COVID-19 Megathread 5: The Trumps catch COVID-19 (user search)
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  COVID-19 Megathread 5: The Trumps catch COVID-19 (search mode)
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Author Topic: COVID-19 Megathread 5: The Trumps catch COVID-19  (Read 262245 times)
TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« on: April 22, 2020, 12:25:15 AM »

Hasn't it been about a week since NY instated their most stringing requirements, including mandating masks? I see that as having an effect more so than herd immunity at this point.

It depends on what you mean. In the short run, yes masks may be more immediately helpful. But in the long run, it's not enough to get the numbers down unless we completely eradicate the virus. We eventually need to either get the numbers down to effectively zero, or get herd immunity, or else the virus will keep coming back anytime we relax the quarantines at all. NYC area is probably a lot closer to herd immunity than it is to eradication, though obviously the latter is preferable.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #1 on: April 22, 2020, 12:49:42 AM »

Hasn't it been about a week since NY instated their most stringing requirements, including mandating masks? I see that as having an effect more so than herd immunity at this point.

It depends on what you mean. In the short run, yes masks may be more immediately helpful. But in the long run, it's not enough to get the numbers down unless we completely eradicate the virus. We eventually need to either get the numbers down to effectively zero, or get herd immunity, or else the virus will keep coming back anytime we relax the quarantines at all. NYC area is probably a lot closer to herd immunity than it is to eradication, though obviously the latter is preferable.

Or, the government could just do what everyone else is doing and use contact tracing and easy testing to keep the virus under control, and enact local stay at home orders in areas where local outbreaks occur.

You aren't even factoring in heat.

That's assuming we can get the infection down to very very low levels to begin with.  We're not going to be able to contact trace 700k people, much less the number of mild or asymptomatic people. Being able to get into a regime where that's possible is a very good goal -- well beyond just flattening the curve. Ultimately the goal of this is to eradicate the virus (or hold it off from the general population until a vaccine).

This is the best option from the standpoint of saving lives, but means a long haul of quarantines first.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #2 on: April 22, 2020, 03:13:37 PM »

It’s funny how everyone is attacking only GOP governors.
Jared Polis is reopening tattoo parlors and nail salons and has yet to be the target of media outrage. It’s ludicrous.

When do you think such facilities ought to reopen? I certainly agree that they shouldn't be part of "Phase 1", however you wish to define that. Mid or late May perhaps?
I say when daily cases begin to go down to around 100-200 per day on a 5 day average/and we have conducted over 10,000 tests per 1M Statewide (we are extremely close), we can start reopening them with safety precautions.
If by some misfortunate, these two don’t happen by May 20th, I would reopen these facilities anyways.

Obviously it’s different for Colorado than for a larger State.
I also would be perfectly okay with Polis allowing rural counties to have more leeway as long as they have testing capabilities. I just can’t fathom the idea of hair salons reopening in the Denver Metro-area this early. I hope our local officials take some extra measures, but I am not so sure what the tri-county Health department will do at this point.


Here in Oregon we're playing it on the other end of the spectrum. The state can test about 10,000 people per week and we haven't had 100 new cases in a day in several weeks (we're averaging around 50 a day in the last week). About 95% of our tests are coming back negative (one of the highest in the country). And we're still not even considering opening anything for a couple more weeks, probably closer to a month. And it will be a slow multiphase roll out when things are relaxed.

I can totally understand why we're being cautious, but wow it will be a while.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #3 on: May 05, 2020, 04:01:00 PM »

If the task force is disbanded, I don't think we'll ever be free of this pandemic. Not until we have a vaccine, which might never happen; we've never created a vaccine for a coronavirus.

We would have to learn to live with it, although I think it's impractical to expect social distancing, masks, and all the rest to continue indefinitely. Our society eventually acclimatized itself to HIV/AIDS, to give an example of what the path forward might look like if there is no vaccine.

HIV/AIDS is much easier to prevent transmission of. If this coronavirus is truly with us forever, we're looking at an eventual herd immunity scenario as the only realistic ending. Of course that probably means 1-2 million deaths.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #4 on: May 08, 2020, 01:33:38 AM »

Mask wearing will probably be a common thing, it is what stops most asian countries from suffering as badly from the flu, when I used to work at a restaurant a lot of the asian customers would come in wearing masks

It won't be a common thing after vaccines (and/or effective treatments) roll out. I'm worried about the meantime, after we enter the neutral state after the wave is over when we have 100--300 cases per day nationwide. Wearing masks during that period is still hysteria and I won't have it.

The question then will be what we do to stop those 100-300 cases from launching us right back into exponential growth again. Perhaps contact tracing and bans on mass gatherings, actual mass gatherings not a couple hundred people, will be enough, but if wearing masks for a year allows us to open up the country three months earlier it's a small price to pay.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #5 on: May 17, 2020, 12:29:09 AM »

I thought the conclusion was that instead of being reinfected, some people just felt better and had a low enough viral load where they'd get a false negative back.

Which may very well be the case. (And I sincerely hope it is the case!) But these were people the Navy found to both definitively test negative and be well enough to be back on duty. Whether they were re-infected or had a relapse is beside the point. Either way, it runs contrary to the eagerly overconfident rush by amateurs to "you had it and tested negative, now you're 100% immune!"

Fair enough.

Studies have shown some of the tests may have up to the 30% rate of false negatives. False positives are thought to be much rarer, but will obviously exist also. These will probably get better over time as we have more of a chance to tinker around with the testing. But yes, keep in mind that testing negative is not a guarantee of being recovered, especially if someone is still symptomatic.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #6 on: June 02, 2020, 08:09:10 PM »



 these bullsh**t health experts.
Del Tachi was 100% in calling our their absolute fakeness.

I should go to a protest with thousands of people but churches have a strict limit of 25. Huh
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #7 on: June 03, 2020, 12:52:56 PM »

The public health response is what happens when PhD holders in this country are totally captured by and face sanction for failing to adhere to ideological wokeness.

edit: as an example of this, a post showed up in my twitter feed this evening (I will not link it) where a PhD student tried to dogpile one of her colleagues for focusing on planning for a post-COVID department rather than "addressing systematic racism". This is the language of people who stand much more to lose by misaligning their priorities in public than by advocating for the wrong thing.

^
The magnitude of this problem moving forward cannot be underestimated. Besides the obvious result of academia pushing for the wrong policies, another major issue is that this has been eroding, and will further erode, conservative trust in academic institutions. Most liberals on here may not see that as something they should care about, but there will eventually come points where conservatives' views of academia affect liberals also. To many people even on a place like Atlas this may be thought of as something that's been happening for decades, but we've clearly turned a corner in recent years in terms of public opinion:


source

Erosion of bipartisan support for an institution is very often the beginning of a marked decline... I see no reason to think it cannot go much lower.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #8 on: June 06, 2020, 02:26:33 AM »

Thursdays and Fridays have consistently been the worst two days of the week for a while now.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #9 on: July 04, 2020, 05:06:41 PM »

Not sure where you're getting the data about the protests and would like to see information backing that up. Here in Wisconsin, it's an increase among young people as well, but a large percentage traced back to bars, not protests.

Protests are not currently associated with Dane County's rise in COVID-19 cases

Quote
What the data look like today

Here’s a recap of the data from June:

622 people tested positive for COVID-19 in Dane County between June 1 through June 24. For the question "In the 14 days before symptom onset, did you attend a gathering, party, or meeting with people from outside your household":
  •     288 answered "No."
  •     213 answered "Yes", and of those, 12 said they had attended a protest.
  •     6 answered "Unknown."

From June 13 through June 26, 614 people tested positive for COVID-19 in Dane County. Here’s what we know about these cases:
  •     45% of cases interviewed reported attending a gathering or party with people outside of their household.
  •     28% of cases (a total of 172) were associated with a cluster: 132 from bars, 14 from workplaces, 11 from congregate facilities, 3 from daycares/preschools, and 12 from other clusters.

Our data are not showing a large impact from protests at this time. This makes sense when thinking about what protests look like: they are outside, many people are wearing masks, and people are moving and not always near the same people for an extended period of time. With what we know about COVID-19, this activity is going to be less risky than gatherings that are indoors, do not have physical distancing, do not have people wearing masks, and include the same people near each other for extended periods of time.

Were people reporting infections asked directly if they attended a protest? If they were only asked the questions listed and 12 people volunteered that they had attended a protest, then the study isn't designed to address that question.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #10 on: July 05, 2020, 12:16:05 AM »

I think what's probably happening is that the disease is taking off in the early states, only the sickest people got tested, so the median age of people who tested positive was super high. Since society was open when the first outbreaks started, the real infections were probably pretty much evenly distributed across the population. Now, the people getting infected are younger people who feel safe out and about, and since we now have vastly greater testing capabilities, we're picking all of them up; whereas, in NY in March young otherwise healthy people who got the virus would have largely been told to go home and only seek testing/medical care if they needed to go to the hospital.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #11 on: July 18, 2020, 02:00:37 AM »



I'm not going to wish the virus on anyone, but DeSantis (and Brian Kemp) is really pushing that resolve.

Clearly they don't care about the science that says even the healthiest people can have severe symptoms if the viral load they're exposed to is high--such as a gym where everybody's in close contact breathing heavily.

Have we established now that being exposed to more of the virus actually leads to more severe symptoms rather than just a higher probability of contracting it?
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #12 on: July 28, 2020, 10:10:59 AM »


Remaining locked down is not feasible in ANY community where there are enough ICU beds, and this has become obvious to 95%+ of all people. 

No, the point of lockdowns is to bring it down to a low enough level where a mitigation strategy of social distancing, and testing and tracing new cases can work. However, states like Florida stopped the lockdown too early so it didn't actually get to bring case numbers down to a manageable level and did not put in the work of building the infrastructure so that testing and tracing can contain flare-ups. So of course, there is a second spike, and of course then preventable deaths occur.

No, Florida's cases absolutely were at a managable level when they ended the lockdown... they just didn't manage it. Florida was hardly affected by the first wave in the US.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #13 on: July 30, 2020, 12:12:52 AM »

More than one American per minute died of COVID-19 today (and yesterday), and the upwards trend has not stopped going up for daily COVID-19 deaths this week. Sigh.

The number of new cases just started to drop slightly this week. This means we likely have another couple weeks before the deaths start to decrease.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #14 on: August 01, 2020, 12:49:13 AM »

Everything is fine.



You know what the most depressing thing about this is? Every state that is rated green or yellow is a state that already had an extremely severe outbreak and death count or is extremely rural.

No state with a significant population center has been remotely successful at containing this.
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TJ in Oregon
TJ in Cleve
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,952
United States


Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: 6.96

« Reply #15 on: August 02, 2020, 01:08:33 AM »

Florida is such a nightmare right now, and it's obviously about to get much worse. When will it be enough? Is there any point at which DeSantis develops a conscience and do another lockdown (it is so clearly needed)?

It depends on what you mean by worse. In Florida, new cases peaked about two weeks ago and hospitalizations peaked about a week ago. I think we've got another week or two before they hit the peak in deaths though. They could still see some benefits from a lockdown now, but it would be a very strange and disproportionate response considering they didn't do one a month ago when it could have helped a lot more.
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