Scholarship table
I think the long incubation period complicates the math. If she is correct, the majority or all of those 100K may be asymptomatic right now and if they all become symptomatic around the same time that is pretty problematic (theoretically at 1% fatality that means at least 1,000 critical patients within days of each other)What I can't get a sense of with stories out of China from a couple of weeks ago and Italy now, how many of the deaths are infrastructure based(the overwhelming of) and how many are "inevitable" because of the disease.The next 10 days will be interesting because if we say 1M people are currently infected but asymptomatic and the conversion rate from infected to requiring hospitalization is 2% that means 20,000 hiting the hospital systems within a matter of days. If the infection volume is 5M at the same conversion rate its 50,000. If its 1M but a conversion rate of 20% we're talking 200,000. So how spread the infection is and what the conversion to hospitalization rate is is critical to whether the US can handle it. And I don't think we really have any idea right now regardless of what the OH health director says.
I agree completely. Here is a disturbing article about how bureaucracy and red-tape slowed testing in Washington.
Legitimate concerns about the FDA here.But FWIW, the FDA is in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" position. If it had given the UW lab the go-ahead without "normal" approval and the error rate turned out to be high (whether false positives or false negatives), they would have been crucified for inappropriately allowing clinical testing through a research lab.The FDA has reason to be worried about toeing the line. In another of its functions (drug approval), it constantly walks a line between getting drugs to market faster (at the urging of the pharmaceutical industry, and often patient advocacy groups desperate for cures), vs taking more time to be relatively sure they provide more benefit than harm. And they have been stung many times over the years for letting a drug get to market too quickly, only to have to rescind its approval after it hurt or killed many people. For some good examples, look up Accutane, Baycol, Bextra, Nuplazid and Uloric.Like I said, damned if they do, damned if they don't.
I see the ODH Director's statement that 100,000 have it in Ohio is getting some national attention. While I do admit to having some doubts about her statement - and particularly how definitively she presented it - I also note that if she's correct that he existence of seeing community spread means that "at least 1%, at the very least 1% of our population" is carrying the virus..." then the fatality rate is not nearly as high as many of the estimates. By her theory, somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.3 million have been infected in the US. We have had 36 deaths in the US. If 1% of the country is already infected, that would make the mortality rate very, very low -- 0.00001. So, something obviously is off. I suspect she's very high. (*Edited: I suspect her estimate is very high.) Data from everywhere else this has spread shows that there is a death rate considerably higher than the common flu. It would appear that it's somewhere between 0.7% (which is still considerably higher than the flu) and 2 or 3%. Any estimate of total cases that would suggest a mortality rate that is much lower than the flu is, presumably, a bit off.
As an aside .. the UK health minister said they have 459 cases, but they believe they are off by a factor of 10-20x.
Problem with that sort of reasoning is people don't die the second they get the disease. Its progresses over a week or two.
To be fair to yourself and most everyone else, we have been through pandemic scares several times over the past 20-30 years, so it was natural for the "here we go again" attitude to take hold. Part of that is based on real-life experience, and part on wishful thinking (the "bad things like car accidents and cancer happen to other people, but not me" attitude). And hopeful attitudes like that are part of what help us get from one day to the next. After all, if we treated every possible pandemic (H1N1, SARS, MERS, Ebola) the way we have learned to treat this one, we would be so wound up in anxiety that we'd never get anything done.
I would also add that this occurring in an election year made things much worse IMO. The political and media based finger pointing and spinning has really slowed the public's ability to understand what is going on and react in a collaborative way. Even know every story has a who's to blame, what went wrong, etc....and I know its fantastical think but I would love to see a refocus on here and now, what do we need to do now and leave the recriminations until the worst is passed.
Of course. But give it a week or two. Do you honestly believe their will be 1,000 deaths in Ohio within "a week or two"? I don't. Good Lord, I certainly hope not. By all accounts, Italy - with a population of 60 million - is a mess right now and they have just barely over 1,000 deaths as of today.
This is one of those rare times that I disagree with you, Eng, but, sad to say, finger pointing is absolutely necessary. We have zero leadership in this crisis and have reacted to it worse than every single industrialized country in the world.Tests are "available" for anyone who wants one, yet people cannot get tested. And as if that isn't bad enough, the leadership has been the single biggest reason for the Stock Market crash with their lies and incompetence.We need to finger-point more as that seems to be the ONLY way for our leaders to be goaded into taking even the most basics actions.
Chinese billionaire Jack Ma donating 500,000 test kits to U.S. and over 1 million masks. Previously U.S. had 14k test kits. (He's also donating to other countries)
Rumor is Trump is going to order a national shutdown today at a press conference at 3.
My little school districts in northern, rural Illinois are shutting down.
Most of suburban school districts are shutting down, as are all Archdiocese of Chicago schools.I imagine they'll all be closed by the end of the day.
Wow, I'm very concerned for Benny. Being able to mimic Myron Medcalf's writing so closely implies an oncoming case of dementia.
I hope not too. Lockdown would give me some additional confidence. Not just canceled schools.
Down 1 w 5 seconds left. Doable.