I don’t think it’s going to go very well. A facebook friend posted this:
The statisticians are going to have to update their model if this is the kind of stuff that’s going on from the start.
Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have sought to change, delay and prevent the release of reports about the coronavirus by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because they were viewed as undermining President Trump’s message that the pandemic is under control.
Michael Caputo, the top HHS spokesman, said in an interview Saturday that he and one of his advisers have been seeking greater scrutiny of the CDC’s weekly scientific dispatches, known as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, for the past 3½ months. The adviser, Paul Alexander, has sent repeated emails to the CDC seeking changes and demanding that the reports be halted until he could make edits.
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My bold. I thought this was too trump-y for the Breaking News thread.
"Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have sought to change, delay and prevent the release of reports about the coronavirus because they were viewed as undermining President Trump’s message that the pandemic is under control the truth.
Paul Alexander, has sent repeated emails to the CDC seeking changes and demanding that the reports be halted until he could make edits fill them full of lies to make trump look good in spite of all evidence that trump is nuts.
Well that three and a half weeks pretty much covers almost exactly the whole of the second wave where deaths have been at least down by percentage by a factor of around four from the period of the earlier wave.
Whist I appreciate that support of patients has improved dramtically and would reduce the death rate, and testing has become more widespread and includes far more younger people, I still think that the figures have been ‘amended’ signifcantly and have been saying so for some time.
I was straightening up stuff around the house, moved a stack of old Comic News and ran across a Smithsonsian from November 2017 with the cover “The Coming Pandemic”. One of the articles spoke of the problem in 1918 of the press, in bed with the WhiteHouse because, war, was downplaying the seriousness of the situation.
No one could have foreseen this crisis.
Much. 
Does anyone understand why so many US deaths are being forecasted between now and January 1?
378,000 deaths by 1/1 is 178,882 more deaths than yesterday. With 3 months and a bit over a week until then that’s 59,627 a month. That’s higher than every month but April, which was our most deaths to date at almost 61,000.
And these are the “most likely” numbers, not the high end if people stop social distancing/wearing masks and we completely go back to our old lives, deaths be damned.
We’ve “only” had 17,000 deaths in September - what do they think is going to happen to spike the numbers so hugely before it’s even officially winter?
Yeah, I find those predictions … puzzling, to say the least, and the creator of another pandemic model with very different projections seems equally puzzled. (I would trust his puzzlement more than my own, since I’m, you know, an English professor.)
Perhaps they are expecting a bad flu season. Limited data suggests that flu as a co-morbidity is bad news for anyone with Covid - Flu and Covid-19 at same time significantly increases risk of death | Coronavirus | The Guardian
We [Australia and NZ] largely avoided our usual flu season, but I’ve not seen anything in the behaviour of Americans or many Europeans which suggests that they will be minimising their exposure by social distancing or mask wearing effectively.
This is going to vary tremendously by location in the US, since distancing, mask usage, and closures/reopenings are so variable here. I have two 7-year-olds, and we’ve avoided all colds and other illnesses that normally get passed around by kids since March. I don’t see that changing in the next few months, because I don’t see our behavior changing much if at all in that time.
In places where caution is much lower, more people gathering indoors will have an effect as it does for cold and flu season every year.
There is an unfortunate feedback cycle in epidemiology: the most extreme forecasts get the most publicity, the most funding, and the most fame. It’s just one more confusing factor to keep in mind when reading suggestions that nobody dies / everybody dies.
Just had the drive-up COVID test near my home. 45 minute wait: with minimal effort they could have cut that down to single figures (lots of staff managing the queue and documentation: single person doing the testing).
Identified and documented at about the 30 minute mark, and the documentation stayed with the car right up until almost at the test station… then separated from the car, taken away from the car, returned to the car at the test station. Really folks. When you depend on staff ‘remembering’ which car is which, you will get errors.
Tested back of the throat, right nostril, left nostril.
This kind of surprised me. I’'ve read test protocol: it says that the very long test swab is supposed to go in, right up the front of the ear. I’m not a trained tester: maybe there are other ideas about how testing should be done. Maybe I’ve got an unusual head, or maybe the nurse had my head at the wrong angle. But that test swab wasn’t put in all the way: it went in behind my nose, hit something and stopped.
The chance that I have COVID in my city is 1 in a million*, so I guess it doesn’t matter what I think. Interesting though.
*I exaggerate. Actually, much less than that.
My wife got tested on Saturday in preparation for a routine colonoscopy tomorrow. We had about a 2-1/2 hour wait in a line that snaked all around the local hospital parking lot (in the nearest city). We stayed in our car the whole time. They tested my wife through the window of the car, and only put the swab in about an inch or so. It definitely didn’t go up into her sinuses. She got a negative test result yesterday.
We’ve had an uptick in my town that started in the last week or so. They will be offering free testing in front of Town Hall tomorrow and Friday, and are encouraging people to get tested to see how bad it is in the community. I’ve been back at work since May, so am considering getting a test.
I don’t know if this universal, but in the quick drive-through places around here (New Orleans metro), they haven’t used the long swab (the “brain tickler”) since at least early July. I would conjecture that using a gentler tests helps encourage more people to come in and get tested.
I wonder if these short-swab COVID tests are close to universal in the U.S. at drive-through type test centers? I also wonder if the South Korean tests deployed in February were short swab or long swab?
This is belongs in an “IMHO subgroup” of The Quarantine Zone because I really am asking for opinions. Unless someone can answer with data-- I’d be fine with that, too.
As the number of cases increases all over the world, in the USA, and in your own location, is it going to be possible in the next, say, year to escape catching COVID?
If I keep up my protocols, mask, being with people who are also masked (unless we’re outside and they’re 10-ish feet away), avoiding being close to people indoors even if masked, hand-washing, yaddayaddayadda, can I avoid catching it? Opinions?
My thinking that prompted this question: in the beginning of this pandemic, there was less of the virus out and about. Now there is much more of the virus abroad in more people than seven months ago.
Is it inevitable that I will eventually catch it in spite of my precautions/protocols just because there are so many more people at large who are carrying it? As the numbers of positive/infected carriers grows, is it comin’ to get me in spite of everything?
I request we avoid the rabbit hijack hole of “herd immunity” and its desirability (or not). That’s another discussion to be had in another thread.
Two opinions, no hard science:
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Yes, IMHO the COVID protocols should keep you COVID-free indefinitely.
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There will come a time in the not-too-far-off future (if pressed, I’ll say within 24 months from today) where therapeutic treatment of COVID-19 will advance enough that it will no longer be regarded as a significant risk of death or disability. There will still be the outliers, the one-in-ten-thousands, the susceptible, the comorbidities, and all that. But consistent study of COVID-19 WILL increase helpful, actual knowledge and will offer the general run of humanity a way out. Both a physical way out and a mental one.
Here are some numbers from WorldMeters:
43,096,130 total cases:
10,191,406 active cases
31,748,203 got better
1,156,521 lost
Of that 32 million who were established to have had it and fought it off, they will probably not get it again. At some point, their bodies will stop shedding virus particles. They will essentially be sidelined (and unless you enjoy or have to hang around corpses, the lost souls are out of play as well).
Eventually, the virus will run out of people. This could happen before it has actually gotten to everyone, so you might miss out on the plague entirely.
Just like there’s a law of large numbers for populations getting exposed, there’s a law of small numbers for you, individually, getting exposed. The chance that two kids in the same class have the same birthday is high: the chance that you, individually, have the same birthday as someone else is low.
I think you can look at other viral illnesses. Measles, Mumps. They can go viral in an unvaccinated community. But even when they do, some people don’t get infected.
Also, viruses mutate. What they want to do is breed and multiply. To do this, they want their hosts to be up and mobile. Viruses don’t mutate to get more deadly, they mutate to keep their hosts healthy enough to go around and infect lots of other people for a very long time.
Hopefully, if we have to get it, we will get a mutated virus that wants us to go out and socialize.
Why do you think that is? I would think the chances of two people having the same birthday in any group of, say, 30 people is the same whether it includes you or not.
Because adding the restriction that includes a specific element will decrease the probability of the event occurring. For example, its easier to roll a pair of any numbers on a pair of dice then it is to roll a pair of 1’s.