This is a small sample but both my kids work in a lab that does testing. They have not seen a decrease in testing.
I can’t find any statistics beyond that.
91-divoc has has selections for visualizing tests and vaccinations now. In my state, the trend in new tests per day is up, but with a recent dip.
What a handy site, thank you.
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/states.html
So this shows NJ is testing at roughly the same rate.
If testing is the same and number of cases is down, that is good news.
The decrease in testing was mentioned in the New York Times weekend briefing email today (link may use one of your free articles). For some reason I can’t link directly to article but there is a text link in the summary.
MISSION, Kan. (AP) — Mortuary owner Brian Simmons has been making more trips to homes to pick up bodies to be cremated and embalmed since the pandemic hit.
With COVID-19 devastating communities in Missouri, his two-person crews regularly arrive at homes in the Springfield area and remove bodies of people who decided to die at home rather than spend their final days in a nursing home or hospital where family visitations were prohibited during the pandemic.
He understands all too well why people are choosing to die at home: His own 49-year-old daughter succumbed to the coronavirus just before Christmas at a Springfield hospital, where the family only got phone updates as her condition deteriorated.
“The separation part is really rough, rough rough,” said Simmons. “My daughter went to the hospital and we saw her once through the glass when they put her on the ventilator, and then we never saw her again until after she died.”
Across the country, terminally ill patients — both with COVID-19 and other diseases — are making similar decisions and dying at home rather than face the terrifying scenario of saying farewell to loved ones behind glass or during video calls.
…
106,686,852 total cases
2,327,308 dead
78,378,631 recovered
In the US:
27,611,403 total cases
474,933 dead
17,354,388 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
[quote=“Snowboarder_Bo, post:459, topic:929428, full:true”]
106,348,262 total cases
2,320,591 dead
77,984,514 recovered
In the US:
27,519,636 total cases
473,528 dead
17,268,517 recovered[/quote]
The positivity rate is often used as a way to check that; if you are testing fewer, but the % positive is going up, it’s a change in testing, not cases, If you are testing fewer and the % positive stays the same or goes down, fewer people are testing because fewer people have COVID.
I feel like Texas is in this trap. Cases are down (yay!). Deaths are way up. However. that gets handwaved away because it’s obviously the result of the high case counts we had 3 weeks ago. But when/if case counts start to rise again, people will point at the then-dropping death rate as evidence that it’s not really that bad.
IOW … In any bucking bronco see-saw event like this, folks who’re determined to cherry pick can find something in the stats to bolster their case. No matter how much wishful thinking or outright malfeasance that takes.
Speaking of Texas:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/08/politics/ron-wright-congressman-dies/index.html
He is the first sitting member of Congress to die of Covid.
I suspect COVID is forcing a lot of people between age 50 and 100 to rethink their non-plan about getting sick and dying.
Hospice care and advance directives are suddenly becoming thinkable for a lot of people who heretofore had assumed they’d live forever and/or die in their sleep after an ordinary day capped off by a fine meal.
Those are BS assumptions for almost everyone. if COVID injects some realism & clarity into the end-of-life planning of at least 1 or 2 generations of Americans it’ll have done some good along with the huge amount of bad.
Mutations may be becoming a problem (bolding mine):
107,007,730 total cases
2,336,337 dead
78,851,588 recovered
In the US:
27,700,629 total cases
476,405 dead
17,512,584 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Fuck.
I’m not sure it’ll mean much in the end, practically. Even if this fact causes 2020-levels of infection to go rampant again, I’m not at all sure that it’ll cause any nation (except maybe New Zealand and Singapore) to close down to prevent wide spread. People are done at this point, national treasuries are strained to the limit. I don’t think many countries will be able to establish lockdowns or widespread restrictions at this point.
Hopefully there will be other factors with the vaccines that’ll keep the levels of disease and death below 2020 levels.
From teh article cited by Bo a couple posts ago …
Manaus is a city proper of about 2.2 million people and an urban region of about 2.7 million people. It’s not some podunk backwater. Think Detroit or Cleveland in the USA and you’ve got a similar scale.
Three fourths of the residents have had COVID. Wow. Just wow!
Or not. This is the study. They used a sample of blood donors from June and found that 44% of them had antibodies to COVID, and then estimated the actual attack rate as 66% on the assumption that not everyone who has had the virus has detectable antibodies, and added another 10% to account for people who had been infected after June. It seems plausible that they could have been wrong in these assumptions, or that blood donors are more likely than the general public to have been infected. (I’m guessing if you’re being very personally cautious, you probably don’t volunteer to donate blood in the middle of a pandemic.)
I don’t disagree, but I think this analysis fails to consider that an open economy is ALSO severly compromised by a population that is ill (of whom a subset are hospitalized, of whom a subset die within a short period; another subset becomes chronically ill).
What I’d like to see is someone really run the numbers here. Given what we know, what are the economic costs of full opening, partial opening, full closure, etc.? No matter your standing on health vs wealth, at some point choices have to be made.
The only arguments I’ve seen so far are about flattening the curve to prevent the collapse of the medical system, but even here, while we’ve had collapses in Brazil that are limited in scope, and what looks like near-collapse in various parts of the US, I’ve seen no real cold, calculating cost-benefit analyses. Just a lot of people with beliefs and agendas.
My guess is that the disease ultimately costs more when spreading in a fully open economy than when contained in an economy that has been shut down in the short term, but I’d really like to see an informed argument either way.
True, shutdown is probably better for public health. But I was thinking more about what’s going to happen, not what should happen. I don’t think there’s much way major restrictions get reimposed on most of the world, even if it should.
107,411,435 total cases
2,351,192 dead
79,322,447 recovered
In the US:
27,799,946 total cases
479,772 dead
17,639,217 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison: