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

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/

Raw



Per Capita

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1246115770284806148


*New York Has Its Largest Death Toll in a Single Day From Coronavirus, Gov. Cuomo Says

*New York Records 562 Covid-19-Related Deaths in 24 Hours

*Gov. Cuomo to Sign Order Allowing State to Take Unused Ventilators, Masks From Institutions

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

1918 has a message for us:

[Badger]

You've got to wonder what the people who put that article out would feel if they, for just one day, had to do the jobs of the people on board that ship.
I bet they would be adopting a different tune.

I would think the criticism is more directed to whoever is responsible for administrative holdups than to the actual people on the ship. On that note, one might wonder why the Trump administration did not have the ship ready to deploy sooner. After all, there have been literally months to prepare, and it is not exactly a surprise that this might be needed. Is there a reason it could not have been ready and arrived a week (or more) before?

I guarantee you the holdups are administrative and Regulatory rather than the work of the people involved on that ship. I'm proud to say that my uncle actually worked around the clock for the small medical supply business he owns to get the Comfort's two hematology units delivered and installed just before it left Norfolk last week.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Is there any real evidence of a true decline in Italy right now?  766 new deaths reported today, and they’ve been hovering around 700-800 deaths almost every day for the last two weeks, now almost a month into lockdown.

[GP270watch]

Is there any real evidence of a true decline in Italy right now?  766 new deaths reported today, and they’ve been hovering around 700-800 deaths almost every day for the last two weeks, now almost a month into lockdown.

 The fact they're not doubling is seen as a positive. The decay hasn't happened fast enough but the thing people need to guard against before seeing a decline is the rapid doubling of deaths and new cases. New cases is really difficult data to track because it depends on how many test were available, how many test were done, what portion of the population received them. This is why people have been focusing on deaths. And the death count is also muddied by the fact that some places are not counting the deceased from nursing homes or who died at home.

[Badger]

Is there any real evidence of a true decline in Italy right now?  766 new deaths reported today, and they’ve been hovering around 700-800 deaths almost every day for the last two weeks, now almost a month into lockdown.

 The fact they're not doubling is seen as a positive. The decay hasn't happened fast enough but the thing people need to guard against before seeing a decline is the rapid doubling of deaths and new cases. New cases is really difficult data to track because it depends on how many test were available, how many test were done, what portion of the population received them. This is why people have been focusing on deaths. And the death count is also muddied by the fact that some places are not counting the deceased from nursing homes or who died at home.

So not so much a decline as a flattening of the line? Still relatively positive news if true. Emphasis on if, though.

[parochial boy]

Is there any real evidence of a true decline in Italy right now?  766 new deaths reported today, and they’ve been hovering around 700-800 deaths almost every day for the last two weeks, now almost a month into lockdown.

New cases flatlined for a about a week before showing some signs of a decline, you expect deaths to do something similar 10 or so days later - and there is a general downward trend.

But even if you don't trust the data on new cases, there is other stuff that shows relatively positive signs. For example, 10 days ago, the number of people hospitalised was going up by around 1'500 a day; and now it's going up by around 150 a days. At the same time, the number of people in intensive care was going up by around 200 a day, now it's about 10-15 a day. That is a definite sign of progress, and gives hope that at some point in the next few days those numbers might even start to decline, which would be a massive win in the context.

[GP270watch]

Is there any real evidence of a true decline in Italy right now?  766 new deaths reported today, and they’ve been hovering around 700-800 deaths almost every day for the last two weeks, now almost a month into lockdown.

 The fact they're not doubling is seen as a positive. The decay hasn't happened fast enough but the thing people need to guard against before seeing a decline is the rapid doubling of deaths and new cases. New cases is really difficult data to track because it depends on how many test were available, how many test were done, what portion of the population received them. This is why people have been focusing on deaths. And the death count is also muddied by the fact that some places are not counting the deceased from nursing homes or who died at home.

So not so much a decline as a flattening of the line? Still relatively positive news if true. Emphasis on if, though.

 There record high of deaths is 919, so there has been a decline. But the decline is not going to be down every single day. There will be jumps on some days. The fact they are not doubling is the first part of the battle. The worst part of a pandemic is the exponential growth. If there was an exponential growth in cases, one would expect to see more deaths.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Google has interesting reports showing how people in different areas are moving around less (to varying degrees) in different countries and also different US states. This may provide some interesting information as to which countries/states have more effective social distancing.

https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/

https://www.blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-community-mobility-reports

Examples:

Italy

-94% Retail & recreation
-85% Grocery & pharmacy
-90% Parks
-87% Transit stations
-63% Workplaces
+24% Residential

USA

-45% Retail & recreation
-23% Grocery & pharmacy
-27% Parks
-47% Transit stations
-36% Workplaces
+13% Residential

Most European countries seem to be somewhere between USA and Italy, to varying degrees.

So from this you can see that, at least so far, USA has a lot less social distancing going on than Italy. Some states are a bit more than others in USA, but even CA and NY don't seem to be anywhere like on the level that Italy is.

California

-50% Retail & recreation
-24% Grocery & pharmacy
-38% Parks
-54% Transit stations
-39% Workplaces
+15% Residential

New York

-62% Retail & recreation
-32% Grocery & pharmacy
-47% Parks
-68% Transit stations
-46% Workplaces
+16% Residential

So insofar as this is accurate, I would expect the epidemic curve in the USA to slow down a lot less than it has in Italy, unless we start doing more in the USA than we are doing now...

A bit weirdly though, it doesn't really seem to be much less in states like Florida/Georgia that were slower on official social distancing measures (at least on the statewide level). That may mean that personal behavior and local measures in the more populous areas may have been somewhat more important so far than statewide stay at home orders. For example:

Georgia:

-42% Retail & recreation
-17% Grocery & pharmacy
-2% Parks
-52% Transit stations
-37% Workplaces
+11% Residential

Florida:

-50% Retail & recreation
-26% Grocery & pharmacy
-48% Parks
-63% Transit stations
-41% Workplaces
+13% Residential

Overall though, if we want to have similar results to Italy, we probably need to get a lot tougher about actually enforcing and tightening up stay at home orders in the USA. Otherwise we are going to continue to have a bigger epidemic curve.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/global-battle-coronavirus-equipment-masks-tests
US hijacking mask shipments in rush for coronavirus protection
Fears of shortages are driving many countries to take increasingly devious measures to secure masks and tests

US buyers waving wads of cash managed to wrest control of a consignment of masks as it was about to be dispatched from China to one of the worst-hit coronavirus areas of France, according to two French officials.

The masks were on a plane at Shanghai airport that was ready to take off when the US buyers turned up and offered three times what their French counterparts were paying.

Jean Rottner, a doctor and president of the GrandEst regional council, said part of the order of several million masks heading for the region, where intensive care units are inundated with Covid-19 patients, had been lost to the buyers.

“On the tarmac, they arrive, get the cash out … so we really have to fight,” he told RTL radio.

Rottner would not identify the buyers, who they were working for or which US state the cargo was flown to, but another French official also involved in procuring masks from China said the group were acting for the US government.

“The icing on the cake, there is a foreign country that paid three times the price of the cargo on the tarmac,” Rénaud Muselier, the head of the south-eastern Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, told the French channel, BFMTV. The Guardian has contacted the US state department for comment.

At a press conference in Brazil on Wednesday, the health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, said recent attempts by Brasília to purchase protection gear such as gloves and masks from China had fallen through.

“Today the US sent 23 of their biggest cargo planes to China to pick up the material they had acquired. Many of our purchases, which we had hoped to confirm in order to supply [our health system], fell through,” he said. “The whole world wants [these things] too. There is a problem of hyper-demand.”

America First, goddammit.

[GP270watch]

 Let's not forget that in many states people drive and their interaction is limited compared to cities where people walk and share streets and buildings. I live in a suburb in Florida. My interaction of going into my garage, car, large shopping center, drive-thru for drugs or food is much different than when I lived in NYC in an apartment and had to share an elevator, walk the street with others, enter small bodega, physically enter a restaurant or have food delivered, and physically enter a drug store and wait in line. Just the number of interactions with others in those two scenarios is vastly different and pandemics are a math problem before they're a health problem..

 You've seen Texas and Florida(for now) grow slower despite not having real statewide protective measure until recently. California had early protections but is also very car centric.

[Virginiá]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/florida-unemployment-benefits-desantis-trump-rick-scott.html

As a result, businesses in Florida pay an average yearly unemployment-insurance tax of $50 per employee — the lowest rate in the country, and less than one-fifth of the national average.

Another result of Scott’s changes: Florida is completely unequipped to process the deluge of unemployment-insurance claims that the coronavirus pandemic has set off.

The state’s website for filing claims is routinely crashing. When and if a laid-off Floridian can actually get her application through, she faces a high risk of being denied benefits for failing to meet Scott’s onerous eligibility requirements. And even those who do successfully get aid will receive only $275 a week in state benefits. The economic relief package that Congress passed last week will up that benefit by $600, and extend the duration of unemployment benefits for 13 weeks. But for unemployed Floridians, that extra 13 weeks still leaves them with less than the standard benefit length of 26 weeks; meanwhile, workers in Montana will be eligible for up to 41 weeks of unemployment benefits.

“It’s a sh– sandwich, and it was designed that way by Scott,” said one DeSantis advisor. “It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.”

DeSantis is scrambling to repair the system his party sabotaged, ordering the development of a new mobile app for accessing benefits and deploying hundreds of state workers to help applicants enroll. As of this writing though, nothing significant has been down to increase the generosity of the state’s unemployment benefits.

Who knew designing an unemployment benefits system so badly on purpose (to significantly minimize the number of people who could manage to collect) could have such catastrophic consequences in a pandemic?

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-plans-to-pay-hospitals-to-treat-uninsured-coronavirus-patients-11585927877
WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE: Trump Administration Plans to Pay Hospitals to Treat Uninsured Coronavirus Patients
Hospitals would have to agree not to bill patients or issue unexpected charges

The Trump administration is expected to use a federal stimulus package to pay hospitals that treat uninsured people with the new coronavirus as long as they agree not to bill the patients or issue unexpected charges, according to two people familiar with the planning.

The plan, which could be released Friday, comes as the White House faces mounting criticism for not launching a special enrollment period for people seeking coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Congressional Democrats also are pressuring the administration and insurers to waive treatment costs for the growing number of Americans who are losing employer-provided health coverage as job losses mount.

Hospitals treating the uninsured often bill patients for the difference between the amount they get from the government and the cost of care. The uninsured also may get bills for care provided by doctors who aren’t directly employed by the hospital. Both would be barred under the administration proposal, and hospitals would likely be reimbursed at current Medicare rates, people familiar with the planning said.

Hospitals are eager to get funding and administration officials are working now to determine how the money will be divided, according to one of the people familiar with the planning. It will go toward revenue assistance, covering the costs of the uninsured, and the needs of hospitals. For example, needs may be higher for hospitals in hotspots hard-hit by the pandemic.

Hospitals, which typically bear the brunt of costs for uncompensated care, have been bracing for an influx of patients. Hospitals of all types provided more than $38 billion in uncompensated care in 2017, according to the American Hospital Association.

A 1918-like pandemic would cause U.S. hospitals to absorb a net loss of $3.9 billion, or an average $784,592 per hospital, according to a 2007 report in the Journal of Health Care Finance that called on policy makers to consider contingencies to ensure hospitals don’t become insolvent as a result of a severe pandemic.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

This should have been done a long timo ago, but at least this seems to be good policy the POTUS is planning to put in place? Here's to hoping he doesn't change his mind.

[GP270watch]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/florida-unemployment-benefits-desantis-trump-rick-scott.html

As a result, businesses in Florida pay an average yearly unemployment-insurance tax of $50 per employee — the lowest rate in the country, and less than one-fifth of the national average.

Another result of Scott’s changes: Florida is completely unequipped to process the deluge of unemployment-insurance claims that the coronavirus pandemic has set off.

The state’s website for filing claims is routinely crashing. When and if a laid-off Floridian can actually get her application through, she faces a high risk of being denied benefits for failing to meet Scott’s onerous eligibility requirements. And even those who do successfully get aid will receive only $275 a week in state benefits. The economic relief package that Congress passed last week will up that benefit by $600, and extend the duration of unemployment benefits for 13 weeks. But for unemployed Floridians, that extra 13 weeks still leaves them with less than the standard benefit length of 26 weeks; meanwhile, workers in Montana will be eligible for up to 41 weeks of unemployment benefits.

“It’s a sh– sandwich, and it was designed that way by Scott,” said one DeSantis advisor. “It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.”

DeSantis is scrambling to repair the system his party sabotaged, ordering the development of a new mobile app for accessing benefits and deploying hundreds of state workers to help applicants enroll. As of this writing though, nothing significant has been down to increase the generosity of the state’s unemployment benefits.

Who knew designing an unemployment benefits system so badly on purpose (to significantly minimize the number of people who could manage to collect) could have such catastrophic consequences in a pandemic?

 I posted about this when Russian Troll was bragging about Red states unemployment benefits health. Florida has a purposely cruel and broken unemployment system. Which is very cruel because unemployment isn't welfare, it's social insurance that you pay for and most people pay and pay for years and never use it.

 I know friends who were fired legitimately and had to appeal their denial because employers and the state have rigged a system of automatically denying benefits. DeSantis has done nothing to fix this. He's only doing so now because many more Floridians will realize just how badly they're getting screwed.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1246133172443717632

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

https://twitter.com/Emily_Baum/status/1245875443309228032

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

Per capita, April 2 end of day:

Number of cases:
60% Blue: 10 - 15 per 100k
40% Blue: 15 - 20 per 100k
30% Blue: 20 - 30 per 100k
30% Red: 30 - 40 per 100k
40% Red: 40 - 50 per 100k
50% Red: 10 - 75 per 100K
60% Red: 75 - 100 per 100k
80% Red: 100 - 250 per 100k
90% Red: 250+ per 100k

Per capita heat map, as of April 1 end of day:

Number of cases:
90% Blue: < 10 per 100k
60% Blue: 10 - 15 per 100k
40% Blue: 15 - 20 per 100k
30% Blue: 20 - 30 per 100k
30% Red: 30 - 40 per 100k
40% Red: 40 - 50 per 100k
50% Red: 10 - 75 per 100K
60% Red: 75 - 100 per 100k
80% Red: 100 - 250 per 100k
90% Red: 250+ per 100k

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

https://twitter.com/Emily_Baum/status/1245875443309228032

Muh wasteful government spending.

[Virginiá]

New thread: https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=367850.0