This video several tweets down in that thread is sad as hell. What we are allowing to happen in this country is a complete tragedy.
https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1327481868200124416
“I’m very confident that transmission between people will be reduced by such a highly effective vaccine - maybe not 90% but maybe 50% - but we should not forget that even that could result in a dramatic reduction of the pandemic spread,” he added.
The goal was to deliver more than 300 million doses worldwide by next April, he said, which “could allow us to only start to make an impact”.
Does anybody live in El Paso or have links there and can comment on what the feeling is on the ground. Like are local over run hospitals enough to wake people up, or are there a bunch of people still trying to go about their normal lives? Could give some insight on whether any amount of death or lack of hospital beds is enough to change behaviors.
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Don’t know about El Paso, but most people will go on living their lives and only care about hospital overruns when they or someone close to them needs the hospital.
Until then it’s just media noise to them
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I just said to someone that it’s going to Take a death in every family to hit home. For better or worse that is what is likely to happen.
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This is latest I can find but as of Oct 21, they haven’t restarted in the USA. But more concerning are their inconsistencies in reporting.
Old news.
Trial results are also due in the next few weeks on a vaccine being developed by British drug manufacturer AstraZeneca and scientists at the University of Oxford.
Washington State gov Inslee ins making an announcement at 11a today, likely closing down the state is my guess (and hope).
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yeah, going to close indoor dining again. probably other things as well. maybe my gym is going to stop charging monthlies.
I’ve frozen our gym memberships but it still costs $10/mo. Bunch of shit.
Update from Steven Millman:
November 15th COVID Update: The Third Surge intensifies
Short version: It’s as bad as it’s ever been and it’s getting worse rapidly. An assumption underlying the Sept 27th model’s prediction for when the third surge would start to decline was invalid and has been updated based on current events. Days with 2,500+ people dying are likely coming before the holidays.
tl;dr: what else would it be?
First off, let’s take a look at the state of things.
CASES. It took about 60 days to reach 1,000,000 confirmed cases in the US. 1,000,000 Americans tested positive in the US in the LAST SEVEN DAYS. To put that into perspective, ONLY ELEVEN COUNTRIES SO FAR HAVE HAD MORE CONFIRMED CASES SINCE THE PANDEMIC BEGAN THAN THE UNITED STATES HAD IN THE LAST WEEK. 184,500 were confirmed Friday, which is by far the highest in a single day since the pandemic began and more than Sweden has had throughout the pandemic. In the second surge, the worst day saw 77,000 new cases. Case positivity is 11.3% which is higher than it’s been since early May. This means the increase is primarily a function of community spread and not increases in testing.
HOSPITALIZATIONS: 68,516 Americans were in the hospital with COVID Friday which is a new all-time record. 13,132 of them are in the ICU which is a new all-time record, and 3,769 are on ventilators which is the highest since June 3rd.
DEATHS: An average of 1,047 people died of the COVID-19 PER DAY over the last week (measured Sat-Fri). This is the first time that’s happened since the peak of the second surge in early August. The death rate has increased steadily over the last four weeks and is accelerating. This is happening even as case mortality rates have fallen (thankfully) over the same period from 1.25% to 0.75%.
As of today, more than 245,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 in less than nine months. This number is hard to relate to, so consider the following comparisons to get a better sense of the scale of it.
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244,000 is about twice as many as die each year from Alzheimer’s in the US (122,000/year)
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Norfolk, Virginia, the 92nd largest city in the US, has about 243,000 residents
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About 243,700 Americans have been murdered in the last FIFTEEN years (2005-2019)
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All flu deaths from 2014 to present (SIX seasons) combine to about 229,000 dead
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Current death toll is close to 300 times the on-screen deaths in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
And now what’s changed from the Sept 27th Model.
In the first surge, there was about a 23-day period between the rapid run-up of cases and changes in behavior (personal and policy-driven) that reduced the spread of the virus. The second surge, there was about a 32-day period between acceleration and decline. That kind of timing, with a few other factors, became an assumption underlying the expected peak of the third surge predicted to be at about 42 days. Unfortunately, we are more than 60 days into this surge and there’s no sign yet of a reduction in community spread which continues to be exponential in nature. See the attached image for a visual look at this.
There are a lot of factors that go into my COVID mortality modeling, but important ones include an interaction of new cases, cases mortality, and test positivity rates. As a result, the continued climb in cases means that death rates will rise farther than predicted in the Sept 27thmodel. As a result, I’ve had to change the model estimates starting the first week of December. The existing model should be accurate to that point. The Sept 27th model estimated that 295,200 would have died of COVID-19 by the end of the year and 342,000 dead by February 28th the approximate one-year mark of the disease in the United States. The updated model estimates those numbers have risen to 320,600 by end of the calendar year and 377,000 in the first 12-month period of the virus. The updated cumulative mortality model through Feb 28th is included as is the daily performance of the model projected to end of year.
The problem we face right now, is that there is nothing we can do about the mortality that will arise from the cases we’ve had so far. Those infections have already happened and the series of events that will follow are simply going to follow the chain of causal events. As an example, of the 185,000 people who tested positive on Friday the 13th will likely result in about 1,400 deaths over the next three to four weeks. The death toll will be higher if health systems are overwhelmed, which remains a real possibility at the current all time highest rate of spread.
One painfully concerning wildcard right now is how many people will ignore warnings around Thanksgiving gatherings. Hundreds of thousands of careless family gatherings in ten days could make all previous super-spreader events look microscopic by comparison. Thanksgiving spread is not included in this model update as I don’t have any reasonable priors to use to establish a prediction. It’s fair to say that co-mingling of households, indoors, for hours, at the highest moment of community spread thus far is a recipe for disaster. I want to be with my extended family and friends on Thanksgiving too, but we have to know better than this. Our collective COVID fatigue makes it not one bit less virulent. As an analogy, the men fighting in the trenches in WWI were sick and tired of being in the trenches. It was damp, cold, and endless. As unhappy as they were with being in the trenches, they didn’t announce that “I need to live a normal life” and climb out because, as fatigued as they were, THERE WERE STILL GERMANS SHOOTING AT THEM. The virus is in more places in the US than its ever been. Please be smart about the holidays.
Assuming Thanksgiving turns out to be a mega-super-spreader event, expect to see that in national case data about two weeks later, and in national death totals about six weeks later.
In my last update, I said, “Here’s hoping that regardless of who wins the election, the national conversation turns to masks and other sensible mitigations and that these insane super-spreading political events come to an end.” Perhaps one of the reasons that people haven’t changed behaviors in reaction to astonishingly deadly numbers is that the election noise drowned out the news. Perhaps the additional intransigence of many GOP-led states to issue mask requirements (or even recommendations) was a function of electioneering. Certainly, COVID is in the news more now than prior to Biden’s projected win. There are some encouraging signs that the issue is being taken more seriously. North Dakota, who’s governor has long derided mask mandates, just issued a mask order as well as limits on gatherings. This could be too little too late, however, as North Dakota had only 18 free Intensive Care Unit beds and 178 non-ICU beds in the entire state as of yesterday.
Once again, even with the election of a new President that appears to want to take direction from the science, please DON’T wait for the government to take care of you. Wear your mask, maintain social distancing, quarantine when you discover you’ve been in the company of someone that was sick. Do all the sensible things and we’ll get through this together as Americans. As my Facebook banner says, there are no red states or blue states, only hosts for the plague. The new administration is more than two months away and a widely distributed vaccine is much farther than that. We will only end the spread of the disease when we act collectively with common purpose.
Never forget that we as Americans have ALWAYS triumphed when we have found common cause. Let’s be THAT America, my friends.
COVID data are drawn from Johns Hopkins University, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Atlantic’s COVID tracking project. As always, don’t forget I’m not a medical professional or epidemiologist. I’m a professional statistician with too much on my mind.
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The second one is really cute too
https://twitter.com/antoni_UK/status/1327935888727347201?s=20
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Welp.
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Czech government projects that it will take at least another month before all of the restrictions can be lifted. It’s a political move designed to get a 30 day extension on that state of emergency but they’re probably telling the truth.
The current government is getting absolutely crucified. The supporting parties of the minority government aren’t expected to make the 5% threshold. Latest poll benefits the left in the CR if it comes to fruition but it still won’t be easy to form a government in 2021.
I don’t see the lower cfr in anything I’ve seen. Maybe he isn’t using an offset as long. The 28 day seems pretty stable in the 1.5-2.0 range and at the higher end this fall so far.
Someone else posted similar yesterday itt.
But I hope his numbers are correct.
Had a family member message me to let me and my dad (who is currently undergoing cancer treatment) know when they were having Thanksgiving. I replied and said thanks, but we’re not going anywhere until we get the vaccine. I received the following reply: Well, we’re looking forward to seeing you again once you stop letting the government control you. That rushed vaccine will probably kill you before the China virus does. I just replied, Happy Thanksgiving to you too.
Another dispatch from Chiefsplanet.
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I asked the CFR question. Will update when he answers.
Are we talking lower CFR since March, or since the peak of wave 2?