shoshin

Philly has canceled all large gatherings through February.

Agree 100%. I was just interpreting the chart.

I think you have it. Thanks. The Yellow line isn't normal: It's excessive. (Here's the answer to your message @Hapless Bills Fan--sorry to keep dragging you into the PPP toilet. I think some of the recent expulsions have cleaned up the behavior a little so it's not quite as bad lately with the insult volume.)

Usually--not always--viruses mutate to weaker variants. Coronaviruses are slow mutators in general.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm The way I read it is this: Total deaths are returning to their normal level. One way to interpret that is, "Hey situation normal, stop worrying." My take as someone who doesn't study any of this is: "We have a lot more people dying from Covid but that's offset by (1) people not getting other transmissible diseases due to masks/distancing, (2) lots of other causes of deaths are down (think: car accidents for example)." Now there may be some other causes of death increasing due to people not getting medical care as well. But in total, the number of deaths is approaching its "normal range." Happy to hear from anyone more knowledgeable about this chart. My view on this is not what you propose. A national plan is not one where 330M people do the exact same thing. A national plan is one where every region gets treated with the same standard (the CDC standard that only NYS seems to follow looks about right) and the government manages outbreaks and increases regionally with behavior changes and funneling resources. There was no need for people in Montana to be doing the same things as NYC Metro in April.

The way I read it is this: Total deaths are returning to their normal level. One way to interpret the chart is, "Hey situation normal, stop worrying." My take as someone who doesn't study any of this is: "We have a lot more people dying from Covid but that's offset by (1) people not getting other transmissible diseases due to masks/distancing, (2) lots of other causes of deaths are down (think: car accidents for example)." Now there may be some other causes of death increasing due to people not getting medical care as well. But in total, the number of deaths is approaching its "normal range." I'll post this over there too.

The thing I can't figure out, and @Hapless Bills Fan just asked me this too, is why the normal line is higher than the actuals. I don't see an explanation on the CDC website but I'm looking into it in my part-time job as a COVID-19 data scientist.

The last few bars are 100% not accurate. The CDC provisional death totals always trail, though they do try to do some projecting. Here are FL and AZ:

The country one looks OK...the state ones depending on the state look better and worse:

Deaths all causes vs history. Just stumbled on this. We have talked about wanting to see this. I would not put a ton of faith in the last few bars because the CDC provisional deaths counts can take weeks to sort into categories and be confirmed: Provisional death counts are weighted to account for incomplete data. However, data for the most recent week(s) are still likely to be incomplete. Weights are based on completeness of provisional data in prior years, but the timeliness of data may have changed in 2020 relative to prior years, so the resulting weighted estimates may be too high in some jurisdictions and too low in others. As more information about the accuracy of the weighted estimates is obtained, further refinements to the weights may be made, which will impact the estimates. Any changes to the methods or weighting algorithm will be noted in the Technical Notes when they occur. More detail about the methods, weighting, data, and limitations can be found in the Technical Notes. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Deaths all causes vs history. Just stumbled on this. We have talked about wanting to see this. I would not put a ton of faith in the last few bars because the CDC provisional deaths counts can take weeks to sort into categories and be confirmed: Provisional death counts are weighted to account for incomplete data. However, data for the most recent week(s) are still likely to be incomplete. Weights are based on completeness of provisional data in prior years, but the timeliness of data may have changed in 2020 relative to prior years, so the resulting weighted estimates may be too high in some jurisdictions and too low in others. As more information about the accuracy of the weighted estimates is obtained, further refinements to the weights may be made, which will impact the estimates. Any changes to the methods or weighting algorithm will be noted in the Technical Notes when they occur. More detail about the methods, weighting, data, and limitations can be found in the Technical Notes. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

That quote supports what I was saying about Fauci's statement above. It sounds like he's saying that masks don't keep the wearer safe from the disease AND people should allow the HCWs to get the good masks. In other news, AZ trending lower on hospitalizations still (while FL jumps up).

Heavy lays the crown. I imagine many people advised the admin including Fauci. Who are you talking to when you say "you?" My 2 cents: I think he made the masks statement because a mask doesn't protect the wearer. I don't know why he said the thing about a run on masks. He sounds pretty bad in retrospect. The point I'm making is that if Fauci is the centerpiece of an incumbent's re-election blame campaign, it's a pretty bad sign. *********** New FL hospitalizations record today. Big jump.

Nationwide map of cases by county. Pretty great overview map. https://globalepidemics.org/key-metrics-for-covid-suppression/ Can't paste the entire image due to size but here's a peak.

If the election has got Dr. Fauci as a centerpiece issue, Trump should pack his bags now. And all those statements you just noted were coming from the administration too, including the last one on masks being such a consistent message that it was huge news that the President wore a mask to a hospital (!) last weekend.

Does it matter for some reason? Take the issues as they come and stay out of the preset uniforms. It's July 15. It's embarrassingly late to take any action, and bypassing the CDC seems a lot like spite. And yes, it's valuable and I hope, transparent, especially by region. You and I have noted many times how awful the hospitalization data is.

Trump admin doing "something" nationally, creating new government infrastructure to track hospital availability. Setting aside the article's political undertone, I have no idea why they don't work with the CDC to do this, but it's the first sign of the admin initiating anything nationally to track one of the most critical data points. It starts July 15, over 4 months into the pandemic. No word on transparency but here's hoping it's transparent and not politicized. The CDC data is a week late but it's always nicely objective.Also, this is all manual entry into some database, which sounds a very 1996 approach. WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public. The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic. Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the virus. But the Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions.

FL new hospitalizations are something to watch--might be a hint of a downturn. It's early and FL has other cities that have to go through a rise perhaps but it's still something to watch since the FL hospitalization occupancy numbers are crappy.

CovidTracking and Worldometer accounted for that. Data today took a little jump on some CA numbers.

Death count coming in LOWER than last Tuesday (and Thursday). That's a surprise. The rise late last week seemed to indicate higher numbers coming.

What he posted is true. Trump downplayed masks until all his henchman turned on him. It was a really bad leadership moment.

Unless CA or TX puts out a huge number of deaths, we may not be above 1000, which would be surprising and welcome data given the rise at the end of last week.

I don't blame the early problems on government either. It was a new virus that spread fast. It's unrealistic to think we would have instantly been ready to have testing capacity. But...that we still have shortages of test and massive delays is a problem.

The result is clear now. But in the moment, NYC Metro had more sick patients in hospitals than they could deal with and thought they needed a load of ventilators and super clean spaces (because remember: We didn't yet know better), so they transferred them to other hospitals and places where there was some standard of care and patient knowledge (nursing homes). Cuomo gets a lot of blame for the nursing home decision but unlike PA and other states that did the same thing, in NYC there were way more bodies needing treatment than beds available and at that point we had no idea where the #s would top out. I sometimes feel like people (maybe not you because you have a lot of NYC exposure) forget how dire things felt in NYC Metro. There was a lot of seat-of-pants flying. I don't have a problem with blaming Cuomo because heavy lays the crown and all that, but let's all remember ***** was really bad when he made those decisions. NYS is the ONLY state that made an attempt to follow those guidelines. Literally the only one. They modified them but the essence of the state decisions was based on those.

No one thought it was a good idea to use the ship, Javits, or Central Park tent hospitals. Those were in place for bottom-falls-out emergency. In retrospect, we should have had COVID wards/dedicated spaces (in WNY they had this in May) but in March and April, we were still climbing the knowledge curve. NYC metro's situation was unique in the US and will hopefully remain so.