COVID-19: Chapter 4 - OPEN FOR BUSINESS

My boss’s oldest is going to USC as a freshman this year (I assume there isn’t a “rowing” scholarship involved.). I was really surprised to see that USC is planning to have live classes for the fall. They start 8/17 and will finish before Thanksgiving. Have to wear a mask everywhere on campus. This doesn’t seem wise. I mean you can’t have fans at the football games anyways.

I realize you are graphing a much longer trend here but the flip side of this is that it is very likely we will have the 6th straight day of increase in the 7 day MA for new cases after today (21,081 7 day MA on May 28th vs. 22,278 7 day MA through yesterday). That is only about 5% higher but the consistent week over week decay in new cases appears to have stopped if not slightly reversed over the past 6 days. Obviously more data and and/or some more substantial movement would been needed to know this is a trend rather than just noise.

Well now I feel better that my pushup form sucks so bad I hurt my shoulder and have been sucking down ibuprofen.

So then is this the 2nd wave already? I thought that wasn’t supposed to start until the fall. Or is this still the first wave and then we’ll get an even bigger one later?

I get both sides. If the politicians are only willing to give free money to billionaires then people need to work. The chances of a relatively young healthy person actually dying from covid are still quite low (although much higher than normal flu). I wish I knew more about how viruses spread and react. Maybe the thing to do IS for healthy people to all be exposed and reach herd immunity quicker. Does hiding from it make us more safe if it doesn’t completely go away? Or does it just lull people into a false sense of security and then in 6 months or a year from now those at high risk let their guard down and get it? Serious questions. I have no idea how viruses work, but I read some are now saying this is an endemic like AIDS where we might be dealing with this for decades

One thing COVID has made clear to me is that we are in a post intelligence world. A person’s response to world altering situations is no longer correlated to the level of their intelligence. It is correlated to where they get their news.

My good friend had a fight with his girlfriends family this week. The girlfriends sister is a pediatrician. She should in theory be a very intelligent person. She is fully team “virus is a hoax” and was yelling at my friend that he and his gf need to watch more Fox News so they can’t see the real truth.

So many otherwise smart people have been completely broken by effective right wing propaganda.

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Probably December, but really no one actually has a good idea when it starts or what it’s going to look like.

Aww yeah baby time to get yo drank on

https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2020/06/03/florida-gov-ron-desantis-announces-phase-2-reopening-of-bars-concert-spaces-to-start-friday

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Damn Florida didn’t even have their bars open yet?

Also let’s just use Florida as an example here. Everyone likes to act like reopening hasn’t made a difference. The only issue is that isn’t true.

Their 7 day MA for cases on their last day being shutdown, April 30th, was 578. After today it is 824. That is a 42.5% increase in a little over a month.

Ok now let’s do Texas.

April 30th their 7 day MA was 866. After yesterday it is 1461 which is a 68.7% increase.

The popular myth that getting OPEN FOR BUSINESS hasn’t mattered is completely false.

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I am wondering the same thing. Wife and I and late 20s, and wondering if we should just stop the extreme precautions since the country as a whole is never going to take the necessary steps to reduce this Ro number down to a manageable amount. I still wear masks out in public and will continue too, but we are probably getting it no matter what since the approach is “meh” across the board. Im due back into the office in 2 weeks so more than likely going to get it there.

The ones that are pretending they are restaurants are open, yes, you just can’t physically sit at the bar. Except for where you can because I’ve seen it happen no sheriff here is enforcing that shit they’ve got an election to win lol

This has always been location specific series of epidemics in the US.

Some states had big first waves and are well past their peaks. We will see when their second wave hits. It may not look like it math wise if the rural areas climb because the urban areas dominate the numbers.

Some states are still going up in their first wave. The west coast seems to be going up a second time. In CA it’s more NoCal/SoCal.

The math is so hard to break up because when we go county by county the baseline values are often too small to see clear trends but when we aggregate by state and look at percent increase we lose the rural data in the big city noise.

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I’m totally confused about the ibuprofen thing. Wasn’t one of the earliest warnings about how NSAIDs will make your case a zillion times worse? Did they turn out to be totally off on that? Was it just naproxen and other stuff that’s bad?

Science is messy. Data can be really hard to deconvulute, especially in medicine where the perfect control might not be available. Sometimes those practicing it aren’t very good.

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I know this is a rhetorical question, but say we look at the US as a whole, how many daily new cases is “too many”? Are we ok with 20k new cases per day? Would 40k be ok? It’s just hard for me to get a feel for whether things are good or bad, but it sort of feels like right here is ok, but I’m just a moron on the Internet.

It just depends on your worldview I suppose. If we stay at our current levels of infection/death we will end 2020 with around 6.5 million confirmed cases and 320,000 dead. To me just throwing our hands up and accepting that without trying to stop it seems insane but obviously others feel differently.

Right. But remember the mask is to protect OTHERS more than it is you. I still wear a mask so as not to give it to some old person or even a young person who might have a compromised immune system. But I agree. Sometimes I want to just take my chances and get it over with already, since I’ll probably get it eventually anyway

In fact, I’m not entirely sure I haven’t already had it. Are antibody tests ever going to be made available to the general public?

You can get an antibody test now they just aren’t very reliable.

In what way? Are they delivering false positives, false negatives, or both?

I’m not entirely sure. Probably some others here could better comment on that but I have heard numbers thrown around like 50% error rate and the like so I am not sure how much good they would really do anyone right now.