Puts up hand.
I had chicken pox twice.
The second time, I said to my dad and the family doctor that I’d already had chicken pox, a few years before. They didn’t seem inclined to believe me until I pointed out a pox scar on my forehead. Then they said, “Oh right, Hmm. Odd.”
A growing concern: pandemic fatigue. We all know what that is.
… “People are done putting hearts on their windows and teddy bears out for scavenger hunts,” said Katie Rosenberg, the mayor of Wausau, Wis., a city of 38,000 where a hospital has opened an extra unit to treat Covid-19 patients. “They have had enough.”
…“Citizens have made huge sacrifices,” said Dr. Hans Kluge, the W.H.O.’s regional director for Europe. “It has come at an extraordinary cost, which has exhausted all of us, regardless of where we live, or what we do.”
…“In the spring, it was fear and a sense of, ‘We are all in it together,’” said Vaile Wright, a psychologist at the American Psychological Association who studies stress in the United States.
“Things are different now,” she said. “Fear has really been replaced with fatigue.”
…“The scary scenario is the number of patients who really just don’t know where they got it,” Dr. Landrum said. “That suggests to me that it’s out there spreading very easily.”
The challenge ahead, he said, would be convincing people that they need to take significant steps — all over again — to slow down spread that could be even worse than before.
…
A city in China locked down and tested 10 million people because of just 13 cases. Ten million tests in a few days seems like a lot. City In China Tests 10 Million People After 13 COVID-19 Cases Are Found : Coronavirus Updates : NPR
China is able to impose much more severe measures to prevent outbreak, partially because it’s more tolerated by the people there, partially because they don’t have to worry about electoral consequences. From reading on another forum about what someone in China went through during the spring, I feel it’s reasonable to believe that China was able to stomp it out simply because it eventually noticed that it was a real problem and took the measures necessary. Once you go through a harsh long-enough lockdown and kill almost all community transmission, you can track the few remaining people coming in and maybe a little community spread. What they did in China is simply not possible much of anywhere else, and is the one “good” thing about an extremely authoritarian government not subject to removal at the ballot box.
Report that the severity of symptoms can be predicted based on the relative amounts of two cytokines in the patient’s blood: IL-6 and IL-10. The first promotes inflamation and the second inhibits it. Based on the change of the ratio of these molecules over the first 4 days, which gives a score called the Dublin-Boston score, doctors can predict how severe the case is likely to be.
I tend to think that it’s harder to hide such things in this day and age than some seem to believe. One could, of course, take the approach some countries have and not look exhaustively for something that is apparently not there, but I’m not sure there is evidence of that happening in China, either.
I found this recent study fascinating. It explores a hypothesis that the virus spread, during an outbreak in Guangzhou, via fecal matter through a hole in a sewer pipe, carried by floodwaters to adjacent buildings, then brought inside apartments on shoes and bicycle tires.
The whole thing makes for a gripping read. But to address the question raised here, it may be illustrative to consider the approach they took in handling the outbreak.
For the index cases in this particular study, a woman and her husband, once they had positive tests confirmed the Guangzhou CDC immediately tested 2500+ people in the couple’s neighborhood. Then they rounded up all 212 residents of the couple’s apartment building and the immediately adjacent ones and took them to a central hotel for quarantine, where they gave them a rectal swab and followed up every two or three days with throat swabs. They each got a single-occupancy room and weren’t allowed to leave it. If they tested clean for 14 days they could go home. Meanwhile, they went through their apartments and swabbed everything for testing, before a deep clean.
It’s the kind of thing that you can’t imagine being accepted, voluntarily, in the United States. But it’s also something that the Chinese government doesn’t seem to care to hide. I am sure there are countless studies along these lines that are freely available for all to view. Maybe it’s anyone’s best guess what happens in the Chinese countryside, but I’m not sure a lot of secrets exist in the big cities.
The study:
39,959,269 total cases
1,114,633 dead
29,888,584 recovered
In the US:
8,342,665 total cases
224,282 dead
5,432,192 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Hey @Snowboarder_Bo,
You started this thread on February 10; that’s just over eight months of you putting up the numbers every night.
That’s an impressive accomplishment, showing dedication to keeping your fellow Dopers informed, and creating an historical record.
THANK YOU!
Not really, when you take into account the sheer size of populations here. I spent a year in a city of approximately five million people in the urban area. In China, that is considered a small town. All local governments throughout the country have access to testing, IIRC. Here in Beijing (population north of 21 million), before schools could open their campuses in May, everyone attendiing or working on campus had to get tested. Back in June there was one cluster of 45 infections connected to one market in Beijing but those infected showed no symptoms. The city shut down all the schools and canceled tourist and sports events. School was online for the rest of the semester.
Government here and the population are taking this seriously and doing what is required. People have died doing what is needed. Those are nurses, doctors, and even food delivery workers who got infected doing their jobs. The only people I know who call this pandemic “plandemic” or “hoax” are foreigners and they show me the excellent caliber of their stupidity by doing so.
I thought the question related to the number of tests, not their capacity to do them. Ten million tests seems plausible, especially if their national approach is to handle it as Say Two described, and they have geared up that specific capacity. The US, with all its problems, has managed a million per day. In fact, just checking Worldometers, US is 20th in per capita testing versus China’s 77th spot. The Faeroe Islands still leads the table. MFIGA.
Huh? I can’t recall anyone ever pointing to India’s flu mortality rates for any reason, and if I ran across it, I would take it with a grain of salt.
I mean, maybe someone somewhere does that, but has India’s flu mortality ever been discussed in the general news in the US? Not that I’ve ever noticed.
As the main focus of U.S. general media discussion, not too often (sometimes in pandemic years), but it is implicit in the expectations experts and others have had for what COVID-19 would result in, both there, and in Africa where there has been much less impact than most had been expecting: knowledge of what influenza usually results in there both in usual seasonal years and in pandemic ones.
The thought early on was pretty much that COVID-19 is X much deadlier than the flu is, Y is how many flu kills there, so start off with X times Y as the expectation. Worries based on the size of the population so was initially expected to be a big driver of worldwide death numbers. Instead, relative to what had been feared, to what would have been if this bug behaved like influenza does, hardly any.
Has anyone been paying attention to the Dakotas? Their numbers are staggering. North Dakota jumped to the top of cases per million in the US and South Dakota isn’t far behind. Cases are still rising in both states. The test positivity rate in South Dakota was above 20% for weeks, then it jumped up to 35%!
South Dakota’s deaths per million per day are bad but not too bad at around 5, but North Dakota has been at over 10 deaths per million for over a week. These low density states should not be having numbers this big!
Sturgis.
Paid attention to some yes.
I wonder how many counties are left in the US that have been relatively spared.
It should also be noted that it is regional: Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Nebraska … that whole group of more rural Western states have had per capita case rates surge dramatically since the beginning of September, minimally tripling, pretty much in lock step, now all well above the U.S. norm. True though that North Dakota is exceptional especially in death rates. The others mostly still have death rates lower than the U.S. average and very low CFRs.
Is the whole region’s rise due to Sturgis? It may be.
More on the South Dakota.
/bow
Thank you for the kind words.
Hawaii started letting in tourists again this past Thursday. My advice is do not come here. Too many of the locals are not yet all that happy to see you again regardless of the crashing economy. There is a convoluted system of Covid checking. In most cases, it seems you must have a test before you come, then promise to have another one after you arrive. Some of the islands still have their own restrictions. I think you still have to quarantine for two weeks on the Big Island. I don’t think anyone is checking to see if you do get that follow-up test. Many of the new arrivals here did not get tested beforehand but were allowed in anyway, with the state saying there will be a period of leniency. All seems a mess.