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The General [Coronavirus] Discussion Thread: Vaccines!
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You pretty much have it. It's basically spiking in 4 counties, all of them having a metro area, local colleges, and a military base -Minot, Fargo, Grand Forks, and Bismarck. South Dakota is similar, with it spiking in Rapid City and Sioux Falls, which have the same basic criteria listed above. But it's bad enough in both states that's it's cropping up in small towns all over already, and to make things even worse, guess what all the people in the cities in those states do for the holidays? Travel out to the family farm to see mom and dad. And while there visit grandma in the local hospice. And go to religious and other holiday gatherings in the local small town. If it gets bad enough this virus could legit take out a local population and wipe some of these towns off of the map. But the state governments are ride or die on "if we ignore it, it will totally go away."
It keeps coming back to the holidays. It's an incredibly avoidable oncoming train, but we choose to stay on the tracks.
There's an out-of-control trolley speeding down the tracks, if you pull the lever 230,000 people die but you get to have dinner with your family at an indoor chain restaurant, what do you do?
So pretty much uncontrolled throughout the entire continental US.
We're almost there. Almost mission accomplished time.
They were right, we were turning the corner. It was just the wrong corner, that's all. Shit, my state is the last bit of non red left, and we're getting there soon.
I can also present to you this data point.
San Francisco has solid testing, and has been deploying a wide scale response throughout the pandemic. Our local positivity rate remains under 1.5% and >85% of people are being contact traced. So, the effect I'm about to detail is not being confounded in any way by either massive changes in testing strategy etc.
We recently allowed the re-opening of indoor dining, 4 weeks ago at 25% capacity. Some other indoor services reopened, and a very small number of private schools. San Francisco did NOT however, re-open its public school system, so, we are effectively running a pretty decent case study here of 'What happens with indoor dining when case loads are pretty decent, but no advanced systems are in place, such as tracking apps or QR codes, or mass testing"
On September 30th we reopened indoor dining
By October 7th our number of cases stopped falling and our positivity rate plateaued at 0.8%
By October 21st our number of cases started rising
By November 10th our number of cases had doubled
Eating inside in restaurants is a disaster. Do not do it.
Thankfully we are closing it down again from Friday, alongside some other reimplemented restrictions. It is absurdly frustrating to have so much of the hard work which has been done by so many members of the community be so swiftly reversed by a few people who couldn't just put on a damn coat and eat outside. We had outside dining for months while maintaining a fall in case numbers.
Edit - It's also annoying to have emailed pretty much everyone in the damn city and the state on the 14th of last month to say, "You can see that we aren't ready for indoor dining, shut it down again. You know you're going to have to do it in like 3 weeks time, just do it now!" and have seen such a slow, glacial response from a city government which really did seem to be working hard. At least we didn't open to 50% capacity on the 3rd like we were supposed to!
You'd still have 93,000 dead Americans if you had the same deaths per million population rate as us in Canada. Which would be a hell of a lot better, but not zero.
I don't think the assumption that Canada's figures are just America's without the Trump mulitiplier is sufficient for this counterfactual. Trump has actively hampered the international response to COVID-19, both by providing a tremendous signal boost to skeptics and directly impeding American involvement in global health organisations. This is also ignoring that Canada shares a land border with a large nation which is currently letting the virus spread out of control.
I'd wager that in a Trumpless 2020 most other countries would have seen a lower death count from COVID. America's, similarly, could have been substantially lower than their nearest neighbour's current figures.
This is definitely true, and I'm sure Americans have kicked off a share of outbreaks here, but it is true that the land border is mostly closed. I'm pretty sure most spread here is community, rather than diseased Americans ruining the great north.
(again, there are definitely irresponsible Americans lying and cheating their way through the border, and Trump makes this a lot worse for all the reasons you listed, but I think Canadians are the primary threat to Canadians in terms of actual outbreaks).
Indeed, Trump isn't to blame for US deaths alone. I'd argue that Trump is POSSIBLY to blame for about 75% of the entire Pandemic worldwide. China probably bears about 25% of the blame at this point due to their mismanagement early on when they could have stopped it (if they had listened to the early whistleblowers, it would never have spread) but Trump's terrible response lulled others into a false sense of security.
In a well managed world you would have been looking at worldwide travel lockdowns starting in late February. Not half assed ones, but, "All flights are grounded other than for relief efforts". You'd have seen testing ramped and deployed by an international task force, going region by region, country by country achieving local elimination and then moving on with resources.
Edit - To be clear, I guess I give China about a 50% chance of stopping it if they had tried properly immediately, and the rest of the world a 50% chance of stopping it and a 90% chance of slowing its progress to a crawl, and if we remain a LITTLE bit fortunate and the vaccine keeps showing all the right data, means we could have actually got the vaccine deployed into phase 3 volunteers BEFORE we even had many cases in most countries. We'd have been looking at major spread in a few nations, with all other nations helping to control it, and vaccines being trialed there.
Edit 2 - Without Trump, noone would even have come up with the idea that masks are some inconceivable threat to civil liberties! We'd all be happily wearing them.
There are also thousands of trucks that deliver across the border every day, and likely tens of thousands of dual citizens who cross frequently as well. The border may be closed to nonessential travel, but that's a hole big enough to drive, well, a truck through. It would probably me more comparable to look at Germany's spread rate than say Canada. As a similarly large country with large borders and very independent states/provinces.
That's true, I always forget the trucks.
Are dual citizens and such crossing frequently? You have to be willfully ignoring quarantine periods for that. I mean, I know people will still do it, but I have no idea how many.
(I'm probably reading my situation too much into what people as a whole are doing, though. I could cross in both directions, and I'm being responsible by not, surely everyone is equally good as I'm being...)
Oh, no doubt. There are all kinds of additional factors like you said from the active harm Trump had caused. There's also the fact we have public health care here which may play a role in ability to respond to pandemics, though the problems in many Euro countries show it's not a panacea by any means.
We haven't even done that great a job here in Canada, so our deaths/million is perhaps a reasonable comparison compared to say, Australia or New Zealand.
CBSA releases figures on border crossings on a regular basis I think, though I have not looked at them for the pandemic.
Right, but the idea is that a lot of international organizations looked to the CDC for leadership, and Trump didn't allow them to do their jobs. And was in fact actively unhelpful in that regard. He shut down pandemic monitoring operations- there's a non-zero chance we could have caught this thing early and killed it off.
And he certainly mainstreamed it beyond just conspiracy level stuff as well.
However, with the recent rising cases, action by the provincial governments has been lackluster and not nearly enough. With what we know now, I think you can make the argument that we dont need widescale intervention, but more targeted and effective intervention which we still arent even getting. We know alot more about how to deal with things now than we did in March, but we are still not really doing the things that should help which is frustrating.
I have 549 Rock Band Drum and 305 Pro Drum FC's
REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS
I think the biggest issue is that you have to act BEFORE cases start rising. You need to change your behavior when you see cases go back to flat. Flat is risky, flat can be a disaster in 3 weeks. You need the numbers to be always falling. That doesn't mean lock everyone inside, here where I live we had falling numbers for 3 months and I could still order a Pizza, go for a walk, and lots of people doing essential science stuff were in offices, until we reopened too much, then we had flat for a month, and now we are anything but. Kids went to summer camps, people hung out in each others driveways. Down and down and down cases went. And then we reopened indoor dining....
Flat is bad. Flat means you are losing.
Half my team is out because of contact with presumed or confirmed positives outside of work. Three or four separate chains of contact. Fuck this. I am now monarch of a desolate understaffed wasteland.
Jesus Fuck.
Tweet is from a Marshall Project reporter, formerly Houston Chronicle and NY Daily News
Every person working at that prison should be charged with murder because there's no way to hit those numbers on accident.
e: Unless this prison is so small 6% is like two or three people or something like that, which the tweet chain doesn't specify.
e2: See comments below for context, apparently it's a minimum security prison for old people
Hmmm yeah that seems bad. Maybe it's population skews really old? That said, prisons as a whole have been terribly undercounted, and undertested throughout this whole pandemic. I wouldn't be surprised at this point if many prisons had reached "herd immunity" levels already, because they've pretty much let it rip through them unchecked. Not to mention medical care at prisons is notoriously awful; many jails will virtually let you die before getting you care. A prison sentence is practically a death sentence at this point.
Shit I was just taking a guess and thought you were joking... but after googling it, nope it actually is. That makes sense then.
Bingo. It's a minimum security geriatric prison with about 400 inmates. So it's kind of like covid hitting a really big nursing home.
It's not like they have a choice at this point, they're at 100% capacity and they've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas. There's no one to replace medical staff waylaid by the virus and really..who cares if a couple of wage slave nurses die from a cytokine storm in the grand scheme of things? There's no one to the west or south of them that can take on patients either. Metro MN is about the closest option, but I doubt MN is all that keen on grabbing patients from the dakotas right now.
I’m pretty sure it matters to the other hospital workers at risk. They get a say in their life, they’re not fucking slaves.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
It was sarcasm. From the start of this there's been a despicable sort of attitude towards frontline, at risk workers. And not just in the medical field either.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
Like, "Let's run a large-scale medico-sociological experiment - with kids and teachers!"
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
But now they can be fired for not working.
There's also significant differences in how different regions of Canada are handling it. For instance, the per capita difference in active cases between Atlantic Canada and the rest of the country is staggering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Canada
The Atlantic region combined has 18 active cases per million people at the moment (and that's considered high here right now). The next lowest province has over 700 per million.
Local news is saying statewide hospitals are reaching capacity and hundreds of hospital workers are coming down with COVID, 300 cases on one day alone. Dr Amy Acton called this months ago before she was ousted because of anti-COVID threats.
GOV DeWine is giving a statewide address today on COVID, so we’ll see what actions he takes.
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MN also is getting close to capacity now in our hospitals, especially outside the metro areas.