Hoosier

Still looking like a bit of snow in the sub this weekend.

I think the sub 0.10" streak is going to end at IND. Already up to 0.07" today.

It's too bad that the calendar isn't different and that there's not like 6 more months to work on vaccines/better treatments before fall/winter.

A couple of the trials were paused over safety concerns. Vaccine may come out before the end of the year, but that's not going to really help us through the rest of 2020. The antibody therapies, even if they get approved for emergency use sometime soon, probably won't be widely available enough early on to really put a big dent in things.

A couple months from now we may be looking back on October as the good old days. The projections farther out in time should be used with caution, but the IHME has the US at 2000+ deaths per day again by the time we get to late December. Honestly, given the current situation, descent farther into fall/winter and a series of events which will present opportunities for more spread (halloween, in-person voting, Thanksgiving, etc) the IHME doesn't seem too unrealistic.

Indeed. The official global death toll is currently around 1.1 million. There has probably been significant undercounting, with some countries severely undercounting. Even if the current toll is 2 million or 3 million, that is a long way from Spanish flu levels.

I'll take the one southwest of Kankakee.

Didn't Spanish flu have a fatality rate of 2.5% or something like that? Covid-19 is probably more like 0.5% when you try to account for the large amount of undocumented cases.

Just passed the anniversary of the Great Chicago fire. Of course the city was largely made of wood then.

Indiana's health commissioner, who has been a fixture at the news briefings, has tested positive. She is asymptomatic as of now but her daughter and infant grandson have symptoms. https://www.wishtv.com/news/indiana-news/indiana-health-commissioner-contracts-coronavirus-mask-mandate-extended-to-nov-14/

Do you mean per day? Because we were getting 200,000 to about 400,000 confirmed cases per week in the summer. Widespread herd immunity seems like it would be really hard to pull off with covid-19, especially with it becoming more clear that reinfections can happen some months after getting it. It would sort of be like a hamster running on the wheel. You'd have to get so many people sick so fast (before the immunity starts to wear off), which the hospitals wouldn't be able to handle. Trying to keep it contained to younger people isn't a bad idea on paper, but it inevitably ends up spreading to older/more vulnerable as time goes by.

Just a tad windy today. I look outside and there's a bunch of leaves flying through the air.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine trial and the Eli Lilly antibody trial are both paused due to unexplained illness in participants. Hopefully just a minor blip.

From March through July... 1,336,561 people died in the US. The expected number (which is typically remarkably stable, outside of a freak occurrence like a pandemic of course) is 1,111,031, which is 225,000 more than expected. Not all of the excess is directly because of the virus, but many are. https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3948

Yeah, the stats support more blacks dying per capita. More white people have died in total, but not when adjusted for population.

Someone died after getting reinfected. This is the first such documented instance. She had leukemia, but it was treatable, so the cause of death is being attributed to covid-19. https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/13/covid-patient-becomes-first-in-world-to-die-after-being-reinfected-13414646/

Last year I started this thread on October 19. I didn't necessarily expect to be starting this one even earlier, but here we are. Extended looks to feature some bouts of unseasonable chill, with perhaps a synoptic snow system or two between now and the end of the month. At the very least, the lake effect snow machine should fire up.

Including today, the 55 day total precipitation at IND is 0.18". The driest 60 day stretch on record (any time of year) for Indianapolis is 0.26", which happened in 1963. If IND can get through Saturday with 0.07" or less, it would become the driest 60 day period on record.

Since August 19, the two biggest calendar day rainfalls at IND are 0.08" and 0.06"

Gonna need the heavier stuff in Morgan county to avoid IND. If it stays light/stratiform, I don't think there's gonna be enough to get to 0.10"

0.02" at IND so far. There is some more rain to the west though and will need to keep any additional to 0.07" or less to keep the streak of sub 0.10" days alive.

Nice list. I would probably add the -23 on 1/30/2019 to the hardest to break list. It stands out quite a bit when looking at surrounding days on the calendar. And I think you could make a case that it's harder to break -25 on 12/24/1983 than -27 on 1/20/1985 due to when the coldest temps tend to occur relative to climo, but both are undoubtedly very difficult. After watching what happened in the late January 2019 arctic outbreak, I am more convinced than ever that the all-time record would have to be broken via cold air advection and not radiational cooling driven. The UHI just won't allow it. It would take a truly balls cold airmass aloft to be able to break it though...

Might as well not have a policy like that if it's not going to be enforced. Unless they are hoping that a mere announcement would dissuade some people from coming in. There would have to be all kinds of exemptions anyway. What about people who live in Indiana and work in Chicago?

Good chance I won't be able to freely travel to Chicago soon. https://fox59.com/news/coronavirus/chicago-residents-urged-not-to-travel-to-indiana-amid-surge-in-coronavirus-cases/amp/ Could be a bigger problem for me if it becomes a statewide policy because I cross the border into Illinois somewhat regularly.

Was reading about a documented reinfection in Israel. Someone had it in April and then again in August. Obviously we are learning in real time, but the issue of immunity seems like a complex thing that depends on many factors, such as a person's overall immune health to severity of the first infection to how much virus that a person is exposed to, among other things. There is probably a good chance that most people who have had it are essentially protected for a while, but what is "a while?" I think there are considerably more reinfections out there that haven't been able to be documented, partly because so many cases were missed earlier on.