The all-new "US Politics and coronavirus" thread

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

The models that Arizona is relying on say that fatalities will rise, but since governor Ducey is re-opening the state, so has shut the modelling team down

 

[The Don]

I imagine that a lockdown will lead to some increase of deaths not related to COVID. Whether it's utterly negligible, I couldn't guess. Maybe it would be.

But you have to figure that some folks have put off going for medical visits that they needed. I don't know how significant that would be.

Then again there are non-Covid deaths that the lockdown is preventing. Less traffic means fewer road deaths, fewer accidental deaths through recreation and on work sites and so on.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

The models that Arizona is relying on say that fatalities will rise, but since governor Ducey is re-opening the state, so has shut the modelling team down

We don't need no stinkin' models. We have Dear Leader and his sharpie .

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

The Trump administration has buried detailed advice created by experts at the CDC, which gives guidance on how to re-open the country

 

[Cheetah]

I posted this in the science thread, but it probably needs to be here as well.


Travel From New York City Seeded Wave of U.S. Outbreaks
_{The link is a google search, with the original NYT article as the first hit.}

And there you have it. Trump was right!
The China travel bad was extremely successful in keeping the China virus out of the USA. Apart form Washington State, where the virus is the Chinese strain, that is.

Genetic analysis indicates NYC virus is of European origin and most other US outbreaks spread from there.

“We now have enough data to feel pretty confident that New York was the primary gateway for the rest of the country,” said Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health.
The central role of New York’s outbreak shows that decisions made by state and federal officials — including waiting to impose distancing measures and to limit international flights — helped shape the trajectory of the outbreak and allowed it to grow in the rest of the country.

...by mid-March, when President Trump restricted travel from Europe, the restrictions were essentially pointless, the data suggest, as the disease was already spreading widely within the country.
“It means that we missed the boat early on, and the vast majority in this country is coming from domestic spread,” said Kristian Andersen, a professor in the department of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research. “I keep hearing that it’s somebody else’s fault. That’s not true. It’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our own fault.”

A New York Times analysis of travel data supports the idea that the chains of infection originated in New York, experts said. The number of cases across the country was closely related to how many travelers each place received from New York in early March, based on anonymized cellphone tracking data from Cuebiq, a data intelligence company.
“It looks like most of the domestic spread is basically people traveling out from New York,” said Dr. Kari Stefansson, founder and chief executive of deCODE Genetics, a leading genome analysis firm based in Reykjavik, Iceland.

 

[Cheetah]

Then again there are non-Covid deaths that the lockdown is preventing. Less traffic means fewer road deaths, fewer accidental deaths through recreation and on work sites and so on.

We are waaaayyyyy ahead in stats compared to last year.
Many more people are alive due to very few road deaths, violence and murder during lockdown, than have died because of the disease.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Wohl and Burkman paid a friend to lie about having been sexually assaulted by Fauci, but she later got cold feet, recanted her story, and got them both on tape admitting to having made the whole thing up and paid her to make the claims

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Trump has lamented the idea of testing more people, because doing so reveals more infections and "by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad"

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Wohl and Burkman paid a friend to lie about having been sexually assaulted by Fauci, but she later got cold feet, recanted her story, and got them both on tape admitting to having made the whole thing up and paid her to make the claims

They truly are a pair of one-trick dead horses.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Double

 

[uke2se]

He probably was around the other valets and the stewards (cooks) who make the president's meals. I do really hope the Americans are all okay and fully recover. Trump and his Trumptrash, well, we don't need their kind.

I would agree. Would be poetic justice, and a way to get Trump dead without him becoming a martyr.

 

[Matthew Best]

We are waaaayyyyy ahead in stats compared to last year.
Many more people are alive due to very few road deaths, violence and murder during lockdown, than have died because of the disease.

So how come I keep seeing stuff like this which says that the US experienced a rise of 16% in the death rate from all causes up to April 11, and New York City a rise of 386%?

 

[Cheetah]

Because I’m not in the USA.

 

[Matthew Best]

But this thread is about the USA.

 

[newyorkguy]

The models that Arizona is relying on say that fatalities will rise, but since governor Ducey is re-opening the state, so has shut the modelling team down

As you can see on the chart below, new cases in Arizona dip and spike from day-to-day but are still trending upward. The risk is, as restrictions are reduced, seeing new cases and fatalities surge to catastrophic levels. But there are a sizable number of people out there who argue the whole thing is 'overblown,' and the way to stop the epidemic is to 'let it run its course.' That strategy is very risky but those kinds of people usually reject expert advice because they 'don't believe the experts.'

Wonder what Arizona will look like by June?

 

[phiwum]

Then again there are non-Covid deaths that the lockdown is preventing. Less traffic means fewer road deaths, fewer accidental deaths through recreation and on work sites and so on.

A good point.

 

[Cheetah]

But this thread is about the USA.

I know.

 

[The Don]

So how come I keep seeing stuff like this which says that the US experienced a rise of 16% in the death rate from all causes up to April 11, and New York City a rise of 386%?

A huge number of untested, and hence undiagnosed Coronavirus deaths ?

There seems to be a great deal of overlap between conditions which increase Coronavirus mortality and non Coronavirus excess deaths - heart disease, pneumonia, diabetes and so forth.

OTOH if there are a lot of extra suicides, murders, anaphylaxis deaths or other csides with little or no Coronavirus link....

An analysis performed by the Financial Times on UK excess deaths came to the conclusion that Coronavirus deaths had likely been understated by a factor of 2.0-2.5. Even though the US has done more testing per capita than the UK, I wouldn't be shocked to find a similar issue in the US.

 

[Matthew Best]

In that case I guess the question is why is South Africa seeing a decrease in deaths while the rest of the world is seeing an increase?

Probably because the murder rate is so huge there that a slight percentage decrease in murder skews the stats drastically.

 

[Pixel42]

A huge number of untested, and hence undiagnosed Coronavirus deaths ?

There seems to be a great deal of overlap between conditions which increase Coronavirus mortality and non Coronavirus excess deaths - heart disease, pneumonia, diabetes and so forth.

Blood clots might be a contributing factor:

Over the past few weeks, physicians caring for patients hospitalized with COVID-19 have raised alarm bells after younger patients developed life-threatening clots and stroke. Recent research by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found that a large number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients have high levels of potentially life-threatening blood clots.

But there should be fewer deaths from respiratory illnesses like pneumonia because of the lockdown, which reduces transmission of flu viruses along with Covid19 viruses.