Doubtful. I expect the US to have a lower fatality rate than Europe, due to its lower population density and almost total lack of functional public transportation.

oh be quiet

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1238860728565747714

Check these replies.

mmhmm

rates to 0 QE started again

Some maths for you all. Pulled from here:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Look at the plot, with a logarithmic Y axis:



There is almost 0 dampening that curve. It's basically linear. This **** is growing fully exponential, the US appears to be failing to even pump the brakes on this.

So, I pulled the data into a spreadsheet, and, uh, the average daily % increase in confirmed cases for the past two weeks is 29%. DAILY. That means in 22 days we're modeled to have a million cases. That already throws hospitals over capacity.

Not to be alarmist, but this looks like it might get ugly.

This is what the curve looks like for Italy:



Italy is somewhat succeeding in braking the growth of this virus. The US appears to be failing completely.

What an unbelievably asinine argument. I'm not even going to point out why some arbitrary metric of urbanization isn't a sufficient statistic for the discussion, because you either know it, or are intentionally ignoring it.


Reid, that's not really enough data for a comparison. First, the US has had testing bottlenecks that distort the curve. Second, the US is a much larger, more populace region. Like greater Europe, even with an optimal response, it's going to take much longer to saturate the system because there are so many more people.

Lastly, the response are designed to do just that, move back the time at which we hit the inflexion point. Right now the goal isn't to contain the virus it's to slow it down. To see if the US is behind its target, you'd need to know what the goal infection rate is, and that's more complex.

There's a goal infection rate? Seems like there's nobody employed at the CDC managing this..

This isn't right, is it? Most cases won't require hospitalization.

That's not to say I disagree with your overall conclusion. Gov. Cuomo's already said they won't have enough hospital space to treat everybody who needs it, and New York has been more proactive than most states.

Yeah, what I said was misleading. That 1 million wont all be going to the hospital.

Hospitals are already crowded with people from normal operation. You dont need the full 1 million in hospitals to crush the system. Even 10% will push many hospitals over the line. From the data I've seen I think its something like 40% of cases needing hospitalization? But that's from memory. What I've read suggests seattle hospitals are already struggling.

mmhmm.

Ouch. I’ve seen 20% thrown around in some studies, but typically closer to 16%-14%. Nowhere close to 40%.

Most cases (80%) are mild, according to Chinese numbers. You can get the 20% rate by adding up the severe (14%) and critical cases (5%)



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#cite_note-116

Okay. 20%. Assuming the model I proposed (which I'm not saying it will, but if) that means 200,000 people needing care within a few weeks. The US isnt prepared.

*crosses fingers*

But even then, it's 20% assuming all cases are reported, but many likely are not. Then you get into the data errors in reporting, such that China had and (as I'm sure it will turn out) the US had as well. The thing to keep in mind with the data that's floating out there now is it's just a "general sense" of what's going on. It's not going to give us an accurate picture.

[My 2 cents]:
It would be interesting to see what these ratios look like plotted against age groups and then compared to the flu. I suspect, when we look back on this, we will realize that we had an irrational and irresponsible over reaction to this (at least in the US). The biggest take away, I think, will be that we should have always had a better screening of visitors to nursing homes and we should do a better job of educating people about the need for washing your hands (but not over doing it).

The other thing to watch are all of these policy relaxations. For example, the TSA now allows you to carry up to 12oz of hand sanitizer on a flight. Air travel is no less safe today then it was yesterday because of it. It shows how arbitrary the fluid limitations we've been living with really were. What about the special paid sick leave? Will that apply to infections like the flu in the future? Are we just going to sit back and watch them roll those policies back to pre-coronavirus standards like good little sheep or will we push back?

Tyranny of exponential function. It doesn't really matter. If you let this thing just run its course, the difference between 20% and 5% is having 6 more days of a healthcare system.

its just a flu bro.

My 2 cents is, you can try to play statistics lawyer all you want with under-reported mild cases or whatever, but regardless of the ground truth this is utterly ****ing up Italy's healthcare system and there's no reason to think it won't happen in our cities too.

It doesn't help that hospitals are understocked and there are no magical warehouses full of medical supplies. A hospital doesn't have to look like the one from Chernobyl for things to be a problem, simply being slightly over capacity for long enough will cause problems.

Nevermind that all of the healthcare workers were already overworked.

I’ve been a little skeptical of arguments I’ve seen on Twitter that the pandemic “proves” that a single-payer healthcare system is better in the face of a crisis, and that having one would somehow solve the problem. But a good point I heard today: a for-profit healthcare system doesn’t have the incentives to produce surplus medical supplies, so that the country is prepared in case of an unexpected emergency. In fact, its incentives are to produce supplies for an operating capacity that’s as close as possible to the typical needs of the system.

the profit motive is a pandemic who could have known

Disaster preparedness is inefficient, I suppose. You're basically paying to maintain stock to be prepared, so.. yeah, it is less efficient, supposing disasters dont happen. Which, of course, the US economy is entirely based around the idea that disasters dont happen. Other than maybe an invasion by North Korea.

Interesting comments here

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/fk78ms/we_have_a_40m_no_pertinent_pmh_intubated_in_our/

God I wish I had gone to Africa or some place with malaria in the last few years and had a stockpile of Chloroquine.

perhaps gin and tonics are the next best thing

I dont get it. They're saying poor people are dying because they cant get treated? That's a shame.. how hard are they to replace as workers? If their position requires lots of training that will cost quite a bit, hoping maybe the government could help me out?

God, I wish high school taught more practical skills so when I lose workers it wouldn't cost so much.

Maybe vodka and tonics, to set you on your feet again. How much gin would that come out to, though, for the appropriate quinine dose from (edit) for the gin? And as someone mentioned in that blog post I posted, lots of sugar in the tonic water.

Maybe take quinine pills and zinc supplements? Apparently the zinc supplements on Amazon are back-ordered for the next week or two, but I still see things like cal-mag-plus supplements which include Zinc. I also have been drinking that pedialyte stuff, which contains (edit: hardly any) zinc.

Actually, these multivitamin pills I have leftover from Costco have a good amount of zinc in them (11mg),

the quinine is in the tonic water not the gin you nerd

oh wait lol i got you

Only nerds know the chemistry of what they drink, nerd.

Wanna take some vitamins and get high?

Not true. Chads the world over know to take Valtrex.

Quinine, like in tonic water or homeopathic pills for restless leg syndrome made from cinchona tree bark, may not be as effective as chloroquinine, which apparently was developed as an anti-material substitute for the original quinine drug. Maybe then instead of taking a gin and tonic folks should consume a supplement containing zinc, which would work together with the chloroquinine as soon as American doctors start to prescribe it off-label for covid-19. As of now it looks like they are still using the anti- HIV (edit) ebola medication, remdesivir (Gilead), but in China and I think maybe Italy, doctors are starting to use chloroquinine off-label.

An interesting twitter thread linked from that blog post.

Oh my god, that moron is retweeting bogus posts from Facebook. And he's a Harvard professor.

if it dies above 80 degrees how does it survive in the human body you ****ing smarmy dickwad

re: how much tonic water you'd have to drink to get a dose appropriate for malaria treatment/prevention, I believe it's above stomach capacity. Tonic water has way less quinine in it than it used to, and it's not clear it was any good against malaria during the colonial era either.

Indeed tonic water was probably never that useful, and it definitely isn't going to help when you are battering your immune system with liquor.

lmao just had an earthquake