COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US) (7 Viewers)

[guidomerkinsrules]

I really hope that this isnt true , but.. I spoke with someone today who is very close to the ‘powers that be’ in re to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and this person said that it is extremely likely that there will be no Mardi Gras in 2021.. i asked this person to repeat themselves, since that’s almost a year away.. but unfortunately he said that an official announcement will be made soon, since a lot of the planning on the part of hotels, krewes, logistics etc happens years (plural) ahead of time, and the idea of bringing in a million people from around the world into close contact in less than a year from now just cannot happen, for public health reasons, and that a vaccine would not have been approved AND distributed around the world by then.. .. Sucks if true .

My school told us to prepare for a potential return to distance learning next year (seemingly in anticipation of a second wave)

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

We need to quit playing the "they all suck except my guy" game and vote them out. Then overhaul salary and perks, and see how many of them are willing to really serve the electorate vs serving themselves.

The last two ‘vote em out’ waves got us the Tea Party and Contract with America before then

 

[St. Widge]

Quick follow up (not The Onion)...

Wife of pastor arrested for nearly hitting protester with church bus flashes wads of cash as she bails him out

The Apostle Paul was jailed in Rome for preaching that Jesus Christ was God. Some 2,000 years later, another evangelist - Louisiana Pastor Tony Spell - was jailed for trying to hit a protester with a bus.While legend holds that Paul was eventually beheaded by Emperor Nero, Mr Spell will have to...

www.yahoo.com

The sad part is that wad of cash comes from people he has duped into giving him money while endangering their lives and the lives of all they come near.

Didn't Spell ask his flock to tithe their $1,200 in stimulus funds to him?

 

[Sun Wukong]

My school told us to prepare for a potential return to distance learning next year (seemingly in anticipation of a second wave)

I'm not going to go into details, but I know of someone who was in a meeting last week in Baton Rouge and the LDOE is 100% operating on the premise that we will be unable to return to schools in the fall.

 

[HoustonGold]

The Las Vegas mayor needs help. Seems like someone gave her bad advice

 

[PurpleBlack&Gold]

For those that still think this is overblown.

"These numbers undermine the notion that many people who have died from the virus may soon have died anyway. In Paris, more than twice the usual number of people have died each day, far more than the peak of a bad flu season. In New York City, the number is now four times the normal amount. "

The Pandemic’s Hidden Toll: Half a Million Deaths (Published 2020)

Far more people died in 2020 during the pandemic than have been officially reported, a review of mortality data in 35 countries shows.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Poison]

This article appeared in a local publication about the current situation in the US. I have found it to be a pretty useful analysis of the current data and highlighted some quotes of interest.

In sum, it does not fill me with optimism and perhaps challenges the assumption that the country is truly on the downward side of the curve.

Gavin Buckley, the Melbourne-born mayor of Maryland’s state capital Annapolis, this week helped open a drive-through COVID-19 virus testing site for his city’s 38,000 residents.

Despite being months into the pandemic, Annapolis, along with the rest of America, has suffered a chronic shortage of testing kits.

Until this week, the city’s health officials had just 40 per day.

"That’s the frustration for local governments. We were ready, prepared, but the big missing piece is mass testing and tracing," Mr Buckley told The Australian Financial Review.

The local county that surrounds the picturesque historic harbour-side home of America’s storied Naval Academy – less than 40 minutes drive from Washington DC – has recorded almost 1100 confirmed coronavirus cases, with 42 deaths and another six likely fatalities.

That’s almost 70 per cent of Australia’s national tally, for a municipality with barely 600,000 residents.

Maryland governor Larry Hogan, a Republican who has clashed with President Donald Trump over testing, has taken extreme steps to secure his state’s own supply.

On Saturday, a Korean Air Boeing 777 landed at nearby Baltimore Washington International Airport with 500,000 kits arranged by Mr Hogan.
Crises likely understated

Such stories are commonplace across America and they’re fuelling persistent fears the official COVID-19 tally is understating the full extent of the crisis.
The lack of widespread and consistent testing means infections may well be rising faster than many assume, suggesting distancing disruptions will last longer and worsen the sharpest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Contrary to some of the claims America has "turned the corner", many experts point out the rate of positive test results is still stubbornly high, running at close to 20 per cent, or one in five Americans who seek a diagnosis.

In countries where infection rates have decisively collapsed and testing is more widespread, positive test results have tended to fall below 10 per cent.
Furthermore, having suffered the world’s biggest outbreak – the latest count topped 800,000 cases, with almost 45,000 deaths – the US has also been sluggish in showing a decline in new infections.

That's confounding those who believe that having climbed a steep mountain, the country can now expect a rapid slide down the other side.

The numbers suggest, if anything, America is now stuck on a high and broad mesa.

In the 11 days after reaching their peak of new cases, total numbers fell 81 per cent in South Korea, 35 per cent in Germany and 22 per cent in Italy, according to Johns Hopkins University and New York Times calculations.
The US, by comparison, has only seen a 2 per cent decrease in a comparable time period.

Despite signs that growth in new cases peaked some 17 days ago, America’s daily death rate on Wednesday (AEST) was only just below the 2524 person peak of April 15.

By contrast, Italy’s death rate peaked seven days after growth in infections ended, and it has since fallen from more than 900 fatalities a day to between 400 and 500.

The US anomalies may be the result of some as-yet unknown idiosyncrasy.
But it may also be a sign there's still a lot of bad news to come: that social distancing isn't being observed as tightly as policymakers are hoping and that reopening the economy could exacerbate an already ugly situation.

"The number of confirmed cases in the US is significantly below the actual number of cases, due to severe capacity limitations in diagnostic testing," Pinar Keskinocak, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a specialist in infectious disease modelling, told the Financial Review.
"We have seen a slowdown in infection spread thanks to, in large part, sheltering in place. [But] the peak is still ahead of us."

"Once people start increasing their activities and social interactions, the number of infections will quickly ramp up."


If such warnings are right, the coming days will provide a crucial test of the Trump administration’s belief that growth in coronavirus deaths will effectively fall to zero by the end of next month or soon after.
In a clear setback, a closely watched computer model maintained by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation – which is frequently referenced by White House experts – this week raised its projected US death toll to August 4 to 65,976 from 60,308, its April 17 estimate.

The final number could be as many as 124,120, according to the institute.
Much of the recent optimism has been fuelled by signs that the rhythm of devastation in New York, America's hardest-hit region, is easing. Equally, however, the expected peak in cases is still weeks away in other regions, such as Michigan or greater Washington DC.

"I do think there's a huge psychological problem when people say 'we're past the peak'," said economist Justin Wolfers. "You've heard this collective sigh of relief that New York has turned a corner, but look at all these other regions.
"There's no corner being turned."

Even in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo was reluctant on Thursday (AEST) to declare victory, warning the number of people going into the state's hospitals was "still troublingly high".

He urged New Yorkers to continue social distancing and pressed businesses to stick with shutdown orders.
"I get the pressure to reopen," Mr Cuomo said. "But we can't make a bad decision. Frankly, this is no time to act stupidly."

Other leaders are pushing in the opposite direction, insisting on a rapid reopening of their local economies.
Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman said the shutdowns were "total insanity" and that "people are begging us to reopen".
On the risk that allowing customers back into casinos would only accelerate the spread of infections, Ms Goodman told CNN that such issues were "not my job, it's the hospital and health system's job".
"And it's people's responsibility to know when they are sick."
But as angst about the state of the economy puts ever greater pressure on local leaders to reopen, even President Trump appears spooked.
Mr Trump on Wednesday told Georgia governor Brian Kemp that he "strongly disagrees" with the state's decision to open spas, beauty salons, barber shops and tattoo parlours.
"It's just too soon," the President said.
When pressed, it's clear the Trump administration doesn't believe the US economy will get back on its feet until the end of summer.
"We're looking forward to the time we get later in the summer having most of the economy, if not all of the economy, open," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.


Mayor Buckley, who owns several restaurant businesses in Annapolis, said the city can't reopen without widespread testing, even as the economic pain of the shutdown deepens.
"May is our biggest month of the year as people come for a whole week and rent houses to watch their kids graduate from the Naval Academy," he said.
"That's been cancelled. One of the biggest tourist weeks of the city has been lost."
That said, the "the craziest thing to do would be to open early".

 

[EGLSShin]

I really hope that this isnt true , but.. I spoke with someone today who is very close to the ‘powers that be’ in re to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and this person said that it is extremely likely that there will be no Mardi Gras in 2021.. i asked this person to repeat themselves, since that’s almost a year away.. but unfortunately he said that an official announcement will be made soon, since a lot of the planning on the part of hotels, krewes, logistics etc happens years (plural) ahead of time, and the idea of bringing in a million people from around the world into close contact in less than a year from now just cannot happen, for public health reasons, and that a vaccine would not have been approved AND distributed around the world by then.. .. Sucks if true .

Doesn't surprise me, mass gatherings cannot happen until an effective vaccine is out there. I've heard fall of 2021 at the earliest for sporting events with fans and concerts.

 

[saintmdterps]

This article appeared in a local publication about the current situation in the US. I have found it to be a pretty useful analysis of the current data and highlighted some quotes of interest.

In sum, it does not fill me with optimism and perhaps challenges the assumption that the country is truly on the downward side of the curve.

Several things: 1)The municipality in Maryland is Anne Arundel county which has a well-to-do population in a state that is overall on the high end of most of the social and economic bell curves, so rates of infection and mortality are likely lower there than many other areas of the US. 2) the US as a whole is less healthy than Australia with a much less effective chronic-care healthcare system.

The picture presented by the article sums up what happens to a first-world country with a broken healthcare system and an administration wholly unprepared for any sort of calamity, much less a pandemic that cuts across all geographical lines in ways that a natural disaster does not.

My 18 year-old son is already preparing for the eventuality of distance learning for his first year of college, in which case he’s going to take a gap year and start in 2021.

Screw it, let’s move to Australia. Reality in the US is that the current administration has no idea what it’s doing or how to control COVID.

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

I'm not going to go into details, but I know of someone who was in a meeting last week in Baton Rouge and the LDOE is 100% operating on the premise that we will be unable to return to schools in the fall.

In that same meeting, the principal gave the dates for school opening but did not sound super confident about it

 

[FootballLady]

A BIG issue is that kids aren’t allowed to be around children and many times can’t really get out and play. It is a miserable existence for children right now. There is really no telling what type of harm we are doing to them right now.

Less of

In that same meeting, the principal gave the dates for school opening but did not sound super confident about it

As part of our contract for next school year, they added language that we are expected to have lessons prepared for both scenarios.

 

[Rickboy]

My son is really going to suffer from the shutdown. His behavioral therapies are essential for him to adapt to his autism challenges. He’s 8 and can barely read as it is. He gets two 30min session per day with his teaching assistants. Sometimes those go extremely well but other times he’s not able to stay seated and complete the classes. I’m probably going to insist he be held back next year.

To make up for some of this, I’m going to get him into a summer program, in July. It’s $3000 but he needs hands on.

 

[Rickboy]

BTW, anyone else get a sinking feeling that another shoe is gonna drop on this whole fiasco? We’ve gotten more stories on strains and mutations, then we hear about blood clots in the lungs, now COVID Toes.

 

[superchuck500]

California reports 'deadliest day' yet, global lockdowns ease

Covid-19 has infected more than 2.7 million people around the world as of Thursday, killing at least 190,303 people.

www.cnbc.com

 

[Mr. Sparkle]

California reports 'deadliest day' yet, global lockdowns ease

Covid-19 has infected more than 2.7 million people around the world as of Thursday, killing at least 190,303 people.

www.cnbc.com

Looking at the state and world maps, there are some things that just do not make sense (yet). The huge death toll in NYC compared to the rest of the country, or even the world, for example. If its about population density and close quarters, public transit, etc., then places like India with even greater density AND closer proximity to China should have tens of thousands of deaths. JHU report says just 21,000+ cases for India- that's almost fewer cases than Italy or NYC have *deaths*.

Maybe its lack of testing or fudging the numbers, I dunno.