70-80% would be pretty terrible, I can only hope that is an artifact of the fairly small population of patients that would've been sent for an X-ray... but yes, the long term morbidity has been a big concern of mine. And if we end up with a large percentage of the population with lung scarring, even if they can go by their day to day ok, it'll likely increase seasonal influenza morbidity and mortality.
Yeah, agree completely. Part of me feels like there's absolutely no way that number can be accurate. But I also believe that the long-term prospects for people are worse than anyone wants to admit.
The hell of it is, we're going to need years of study and data collection to be able to say for sure.
Yeah I don't know how they came up with that number, but most asymptomatic people aren't ever getting tested, let alone going the hospital and getting an xray. Maybe they've had a group they're studying though.
A Texas trauma surgeon says it's rare that X-rays from any of her COVID-19 patients come back without dense scarring. Dr. Brittany Bankhead-Kendall tweeted, "Post-COVID lungs look worse than any type of terrible smoker's lung we've ever seen. And they collapse. And they clot off. And the shortness of breath lingers on... & on... & on."
"Everyone's just so worried about the mortality thing and that's terrible and it's awful," she told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth. "But man, for all the survivors and the people who have tested positive this is — it's going to be a problem."
She says patients who've had COVID-19 symptoms show a severe chest X-ray every time, and those who were asymptomatic show a severe chest X-ray 70% to 80% of the time.
"There are still people who say 'I'm fine. I don't have any issues,' and you pull up their chest X-ray and they absolutely have a bad chest X-ray," she said.
That's not 1-2% of people getting long COVID. That's a majority of people infected having a life-changing disability.
Doctors giving anecdotes have a tendency to exaggerate, for whatever reason.
The actual scientists are finding things that ... well they aren't great, but they aren't anywhere that dire:
Looks like another day with more than a million vaccine doses delivered according to the Bloomberg vaccine tracker. Different ways of counting on different sites of course, but Bloomberg is reporting 1.1 million doses yesterday (0.33% of the US population dosed). If it wasn't for the national disgrace that is the California rollout we'd be beating 1 million a day easily every day.
Looks like another day with more than a million vaccine doses delivered according to the Bloomberg vaccine tracker. Different ways of counting on different sites of course, but Bloomberg is reporting 1.1 million doses yesterday (0.33% of the US population dosed). If it wasn't for the national disgrace that is the California rollout we'd be beating 1 million a day easily every day.
California will be picking up soon. A lot of the mega-sites are opening on the 15th and they’re expanding qualification significantly
Looks like another day with more than a million vaccine doses delivered according to the Bloomberg vaccine tracker. Different ways of counting on different sites of course, but Bloomberg is reporting 1.1 million doses yesterday (0.33% of the US population dosed). If it wasn't for the national disgrace that is the California rollout we'd be beating 1 million a day easily every day.
California will be picking up soon. A lot of the mega-sites are opening on the 15th and they’re expanding qualification significantly
True, but, you know whats better than a vaccine tomorrow? A vaccine yesterday. And after the sites get open then we have to have the first few days news stories of "People have to stand in lines! The horror!" and "Websites crash for no god damned reason" and "A person under the age of 60 managed to get the vaccine! The horror!" and "County X says they will never open mass testing sites, as they think that people should get their shots from their doctors"
We crossed some Milestones, according to the tracker.
The world is approaching 94,000,000 recorded cases (this is obviously missing a ton for a variety of reasons I won’t bother trying to catalogue) and 2,000,000 deaths (same caveat).
The US is likely crossing 24,000,000 cases and 400,000 of those deaths tomorrow, based on our relentless gazing at stats pages and the last year of data.
Even as someone in a country that is doing... okay (could be better, could be so much worse), and as someone happy to finally see vaccines being deployed, we’ve been saying for ages that this things tail would make January rough, even if Americans didn’t fuck up with wild holiday celebrations.
Stay as safe as can be, folks.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Meanwhile, Johnson and Johnson admitted that they've fallen behind projections and will not have all that many doses ready to go in February if/when they receive approval, although they hope to make it up and catch up, maybe as soon as March or maybe later:
There's also the AstraZeneca vaccine that may be up for approval in the US as soon as February. But even all four vaccines combined would still leave us running into a supply problem pretty soon as the rate the US is ramping up administration.
I don't think it changes the trajectory of the pandemic all that much, tbh. The disease is heavily asymmetric in how it produces casualties. Getting the most vulnerable 10% of the population vaccinated does as much work as the last 60%. But people are going to be frustrated when we get all this infrastructure built up for massive vaccination campaigns and just plain run out of shots to give people.
Meanwhile, Johnson and Johnson admitted that they've fallen behind projections and will not have all that many doses ready to go in February if/when they receive approval, although they hope to make it up and catch up, maybe as soon as March or maybe later:
There's also the AstraZeneca vaccine that may be up for approval in the US as soon as February. But even all four vaccines combined would still leave us running into a supply problem pretty soon as the rate the US is ramping up administration.
I don't think it changes the trajectory of the pandemic all that much, tbh. The disease is heavily asymmetric in how it produces casualties. Getting the most vulnerable 10% of the population vaccinated does as much work as the last 60%. But people are going to be frustrated when we get all this infrastructure built up for massive vaccination campaigns and just plain run out of shots to give people.
Novavax is on the table too.
If things are working, then they will find a way to make more vaccines. They opened a new factory in europe with a 4 month build out time. They will build more.
A Texas trauma surgeon says it's rare that X-rays from any of her COVID-19 patients come back without dense scarring. Dr. Brittany Bankhead-Kendall tweeted, "Post-COVID lungs look worse than any type of terrible smoker's lung we've ever seen. And they collapse. And they clot off. And the shortness of breath lingers on... & on... & on."
"Everyone's just so worried about the mortality thing and that's terrible and it's awful," she told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth. "But man, for all the survivors and the people who have tested positive this is — it's going to be a problem."
She says patients who've had COVID-19 symptoms show a severe chest X-ray every time, and those who were asymptomatic show a severe chest X-ray 70% to 80% of the time.
"There are still people who say 'I'm fine. I don't have any issues,' and you pull up their chest X-ray and they absolutely have a bad chest X-ray," she said.
That's not 1-2% of people getting long COVID. That's a majority of people infected having a life-changing disability.
Doctors giving anecdotes have a tendency to exaggerate, for whatever reason.
The actual scientists are finding things that ... well they aren't great, but they aren't anywhere that dire:
Even if I take that Dr. at their word, that's just 70-80% of the people who both needed to seek hospitalization in the first place, and had severe enough symptoms to require the X-rays.
Most people who get COVID-19 don't need to go to the hospital.
Hmm, I wonder if we could conduct a science experiment where there were two groups of people from pretty similar wealth categories but from all over the country where we could carefully monitor them and have one group which took the pandemic seriously and took some basic precautions like mask wearing and the like, but still had to work in person, while the other group just said fuck it. iChat if those two groups had to work in the same place. I wonder how infections would spread.
In summary, since the start of the pandemic 44 republicans in the house have been infected vs 17 Democrats. Being a democrat has an effacacy of more than 50% vs catching Covid19
Not to mention those democrats have a massive risk factor of having to work with Republicans as we saw from the Jan 6 event which probably accounts for 30% of your democrat cases.
Not to mention those democrats have a massive risk factor of having to work with Republicans as we saw from the Jan 6 event which probably accounts for 30% of your democrat cases.
Which is exactly why I thought this was more interesting. These Congress folks have a pretty high risk job in terms of the number of contacts they have, the amount of time they spend around other people, the unmasked people they have to see. And we’ve seen that even the Democrats aren’t like, staying home every second they aren’t at work, wearing N95s and ad hoc PAPR systems etc.
With these ratios, if everyone just took the virus vaguely seriously, it would be extinct. R would never have been above 1 anywhere after we learned about it.
There have been neither enough cases for herd immunity or enough vaccinations to turn the curve downward at this time. The math and time components just don't work out.
A Texas trauma surgeon says it's rare that X-rays from any of her COVID-19 patients come back without dense scarring. Dr. Brittany Bankhead-Kendall tweeted, "Post-COVID lungs look worse than any type of terrible smoker's lung we've ever seen. And they collapse. And they clot off. And the shortness of breath lingers on... & on... & on."
"Everyone's just so worried about the mortality thing and that's terrible and it's awful," she told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth. "But man, for all the survivors and the people who have tested positive this is — it's going to be a problem."
She says patients who've had COVID-19 symptoms show a severe chest X-ray every time, and those who were asymptomatic show a severe chest X-ray 70% to 80% of the time.
"There are still people who say 'I'm fine. I don't have any issues,' and you pull up their chest X-ray and they absolutely have a bad chest X-ray," she said.
That's not 1-2% of people getting long COVID. That's a majority of people infected having a life-changing disability.
Doctors giving anecdotes have a tendency to exaggerate, for whatever reason.
The actual scientists are finding things that ... well they aren't great, but they aren't anywhere that dire:
Their conclusions are quite dire and you should reread the paper. None of those endpoints like cognitive deficits, trouble breathing, trouble walking are things you want three plus months out from covid. Those are significant disabilities.
Meanwhile, Johnson and Johnson admitted that they've fallen behind projections and will not have all that many doses ready to go in February if/when they receive approval, although they hope to make it up and catch up, maybe as soon as March or maybe later:
There's also the AstraZeneca vaccine that may be up for approval in the US as soon as February. But even all four vaccines combined would still leave us running into a supply problem pretty soon as the rate the US is ramping up administration.
I don't think it changes the trajectory of the pandemic all that much, tbh. The disease is heavily asymmetric in how it produces casualties. Getting the most vulnerable 10% of the population vaccinated does as much work as the last 60%. But people are going to be frustrated when we get all this infrastructure built up for massive vaccination campaigns and just plain run out of shots to give people.
Novavax is on the table too.
If things are working, then they will find a way to make more vaccines. They opened a new factory in europe with a 4 month build out time. They will build more.
Novavax didn’t start their US trials until a couple of weeks ago, they’re at least a month or two behind the others.
They will absolutely build more. But if we run out of doses in February, a new factory that starts churning them out in May doesn’t change that.
It’s still better to run out of doses than not, but we still need to be aware that this is what is likely to happen. We are going to ramp up our output capabilities and then be limited by supply within a month or so
There have been neither enough cases for herd immunity or enough vaccinations to turn the curve downward at this time. The math and time components just don't work out.
Herd immunity is a hypothetical threshold that only applies to a population behaving completely unaware of the virus. It does not apply the moment anyone, anywhere changes their behavior.
We do not have enough population immunity to prevent the virus from spreading at a transmission rate above 1 if we went back to pre-pandemic behaviors.
We do appear to have enough population immunity to drive transmission rates below 1 at current behavior levels. This is both predicted by the math and seen empirically over the last few days.
The reason you don’t see the tipping point in that graph is because it happened (possibly, we still need more data to be sure) this week and you used a weekly graph that doesn’t show what is happening in just the last few days. The running 7-day-average shows the downturn in cases and hospitalizations.
These are the plots which are saying ‘tipping point’.
As you can see, from the same data source, we are at record levels of testing, but our caseloads and hospitalizations have been falling for a couple of days. Will things turn to crap again tomorrow? Maybe, but there’s no reason to expect it.
As ink stain has discussed. We’ve not been dealing with an Rt of 1.5. We’ve been dealing with 1.1 to 1.2 and over the last few weeks, tens of millions of Americans have been infected. We are not at herd immunity. But herd immunity is a function of behavior. We may be approaching herd immunity for the way we are behaving today. We’ve been infecting close to a million people a day for two months. That’s 60 million more people with at least some additional immunity.
In addition, vaccines have a massively weighted effect on hospitalizations and deaths. For all the horror stories, the hospitals aren’t full of young people. The majority of hospitalizations and deaths are in the over 65s
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
I've seen images of states that are doing first come first serve vaccines, and it's just old people camped out like they are trying to get a day 1 Playstation 5.
We need to have a better system. We've had months to figure this out, and lining old people up was the best that we could figure out.
+1
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
These are the plots which are saying ‘tipping point’.
As you can see, from the same data source, we are at record levels of testing, but our caseloads and hospitalizations have been falling for a couple of days. Will things turn to crap again tomorrow? Maybe, but there’s no reason to expect it.
As ink stain has discussed. We’ve not been dealing with an Rt of 1.5. We’ve been dealing with 1.1 to 1.2 and over the last few weeks, tens of millions of Americans have been infected. We are not at herd immunity. But herd immunity is a function of behavior. We may be approaching herd immunity for the way we are behaving today. We’ve been infecting close to a million people a day for two months. That’s 60 million more people with at least some additional immunity.
In addition, vaccines have a massively weighted effect on hospitalizations and deaths. For all the horror stories, the hospitals aren’t full of young people. The majority of hospitalizations and deaths are in the over 65s
That "tipping point" data is way too close to the current date to be viable. Those numbers that look like they're barely going down? Those points on the graph will shoot back up once data is finalized.
As someone who's been watching my county numbers constantly, this is the illusion of the graphs: It ALWAYS looks like the numbers are going down when you look at the graphs, because they back-fill the data later. You're looking at an artifact of the data - not a trend.
Also, once again HOSPITAL DEATHS AREN'T EVERYTHING. There are people who will survive this and die to flu when they otherwise would recover next year.
These are the plots which are saying ‘tipping point’.
As you can see, from the same data source, we are at record levels of testing, but our caseloads and hospitalizations have been falling for a couple of days. Will things turn to crap again tomorrow? Maybe, but there’s no reason to expect it.
As ink stain has discussed. We’ve not been dealing with an Rt of 1.5. We’ve been dealing with 1.1 to 1.2 and over the last few weeks, tens of millions of Americans have been infected. We are not at herd immunity. But herd immunity is a function of behavior. We may be approaching herd immunity for the way we are behaving today. We’ve been infecting close to a million people a day for two months. That’s 60 million more people with at least some additional immunity.
In addition, vaccines have a massively weighted effect on hospitalizations and deaths. For all the horror stories, the hospitals aren’t full of young people. The majority of hospitalizations and deaths are in the over 65s
That "tipping point" data is way too close to the current date to be viable. Those numbers that look like they're barely going down? Those points on the graph will shoot back up once data is finalized.
As someone who's been watching my county numbers constantly, this is the illusion of the graphs: It ALWAYS looks like the numbers are going down when you look at the graphs, because they back-fill the data later. You're looking at an artifact of the data - not a trend.
Also, once again HOSPITAL DEATHS AREN'T EVERYTHING. There are people who will survive this and die to flu when they otherwise would recover next year.
Your experience with your county data does not apply to this, a completely different data set that behaves differently. Hospitalizations are not back filled, and case trackers do not back fill their data like that.
This particular data set does not behave the way you describe. It does not “always look like it’s going down.” Hospitalizations have not once looked like they were going down for more than 100 consecutive days before this week.
Cases have appeared to be going down twice during that time period, both if which came during holiday weeks when many reporting agencies were closed and the false dip was predicted weeks in advance. No reporting places have been closed this week to cause this effect this week.
No one in the press or medical fields is saying what the two of you are saying.
Deaths are still a lagging indicator, and if you think the news media is the best place to get these sorts of predictions, we will just have to disagree.
All I see in that graph is a hook effect at the end of the data set. Which is pretty normal for lots of types of data, which is why those aren't generally weighted too heavily doing trendlines.
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
These are the plots which are saying ‘tipping point’.
As you can see, from the same data source, we are at record levels of testing, but our caseloads and hospitalizations have been falling for a couple of days. Will things turn to crap again tomorrow? Maybe, but there’s no reason to expect it.
As ink stain has discussed. We’ve not been dealing with an Rt of 1.5. We’ve been dealing with 1.1 to 1.2 and over the last few weeks, tens of millions of Americans have been infected. We are not at herd immunity. But herd immunity is a function of behavior. We may be approaching herd immunity for the way we are behaving today. We’ve been infecting close to a million people a day for two months. That’s 60 million more people with at least some additional immunity.
In addition, vaccines have a massively weighted effect on hospitalizations and deaths. For all the horror stories, the hospitals aren’t full of young people. The majority of hospitalizations and deaths are in the over 65s
That "tipping point" data is way too close to the current date to be viable. Those numbers that look like they're barely going down? Those points on the graph will shoot back up once data is finalized.
As someone who's been watching my county numbers constantly, this is the illusion of the graphs: It ALWAYS looks like the numbers are going down when you look at the graphs, because they back-fill the data later. You're looking at an artifact of the data - not a trend.
Also, once again HOSPITAL DEATHS AREN'T EVERYTHING. There are people who will survive this and die to flu when they otherwise would recover next year.
Your experience with your county data does not apply to this, a completely different data set that behaves differently. Hospitalizations are not back filled, and case trackers do not back fill their data like that.
This particular data set does not behave the way you describe. It does not “always look like it’s going down.” Hospitalizations have not once looked like they were going down for more than 100 consecutive days before this week.
Cases have appeared to be going down twice during that time period, both if which came during holiday weeks when many reporting agencies were closed and the false dip was predicted weeks in advance. No reporting places have been closed this week to cause this effect this week.
Firmly disagree on all points, but I gather arguing with you about it will be fruitless, so I'm just going to drop it.
The general trend for the entire pandemic in the US has been steadily climbing rates with no drops. What evidence do you have to make such a grand claim that this is the tipping point?
Did you calculate rate equations to show that the number of vaccinations will remove enough susceptible people that the infection rate will decrease?
These are the plots which are saying ‘tipping point’.
As you can see, from the same data source, we are at record levels of testing, but our caseloads and hospitalizations have been falling for a couple of days. Will things turn to crap again tomorrow? Maybe, but there’s no reason to expect it.
As ink stain has discussed. We’ve not been dealing with an Rt of 1.5. We’ve been dealing with 1.1 to 1.2 and over the last few weeks, tens of millions of Americans have been infected. We are not at herd immunity. But herd immunity is a function of behavior. We may be approaching herd immunity for the way we are behaving today. We’ve been infecting close to a million people a day for two months. That’s 60 million more people with at least some additional immunity.
In addition, vaccines have a massively weighted effect on hospitalizations and deaths. For all the horror stories, the hospitals aren’t full of young people. The majority of hospitalizations and deaths are in the over 65s
That "tipping point" data is way too close to the current date to be viable. Those numbers that look like they're barely going down? Those points on the graph will shoot back up once data is finalized.
As someone who's been watching my county numbers constantly, this is the illusion of the graphs: It ALWAYS looks like the numbers are going down when you look at the graphs, because they back-fill the data later. You're looking at an artifact of the data - not a trend.
Also, once again HOSPITAL DEATHS AREN'T EVERYTHING. There are people who will survive this and die to flu when they otherwise would recover next year.
That's not how this website works. Its the same data as for the plot fuzzy presented but with three more days of data and presented with a 7 day moving average rather than in 7 day chunks. This website does not have the artifacts that you are suggesting. They report data from tests on the day they receive the data. And yesterday was a solid week for testing. The artifacts it has is that it is more vulnerable to under reporting on a certain day which would be expressed in very low test numbers for that day followed by massive spikes in test numbers on following days. We saw that over Christmas. However, there is no sign of a testing fall to accompany the case load fall.
None of this has any application to the potential new variants. If they 'new variants' are 70% more infectious then nothing can be done, the vaccines are useless unless you were already lucky enough to get one, stay at home orders (even strictly followed) won't work at all and everyone will be infected and not get a hospital bed. Game over. No point worrying about anything. You will live or die based on good fortune alone, if you get sick there's zero chance of a hospital bed for you. Maybe if these new variants take a long time to be established and we have an effective vaccine rollout over the next month or two, then the peak they cause will be no worse than the current one. Perhaps more muted if many old people are vaccinated. But, none of us can see the future with clarity. Fortunately each new estimate of the infectiousness of the new variant is revising its increased infectiousness down and down. With 30% more infectious being the new midpoint I'm seeing. Which is very good, because it means a longer time to dominance, and more time to vaccinate.
None of this has any other application to other countries. The USA has done a uniquely terrible job of managing the infection and has a gigantic amount of deaths for a developed nation. This means it has a truly enormous amount of pre existing cases, likely higher than 25% already infected. US hospitals have done a very good job keeping people alive, which means our actual case burden is even higher than other nations with similar numbers of deaths.
Hospitalizations and deaths are not everything, that is 100% true. But they are a very significant component of the terrible pain and death this disease is causing in our community.
Herd immunity is a thing in the US right now, unless you believe that the virus just gave up and went home in North Dakota? Its not a fundamental truth, because it comes from behavior too, but it is a functional effect. It could collapse tomorrow if people changed their behavior, but so could any herd immunity. If I had a 100k like minded friends about America I could eliminate US herd immunity to measles by carefully exposing our children to measles to create a sustained transmission chain and then deliberately having every sick kid go to Disney. Herd immunity is a function of human behavior, which can always turn on a dime.
These are the plots which are saying ‘tipping point’.
As you can see, from the same data source, we are at record levels of testing, but our caseloads and hospitalizations have been falling for a couple of days. Will things turn to crap again tomorrow? Maybe, but there’s no reason to expect it.
As ink stain has discussed. We’ve not been dealing with an Rt of 1.5. We’ve been dealing with 1.1 to 1.2 and over the last few weeks, tens of millions of Americans have been infected. We are not at herd immunity. But herd immunity is a function of behavior. We may be approaching herd immunity for the way we are behaving today. We’ve been infecting close to a million people a day for two months. That’s 60 million more people with at least some additional immunity.
In addition, vaccines have a massively weighted effect on hospitalizations and deaths. For all the horror stories, the hospitals aren’t full of young people. The majority of hospitalizations and deaths are in the over 65s
That "tipping point" data is way too close to the current date to be viable. Those numbers that look like they're barely going down? Those points on the graph will shoot back up once data is finalized.
As someone who's been watching my county numbers constantly, this is the illusion of the graphs: It ALWAYS looks like the numbers are going down when you look at the graphs, because they back-fill the data later. You're looking at an artifact of the data - not a trend.
Also, once again HOSPITAL DEATHS AREN'T EVERYTHING. There are people who will survive this and die to flu when they otherwise would recover next year.
Your experience with your county data does not apply to this, a completely different data set that behaves differently. Hospitalizations are not back filled, and case trackers do not back fill their data like that.
This particular data set does not behave the way you describe. It does not “always look like it’s going down.” Hospitalizations have not once looked like they were going down for more than 100 consecutive days before this week.
Cases have appeared to be going down twice during that time period, both if which came during holiday weeks when many reporting agencies were closed and the false dip was predicted weeks in advance. No reporting places have been closed this week to cause this effect this week.
Firmly disagree on all points, but I gather arguing with you about it will be fruitless, so I'm just going to drop it.
This is not a matter of opinion. Everything I stated there is an empirically observed fact.
These data sets have been observed for months and their behavior is on the record. Whether or not officially reported hospitalizations dropped week over week on any day between late September and early January is not something we can have different opinions on. It’s just an issue of public record.
What do you think the current r(t) is in the United States as a whole?
How many people do you think are being infected per week (remembering that we don't catch every infection with a test) per week?
I don't care about either. I look at existing data because I'm a scientist. Not a weather person.
Cool. I won’t be responding to any more of your posts. You frequently post disinformation and I’m not interested in having to repeatedly debunk it if you aren’t engaging in good faith. Good luck out there
The general trend for the entire pandemic in the US has been steadily climbing rates with no drops. What evidence do you have to make such a grand claim that this is the tipping point?
Did you calculate rate equations to show that the number of vaccinations will remove enough susceptible people that the infection rate will decrease?
Ok, I lied, one more debunk of your disinformation.
The us showed decline phases in cases from April to June and from late July to early September
Please stop lying about publicly available numbers
Look we can do without the drama because you don't like what I'm saying. Let's mark this date in the calendar like I did with tblox's predictions earlier in the thread and revisist in a month. Then we can see who is right.
As to disinformation, my head is spinning as to what I possibly could have said that deviates from factual reality. I'm sorry that I don't agree with whatever funny math you've cooked up for the group this week. I'll stick to the experts in epidemiology at world class institutes for my sources as I always have.
Now, there are *lots* of ways I could be wrong about this being a tipping point.
If people loosen their behavior over what they've been doing in November/December, then cases will go up. Population behavior is the elephant in the room.
If the new, more transmissible variants are as bad as we fear they might be and they gain a significant foothold, then cases could go up.
If I'm wrong and we're actually catching most new infections and we're infecting less than 1% of the population per week at current rates, then there's less downward pressure than I thought on transmission rates.
Maybe the only reason it appears cases are going down this week is because we had an extremely high week last week due to the holiday catchup, and actually cases have been (very slightly but steadily) growing all through the last several weeks.
I'm sure there's other ways I'm missing that I could be wrong. But "One time I looked at a different data set and it used backfilling, so obviously this data set uses backfilling" is not one of them.
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Yeah I don't know how they came up with that number, but most asymptomatic people aren't ever getting tested, let alone going the hospital and getting an xray. Maybe they've had a group they're studying though.
And I'm negative! Ah we'll sleep easy tonight!
Doctors giving anecdotes have a tendency to exaggerate, for whatever reason.
The actual scientists are finding things that ... well they aren't great, but they aren't anywhere that dire:
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1750/5998118
California will be picking up soon. A lot of the mega-sites are opening on the 15th and they’re expanding qualification significantly
True, but, you know whats better than a vaccine tomorrow? A vaccine yesterday. And after the sites get open then we have to have the first few days news stories of "People have to stand in lines! The horror!" and "Websites crash for no god damned reason" and "A person under the age of 60 managed to get the vaccine! The horror!" and "County X says they will never open mass testing sites, as they think that people should get their shots from their doctors"
The world is approaching 94,000,000 recorded cases (this is obviously missing a ton for a variety of reasons I won’t bother trying to catalogue) and 2,000,000 deaths (same caveat).
The US is likely crossing 24,000,000 cases and 400,000 of those deaths tomorrow, based on our relentless gazing at stats pages and the last year of data.
Even as someone in a country that is doing... okay (could be better, could be so much worse), and as someone happy to finally see vaccines being deployed, we’ve been saying for ages that this things tail would make January rough, even if Americans didn’t fuck up with wild holiday celebrations.
Stay as safe as can be, folks.
Pfizer and Moderna both upped their projection for 2021 vaccine manufacturing significantly this week as the ramp-up goes well for them:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-11/pfizer-biontech-boost-covid-vaccine-target-to-2-billion-doses
Meanwhile, Johnson and Johnson admitted that they've fallen behind projections and will not have all that many doses ready to go in February if/when they receive approval, although they hope to make it up and catch up, maybe as soon as March or maybe later:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/health/covid-vaccine-johnson-johnson.html
There's also the AstraZeneca vaccine that may be up for approval in the US as soon as February. But even all four vaccines combined would still leave us running into a supply problem pretty soon as the rate the US is ramping up administration.
I don't think it changes the trajectory of the pandemic all that much, tbh. The disease is heavily asymmetric in how it produces casualties. Getting the most vulnerable 10% of the population vaccinated does as much work as the last 60%. But people are going to be frustrated when we get all this infrastructure built up for massive vaccination campaigns and just plain run out of shots to give people.
Novavax is on the table too.
If things are working, then they will find a way to make more vaccines. They opened a new factory in europe with a 4 month build out time. They will build more.
Even if I take that Dr. at their word, that's just 70-80% of the people who both needed to seek hospitalization in the first place, and had severe enough symptoms to require the X-rays.
Most people who get COVID-19 don't need to go to the hospital.
Hmm, I wonder if we could conduct a science experiment where there were two groups of people from pretty similar wealth categories but from all over the country where we could carefully monitor them and have one group which took the pandemic seriously and took some basic precautions like mask wearing and the like, but still had to work in person, while the other group just said fuck it. iChat if those two groups had to work in the same place. I wonder how infections would spread.
In summary, since the start of the pandemic 44 republicans in the house have been infected vs 17 Democrats. Being a democrat has an effacacy of more than 50% vs catching Covid19
Which is exactly why I thought this was more interesting. These Congress folks have a pretty high risk job in terms of the number of contacts they have, the amount of time they spend around other people, the unmasked people they have to see. And we’ve seen that even the Democrats aren’t like, staying home every second they aren’t at work, wearing N95s and ad hoc PAPR systems etc.
With these ratios, if everyone just took the virus vaguely seriously, it would be extinct. R would never have been above 1 anywhere after we learned about it.
There is nothing in these graphs that screams "tipping point".
Novavax didn’t start their US trials until a couple of weeks ago, they’re at least a month or two behind the others.
They will absolutely build more. But if we run out of doses in February, a new factory that starts churning them out in May doesn’t change that.
It’s still better to run out of doses than not, but we still need to be aware that this is what is likely to happen. We are going to ramp up our output capabilities and then be limited by supply within a month or so
Herd immunity is a hypothetical threshold that only applies to a population behaving completely unaware of the virus. It does not apply the moment anyone, anywhere changes their behavior.
We do not have enough population immunity to prevent the virus from spreading at a transmission rate above 1 if we went back to pre-pandemic behaviors.
We do appear to have enough population immunity to drive transmission rates below 1 at current behavior levels. This is both predicted by the math and seen empirically over the last few days.
The reason you don’t see the tipping point in that graph is because it happened (possibly, we still need more data to be sure) this week and you used a weekly graph that doesn’t show what is happening in just the last few days. The running 7-day-average shows the downturn in cases and hospitalizations.
These are the plots which are saying ‘tipping point’.
As you can see, from the same data source, we are at record levels of testing, but our caseloads and hospitalizations have been falling for a couple of days. Will things turn to crap again tomorrow? Maybe, but there’s no reason to expect it.
As ink stain has discussed. We’ve not been dealing with an Rt of 1.5. We’ve been dealing with 1.1 to 1.2 and over the last few weeks, tens of millions of Americans have been infected. We are not at herd immunity. But herd immunity is a function of behavior. We may be approaching herd immunity for the way we are behaving today. We’ve been infecting close to a million people a day for two months. That’s 60 million more people with at least some additional immunity.
In addition, vaccines have a massively weighted effect on hospitalizations and deaths. For all the horror stories, the hospitals aren’t full of young people. The majority of hospitalizations and deaths are in the over 65s
We need to have a better system. We've had months to figure this out, and lining old people up was the best that we could figure out.
That "tipping point" data is way too close to the current date to be viable. Those numbers that look like they're barely going down? Those points on the graph will shoot back up once data is finalized.
As someone who's been watching my county numbers constantly, this is the illusion of the graphs: It ALWAYS looks like the numbers are going down when you look at the graphs, because they back-fill the data later. You're looking at an artifact of the data - not a trend.
Also, once again HOSPITAL DEATHS AREN'T EVERYTHING. There are people who will survive this and die to flu when they otherwise would recover next year.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/brazil-manaus-amazonas-covid-coronavirus
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/vaccines-coronavirus-deaths-tom-fireden.amp?__twitter_impression=true
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2264672-warnings-of-huge-new-spike-in-us-covid-19-cases-as-uk-variant-spreads/
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-01-11/south-africa-struggles-with-post-holiday-spike-in-covid-19
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/01/14/cdc-projects-nearly-25-increase-in-us-covid-19-deaths-in-next-three-weeks/
No one in the press or medical fields is saying what the two of you are saying.
Your experience with your county data does not apply to this, a completely different data set that behaves differently. Hospitalizations are not back filled, and case trackers do not back fill their data like that.
This particular data set does not behave the way you describe. It does not “always look like it’s going down.” Hospitalizations have not once looked like they were going down for more than 100 consecutive days before this week.
Cases have appeared to be going down twice during that time period, both if which came during holiday weeks when many reporting agencies were closed and the false dip was predicted weeks in advance. No reporting places have been closed this week to cause this effect this week.
Deaths are still a lagging indicator, and if you think the news media is the best place to get these sorts of predictions, we will just have to disagree.
What do you think the current r(t) is in the United States as a whole?
How many people do you think are being infected per week (remembering that we don't catch every infection with a test) per week?
Firmly disagree on all points, but I gather arguing with you about it will be fruitless, so I'm just going to drop it.
Did you calculate rate equations to show that the number of vaccinations will remove enough susceptible people that the infection rate will decrease?
I don't care about either. I look at existing data because I'm a scientist. Not a weather person.
That's not how this website works. Its the same data as for the plot fuzzy presented but with three more days of data and presented with a 7 day moving average rather than in 7 day chunks. This website does not have the artifacts that you are suggesting. They report data from tests on the day they receive the data. And yesterday was a solid week for testing. The artifacts it has is that it is more vulnerable to under reporting on a certain day which would be expressed in very low test numbers for that day followed by massive spikes in test numbers on following days. We saw that over Christmas. However, there is no sign of a testing fall to accompany the case load fall.
None of this has any application to the potential new variants. If they 'new variants' are 70% more infectious then nothing can be done, the vaccines are useless unless you were already lucky enough to get one, stay at home orders (even strictly followed) won't work at all and everyone will be infected and not get a hospital bed. Game over. No point worrying about anything. You will live or die based on good fortune alone, if you get sick there's zero chance of a hospital bed for you. Maybe if these new variants take a long time to be established and we have an effective vaccine rollout over the next month or two, then the peak they cause will be no worse than the current one. Perhaps more muted if many old people are vaccinated. But, none of us can see the future with clarity. Fortunately each new estimate of the infectiousness of the new variant is revising its increased infectiousness down and down. With 30% more infectious being the new midpoint I'm seeing. Which is very good, because it means a longer time to dominance, and more time to vaccinate.
None of this has any other application to other countries. The USA has done a uniquely terrible job of managing the infection and has a gigantic amount of deaths for a developed nation. This means it has a truly enormous amount of pre existing cases, likely higher than 25% already infected. US hospitals have done a very good job keeping people alive, which means our actual case burden is even higher than other nations with similar numbers of deaths.
Hospitalizations and deaths are not everything, that is 100% true. But they are a very significant component of the terrible pain and death this disease is causing in our community.
Herd immunity is a thing in the US right now, unless you believe that the virus just gave up and went home in North Dakota? Its not a fundamental truth, because it comes from behavior too, but it is a functional effect. It could collapse tomorrow if people changed their behavior, but so could any herd immunity. If I had a 100k like minded friends about America I could eliminate US herd immunity to measles by carefully exposing our children to measles to create a sustained transmission chain and then deliberately having every sick kid go to Disney. Herd immunity is a function of human behavior, which can always turn on a dime.
This is not a matter of opinion. Everything I stated there is an empirically observed fact.
These data sets have been observed for months and their behavior is on the record. Whether or not officially reported hospitalizations dropped week over week on any day between late September and early January is not something we can have different opinions on. It’s just an issue of public record.
Cool. I won’t be responding to any more of your posts. You frequently post disinformation and I’m not interested in having to repeatedly debunk it if you aren’t engaging in good faith. Good luck out there
Ok, I lied, one more debunk of your disinformation.
The us showed decline phases in cases from April to June and from late July to early September
Please stop lying about publicly available numbers
As to disinformation, my head is spinning as to what I possibly could have said that deviates from factual reality. I'm sorry that I don't agree with whatever funny math you've cooked up for the group this week. I'll stick to the experts in epidemiology at world class institutes for my sources as I always have.
If it's so easy to demonstrate this is a tipping point why have you focused on me instead of just showing everyone the data?
If people loosen their behavior over what they've been doing in November/December, then cases will go up. Population behavior is the elephant in the room.
If the new, more transmissible variants are as bad as we fear they might be and they gain a significant foothold, then cases could go up.
If I'm wrong and we're actually catching most new infections and we're infecting less than 1% of the population per week at current rates, then there's less downward pressure than I thought on transmission rates.
Maybe the only reason it appears cases are going down this week is because we had an extremely high week last week due to the holiday catchup, and actually cases have been (very slightly but steadily) growing all through the last several weeks.
I'm sure there's other ways I'm missing that I could be wrong. But "One time I looked at a different data set and it used backfilling, so obviously this data set uses backfilling" is not one of them.