Reopening in Reverse
Yesterday, Covid-19 cases in Texas soared to a record high 6,177. In response, Texas Stopped Reopening Plans.
“The State of Texas will pause any further phases to open Texas as the state responds to the recent increase in positive COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations,” Governor Greg Abbott’s office announced in a statement.
“The last thing we want to do as a state is go backwards and close down businesses. This temporary pause will help our state corral the spread,” Abbott said, asking residents to wear masks and respect social distancing guidelines.
Trump’s Fake News of the Day
Yesterday, Trump complained of too much testing. Today he repeated his own fake news in a Tweet.
Trump says Texas and 4 other states are doing too much Covid testing and he seeks to stop it.
Trump has not yet figured out that hospitalizations follow cases and deaths follow hospitalizations.
Testing Wait Times
Trump wants to halt testing despite Dallas County wait times of at least two hours at drive-thru testing sites in downtown Dallas and southern Dallas County.
Four And A Half Hours For A 30-Second Test
Pete Freedman, co-founder of Central Track, documented his Four And A Half Hours Wait For A 30-Second Test.
Texas Medical Center ICU Beds 97% Occupied
Please note that Texas Medical Center ICU Beds 97% Occupied.
Fake News on Fake News
In case you missed it, please consider Trump’s Fake News of the Day: States Testing Too Much.
Trump’s solution is to cut funding for testing in Texas and 4 other states.
Great Testing
Today, Trump brags about “Great Testing“. Apparently our testing is so great that it is now bad.
Mish
I didn’t realize it was this bad…
Incorrect donning and doffing of a face mask, as Biden illustrates, is worse than no face mask at all…
our truly stable genius could reduce the number of new cases to 0, by completely shutting down all testing centers!
Meanwhile back in the European “hellhole” they are getting back to life as normal safely after beating back the virus. Trump is a cancer on US conservatives, no wonder people are looking somewhere else.
The real problem with the Texas announcement–virtually everything is open in Texas–with some restrictions remaining that are widely winked at.
Pausing further “reopening phases” just means that the conditions that lead to the current spike will still exist.
What do you think is going to happen? Does anyone really belief that things will get better if you continue to do the things that made it worse?
Picture this– opening a water tap in your sink with a somewhat plugged drain. The water is rising to the top of the sink. What would you do–pause on the re-opening of the tap, and hope that the water doesn’t overflow–or do you actually slow the flow of water by tightening down on the faucet.
Progression of disease (approximate)
Exposure
First symptoms 2 to 14 days after exposure
Admission to hospital 3 to 7 days after first symptoms (5 to 21 days after exposure)
Admission to ICU 7 to 10 days after first symptoms (9 to 24 days after exposure)
So hospital deaths would start to occur, at a minimum, 2 weeks after first symptoms, and with a typical multi-week stay in ICU, deaths from a spike will occur up to a month or more from exposure or first symptoms.
We’re looking at higher numbers of deaths in July from this recent spike in cases.
I think the average numbers were 12 days from infection to testing, death at 17.5 days.
The numbers are of course influenced by testing gateway protocols. Obviously incubation, disease progression, and recovery/fatality ranges have large exceptions, but the outside extremes to the ranges are relatively few.
I don’t know whether recovery/fatality ranges have moved much with better therapy protocols.
Trump is a criminal. Lock him up and throw away the key!
As has been stated before, deaths lag positive tests by about 2 weeks. Because daily US cases started to surge upward again in mid-June, the daily deaths can be expected spike upward around the end of June / beginning of July. Unless treatment protocols at hospitals have improved significantly over last time, a corresponding increase in deaths is baked in.
The President tweeting that deaths remain low right now and therefore new positive cases are not a problem is likely a repeat of the denial he showed us the first time around. Doing this same thing again is gross negligence at best, and willful malfeasance at worst. If he is going to try to make the point that a surge in new cases is not a problem, then he should at least make an argument which is not so obviously misleading (i.e. treatment options are better than they were, etc.). He appears to be unable to stop digging himself a deeper hole.
Per Zerohedge article on this: Experts say the fact that new coronavirus deaths appear to remain flat is driven by more younger patients getting infected and recovering amid reopenings as the worst of the pandemic passes. On Wednesday evening, the Washington Post issued a breaking news email alert headlined “New coronavirus cases in the U.S. soar to highest single-day total.” Yet the article failed to mention that even while new infections are on the rise, new COVID-19 deaths are not.
I saw this story. It is likely to be totally wrong. Deaths lag new cases by 2 weeks. The chart they presented as “evidence” that deaths are not following the surge in new cases actually shows the surge in deaths should arrive around the end of this month / beginning of next.
There may be some, perhaps substantial, decrease in death rates, BUT
Deaths lag.
Meanwhile, what do you do when hospital beds fill up?
You Die!
One of the things I think should have been done with the time bought by the shutdowns was the arrangement of temporary field hospitals dedicated to COVID-19 and stocked with supplies and technicians to safely administer MATH+ treatment. That could have greatly expanded treatment capacity and kept most COVID-19 cases out of the hospital.
As far as I know nothing like that was done, so here we are on the cusp of the second verse, same as the first.
Plus, our hospitals are not designed for infection control, the UK released a study that hospital-acquired infections caused 10-20% of C19 cases – I would bet $$$ we are slightly worse. So, expect a surge from the surge as health folks catch this in the hospital setting – just like NYC, IT, etc.
RE: “All I am saying is there should be a place for sick people to get treatment, the capacity needs to be sufficient to handle the load, and it needs to be outside normal hospitals so hospitals can continue to function giving the medical care they usually provide.”
In effect it just sounds like you would need to rapidly build a lot of brand new “temporary” hospitals … Your COVID “field hospital” concept might work for the less serious cases but the staffing and necessary medications/supplies and equipment could be the sticking point.
It almost sounds like asking for more, possibly “beefed up” “Urgent Care” centers, with added in-patient facilities … I just don’t know how places like that could handle COVID cases unless they were pretty mild. Although early on it looked like they were trying to convert stadiums (indoor and outdoor) and any large areas to that kind of “field hospital” in case of explosive hospital overflow.
Would they be safer for healthcare workers than already existent hospitals? An unanswered question I suppose …