After 52 days dad finally got a negative test
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One of my neighbors named Mary who insisted on talking at the back fence of our yards with every single person walking by (we live right on a walking path), and I labeled ‘Typhoid Mary’ because of it, just got hauled out by an ambulance I guess. #hatetoseeit.
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Report back if Covid confirmed.
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Little Bill: You just arrested an unarmed protester.
Reply: They shoulda armed themself.
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I can only assume the cops teargassed them shortly after…
What’s that? They were white?
Well nevermind then
I’m very glad to know your dad didnt have covid two months ago
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Oahu rolling back some OFB,
In the Brazilian Amazon, a sharp drop in coronavirus sparks questions over collective immunity
The hospital system was coming apart. Coronavirus patients were being turned away. Basic necessities — beds, stretchers, oxygen — had run out. Ambulances had nowhere to take patients. People were dying at home. Gravediggers couldn’t keep up.
The human destruction in the Brazilian city of Manaus would be “catastrophic,” physician Geraldo Felipe Barbosa feared.
But then, unexpectedly, it started to let up — without the interventions seen elsewhere.
Hospitalizations of coronavirus patients plummeted in the state from a peak of more than 1,300 in May to fewer than 300 in August. Excess deaths in Manaus fell from around 120 per day to practically zero. The city closed its field hospital.
In a country devastated by the novel coronavirus, where more than 3.6 million people have been infected and over 114,000 killed, the reversal has stunned front-line doctors. Manaus never imposed a lockdown or other strict containment measures employed successfully in Asia and Europe. And what policies did exist, many people ignored.
In the spring, the Amazonian city became a global symbol of the devastation the disease can wreak in the developing world. But now it has returned to near normalcy — far sooner than many expected — and scientists and public health officials are asking why. The question is part of a broader debate among scientists and public health officials over the mechanics of herd immunity and the level of transmission that must be crossed before the disease starts to recede.
Brazil reports record infections as coronavirus spreads to all regions
European cities that were pummeled by the disease have begun to reopen without crippling second waves. In Guayaquil, the Ecuadoran metropolis where bodies were left on the streets, scientists have cautiously speculated that collective immunity has been reached. Some researchers are now suggesting the same about New York City.
The factors that are helping to keep the virus at bay in Manaus and other cities remain unclear. Changed behaviors and individual community characteristics surely play a role. Manaus is testing far more than it once did. But whatever the dynamic, scientists and health officials are starting to wonder whether early prognostications about herd immunity overshot the mark.
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It was initially believed that between 60 and 70 percent of the population needed to develop antibodies to reach collective immunity. But Guayaquil never broke 33 percent. Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, never got past 20.“Manaus is an interesting case, indeed,” said Jarbas Barbosa da Silva, assistant director of the Pan American Health Organization. “The hypothesis — and this is just a hypothesis — is that the peak we had in Manaus was very strong, and there was such widespread community transmission that it may have produced some kind of collective immunity.”
Draconian restrictive measures reduce the disease sharply, Barbosa said. But in Manaus, the reduction has been gradual, with a steady progression of new cases still arriving every day. That curve suggests the disease followed a “natural dynamic,” Barbosa said.
Manaus, he said, “paid a very large price” to get there. During the spring, it suffered three times as many deaths as normal. In all, the city of 2 million along the Amazon River buried some 3,300 people more than usual.
“This was not a strategy,” Barbosa said. “It was a tragedy.”
Cautious optimism
Pietro Pinheiro Alves, a physician in Manaus, knows how quickly that can happen. Despite its physical remoteness in the rainforest, Manaus is one of Brazil’s most international cities. Drawn by a free-trade zone, companies from all over the world have put down roots in the Amazon. As the coronavirus spread worldwide, strains from China, Europe and the United States were soon circulating, unseen.
It didn’t take long for the patient surge to overwhelm the hospital system.
“People are dying in their houses,” Pinheiro Alves wept into the phone in early May, when things were at their worst. “They can’t get any help in the hospitals.”
He felt hopeless. People were still crowding the streets. Officials weren’t willing to impose a lockdown. In impoverished Manaus, where many already live on the brink, the mayor said it would lead to social chaos and violence. So Pinheiro Alves spent his off hours trying to jury-rig ventilators.
Manaus Mayor Arthur Virgílio Neto said he “fought for social isolation.”
“The attempt failed,” he said. “There wasn’t real social isolation. People still went out, and it wasn’t understood why. In the most difficult hours, I’d go to the field hospital, get stuck in a traffic jam and think, ‘Why aren’t people home? What are they doing out?’ ”
Physician Uildéia Galvão saw the result: Every day, there would be a line of ambulances outside her hospital in central Manaus, each holding a patient in need of a bed. Sometimes they sat for hours, waiting for someone to die and relinquish their bed.
In Brazil, a dying man and a desperate search for an open bed
At the height of the city’s outbreak, there would be three or four lined up. Then one day, it was two. Then one.
“It was the first sign that the number of emergency calls were dropping,” Galvão said.
Intensive care units started to clear. Emergency coronavirus calls slowed, dropping from 2,410 in April to fewer than 180 in July. The wail of ambulances quieted. Some scientists said victory was in sight.
“Why Manaus will be the first Brazilian city to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic,” wrote a group of researchers from the Federal University of Amazonas.
Street activity returned to pre-pandemic levels. People flocked to the river to swim and party. Appeals to wear masks: widely ignored. Private schools opened up. Then public. Cases continued to number in the hundreds every day, but far fewer were serious enough to warrant hospitalizations.
“There isn’t a concrete explanation,” said Henrique dos Santos Pereira, a scientist at the Federal University of Amazonas. Maybe there’s an unseen biological immunity in the population. Or the city’s relative youth staved off the worst.
As coronavirus kills indigenous people in the Amazon, Brazil’s government goes missing
“The problem is that we don’t know how many people are susceptible,” dos Santos Pereira said. “In the beginning, we were thinking it was everyone, but it doesn’t seem like the whole world is susceptible. . . . It is causing us to reconsider the theory of herd immunity.”
Virgílio, the mayor, hopes the scientists are right. The medical system in Manaus has failed once. If a second wave does come, he has little doubt what would happen.
“Our capacities would be overwhelmed.”
Anyone want to take a shot at what’s happening in Manaus?
I’ve always thought your low hanging fruit theory had a lot of merit. Places can hit a sort of mini-herd immunity through it maybe?
But that theory assumed a big chunk of people were like me - working from home, taking it very seriously. Or older and retired and taking it seriously.
Nothing like that is happening in Manaus from what it sounds like.
Maybe there’s something to this heterogeneity idea that only some fraction of the overall popuation is vulnerable. Might help explain that slum in India that also had super low death rates as well.
It’s been going quite badly in Hawaii for the last roughly two weeks, so it’s about time.
Ya I guess I just mean maybe we all have differing chances of getting infected. Whether that is due to our lifestyle choices or other factors. Which I believe is what you floated a couple of months back in one shape or form. I mean how do you explain Florida? I think it is possible you can hit a max new infections per day long before you hit true herd immunity. In fact isn’t that what we would expect to see? The peak would occur long before true herd immunity occurs right?
See if you can find how many active cases they have and what the peak active cases was, if possible.
I definitely think each place has a max new infections per day, but still don’t think anyone but NC/FL/CA/NY/NJ have hit theirs with the additional possible exception of Arizona (I think IL can get hotter than its original peak). Texas has gotten close but testing there has never been consistently high enough to produce what I think is their current testing ‘peak’ daily cases. North Carolina is just a wildfire sitting in place, not going down or up in any great measure outside of testing due to no behavior seeming to have changed in a couple of months. I think NC, Nebraska, and maybe Kansas are the best examples of close to detente places that don’t ever seem to have spikes but just a consistent burn.
Arizona is a bizarre outlier but today they had a relative ton of new cases with a 17.2% pos. rate (highest pos. since 8/2) with their lowest test total since June 28 (an outlier in the middle of more testing than today). I don’t know how many people agree with me at this point, but testing is so effed in so many places right now that’s it’s very hard to get a handle on what’s going on. I think we’re now going up again after a small fall but it’s still too early to tell conclusively. FL, CA, and TX are really skewing the data down right now because they’re nowhere near their peaks from a month ago but still clearly have a ton of cases. It’s starting to look like the pandemic is going to be giant flares of hot spots (hello upper Midwest next) but there aren’t enough people there to replicate the NY, FL, TX, CA conditions of earlier. While I think some states still have good peaks left to hit, I think we’ve hit the highest we’re going to see in many places unless testing really goes up. I don’t see CA or NY ever getting back up to their peak case load again barring something really weird happening.
Had an idea, wanted to run it by you guys:
Basically I’m thinking of building a beekeeper type helmet, covered in plastic, with a hepa filter and computer fan air intake. Basically a boy in the bubble type helmet. Semi-jokingly ran it by a teacher friend of mine, and she actually expressed interest. Can you guys see any glaring issues with this idea?
Was thinking of using this style filter:
I’ve been tracking test results since the measurement period of 7/15-7/21 and the measurement period of 8/19-8/25 is not good. There have been 6 measurement periods tracked since the peak week of 7/15-7/21. The measurement period of 8/19-8/25 was the lowest number of test results returned since the peak week in the U.S. The highest testing in any of the 6 measurement periods in the U.S. was 5,639,799 the week of 7/22-7/28. The most recent measurement period had 4,743,015 test results returned. The peak testing week positive percentage in the U.S. was 8%. This past week had a positive percentage of 6.1%.
Even with this lowering in testing, it seems clear cases are still on a downward trend in the U.S. helped mightily by greatly reduced new case numbers in CA, FL, and TX. CA and FL had their lowest number of test results returned in this measurement period, while TX had its second lowest number of test results returned in the 6 weeks tracked. CA is down approximately 174,000 test results from its testing peak week of 7/29-84 (pos. pct. this week is 5.7%). Florida is down approximately 223,000 tests this week from its testing peak week of 7/15-7/21 (pos. pct. this week is 13.6%). Texas is down approximately 221,000 tests this week from its testing peak of 7/15-7/21 (pos. pct. this week is 16.3%).
These places had their lowest testing results returned in the 6 weeks I’ve been tracking since peak week during the 8/19-8/25 measurement period:
U.S. overall, CA, FL, AZ, SC, LA, AR, UT, PA, WA (misleading due to no negatives returned since 8/3), MD, OK, NV, IA, WI, MO, CO, KY, OR, NE, ID, and DE
These places had their second lowest test results returned this week in the 6 weeks tracked:
TX, NC, AL, MS, NJ, NM, AK
These places returned at least 30k fewer test results this week than the testing peak in the area while still having relatively consistent test results over the 6 week measurement period:
GA, MN, and OH (aberration in testing, other 5 weeks are relatively similar)
These places have relatively consistent test results returned throughout the 6 weeks measured or at least the past 3 weeks:
TN, VA, MI, SD, DC, ND, HI, and VT
These places returned their highest level of test results during the 6 weeks measured during the 8/19-8/25 measurement period:
NY, IL, IN, MA, KS, CT, RI, WV, NH, ME, WY, and MT
These places have a higher positive percentage since the peak week of 7/15-7/21 by at least 1.6% during this measurement period:
SC, IL, UT, MS, WA (misleading, see above), MN, OK, IA, MO, CO, KY, NE, SD, ND, and HI
These places have a positive pct. within 1.5% either way since the peak week:
TX, NC, NY, VA, AR, MS, MD, NJ, WI, IN, MI, MA, OR, KS, CT, DE, RI, DC, WV, NH, ME, MT, AK, and VT
These places have a positive pct. during this measurement period that is at least 1.6% down from the peak week of 7/15-7/21:
U.S. overall, CA, FL, AZ, GA, TN, AL, OH, LA, NV, NM, ID, and WY
These places have a positive pct. during this measurement period of 0-3%:
NY, NJ, MI, MA, NM, CT, DC, WV, NH, ME, MT, AK, and VT
These places have a positive pct. during this measurement period of 3.1% to 5%:
IL, OH, LA, PA, MD, DE, RI, and WY
These places have a positive pct. during this measurement period of 5.1% to 10%:
U.S. overall, CA, AZ, GA, NC, TN, VA, AR, MN, OK, WI, IN, KY, OR, NE, and KS
These places have a positive pct. during this measurement period of 10.1% to 15%:
FL, AL, UT, NV, IA, MO, SD, ND, and HI
These places have a positive pct. during this measurement period of 15.1% to 20%:
TX, CO, and ID
These places have a positive pct. during this measurement period of 20+%:
SC, MS, and WA (see above)
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Without knowing if behavior changed (without a government order) makes it hard to conclude.
If We had an SDI number and/or mask usage number we might be able to make sense of it.
If I had to guess: there are some behavior factors tied with local herd effects to drop R dramatically.
Another where there are confounding or codependent variables. The actual level of infection impacts the amount of testing. People get tests due to symptoms or exposure primarily (along with regulatory requirements of say nursing home workers getting tested weekly or whatever time frame in each state)
if raw testing and positivity are both dropping probably good news.
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As much air as the fan can suck in will be pushed out somewhere. This device will wildly spew germs everywhere. It’s an infection spreading machine.
Filter the exhaust and not let any air escape anywhere else? Probably not realistic without a suit that covers your whole body and it will be pressurized.
Yup needs a kick ass HEPA or MERV13(?) filter. Gets really complicated real fast as filters dramatically increase the pressure needed.