shoshin

B-Man’s sources would have covered this in great detail if it was as you describe. I see nothing from Professor Google.

Do you have a link to that claim about the CDC changing its spec in June? I'd like to read about that.

If India is diagnosing 80K cases per day, the real number is probably at least 10X that. That's astounding.

The states do exactly what you say, backfilling the data (they 100% do that in PA). But most if not all of the amateur Covid reporting websites like Covid Tracking Project and Worldometer don't have the energy and manpower to place all the deaths classified today on their proper date from days before--there's really no way for any state or medical system to say at midnight, "X people died of Covid today." So just about every site just makes today's total the difference in total deaths from yesterday to today. This averages out OK over time but "today" is never accurate--and when there's a really big backlog data dump, you get a Patriots *.

Obesity as comorbidity. PPP/TBD is screwed.

Kind of a dubious measure though, cases. If you look at deaths per million, several European countries are still way ahead of the US and their cases are rising now that they stopped their draconian lockdowns...so their deaths are not yet done climbing. I don't expect we will see big rises here from here on out (except maybe for CA) because we didn't have that kind of lockdown. Our leadership has sucked on this, no doubt, but just saying that the cases graphic is not the best measure.

Try swallowing $58,000 per year for online.

My freshman is at Penn but they are all remote. Fingers crossed for spring. Testing and the compacts are critical. It seems like in many places, the kids are getting the memo.

Two senior FDA spokespeople fired. One was a former OAN reporter with no medical background and serving as the Chief FDA spokesperson (yes that's true, that's who was serving as Chief FDA spokesperson during the worst pandemic in 100 years), and who had gone around defending Hahn's incorrect statement. The other is the guy who went public telling everyone that Hahn's statement was incorrect: ...Wayne Pines, a consultant to Hahn who had advised him to walk back his inaccurate claims about convalescent plasma, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Hahn’s late-night mea culpa angered officials at HHS, and after discovering Pines had aided that decision, they severed his contract.... The politicizing the FDA continues after the news earlier this week that the Admin pushed to reduce testing following Trump's drum-pounding that we test too much (!?) --Pines is the bad guy who called out Hahn on reporting bad data at the plasma presser. Can't have that.

I'm deeply invested in this because I have a Freshman who can't go to college.

Thank you for all you do. Is now a good time to cut down on a chunk of space taken up by some of the non-TSW portions of TBD. There are so many outlets now for other topics.

I keep reading about pooled testing and yet see it in use *so* seldom after months of people discussing its benefits. Any insight as to why? I would think it solves so many problems.

PA is 49th in testing per capita, only ahead of Colorado. As long as there is capacity (meaning as long as we are not delaying testing for people with symptoms and that seems like less of an issue than it was a month ago), we should ALWAYS be testing more. Focus on elderly and health care, people who have to interact more with others. For example, my wife is a hospice and home care social worker in PA--she has not once had a test--and she works for a mammoth health system, not some rinky dink small provider. Hell, I work from home mostly and I have had two tests as part of a volunteer study! PA is almost the worst example you can use for a place that needs to test less.

Great stuff there. -94F is totally impractical for storage and handling.

Pretty cool %pos map by state. So many cool data points out there now that I feel like I maybe posted this before. This guy always posts in the Covid Tracking Project daily tweet. People have been talking about these since April. It's clear how in demand they are and how they would end the lockdowns for everyone even in the most stubborn places very fast. Yet they still haven't been able to make it to a wide market. It's frustrating. They better have this ***** down by the time the the Superbowl comes around because I'll Ozzy Osborne a bat's head to get to see the Bills this year.

Mitt Romney. Thanks RC2catch for that take. Ready to do it here?

It would have been more effective if it just showed the drop not the rise.

What is this supposed to mean?

This will be a long term fallout and will be seen for years.

Look at Worldometer and you'll see that yesterday's deaths were not even lower than the day before. I love the Covid tracking data but they close their day early and often miss the last CA update (it dumps to the next day). Sometimes they catch it, sometimes not. The data is going down but today will be a better measure of where we are relative to the weekly peak.

Shocking the retreat that the fda has had to do from the 35% number in the plasma press conference. I'm just glad other scientists called BS and Hahn acknowledged it. https://www.axios.com/hahn-criticism-covid-19-plasma-remarks-justified-0f9ddf5e-13f5-498c-91e6-c406dcf4b512.html Really have to guard against the admin''s desire to push good news to better news. Hahn made his error multiple times and it was not a small one.

If you look at the UK that more or less didn't shut down (sort of a crappy half-shutdown like us) and Sweden, they are not seeing the second rise. UK data shows at most a little bump but not a big spike (so far): The shutdown countries, I believe, are just seeing the continuation of their initial wave, which was cut short by the draconian shutdowns. Or it could be a second wave and we're both wrong and there's not a herd immunity setting in long term. Time will tell but I suspect this isn't a second wave as much as a continuation of a wave that got cut off. Deaths are not rising particularly quickly in Spain and Italy, nor would we expect them to do so.

Madrid shut EVERYTHING down hard core. That stopped progression. When they reopened, Covid returned (shocker). I don't see it as a second spike. More like a continuation IMO. And there's almost no chance they get the same deaths like before this time around because there are much better treatments and a younger demo getting hit. Several perspectives in this article. One interesting thing is that Spain has a *****-ton (an additional 16,000) of unclassified deaths (likely Covid) so far this year but there's a lot of political pressure around how to classify those.

Good article. Also makes as one of its premises the effectiveness of masks: Also agree with this take (the former approach being the one I wished we'd done and still wish we would do): Dr. Mina of Harvard said the U.S. at the outset could have chosen to prioritize the economy, as Sweden did, and accept the deaths, or it could have chosen to fully prioritize health by staying locked down until new infections were so low that testing and tracing could control new outbreaks, as some northeastern states such as Rhode Island did. Most of the U.S. did neither. The result was “a complete disaster. We’re harming the economy, waffling back and forth between what is right, what is wrong with a slow drift of companies closing their doors for good,” Dr. Mina said.

It's helpful for at risk and later stage patients for now. For most people, it wouldn't be necessary.