November 4 has come and gone and Covid-19 still hasn't disappeared

[Juvenal]

There was a dramatic decline in new case counts on Thanksgiving Day, followed by a rebound yesterday, November 27, spiking to the highest single-day numbers ever, though only slightly higher than the spike on November 20. I have to assume family gatherings, despite official warnings, and in too many cases to spite official warnings, will act as superspreader events, but I don't have any way to put numbers on that assumption. Absent that risk, the numbers suggest we were heading for a peak inside a month.

I'm still seeing declines in how fast new cases are rising, down to a 17 percent increase today, but new cases are still rising. The case fatality rate has come down remarkably from its peak in April, coincident with the highest weekly death counts we've seen to date, in part due to better treatments, but mostly because it's cutting into a younger demographic. Most of our older folks at the highest risk are either using extreme caution or dead now. But benefits from better treatments have reached a point of diminishing returns.

2020-11-28_09-09-15.jpg

Note the "reported deaths by day" in the above graphic are actual reported deaths prior to the last two weeks, with an algorithm filling the gap between when deaths occur and when they're reported. By necessity, the data are being collected directly, as there's reason to doubt the professionalism of federal intermediaries newly placed between state and local officials and the CDC.
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The New York Times is engaged in a comprehensive effort to track information on every coronavirus case in the United States, collecting information from federal, state and local officials around the clock. The numbers in this article are being updated several times a day based on the latest information our journalists are gathering from around the country. The Times has made that data public in hopes of helping researchers and policymakers as they seek to slow the pandemic and prevent future ones.

The Times’s data collection for this page is based on reports from state and local health agencies, a process that is unchanged by the Trump administration's requirement that hospitals bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all patient information to a central database in Washington.

Weekly average deaths due to Covid-19 have passed the peak from the beginning of August, but have not yet passed the highest peak in April. So long as the case counts keep rising, that's where they're heading.

[Juvenal]

It will be interesting to see how issuing any vaccines will be prioritized. Will young, healthy millionaire entertainers and athletes elbow their way to the front of the line while others who are far more at risk are forced to wait?

If they couldn't bust the lines for testing, I don't see much concern about busting them for vaccinations.
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But ultimately the leagues, with billions of revenue dollars at stake, contracted with private labs

It's conceivable that a private market for vaccinations will emerge eventually, but I'd be really leery considering the temperature regimen needed to preserve the top candidates so far. The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna require dry-ice temperatures to maintain while frozen and have a shelf life of about a week after unfreezing.

So I'd say it's important to make sure distribution is prioritized in order of medical necessity, but the signs so far show they will be.

It's even more important to pay attention to the numbers.

There will be tens of millions of vaccinations available next month. A few thousand sports stars or entertainers is a drop in that bucket. What's much more disturbing to me is health care workers being denied regular testing, and worse, that testing is still a limited resource.
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“The current [presidential] administration did not focus on tests and instead focused on the vaccine,” says Mara Aspinall, a professor of biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University. “We should have focused with the same kind of ‘warp speed’ on testing. Would we still have needed a vaccine? Yes, but we would’ve saved more lives in that process and given more confidence to people to go to work.”

The largest ambiguities in my own projections stem from the gap between infections and cases, due entirely to lack of testing. Right now, the pandemic is out of control, and public policy is flying blind when we need to know, two weeks ago, what measures are going to be necessary to break the back of the curve, and keep it dropping until we can resume contact tracing again.

Without increasingly aggressive NPIs while we're waiting for sufficient vaccines, additional hundreds of thousands will die in the US, and the data to support those decisions is conspicuously missing.

[Stoic]

It will be interesting to see how issuing any vaccines will be prioritized. Will young, healthy millionaire entertainers and athletes elbow their way to the front of the line while others who are far more at risk are forced to wait?

Seems likely. Unless they don't want to be at the front of the line, of course.

[shunyadragon]

I think next that we should be checking for how many people have runny noses. Let's start at the hospitals with people who come in for heart surgery. After that we can start doing checks of people who voluntarily come into the test station. Wow. The number of runny-nose cases just has increased.

Next we will push for everyone to get checked for runny noses. Wow. Another 10% increase occurs in runny nose cases. Next we will send out contact tracers who will go and check more people for runny noses. Hey. Another 20% increase. We just keep seeing the number of runny-nose cases increasing.

This is just spreading like a wildfire.

Sorry about this view but the treatment of this covid-19 thing has just been an international circus being run by a bunch of clowns. The number of cases is a meaningless. At best it just shows that you cannot stop the spread of something that does not harshly affect most people.

. . . and you previously denied that you are a COVID-19 pandemic denier. This confirms this is what you believe and your cold indifferent attitude to ward the pandemic and those that have suffered and died from COVID-19

[mikewhitney]

. . . and you previously denied that you are a COVID-19 pandemic denier. This confirms this is what you believe and your cold indifferent attitude to ward the pandemic and those that have suffered and died from COVID-19

you sure come out with weird interpretations of what I say. You have to work on your logical skills.

[Juvenal]

. . . and you previously denied that you are a COVID-19 pandemic denier. This confirms this is what you believe and your cold indifferent attitude to ward the pandemic and those that have suffered and died from COVID-19

you sure come out with weird interpretations of what I say. You have to work on your logical skills.

Mike's been asked to leave. Please stop responding to him.

Please.

[Juvenal]

Seven day average, new cases reported

11/14 145,809

11/22 171,380
11/23 173,187
11/24 175,550
11/25 176,729
11/26 164,677 Thanksgiving
11/27 165,647
11/28 162,681

In two weeks, we'll know if we had a superspreader Thanksgiving, but in the meantime, I want to focus on the average cases over the past week. Yes, they're still showing increases from two weeks ago, 12 percent as above, but for the first time since mid-October, day over day, averages have declined, and it's happened twice this last week.

Daily Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. rise back toward the record level set in April.
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On April 15, 2,752 people across the United States were reported to have died from Covid-19, more than on any day before or since.

Now daily deaths are rising sharply and fast approaching that dreadful count again. On Wednesday, 2,300 deaths were reported nationwide — the highest toll since May.

The pandemic has now claimed more than 264,800 lives in the country. But how the virus kills has changed in profound ways. Months of suffering have provided a horrific but valuable education: Doctors and nurses know better how to treat patients who contract the virus and how to prevent severe cases from ending in fatality, and a far smaller proportion of people who catch the virus are dying from it than were in the spring.

Yet the sheer breadth of the current outbreak means that the cost in lives lost every day is still climbing.

Because of the delay between identifying cases and an unfavorable outcome, so long as we're seeing increases over two weeks ago, I expect death tolls to continue to rise. Again, this is horrid, but in comparison to the numbers I was projecting when the percent rate of increase was in the 70's, and then the 80's, I'll take an increase of 12 percent.

But not for long. Even if the current wave crests, and the above numbers are no guarantee, until the numbers push down, we'll be looking at something north of 60,000 deaths a month. If the current wave doesn't crest, rolling out vaccines is going to be a footrace with the bear.

[shunyadragon]

Please.

OK!

[shunyadragon]

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election/trump-says-pandemic-will-end-soon-after-biden-blasts-his-handling-of-crisis-idUSKBN2781A4

Trump says pandemic will end soon after Biden blasts his handling of crisis

By Steve Holland, Trevor Hunnicutt

6 MIN READ

PENSACOLA, Fla./WILMINGTON, Del. (Reuters) - President Donald Trump promised supporters in Florida on Friday that the coronavirus pandemic would end soon and accused Democratic rival Joe Biden of overstating the health crisis to scare Americans into voting for him.

. . . .

“We’re going to quickly end this pandemic,” Trump, who has played down the threat since it started, said in The Villages, a sprawling retirement community in central Florida.

Later, Trump told a big crowd in Pensacola that the election was a choice “between a boom and a lockdown.”

© Copyright Original Source

[rogue06]

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election/trump-says-pandemic-will-end-soon-after-biden-blasts-his-handling-of-crisis-idUSKBN2781A4

Trump says pandemic will end soon after Biden blasts his handling of crisis

By Steve Holland, Trevor Hunnicutt

6 MIN READ

PENSACOLA, Fla./WILMINGTON, Del. (Reuters) - President Donald Trump promised supporters in Florida on Friday that the coronavirus pandemic would end soon and accused Democratic rival Joe Biden of overstating the health crisis to scare Americans into voting for him.

. . . .

“We’re going to quickly end this pandemic,” Trump, who has played down the threat since it started, said in The Villages, a sprawling retirement community in central Florida.

Later, Trump told a big crowd in Pensacola that the election was a choice “between a boom and a lockdown.”

© Copyright Original Source

Thank you for that pre-election story

[Juvenal]

The weekly average of daily death counts in the US is now as high as the April peak, the highest we'd previously seen during the pandemic, and still rising. There was a significant dip in the case counts at Thanksgiving, enough to give me some real hope. At that time, the principal statistic I'd been tracking, the rate of increase, nearly zeroed. It's since rebounded.

The decrease in case fatality rates is now matched by the increase in cases.

Meanwhile, we're running out of hospital beds for Covid patients, not just in specific locations, but nationally now.

2020-12-06_05-39-37.jpg

Earlier this week:

Redfield warns this winter may be ‘the most difficult time in the public health history’ of the U.S.
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The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Wednesday that the nation is facing a devastating winter, predicting that total deaths from Covid-19 could reach “close to 450,000” by February unless a large percentage of Americans follow precautions like mask-wearing.

“The reality is, December and January and February are going to be rough times,’ said Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the C.D.C., in an address to the Chamber of Commerce Foundation. “I actually believe they’re going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.”

The C.D.C. has been posting aggregate forecast models of the potential for a mounting death toll as the pace of the coronavirus outbreaks in various states has accelerated.

“We’re in that range potentially now, starting to see 1,500 to 2,000 to 2,500 deaths a day from this virus,” Dr. Redfield said. “The mortality concerns are real, and I do think, unfortunately, before we see February, we could be close to 450,000 Americans” dead from the virus.

I've tweaked the sheet again, replacing the lowball estimate for IFR with the literature estimate, including the cume/cume CFR, and projecting from their geometric mean. If the rate of increase freezes where it's at today, I project another 157,000 fatalities will enter the pipeline between now and Jan. 31, adding to the current fatality count, another 280,000 fatalities, to give 437,000 total deaths by February. That's based on a today's reported rate of increase in the weekly averages: 12 percent / two weeks.

The usual caveats.

1. This is what will happen if the numbers don't change.
2. The numbers will change.

The numbers will change, radically, as the first wave of immunizations makes its mark. That's not fast enough. We're going to be seeing a Thanksgiving surge over the next few weeks. That's in the pipeline already. So we need to bring the rates down with NPIs.

Masks and distancing will save lives.

[Juvenal]

The first phase of immunizations, starting with 1a, is targeted not at those most likely to die from covid, but instead at those most likely to spread it, which mostly means healthcare workers. Long-term care facilities are also included, starting with the staff. The calculus is to address the most pressing need, the lack of healthcare resources. We're running out of hospitals and medical staff to cover the surge of hospital patients. The medical system could melt down, putting more lives at risk from all causes.

As an essential worker, I'm included in phase 1b, but toward the bottom, behind more essential workers, like grocery store clerks, firefighters, and LEOs.

[Starlight]

Not only has November come and gone and Covid not disappeared, it's now reaching its highest levels ever.

I think some conservatives owe some liberals and the MSM an apology.

[Reepicheep]

Below are the number of daily deaths (seven day moving average) in the US from coronavirus, for each day since the election:

870 - Nov 3 (election day)
894 - Nov 4
910 - Nov 5
946 - Nov 6
962 - Nov 7
983 - Nov 8
1001 - Nov 9
1041 - Nov 10
1080 - Nov 11
...
2742 - Jan 6
2837 - Jan 7
3085 - Jan 8
3249 - Jan 9

In the 8 days since the election, the death rate has risen by over 24%.

The excitement over the election has caused us to take our eyes off COVID. It has gotten much, much worse in the two months since election day. In the above list of daily US deaths, I've added in figures for the past few days, see for yourself, Apparently, Trump was wrong when he predicted that COVID would disappear after election day.

Incidentally, since the protestors at Trump's riot were in close proximity to each other, and most of them were not wearing masks, it is predicted that the riot will become a "super spreader" event. Another gift to the American people from Trump's administration.

[Reepicheep]

Some facts about COVID in the United States during 2020:

- COVID was the third leading cause of death in the US, after heart disease and cancer

- the CDC estimates that 3.3 million Americans died during 2020, the first time more than 3 million Americans have died in a calendar year

- life expectancy in the US dropped by an estimated 3 years, when comparing 2020 to 2019

- in percentage terms, the increase in deaths in the US is the largest since 1918

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ctancy-experts