dan11295

Real effects from Thanksgiving should start showing up starting about now. A lot of tests from Wednesday are now starting to come back, which would be 1-2 days after many people would get symptoms (which would be 4-5 days after Thanksgiving generally).

Still rain here in Maynard, but if snow in Westborough should flip soon, am low elevation so maybe not quite yet.

Wonder if they are a bit too bullish on metrowest. Could very easily bust low here IMHO.

Ugh @ California 24,000 cases, including 8700 in LA County

From Covid Tracking: - New cases: 224,831 - Positivity rate: 12.4% (+0.8) - In hospital: 101,276 (+609) - - In ICU: 19,858 (+416) - New deaths: 2,563 Noticed the high ratio of ICU vs overall hospital increase. Could be another indication that hospitals are restricting admissions to sicker patients?

Over 10k cases again in IL, but another good drop (-200) in total hospitalized. Following trends of adjacent states like MN/WI/IN as far as hospital numbers. Drops like this should keep the nationwide hospital number from going up as much (in addition to capacity issues limiting admissions in some places).

Watching Arizona now too. 2900 in hospital (+100 today) vs 3400 July peak. But in July they less in hospital for non-Covid emergencies due to their demographics (seasonal elderly population). Also in the summer they were able to send patients to Colorado and New Mexico. Not really an option now.

One thing I am watching is whether the plains/upper Midwest states which have seen the case, positivity & hospital numbers drop see that trend stop or reverse due to Thanksgiving. Will know that starting next week. Positive rate appears to be rising again in IN based on preliminary data. Outside of this area trends are just bad. PA had over 10k cases again today +150 hospitalized.

Haven't read much lately on risk of transmission from surfaces. Obviously we now know aerosol is primary transmission method. But risk is certainly greater now with more widespread transmission/cooler and drier air.

So its anything from nothing to over a foot for my area. could really bust either way. Comes down to how quickly it gets going/how warm,

Down by 70 per the dashboard. Thats just new people admitted. Doesn't factor discharges or deaths.

In hospital: 100,667 (+441) Very muted hospital increase today. Probably a combination of things: Rate of increase in cases last week was lower. Some areas in upper Midwest have seen their numbers go down some. Am also guessing in some areas many patients that would previously have been hospitalized are not actually being admitted.

Here in Mass. the main Sewage Treatment plant for metro Boston keeps track of the amount of SARS-Cov-2 Viral RNA is the wastewater, and the graph just had a major spike. This is through 12-3. That spike is too soon to show up in reporting testing yet.

Going to be 5 states with 10k cases today.

Anyone exposed last Thursday would typically get symptoms early this week. So they would be getting testing around now. So those cases would start to appear early next week.

Another fairly high numbers day for IL, 10,959 cases 191 deaths. On a positive sign hospital numbers continue to drop some off the latest peak, fell by 100 today to under 5700.

Yikes at Pennsylvania. Over 10k new cases. 5071 hospitalized (+90)

I suspect in many locations practical capacity limits are being approached, regardless of how many open beds a state says it has on a dashboard. You can open overflow facilities but without adequately trained staff they are limited in usefulness. Already reading reports about patients who might normally be hospitalized being sent home with oxygen and a pulse oximeter if their oxygen saturation level isn't too low.

-In hospital: 100,226 (+1,535) -In ICU: 19,396 (+408) The high ICU/overall ratio of the increase would imply hospitals are only taking more severe cases in general now.

Really an overflow facility. I was using the term loosely.Its not outdoors lol

Just came in with 4600 cases here in Mass. ugh. Looks like some of that may have been a backlog from yesterday though, but positivity is trending up, (~7% if college tests are excluded). Still have relatively low hospitalizations per capita compared to most other states, including CT & RI to our south. RI just opened a field hospital today.

Almost 5000 hospitalized now in PA (+238 today). 7700 new cases today.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/05/18/icu-bed-capacity-in-all-50-us-states-compared-infographic/?sh=6218b7cd24dc Here is an ICU bed per capita ranking. From the link above there are normally ~105k ICU beds in the US. There are currently ~19k COVID patients in ICU beds. Of course hospitals have been converting beds, etc. as much as space (and staffing) allows. But it gives you a sense of the stress on the hospital system when almost 20% of your normal ICU capacity is COVID.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/rankings-and-ratings/states-ranked-by-hospital-beds-per-1-000-population.html Hospital beds per capita. Would help explain why the Dakotas were not completely overwhelmed despite their very high per capita numbers. Although Wisconsin is very low on this list, lowest numbers on this list are generally western and southwestern states.

Obviously they are trying to target the source of a large % of current mortality. I agree that the employees should be vaccinated early as well. But I guess you cannot consider allowing visitation again in the near term without the residents vaccinated. I wonder how long it will take for vaccinating to begin cutting into infections/mortality numbers. Am guessing with a focus on nursing homes you can begin to really cut into the infection numbers there by sometime in early/mid January. That would put early February for when you would be noticeably cutting into mortality. I suspect that we will be over the crest of the current infection wave by that point, so that will help accelerate the decline in numbers there.