Yea that video makes me wonder if I’m the crazy one hiding out at home.
5 Likes
It’s never just one positive. Rudy G was 5. Apparently these morons were together as a group of ~50 before the tested or at least got the results.
Jfc. It’s probably not going to work but at least be smart about it.
I repeat my contention that 100 teams x 100 athletes/managers is 10,000 so even at the low fatality rates for young people- we are drawing live to a death and very live to a serious case or 10. I’m assuming eventually ~10-20% will test positive if they just try to isolate cases vs shutting down or quarantining whole squads.
Toss in fat old coaches and athletes that have very different physiologies than average folks and it’s a witches brew of risk factors known and unknown.
Maybe this is because I’ve been drinking, but I stared at this for like a minute before realizing that you were not referring to Giuliani here.
13 Likes
I think the chances AZ “re-shuts-down” are about 0%.
Even with the recent spiking of new cases and hospitalizations, the current line from the Health Dept. is:
Dr. Cara Christ, director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, said at a Thursday news conference that the increase in cases was expected given increased testing and reopening.
Moreover, she felt like it was important to mention:
"We are seeing an increase in cases, and so we will continue to monitor at this time. But we have to weigh the impacts of the virus versus the impacts of what a stay-at-home order can have on long-term health as well.”
The (Republican) governor has no regrets:
"… I’m confident that we’ve made the best and most responsible decisions possible, guided by public health, the entire way,” Ducey said.
All quotes are from this ominously-titled article:
Arizona’s largest health system reaches capacity on ECMO lung machines as COVID-19 cases in the state continue to climb
This article is not even close to the top story on azcentral right now. It’s part of the problem. People are tired of this shit and want things to get back to normal. Also, Native Americans make up about 5%(?) of the state’s population but 20% of COVID deaths. So at this point deaths are mostly old people, and disproportionately poor and non-white. As long as the bodies aren’t visibly piling up, I think AZ (and everywhere else for that matter) is going to remain Open For Business.
2 Likes
Also from that article
The percentage of positive tests per week increased from 5% a month ago to 6% three weeks ago to 9% two weeks ago, and 11% last week. The ideal trend is a decrease in percent of positives tests out of all tests.
Picked up some dinner tonight from a local fancy restaurant. The place wasn’t packed or anything but basically every customer was 65+ in a party of four or more and none wearing a mask. Staff of course wearing masks so they are the ones protecting customers while being put at risk. People definitely think it’s over while our ICUs are reaching capacity and again there’s no reason to think it will be contained to here and not spread to neighboring states.
1 Like
An Italy-level ICU crunch will make her decision for her. That’s the whole game. Obviously no state is going to shut down again until they know that’s inevitable.
My understanding is that most of the crunch on medical resources in Arizona is due to patients that have been transported from Native American reservations. The dire outbreak on Native reservations is a major problem, but it’s not really related to recent reopening measures.
From 22. This explains a ton. No wonder it’s barely in the local news. Also hold off on the concern until white people can’t get a hospital bed because of this.
Native Americans - getting the worst of the white man’s diseases for 500 years.
1 Like
Same. I shaved my head bald 2 weeks ago and some of my friends were legit shocked that I didn’t go for a haircut. And I didn’t even tell them I’m not getting one til a vaccine is developed. 🤷🏻
2 Likes
I’m not sure this is true, the increase in cases that I saw described were from Maricopa and Pima counties, the major population centers. If someone is diagnosed in the reservation and shipped to a hospital in the city I don’t think it gets counted in the city’s numbers. The reservations have been hit hard so that might account for some of the increase in ICU beds but the outbreak has been raging there for a while, doesn’t seem all that likely they’d be having some new resurgence when there’s a perfectly good explanation as to why the rest of the state is experiencing growth.
No offense but I think you and anachronistic are both trying to convince yourselves of a certain outcome and are massively favoring data that reinforces that. Like to me that graph shows that cases weren’t really going down during the lockdown, then we decided to end that prematurely and hospitals are getting increasingly more full.
Just as another data point, I can tell you that across our two hospitals which deal with COVID patients, we typically had 20-24 patients admitted at any one time during April which then dropped to 10-12 during May. On May 27 we had 11 confirmed cases although the number of patients under investigation increased sharply from previous updates, from ~20 to ~40. On Monday June 1 we were up to 30 confirmed cases and on Friday that was 37 with another 25 under investigation.
4 Likes
Yeah I was wondering about this. That article explicitly says 2/3 of deaths are residents of Maricopa and Pima counties, which matches exactly my numbers below (meaning a Navajo County resident who dies in Maricopa county doesn’t count as a Maricopa death, assuming the article’s use of “residents” is accurate and not just a sloppy assumption).
I hadn’t realized how bad those 3 northern counties were on a per-capita basis. The data is a bit messy since those 3 counties are probably like 50-80% reservation land, but none of them are exclusively reservation. And for some reason the Navajo Nation just stopped doing their full weekend lockdowns, which they had been doing for the past 8 weekends.
Thanks for the update, always appreciated.
FWIW - I’m not really favoring any outcome. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going to happen and what is happening. I’ve been saying it looks like AZ might be the first place to tip over in the second wave.
But then as others have been pointing out - it’s really weird that there’s not much press about hospitals filling up - other than that one woman who’s in charge I guess sounding the alarm. But alarms were sounded in New Orleans and Atlanta that made it sound like they were about to hit completely full.
I expect whomever is in charge of these things to sound the alarm early and often. They’d be derelict in their job if they didn’t. It just seems odd no one seems to be listening. One explanation it seemed like could be that a lot of it is native americans - which we know doesn’t really move the needle much in white people news world.
No matter what we should know in a week or two if things get really dire.
A gradual increase doesn’t make for a very sexy story. Especially after the apocalypse was predicted and largely didn’t materialize back in March. And a gradual increase in cases as we move forward is much more likely for all the reasons we have discussed.
I would also contend that the growth in Covid cases here from Jan-March was gradual somewhat. The graphs make it look straight up but in the early stages we could find as many cases as tests we could run. We also basicslly weren’t testing for it until March and even then were doing a laughably small amount of tests. Essentially we were really just graphing testing capacity increasing at the outset. If we had today’s testing capacity back in January the initial curve shape would be very different. We now have basically unlimited testing(enough to test all symptomatic people anyways) and so the data matches reality much better over the last month and a half or so.
Was it hotter sooner there? Less outdoor eating and drinking with the desert sun?
Arizona’s in a 5-way tie for 41st in hospital beds per capita according to Kaiser. Florida has 2.6 per 1,000. Georgia has 2.4. Texas 2.3. Arizona 1.9.
According to this a lot of the beds are also in use due to the backlog of elective surgeries.
Arizona is also more densely populated in terms of living experience than people realize. 80 percent of the population is in the Phoenix or Tucson metro areas. So the lower overall density may not help as much as one might think.
1 Like
We don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, though. The governor’s team could be lying to hospitals about their model. Hospitals could expect to be able to open up beds as they clear out elective surgery backlogs, or they could be keeping quiet to protect their elective surgery profits.
I think we’re counting on doctors and nurses leaking info in some states, and by the time they do, we’ll be way past a tipping point.
I then expect the NYC approach to sending people home to die: don’t tell them that’s what you’re doing, tell them they aren’t sick enough to admit yet. By basing the criteria on who is sickest rather than who benefits the most from treatment, you still send people home to die, it’s just not as obvious. There will also be racial and class bias, which will keep concernsb lower in wealthy communities.
I fear red states can blow farther past capacity than we think.
Trip report from some of the Vegas poker rooms. Tl/dr: Waiting lists abound. Old Man Coffee will not wear a mask, will complain about playing short handed.
https://twitter.com/JimBarnesLV/status/1269390370447568896?s=19
1 Like
I believe at the Maricopa county level it’s much more severe. I see my pony died of thirst in the desert.
No your pony died of COVID in Indian Country in NE AZ.
1 Like
We should see the Memorial Day spike in what… 2 weeks? If there is going to be one.