On May 18, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said there is “no doubt” that his self-quarantine order imposed on travelers from New York saved lives.
Now that Covid 19 cases are diminishing in New York but soaring in Florida, New York Governor Cuomo Floats Quarantine for People Entering N.Y. From Florida
“I have experts who have advised me to do that,” Cuomo said. “I’m considering it now.”
Efforts to reach the DeSantis administration for comment weren’t immediately successful.
Coronavirus Cases By State
Covid-19 cases are soaring to new highs in California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina.
Bloomberg reports “Texas registered a 3.6% rise in cases, the biggest one-day jump, as hospital admissions climbed for a record seventh straight day. California mandated masks for residents outside the home. Florida’s cases rose the most ever.”
New Cases vs Deaths
So far, the escalation in cases has not resulted in an escalation of deaths.
Will it?
I do not know, nor does anyone else. No one seems to have figured this out.
Cases and death spikes have very random patterns. I suspect different strains and mutations have spread in different places.
And the one thing people were most confident in, that this would all go away once weather warmed up is a proven falsehood.
Extremists On Both Sides Wrong
Extremists on both sides (this is nothing and will soon go away) vs (a million people will soon die) have both been wrong.
I am positive of two things.
- I don’t know what’s going to happen
- No one else does either
My best guess is the extremists on both sides will remain wrong.
Moreover, those who said this was nothing and still believe so are already wrong even if they won’t admit it.
This was not the flu.
Mish
From where I’m looking everything is still chaotic. The policy choices, how guidelines are followed, data on the virus, seem very confused.
Rules between regions and countries are being set arbitrarily, sometimes for solely political or economic motives.
At a personal level, for example how I see people acting, apart from a general acceptance that precaution might be justified, beyond that and it is a real mixture of ideas and attitudes. I notice that even with myself, not a fatigue of the event but just days where you look out and think “everything feels back to normal” and you really have to convince yourself again there is still virus going around. I guess the initial doom panic is over sort of, people see relatively low infections and want to rebuild how things are. The lack of credibility of official figures and narrative does not help, it is like being offerred a range of views and you get to pick the one that most suits.
As I am mostly removed from much interaction with public anyway, how I feel, which is based on how I see others going about their lives (this all re. various countries and/or people I know, except where I explicitly name a country), is neither here nor there except for just being a gauge of the wider mood. When I do go to more public places I still follow all precaution.
So I don’t really have much to add that is more than anecdotal.
In our region in Portugal there have been few cases so far, in the hundreds for all the Algarve. However the recent headline is of 90 infections from one illegal rave party ten days ago, and I’m not even sure if many of those aren’t pre-existing background infection – it is hard to know. In Spain 67% of those who had a symptom of ncov were not tested, for example. Whichever the reality, it is a reminder that the virus is around, and is easily transmitted.
Mish wrote “So far, the escalation in cases has not resulted in an escalation of deaths.
Will it?
I do not know, nor does anyone else. No one seems to have figured this out. “
Of course we have it figured out. There is NO CONNECTION between number of cases and deaths. They are independent numbers although the media keeps trying to imply in their always breathless reporting that more cases results in some kind of linear increase in deaths.
The really important figure in between new cases and deaths is number of hospitalizations because almost everyone who dies of CV19 winds up in a hospital first. This article pointed to by DBG8489 in post #1 above discusses hospitalization numbers and shows that HOSPITALIZATIONS ARE ON A DOWNTREND!
“HOSPITALIZATIONS ARE ON A DOWNTREND”
For those who believe this is unlikely, your suspicions are corrent.
The claim that hospitalization is trending downwards is inaccurate. In states with increasing cases — all 17 of them — hospitalization is increasing. In most of them, deaths are also on the rise.
The “this is no big deal, ignore it” crowd is insane, just like the anti-vaxxers or the people who believe that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. They’re best ignored.
Check out more about the actual trend here:
“After the rise in cases in Arizona, California, Texas and Florida, I would think the dreams of the virus being restrained by sunlight, heat and beaches are just dreams—or are you really saying we should expect an extremely hellish fall and winter?”
It’s almost inconceivable that increased warmth, UV radiation and breathing outside air; as opposed to cold, dark air hudled together in too small, invariably poorly ventilated (which is the inevitable result of people “making money off their “real estate”) places; does not reduce virus transmission.
People using the good weather as an excuse to mingle more, may pull in the opposite direction. But unless schools remain on summer vacation, people work, shop and “socialize” from home, fall will almost invariably increase contagion. It’s highly unlikely that this particular respiratory virus is so insanely different from all the rest, that it somehow doesn’t abide by the same seasonality that all the rest of them do.
Coming off a couple month of using the biggest weapon in anti-pandemic (shutting off points of public contact), it’s a little early to say we’re past the worst. Distancing, mask-wearing and other measures are slipping everywhere.
Is it really surprising then that those places earliest out the gate of re-opening, those places who had little regular contact with travelers, and those places that place politics as defeating science, are having rises now? I think not.
The rest of the country is following these areas.
After the rise in cases in Arizona, California, Texas and Florida, I would think the dreams of the virus being restrained by sunlight, heat and beaches are just dreams—or are you really saying we should expect an extremely hellish fall and winter?
US–about 20,000 cases a day.
EU countries (population 10% more than US) with about 4,000 cases a day.
China with essentially zero case (but militantly shutting down areas with the few discovered).
And if you want a nice weekend, don’t read anything about studies that seem to show a short period of immunity that seems to exist for those who have had it.
Mish, the deaths tend to be a lagging indicator, give it another two weeks. I hope I am wrong. Plus we are getting better at treating. There is so much yet to be known about this bug. My theory is a much less lethal strain went thru the US west coast and beyond primarily last fall and winter. Both the Harvard study detecting first possible signs of viral activity in China in August, plenty of studies on the Covid variants, and a ton of anecdotal reports support this. I’m absolutely sure I had it in December by the symptoms I had. However I suspect the anti-bodies drop off even faster than the cold corona virus, thinking 4-6 months. We now have an extremely well confirmed case from Texas where a woman has caught it a second time at the 4 month point. I suspect the New York outbreak wave now spreading to the rest of the country is more lethal. Everyone wearing a mask indoors when around non-household members and outdoors in crowds plus vitamin D supplementation are two great ways to cut individual risk.
The rationale for the lingering of the disease, in the Americas at least, is twofold:
The covidiots who claim it’s a government hoax to limit their god given freedoms, and anyway a real cowboy can’t be felled by a microbe.
The covidiots who devised and implement the guidelines. For instance, the two meter distancing idiocy. Now, you go into stores and bump into other shoppers, but can’t come closer than that in the open air, e.g. on a park or forest trial?
This obvious idiocy is fueling mistrust, and cynicism.
The two sides deserve each other.
Similar to how the military operates; “orders”, and even “suggestions” have to be very simple and broad, as well as somewhat realistic, if they are going to be understood and acted upon by large, diverse populations.
While “2 meters” is obviously a massive oversimplification, you can’t expect people to make accurate covid-concentration-in-the-air estimations from second to second as they go about their day. Yet, in aggregate, across large populations, it does look like 2 meter guidelines are reducing new cases, compared to no guidelines.
I can tell you from personal experience that the implementation is truly idiotic. They would shut down a forest trail because it’s less than 2m wide. There is probably a one to million chance to get an infectious viral load in the open air as compared to stores or elevators. I didn’t use the term covidiots for nothing.
PS: I wear facemasks and gloves indoors everywhere.
“They would shut down a forest trail because it’s less than 2m wide.”
Now that, truly is idiotic. But perhaps, since we live in THe Age of Incompetence and all, figuring out how to step a few feet off trail and into the trees when they meet someone, is far too complimecated for properly indoctrinated contemporary Americans….
The trouble is that there are plenty of idiots who will ignore rules that aren’t simple. Six feet of separation is easy to remember (and for social pressure to enforce). It also helps guarantee a better outcome and reduced transmission.
I think we’re seeing a Vitamin D factor at work. It is well documented that those with below average levels of Vitamin D have a strong correlation to those having a bad outcome. The number of people in the Winter with low Vitamin D levels is much higher than in the Summer, especially in the northern states. Note that virtually all of the states with high deaths/million are in the North.
Right now it is summer, and people are getting more sunshine, and thus have higher Vitamin D levels. The result is that, while cases continue to rise, deaths are not rising nearly as fast. Part of that is probably attributable to better treatments (such as using corticosteroids, as opposed to following WHO guidelines which say not to use them, and after all, they have been wrong on virtually everything), but part is probably also attributable to higher Vitamin D levels. I do expect, therefore, for deaths to continue to continue to slow until mid-September, after which those in the North can not get Vitamin D from the sun in sufficient quantities.
Come Fall, everyone should consider supplemental Vitamin D, by the way.
I take 4000IU vit D3 daily all year round. I think it is worth taking regardless of CV19. Many don’t know that sunblock (which skin docs recommend to all light skinned people when going out) also blocks rays that help create vit D in body. When I weigh myself in the AM, my scale reports that my bone mass is “inadequate”, so extra vit D apparently not helping there. Yet despite many falls in sports over the years, like trail jogging, I have never broken a bone.
I don’t know if vit D helps prevent CV19 but I haven’t yet gotten sick and I don’t do anything more than what I would normally do in flu season, which is basically wash hands more often.
I also have blood type A+, which is supposed to be the type most susceptible to CV19.
June 18, 2020 / 10:50 AM
Blood type, genes tied to risk of severe COVID-19: European study
I don’t see how any ban is enforceable in any meaningful way… you only need a few to spread an outbreak. We’re one big humanary stew.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen
No one else does either”
…
Yes. Too early to tell how things will turn out (2nd wave / mutation / etc.). Recent stories (that may well be just stories) that anti bodies fade or not plentiful … or how asymptomatic Princess Cruise carriers now show lung damage … do not give me warm fuzzies.
Till we know a lot more, err on side of caution.
Tony, do you have a link to the Princess Cruise story about asymptomatic carriers now showing lung damage?
Another concern, says Topol, is that the virus may be damaging the bodies of asymptomatic in other, silent ways. Among the 331 passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship who tested positive but did not have symptoms, 76 people had CT scans of their lungs and nearly half showed signs of lung tissue damage typical of coronavirus infection. “People who are getting infection without symptoms are actually doing a lot of damage to their bodies and they don’t know it,” says Topol.
US population is around 330 million. Death rate in the US is around 7300 people per million. Therefore total deaths anyway per year is 2.4 million i.e. 200,000 per month. So between March to June it would be 800,000. Total deaths due to coronavirus now is 120,000 i.e 15% of all deaths (in the same span of time).
The moot question is without lockdown would it have been 2-fold or 3-fold. We really do not know. [Remember Bernanke’s if I had not done this in 2009… something far worse would have happened – one cannot prove it. It is just a hypothesis]
But the economic damage has been immense. Lives lost due to this. We do not know.
All in all a terrible tragedy.
Does the US now use excess deaths to determine covid deaths? Until recently they seemed to undercount covid considerably
You mean “overcount”, yes?
The NBA is planning on finishing the season with teams sequestered at Disney World.
Will they be able to pull it off?
And what about NFL? … especially after Fauci’s recent comments …
When will the stock market take notice (if ever)??
The stock market took notice: it saw all the money being pumped into it and said “hurrah”.
Let’s define a spike – if C19 has an R0 of 3 than cases should grow by 3x every 14 days or roughly 10-11% daily – I will call that a spike. Also, I think active case should be used a the denominator since they would be the know spread vector.
Under that definition, FL is on it’s way to a spike with daily cases growing slightly over 4% but are still below 50% less than the known R0 of C19. Now TX is in the 10% range with NC trailing quickly.
And in case no one has watch the data on case growth, they accelerate for 70-90 days then start to bend naturally downward – lockdown or no lockdown.
Here in NL the health authorities use 5 days for the R(0) factor: an R(0) of 3 means a tripling of cases in 5 days, not 2 weeks.
You should read about R numbers before making further posts. Here’s some help:
The Fatal Conceit of COVID-19 Epidemic Models
AIER >> Daily Economy >> Regulation >> Economic Education >> Crisis
Gregory van Kipnis
– June 10, 2020
Jojo is a MAGA dude who is desperately seeking out “alternative facts” to support his guy’s narrative. Debunking his nonsense is helpful for new readers, but it isn’t going to bring him to the scientific, data-driven consensus because it isn’t what FOX is telling him to believe.
Mish, before you make a definitive statement that “this was not the flu”, perhaps an analysis of the death rate of confirmed cases between the flu and CV19 would be useful.
If, say, in a given year, 10% of the population is susceptible to the current version of the flu that goes around, yet, due to the novel characteristic of this CV19 virus not having circulated before, 90% of the population may catch it… Of course there will be more total infections, and subsequent deaths, than the flu. However, as far as the morbidity rate of one vs the other, I have typically seen stats that its about the same….or CV19 may actually be a bit lower.
So when people state its like the flu, Im pretty sure this is what they are talking about, and not the overall number of infections or deaths. Thankfully its not as bad as the 3% death rate that they originally assumed would be the case, or something off the charts like 80%+ for Ebola.
I am amazed that people don’t understand the details and compare Covid -19 with the flu.
The Covid -19 is a horrible Virus, death is not the only measure you can compare, when you get infected with Covid-19 and even though you recover, you will not have the same lung capacity, you will get tired with even a small exercise, you will have problems with kidneys and other organs which are permanently damaged you will never be the same person again, there is nothing to compare.
All true, but I am surprised the land whales who are more vulnerable, would notice a difference.
D’oh. SOME people will have long term problems after recovery. But no one yet knows what the number of people who will experience longer recovery’s or long-term debilitation.
So you should stop trying to find ways to panic people with unproven anecdotal statements.
‘Recovered’ COVID-19 patients suffer major ongoing physical, cognitive problems
Memory loss, psychological issues, profound fatigue, phantom pain, along with lungs that won’t heal, discovered months after recovery, even among those who had only mild symptoms link to timesofisrael.com
Cbb is describing how the virus kills. If the virus debilitates the body over time, studies and time will tell.
Larry, it is not a “normal” virus, as some of the links posted above might show, it has some very unusual modes of action.
As far as fatality ratio goes we still do not have a definite picture. Flu is skewed against older or infirm population also, so if we try to take the overall IFR of both as comparison, well we don’t have an agreed on figure for ncov – currently the range is from roughly the same as flu to several times more lethal. This figure depends on getting a full count of those infected vs. fatalities, this is difficult for various reasons.
Finally ncov is very transmissible, and the asymptomatic carriers plus transmission before symptoms, make it very hard to control.
So, ncov just is not like flu, it is “something else”.
Per acquaintance with difficulty post COVID, issue often is recovery from effects of vent not virus.
There’s really no excuse to have a NYC repeat in a second wave in the US, except for the incompetence of the federal government and gullibility of certain groups of people.
This is no longer a surprise, everyone knows about it.
Everyone has been told appropriate steps to mitigate virus spread. Masks and distancing. Not everyone will do it, because it was turned into a political issue.
Cases and deaths are spotty because demographics and politics will determine the most at risk people. Older people are more likely to die from covid, and Trump supporters less likely to wear a mask, and probably also skew older.
Improvements in treatment methods means mortality will be less as long as ICUs are not overwhelmed, but ICU occupancy rates are trending up in hot spots.
But since nothing can be done in the immediate term about federal government competency and gullibility of people, I expect we’ll see an expansion of the first wave. As a country we’re not even in second wave territory… yet.
The brush fire took out the easy fuel (old people in LT care facilities). The deaths might never spike much as a percentage of cases. In fact it’s more likely it mutates itself right into the cold and flu season profile, making in several times worse of a flu season for most, and 5-10 worse for the 70+ crowd.
It’s Natures way of removing the weak and decrepit from the population mix.
Don’t forget thst the Spanish flu mutated into something more lethal and the second and third waves had far, far higher death rates than the first
It was (and is) definitely not the flu.
However, overall US deaths per day are on a steady decline as are hospitalizations.
Quote:
“The northeastern U.S. was hit hardest, but most states are either seeing declining or flat trends in hospitalizations, with a few notable exceptions such as North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona. But in those states the number of hospitalizations is still relatively low, a fraction of the totals that New York and New Jersey were seeing in April. Claims that Alabama, Georgia, and Florida are emerging “hotspots” are not supported by the hospitalization numbers despite media reports to the contrary.”
What would be helpful for that chart would be to have similar but of say “under 60 without major pre-existing condition”. We really should have this sort of data accessible, because though the chart looks uniform, we have no way of telling if for example the elderly are a decreasing part due to precaution, while those younger are increasing due to an increase in infections. I don’t say it is like that but it is the sort of detail that matters, because it shows where caution is needed or not.
I agree.
One of the weaknesses of our system exposed as a result of this is the ham-handed way we manage and compile statistics on a national level. HIPPA has a lot to do with that as that particular piece of legislation, along with all the amendments and changes, creates a compliance nightmare for anyone who does database/storage of healthcare data.
However, I don’t see why the CDC – with the budget they get – doesn’t have their own central database to which healthcare providers have outside access or an API that allows them to export their own data either from a comma-delimited text file or spreadsheet.
Then again, if you have that, you put thousands of government workers who currently do the data entry manually out of a job…