The lag between when cases rise and when deaths rise is allowing disingenuous disassembling, or that's what I see. I think the Midwest is about to start the death phase in a couple of weeks.
We are squarely in the "cases are rising; who could have predicted" phase of denial. And reports are that half of the on-campus students got a waiver to stay. I wouldn't have thought that we could do so much worse than the country as a whole, but here we are...
Maryland has been frustrating in that we've settled into a pattern of doing well and then blowing it by trying to reopen things too quickly.
Interestingly, there's been basically no correlation between cases and deaths since June.
Everywhere around here, it seems like school outbreaks are being masked by the larger community still falling, so things look mostly flat. I find it very nerve-wracking.
I also find it nerve-wracking when case counts explode, but in a totally different way.
Interestingly, there's been basically no correlation between cases and deaths since June.
Here too. End of June was about the low point - 500 cases a day and 40 deaths a day. End of July: 1000 cases a day and 11 deaths a day. Now: 2000 plus cases a day, and 7 deaths a day. And it's not because there's massively more testing - that's gone from 130k per day to 150k to 180k.
It's probably because younger people are catching it.
re: 6
That is the working hypothesis, yeah. Also, we've just generally gotten better at caring for people who are very sick, and, a lot of the vulnerable elderly in care homes are either already dead, or in much tighter shielding than they were.
Building on the sense described in the OP, this morning the light is a deep, deep orange.
I've been looking at the Johns Hopkins Corona virus tracker every day for the last 6+ months. I think in the last week their deaths data has started being systematically falsified. I expected this sooner like right after the Trump White house inserted themselves into the CDC's process.
9: Every day for me: Drum's coronavirus tracker and Silver's election forecast. I suspect this is not a healthy habit.
lol
I've been doomscrolling since 9-11. I only found out what to call it a week ago.
Greece and Mongolia have also been notable success stories in COVID response. There appears to be essentially no correlation between successful response and socioeconomic status at the country level, which is interesting.
9: I like 91-DIVOC better than JH. The JH tracker emphasises cumulative totals, which is great if you want to wring your hands, and it has a lousy UI. 91-DIVOC allows you to easily get to recent trends in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. These are good for answering the question, "How much danger am I in right now?" I look at Drum's charts and the JH tracker pretty often as well.
What do you see that makes you think it's falsified?
Deaths would have to be hidden completely rather than misclassified I think-- https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
There appears to be essentially no correlation between successful response and socioeconomic status at the country level, which is interesting.
I've been thinking of it partly as countries correctly recognizing how rich they are -- you can't deploy resources if you don't know what you have, but there are low tech approaches even to Ebola, and more so to a virus that's killed pretty well by soap.
My theory is that countries that are hot but don't have a lot of air conditioning are likely to be ok, whereas places that are hot and air conditioning is common are at high risk. I think that's why middle income countries in South America are getting hit a lot harder than poorer countries in Africa.
17: Do people without air conditioning stay outside in the heat? Or is it just that they keep the windows open?
I've been thinking of it partly as countries correctly recognizing how rich they are -- you can't deploy resources if you don't know what you have, but there are low tech approaches even to Ebola, and more so to a virus that's killed pretty well by soap.
Yeah, I'm sure that's a factor. Also, since there's no vaccine or cure yet, effective response is largely a matter of organizational efficiency rather than material resources.
17: They're blessed to not have Trane down in Africa.
When I lived in Africa twenty years ago we had windows that had these slats that didn't even close. It was all about the cross-breeze.
I'm sure that situation can be generalized to the entire continent.
That kind of defeatism will keep you from getting a cabinet position.
21. When I lived in Africa sixty years ago all the windows had insect screens but you never dreamed of closing the glass unless it rained really hard, and that cooled it down a bit anyway.
I wouldn't generalise, bits of North Africa and South Africa are quite temperate, but Senegal is plenty hot.
DaveLMA 91-DIVOC is good, I like the way you can break the data down a bunch of different ways.
I feel like lw in 14 kind of answers your question. If you look at the graph in https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm (weekly deaths from all causes) you will see something different about the recent shape of the graph. I guess if I were more of an optimist I'd think it was a sign we are starting to beat this thing. As it is, since I've been expecting them to start to cook the books, it looks to me like a sign they started.
I think it's more of the lull before bad school opening plans and overly social undergraduates form another wave. They have to get infected and then spread it to other populations before deaths rise again.
26: Dr. Fauci said again this morning that we should stop talking about waves and just call them surges. In 1918 the flu really disappeared in the summer and came back with a vengeance. We have never had it disappear in that way.
Early on in the pandemic there was an article that featured a Rwandan academic who was surprised at the West's lack of response compared to her own personal idea of what to do when there's a novel virus going around (self-imposed two week quarantine upon return from Europe, e.g.), and she made a comment to the effect that Europe/U.S. think of pandemics as happening elsewhere. "Elsewhere" knew damned well that pandemics happen and knew the basic steps.
But still, some mild surprise that the U.S. botched this so badly, especially since previously our pandemic response efforts included lots of training and education on low-tech interventions in poorer nations. It's like discovering that the person who taught you to cook starved because they refused to turn on the stove.
I worry that the US has reached a level of disfunction where it is simply incapable of doing anything.
The real trick is to believe both that and that the U.S. is so obviously the best country in the world that anyone trying to improve things really just hates America.
I'm one of the few Americans here, when people ask me what's going on I say please, I know we did some bad shit in the past but remember us for when we sent men to the moon and brought them back safely. And when we were forward looking and welcoming.
Great. Talk up the Nixon administration.
Moby-26 What is the America-wide change in behavior which caused this lull? What happened 3-4 weeks ago?
Texas and some other states (Arizona? Florida?) realized letting everybody die was a bad idea and shut the bars back down. That was about ten weeks ago, but deaths are a lagging measure.
25: I really can't look at that excess deaths figure and see something that is prima facie suspicious. Compared to other countries the US looks different but that's because it's larger - you had the NE spike first, then other outbreaks in other regions. Now there's a dropoff in deaths while cases continue rising - we're getting that in the UK too. It's because we've got better at treating the cases, and because the patients are younger.
Also, you really should read the box that comes up when you mouseover the chart, because it points out that data for recent weeks is incomplete and unreliable, because only 60% of death records get to CDC within ten days of death. So the latest set of figures is always going to be abnormally low because it isn't complete.
I also wonder how much of the uptick was summer family reunion season? Which is important in terms of whether holiday season is going to have a huge spike.
36: Locally Memorial Day was a big spike. The lockdown-lite had just ended, mask-wearing hadn't yet become protocol, and so we had a couple of outbreaks. Since masks were mandated the number of cases has dropped significantly, although we're also hearing anecdotes of "don't get tested or they'll shut down our season" and "there's no reason to get your kids tested if Dad has a positive test, because you want to be able to send them to school", so who knows if the numbers are accurate.
Surely everything is about to explode. I'm tense, waiting for case counts to tick upwards en masse.
Letting 17,000 people go to tonight's UT football game should help with that.