Corona Virus Panic

[gungriffin]

As I understand it, that is the death of people who have confirmed cases of COVID-19. So in addition to the normal death rate. The "normal" death rate is likely up as well just because EMS is so overwhelmed.

I was reading a story the other day about an EMS worker in NYC who had their defibrillator battery go completely empty from use throughout their shift. At this point, you have to be in really bad condition before EMS will take you to the hospital.

Edited to insert the link to the story I was referring to above. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-ems.html This was a tough read. From the story:

"Like doctors and nurses, many paramedics fear they are already infected and have brought the virus home to their families. On March 18, three members of the Fire Department tested positive for the virus. By Friday, 206 members had positive results."​

 

[FJCDan]

We just found out that my wife’s daughter and her husband may very likely have it now. They are in Colorado Springs. Our son in law works at kidney dialysis clinics and may have gotten from there. We can only hope he gets over it. He is pretty sick right now and on home quarantine. Luckily they have a large house and everyone can stay in separate areas of the house, since there are 9 living there including our new 6 week old great grandson. This S$#t is nothing to take lightly. Everyone please be careful out there. Dan

 

[gungriffin]

We just found out that my wife’s daughter and her husband may very likely have it now. They are in Colorado Springs. Our son in law works at kidney dialysis clinics and may have gotten from there. We can only hope he gets over it. He is pretty sick right now and on home quarantine. Luckily they have a large house and everyone can stay in separate areas of the house, since there are 9 living there including our new 6 week old great grandson. This S$#t is nothing to take lightly. Everyone please be careful out there. Dan

The good news is that everything seems to be holding true that COVID is very very unlikely to cause issues in anyone below 20 years of age. That certainly makes this a different style of infection than has come before.

Good luck to your family. I hope that they make it through this well.

 

[satchel]

Starting to get into that high exponential growth in cases in NY, with the same graph in deaths a few days behind since the virus takes a little time to cause the damage. 32k new cases in the USA just yesterday. Hopefully you can see below that just one day of deaths at 680 in NY is a crisis and all these numbers are still in exponential growth, so could be a while before we see the deaths come down under 600/day anytime soon for those guys.

 

[cbmontgo]

So if anyone needs carpet cleaning when this is done I will certainly appreciate it.

Dan, I’ve got a bedroom and office that need new carpet if you’d be willing to come all the way to Divide. Probably not worth the long drive, but wanted to put it out there.

 

[FJCDan]

Dan, I’ve got a bedroom and office that need new carpet if you’d be willing to come all the way to Divide. Probably not worth the long drive, but wanted to put it out there.

Thanks for the offer Carson, but your right a little out of the way. Great to see you back in Colorado. I also still have Martins old tires on my pickup still.

 

[RayRay27]

Heres a gentleman who got sick on his trip to Moab.
https://kdvr.com/news/coronavirus/c...perspective-after-being-hospitalized-with-it/

 

[gungriffin]

In new news (that isn't really news) the CDC has officially reversed course on wearing masks. We should all be wearing masks or a face cloth now. Interestingly, this is to slow community spread from those who are already infected but may not realize it yet.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/cloth-face-cover.html

Also, some interesting reads I have come across:
Gunnison was one area of the world that fared especially well during the 1918 flu because of the extreme precautions they took to quarantine:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...own-that-dodged-the-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic

An interesting look at flattening the curve for the 1918 flu. Especially how certain failures to take precautions greatly spiked the mortality rate for cities.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...-curve-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus/

In 1918 some areas of the country made it illegal to NOT wear a face mask. In some areas of the country people were shot for violating the mask laws.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/03/americas/flu-america-1918-masks-intl-hnk/index.html

Here is an article that refers to someone being shot for not wearing a mask. It made me chuckle that he was then ticketed at the hospital for not complying with mask laws.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-20-me-then20-story.html

"One San Francisco deputy health officer shot a man in the leg and arm for refusing to wear a mask. The man was taken to a hospital, where he was arrested for violating the mask law."​

​

Another article that refers to the officer above in San Francisco shooting the person wearing no mask.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/how-fragmented-country-fights-pandemic/608284/

 

[Jenny Cruiser]

Starting to get into that high exponential growth in cases in NY, with the same graph in deaths a few days behind since the virus takes a little time to cause the damage. 32k new cases in the USA just yesterday. Hopefully you can see below that just one day of deaths at 680 in NY is a crisis and all these numbers are still in exponential growth, so could be a while before we see the deaths come down under 600/day anytime soon for those guys.

I believe NYC sees an average daily death rate of just above 500. Certainly, a significant increase, but not devastatingly so. Here are some pics from the Javits Center. FEMA has provided the resources for over 2,900 beds. So far, they have seen a total of less than two dozen patients with just a handful in the ICUs. * I don't have a tv or listen to the news much at all, so I apologize if this is old news.

 

[3rdGen4R]

There's two different metrics. On average New York City sees 54,000 annual deaths or about 150 per day. The article was @gungriffin linked in the Daily News states 188 deaths in 24 hours and 165 within a 7 hour period in NYC. So if I read it correctly it fell within an average day statistically.

The "in just seven hours" part is I think for dramatic effect.

New York State I'd think probably would see 500 per day. Roughly 8,000 people on average die each day (the U.S. typically experiences about 3 million deaths annually for all natural and accidental causes) across the whole U.S. Statistics are getting throw about it's important to make sure we're all talking about the same thing.

So what should I get from what you guys are saying?

 

[Beach Boy]

I knew there was a reason I moved to Moab. We have had only one case here, and the woman had been traveling. There are no tourists in the county as it is shut down. City Market is reasonable stocked, even toilet paper ( I sent some to friends in Boulder). Been enjoying the outdoors with Ruby (the dog) hiking and off-roading to places I haven't been in a while. I refuse to panic and start hoarding, as the only time I have done that in the past was in college when the bartender call "last call". Everyone take care. PS. Construction is still continuing on my house which is great.

 

[gungriffin]

The point I'm making in the subthread about NYC/NYS is that the number of deaths being used may be one of two scenarios. The statement is that 188 people that died. Does that mean that a typical number of New Yorkers died that day and they all tested positive for COVID RNA/DNA or is that 188 above the number that might be expected for a typical day (e.g. 300+ in NYC alone)? There's a statement that 500 people living in New York State died and that's probably typical for the whole state. The article isn't specific. The one inescapable fact of life is that you die at the end of it. I just want to know what they are reporting. Is every death now assumed to be COVID or is that 188 above the normal deaths. No one seems to say that. Are we going to look back in a week, month or year and see that there were no cancer, heart disease and non-COVID respiratory attributed deaths for 2 or 3 months?

I am not really understanding what point you are seeking to make. Here is the first line of the article that I posted:

"New York City saw 188 people die of coronavirus and 4,000 new cases in just over 24 hours, health data shows."​

These are the numbers that are being reported by the NYC Department of Health. The numbers are even worse today. I am seeing approximately 350 deaths from COVID-19 from about 4:30pm Friday to 4:30pm Saturday in NYC alone. There is some talk about the numbers tapering off, but that would still imply that at present the deaths per day are about 3x normal right now.

 

[Jenny Cruiser]

The numbers are the problem. What numbers are people using? Is NYC's population ~9 million or is it ~19 million? When I go to Denver I see everything - Commerce City, Lakewood and all the others as part of Denver. Over 95% of NYS population lives in the NYC metropolitan area. What I was trying to say earlier is it's okay to take a breath, turn off the news and wait till the end of the year to see what the actual stats are. I think it won't be long before we realize that we didn't need to close schools, restaurants and other businesses. Bars and clubs - yes. Definitely, yes. Restrictions on public transportation - buses, subway/metro, airports - yes. Hindsight 20/20 - if those who didn't want to risk illness covered their faces and wore gloves in public, washed hands, used sanitizer/alcohol to spot clean, avoided bars/clubs and went about their daily lives as per normal, most would have been fine. This is a nasty bug for those for whom it bodes ill for. NYC/S death rates will be higher next year, but the following years they will be lower than average. Over five years, the average will follow the trend of the last five years and show a continued decline in the overall death rate. To be continued in five years.

 

[cbmontgo]

I knew there was a reason I moved to Moab. We have had only one case here, and the woman had been traveling. There are no tourists in the county as it is shut down. City Market is reasonable stocked, even toilet paper ( I sent some to friends in Boulder). Been enjoying the outdoors with Ruby (the dog) hiking and off-roading to places I haven't been in a while. I refuse to panic and start hoarding, as the only time I have done that in the past was in college when the bartender call "last call". Everyone take care. PS. Construction is still continuing on my house which is great.

Exactly. Peddling fear is half the problem with where we are right now.

 

[DaveInDenver]

I am not really understanding what point you are seeking to make. Here is the first line of the article that I posted:

"New York City saw 188 people die of coronavirus and 4,000 new cases in just over 24 hours, health data shows."​

These are the numbers that are being reported by the NYC Department of Health. The numbers are even worse today. I am seeing approximately 350 deaths from COVID-19 from about 4:30pm Friday to 4:30pm Saturday in NYC alone. There is some talk about the numbers tapering off, but that would still imply that at present the deaths per day are about 3x normal right now.

What I'm asking is whether everyone who died in NYC that day was due to COVID-related pneumonia or did the typical ~150 normally seen also die. Therefore is 188 inclusive (e.g. the total deaths in NYC that day was 188) or excessive (~150 + 188)?

There's a difference dying of something and dying with it. A person who was already diabetic or had tuberculous or congestive heart failure any number of other reasons deaths normally occur just happen to show positive doesn't mean that was the cause of it.

That's the underlying reason for comorbidity investigation. In Italy 99% of the people who died showing an infection also had at least 1 other disease and 50% of them had 4 or more. That's how risk is determined. If you're healthy the risk is a fraction of a percent. If you have 3 serious illnesses already the 4th might be irrelevant.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says

Numbers are being thrown around that got a "COVID" tag but not much explanation. Fact is 8,000 people die each and every day on average in the U.S. from something. Has COVID caused every other disease to stop killing people or are we be seeing a net increase in total deaths?

BTW, I mentioned tuberculosis, which has been a reoccurring problem in NYC due to its significant immigrant population and international tourism. The past few years they've been able to get it down to few hundred cases a year from a high of several thousand back in 1990s. But TB thrives and spreads when people are kept in close quarters, like prisons, schools, nursing homes. Or being confined to your house. It's a respiratory disease that in a lot of ways I surmise looks like the symptoms described for COVID.

So are politicians acting based on sound data? Are they or the reporting even being honest? Raw numbers of deaths don't mean anything until autopsies are done and feeding empirical data back to see if epidemiology and medical models were correct. You know someone died. But RT-PCR tests for CoV-SARS-2 have been highly unreliable so if that's what's being used there's something like a 70% chance any one test is false negative or positive.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51491763

Are TB or flu tests being done for people who had no other comorbidity to rule them out? Even if it happens to be a correct positive it just means they found the virus but they haven't said the person actually died of a heart attack.

There's been suggested a possible connection that the PCR will show false positive for CoV-SARS-2 if the person had a trivalent or quadvalent flu shot this season. But even that's just Internet rumor it's been known that generally RT-PCR tests have a high chance of both false positives and negatives.

https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.036178-0

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/molecular-assays.htm

 

[J1000]

The numbers are the problem. What numbers are people using? Is NYC's population ~9 million or is it ~19 million? When I go to Denver I see everything - Commerce City, Lakewood and all the others as part of Denver. Over 95% of NYS population lives in the NYC metropolitan area. What I was trying to say earlier is it's okay to take a breath, turn off the news and wait till the end of the year to see what the actual stats are. I think it won't be long before we realize that we didn't need to close schools, restaurants and other businesses. Bars and clubs - yes. Definitely, yes. Restrictions on public transportation - buses, subway/metro, airports - yes. Hindsight 20/20 - if those who didn't want to risk illness covered their faces and wore gloves in public, washed hands, used sanitizer/alcohol to spot clean, avoided bars/clubs and went about their daily lives as per normal, most would have been fine. This is a nasty bug for those for whom it bodes ill for. NYC/S death rates will be higher next year, but the following years they will be lower than average. Over five years, the average will follow the trend of the last five years and show a continued decline in the overall death rate. To be continued in five years.

Glad to see you're changing your tune.

 

[satchel]

I believe NYC sees an average daily death rate of just above 500. Certainly, a significant increase, but not devastatingly so. Here are some pics from the Javits Center. FEMA has provided the resources for over 2,900 beds. So far, they have seen a total of less than two dozen patients with just a handful in the ICUs. * I don't have a tv or listen to the news much at all, so I apologize if this is old news.

Hopefully the Javits center pic you showed remains empty, but someone is dying in NY state from this every 2 mins currently, well maybe every 1 min today. I guess my problem is I was a boy scout and the whole "always be prepared" thing is deeply ingrained in me. I'm not sure it was setup to handle cases today as much as it was setup to handle the apex which NY is a week to 2 weeks out on. And again, I hope at that apex it is empty, but in my opinion, better to have and not need than need and not have.

If currently NY state is seeing twice the death rate as normal (500 daily av from last year and current corona deaths of 600+) then yeah, they can probably handle it, but I'm happy they are preparing for the apex and not the current. Yes I get that some of the 500 may be in the corona counts cause they may have already been dying from something, not gonna dispute that. My point is, let's wait it out and see what it looks like for them at the apex at least. Yesterday was another 600 deaths from corona in NY and they have that many today already this morning.

There's also a reason the most deaths are coming out of NY. Draw your own conclusions on what that means for social distancing (NY state vs California state for example). We'll have much better info when the line flattens out. The line charts below do represent data from today, and are only available for the total not geo based.

As of noon ET:

 

[gungriffin]

What I'm asking is whether everyone who died in NYC that day was due to COVID-related pneumonia or did the typical ~150 normally seen also die. Therefore is 188 inclusive (e.g. the total deaths in NYC that day was 188) or excessive (~150 + 188)?

There's a difference dying of something and dying with it. A person who was already diabetic or had tuberculous or congestive heart failure any number of other reasons deaths normally occur just happen to show positive doesn't mean that was the cause of it.

That's the underlying reason for comorbidity investigation. In Italy 99% of the people who died showing an infection also had at least 1 other disease and 50% of them had 4 or more. That's how risk is determined. If you're healthy the risk is a fraction of a percent. If you have 3 serious illnesses already the 4th might be irrelevant.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says

Numbers are being thrown around that got a "COVID" tag but not much explanation. Fact is 8,000 people die each and every day on average in the U.S. from something. Has COVID caused every other disease to stop killing people or are we be seeing a net increase in total deaths?

BTW, I mentioned tuberculosis, which has been a reoccurring problem in NYC due to its significant immigrant population and international tourism. The past few years they've been able to get it down to few hundred cases a year from a high of several thousand back in 1990s. But TB thrives and spreads when people are kept in close quarters, like prisons, schools, nursing homes. Or being confined to your house. It's a respiratory disease that in a lot of ways I surmise looks like the symptoms described for COVID.

So are politicians acting based on sound data? Are they or the reporting even being honest? Raw numbers of deaths don't mean anything until autopsies are done and feeding empirical data back to see if epidemiology and medical models were correct. You know someone died. But RT-PCR tests for CoV-SARS-2 have been highly unreliable so if that's what's being used there's something like a 70% chance any one test is false negative or positive.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51491763

Are TB or flu tests being done for people who had no other comorbidity to rule them out? Even if it happens to be a correct positive it just means they found the virus but they haven't said the person actually died of a heart attack.

There's been suggested a possible connection that the PCR will show false positive for CoV-SARS-2 if the person had a trivalent or quadvalent flu shot this season. But even that's just Internet rumor it's been known that generally RT-PCR tests have a high chance of both false positives and negatives.

https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.036178-0

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/molecular-assays.htm

Maybe you will like these stats. They do show that you are correct that the majority of people do have underlying health issues. The deaths are very skewed towards the elderly. The health departments are doing the best that they can with what they have. Maybe the numbers will eventually be revised down a bit at the end. I cannot see how we would see major downward revisions though. Because more people are staying home, I could see that there are fewer deaths in certain different categories like auto accidents too. So it is likely that certain other deaths are down from their normal numbers.

With that said, if someone who has cancer gets in a car accident and dies from injuries sustained in the accident, they died from the accident. There might have been complications from the cancer, but the accident killed them. Many of these people with complications would have gone on to live a lot longer because of modern medicine. Ha ha that said, I am not always sure if we are living longer or just dying for longer though.

 

[Jenny Cruiser]

Glad to see you're changing your tune.

I don't think I've changed my perception/opinion on this, however, my sense of empathy has increased. These patients who are admitted have two options - get better or die. They can't stay on 02 or antibiotics forever. By the time they are intubated they are unconscious and circling the drain. Until that moment that they close their eyes, they are perfectly lucid and they know what is happening to them.

 

[Rzeppa]

His recommendations are what was being suggested back in January for public health - wash your hands often and don't lick door knobs - before it went hyperbolic and irrational.