> In Massachusetts (where we have been hit pretty hard by C19) we're trending downwards in a significant way and have been for a few weeks now.
Same in California - corona is a health care non-issue here, aside from our governor running for President soon, so it's a political issue. So we'll be the last to leave lockdown, and it's looking like Jan. 2022 now.
By non-issue, I mean hospitalizations and deaths according to the official data have been at the same low rate for months, basically flat. California never had a ventilator or ICU shortage at all. (Last time I checked, we had 58 total deaths in SF/Santa Clara County with millions of pre-lockdown arrivals from China.)
I'm not sure if you're talking about daily deaths, or in total, but California has had 5,286 deaths as of today, not 58. We also had 81 deaths today specifically.
In a perfect world, the point of a lockdown is to arrest the spread of a disease entirely. Unfortunately, we're well past that point in the US. Having failed at that, the goal is not just to keep health care utilization below capacity, but also to buy time to mitigate the disease, by stockpiling PPE and health care supplies, implementing robust contact tracing, and establishing policies for individuals and businesses.
California has been prudently relaxing restrictions for a month now, and is now in Stage 3 of the reopening plan.
Deaths has a few problems. One is that once SARS-CoV-2 finds a nursing home, it's a lot of at-risk people in once place, so it gets hit hard. If deaths is the metric you care about, it's best to put a lot of effort into testing workers at care facilities and putting those facilities strict lockdowns. Once we learned this, we started "gaming" the metric a bit. The other problem is it's a lagging indicator.
Positive tests are problematic because early on, there was a shortage, presumed positive people weren't being tested because it wouldn't change anything, people without symptoms aren't being tested, etc. It's the flakier metric, for sure.
For how many tests are coming back negative, I wish we were doing random testing and random antibody testing. If we're not doing those, we're still being reactive.
Indeed - there have been many cases of where when things have been reported is what gets graphed instead of the actual dates of particular statistics.
The lack of consistent context and framing around the human malware has made most discussions of it pretty useless, but easy to skew in a particular direction for those wishing to make political hay out of a trend (on either side - very few have clean hands in this regard).
58 total deaths for the SF Bay Area in 2020, out of about 4 million people.
The positive rate for 2020 of all tests is 3%, but it really appears that whatever tests they're using are just wrong - California had daily flights from Wuhan.
The one logical conclusion from this thread is that if ships, hospitals and nursing homes have high rates of infection, and California homes don't, turn off your central AC and heating in NY, etc.
The number of deaths for the SF Bay Area is not 58, either. It is:
San Francisco: 47
Alameda: 116
Santa Clara: 152
San Mateo: 99
Contra Costa: 50
Marin: 18
Solano: 23
In other words, about ~500 deaths. If you had 60% of the population infected, you might expect 20x that figure.
Why would it matter that California had daily flights from Wuhan? It changes the math almost by nothing. Whenever an initial seeding occurs, domestic cases rapidly and overwhelmingly takeover in spread.
Wuhan has, as of early June testing, a SARS-CoV-2 seropositive rate of approximately ~3%. There were very few infected people coming on those daily flights in January, and by February domestic spread was many orders of magnitude larger than any seeding event.
California also shutdown earlier than other states, especially in the Bay Area, where essentially all major employers implemented work from policies 7-10 days before the official Shelter-in-Place notice.
California may have had an earlier seeding, but we know for sure it was spreading domestically by mid-January in several cities around the country.
>I'm not sure if you're talking about daily deaths, or in total, but California has had 5,286 deaths as of today, not 58. We also had 81 deaths today specifically.
They are talking about total deaths, but only in SF/Santa Clara. The actual figure is 47 for SF and 151 for Santa Clara [1][2].
> In a perfect world, the point of a lockdown is to arrest the spread of a disease entirely.
The problem with this is, that the whole world has to stop for that to happen, and by stop, i mean stop entirely.
Even if you stop the spread in California, and have zero infected people there, the first infected outsider that comes into the state, will spread infections, and you're back at closing down everything.
Basically the second part (keeping healthcare system managable, and hoping for a vaccine soon) is the only think we can do.
Are you ignoring LA county? It's rising rapidly there and starting to spread to the surrounding areas. The wealthy So. Cal. residents who haven't fled yet will move North and then the North will get hit, kind of like what happened to Connecticut via MA and NY.
Same in California - corona is a health care non-issue here, aside from our governor running for President soon, so it's a political issue. So we'll be the last to leave lockdown, and it's looking like Jan. 2022 now.
By non-issue, I mean hospitalizations and deaths according to the official data have been at the same low rate for months, basically flat. California never had a ventilator or ICU shortage at all. (Last time I checked, we had 58 total deaths in SF/Santa Clara County with millions of pre-lockdown arrivals from China.)