Hoosier

Hit 300k on worldometers.

Whether or not you blame it on holidays, we are not going in the right direction. We have a non-zero shot at seeing 300k cases today, and likely to end up north of 280k.

Think about those first two sentences. If you say that 50% of people who have died are over 80, then who makes up the other 50%? You have a knack at making head scratching posts at this board, and it started well before the virus came.

I agree we'll drop. I'm just not falling for overly optimistic projections given what we have seen since this started, and now the added thing of the vaccine rollout being messy, which is going to take time to fix. Even then, a significant chunk of the population won't take it. I could easily see us having about 50k-100k cases per day through most of the spring, but hopefully not.

The problem with your post is that any age group can get covid. I think we will get to a point where the ratio of hospitalizations/deaths to cases drops as more of the vulnerable are vaccinated, but I expect the number of cases to be stubbornly elevated even past March/April.

Really depends on what individual preferences are. If we manage 1 huge storm, that will make it a good winter in the eyes of some.

You have a bizarre obsession with mentioning suicide.

Thank you. We actually shared the same birthday... many years apart of course since he was in my mom's age group. That was always a thing with us. We greeted each other by the number month/day of our birthday instead of by name. Good guy and such an unfortunate way to go since hospitals don't allow visitors.

My mom's cousin (well, technically my cousin too) passed away earlier this morning. He was 68. I have already been taking the virus seriously, but it hits a little differently now.

The only thing that surprised me is that it didn't happen weeks ago. Anyway, shouldn't be making references to it here. A friendly reminder from the admin: https://www.americanwx.com/bb/announcement/21-reminder-no-political-discussions/

The holidays complicate the picture, but if you just compare the numbers, we are pretty much where we were right before Christmas in terms of cases and deaths. Hopefully a downturn is more obvious than this in the next couple weeks.

Here's the first 5 days of the month. Overall temperature departures, high temperature departures and low temperature departures. The warmer than average lows are really propping things up in much of this sub.

Normally don't comment on pics, but that is awesome yet creepy.

I have an update that's not very good. He seemed to be doing relatively ok but then got much worse last night. High fever, oxygen level dropped into the 70s and started having stroke like symptoms. Not sure if he actually had a stroke but he is currently in the hospital in ICU. They are trying to transfer him from a Bipap machine to high flow oxygen. He is receiving convalescent plasma (that's what was said, so I assume it is that and not the monoclonal antibodies) but I wonder if maybe he's passed the optimal window for that treatment. I'm not sure exactly when he started developing symptoms, but since he tested positive 10 days ago, it would be fair to think that he's had symptoms for about 2 weeks.

Not that it can't come back to some degree on future model runs, but the southern snow is completely gone on the 12z GFS.

Got a grass/glacier mix here. Too many bare spots.

My hoar frost is at about 1.5 on a scale of 1-10. Enjoying the pics though.

Hmm. They don't strike me as a subpar office (the performance on the recent storm notwithstanding) but perhaps somebody living in their cwa would have a different take.

What's an epic winter down there? 3 inches? 6 inches? I guess maybe the bar could be slightly higher for Dallas considering their geographic location.

Pessimism is understandable with how things have been going, but I think you could add Atlanta, Birmingham and Dallas together and Indy will still come out on top by the time it's over.

Despite some improving metrics, still having a pretty high positivity rate here in IN. I wonder if one reason for this is that the surveillance testing at the universities would have largely stopped in recent weeks, which lowers the denominator in the ratio of positive tests/tests performed.

Remember seeing this name on various NWS products. https://www.weather.gov/ilx/ernie-retire

Anecdotally I'd say the Bering Sea Rule/concept has more merit, which would make sense since it's on a shorter time scale. The LRC seems too easy to go back and try to fit the narrative that you want.

I'm much more into short/medium range stuff and would defer to mets and other knowledgeable people for the long range, but fwiw, I agree with the idea of things getting better after mid-month or so. There are no guarantees that it will work out to everybody's liking, but overall I think that it will be a pattern with more cold air available for systems to work with instead of the super marginal thermal setups that we have been seeing.

This system had overachiever written all over it as we were discussing in the January thread. Just wasn't sure exactly where.