(Cases in) the South shall rise again!

NC Governor won't yet commit to allowing the GOP convention, so Trump is now threatening to move it. At the moment it seems like the GOP is determined to get tens of thousands of people together in August.

I had similar conversations with family members in the medical profession yesterday. The shift from overwhelming sadness and grief to absolute rage and bitterness has been palpable over the last week or so.

I think Arizona is headed into the "I don't give a f*ck" mode here in the next few weeks. We have seen some higher hot spots in the west Phoenix area and in Tucson. It's basically most areas that have Native American reservations or poorer communities. A nurse I know made a really good point. She works out west and said that a lot of the Native American community has families living together and it tends to mimic those areas in Italy hit pretty hard (grandkids living with grandparents). Her hospital is starting to see additional cases, but ones in Chandler/North Scottsdale have been pretty consistent.

Where I live doesn't seem to be hit as hard and I think people are starting to go back to normal. One friend I have (who has been cautious to this point) finally went out Saturday night to a bar. I asked him about it and he said this (paraphrased but pretty close): "We have 7.2 million people in Arizona. We have done 260K tests and just 16,000 people have gotten it. Of those, just 800 have died. So, over three months, we have had 800 dead from this. At this point, it's really no different than the risk of driving a car. I will try to social distance when possible and maybe even wear a mask. But, I'm not avoiding living my life when this thing just isn't impacting AZ much."

He wouldn't hear of it when I said social distancing has kept the numbers down. He is one of the more reasonable friends I've known here regarding this and he's ready to go back to normal. I'm not sure what this means, but I would highly recommend elderly and other health compromised people stay home as much as possible during the next couple months. People just don't care right now (which is exactly what I told my dad who is recovering from hip surgery this morning). I will be going to the grocery store for my parents (and doing a mask hand off outside of their house) and my sister is picking up some of their meds.

The thing is, places like Arizona might be the safest to do that due to the heat. I don't expect coronavirus to spread very fast (relatively) during the summer. But the fall could bring a rude and very unpleasant awakening.

I'm going to a bar this afternoon for the first time since March 15. Hopefully sitting outside. Very happy about this. And I've always been good at social distancing while at bars do it shouldn't be very different for me.

Yeah, I have noticed a lot fewer people in masks going to the grocery store the last week. I still wear one because my wives parents are super high risk and she is their primary care giver. We did eat out last week and sat outside where nobody was closer than 10 feet from us. It was nice and I am worn out as much as anybody, but their is no excuse to be careless.

I'd expect the heat to encourage more indoor gatherings with recirculating air conditioning. Some churches around here held outdoor services this Sunday. That ain't happening a month from now. Just about everything will be forced into the A/C pretty soon. There's a breeze at the beach; nobody in their right mind in Birmingham or Charlotte or Augusta or Columbia or Columbus or Macon is sitting outside at a restaurant or bar when it's 90 degrees with no wind at 7:00pm.

For example, I just got an email today that the "make-up" for the lost skills from the cancellation of spring soccer will be a new indoor league this summer "if it's allowed." Unless they're socially distancing game start times in a way not done during the winter (indoor) league and radically changing the physical setup of the building to not use part of the fields, it'll be simply impossible to have six feet of spread. I'm pretty sure there's not six feet between the net that keeps the ball from hitting the spectators--all of whom have to stand one-deep in whatever soccer people call what would be the end zone--and the wall. And because everyone is standing one-deep behind a net, anytime a younger sibling has to go to the bathroom, or a spectator arrives after a game starts, or the parents are leaving from one game and entering for the next, or someone leaves early....you have to squeeze past one another. It's not quite as bad a stadium row, but it's tight enough quarters in there that I've asked my kid "can you hold it for 20 minutes" rather than leaving to go to the bathroom and coming back in. All parents and other spectators for both teams are jammed into one "end zone," too. It's, uh, not an environment that I'd think is a good one during a pandemic, but no one is considering kids playing rec-league soccer outside at that time of year, either.

Has it been shown definitively that heat does significantly slow this down?

Depends on who you ask. CDC says who knows. Lab studies have said yes but we don't know how much. MIT says transmission rates should decline by 20-30% during the summer. General consensus is yes it slows it down, but not as much as some other viruses, but there's a lot of unknowns.

We pretty much know it doesn't slow nearly as much already compare to Influenza (to name the resident widespread virus). Dunno about the CDC, but the german institute in charge publishes Surveilance data from doctors offices across the country on Influnenza and other viruses and where they get like 100-300 'hits' for the influenza strains per week in Winter this drops to virtually zero with a couple here and there come April and usually happens only 3,4 weeks after the absolute peak.
It goes virtually extinct locally, than spreads around the globe again. (Some years you have almost no overlap to the year before on various strains. For example the bad flu season in 17/18 in Germany had almost 60% Influenza B, which was not included in the vaccine that year, the year after not a single case all winter)

I really think it is less about the weather/climate and more about the areas where people congregate.

This gets to Quik's point in this or another thread about everyone up the food chain washing their hands of any responsibility.

They will say that they are open (so say goodbye to your refund), but y'all should "distance."

Distancing will be, literally, impossible.

But they told you to distance, so it isn't their fault if you die.

In good news: In Austria at least Remdesivir + Plasma therapy + early oxygen (not Ventilator, but high pressure masks) have really improved Treatment success rate and Symptom length to a similar degree as happens with the flu when properly diagnosed. (Not making it the same, just improving the respective odds similarly).

Hey, leave us out of this one... due to the location vis a vis the mountains there's almost always a breeze at night here in Charlotte! Now that'll also be accompanied by near-nightly thunderstorms in the summer that will drive people inside at times, but this is a city where social life is very much centered around drinking outside on patios & roofdecks. Seemingly every one of the dozens of breweries (and now Seltzeries because apparently that's not a fad) has outdoor areas. (Will people still be idiots and be in packed bars - yes I'm already seeing that unfortunately, and will people including myself overcrowd even those outdoor areas yes, but I'll be able to stay strictly to outside seating and go back to a fairly normal social life.)

Going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I think as a nation we've clearly chosen the path where we accept infections and deaths as long as the hospitals aren't overwhelmed, and North Carolina as a whole is definitely not meeting the benchmarks Cooper etc set for continued re-opening, but I don't see any way they'll go back into lockdown unless hospitals become triage areas like NYC was.Hopefully people are smart enough to at least respect the nursing home regulations and do what they can to avoid contact with and protect elderly and at-risk people (unlike everyone's favorite Andrew Cuomo...), but even though I'm in a more liberal/educated bubble we've still got a couple people on the fringes of the friend group and I run across people every time when I'm grocery stores/gas stations who seem to be outright flaunting their refusal to wear a mask or avoid standing directly next to people. I'm pro-Open, and pro-let people make their own risk assessments (& pro-Darwinism) overall, but throwing a bandanna on for the 5 minutes I'm in a store possibly around older people, or maintaining 5+ feet of separation from people I don't know and aren't talking to seems like a pretty acceptable sacrifice & way too many people won't/can't even do that, which is why I've been arguing against the lockdown stuff from Day 1 until/unless a vaccine is imminent.

I'm still working legally at the Amazon warehouse where it is a quite high risk environment, the company is officially enforcing things while in practice making decisions that force me & others to be within 6 feet of people more than before, and I get a text seemingly every other day confirming another case (and a refusal to tell anyone what department or shift the employee was on...) and I'll be back to borderline illegally coaching kids outside again in a week in what seems like a very low risk environment (where we will avoid any contact drills or players standing near each other, wear masks as coaches, leave the fields if police or park rangers show up because the city isn't officially honoring permits right now, and also weirdly make everyone use hand sanitizer when entering/leaving the fields even though the players wear gloves). I was willing to illegally hang out with the same small group of friends who like me don't have family in the area or interact with elderly people or co-workers I already spend 40+ hours a week in contact with this whole time, and am now willing to hang out outside at bars etc but not inside, while I see people who were holed up the last two months just jumping back in like nothing's changed, and it's baffling to me. (Almost as baffling as the fact we're 2+ months into this, basically no state/city/company has taken it upon themselves to do a real representative sampling so we know how many people are/have been infected, and seemingly nobody cares.) About the only things we know definitively about this is that there is a much lower risk of transmission if you are outside, and a much lower risk of hospitalization/death if you are younger(/in shape), and yet we still refuse to base our general policies around those two facts and drive peoples activities and energy in that direction. :confused:

Trump’s medical beliefs and general intelligence are truly staggering: WHO trials of hydroxychloroquine halted as a study published in The Lancet has found that it might actually double the risk of dying from Covid-19...

Coronavirus: WHO halts trials of hydroxychloroquine over safety fears - BBC News

Dola: I understand that there is someone who has put his blood, sweat, tears, and probably life savings into running this youth soccer league. I am not unsympathetic to that person. It seems like the obvious answer is for Congress to take businesses like this that are nonessential, have a high risk of transmission, but are still useful to the economy, and give the owners 12 months or so of payments to help the weather the storm, and keep their employees on the payroll.

That lets the more essential and less transmission heavy parts of the economy reopen on their own.

Here is a picture of a 1918 Gorgia Tech football game during the spanish flu pandemic

Those seats look very uncomfortable

Maryland's dashboard webpage for CV info was suddenly stripped of a major and easily-seen bit of data - the added cases/numbers in the last day.

You can still find that, but you have to go digging. Used to be right out there.

I'm trying to think what might underlie this decision. Trying to find a non-awful answer there. No luck thus far.

I got to see my first mask/social distancing fist fight today. Guy in his forties took out a guy in his mid twenties after words were exchanged about the young guy not respecting social distancing in Winn Dixie.

You have to be prepared to fight if you are going to be fake coughing behind people while not wearing a mask? Because that seems like something is going to lead to a confrontation most of the time.

Whew, good thing it was Gen X vs Millennial.

Well, was it an entertaining fight?

St Louis county has issued a travel advisory for anyone that went to the Lake of the Ozarks this weekend. Told people that went to quarantine for 14 days or until testing negative.

I'm not up to speed on Maryland politicians since The Wire ended (after Season 4!) & O'Malley/Carcetti had his failed national bid... is Hogan normally a reasonable guy or a sycophant?

That's probably a fair way to look at it, yes.

Most days I'd just laugh or eye roll honestly but, sooner or later, yeah there are definitely odds are that somebody will pick the wrong day.

The good news for me is that if I get a jury in the county where that's most likely to take place, I've got a decent shot at being acquitted via jury nullification if nothing else.

On a related(ish) note I guess, the frequency with which I see masks improperly worn is getting kinda comical. And by that I mean employees under a mask mandate, not customers.

Can we all at least agree that wearing a mask around your chin is literally doing NOTHING of value for anyone?

Screw whether it bothers you or doesn't bother you that they're doing it, can all sides at least come together on the notion that wearing it that way is silly?

Hogan, a Republican Governor in a deeply blue state, got elected in a weird setup, re-elected in a tidal wave, and ranks among the most popular governors in the US. Plays the moderate lane, ignores/skips Trump, and shies away from the most controversial issues. Some deep blues dislike him and try to paint him as a monster, but he has been mostly moderate and very reasonable in most people's eyes.

I've seen this a bunch, too! I don't get how this is even a thing. I have yet to see a mask on the hair like the sunglasses on the head thing, but I'm sure I will, given time.

SI

When I walk around our neighborhood I have the mask around my neck so that I can pull it up if we meet anyone and talk.

We don't wear a mask when walking the dog in our subdivision. We (or they) just step aside when we pass each other. If we stop to talk, only the dogs are really close sniffing each other.

We may be doing it wrong but think 6 ft apart while talk in the open is okay.

That's how I've been doing it as well. Out walking the dog I'm not wearing a mask and keep a respectful distance when passing others, especially if they are wearing a mask.

Been going out for longer hikes the last couple of weekends. Then I'll wear a mask around my neck and pull it up if I pass someone else wearing a mask. Would say about 50% of the people on the trails are wearing mask. Colorado in general is doin a pretty good job of mask wearing I think. Especially at grocery stores, some require a mask.

Went out to two bars yesterday. First one had a lot of people, very few wearing masks though besides the staff. You were supposed to wear one when going to the bar to order a beer and then take it off at your table but that generally didn't happen. In general though the seating was spaced out appropriately and most people were sitting outside.

Second taproom, a brewery, was much more stringent. Temperature check at the door, mask required, escorted to our table where we could then remove the mask.

Most bars and restaurants in Colorado will be able to open at 50% capacity on Wednesday. The county I'm in got a variance allowing them to open a few days earlier.

Am I falling into my typically overoptimistic way of looking at the world, or have we had a run of pretty good vaccine news over the last couple of weeks?

Officially at 100K deaths.

US has also tested more people than Spain, Italy, Germany, Canada and S Korea combined. Also, out of the 505 deaths from yesterday, 250 were in the NE states. It's almost like we have two different countries when it comes to this: New England and NY are one and the rest of the US is another.

We also have 15-20% more people than all those countries combined so I don't think the raw testing number is super-important It definitely is good news for the rest of the country though that the northeast remains fairly isolated or whatever you want to call it on the casualties here.

The next few weeks will tell the story in Missouri. After the shit show in the Lake of the Ozarks, if there isnt a spike, Im officially open it up. If the 2nd wave starts, I will be shut it down.

South Korea is under 300.

But you're not doling out soup into a to-go container.

They've also tested fewer people than Peru (despite having over 51 million). We've tested 15.4 million so we are going to have more deaths just by the testing effort. Anyone who has tested under 2% of their population (S Korea, China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Brazil, etc) is hard to make any kind of general results comments. Imagine if the US just tested 4 million people from Utah, New Mexico, Oregon, Nebraska and Kansas - we would look great right now.

S Korea has appeared to do a very good job in managing this because of the willingness of their people to given away nearly all their privacy. But, we don't know for sure.

When people aren't getting sick, you don't need to test as much. They make us look like a clown show.

I'm actually worried that it might take a few rounds of these types of activities before we notice. Assuming most of those people were quarantined for the past 9 weeks the spread from this weekend could be minimal because few are likely to be infected. However, if they do it again next weekend and the following weekend, now you have increased the # of asymptomatic carriers. Therefore, it might not be until 4th of July until the repercussions are seen.

We kinda do... they haven’t got tens of thousands or even thousands of otherwise inexplicable excess deaths.

South Korea has a culture of wearing masks, they've done it for decades. They have tracker apps on their phones for flu/virus and they have basically given their civil liberties up to the government because they are so afraid of these viruses. Because the US does not want to behave like that doesn't make us "a clown show", it just opens us up a little more to having more cases. At the end of the day, we have tested 15.4 million people and only around 100K of those died from this due to the social distancing and shelter in place laws setup in many states. I'd say that's a pretty good job by our local governments and even most citizens. The federal government didn't do much to help, but atleast it got out of the way to make this much less of an impact than nearly everyone thought it would be in March.

Is the US close to perfect? No, but the results are extremely positive to this point across 80% of the US. We just have to keep social distancing in these hot spot areas and hope the rate of infections/test keeps going down (as it is in many states right now). I'm just not what people want us to do at this point. Of the 74.5 million tests done in the world, the US has done 21% of them (and we don't have close to 21% of the population). People are going to be idiots in areas like Florida and the Ozarks, but most people seem to have taken precautions and stopped this from really impacting the US as a whole like it did in Spain, Italy and other places. But, because we have 100K deaths out of the millions who have had this, we are a clown-show. If you look at places that have seriously tested their population, we are better than nearly all of them by percentage (Belgium, Spain, UK, Italy, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Canada, Ireland, etc).

Even if that number of 300 is low because they haven't tested as much, they could have 50X that number and still be doing light years better than we are.

Cases per million population:
USA - 5,215
Belgium - 4,959
Spain - 6,060
Italy - 3,813
France - 2,800
Sweden - 3,412
Netherlands - 2,661
Canada - 2,298
Ireland - 5,015

Hey, at least its better than our educational and health care systems.

We've also tested 15.5 million people - most of whom had a reason to be tested.

Here's the most important number (IMO): Deaths / recorded cases -
USA - 5.8%
UK - 14.0%
Belgium - 16.2%
Spain - 9.6%
Italy - 14.3%
France - 15.6%
Sweden - 12.0%
Netherlands - 12.8%
Canada - 7.7%
Ireland - 6.5%

While we may have slightly more cases per million (we are talking about a difference of 1-2K per million or 0.2% of people), we have significantly fewer deaths.

How does deaths per recorded case tell us anything worthwhile? You yourself have been saying repeatedly that we don't really have any idea how many cases there have been both here in the U.S. and globally. This stat is basically just a substitute for number of tests conducted.

Deaths per recorded cases is a completely meaningless number. Especially with lack of testing.

It tells you how many people with the virus you can keep alive, it’s probably the most important number from this limited data set. If you have 1,000 cases and 30 die, it’s better than having 100 die. It shows that you have a better infrastructure with which to treat the sick patients. It also means how successful we’ve been at keep the most vulnerable from getting it.

Again, I agree you can’t tell a ton from the limited numbers, but you can see how many people with the virus you manage to keep alive. What’s a more important number than that?

I apologize for trotting out a wilted half-zinger, days late, but what are the odds that someone/everyone who will risk their lives for a maskless, 'zero ducks given', industrial grade, dirty water boozer is NOT peeing in the pool?