In Florida, cases surge nearly 80% as the US hits daily high of nearly 40,000 new cases.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has had enough of his reopening plans and has shuttered bars at noon.
Florida reported 8,933 new cases of coronavirus on Friday, an almost 80% increase from the day before. Florida, Texas, California and Arizona accounted for nearly half of a record-breaking 39,972 confirmed Covid-19 cases reported on Thursday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Amid the rising number of cases, Mr. Abbott on Friday limited restaurants to 50% capacity and required bars to close at noon except for delivery and takeout.
“At this time, it is clear that the rise in cases is largely driven by certain types of activities, including Texans congregating in bars,” Mr. Abbott said. He also said most outdoor gatherings of 100 or more people would need approval from local governments. Texas had been allowing gatherings of more than 500 people, with approval from local authorities.
Abbott’s Change in Tune
- Recall that Abbott would not let local jurisdictions set reopening rules any tougher than set at the state level.
- Also recall state level rules were widely ignored.
- Now he closed bars at noon.
Delayed Reactions
A few states started reopening on May 1. Texas was in that list.
It takes time after premature openings and abandoning of social distancing for cases to escalate.
Premature Celebration, Led by Trump
Things looked good in early June, but it was a premature celebration, led by Trump.
Trump insisted on having rallies in packed stadiums and halted testing in locations in five states including Texas.
We have yet to see the fallout from those moments of self-adulation.
For details, please see Trump’s Campaign Visit to Arizona Church is Irresponsible at Best
Trump Blames Increased Testing
Not Just Increased Testing
Covid-19 Hotspot Update: Why the Surge in the South?
On June 24, I addressed the question Why the Surge in the South?
Trump is Behind in Every Recent Battleground Poll
Meanwhile, Trump is Behind in Every Recent Battleground Poll.
Trump is behind in all 17 of the most recent polls in 6 key battleground states. In addition, Trump trails in the most recent Ohio poll.
One of the reasons is his poor handling of Covid-19, which Trump has dubbed “ChinaVirus”.
If that is supposed to win votes, here’s a hint: It wont.
Mish
If me reading the stats everyday doesn’t scare them, it’s because, I hear, ” I don’t know anybody that’s sick” attitude, so it must not be real”! It is a cleansing. Some people, I’ve been around @ the stores, think it’s a conspiracy. Population control. They didn’t scare us as much back in the 50/60/70′ with chicken pox, measles, & didn’t hear about deaths, as we are w/ COV 19. Maybe they should have. Need to test everybody, to many are unaware.
The total death rate is not likely to ever reach over 0.1%, or 330k people. As a result, most people will not know someone who dies. However, up to 10% of people with infections will have problems with last awhile, some of which will be permanent. As we approach herd immunity (80% of people infected), that could mean up to 8% of the population struggle for at least awhile with after effects. At that point, most people will know at least one person who struggles with it.
A series of tweets yesterday from Florian Krammer yesterday, making the case that the rise in cases (mostly younger people) will be followed by an increase in deaths 3 to 4 weeks after the start of the spike. This was based on Iran’s experrience and data–they have a big uptick in deaths now.
We’ll have to wait til mid July to see if this will happen here, too.
Florian Krammer—Professor at the Department of Microbiology Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
His tweets..
A lot of people see cases rising while deaths are going down in the US. Somebody who did not like my tweet earlier about the record cases today just pointed that out to me (and also calling me ‘dipsh**’). So, I wanna tell a little story about Iran…….
There are many reasons why the CFR might go down. We test more, we find more cases. There might be many more younger people infected while older people are more careful and stay at home. Management of COVID-19 got better. There might be several more reasons…..
But I would be a little careful. So, Iran experienced a ‘second wave’ recently. Actually, it wasn’t a second wave because the first one never went away. But anyways, after falling case numbers they started to rise again. I was curious about that on Twitter……
Below is the curve. It starts to go up around May 1st again. But deaths did not go up. People explained to me, that now mostly young people are getting infected so nothing bad would happen……
So, here is the graph for the deaths. That one started to rise again around May 25th. This is a solid 3-4 week delay. What happened? First, it takes time to die of COVID-19. Second, cases probably really built up in younger…..
……people. But they diffuse into older populations. And then the deaths rose (both graphs below ). Surely everybody – even the person calling me ‘dipsh**’ earlier – would agree that we need to do better than Iran. But looking at what happens in the US, I am not optimistic.
From hospital data, the average time to death is 10 days after hospitalization. If it takes a week from detection until hospitalization, that gets you to 17 days. I can’t see how the lag would be longer than that.
Did it occur to anyone that folks like JoJo are just trying to get a rise out of the rest of us? Best way to treat those type of comments is to count to 10 and ignore them.
Never try to match wits with an unarmed person.
The word is “troll.”
Sure, it’s been obvious for a long time, but sometimes it’s just fun to pick up that mallet and play “Whack-A-Troll” for a bit.
You know … “All work and no play …”
Then I usually count to 10 (base 2) and find something more productive to do.
I found out the hard way that he doesn’t read the links that he posts. Then when they turn out to have obviously faulty data, he deflects and tells you to take it up with the author.
Don’t waste your time on him, he’s not here to learn anything.
I don’t get points if you read my posts or not, shrug. There are a whole lot more people reading Mish’s posts that your small clique of uninformed posters.
No reason to hate on Jojo. While he has been wrong on every issue, he hasn’t been rude, and he serves an important purpose. By demanding evidence, he keeps posters honest, since they have to be able to support whatever they say.
Lets run a controlled clinical trial. Shut down everything west of the Mississippi, and open everything east of it. Then see what happens.
Since I live east of the Mississippi I think I prefer Realist’s alternative proposal … ;>)
Since lockdowns are a bad idea from the start, how about this experiment, which is already underway? Some states require masks in public, some don’t. Now we watch to see the differences in case growth, deaths, and the end economic toll between the states. Soon enough, it will become clear which was the better plan.
The early indications are that those who have required masks have done better. All of them have rapidly falling cases and deaths. A sign that people can see the difference is that three states moved from the no-masks rule to requiring masks this week, Washington, North Carolina, and California.
Just went through tRump’s strategy again, and I suddenly realized that tRump is indeed the most stable genius: he must be playing 5-D chess! to Make America Great Again, you need to get rid of all those idiotic dumb people who give no respect to science and progress of the mankind. tRump is using Darwin to achieve his noble goal.
Nearing real spike territory – defined as 10% daily case growth (trailing 5-days) vs active cases, aka the growth rate of an R3 – TX and FL are heading in that direction. Looking at Houston vs. NYC… it will take roughly 80K PCR confirmed cases to bend the curve down, they have 2/3 of the way to go. Also, we’ll have the hospital effect accelerating – as UK published 10-20% of cases are acquired in a hospital setting, the US is likely worse not better.
Actual cases of C19, (finally) the CDC confirmed yesterday that 90% of cases are missed, the reality on the ground is 8-10x more cases in the community, which means the US likely over 20 million cases in total.
Deaths will lag by 10-14 days, hopefully, the younger demo and MATH+ or similar protocols (if hospitals are using it) will keep the numbers down.
Don’t count AZ out
“Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is recording as many as 2,000 cases a day, “eclipsing the New York City boroughs even on their worst days,” warned a Wednesday brief by disease trackers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which observed, “Arizona has lost control of the epidemic.”
They may be small, but they’re wiry.
The big thing is what happens next weekend (4th). Do the young asymptomatic infected get close to their friends and family? If so then we are in for a hard time. Someone should tell Abbot about closing the barn door after the cows have gotten out.
As Devin Nunes says, it a mooot point after the cows get out.
Of course, everyone will be partying. I don’t see any posts here about people pointing fingers at the large protests that went on over the past month and their likely contribution to the spread of the virus. Why?
The cows are definitely out of the barn. Politicians should have seen this as the most likely eventuality. The USA isn’t China and you can’t really force people to lock themselves away and follow orders.
The economy should not have been shutdown. This will be the eventual conclusion in the CV19 postmortems and will result in a lot of politicians who supported the lockdowns being sent home packing.
It should be easy enough to profile the new cases to determine where they were infected, and know if they were from bars, or from protests.
I do agree that there was no reason for the lockdowns. Instead they should have mandated masks from the start. That way the economy didn’t need to be shut down, and more lives would have been saved anyway.
I do disagree with you on the end outcome, though. If the election will be held against a backdrop of rising cases, combined with large numbers of “recovered” people still suffering the after effects, it is quite possible that there will be a major shift, and the politicians who supported not taking Covid seriously will all need to find new work.
Still trying to learn why MSNBC and CNN refuse to show hospitalized counts in their scary info bars on the TV screen. Could it be that there aren’t enough hospitalizations compared to new cases to scare people enough?
Because some states report that, some don’t, others don’t report it on the same date as the day other states do, some report it weekly.
Talk to the CDC if you want an aligned report on that.
Oddly one of the states that does not report is FL, I wonder why?
Because not all states make the statistic available. It’s as simple as that.
I’m certain that the same reporting problems exist for the other components, so WHY report those then? Doesn’t it suck when your justification for something can be turned around 180º?
Not sure if the article was about ncov or Trump, but I think I remember why I started to read it, I thought I remembered…
The Fort Derrick virus, Gates virus… Chinavirus is as good if that is what Trump believes until proved wrong. I mean he is referencing the apparent source nation, which is better than Spanish flu, which is still used and rarely called out. Why not Catalan virus
where they are now verifying if the PCR tests on sewage samples from early last year are correct. Likely not, but it would make a good narrative for how unlikely sequences worked their way through to the virus.
Same goes with background infection rate, I thought there were several immunology studies underway, must have missed them but they would have helped round up the IFR. I’m not saying testing is cause for the increased detected cases, I don’t believe China goes from Wuhan to no virus either. Just about everything to do with the virus seems designed to confuse, some has an explanation for it being that way if you study it, some not.
For most people I think the best attitude is to act like how it seemed around the time of going into lockdown, but without the lockdown. So that means take precaution while appreciating what is possible without major restrictions. Eventually we will know if the level was exagerrated, but the effect the virus has on some people is not.
I check CDC every day. Recent trend has been a little over 30K new cases … and 600 to 800 deaths a day.
Today (for yesterday’s reports)
That death number includes a 1 time adjustment of about 2,000 from NJ for “presumed deaths”.
Thanks, I did not know that.
Wonder if there are other “adjustments” on the horizon?
Of course there will be, just as there is with all data. After this scare dies down and the death reasons are reviewed, I think that a lot of CV19 deaths will be reclassified as due to some other primary cause, which will drastically lower the CV19 death count.
many deaths will be re-classified as Electric Piping’s caused pneumonia? BTW anybody knows why that sudden rising in Electric Piping’s caused pneumonia near Fort Detrick last summer/autumn?
Cash4Covid – How hospitals are making money off the coronavirus We’ve known for weeks that hospitals get payments for diagnosing Covid19, and even using ventilators. That should worry everyone.
Kit Knightly
I have been tracking the worldometers data in a spreadsheet and have become frustrated with the number of adjustments that affect the data going all the way back to March 21, the day I started tracking.
I can understand adjustments to newer data and even a few adjustments to older early on but this has been going on for weeks and last night I discovered the numbers do not add up once again and again my base value has changed.
The data has changed for a few countries a couple times but I have changed the data at least 10 times for the US. And in the end, the US data is ALWAYS adjusted upward whereas for other countries some of the adjustments have been down. In addition to growing frustrated with the tedium (I know of no text file I can get and have to go day-by-day and adjust 3 months worth of data by hovering on the charts for values) I am now questioning the credibility / reliability of this data.
Of course. Every year, at the end of the flu season, the CDC takes a second look at the data. When you try to count deaths from a specific cause, you always come out low. People die at home, for example, and their death is recorded as “natural causes”. Was it Covid? Pneumonia? A stroke? Heart attack? No way to know without an autopsy, and they aren’t going to do one. So, at the end of the year, CDC makes a best guess of the level of undercounting, and then multiplies the deaths by a “factor” to get a better estimate of the real deaths. That factor is usually about 5, so 5,000 recorded deaths becomes 25,000.
Because people are paying closer attention to Covid than they do to the regular flu, the recorded deaths are much closer to being accurate. I don’t expect the ultimate correction factor to be anything like 5. My guess is that it will be in the 1.3 to 1.5 range, turning 300,000 recorded deaths into 400-450,000.
Katy (TX) Bar The Door
Unless/until other states/counties/cities/neighborhoods start blocking inbound travel from “hot spots,” this stuff will never be contained.
China could only get away with completely shutting down and starving the virus in Hubei, because they fenced off the problem sufficiently that other regions could get back to some productive normalcy quicker. Ditto the different countries in Europe and the rest of Asia.
You can’t solve this, by treating the whole country as a black box. Doing that, makes about as much sense as transferring all police to a giant police station in DC, and dispatching cops from there. Instead, a recursive divide and conquer strategy, is the only thing with any hope of working. If there are “hot” states, counties, cities or even neighborhoods, you have to prevent contagion from spilling over from them. The finer the granularity, and the tighter the boundaries, the better. Such that less affected regions can continue to be productive, and hence have resources to spare in aid of regions worse hit.
“You can’t solve this, by treating the whole country as a black box.”
…
Yes. I remember years ago Karl Rove (while in WH under GWB) say something along the line of ‘we create reality’.
By controlling the narrative – ignoring covid AMAP and talking V recovey AMAP – WH thought they could run buffalo over covid. Politicians are so used to lying … about everything … and getting away with it. Met their match.
There will always be another hot spot opening up. Stopping this with stupid masks and shutdowns is the equivalent of trying to plug holes in a leaking dyke. Plug one and another opens somewhere else.
The only solution is to man-up, face the virus enemy directly and may those with the best immune systems win. If you are fat/overweight, a smoker, out-of-shape, eat a poor diet and so on, then that’s YOUR issue, not mine or societies. You have to sleep in the bed you make.
This is how Mother Nature has worked for all of the history of the Earth. Why try to change now?
Europe seems to be doing well. American exceptionalism, in a bad way.
Yes – why did we ever attempt to improve our lives from the 1200s? That was such a utopian time.
We try to change because we can achieve better results than they did in 1919 during the Spanish flu epidemic. Do you really want our major cities digging mass graves because the funeral industry can’t keep up with the number of deaths occurring?
Sorry, 1918-19
For all of history of the earth, people have also casually culled those they deem a threat to themselves.
Freedom does work. I don’t disagree with that. But if you have the freedom to conduct biowarfare against me, I have the right to conduct more traditional warfare against you, to keep you, and the bioagents you are likely to be carrying, at bay. Keeping you from recklessly increasing my risk of being exposed to them.
As I’ve pointed out before, I have no doubt that the Taliban areas of Afghanistan will get through this perfectly fine. In the face of a pandemic (heck, pretty much at all other times as well…), genuinely free people will self organize to socially distance. By way of opening fire on those they aren’t comfortable letting too close.
The only way they won’t, is if they are prevented from doing so by government. And then, once some government starts preventing otherwise free people from doing the defending themselves, that government then implicitly accepts the responsibility to keep those people defended. Which, among other things, involves curtailing the ability of yahoos to expose others to needless risk.
You can’t have it both ways: A legitimate government can not simultaneously allow you to run around blasting deadly bioagents at other people to your heart’s content; without, at the same time, allowing everyone else to blast similarly deadly lead bullets at you.
Say what? Brevity is the soul of wit, Shakespeare wrote long ago.
Freedom is a great thing, but it can also have downside at times. In dealing with things like Covid, it’s difficult to get uniform agreement on a specific method of dealing with it, especially at times when the country lacks leadership, and lacks the ability to achieve a consensus. The result is that the US must tolerate the associated costs.
What are those costs? Some countries, such as New Zealand, were able to essentially eliminate Covid. Those countries are now able to move back towards business as usual. They will also be able to resume travel, among themselves, and will have less long term economic burdens due to the loss of people from their economy from death and permanent disability. They will, however, have to remain vigilant, and deal with hotspots when a case creeps up now and then, and they will have to ban travel from areas of the globe that are known hot spots, such as the US, Brazil, Sweden, and India.
Meanwhile, other countries either elected not to control it, or have not done a particularly good job of controlling it. Those countries will have high costs due to:
So, which alternative is better? Which is the least destructive to the economy? The three choices are:
I favor alternative #2. Jojo favors #3. Some others here favor #1. Because of the lack of consensus, we are currently on path #3, in most states, at least.
States rights–to be stupid
Mask wearing isn’t a political statement it’s an IQ test.
Exactly! Those who submit to mask wearing have low IQ’s and should be avoided at all costs.
Yes, please.
Everyone that can’t stand to wear a mask please treat those with masks like they have cooties. Move away from them at all costs. That way your eyes won’t be assaulted by those ghastly covered countenances and you can keep your freedumbs safe from ‘those people’.
Yes, the last thing we want is people trying to do what is right for others’ wellbeing. We need more people that don’t give a damn about others and only about themselves!
Had to figure Jojo the Clown would pop out of his J.O. in a box sooner or later ….
Notice the phrasing “submit to mask wearing” … to clowns this is solely about politics and “submission” to “the other side” … to clowns there is not even any consideration of a virus or an illness or deaths or physical impairments of people … or trying to ameliorate any of that … because clowns tend to be just like their own Master Clown, to whom they submit … narcissistic sociopaths who all aspire to be “The Joker”, or at least henchmen of “The Joker in Chief”
I thought all this covid stuff was going to be gone in the hot summer months?? Did covid have other plans??
It’s like the trade war. All very easy to win. Trump can call this virus anything. Kung flu, Chinese virus, etc, etc. The problem is viruses can’t understand human speech.
Air conditioning.
With Trump supporters refusing to wear masks, we will make sure that America will soon be great again.
Yes but only if the deaths are confined to Trumptards. That’s the big trick.