Bumped:
I guess 7 weeks is the answer.
First: We’re not in lockdown. I’ve been in a city under military lockdown. It’s rather unmistakable. We’re sheltering, avoiding needless exposure hopefully. We’re not sealed in our homes except by our own caution.
Next: I understand people chafing at safe distancing. I expect less cautious folks to gaily sally forth as businesses re-open. I foresee post-opening infection spikes, further economic losses, and more draconian emergency orders. Any who WANT a lockdown need merely infect as many as possible. That’ll put troops on your street.
So: How long will people shelter, mask, distance, wash? Cautious survivors will continue till vaccinations succeed.
This rather charmingly low tech news broadcast suggests that "quarantine fatigue’ is kicking in, and people are moving about more than they were a few weeks ago:
As my area reopens I’m sure their will be some increase but I doubt we will have the huge spikes we had back in March.
For one, many stores have protections in place like barriers and are cleaning things more often. The most vulnerable in nursing homes are still under quarantine. People are wearing masks, using sanitizer, and practicing social distancing. Large gatherings are still prohibited.
Now hopefully we wont see the spikes at the meat packing plants anymore.
So while I see a spike, I dont see it to be as big.
???
I found this little utility that lets me look at new case numbers per day per state.
During the week of March 22 ( the last week I can see on this tool) Kansas had 255 new cases. During the past week, they had 1904 new cases. While I don’t have the graph for earlier in March I do have an article which shows the first case coming in on March 7th and 14 total on March 17th.
So I really can’t figure out what you’re referring to when you talk about avoiding the “spikes” you had in March. I guess in some sense that it’s worse when you go from 2 cases to 4 in a day than it is when you go from 500 to 975 in day because the rate of increase is lower.
But the linear rate of new cases in Kansas is heading UP UP UP with no leveling in sight. I think your confidence is misplaced.
USA Today: ‘It makes no sense’: Feds consider relaxing infection control in US nursing homes
That’s atop the sleazy long-care facility industry itself. MrsRico’s mother died in one of a chain that, as we learned too late, regularly settles wrongful death suits. But if you figure the residents have been abandoned then why not just let-em die? Quarantine in a hotspot is a death sentence. THEY are the populace in lockdown, trapped within walls.
♫ If your granny’s
Got the COVID, then
You gotta let her die ♫
Another appropriate lyric would see a slight rewrite of Jimi Hendrix from “Have you ever been experienced?” to “Have you ever been expendable… well I have.”
They’re been debating making these changes since July without putting them into effect. It would be interesting, and odd, if they decided to go ahead with them in the near future considering everything that has changed since last summer.
From your cite:
That’s worked so well so far.
And I love your song version.
Yes the case rate in Kansas has spiked but that is because they have finally been doing testing in areas they had not before. This has really made the numbers go crazy.
I had wrote earlier that I thought most Kansas counties had been doing adequate testing and it looked like western Kansas was virus free. I was wrong. Ford county home of Dodge city and its numerous meatpacking plants, went from like 1-2 cases to over 500 now within a week or 2. Same with Seward county and Leavenworth county home to many state and federal prisons. LINK Thats all because they were finally testing people. I wish they had been doing this a month ago. Your absolutely right ripping the bandaid off right now would be crazy.
Again, this jump is because of increased testing. You go from testing 10 people to testing 1,000 the number is bound to shoot up.
What I’m saying is we can selectively lift quarantine in selective areas and in selective places of business to put more people back to work and keep people from going crazy. Precautions are being made. Lots of people everywhere are wearing masks. In the grocery stores they clean everything, people try to keep social distance, and the checkouts have barriers. Almost every store I visit now has hand sanitizer and they limit the number of people in them. My work gives out masks and they push sanitizer and hand washing and people are doing it.
A big problem will be the increase in cases coming from the prisons but I’m not sure how they control a situation like that.
Cant you look around and see how the world has changed in the last 3 months? It doesnt matter if we wait till the end of August there will be spikes up and down in different places.
But I think now they can be controlled.
Is that based on your expertise in epidemiology?
BTW what is your expertise in this subject? A brief CV would suffice.
CMC fnord!
You dont need a PHd to see the world has changed.
Correct, it’s a PhD you’d need.
Unclear if there’s enough testing in Kansas to make this statement. Recent testing data is borderline at best; you need enough testing to be able to track your new cases and have some degree of confidence you’re not failing to count a large number of infected. Kansas data here: https://covidtracking.com/data/state/kansas
General rule of thumb is you want your testing to show a 10% rate of positive cases or less. You want the rate of positive tests to be low compared to total tests; that way, you can be somewhat confident that you’re counting a large percentage of the new cases, you can do appropriate contact tracing, and so on. Kansas is running at about a 15% rate of positive tests recently, which is high and suggests there may not be enough testing going on. The 10% number is just a rule of thumb; there’s nothing magical about 10% specifically (9% is better capacity, 11% is worse capacity, etc…) But at 15% rate of positives, you have to start wondering how many infected people you’re missing and simply don’t know about. Being blind in that way makes it difficult to control outbreaks.
That said, folks have been under restriction for a number of weeks now, and the April 2020 jobs report comes out Friday; one assumes it’ll be ugly. Staying safe from COVID doesn’t do you much good if you run out of money and start going hungry.
No, but this part,
demands more than your ‘common sense’.
Now either you can support your claim that ‘end of August spikes can be controlled’ with some, I don’t know, maybe, SCIENCE or stop treating this pandemic like it’s something we can just pretend our way through.
CMC fnord!
Statewide that is true.
However my county,Johnson County, is currently at around 7%.
Now they are all over the map on testing. One day they might do 100 tests. The next 50 and so on. As I understand it they only test people showing symptoms.
Getting back to state, Kansas data is all messed up by the late testing and massive number of positives in places like Ford and Seward counties which just 2 weeks ago were almost none.
Plus often we are seeing positives are associated with just one particular business or location like an assisted living facility or a meat packing plant or in the case of Leavenworth county, a prison.
A big question is how should we or can we, evaluate data when its so thrown off by one particular place like a meatpacking plant showing almost all the positive cases?
Its even worse in South Dakota where in a state having 2700 cases, 2200 are from ONE county.
How many in South Dakota have been tested? Without tests, how can we know the infection rates? My rural county of 40,000 non-prisoners* has 8 cases with 7 recoveries and no deaths - with a total of 525 tests by yesterday. That’s 1.3% tested, hardly an informative sample. We just don’t fucking know.
- Another 5,000 or so are in the state prison and they’re not announcing anything.
The US nationally was at 5:1 ratio of tests to positive results.
Italy during its worst days was at 2:1.
For all I know, we go to the same Home Depot and shop at the same Wal-Mart, and get our gas at the same QT. And yes, while there are people wearing masks, it’s half or less. Sometimes much less. Hell, I stopped at QT this morning to get gas and NOT ONE person going in or out was wearing a mask.
If the data is highly-biased, then that’s not particularly useful in telling you where you stand overall; you’re still sort of blind. In that case, I’d want to know things like:
- How is the contact tracing? Are authorities reaching out in a timely fashion, and are tests being made available in a timely fashion to folks who have recently come in contact with a known infected person?
- What’s your weekly testing capacity vs. your population count? Can you test, say, 1% of your local population each week, for a few weeks, if you have to?
- Are there any efforts / capacity to do semi-random testing even if it’s at small random-sample sizes, to try to mitigate some of the bias in the data?
Basically, if I can’t really tell what’s going on, I want to know we have the ability to react if something awful happens, within the “typical” ranges of awful that we’ve observed to date.
Yes, for many parts of the US. But you can’t just wait around forever. You have to get real with yourself and start asking things like:
- Just how much longer can we realistically afford to hang tough with these restrictions?
- If we do hang around for a while longer, is the testing/contact-tracing situation likely to improve in that time?
If the answer to #2 in particular is “Probably Not”, then you suck it up and accept the risks now, rather than kick the can down the road and accept similar risks next month while being poorer for having hung around a month. For a good portion of April, testing capacity was largely flat and there was little improvement. In the past week or so, things have gotten a bit better. If we want to borrow another couple trillion and dole it out in order to buy time to meaningfully improve testing infrastructure over the next few weeks, okay, fair enough. But if we see the improvements in testing capacity stall again, I think we have to accept the sad reality that this may be as good as it will ever get in terms of readiness.
At least there will be plenty of easy targets to blame for the pile of dead bodies.
The problem you’re not taking into account is that the meatpacking staff (and the prison staff) aren’t confined to that particular place. They go to the grocery store and the library and church and Wal-Mart, their kids go to school and the community center, etc. At Lansing Correctional Facility in Leavenworth County, e.g., they’ve got hundreds of inmates positive, but they also have 89 staff positive, and those 89 are not locked in cells and forbidden from going outside.