“Just you wait another couple of weeks. Things will REALLY get bad then.”
“We haven’t seen the peak yet. Just wait another couple of weeks.”
And so on and so forth. For the past month. It seems like the worst is always juuuuust over the horizon to get you worked up, and then you’re told that no, you have to wait another couple of weeks.
This can’t be good for mental health or the ability to plan ahead, can it? I know this thing is unpredictable, since it’s new, but isn’t it bad enough without the anticipation of watching things steadily get worse for months on end?
Watch less news. News feeds off of emotion and drama to maintain daily viewership. Yes, this is a new virus and so the landscape changes rapidly. But not in a “Yesterday: Not bad!”, “Today: Doom!” rapidly-swinging way. It’s an exponential growth pattern, not a stock market circuit-breaker pattern.
Following stock market too closely right now can lead to psychotic breaks.
I try to stick to the sciencey stuff. Human interest is just too depressing, while this blood clotting story is fascinating. How could releasing iron from heme possibly help a virus? Odd stuff.
Actually, it’s been looking for several days like we may be past the peak. The problem is, there’s no way to tell whether the hospitalizations and deaths decline slowly or rapidly post-peak.
You have to realize flattening the curve only delays it, so that the healthcare system isn’t overwhelmed.
This will save lives, and not just Covid19 lives but those with heart conditions, gun shots and a host of others that would have trouble treating.
Also the maps we look at highly distort facts. I looked at Illinois recently by county. Chicago and Cook, Will, DuPage, McHenry, Kane and Lake counties account for 91% of the Covid19 cases. Throw in the St Louis metro Illinois counties and you get 95% of the cases.
The high numbers listed for Illinois (currently 4th largest by state) makes it seem Illinois is full of Covid19 cases.
But it’s not really. And the same thing can be applied to most states. In fact in Washington State there are issues with hospitals losing as much as 18 million dollars last month because they cancelled elective procedures with little use by Covid19 victims.
So you have to look at it from many angles and not just rely on numbers reported by the media. They are accurate all right (as far as they can be) but don’t show the complete picture.
Please correct my understanding: many graphs show that the US is experiencing a high plateau – deaths per day are not increasing. New cases per day are also not increasing. But they are not going down either. This means that social distancing etc. is “working” in that it is slowing the rate of infection. But that is all it is doing. Without a vaccine, infections will continue until virtually everyone has either survived or died from the virus. Only at THAT point will the infection curve really go down, because there is nowhere for the virus to spread to.
Deaths may continue to decline because we gain a better understanding of how to treat, when to come in, how to protect the people most likely to die of it, without infection rate going down.
The shoe will start dropping in theis first act about 2-4 weeks after partial or full re-openings when infections spike. The second act will follow in 2-4 months, with more hospitalizations and job losses. Then comes the third act…
I’m thinking more like this as well. We’re averaging 2,000 deaths per day. Will have 70k on Monday. Then 80, 90… Re-opening too early can spike hospital care again. But we honestly can’t keep going economically for the rest of the year this way either. And we have NO REAL testing happening here. Our lack of data is keeping us on the 2-week pendulum.
I suspect out here in CA, we’ll hear 2 more weeks in mid-May, then soft openings in June depending on data, then that delayed… Gah!
Nah. While the beach crowd has been exchanging virus particles, the fun in Florida won’t start until two weeks AFTER everybody makes an obligatory visit to Granny on Mother’s Day.
~VOW
