserts. Food deserts are heavily concentrated in southern states, which correlates with concentration of poverty. The map presents percentages of people without cars living in areas with no supermarket within a mile.

You can complain that there are so much poor people in US/these states (it's a tragedy) and that the [southern] states didn't fix that, but you can't complain that these people didn't stop "travel more than 2 miles". They doesn't have that privilege.

I know that this map has been used for weaponized outrage but I don't think it's nearly as compelling as most people. The highest density of food deserts are in the Black Belt and Appalachia, but even those regions don't make up the entirety of those states. In the first map, you see that nearly all of the non-urban/suburban parts of states which have been slow to adopt policies are highlighted in red.

Western North Carolina, Oklahoma outside of Little Dixie, Northern Georgia, NE/Central Florida, East Texas... all of these areas are showing up as low-density for food deserts but still having transit. Meanwhile if you move outside the rural south there are still plenty of food deserts and they don't correspond very well to areas which still have public movement. Even if you look in WV/KY you'll see WV is mostly food deserts but has mostly been staying home while KY has movement in Central/West plains and no movement where there are higher densities of food deserts than in the Eastern part.

I've seen people like Chris Arnade (yes, I know his book is in my signature and yes, despite that I think his Twitter persona is toxic) and Sarah Taber use this to "coastal elite"-shame people who post this map and call it racist (?) but that's a pretty tenuous case to me.