shoshin

Philly is at 90 deaths/1M or 170 deaths/1M depending on how you count the area. Philadelphia like many cities out west, closed early but there is also a lot less population and people don't live like they do in NYC. It's not unaffected but it is having nothing like the NYC problem. The hospitals are struggling but only a few hospitals are having capacity issues and they are working with others to transfer patients. A sobering statistic follows the trend in many states that 50% of all the PA deaths have been in nursing homes. (Story was from yesterday.) In the WSJ story last week on that topic, lots of states had that exact number, with NY being a lower outlier due to so many deaths in NYC. There has been a buzz about Remdesivir for a while. I hope they can produce it quickly if it turns out as good as this initial data.

Philly isn’t a hotspot. Can’t even come close to comparing it to NY. NYC Metro is a zone unto itself in this. The closest cities are New Orleans and Detroit and they are not in the same galaxy. To the extent govs have to be more careful with reopening urban areas, they can easily be lagging behind rural counties on phased openings.

The anecdotes make the headlines bu responding to your next point, the data don’t lie. Take a look at any distribution, and they all massively underreport positive outcomes, and U60 with no complications is a very very low risk group.

Your first stat is wrong and your second sentence is one of the reasons why. And if you are not in an at risk group (obese, respiratory issues, diabetic, asthma, older, being the big ones) or care for someone in that group, your risk is minimal. BUT you should follow the guidelines and wash like a nut, wear a mask, avoid unnecessary crowds, etc just as a matter of good practice for the foreseeable future. There will be a new normal.

I'm no expert but I'm not sure if you can feed a family of 4 from soil and seeds in a bucket sitting in the window of a 4th floor apartment. I assume you're just being a troll, and it is kind of funny.

The guidelines are good. happy to see they are recommending contact tracing.

I see a lot of farming happening in East Newark. You are in a fantasyland. We are not headed to The Stand if we reopen, even if we reopen too soon. But it could be grim, that much is true.

There is no chance, zero, that we wait 1-2-3 years for a vaccine to reopen.

Wait until we all see our federal and state tax bills for the next 5 years. You thought the state and federal government spending was responsible before this hit? Ha!

With the exception of really hot spots still burning on May 1, I would think we better be reopening that first week in May to have any shot at a sub 2-year recovery. And that's ready or not. Put on the masks, install the apps, social distance the F out of yourself whenever you can and however you can, set up dedicated covid wards for testing and treatment...but get all the plans lined up and open 'er up.

The Philly mayor said closed through the summer a few days ago. He's since been more coy about his wording, seeming to say that he meant we won't be back to something like "normal" until then. But his original statement was that the shutdown would last through the summer. Setting aside the economic grey goo that would result from that long of a shutdown, it's just not necessary. If Covid-19 is strongly around in July and August, we will still be back to work. The economy just can't wait that long. But if we are back to work in July/August AND Covid is running rampant, then you can really look to your politicians, who got both the closure and reopening wrong.

This is having a way, way, way, way worse effect on the economy. It's not even close.

This is exactly right. I really hope there are specifics but I doubt there will be. Not a knock on the administration. Just that it's too early for them to have that in hand.

I'm not sure what you're saying.

My company is in line for the PPP money too, and it won't be enough but it will help. But when we are spending 2.3T in a few weeks time, it can take a day or two. The PPP rollout has changed multiple times since it was passed and it's being implemented in wayes the CARES act is not written. On another note, the NYS shutdown to May 15 seems like a dramatic overreaction. I know the IHME model has not been good but it's also been the best thing we have, and it shows that the health crisis will be way behind us on May 1. May 15 is waiting for it to get to near 0. We can't wait that long. Maybe in NYC they will need to but the rest of the country can't. This is the NYC projected healthcare needs.

Probably correlative. Bad weight, bad health, bad outcomes due to CV-19.

That's what Merkel said today. And her reopening was an announcement of extreme caution that they are reopening on a knife's edge. I hope that when we reopen, we heed her caution. We may not bounce back economically once for a long time. Twice is unthinkable. It's wrangling over something. It will pass.

That’s too long for the entire state and the ones around it. South Jersey, Upstate, WNY, and PA should be much closer to opening than mid May if they can come up with plans to test and track adequately. Bill Gates by the way said it would take 6-10 weeks to get this under control and get ready to reopen. This is right in line with that prediction. I know Gates gave people the virus so he could make money off vaccines or something something and Jeffrey Epstein, but he's been prescient throughout this. I wish he had Trump's ear on how to come out of this but hopefully other bright people have it.

You can see total tests and total cases on the worldometers site.

I have been trying to picture this. MLB will be the first league to give this a shot. It probably works fine for baseball since it's a quiet crowd. Football would be hard to imagine in an empty stadium. It would be like watching a scrimmage but where the game had meaning.

This is a lack or resources issue (kits and humans). And while the system is overwhelmed and most people recover well on their own, not testing everyone also keeps the general population healthier. My neighbors just are getting over it (presumably) after 9 and 12 days of fever, muscle pain, etc (they were in NYC the days before the NBA/Tom Hanks night). Their primary care doc gave them advice for what to do and how to self-treat, as well as when it would be necessary for the hospital. 2 cases with a certainty of 99+% as Covid, not tested. Before that, another person I know tested positive, her family got it too. But only the mom was counted as a positive test because why drag the whole family out and use up kits and nurse time to do the testing (as well as risk exposing the nurses). This is happening all over the place. I've seen we're undercounting cases by as much as 10x in the news. I have no idea what the real number of uncounted positive cases is and it's why I prefer counting deaths as a measure of progress, even with its flaws. You can't not count a body and at least a doctor saw it and made some informed Dx. If we have a national plan, we could re-open regionally as it made sense. And this is a national problem with NYC as its current epicenter but Florida and other states will get it bad when they are peaking in 3 weeks. Not NYC bad, but bad enough. Our shutdown helped contain it. Let's not make it a bigger problem by reopening in a random (state by state) fashion where we have a situation like what happened on the shutdowns where NYC is closed and Boston is open for 10 days.

And?

Gov Wolf deserves a ton of credit for Pa’s low death count. I tried to find details of what the Senate passed but couldn’t. I’m for openings but it wasn’t clear to me how informed by science this bill was. Great fix and that’s awesome. We are behind Europe on when we will peak, so that’s what I mean. A better comparison is where Europe was 10-14 days ago vs Us now. I’m not caring about this comparison that much but if we are doing an academic exercise, that’s a better data point. I have rarely blamed a single politician for decisions made in this crisis. Could Trump have done better? Absolutely. And if he wasn’t such a narcissist, he could admit that. But he didn’t make any decision early on that others would have made all that differently. Monday Morning QBing this is a fair thing to do when we vote in November but I didn’t see anyone in politics in the US or Europe getting ahead of this thing and many of his biggest critics were in fact advising to do the exact wrong thing (China travel).