outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Well that makes more sense, that's like where NYC was in June/July. Now there's free walk-in testing in every neighborhood and you can request the rapid test or the PCR, which takes about 2 days to get back.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Thursday, November 12, 2020 4:08 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm on Long Island and my experience at the very end of August was that the PCR testing was widely available but with 2-10 day results. On the other hand the rapid testing availability varied depending on how many tests were available when you called - I was able to get the rapid test after a couple of phone calls but had to drive about half an hour.

We're renting a house in Woodstock with another couple for the week of Thanksgiving and everyone is going to get tested the week prior (everyone WFH and everyone pretty smart and safe). We'll see.

Question: It seems like testing is readily available in NYC now--is it also in other places? Liiike, re Thanksgiving, are there...reasons not to get everyone tested and then isolate for a couple of days until you get results and then get together? We are considering this for my roommate/house-mates, who are semi- all podded together anyway. The testing is just out of extra caution.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Thursday, November 12, 2020 3:54 PM bookmarkflaglink

It's pretty readily available in Florida, but there are definite defects in the communication part. I don't think it's a bad idea for everybody to get tested. really the main concern is that if you get a positive test, yeah, pretty sure you have it, but there is no current COVID test which has a high enough degree of confidence in its negative results where you can be 100% sure you don't have it.

I was told that if I got tested prior to 8 days after I came into contact with an infected, I might test negative and still be positive. that was horrifying to me, because most people who get tested after exposure do so, like, the day after, and then get what they think is a clean bill.

there are two tests I took this past summer that I was never given results on. and when I searched the system, no record of the tests. thanks guys!

ima probably have to start getting occasional tests again now that I live with the folks, but I may also go back to masking in the house. hate it but...y'know....gives me piece of mind.

today at least according to worldometer we've passed the 150,000 new cases a day mark in the US, and we're rapidly approaching 11,000,000 overall cases, just days after passing the 10,000,000 mark

The thing really pissing me off is that I was supposed to have the kids for Thanksgiving this year but instead I haven’t seen them in person since February and it’s a crap shoot as to whether I will be able to have them after Christmas.

that's got to be hard.

I'm ok not spending this Thanksgiving or Christmas with my adult family, but even that sucks

Circumstances like DJP's have to be the most infuriating. What can you even do besides FaceTime as much as possible?

Damn, hang in there DJP.

Awful. And I was just lamenting the possibilty (dependending on test results) of not seeing my own for a couple more weeks...I can't imagine how hard that is.

Stay safe Chicago. I thought we'd be next but Mayor Lightfoot was quick on the draw.

did she announce anything good? only thing i saw was an "advisory" starting monday to do certain things people should have been doing anyway

starting monday: stop doing dumb things you shouldn't be doing. pretty please!

That's pretty much all it was, "maybe you might stay home so you don't make us think about considering how we might discuss possibly landing on some meaningful action".

xps in orbit:

Where test positivity rates are above 15%, accessible testing with prompt results is difficult.

South Dakota (56.4%), Iowa (51.4%), Kansas (46.2%), Wyoming (45.8%), Idaho (40.5%), Missouri (28.2%), Alabama (27.0%), Pennsylvania (19.7%), Oklahoma (19.3%), Utah (18.6%), North Dakota (16.2%), Montana (16.0%), Wisconsin (15.9%), Mississippi (15.6%).

...

New York (2.6%)

And yes, Kristi Noem of South Dakota is the worst.

so many of those south dakota deaths are in long-term facilities, too, at a higher rate than the rest of the country, even

Air can hurt you too
Some people say not to worry about the air
Some people never had experience with air

according to worldometer there have been 180,000+ new cases today in the US

where will be the peak

I mean, everyone could just get infected, that's a strategy.

it definitely won't peak over 2 or 3 billion per day, unless something unexpected happens

We gotta run out of people at some point, right?

December thread title

just imagine if in the movie 12 Monkeys, instead of moving underground, everybody just said the virus was a hoax and then slowly died, insisting to the grave that they were killed by something completely different and it was a complete coincidence.

If you sneeze and then you get hit by a bus and die, they’ll say it was coronavirus is what I heard

We gotta run out of people at some point, right?

We run out of testing supplies, first.

But yeah, I can easily see some 30% of the nation infected by inauguration day, and about a tenth of those suffering from the new disabling preexisting condition #longcovid. We'll be half-way to herd immunity.

It is a grim certainty that New Year's Eve is not going to be very cheerful this year, even with our leaving 2020 behind and the early doses of vaccine becoming available for emergency use. We're already hitting 150,000 new (known) cases a day.

I know this doesn't mitigate against the national totals, but what we are seeing now is still nowhere near as intense as what we saw in March-May, it's just that it's spread across the 50 states. On a per million severe and dead basis, no state is suffering anything close to what NY and NJ suffered, and so far I don't know that you can say that we're on a trajectory to get there. It may just be the nature of less dense states that you're going to get an ongoing slow burn rather than a raging wildfire.

what we are seeing now is still nowhere near as intense as what we saw in March-May

I think a large part of the intensity depends on how overwhelmed the regional hospitals become. When there are many more patients in dire need of care than there are nurses and doctors available to administer to them, things get intense in that area, no matter how it's spread out across other parts of the country.

and so far I don't know that you can say that we're on a trajectory to get there.

how can you look at trends that are exponentially rising and say you don't know that we're on a trajectory to get there?

give 103% growth another several days to exponentially grow, you'd be surprised

yes agree

Since cases first started popping up in Illinois, I've been checking the stats every day, but after the last couple of days I think I need to stop doing that. This shit is getting scary.

If your takeaway from the current spike/trajectory is that this is a "slow burn" and somehow "better" than what happened March in NY/NJ, you are in for a ride.

ie

taking sides: 1500+ Americans/day vs. 1500+ tri-staters/day

i felt like such a fucking idiot, earlier today.

my mom said, "so what would happen if some of us take vaccines, and the others don't? why can't we just go back to normal, and if some people don't take them, they don't take them?"

(the context is that my mom doesn't trust any vaccine and thinks this is all a conspiracy)

my two quick answers, in the moment, a bit frenzied because there was a lot of racist bullshit going on in the same conversation), were:

1) people that don't take a vaccine will quickly be exposed (due to going back "to normal"), and even though they are dumb, they don't deserve to suffer
2) the aforementioned people which don't take the vaccine will continue to overload the healthcare system, which, in addition to creating unsightly ~temporary morgues in the visible area~ would also lead to worse conditions for everyone else in the healthcare system.

am i missing anything else? it ends up killing a bunch of people and also makes things worse for everyone else? was too overwhelmed in the moment to game it out

that vaccines are not 100% effective so we have to rely on that "herd immunity" they keep talking about for them to really work, otherwise we will not be back to normal

maybe not a good idea to introduce to a conspiratorial thinker's mind, they will just go "but it's not 100% effective" and not understand that that's how it's meant to work

I will get the vaccine, but still wonder how I'll feel if it's 90% effective but 40-50% of the population refuses to get it and could still infect me.

how can you look at trends that are exponentially rising and say you don't know that we're on a trajectory to get there?

― @oneposter(✔️) (Karl Malone), Sunday, 15 November 2020 00:54 (one hour ago) link

Because I don't think any state in America is at the point we were in March where literally nothing was closed, no one was taking any precautions, no one knew how to deal with COVID, hospitals didn't know how to treat it, people were actually being told NOT to wear masks, etc. Even in red america I just don't think we are at the equivalent of early stage tri-state.

We would not be able to (in your Mom's words) "return to normal" because many people would continue dying from the disease and it would (continue to) overwhelm medical facilities. We would be in a state of perpetual yo-yo of social distancing/masks/shelter-in-place and cautious relief until another crisis outbreak.

there are 7 states so far that have had over 1,000 deaths per million - NJ, NY, CT, MA, RI, LA, MS - but the numbers in other states are rising rapidly

the total number of cases is the area under the curve, which can be larger even with a slower increase in cases than NYC in march because it's over a longer time. but this is a fast increase in cases so idk. looks bad.

We also don't have a graph that shows how fast the rise in cases actually was in the tri-state in March, because we didn't have anywhere near the levels of testing we have now. It's definitely bad now, I just think the graphs and numbers can lead to a misleading comparison to March that doesn't apply, at least yet.

also, death rates for covid cases have fallen

Yeah but I'm still worriedly curious to see what the life expectancy for survivors is gonna ultimately wind up being.

But it's 99.7% survivable ROIGHT?

If you don't mind living out yr remaining years in an iron lung, I have some very good news for you

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-mental-illness/one-in-five-covid-19-patients-develop-mental-illness-within-90-days-study-idUSKBN27P34L

I think the calculated infection fatality rate (IFR) has been just a hair under 1%, based on the best available statistics so far. So call it about 99.05% survivable. Maybe. This is not a stat that ordinary people should be encouraged to dwell upon, since most people are really bad at connecting numbers to reality.

in all seriousness, i keep wondering how people think that hospitalizations, which are now at record levels (meaning many hospitals in many states are full) could somehow be managed if they were ten times higher than they are now, which is what would happen if we went back to normal.