ErinInTheSky

Oh absolutely. This is going to continue until we have a vaccine. I think it's pie in the sky to think that even if the government opens things up, that everyone will act like things are opened up. When they opened things up in Wuhan, people are STILL staying inside, businesses there are not operating at full capacity nearly. And that's with the disease completely eradicated in China. With the disease still active, spreading? Yeah, good luck. No arbitrary "we'll open up" date is ever going to work. Else we'll see deaths come back to the 2000-3000/day range, and if we refuse to shut down then, the sky is the limit. This thing will kill with no regard.

Bill Gates illustrates what I'm trying to say best with a recent interview with this quote: “There really is no middle ground, and it’s very tough to say to people, ‘Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner. We want you to keep spending because there’s maybe a politician who thinks GDP growth is all that counts,’”

It doesn't matter if they allow it or not. People won't go to work or engage in economic activity if bodies start piling up.

If that happens then we will just all shut down again. So like it will either happen because we self police and are slow to return to normal or it will happen because the virus runs rampant again.

Life is going to be so weird for the next year or two and possibly for the rest of our lives. Like you couldn't pay me to go to a restaurant right now. I'm likely going to avoid them for quite a while. And I'm seriously considering just not returning my son to daycare. I have a work from job so it's fairly easy if I want to avoid it. Movie theatres? I mean... I can't see that anytime soon. I don't see big gatherings, festivals, fairs, etc or concerts through the summer, there will be too much a chance of a few asymptomatic people starting this whole damn thing over again. Like... perhaps we'll be allowed out, but we'll all be wearing masks, there will be temperature checks everywhere, people will be social distancing 6 feet often, etc. I realize that not everyone will care, but a lot of people will and just that will put a damper on any sort of return to normalcy until this damn vaccine happens.

Yup. We're bringing down the cases but the simple fact of the matter is, until we have a robust testing system, we can't open back up. There will likely be repeated shutdowns and quarantines for cities/states as clusters pop up again given that this disease has a 2 week incubation period and will spread asymptomatically. We're going to be doing some form of what we are doing right now for the next year at least.

Basically goes to show how bad this would be if it were not contained. Even locked down completely, we are losing more people every day than we do to heart disease.

1.7k deaths today and we aren't at the evening update yet. This would make today a day where COVID is the leading cause of death in the US. 1.6k die of heart disease every day.

Honestly I think he should have done the shutdown earlier but his early school closure was great.

It's almost certainly a lot more. Maryland is going to be in one of the best shapes of any state though because we closed schools much earlier than other states.

"I think vaccines are not going to be a realistic solution for years. The 12-to-18 month timeline that you’ve likely heard assumes that the science works in our favor. But it will take years to get the quantities that we need. I don’t see vaccines being a viable solution for a long time."

https://daily.jstor.org/jennifer-nuzzo-were-definitely-not-overreacting-to-covid-19/ Fascinating article about how vaccines may never work for COVID and we may have to entirely change how we interact for years.

The COVID situation is improving right now thanks to very good social distancing. I'm looking at models now calling for 80k or so total deaths. Remember though: It's going to be a while before we can drop the shelter in place. Even with the United States shelter in place orders all over this country, this virus is the third leading cause of death for the last 5 days behind only heart disease and cancer. Allowed unrestricted, it would be truly catastrophic. This week and next week will be tough - remember it takes 10-14 days after a positive test to usually die from this bug. Deaths are going to be really high for a while. Then it'll take a month or so to come down to lower ranges, and we'll hopefully have a testing system in place to slowly come back off of the shelter in place guidelines. Until we have a vaccine though, we'll likely see continued lockdowns, social distancing orders come back up from time to time.

This is why we will have the worst response of any country:

We are easily going to have the worst response to this pandemic of any country. We are still in the exponential growth phase too.

Whelp. The non-COVID hospital ship is now a COVID ship.

This is going to kill several times more people than the flu, in a fraction of the time, WHILE we are under intense stay at home orders. Insane to imagine what this thing could do if allowed to run completely rampant.

I think we are being mired in the details. Ultimately, we are arguing over adding a new cause of death as bad as cancer this year or several times worse. Its bad no matter what. It could have been better, but here we are and we will be here a long time.

“Mankind’s greatest failure is it’s inability to understand the exponential function.” - Prof Albert Bartlett Every country, ours included, thought it couldn’t get that bad. Well almost every country. Singapore, South Korea, Japan all were on top of their stuff and stockpiled.

We’ll see. As of right now we are easily heading towards a few hundred thousand deaths, loss of icu capacity, and the highest per capita infection of any country if trends continue. I mean... we aren’t all shut down for nothing, and we’re going to be this way for a long time while many people die.

I’m not so sure of that. Let’s hope we don’t but we are still running behind Europe. They hit their vent capacities and their rates shot up. Some states are already seeing pretty high mortality rates, including my home state of Louisiana.

So the US is about to run out of drugs required to run ventilators. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/04/826961777/u-s-may-get-more-ventilators-but-run-out-of-medicine-for-covid-19-patients

Mortality rates are kind of useless to speculate over at this point. This is not a rate problem but a capacity problem. Even a novel flu with a mortality rate of .1% can strain the health care system. A coronavirus with no immunity and a mortality rate of 0.6-0.7% (true, infection based) is catastrophic. On top of that, once the medical system is adequately wrecked, the mortality rate shoots up. When ventilators no longer are available, more people die. Right now on a daily basis, COVID is the 3rd largest killer. In the next few days on a daily basis, it will be the largest, surpassing heart disease in this country: https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-no-3-cause-death-us-after-heart-disease-cancer-1495506 On top of all of this is the chemotherapy being delayed, the drug supply shortages, the less and less ICU capacity to handle strokes and heart attacks, etc. Quibbling over death rates Being 0.7 or 3.4 in a pandemic is next to useless - when all is said and done we will be able to look back and calculate it properly.

US. Going to be the deadliest day by far. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

1315 deaths and climbing today. It's going to be bad.