Yes, it’s something like 1700 additional at-home deaths in NYC the past few weeks compared to same period last year or the period before covid.
Like 250+/day the last few days compared to 20-25/day historically.
At some point you get bad enough you aren’t able to call anyone. And people don’t want to go to hospital before it gets to that point because they are afraid of costs, of getting turned away, or of catching covid in case they don’t have it.
That’s what the orange line is for? Blue line is a moving average of the last three days. I’m too lazy and I don’t have access to good fitting software at home or I’d fit it to some kind of curve.
Most drive through facilities in the US required a doctor’s order which one could only get through the usual triage process. Drive through testing is more about not contaminating hospitals than expanding testing.
Heh, if it doesn’t slow down after four weeks we’ll have more deaths than infections.
One data point but I think my boss is being a lot more productive not having to spend 3 hours on the road every day. She seems finally caught up to the point where she can engage on a lot of things she was just letting slide before. She said for the first two weeks she just worked nonstop 16 hour days. That’s how much backlog of stuff she had to deal with.
Our whole team should be mostly remote. We all drive a ton. They’d get so much more out of us.
Cut my own hair today for the first time in the pandemic. Did a half decent job, I can live with it! I’m no longer all scratchy, and I’d say it doesn’t look any worse than like a bad haircut by a professional. Definitely looks better than it did before I cut it. I’m now wondering how many more times I’ll cut my own hair before I deem it safe to go outside.
I think a lot of people are absolutely dying at home. The current awareness of what is going on in hospitals is scary for everyone. Many people are likely in denial they have corona, and think they just have the flu and don’t want to go to the hospital because then they would get really sick.
Since most people are keeping their distance and a lot of people are isolating, people who are sick are interacting with fewer people in person who might be able to push them to go to the emergency room.
As someone who almost died from pneumonia before and who waited for ever before going to the hospital, I can say that the reality now would make it much worse. If I lived in NYC, I don’t know if I would feel sick enough to go to the hospital before I died.
Plus the hospital can not even do much for you unless you are so sick to need a ventilator. You have to thread a pretty small needle to have how you feel line up with being the proper percentage of sick to go to the hospital.
None of this takes into account people who are afraid of being stuck with massive treatment bills, whether they will or not.
Also some people who were sick went to the hospital and were told to go home because they were not sick enough. Later they got more sick and died. I think that scenario has probably played out quite a few times. People don’t want to be sick and don’t want to think they have the worst of it, so if they are sent home, they are going to try and be as optimistic as possible, even if they get sicker.
It is all quite a mess obviously. But yeah I think a lot of people are dying at home.
Turns out lack of testing means bad data so we don’t really know if it’s leveling off or peaking or still growing.
Deaths (also not counted properly) will be somewhat more accurate but lag by awhile so we won’t know yet.
We also don’t know that it’ll peak then go back down; it’ll likely have multiple peaks, and nobody knows if this first peak will be a local maximum or the actual highest peak that NYC will see.
And then Nationally it’s even worse data than NYC and will have even more peaks which will end up being determined more by if multiple cities happen to peak around the same time than anything else. It could look “flat” for a long time if the right combo of local peak timings result in similar cases and deaths nationwide every day for months.
As of today, Germnay has the same total deaths that US is getting daily and Germany started the count a fortnight before the US. Adjust for popluation (and climate / density and your other factors) and in 7 days you’ll dwarf Germany numbers.
The South Korea ship sailed about 3 weeks ago too.
One thing I’ve learned from this is old people die all the time and no one really bothers to investigate the cause of death much.
And come to think of it my 61-year-old uncle who had had a stroke and was also on dialysis, probably died of a heart attack or stroke. They asked my cousin if he wanted an autopsy to determine cause of death and he declined.
The only reason to know would be to know if our family was more susceptible to one or the other. But my uncle was an alcoholic who destroyed his body.
Another good point. Wasn’t even including nursing homes. At this point nursing homes are not likely sending many sick patients to hospitals in hotspot areas.
You’re probably right. Heartbreakingly, they sometimes plead with Alexa to help…
I’m talking about when we try to open back up.
Not necessarily. If we’re consistently undercounting cases, we can still track how it’s trending. Think of it like opinion polling.
Even if it was 2/3 days at home and 2/3 days in the office. I have found most people are more productive from home but it helps if they go into the office at least once a week.
I am going to let my 8 year old daughter cut mine soon. She is pumped about it.
Big assumption that it’s consistent
Especially with something where you take a turn for the worst so rapidly and dramatically. People are probably thinking they’re fine in that 1-2 day lull, then getting hit hard by the lung issues, thinking they are okay, going to sleep and then never making it out of bed again.
I didn’t need that, Jesus.
That would be awesome if it could happen for you and many others. I shifted my thinking a bit on what to expect from myself in comparison to if I had an office job and thus what we should expect from those who usually work on site and are now working from home. I read that
Of course we’re capable of going beyond that, but we have to spend a period in recovery or else we’ll face a series of diminishing returns until we collapse, finally recover, and then repeat the cycle.
So even though I’ve worked from home for over a decade now, I think of it the same way. I have about four hours M-F of intense productivity each day. What am I going to spend it on? I can work more than four hours, of course, but anything beyond that total for the day will be low stakes.
It’s really helped me get a lot more accomplished day to day and week to week. Instead of trying to spread the most-intense focus possible FOR EIGHT OR MORE HOURS, I have an even sharper focus for four hours. I can lean into those hours hard because I know the rest of the day will either be low stakes or clocked out.
So anyway, I think the same thing is likely happening for many people now working from home. They no longer have to sacrifice so much of their time and energy on things that have nothing to do with the point of their job. They get to recover, meaningfully redistribute their focus when and where it matters, and thus their productivity and the quality of their work soars.
Anyway, that’s my speech for M4A and UBI. Obviously we will need to contend with the increasing amounts of day drinking, but if the Russians can make it work, I think the USA has a fighting chance.