When I started keeping track of this I looked at different ranges and chose 10 because it looked closest to the trend. Running it out 3 months the 7 day does look smoother over the long term and the peaks shift on different days depending on where they fall within their respective ranges. But when I look at the most recent days the 10 day usually looks closer to what’s going on. I still prefer the 10 day average but you can’t seem to let it go so I’ll post in terms of 7 day averaging
New Jersey drops a large spike from the 10 day average.
Here’s the 7 day average deaths
I don’t know what to make of New Jersey. They’re all over the map. At some point they changed how they count Covid-19 deaths because they made a large adjustment on June 25. From New York’s perspective a rise in New Jersey deaths is likely going to spill over.
To be fair if deaths completely stop at this point it might not make the top 3, like that’s going to happen.
But that raises the question: if this is an extremely low casualty rate, what would be a merely low casualty rate? If it caught up to all forms of cancer and became the second leading cause of death, would that be enough to push it to merely “low” casualty rate instead of “extremely low”? If it surpassed heart conditions as the number one American killer, would it be deadly enough to begrudge it a “moderate” casualty rate?
Magiver’s point is that the percentage of people who die after contracting it is really low. It’s orders of magnitude lower than, say, bladder cancer.
Of course, that’s pointless, because
Yes, most people don’t die, but the problem is that if we do nothing to prevent transmission, everyone will get it. It is extraordinarily contagious, whereas things like heart disease and bladder cancer are not. Even if one takes a really low 0.5% death rate as the correct figure, that impact to the USA if the virus is unchecked could be extraordinarily devastating.
The problem with an incredibly contagious disease like this is not just that everyone would get it, it’s that they would all get it at once, resulting in an involuntary economic shutdown, panic, and increased mortality due to a lack of effective therapeutic attention.
The rate ends up being about .1 percent, or one in a thousand
Everyone in the country gets exposed
The exposures get spread out across twelve months or so
Would that still count as ‘extraordinarily devastating’? In relative terms, I mean, or at least in an act-of-God sort of resignation to it all. If it would, then how about .01 percent, or one in ten thousand? Would that be closer to just plain old ordinarily devastating?
For some, even if 1 in 10 citizens die, bodies are piled up in the streets, and feral dogs are roaming cities tearing into the bodies…
They will say: “It’s just the sniffles! It has an extremely low casualty rate. How come the lamestream media is not focusing on the 9/10 people who are alive?”
328,000 dead, more than the US casualties in WW I in a 12 month period. Yes, I’d consider that extraordinarily devastating. Just MHO. That’s basically a very bad flu season x10.
We’ve spent trillions on it and severely damaged the economy to stop extraordinary devastation. We did this to flatten the curve and prevent collapse of the medical system.
We’re now to the point we can and must return to work. We need the cash flow and a resumption of normal medical treatment for other diseases. We’re doing it in a controlled manner and adjusting locally as we go as needed to maintain control of the health system and keep the death count as low as possible.
If Houston was located on Mars I’d agree with you. It’s not an isolated location and has a massive infrastructure in place to transport patients to other hospitals. This is what NYC did if not a little late to figure it out. They sent patients to other hospital within the state and 4 surrounding states.
And some people, whether their problem is covid or not, will die or suffer greater permanent injury due to the time necessary to ship them out of state.
Claiming that the situation is under control because a hospital bed may be available hours away doesn’t strike me as reasonable at all.
If the area that they send the excess patients to ends up having a spike in cases, do they send the Covid patients back to Houston, or turn away their own people?
That only works if other areas reasonably close by have enough beds to accommodate the patients being moved. Do they?
Most of the major metro areas in Texas have their own big outbreaks. Texas has an Excel spreadsheet of ICU capacity/availability by region available through their Dept of State Health Services; it’s already several days out-of-date (last updated Friday 7/20 as I write this), but the data is worrying. The Houston area is one of 22 “trauma service areas” [TSA] in the state, but it has a quarter of all ICU beds in Texas, and it is over 95% of capacity (1843 of 1931 beds occupied). Several of the immediately adjacent areas are small; TSA “H”, centered in Lufkin, only has 69 ICU beds in the first place (of which 17 are empty), while TSA “S”, anchored by Victoria, has 80 total and 17 empty. Galveston-based TSA “R” is close and larger, but already had 96+% capacity as they deal with their own outbreak. Farther afield, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and the Lower Rio Grande Valley are at 90+% themselves. Dallas still has some capacity (that region has “only” 81% of ICU beds filled), but it is more than 200 miles away; Amarillo is 600 miles. Nearby Louisiana is dealing with its own resurgence. If you start having to move patients hundreds of miles, you’re going to start losing some in transit as they run out of time en route.