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COVID-19

The concern about overwhelming hospitals was so critical that no one is actually counting how many people have needed in patient care.

EDIT: It is being counted, just had to look harder. Approximately 88,000 people have been hospitalized for COVID-19, or roughly 1.5x the amount of people who died.

Under a pessimistic estimate of 200,000 people dying before herd immunity takes over, that's 300,000 people who will need in patient care. There are 950,000 beds in America, with roughly 50-65% occupied at any given time. So as long as the entire population doesn't get COVID-19 at the exact same time, the healthcare capacity exists.
 
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taxi1 said:
That sounds low. What assumptions do you base that on?
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That was Dr Fauci's initial estimate... before it became politically inconvenient and all models started to magically end in the summer.

Aside from that...

Over 1 million people have tested positive. It's estimated that there are about 50 people who are undiagnosed for every positive test, which means there are roughly 50 million infections so far.*

Swine flu infected 60 million people over a year or so, with an estimated 2/3 herd immunity, which means we're in for approximately 180 million infections....or roughly 3-4x more than we currently have...

Which brings the death count to 150-200,000 people when you multiply 58,000 x3-4 and do some rounding.

Turns out Dr Fauci is smart. Who knew.
 
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Some afternoon beer thoughts:

One interesting thing is how poorly recoveries have been tracked. Some of that is undoubtedly due to limitations with testing, but there have been some strange occurrences. For example, the Bing tracker no longer tracks recovered cases in CA. It would seem to no longer be a priority to track recovered cases, just total cases. Someone who got sick in February, tested positive, and recovered by March 1 is still counted as "sick". This raises interesting questions surrounding the utility of the data being provided to the general public.

Using @Spekkio 's reported 1:50 assumption of confirmed to real cases (which to me seems high, I'd guess it's more like 1:20), today's numbers would indicate that 50 million people have had COVID 19. Very different than assuming 1 in 6 Americans currently have it. Some proportion of them undoubtedly have recovered, and we could be well on our way to herd immunity. The implication would be that future waves will be much less pronounced.

It would be nice to see some front line, mainstream effort to collect and report on that data. No testing required, just add in a reasonably safe assumption that every case >5 weeks old where the patient survived is "recovered". We could at least get some working numbers that way. Since the desired end state would appear to be either a.) herd immunity or b.) a vaccine, we could really measure our progress toward the former, while the latter is being developed.

I'm just having a harder and harder time buying the narrative of staying shut down to not overwhelm the healthcare system. An initial shutdown was not a bad idea to ensure this didn't happen and allow us to evaluate the severity of the situation. Having mitigations in place, absolutely! But with proper hygene and appropriate measures, it's time to...

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sevenhelmet said:
Using @Spekkio 's reported 1:50 assumption of confirmed to real cases (which to me seems high, I'd guess it's more like 1:20), today's numbers would indicate that 50 million people have had COVID 19. Very different than assuming 1 in 6 Americans currently have it. Some proportion of them undoubtedly have recovered, and we could be well on our way to herd immunity. The implication would be that future waves will be much less pronounced.

It would be nice to see some front line, mainstream effort to collect and report on that data. No testing required, just add in a reasonably safe assumption that every case >5 weeks old where the patient survived is "recovered". We could at least get some working numbers that way. Since the desired end state would appear to be either a.) herd immunity or b.) a vaccine, we could really measure our progress toward the former, while the latter is being developed.
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With our current testing policies, and the false negative rate, accurately tracking recoveries is impossible.

I think what's a bit morbid is that if you're admitted to inpatient care, you have a 2/3 chance of dying anyway. Personally... knowing that those fuckers won't let patients see their families, I just won't go.
 
Spekkio said:
With our current testing policies, and the false negative rate, accurately tracking recoveries is impossible.

I think what's a bit morbid is that if you're admitted to inpatient care, you have a 2/3 chance of dying anyway. Personally... knowing that those fuckers won't let patients see their families, I just won't go.
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Perhaps. But plugging in an assumption of >5 weeks past positive confirmation = recovered (if not dead) seems reasonable enough to give us a thumbprint of potential recoveries. Costs nothing, and could help us measure progress toward herd immunity. In a world where people are assuming X:Y cases exist based on limitations in testing, it's not that farfetched of an assumption.

I'm just not seeing a lot of discussion about this. It's all about "flattening the curve", but if you level off infection rates without removing people from the count of infected, you just get a linear increase until "everyone is sick". It's bad data, pure and simple.
 
sevenhelmet said:
Perhaps. But plugging in an assumption of >5 weeks past positive confirmation = recovered (if not dead) seems reasonable enough to give us a thumbprint of potential recoveries. Costs nothing, and could help us measure progress toward herd immunity. In a world where people are assuming X:Y cases exist based on limitations in testing, it's not that farfetched of an assumption.
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Me spitballing a 50:1 infection ratio based on some studies done in CA is entirely different than the licensed professionals putting their reputations on the line with an official count based on estimates that have a wide variation.

I'm just not seeing a lot of discussion about this. It's all about "flattening the curve", but if you level off infection rates without removing people from the count of infected, you just get a linear increase until "everyone is sick". It's bad data, pure and simple.
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I think that we started social distancing and stay at home orders with a scientific aim in mind; I think that the measures are being extended primarily based on political calculations and perception of media backslash for lifting them. John Q Public is convinced that lifting social distancing measures will kill people.
 
Spekkio said:
I think that we started social distancing and stay at home orders with a scientific aim in mind; I think that the measures are being extended primarily based on political calculations and perception of media backslash for lifting them. John Q Public is convinced that lifting social distancing measures will kill people.
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I agree with you. Most people don't assess risk very well.

I'm really just frustrated that we might be allowing risk-averseness toward COVID to create more socioeconomic risk than the virus actually posed in the first place.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I think this will all balance out to some sort of "new normal" eventually.
 
sevenhelmet said:
I agree with you. Most people don't assess risk very well.

I'm really just frustrated that we might be allowing risk-averseness toward COVID to create more socioeconomic risk than the virus actually posed in the first place.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I think this will all balance out to some sort of "new normal" eventually.
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Was this a eureka moment for you?

Because this has been a discussion on this thread for a while. Absent the guys trying to blame our President.
 
Spekkio said:
Swine flu infected 60 million people over a year or so, with an estimated 2/3 herd immunity, which means we're in for approximately 180 million infections....or roughly 3-4x more than we currently have...
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Here's my estimate, based on latest estimates of IFR (infection fatality rate) being in the 0.2 - 0.5 range, which is itself based on historical death rates for communities versus deaths experienced currently, allocating the difference to COVID. Using 150M as total infected...

300,000 - 750,000

We had 15K dead this past week, bending down rapidly. But I expect with relaxing distancing we will muddle along at 8K per week, so I think we will hit 120K by 1 July.

We're one decent therapeutic drug away from dividing the future fatalities by an order of magnitude or so. We're also a mutation away from increasing the fatality rate.
 
Mos said:
This was pretty unnecessary.
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I don’t agree with you.

If you subtract any opinion post mentioning our President and the subsequent responses, this thread would be pretty relevant. There’s been a contingent on here essentially paraphrasing what he said for a while now. I’m interested to hear him explain why all of a sudden, on a Tuesday afternoon, his opinion changed. I doubt anything on this thread changed his mind, so I’m curious if it was the realization that his impending career change had taken a 180, the Dr. Erickson video that YouTube censored, etc.

Now, he doesn’t have to explain his reasoning, just like you and I don’t have to agree about the necessity of my post. And it’s our right to share our differing opinions.
 
SlickAg said:
“Sweden’s death rate of 22 per 100,000 people is the same as that of Ireland, which has earned accolades for its handling of the pandemic, and far better than in Britain or France.”

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The UK rates are terrible through inaction. They make the US rates look good. But for action and inaction. I would suggest Australia and Sweden. The Swedes didn't do nothing, they just didn't do much. They have a lot higher numbers than their neighbours.
Australia have 19 covid cases per 100,000. The deaths are 0.34 per 100,000
 
Speaking of testing. Has anyone seen the nasal swab video from the Army floating around the interwebs? How the EFF is that swab not touching the back of that guys skull?
 
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