False pos rate is dependent on incidence. Not a super helpful way of looking at it
Best of luck to everyone in here who works in health care. Going to be a brutal few months 
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Manitoba is back to full lockdown. Churches even shutdown, no gatherings permitted outside your household. One month of these restrictions.
Schools still open though!
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I don’t know I think the political landscape might have changed the political will for this in a lot of states. 71 million people voted for no lockdowns, no mask mandates, covid is over etc. Which is terrifying.
A vaccine is coming and only old people die.
For the entire western world there is only covid 19 management until vaccine gets there.
Lockdowns are off the table.
We are getting ready to make what happened in Italy and NYC look like no big deal nationwide. I’m really not so sure lockdowns are off the table. Especially not in states with competent government.
Not to mention several european countries are back in some form of lockdown so I’m not exactly sure the entire western world having lockdowns off the table is accurate. The vaccine is still probably 6-9 months from widespread distribution.
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Almost all of Europe is in lockdown. So that false. When the weather cools and the east coast gets hit hard again we will be back in some form of lockdown here IMO.
That’s basically been the truth nobody wants to say out loud since day 1. It’s never been about saving lives, just keeping the rates of hospitalization and death at a manageable level.
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I think there’s ~zero chance states implement a lockdown that interferes with Thanksgiving due to all the OFB anti-mask nutjobs. Thanksgiving is going to be looked back at as a nationwide super spreader event. People will die, no one will care.
Isn’t it better to have a lockdown anyway so that reasonable people will comply?
I think some of you guys are way more optimistic about what is coming that I am. The virus hasn’t changed since March. Most places in the US and Europe were not hard hit because of a combo of summer, initial lockdowns and no school. We very clearly have the entire US about ready to tip over their hospitals. There may be beds but there will not be adequate staff. Normal travel contracts run $50-80 an hour depending on location for travel nurses. They are now running $150-200. The hospitals see the writing on the wall and know they need to lock in nurses now in a mad competition to see who is the least understaffed. Hospital corporations are not in the habit of giving away money for no reason.
We now have winter coming, school in session most places, 80% of the country has given up, Thanksgiving is in two weeks and we are at a baseline of 125k cases a day. We are about to see what a widespread uncontrolled pandemic can do. Mostly because we are selfish idiots who haven’t learned a thing in 8 months of this. Many people are going to die due to lack of medical care. There is a very big difference between a ICU nurse and your run of the mill nurse from my understanding. There are a finite supply of ICU nurses. There is a finite amount of ICU level equipment. If you do not have access to these two things when you are really sick, whether it is covid or not, your chances of dying go way way up.
If we somehow avoid 3-5k dead/day every day for a significant period of time this winter with no additional precautions I will be shocked.
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If the goal was to minimize death, yea, I just don’t think that’s the actual goal of most politicians. They will instead base their decision on which course of action will avoid public outcry and protests that could hurt them politically.
Also given the election bullshit any lockdown would face immediate conspiracy theories (nearly certain to be retweeted by Trump himself) about how it’s actually about shutting down election protests and installing communist Joe Biden into the White House or something.
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I don’t think places are going to have a choice. We are in an exponential spread phase from a massive baseline. The hospital my wife is travel nursing at is the largest in the state. She is in orientation today and there are 100 ICU nurses they have poached from all over the country. Their normal ICU only has 80 beds. The sad truth is that these nurses come from other hospitals who are either behind on this process or don’t want to pay the going rate.
This time around we won’t be able to divert resources like we did in NYC. This time it is an every hospital and person for themselves situation. Rural and smaller city hospitals are going to tip over first if they aren’t already and then you will see a cascading event. Here in OKC we have routinely been diverting patients 200+ miles in some cases. What happens when every hospital in the area is maxed out? We are about to find out.
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This is the time to go full Johnny if you can. Take zero avoidable risk the next 3-4 months. You do not want to get triaged.
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Your updates from your wife are gold. The news should give Trump wah-wah-wah 15 seconds and then move on to 29.75 minutes of covid.
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Ugh, that’s bleak.
I really, really hope you’re wrong about this.
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He isn’t. We’re past the writing on the wall phase.
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I agree that things could be really bad. Bad enough that we may not need mandatory lockdowns. Many people will lock down voluntarily when they understand that getting sick means they’re on their own and getting a hospital bed is probably not possible. I think local leaders and governors etc. will be on solid ground just to explain how prevalent the virus is, and how crippled their hospital systems are, and maybe people will dial it back a few notches.
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As I said yesterday the absolute worst is still avoidable. We are just going to choose to not avoid it. Buffets, dry turkey and pumping iron are too tough to give up for a couple weeks.
We literally probably need one more lockdown cycle to get to the vaccine and we won’t fucking do it. It’s complete insanity.
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