Corona Virus Update

Dr. Anthony Fauci believes that the COVID-19 would get worse before it got better would probably be a true statement as reports like in Los Angeles that hospitals there are almost to capacity and people are dying by the minute or perhaps by second. It may come to who lives and who dies. Hard decisions are going to be difficult.

 

I’ll have to look up what your lockdown rules are, I’m not familiar. But large areas of the US would be unenforceable. There just aren’t sufficient surveillance or enforcement capabilities. Furthermore, again, such attempted control would result at some point in physical force being used to force compliance. That would pretty much be the end of the lockdown because that wouldn’t be tolerated by the citizenry.

I believe most politicians here are wise enough to understand this. That’s one reason lockdowns aren’t implemented here.

 

The big fines have only been applied when people have organised large gatherings. House parties with 80 guests etc. Easy to police as these parties go on all night so neighbours can hear them and inform the authorities.
The current lockdown is straightforward. Stay at home unless you have to leave your house to work, shop for essentials or to take exercise once a day.

 

Here they are done by consent. Plenty of people have broken them with very few prosecutions. Indeed the police actively told people they would not enforce the rules over Christmas.
TBH though I think most people here have obeyed the rules because they understood them and saw the consequences of earlier lax attitudes.

 

Wow, $13,000 times 80 is over a million dollar fine! Or do they just fine the land owner? Where I live many people could party all night with a crowd and only the coyotes and possums would ever know.

Interesting lockdown. I don’t understand how that does a lot of good. Who decides what’s essential shopping? And if people don’t take precautions at home I can’t see how such a lockdown could have more than a slight overall effect on infection rates.

 

Interesting. So overall not really different than many states here. That’s funny. Christmas vacation for a virus. I’m becoming more convinced nobody really takes this very seriously. Maybe some individuals.

 

Just the organisers are fined and 10k is the maximum. Often it has been less.

I think it would work just fine if people stuck to it.
I've only left home once since Christmas which was to buy food.
I've not had a haircut since April since it is not essential.
The first lockdown was pretty effective. By mid-summer we were down to deaths in single figures. Then the rules were relaxed and shops re-opened and kids went back to school.
Now we are up to 60k of new cases today and over 800 deaths.

 

As above, essential goods were limited by the government, though there were some arguments about things for sale in the supermarkets, when other shops selling the same things were closed. But again most folks saw sense.

 

Ok. That makes sense. I was about to get a plane ticket over and cut a snitch deal with your bobbies for a small cut.

I finally cut my own hair. About time to try again. Maybe “essentials” over there means something else. Here it means if someone has plain milk but develops a craving for chocolate milk at some point they put on their mask (maybe) and go get a quart of chocolate milk. Food is essential after all.

I didn’t really follow your first shutdown. A few weeks ago our media was praising your fall lockdowns and I ran the numbers comparing your decreasing (at the time) new case rates to South Dakota’s. They were virtually identical, about a 30% decrease over the same time period, with SD having virtually no mandated mitigations. Sounds crazy, but that’s the numbers.

 

Interesting. I didn’t know your retailers were limited to what they could sell. It makes sense in a way. Can’t you get virtually anything your heart desires from Amazon regardless of what brick and mortar retailers do?

 

Not presumably if you compare England's 1,349 people per square mile with South Dekota's 11.3.
11.3 per sq mile! That's what you call social distancing.

 

Yes, online shopping was still allowed. We now have a permanent rail track from Amazon to our front door.

 

Well, the funny thing about density is it didn’t stop SD case rates from skyrocketing to comparable levels with the UK to begin with. If less density didn’t prevent infection rates comparable with the UK to begin with, we really can’t credit it with dropping rates.


If you take some time and look at the graphed data on Worldometer or elsewhere, infection rate increases, peaks, and decreases follow almost identical patterns over very similar periods of time regardless of country, state, city, level of mitigation, or government control. There are very rarely exceptions.

 

Yeh, we’ve even used Wal-mart.com a couple times recently. I feel sorry for the delivery drivers.

 

The U K I hear is in lockdown because of COVID-19

 

You too??!!

seriously, many THANKS to all the delivery drivers !!!

 

Well you would need to run the density infection graph along side a timeline showing what actions were taken.
What I can tell you as someone interested in the UK data is that the obvious is true.
The virus spreads faster in denser populations and when lockdowns were put in place the infection rates fell rapidly.
Thus we had blooms in major cities, lesser blooms in busy counties such as Essex and very low numbers in low population counties like Cornwall.
My conclusion, Had we not had lockdowns then the numbers would not be the same as NE and had NE had lockdowns your numbers would be lower still.

 

S D has a lot of land mass but it has a large native American population and they are very family oriented. That close living makes them susceptible to contagious diseases. I think that is largely what we see everywhere, lots of people living close you get lots of infections.

 

Yes, I looked at the counties with the highest rates a couple days ago. They are counties where over 80% of the population are Native American.

 

It seems obvious until you look at other cases. Like California being in lockdown for weeks with cases continuing to skyrocket until the average time from exponential growth to peak is reached. There’s the classic US story of Kansas implementing mask mandates in some counties and not others. Then the claim was made cases fell in every county with a mandate. If you went and looked at county data, many mandated counties began exponential growth of cases days after the mandate that continued-you guessed it-for the normal time period from beginning of waves to their peak.

Perhaps there are exceptions, but look at graphed data and look for the patterns.

In the US less densely populated places didn’t have big infection waves early, but later. In most cases infections per million per day very similar to populated areas, with the elapsed time from exponential growth to peak very similar.

I’m not claiming all mitigations are useless. We can theorize about what may have happened without them but that’s just speculation. And when there are clear cases where the same thing happens in areas of mitigation and areas without, one has to consider there are other factors in play. I don’t see anyone concerned about those factors. We instead keep trying the same things over and over that can be shown to not work consistently or not at all. I think there is a lot of the classic “correlation doesn’t equal causation” going on here. When it’s obvious the same decreases in infection rates occur regardless of what mitigation is in place, we simply can’t assume the mitigation was a causative factor. That’s my point based on data, not on speculation about what may have happened.

 

After a freezer filled with Covid-19 vaccines broke, a California hospital scrambled to administer more than 800 doses in about 2 hours.
Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at a Northern California hospital broke, officials soon realized they only had about two hours to administer the more than 800 doses that were inside.

They were in a hurry to administer the vaccine giving 800 of them in 2 hours That's like 6 shots a minute. or one every 10 seconds. You have to wonder whether they made it or not.

 

One could assume lockdown in California was not being taken seriously until enough people got ill and then was obeyed causing them to take it seriously and let the lockdown do its job. We had something similar to this in the North of England, where they initially boasted they were real men who weren't scared of the virus and.. well you can guess the rest.
Logic must tell you that a disease spread by contact and close company must be slowed by stopping contact and close company.
If that isn't working its because people are not following the guidance.
That said there have been some stupid decisions. When all the students went back to Uni no one thought to test them. Result freshers week became a massive petri dish for growing Covid.

 

Yep. Now we are headed in the same direction. It’s not the mandate that does the work. I think the problem in the US is that we were told too often masks would save us. Tests would save us. Six foot social distancing “is good enough” in the words of our premier “expert”. Spread in public is the only spread addressed by experts and media. Everyone totally ignores mitigation in the home. Even two or three week total lockdown won’t stop the pandemic if large households are keeping newly infected reservoirs in reserve for when restrictions are relaxed.

Instead of just playing at following the rules (which are tepid anyway) people need to act like this is serious. I think we agree on that. But my point overall is that just doing what experts advise isn’t working. You alluded to that when you said some in the UK are learning from previous mistakes.

I agree total isolation equals stoppage of transmission. But in the absence of total isolation (which won’t ever happen) the other strategies just aren’t working. Hopefully the vaccines will help soon, because I don’t think our societies are equipped to stop transmission otherwise.

What is your opinion on the naturally reoccurring shapes of waves of infection? I’ve been reading some about coinfection and how coinfection can shape and create waves. Also, I’ve talked here on PF about the possibility of different demographics having different RO’s and creating waves as infection moves through that demographic until the herd immunity threshold is neared. Then subsequent waves are mainly in a different demographic.

 

Total agreement here, we watched with disbelief at how un-seriously Americans were taking the pandemic.
Inter family transmission relies on one member of the family going out to get the virus, what we saw on a lesser scale than yours was that enough people didn't want to see this, or rather did not want to chastise family or friends for breaking the rules.
However the third wave in this country REALLY seems to have shocked people, so I will wait and see.

Coinfection is an interesting subject, but I think its gained popularity because it sounds interesting.
The figures that are emerging are very much tilted by the age of the people dying many of whom were on their way out with failing immune systems and with multiple viral infections. Had they not have died of Covid they would have very likely have died of pneumonia caused by some other virus or bacteria.
There is a reasonably high incidence of younger people who died with secondary viral illness, but then as you are highly unlikely to die of Covid when you are young unless you have a secondary condition so this will also create a false positive.

I don't see any connection to herd immunity?

 

Nobody seems shocked here. At least in my circle of friends/acquaintances that span numerous states excluding the coasts.

Nobody talks about it here. Nobody. I think the only times it’s appeared on the forum I’ve brought it up. Centerfield may have. I know he has encouraged influenza vaccination to prevent two simultaneous pandemics during flu season. Statistics are hard to find even on C19/influenza even though a high volume of current CDC PCR tests are for both. What little information is available points to significantly increased death rates in cases of C19/influenza infections. However, data also points to there being a “competition for resource” relationship where C19 infection protects from influenza infection.

It fascinates me because I’ve done so much research on influenza during this pandemic and found many of the common beliefs on influenza are incorrect. It bothers me that there seems to be a lot of denial in the scientific and medical community to how deadly influenza really is. On the other hand, there is widespread push to be vaccinated against influenza while not publicizing it’s severe death toll. Things that aren’t reported and don’t add up bother me.

Another serious consequence of co-infection is mass antibiotic treatment of hospitalized C19 cases. I see some professionals are concerned about using antibiotics to prevent co-infection leading to development of antibiotic resistant bacterial pathogens. It’s really a big deal, but it seems to be taboo to discuss.

Discussing co-infections, especially with influenza, is taboo I think because it blows up the narrative that anyone with C19 who dies was killed by C19. If someone with C19 who would have lived if not for co-infection with influenza dies, do we say it’s a C19 death or an influenza death? If someone co-infected has a stroke or heart attack, how do you determine accurately which pathogen is to blame? This is why I hate politicization of science. We can’t ask these questions and research co-infections because of the political ramifications.

Sure. Herd immunity exists in defined populations. It’s conceivable an early wave of infections in a population where only essential workers are out and about would reduce the RO in that population through reduction in the percentage of susceptible individuals in that population. The essential workers and their families essentially become a population without enough susceptible uninfected individuals to sustain high infection rates anymore. Thus, we see that wave of infections predictably peak and decline just like I’ve been pointing to previously.

Then, say schools open up. A group of kids without essential working parents are exposed, infected, and take the virus home to infect their parents who have been not working or working from home. This creates another wave of infections that grows exponentially, peaks, and falls precipitously just like the preceding wave. It’s just in a different population—a population with higher percentage of susceptible individuals because few have been removed from the susceptible pool through infection and recovery or death.