Tracking the COVID-19-Virus in Germany, the USA, Italy and other hot spots in the world

I NEVER said that the DATA was dishonest.

I said that Dr Birx is being dishonest by lying by omission regarding the ASSUMPTIONS in the model.

Furthermore listening to her I don't get the impression that she actually knows what she is talking about because she failed miserably to actually ANSWER the questions that were posed to her. That makes her a political shill without any credibility IMO.

 

No doubt that no countries were prepared for a novel extremely contagious virus to explode all over the globe. Hard to plan for a crisis if you aren't expecting one, and no one expected this.

There will be insufficient manpower and resources here just like there are in most countries of the world.

This is like a war, but the enemy is invisible. The foe doesn't give you a lot of heads up before they drop the nuclear bomb on your head.

The next week to ten days is the calm before the storm, before we expect a 10-day period with deaths over 2,000 "casualties" per day. We will have to make some decisions on who lives and who dies for a short time through the peak.

There are global shortages of parts to make ventilators and that has been the case since late January. All the planning in the world doesn't make necessary parts suddenly appear.

 

I think you'd have to click through each state's page. This data model is not static, but dynamic. It will get updated daily as things change.

 

Dr. Birx's "public" job is to communicate the urgency for everyone to stay at home. It is the president's job to communicate publicly which decisions he has made for the country. Sorry, you had to wait a few hours between the Chuck Todd interview and the task force press conference later the same day to get the answer to the question. Criticizing Dr. Birx for doing her job is certainly the most relevant thing worthy of focus and criticism in the middle of a crisis. We should all do it!

 

Okay. I'm 75% German by ancestry too.

 

Not a bad idea, especially if all the disinfecting wipes have been hoarded from the stores. Water (with a cap of bleach) to soak a rag and wring out would work just as well....and less expensively. I think I'll do that and drop a damp "disinfecting" cloth in a Ziploc bag today!

 

That is incorrect. There has been ample warning and nations like Germany not only planned for it they also ensured that they had the necessary resources available. Plenty of studies predicted a Pandemic of this scale since they have occurred in the past. The prior administration even instituted a Pandemic Panel for just such an event.

 

I heard Dr. Birx talking about a GPS tracking system software to find contacts of known infected people. It was only one sentence at one of the daily briefings. She didn't go into any detail.

Also, after one of the first local cases, a city representative was talking to the press about trying to find over 100 people who were thought to have made contact with one of the early cases. She said something along the lines of "You'd be surprised at our ability to track and find people," with a grin. That statement kind of creeped me out. Maybe it was the grin.

 

Isn't Germany doing massive testing? If you test everyone, the mortality rates would be much lower. Sorry if you already mentioned that (and I missed it).

 

Maybe our friend in Germany can answer that specifically, but availability of ventilators probably does have some impact on Germany's good numbers.

Germany is a major global supplier of hospital ventilators. Many countries, including the U.S., used to buy ventilators from Germany before they decided to keep them all for their own citizens.

 

If you are young-ish with no underlying medical conditions, then you are likely in very good shape.

The social distancing and hand washing, from my point of view, is not so much to save myself, but to not get sick and potentially spread the disease to those who are vulnerable. Saving yourself does mean saving others, so everyone wins.

 

Maybe Germany "planned" well because they are one of the top suppliers of ventilators.

Just because the president is acting as a federalist and not an authoritarian dictator does not mean that the federal government and the individual states haven't been trying to procure "whole" ventilators and private industry has been trying to get the parts to manufacture more ventilators during a time of global demand for both complete units and parts. There has been a known skyrocketing demand and a scramble of orders being placed but unfilled all over the world (except maybe in Germany). You think ventilators can be made out of thin air?

If you are a hospital or a state governor and you need ventilators, who do you call, a ventilator manufacturer or the president? Who is likely to fill your order as soon as they have availability?

You can't produce anything until you get access to parts.

https://www.seattletimes.com/busine...re-ventilators-to-treat-coronavirus-patients/

"About half of the top ICU models used domestically are imported from foreign manufacturers, and some countries — including Germany — have decreed that life-saving equipment be prioritized for their citizens. There are fewer than a dozen domestic manufacturers that are largely backlogged with international orders; the United States has been slower than other countries at implementing policies for speeding up ventilator production."

(Slower....because parts have been hoarded and backordered.)

GM stepped in not only with is plant capacity, but also with it's global purchasing contacts. They are making 10,000 extra ventilators in April which will add to an estimated 200,000 already in hospitals around the country.

 

Perhaps something you and @alexa could look into is something akin to what Italy did with that regional study where they compared the "covid" deaths against the "all cause" and the typical mortality rate for that region at that point in time.

So, essentially, how many have died in Germany from all causes in the month of March? How does that compare with the typical month of March? Are there differences in that trend line if you look at a city or "county" which was particularly hard hit?

 

It was SARS in China (2002/4) that should have warned us that worse was yet to come.

But we (as a species) did absolutely nothing. Evidently thinking that a virus was "China's Problem so they should find a solution!"

Well, it is certainly one more thing that China exports to the world ... !

 

Germany's infection rate is in the top 10 of nations, but mortality is very low - which makes for all the difference in the world.

Without a definitive anti-dote, how could this happen ... ?

 

Each state's page? I'm sorry what website?

 

Hype and fear. I just heard on the radio that the Mayor of Austin is trying to procure 20,000 ventilators for our city. We have a population of just under 1 million people and 1 death. Gov. Cuomo went from saying they want to buy 30,000 last week to 50,000 this week even though they currently have a stockpile which is sitting idle. My city alone can't possibly need 40% as many ventilators as the entire state of New York.

These state and local governors/mayors are trying to hoard ventilators like the panic buyers who've been hoarding 20 years worth of toilet paper. That is not going to help what is certain to be a regional shortage of ventilators as different areas have a real need in the weeks ahead. We'll end up with people dying in some areas, while some cities and states sit on a warehouse of unused ventilators.

That gives justification to the federal government sitting on a 10,000 unit emergency supply which they can move around the country to the true hot spots as needed.

The White House administration is trying to do the right thing to preserve states' rights to take care of their own people by ordering supplies according to their needs, but it looks like they may be forced to step in, slap some state/local people for hoarding, and completely take over the supply/demand chain before this is over.

 

It comes from the wealth which results from capitalism. And capitalism results in more wealth than any other economic system. Tax revenues from this maximum wealth creation funds infrastructure. See how that works.

 

The modelling website which our federal government has chosen.

You asked how many states have implemented the 4 points which will impact deaths. At the top of each state's page, it shows the steps implemented (or not yet implemented) and the date of implementation.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

 

What scares California is the vulnerability of the homeless population which is concentrated in the larger sanctuary cities, live in close proximity to each other, and whose immune systems are compromised.

 

...who the rich people walk past every day and might contract something nasty from the previously invisible street people. Yes, protecting the "vulnerable" as usual.

 

The real problem is that the so-called liberal progressive California state governance system ignores them. They should be getting treatment for their mental illness and drug addition problems. It's a tough and expensive problem which has been ignored for decades and now could have even more disastrous effects both on the homeless population and healthy Californians.

All healthy income quintiles avoid walking near them for fear of contracting the diseases like typhus which have popped up and stepping on a needle. Kids can't use playgrounds and parks due to fear of contamination.

 

Back to the tracking topic of this thread....

I just saved a copy of the current U.S. projections as a barometer of whether we end up doing better or worse than today's outlook. This model, as I've mentioned a couple of times, will change daily as new data is updated.

(I'm also saving a screenshot copy of the Texas curves, so I can compare how my state is doing.)

One more time, here is the link to the government's tracking model.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

 

The German government has ordered 36.000 ventliators, which will be produced in Germany. The company Dräger has quadrupled its ventilator production in a very short time.

There is a lot of ripp-off happening concerning medical supply, especially from Chinese companies. That will not be forgotten and it will cause significant changes.