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COVID-19 in America

Shocking figures here...

The United States reported over 400,000 new COVID-19 cases for the week ended July 12, up 21% from the previous seven days, and deaths linked to the respiratory disease rose nationally last week for the first time since mid-April.

More than 5,000 people died from COVID-19 from July 6 to July 12, up 46% from the prior week, according to a Reuters analysis of data from The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the outbreak.

Testing for COVID-19 rose by 7.4% in the United States last week and set a new record high on July 10, with over 823,000 tests performed, the Reuters analysis found.

Nationally, 8.8% of tests came back positive for the novel coronavirus, up from 7.5% the prior week and 5% three weeks ago.

Thirty-one states had positivity test rates above 5%, according to the analysis, including Arizona at 27%, South Carolina at 19% and Florida at 19%.

:eek: :(

 
Who is being tested there? Anyone with symptoms or is it more wide ranging? 27% is crazily high
As most healthcare is private, I guess if you want one, you can get a test. I spoke to someone there yesterday who chose to get an antibody test to see if she had had it previously even though I don’t think she had felt ill and thought she had had it.
 
As most healthcare is private, I guess if you want one, you can get a test. I spoke to someone there yesterday who chose to get an antibody test to see if she had had it previously even though I don’t think she had felt ill and thought she had had it.

The more we learn the more likely it seems that the antibody tests are a waste of time / money on the individual level. Sure they are important from a data gathering perspective but to us as individuals? Nah. Keep your pennies.
 
Lets see if they blatantly try to fuck with some of the data.

Dr Fauci's comments come after reports that as of 15 July, US hospitals will have to report Covid-19 patient data to the federal health agency in Washington instead of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

The CDC, the US's top public health institute, has until now been responsible for handling data about the pandemic from its hospital network.

Health experts have expressed concerns that data will be politicised, become less transparent and possibly affect the work of researchers and modellers.

 
Two interesting articles


 
It's a bit of a mess at US bases in Okinawa:


The coronavirus outbreak has only fueled that anger, which rose further with confirmation this week from U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, on the Japanese mainland, that an American couple and their 10-year-old daughter had tested positive for the virus after arriving from the U.S.

The family flew in on a commercial flight from the U.S. to Tokyo's Haneda airport on Sunday, and like all other international arrivals they were given COVID-19 tests. But before getting the results of those tests, the family reportedly boarded a domestic flight — against rules barring newly-arrived passengers from public transport — to get to the Marine base.

Japan "extremely concerned" as 136 COVID cases reported on U.S. bases
 
A government doing its best to undermine one of its top medical experts. The mind boggles. Wouldn't be so stupid as to fire him, or would they?

Trump can't fire him directly because of measures in place to stop career civil servants being fired for political reasons, according to CNN - although he does have the power to sideline him, which he has already done.

 
This is a good article covering the regional versions of Covid across the US, and how the national daily deaths figures 'hides' just how bad things are going in the south & west, because their rapidly increasing crisis is off-set by falling death rates in the northeast & midwest.

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The regional variation of the American outbreak is crucial to understanding both what happened and what’s going to happen next. Nationwide, the U.S. deaths per million tally—a hair under 400—is in the top ten globally. But look just at the Northeast’s 56 million people, and the death rate is more than double the national average: 1,100 deaths per million.

By contrast, the South and West—where SARS-CoV-2 is burning through the population—are much more populous than the Northeast. If those areas continue to see cases grow, they could see as many deaths per million as the Northeast did but multiplied by a larger number of people. At 1,100 deaths per million, the South and West would see 180,000 more deaths. Even at half the Northeast’s number, that’s another 69,000 Americans.

In truth, the fan of possibilities is probably wider. Looking at individual states, there was tremendous variation from low-death states like New Hampshire (288 deaths per million), to extremely high-death states like New Jersey (1,750 deaths per million), and a bunch in between, like Massachusetts (1,208); Washington, D.C. (805); and Pennsylvania (539).

It’s possible that the summer-outbreak states could follow the lower death trajectory traced by Pennsylvania or Washington, D.C. Right now, only Arizona, at 307 deaths per million has crossed even the lowest line above, New Hampshire; there is a lot of room for things to get worse, even if they do not come close to equaling the horrors of the spring.

New York City is and probably will remain the worst-case scenario. New York City has lost 23,353 lives. That’s 0.28 percent of the city’s population. If, as some antibody-prevalence surveys suggest, 20 percent of New Yorkers were infected, that’s an infection-fatality rate of more than 1.3 percent, which exceeds what the CDC or anyone else is planning for. To put it in the same terms discussed here, New York City saw 2,780 deaths per million people. A similar scenario across the South and West would kill over 550,000 more Americans in just a few months, moving the country to 680,000 dead. It is unthinkable, and yet, 130,000 deaths—the current national death toll—was once unthinkable, too.

That’s still not the worst-case scenario for a truly uncontained outbreak, in which serious measures are not taken. For months, most public-health officials have argued that the infection-fatality rate—the number of people who die from all infections, detected and undetected, symptomatic and asymptomatic—was somewhere between 0.5 and 1 percent. The CDC’s latest estimates in its planning scenarios range from 0.5 to 0.8 percent. Take that lower number and imagine that roughly 40 percent of the country becomes infected. That’s 800,000 lives lost.

The point in laying out these scenarios is not that we’ll reach 300,000 or 800,000 American COVID-19 deaths. That still seems unlikely. But anyone who thinks we can just ride out the storm has perhaps not engaged with the reality of the problem. As the former CDC director Tom Frieden has said, “COVID is not going to stop on its own. The virus will continue to spread until we stop it.”

The lack of containment by American authorities has resulted in not only lost lives, but also lost businesses, savings accounts, school years, dreams, public trust, friendships. The country cannot get back to normal with a highly transmissible, deadly virus spreading in our communities. There will be no way to just “live with it.” There will only be dying from it for the unlucky, and barely surviving it for the rest of us.

 
There's not enough of these > :facepalm: for this news.

As the tally of coronavirus infections reported in the United States rapidly approaches 3.5 million, the debate over mask-wearing has gotten so heated that complete strangers are coming to blows.

On Wednesday, both Walmart and the state of Alabama came out in favor of mandatory face coverings, suggesting that science was beginning to prevail over partisan debate.

Mere hours later, though, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) issued an order nullifying all local mask mandates and a Utah county commission meeting had to be postponed after anti-mask protesters caused it to devolve into chaos.

 
What the USA needs now is LESS data on the covid situation :facepalm:

Sadly it looked like that was going to happen the other day, talked about it briefly on Wednesday.

I'm still tracking the individual state data for a small handful of states, because that can be obtained from individual states websites, although the nature of the data varies quite a lot per state. Here is Texas:

Screenshot 2020-07-17 at 11.06.47.png
Data is from several different links on this page: https://www.dshs.state.tx.us/coronavirus/additionaldata/
 
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