Looks like the ‘big three’ from the summer, if it’s fair to call Arizona, Florida, and Texas that, may be winding their way out of the woods. For now, at least.
Cases are on the rise in Arizona since the end of September.
Cases in Florida are not decreasing since September.
Cases in Texas are holding steady if not rising since September.
It’s deaths that look like they are trending well down.
Here in the Chicago area, the news is consistently about all measures being way up, and are scaling up restrictions. Restaurants will close for inside service Friday. (I expect them to be PACKED tomorrow! 
) Many of the schools that had recently opened are closing - at least temporarily. Seems weird, as you can drive by any park and see sports and socializing going on w/o ANY apparent distancing/masks…
Personally, I’m not sure how much more dangerous it is for ME, or what additional steps I should take, but just about all of the limited number of people I interact with are expressing concern and discussing reducing what limited in-person interaction they have engaged in.
Do you think that’s the best metric to use? If deaths are trending down, but cases, positivity rates and hospitalizations are trending up, do you think that’s a sign that things are better?
Personally, I consider deaths to be a baked-in cost that reflects what happened three weeks ago, and that the other metrics are more important. They tell you what death rates will be in three weeks. Yes, treatments have gotten more effective, but I expect that will or has already plateaued: we had a crash course in COVID treatment, but at some point we will reach diminishing returns unless we add something new to the playbook.
So in Dallas deaths are not spiking yet, but all the other metrics are making huge jumps every week. i am not feeling like that’s a positive thing.
As long as hospitalizations are still connected to deaths in a meaningful way, even if the rate of those hospitalized who are dying may be decreasing, then yes, I agree that that’s still a meaningful metric. Those are the only stats that seem all that meaningful, throughout this. The emptiness of ‘positive PCR tests’ as a metric has, I believe, been demonstrated over and over and over again. It needs to be way more granular than that to have any real meaning. Yes, positivity rates are much better than raw positives alone. But even those can still lack important context, especially when compared across jurisdictions.
Even if some of the hard-hit states are facing increases at the moment, those still seem much slower than they were in earlier weeks and months, and to me that’s the important takeaway. There was great concern in the mid-summer that we’d see extraordinary damage, relative to what we’d seen up to that point, and that does not seem to have come to pass. I think that is something to celebrate, not bemoan.
Well, hospitalizations are up 31% over the last 14 days in TX, so not feeling super excited over here.
I keep harping on Wisconsin, but it’s where I grew up, and where my parents and sister still live, and the trends there concern me greatly.
As of a week ago (the latest data available on the state’s site, due to a really poorly-timed computer upgrade), the 7-day moving average for hospitalized COVID patients there is 901; two weeks earlier (on 9/30), that number was 598, so that’s a growth rate of 51%. As of that date, 85% of the total hospital beds, and 86% of the ICU beds, in the state were in use.
Positive cases have risen dramatically in the state in the week since that data was posted – the seven-day average for new cases is up 39% versus two weeks ago. So, if we had data on what the hospitalization status is in Wisconsin today, it’d undoubtedly look even more dire than it did a week ago.
So, not feeling super excited about what’s going on there, either. The national numbers show deaths flat, or even on a very modest downward trend, and yes, that is a bit heartening. But, in some places in the U.S., the pandemic is absolutely on fire right now.
Where I live, we are now recovering from the second wave. Not sure, but based on the numbers posted daily by the county health department, the 7 day moving average of new infections is about 50% of what it was about a week ago and about 40% of the peak which was about two weeks ago.
The second wave was roughly in the neighborhood of the first wave in terms of number of infections, but nowhere close in terms of deaths. I believe only about 3-4 people this time around versus 70-100 the first time around (and of those 3-4 people, one - a guy who lived a block away from me - is suspected of being a hydroxycloroquine victim).
The interesting thing is that this community did not close down the second time. Schools stayed open, so did businesses, and while some older or sicker people wear masks and/or practice social distancing, the vast majority are doing none of this at all.
Based on my experiences here, I am increasingly of the belief that the efficacy of the various social distancing measures are being vastly oversold. To recap, there was about a 3 1/2 month delay from when social distancing virtually ceased and when the second wave hit, and when the second wave did hit, it seems to be fading on its own.
It seems obvious that these SD measures have to have some positive impact. But I strongly suspect that it’s not nearly as much as various scientists, government officials, and other pontificators have been selling them.
A I observed earlier in this thread, there doesn’t seem to be a clearly defined timeline from when SD starts/stops and when cases are expected to decline/increase. As a result of this, it’s possible to attribute virtually all increases/decreases to these measures, since they’ve all been put in place at some point and eased up at another point. But from what I see, I’m skeptical.
Definitely not asking for your street address, and not even the city/town especially if it’s a small one, but I think it’s a relevant question to ask approximately where you live.
Based on your previous posts, you’ve attributed the second wave to a different strain of the virus. Do you think there are other strains of the virus? If so, how many? If not, is the pandemic over in your area, in your opinion?
I’m also wondering what you would suggest (if anything) to help protect people from the spread of the virus, or if you believe that it will just spread if there’s another strain regardless of what is done.
NJ
I don’t recall attributing the second wave to a different strain of the virus. I may have reported that as a possibility out there (I don’t recall - possibly in connection to the lower mortality in the second wave?) but I’ve personally been skeptical of that.
I should stress that I don’t have any particular professional expertise in these matters (I’m an actuary by profession, FWIW). I just happen to be part of a community which has been very hard hit by the pandemic and am also connected to one degree or another to various medical-type people (doctors/nurses/EMTs etc.) so have access to some factual information that you wouldn’t get from the media. (In general, I think the media state-level reporting misses the true picture, which is far more granular and not aligned with state boundaries.) But after that we’re all speculating.
What I can say is that having seen a heck of a lot of people get infected in each wave, that there’s definitely a strong negative correlation between having been infected once and getting infected again. I know a few people who have been infected twice and have heard of others, but the overwhelming majority of people who got infected in the first wave did not get infected in the second wave and vice versa. And this is despite the previously infected people taking less precautions than the others. (As I’ve said earlier, there has been very little social distancing here during the second wave, other than high risk/older people. But that’s for interactions with people who are not known to be infected. People who have never been infected have been distancing from actively contagious people (for the most part - some exceptions for immediate family members), while that is not true of people who were previously infected and consider themselves immune. And yet, reinfections among the latter group have been very rare.)
So if indeed there is a second strain, then it’s clear that having been infected with the first strain offers some protection against the second as well. But I’ve not seen anything to make me think there is a second strain.
Re your final paragraph, again I don’t have any particular expertise. But FWIW, I would just offer that I don’t have any particular reason to disagree with the suggestions being offered by the health authorities. The problem, I suspect, is that these are not really possible to implement rigorously enough to actually stamp out the virus. So as a practical matter, the efficacy is very limited. IOW, the difference between ordinary contact and lockdown-level contact is not great enough to make a tremendous difference.
That marks the fifth consecutive day with more than 1,000 cases - the first time that’s happened since May - and the rate of transmission increased for the third day to 1.17. Hospitalizations were also above 800 patients for the second day - more than double the amount than a month ago.
– so I don’t know whether cases are going down and you’re “recovering from the second wave” in your specific community, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in New Jersey as a whole; where the disease does not seem at all to be “fading on its own”.
As I observed in my prior post, “In general, I think the media state-level reporting misses the true picture, which is far more granular and not aligned with state boundaries.”
Two things. One, it’s now been five weeks since Florida reopened, and things are looking good. I wonder if they’ll see a seasonal surge eventually over the winter. They seem to be in manageable shape now.
Two, Florida Atlantic has a very impressive dashboard. It’s got some looks I’ve not quite seen before. Great stuff. Looks like it comes from their business school.
https://business.fau.edu/covidtracker/data/florida-data/index.php
One granular resource is here. It specifically looks at rural-urban divides. For that it can be seen that the bigger spread for case numbers is rural but that the divide is significantly greater for deaths - the deaths 7 day rolling average is twice as high in non-metro as metro now, really taking off over October.
That’s depressing. Do you think it’s because the non-metro areas are getting hit the first time, and so have the most vulnerable populations getting hit, or because medical care in non-metro areas is less sophisticated?
All, with the modifier of not less sophisticated just less. Fewer, more easily overwhelmed, so on.
Mostly more vulnerable. Older. More comorbidities inclusive of obesity.
Which part is good? The trend line in your cite for more cases is increasing on a steady incline and has been for several weeks.
The [possibly uncharitable] theory I’ve read most is that the rural areas might have thought they were immune because they weren’t hit hard in the beginning, so they didn’t take many/any precautions like social distancing or masks.
ICU bed occupancy down. Total hospital bed numbers flat with fewer occupied by COVID-19 patients.
Fewer sick enough to be hospitalized or in the ICU is unarguably looking good.
For now.