Northern Mich Reopening This Weekend!
I don't know about you mate, but I rolled a double six on my first turn in late March. I’ve been free as a jail bird.
LIBERATE XTRAMELANIN!
Wisconsin is just about completely open. My family and I are staying the course for another month to see how this all plays out. I fear it won’t end well. Too many idiots absolutely packing the bars already.
Probably smart to hold off. My area went to phase 1 reopening and the number of infections went from 130 to 140 really quickly after. We had been stuck at 130 for weeks.
Which is totally expected, correct? We will expect that infection rates will increase, so there is no need to be concerned about it.
What level of increase and the pace of increase (i.e. development of potential hotspots) - so as to not overwhelm the healthcare system - is the concern.
I’m aware of the concerns.
However, if infections in an isolated area are static over many weeks and you open up to an immediate increase, that suggests people from locked down areas (NYC in my case) are reinfecting previously disease free locations due to travel.
That’s a problem.
Again, totally within what should be the expectation. You will have more cases in your area - as will nearly everyone, whether they were previously disease free or not.
Perspective? How can an “area” stay static at 130 cases for several weeks? Was testing still ongoing? What caused the jump to 140? Were an increased number of tests carried out? How long after the loosening did the additional 10 appear? Right away? Two weeks later?
Inquiring minds...
There's nothing besides the obvious. My "area", a unit of measurement called a "county" had a static (that means unchanging) infection count for several weeks (units of time consisting of 7 days each). Of course testing was ongoing. It was ramping up even. Testing has been widely available here for a month.
The jump lagged the announcement of phase 1 reopening by about of week, though it was only a day or two after the official opening date - people started going out almost immediately once the plan was in place. I could build a discrete event model to illustrate the obvious, but I'll go ahead and skip it.
Thanks for the condescending reply. Especially the explanation of what a “week” consists of! That helps me.
So testing increased and then # cases increased. Hmmm.
Not sure several days (a unit of 24 hours) is enough of a lag to directly tie it to the relaxation of rules. But you’re the smartest guy here so I’ll leave you to it.
When they can't answer the question they attack it... happens a lot these days.
Funny you should mention travel as interstate travel is something Whitmer can't control. That is the one variable that makes me question whether the concept of fine turning is an exercise in futility. What hopefully mitigates spread of infection from the increase in social contact is summer weather where being outside is helpful to disperse aerosol droplets. Even with a vaccine, polls show that close to a third of Americans won't get vaccinated. Bottom line is COVID-19 is going to be here for a while.
At some point, things have to reopen and largely stay open and soon.. I believe Whitmer is late to do what a good chunk of the US has already done. Three counties in SE Michigan are responsible for 66 percent of the State's infections. Keep them closed but start opening everything else. I believe we have lost something close to 30 million jobs nationally which means healthcare has been lost by millions of people. That will result in sickness/death. In Michigan, the initial budget deficit is 3.2 billion this year and 2.0 next year with the potential to go much higher. The US deficit this year will break all levels. It's really a pick your poison situation with every day being closed putting us into a deeper and deeper hole.
You assume that opening will result in a rebound in the economy. Wharton released a study a few weeks ago indicating that a premature opening would result in only a 10% boost in economic activity from the nadir as so many will continue to quarantine.
According to the study, a premature opening would be counterproductive in the long run.
Oh, I thought you were joking. You’re freaking out about 10 cases in a week? Come to Genesee County bro. I guarantee more had it than 130. Increased testing improves the rate of infection. ?♂️
We aren’t seeing an explosion of cases yet in southern states that have reopened largely because 80% of people are still in self-quarantine. One of my criticisms of Gretchen is that she could have handled the communication better and just scared people into staying home without actually ordering it. One reason Florida has been so low is people were leading their moron of a governor by staying home before his order.
Just curious: what are your success/failure criteria? It seems that it's based on the media's representation of actions taken. Our "moron of a governor" didn't knee-jerk react by immediately putting everyone in house arrest. He thoughtfully focused on nursing homes, and protecting the residents thereof. Whereas Cuomo, he of the mighty news conference performance, sent infected people back into nursing homes when we had temporary hospitals languishing empty.
Please enlighten me as to the judgment of a successful response (or at least more successful) to be moronic. I guess it's in your post: Florida citizens are smarter than New York citizens.
kudos, solid point...and yes it appears 'moron' is a new buzz word that means my idea is more righter than yours...(eye-roll)
DeSantis is refusing to report accurate death and illness statistics regarding his state and is actively blocking the public’s’ ability to get information about how serious things are in Florida. This is purely a self-interested political move, is anti-democratic and dangerous. That help your curiosity?
Lol, come on man.
You can educate yourself:
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/96dd742462124fa0b38ddedb9b25e429
Ftroop, take some time and inform yourself. There are facts out there, learn about them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20200519/coronavirus-florida-firing-of-state-data-employee-raises-questions-about-re-opening%3ftemplate=ampart
You must not be aware of what's happening in Texas, huh?
1) Reported cases are going to lag 10-14 days from the period when things are opened up.
2) There is good evidence that Florida in particular is manipulating things to keep the numbers down.
GA just got caught manipulating the data: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/just-cuckoo-state-latest-data-mishap-causes-critics-cry-foul/182PpUvUX9XEF8vO11NVGO/
It's not a conspiracy theory when it supports your side, eh? Are you incensed in the same measure about NY not classifying nursing home deaths when they happen to occur in a hospital?
ftroop, It’s not a conspiracy theory when the people in charge of the conspiracy are too stupid/incompetent to keep it a secret.
Lol - Desantis doesn't include CV deaths if the deceased have licenses from other states -- you can't trust the numbers there at all.
Thank you for making the actual point: we can't trust the numbers at all right now. So can someone tell me why we delivered a death blow to our economy when we don't know anything really?
We do know some things. One of them is excess deaths. You can manipulate (up or down) or speculate the cause of a death, but short of falsifying or hiding death certificates, you can't fake actual deaths.
And there have been well over 100,000 excess deaths in the US the past two months. That's how many people have been directly or indirectly killed by Covid19 above what is normal. And that would be double or triple had we not shut down the country for the past two months.
One thing we definitely don't know is what would have happened to the economy if we didn't shut it down. When deaths would have kept rising, many people would have stopped traveling and eating out anyway. It was already happening before the shutdowns happened. Look at restaurant booking data in the weeks before lockdowns went into place.
The idea that things would have been all good had we not imposed shotdowns is a false assumption.
- There have been extremely low numbers of people presenting with cardiac and stroke symptoms, suggesting that all excess deaths may not necessarily be due to covid.
- Your assertion of "double or triple deaths had we not shut down" is an assertion.
- The data shows the largest death rate has been in long-term care facilities, suggesting there may have been a smarter, more "science-based" approach that avoided many of the negative consequences of the economic shutdown while preserving lives.
- One thing we definitely don't know, but will be discovering for years, are the consequences of the economic shutdown. The idea that they can't be worse than the direct effects of the covid is a false assumption.
My original point, ftroop, was that it doesn’t matter what politicians do, the deathblow to the economy was delivered by the people who decide to stay home regardless of orders, which is a huge percentile. You got all snowflakey when I criticized DeSantis, but the people will continue to stay home no matter what and the 20% that don’t will start to get sick. Don’t believe me, look at Texas.
Yeah, my state never imposed major restrictions and this weekend the governor basically said everything can re-open. Given that cases have been on the rise here for the last several weeks, and our area is poised to be a hotspot, we're going to go on a more stringent personal lockdown for a while. At least until we can be reasonably assured that there isn't a new spike in cases. But goddamn, I would like to get back to normal.
[On an angry side note: we went to the supermarket on Saturday afternoon and about a dozen preppy 24 year olds were milling about in front of the entrance, none of them wearing masks. I literally thought they were on line to get in because I assumed the store was limiting the number of people inside. But, I realized that wasn't the case because these brats all had bags and had already been in the store. Inside, some of their friends, again, not wearing masks, strolled around with no regard for other people's space (including mine). They went to check out and buy the essentials: chips and beer. If you want to risk your own health and hang out with your friends, fine, but GTFO of everyone's way. Be aware of other people. /End rant].
Effin’ millennial dirtbags.
Wouldn’t they be Zoomers?
Cases are generally "on the rise" because testing has increased almost everywhere (in a lot of places, outstripping demand).
Over the last 7 days, the United States ran 2.535 million tests and had 160,000 new cases or 6.3% positive test cases. Not too long ago we were at 14%.
Interesting how the same data, with a little added context, can mean something so different.
It's not clear what the relationship between the increased testing and increased number of cases is at the moment. For example, as with everything else in the epidemiologic data, NYC has an outsize impact on the numbers. The testing there has soared over the past few weeks, and the case numbers are still dropping.
Taking the NYC numbers out of both the testing and case numbers leaves things very muddled. Most likely the true case numbers are indeed going up in other pockets, but where that leaves us overall will be hard to parse for a while longer.
I think I'm commenting more on the dishonesty of how "surges" and "peaks" are being reported now.
A state will have a "surge" and articles will start rolling in about how they just opened and that is the cause or can't open because of it, but then you take a closer look and they've doubled their testing or the outbreak was actually at a prison or its relatively contained because it was at a meat-packing plant.
I have a friend who is a senior executive at Meijer. They have 254 stores and out of 254 stores only 4 employees have tested positive for Covid.
That could be the case, but our state has not done a good job with testing. And our deaths (usually lagging 2 weeks behind) have been increasing as well. I read last week that our state ranked something like 31st in testing but ranked much higher (like top 10) in cases per 100,000 and new cases/week. And I could be wrong - but I think you still have to be pre-approved to get a test. Plus, we've had some of the worst rural outbreaks in the country. In NYS, cases and deaths have been steadily decreasing for weeks now thanks to the social distancing/lockdowns. But. our cases are almost certainly going up for the wrong reasons.
What state are you in? I agree NY skews the numbers. This site does a good job of reporting data directly from the states with historical numbers for reference.
https://covidtracking.com/data
Not too long before that, we were over 20%.
Yeah, ir all sounds good at first glance but remember it took and act of congress to get tested initially. Today it’s less restrictive. So comparing those percentages is somewhat misleading. So many factors go into the “science” of this pandemic.
Oh, I completely agree. Just pointing out how high it was at one point (largely because of testing being so restrictive).
It is hard to tell whether the percentages are going down just because we're testing a lot more people (rather than infections actually going down).
I live in Los Angeles where they've opened up testing for all. I had friends with no symptoms and no reason to get tested go just out of pure curiosity. They were negative of course but those kinds of people would drive down the positivity rate without that being meaningful in any way.
What is interesting is so many places imposed all these arbitrary testing goals and aren't meeting them because demand for testing isn't high enough. Los Angeles county wants to be doing 15k per day and can't get there.
For the life of me, I can't understand why we are the technology leader of the world, home to Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon - the most valuable companies in the world - and we have zero technology aiding this effort. And it's not for lack of resources given that we're throwing trillions at the stock market.
The fact we aren't digitally contact tracing and intelligently recommending certain people get tested is truly mind-boggling. S. Korea, Taiwan and several other Asian countries very quickly launched apps and plug-ins to existing social media apps to solve this problem.
If we want to increase testing, and do it in a way that is actually intelligent rather than arbitrarily asking people to waste their time. Work with the social media giants or create an app (could be insanely simple) that users opt into that tells them if they've been near someone that tested positive. I have to think that a lot of people would be like, yes, I'd like to know if I was near someone that tested positive and then if they were informed that "hey, you were approximately 3 feet away for 10 minutes from a person that tested positive 5 days after your proximity so we recommend you get tested, here's how to register" they'd be highly likely to go get tested.
Then if you test positive, you punch it into the app and it informs all the people you were near for the previous two weeks and on and on.
Truly astounding that human, manual contact tracing is what people are focused on. It's not only labor intentive and dangerous, it's not very accurate because it requires people to actually know who they were close to when the vast majority people one might encounter are perfect strangers (in the grocery store, in the elevator, passing on the street, etc). WTF.
My area went to phase 1 reopening and the number of infections went from 130 to 140 really quickly after
If it happened really quickly after, it probably wasn't related to the reopening. Given what we know about COVID-19, you need to wait a good 2-3 weeks after the fact to see the effects show up. What probably happened was the number of people tested increased.
In any event, the most critical metric is the number of people hospitalized. If we lower the threshold of symptoms for obtaining a test so that people with mild symptoms are tested, we'll find more positive cases but it may mean nothing for the health system.
I'd be a lot more nervous if i didn't already struggle through it and have those antibodies. No lie, was hell -- 18 days of crap and 2 actual nights of legitimate nervousness and breathing exercises [no hospital, but only by personal choice -- others with the same level would have definitely gone to the hospital -- I just took it upon myself to buy on oximeter and could still self-regulate] (as only a 31-year-old). But, I am going to be honest -- having done that makes me feel more invincible than I am (especially because it isn't proven immunity yet) -- Just being completely up front that I likely would be one of those people out.
I know you may not wish to answer, but do you have any pre-existing conditions noted as being at-risk for COVD? Thanks for sharing your story
redacted
Asthma -- but probably the most minor level of asthma possible (I would think). No worries.