ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
There has been no evidence that the poor have been denied healthcare, at least to any statistically relevant extent.
Why would COVID-related costs be any different than this? The reasons that underly the below (and there are
many such polls and studies, BTW) are a structural flaw in our system.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/29/over-ha ... rd-it.html
ORIGINAL: Chickenboy
ORIGINAL: Lokasenna
Before I get caught up on the 6 pages I've missed since checking in yesterday (I'm taking the opportunity to get stuff done around the property since I don't have to commute anymore), here's a really cool link.
Note that it assumes our current measures of extreme social distancing will remain in place through all of May. Its projection (which should be a median projection) is for 93,765 deaths in the US from COVID-19 by August 4 (the error bar covers 41K to 177K, so not too different from Fauci's comments on Sunday).
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
Hey Chickenboy - got thoughts?
Yeah. I got thoughts: "F*** that's depressing." But, yeah, I could see it in that range.
CDC revised 2018's flu numbers to 80,000 deaths in the US. This 'feels' worse than that, but that's because this is being squeezed into a month or so of meaningful mortality instead of 5 months. I think the presence of a vaccine, even one of partial / incomplete efficacy also gave people a greater sense of personal control in 2018. Unknowns are always worse than bad news. I think for those reasons, this feels more soul-sucking than the covert epidemic from 2018 that was more spread out.
If there is a silver lining, the model indicates that we should probably stay under the capitated limit for ICU beds and have sufficient ventilators nationally (between new production and that in the National mobile reserve). But this will be a region-by-region trial by fire. Excess ICU bed/ ventilator capacity in Dubuque is meaningless for a local crisis in New Orleans.
Lastly-full disclosure-assignation of resident hospital care and surge capacity is not my forte. I'll demure to actual physicians on this. I got no chops here.
Yeah, at first glace on the site I looked at New York and North Dakota. It's obvious which curve was scarier and which had more capacity for catastrophe. Region by region, as you say.
ORIGINAL: BBfanboy
ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake
American intelligence agencies report to the President that China......wait for it...LIED about the numbers...thus hampering public health decisions worldwide and making containment impossible.
I'm shocked I tell you...SHOCKED!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... gence-says
If US Intelligence agencies had been on the ball they would have estimated the true extent of the problem by tracking the purchase of toilet paper in that region. Empty spaces on the TP shelves are a sure sign of an epidemic!
Don't they use squatty potties and no TP there? I'm ignorant of Chinese potty customs.
ORIGINAL: DD696
Regarding the California Herd, it is my personal opinion that this virus is seeking some form of intelligent life, and is finding a huge lack of that in California.
I meant to respond earlier to Canoerebel's comment about those taking exception with American exceptionalism being the political posts in this thread, but this above quoted comment is
at least as political in nature. It's not the only one of this nature in this thread that's gone ignored, either. It's been far from 100% apolitical except for mostly-gentle pushback on notions of American exceptionalism.
ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake
From the Victor David Hansen article in National Review.
Moreover, researchers in Italy believe that the Chinese were not telling the truth about the origins or birth dates of the virus; they argue that COVID-19 was first loose worldwide in the middle of Autumn 2019 rather than in Winter 2020. Reuters recently reported:
Adriano Decarli, an epidemiologist and medical statistics professor at the University of Milan, said there had been a “significant” increase in the number of people hospitalized for pneumonia and flu in the areas of Milan and Lodi between October and December last year. . . . He told Reuters he could not give exact figures but “hundreds” more people than usual had been taken to hospital in the last three months of 2019 in those areas — two of Lombardy’s worst hit cities — with pneumonia and flu-like symptoms, and some of those had died. . . . Decarli is reviewing the hospital records and other clinical details of those cases, including people who later died at home, to try to understand whether the new coronavirus epidemic had already spread to Italy back then. . . . “We want to know if the virus was already here in Italy at the end of 2019, and — if yes — why it remained undetected for a relatively long period so that we could have a clearer picture in case we have to face a second wave of the epidemic,” he said.
If this is true it should be possible to find some viral nucleic acid in a frozen specimen from one of these patients
A hypothesis that COVID-19 actually showed up in fall 2019 rather than winter 2019-2020 is extremely unlikely to be proven true. The likelihood that it was present throughout the world, but somehow undetected and somehow not causing widespread issues like it is now, prior to the outbreak in Wuhan is laughably small.
That's about the level of journalistic integrity I expect from the National Review op-ed pages, though. Those guys are pretty high up in the breeze.
