I think one of the things that’s saving Georgia’s ass right now (still a long way to go) is that for the most part, the people haven’t been acting stupid. Obviously, there is always going to be a percentage that just throws caution to the wind, but it doesn’t seem like people have been flocking to restaurants and what-not.
My daughter’s gymnastics coaches opened the gym back up this week on a limited basis. We aren’t sending her and from what I can tell, most of her teammates aren’t going, either.
Wikipedia says it’s not a constant and that it’s value is dependent on the model and parameters, which I assume are environmental parameters.
R 0 is not a biological constant for a pathogen as it is also affected by other factors such as environmental conditions and the behaviour of the infected population. Furthermore R 0 values are usually estimated from mathematical models, and the estimated values are dependent on the model used and values of other parameters. Thus values given in the literature only make sense in the given context and it is recommended not to use obsolete values or compare values based on different models.[21]R 0 does not by itself give an estimate of how fast an infection spreads in the population.
Are you looking at the crappy graph on the GA state site, of the data on covidtracking.com? Everyone has a weekend lull so I don’t blame them for that.
At least we know if Georgia DOES start showing a spike then it’s pretty damn serious.
Georgia has a very low amount of testing and a suspicious confirmed case/death ratio. There is something weird going on there. Add in the fact Kemp literally rigged his own election and you really think fudging some Covid reporting numbers that would be damaging to him is beyond him?
California has been on a steady rise and had one of its highest single days of new cases yet today. Something to keep our eye on.
Early on I heard an epidemiologist describe R as a “made up”, highly culturally and context dependent measure. I mean it’s helpful to know, both relative to other pathogens (e.g., insanely high R of measles) and relative to the same pathogen over time, but it’s not a constant inherent to the virus.
California is 40M people - twice NY state. They’ve got a long way to go to get near most states in per capita cases. It doesn’t surprise me they’d keep rising.
How long before we have some reasonable idea about whether contracting COVID confers immunity? It seems like we have been going through this long enough now to have figured that out. Monitor people who have recovered and see if they get sick, or get a bunch of people to agree to be exposed again and see what happens. That seems like a very important piece of information to have so that we can plan for the future effectively.
I don’t think these things are as simple as just “Kemp called, lower the numbers” and nobody blows a whistle. I look at that FUBAR chart on their homepage and think that might be a major fudge attempt they’re doing. But they seem to be reporting reasonable data in their streams.
The media is so fucking lazy they probably look at the chart only, and don’t raise issues, which keeps Kemp happy.
Early on red state governors had success limiting access to tests. If we get a summer pause I could see them trying to do that again. But the reporting machinery numbers don’t seem like something they can completely control within their state at the moment.
You could put a policy in place that makes it so less deaths get reported by simply excluding presumed cases/deaths. In fact that is exactly what that Birx article from earlier today said that the WH would doing.
Or are we just supposed to think Texas/Georgia/Florida magically have both very low rates of testing and a CFR that is half of most of the blue states?
You literally don’t need a grand conspiracy. It’s all right out in the open with direct pressure from the White House to suppress the numbers.
I’m not looking at deaths. I’m looking at cases and hospitalizations. By the time deaths spike we’ll know there’s a problem.
I understand you don’t need a grand conspiracy. But I also think there are difficulties in the system to just fudging #s to whatever you want. The primary one being eventually you’ll get a hospital crunch you can’t hide - unless you have the power to throw doctors out of windows.
So they know they can only fudge the #s for so long if a crunch is on the way.
Ya I agree eventually you can’t hide it. If Georgia has a Rt of 1.2 (obviously I am just pulling this out of thin air) you could probably fudge the stats for months without this ever happening though. Even if they aren’t fudging the numbers with that Rt value it would take a couple months to get a significantly noticeable increase.
Ultimately I am both cautioning against using Georgia for being the most likely to fudge the numbers and the fact it isn’t as simple as just setting an alarm for two weeks after re-opening and then comparing the numbers. I look at all these numbers every day myself so I am not trying to be critical. Just pointing out why we might not see a dramatic increase that quickly even if we are back to exponential growth.
You really need to differentiate between “California” and “LA County.” The Bay area counties have been at, like, low double digit new cases for weeks now. LA county is a shitshow.
I just ran through my 7 day average tool and no states are going up very fast currently. It lags on purpose so I don’t get excited one way or the other and I’m trying to only update 1-2 times per week. (Any data shenanigans aside).
Assuming no breakthroughs before 2021, this could be the worst possible outcome IF seasonality slows it down.
We settle for a very slowly declining death rate from 1500/day and accumulate 60-90k through summer. Kind of unbelievable but seems highly likely.
We open and things don’t get worse. Maybe even a little better.
We get very complacent. Trump continues to declare victory even though a 9/11 every 3 days. We really don’t prep for the fall. Case loads decline but much less than an order of magnitude. This thing gets at least seeded absolutely everywhere. Even Montana.
Schools open and we go back to sports church entertainment etc.
An absolute slaughter. We kill 100k in October alone and the trend is 200k in November. Fuck let’s toss in a mutation that increases the weird symptoms in children.
Sigh. I really think the better it gets now by nature’s action, the worse the fall will be.
