Covid-19 #15 : It Ain't Over Until It's Over

[The Anti-Targ]

Are death rates possibly being under-reported in the USA? Apparently 24 states are only reporting confirmed COVID-19 deaths and not probable / suspected COVID-19 deaths. I guess as long as reporting practice hasn't changed since the start then relative death rates will still be meaningful, but it still means the overall death rate is likely higher than what the official data says.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

I hope I misheard this, but I believe the talking head on the TV said 20 states saw single day positive testing records this weekend. And only a few states are showing signs of decreasing positive tests, though they are largely small states.

[williamjm]

6 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I hope I misheard this, but I believe the talking head on the TV said 20 states saw single day positive testing records this weekend. And only a few states are showing signs of decreasing positive tests, though they are largely small states.

Some of the numbers are horrific. Florida is now reporting more new cases each day than the entire continent of Europe (even including Russia's massive total).

[Paxter]

1 minute ago, williamjm said:

Some of the numbers are horrific. Florida is now reporting more new cases each day than the entire continent of Europe (even including Russia's massive total).

And more alarming is that fatalities / day are now increasing too (Donald won't be able to tweet about decreasing death rates for much longer).

California just crossed a rolling average of 100 deaths / day, Texas is at 83, Florida at 72 and Arizona at 62. It will be interesting to keep monitoring those numbers as the cases count grows. 

On Latin America, are there any reasonable guesses as to how far off the official fatalities data would be? I find it a little odd that Mexico and Brazil seem to have hit a ceiling of fatalities at 1,000 and 600 per day, respectively, and haven't breached that ceiling over the past two months. The curve seems remarkably flat, considering that the government responses have been quite patchy (esp in Brazil). 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

14 minutes ago, williamjm said:

Some of the numbers are horrific. Florida is now reporting more new cases each day than the entire continent of Europe (even including Russia's massive total).

Yeah. The pictures are down right offensive. People are throwing huge beach parties all over the state and ignoring all the suggested safety measures. And I'm sure the bars and clubs have been packed. FL in the summer is about as bad a place you can be given the current pandemic. I'm surprised things aren't worse here because summer beach/lake parties are a big part of our culture here in the Twin Cities, MN. 

I also heard that Brazil had roughly a quarter million new cases in the last week. I said from the beginning of this Brazil was the country that most worried me, but apparently our completely incompetent government told them to hold our beer. 

[Fragile Bird]

Good grief. All along I thought that Admiral in the Coronavirus Team was, you know, an Admiral. Like, military. Giroir.

He’s not. He’s an Admiral of the public health service and therefore gets to wear a uniform. FFS. No wonder Trump never referred to Dr. Brix by her military title, colonel, because she was real military.

Not only that, but when he worked at a university on a vaccine research team, he was fired for...not being a team player. He was hired out of the private sector. Talk about bullshit!

[The Anti-Targ]

It is rather an oddity of the US public service that you can have a military rank and uniform without ever actually serving in the military. There are these types of people in all of the federal departments. I think part of the attraction of going down the military pathway in public service is getting the military pension. But there are downsides to it as well, I think you can get called up to actually serve in the military in war time even in the absence of a draft. The colonel in the FDA who came here one time to audit our dairy programme explained it to me, but that was about 7 years ago, so I forgot most of the detail he talked about.

[Fez]

1 minute ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It is rather an oddity of the US public service that you can have a military rank and uniform without ever actually serving in the military. There are these types of people in all of the federal departments. I think part of the attraction of going down the military pathway in public service is getting the military pension. But there are downsides to it as well, I think you can get called up to actually serve in the military in war time even in the absence of a draft. The colonel in the FDA who came here one time to audit our dairy programme explained it to me, but that was about 7 years ago, so I forgot most of the detail he talked about.

The biggest reason it happens is for civilians who regularly work with the military so that can quickly get their work done and not get stonewalled. For instance, the federal budget staff that directly audit military spending are mostly generals, so that they can use chain of command to simply order documents get turned over to them.

[Paxter]

43 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I also heard that Brazil had roughly a quarter million new cases in the last week. I said from the beginning of this Brazil was the country that most worried me, but apparently our completely incompetent government told them to hold our beer. 

If you believe the official data, that's been the case for a month. Brazil has been averaging (on a 7-day rolling basis) around 30,000-35,000 cases per day (245,000 per week) since mid-June. The rate has been more or less flat since then. 

[The Anti-Targ]

Interesting statistic to come out of our lockdown. Total deaths during the 2 months of lockdown were ~540 less than the 5-year average for the same time of year. Some of that is likely to be fewer road and work accidents. The lockdown occurred over Easter weekend, which is a pretty big weekend for road accidents, though only like 15 or 20 fatalities, so only a small part of that 540 decrease. The forestry industry is the biggest workplace killer, and that was pretty much completely shut down during the lockdown. But that still that kills maybe a hundred or so a year at most, so won't account for a huge number for that ~2 month period.

[BigFatCoward]

French healthcare workers given big pay rise on the back of the work they have been doing, good for the French.  Wonder if anyone else gets shamed into recognising what their healthworkers have been through.

[Which Tyler]

14 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Forgive me if this has been asked before,  but what has changed in the science regarding masks since this all started? 

That  depends on what you mean by "the science".

The effectiveness of masks hasn't changed - our knowledge on the effectiveness of masks on combatting this specific threat has changed (airborn vs droplets; large droplets vs miniscule droplets; symptomatic spread vs asymptomatic spread; length of time sars-cov-2 is viable for on different materials...).

Concerns about selfish arseholes stockpiling (whether one person is buying up a million packets to create scarity and sell at a 20x markup, or million people buying one packet for their personal use - often with no knowledge of the "normal" costs, and therefore paying a 20x markup without knowing) creating both a lack of masks and a lack of afordable masks for those who actually need it.

Rationale for wearing a mask (protecting wearer vs protecting people from the wearer). This is made worse by the false sense of security mask wearing was giving people with the wrong rationale.

When it comes to washable masks - 1/3 of the global population doesn't have access to sanitary water to drink, let alone to clean a mask in (and many more won't have convenient access) - meaning that the mask becomes a petri dish to spread, rather than a protection to prevent).

Given the numbers who won't be able to wash a bit of rag - how many more won't have access to single-use, disposable masks?

There's already a crisis of too much plastic in our landiflls and oceans - adding to that with loads more single-use plastic PPE.

 

 

I could go on, and I'm sure I've missed important points; but the above is off the top of my head, and feel is enough to make the point.

[Which Tyler]

7 hours ago, Fez said:

The biggest reason it happens is for civilians who regularly work with the military so that can quickly get their work done and not get stonewalled. For instance, the federal budget staff that directly audit military spending are mostly generals, so that they can use chain of command to simply order documents get turned over to them.

That one happens in the UK civil service as well (which I never knew until my niece worked there) they have an "equivalent rank" - and it's so that the military know what level of authority and clearance they have without any rigamarole. As far as I'm aware it's only used when interfacving with the military though, and seems to be capped at "colonel" - or at least, that was her last rank before being promoted out of having an equivalent rank.

 

 

Quote

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53397617

So... from the 24th of July (but not earlier) we'll have to wear a mask in order to go into a large, but confined space, and buy a pie to eat at home.
From 31st of July, We'll be paid £10 to go into a small, but confined space, and buy a pie to eat there - whilst not wearing a mask.

 

Shamed? - surely you're not thinking of our government - they have no shame.
They may U-turn more often than Ben Ainslie; but through popularism, not shame.

[Gorn]

Personally, I blame WHO and most of the medical experts for the messaging failure on masks. Let's go back to what they were saying in March:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html

Quote

World Health Organization officials Monday said they still recommend people not wear face masks unless they are sick with Covid-19 or caring for someone who is sick.

"There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.

Or as recently as April:

https://www.businessinsider.com/who-no-need-for-healthy-people-to-wear-face-masks-2020-4

Quote

WHO says there is no need for healthy people to wear face masks, days after the CDC told all Americans to cover their faces

It's really difficult to go from this to "actually, forget what we said earlier, everyone should totally wear a mask all the time now".

People were attacked and mocked on this very board a couple of months ago for wearing masks.

[Which Tyler]

57 minutes ago, Gorn said:

People were attacked and mocked on this very board a couple of months ago for wearing masks.

No-one was attacked.

People weren't mocked for wearing a mask, they were mocked (mostly educated / discussed - but yes, occassionally mocked) for their rationale in wearing a mask, and got some irritated responses for playing their part in preventing front-line workers from wearing a mask whilst dealing with covid patients, so that they could have a false sense of security whilst walking their dog (for example).

 

 

The argument over the WHO has been done to death, so I don't really want to get involved (again) in that one. Some people think the WHO are there to give advice to the top 10% of the global population; others think that they're there to give advice to the bottom 30% who can't afford more personalised advice; others still think that the same advice isn't necessarily applicable to the whole globe in one shot as different situations have different solutions.

[Spockydog]

12 minutes ago, Which Tyler said:

No-one was attacked.

I got pitchforked here for my use of a FFP3 mask, and my insistence that if money wasn't an issue, masks would have been mandated months ago.

[Which Tyler]

5 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

I got fucking pitchforked here for my use of a FFP3 mask, and my insistence that if money wasn't an issue, masks would have been mandated months ago.

I do not believe that anyone came around to your house and stuck a pitchform in you.
How many people were banned for attacking you? (If they were, then I apologise, and withdraw my claim that noone was attacked)

Criticised =/= attacked

[Spockydog]

1 hour ago, Which Tyler said:

I do not believe that anyone came around to your house and stuck a pitchform in you.
How many people were banned for attacking you?

Yeah, but everyone insisted I was wrong. Everyone insisted that because I am not a health professional, or an expert in communicable disease, wearing a mask was a waste of time because I wouldn't know how to use it properly. It was also suggested that me buying a box of gloves on Amazon was somehow detrimental to the national effort to control the pandemic.

Whilst attempting to defend myself, I was threatened with a ban, even though I never called anyone a wanker or anything like that (unlike some posters here, who appear to be able to do precisely that with zero consequences).

[Gorn]

The problem with WHO is that a scientific organization shouldn't make emphatic, unconditional statements such as "don't wear masks, they're useless" without firm science to back them up. That kind of statement tends to embed itself in public's consciousness, and it's really difficult to backtrack or reverse them.

[rotting sea cow]

6 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Yeah, but everyone insisted I was wrong. Everyone insisted that because I am not a health professional, or an expert in communicable disease, wearing a mask was a waste of time because I wouldn't know how to use it properly.

Whilst attempting to defend myself, I was threatened with a ban, even though I never called anyone a wanker or anything like that.

The amount of damage done by the WHO and other health officials regarding mask usage is unspeakable. I had to insist several times to relatives (some of whom are high risk) they should wear a mask or a rag around the mouth whenever they venture into high risk settings (like going to the doctor!). Their answers was often a "but the WHO said...". I know a company that backtracked their policy of wearing masks because of that advice only to re-instate it recently, after they got their first case. Etc.