Coronavirus

[OSUmetstud]

10 hours ago, dta1984 said:

That's a huge percentage of non contagious positive tests

"Public health experts throughout the U.S. are raising concerns that "standard [COVID-19] tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus," the New York Times reported on Saturday. A significant majority of the individuals who test positive "are not likely to be contagious," the paper says. "

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/report-90-covid-19-cases-might-not-be-contagious

This is an old article. The NYT article which does a better job at describing the issue discusses why. Its likely that these people are being caught too late in their illness/infection when they get their positive test. Michael Mina discusses this back a few months ago on this week in virology. The average cycle to positive was 35 on the the RT-PCR meaning the majority of people are being caught after they are infectious. The point of care antigen testing thats being done more now is less sensitive so if you're positive from that you're more likely to fall in the infectious band. 

The high sensitivity RT-PCR test is still needed for clinic diagnosis. When people are late in their illness and show up at the hospital sometimes they have very little virus left. The inflammatory response is whats killing people generally not when they have a huge amount of virus. 

[Hoosier]

Considering it's thanksgiving, the early reporting states are putting up fairly high numbers.  Perhaps the decrease from holiday reporting will show up more significantly in the coming days.

[dan11295]

1 minute ago, Hoosier said:

Considering it's thanksgiving, the early reporting states are putting up fairly high numbers.  Perhaps the decrease from holiday reporting will show up more significantly in the coming days.

Would make sense if most of that data is from yesterday. It will become more apparent in the coming days. Multiple states aren't going to report today (I know Mass. isn't).

[Hoosier]

12k in Illinois.

[Hoosier]

Having thanksgiving outdoors today is not really feasible in a lot of the northern US. 

[nwohweather]

Having thanksgiving outdoors today is not really feasible in a lot of the northern US. 

So I’ve heard. My buddy flew from Charlotte to Denver and the temp was 50° less when he got off the plane lol.

We’re doing a smoked turkey outside, quite a bit of family drove in from out of town and it’s 83°. Can’t beat an outdoors thanksgiving in shorts

[Hoosier]

Lots of cars down the street.  Somebody's having a big gathering.

[Hoosier]

Sort of hit a wall.  Almost 20 states haven't reported yet.

[Malacka11]

Went for a run this morning... everywhere I went smelled like food. Saw quite a few more cars on the road and all that; nothing crazy like what Hoosier's describing but there's definitely a lot of family fun going on right now. Even if everyone were to just celebrate with their own immediate families, I wonder if there would be a notable increase. Please don't weenie me, I'm just speculating.

[dan11295]

2 minutes ago, Hoosier said:

Sort of hit a wall.  Almost 20 states haven't reported yet.

Many states are not reporting for Thanksgiving. Even some that are probably will have limited county level data.The combination of closed testing sites, closed labs, etc. will cause numbers to be artificially lower for 4-5 days at least (See Labor Day). With testing capacity so strained right now I would think the effects on numbers would be even worse.

[dta1984]

Remember to avoid singing, keep the music down and limit the alcohol today.  

[Hoosier]

25 minutes ago, dan11295 said:

Many states are not reporting for Thanksgiving. Even some that are probably will have limited county level data.The combination of closed testing sites, closed labs, etc. will cause numbers to be artificially lower for 4-5 days at least (See Labor Day). With testing capacity so strained right now I would think the effects on numbers would be even worse.

No doubt there will be some ugly looking data dumps on the rebound.  

[Hoosier]

20 minutes ago, dta1984 said:

Remember to avoid singing, keep the music down and limit the alcohol today.  

What's sad is that all of those recommendations immediately made sense as to why it could increase the transmission risk.  Been at this too long.  

[nwohweather]

Remember to avoid singing, keep the music down and limit the alcohol today.  

I blame the Lions for the yelling and alcohol today

[Cary67]

4 hours ago, Hoosier said:

Having thanksgiving outdoors today is not really feasible in a lot of the northern US. 

Just cold enough to not snow

[Hoosier]

The AstraZeneca vaccine is taking on substantial criticism because of how they ran the trials.

[RyanDe680]

1 hour ago, Malacka11 said:

Went for a run this morning... everywhere I went smelled like food. Saw quite a few more cars on the road and all that; nothing crazy like what Hoosier's describing but there's definitely a lot of family fun going on right now. Even if everyone were to just celebrate with their own immediate families, I wonder if there would be a notable increase. Please don't weenie me, I'm just speculating.

Actually +1 to this.  I noticed that too along with a lot of wood burning (fireplaces)

[RyanDe680]

Just now, Hoosier said:

The AstraZeneca vaccine is taking on substantial criticism because of how they ran the trials.

There’s a lot of questions on the accuracy and the distribution of the doses.  

[Hoosier]

Swedish Life Expectancy to Drop for First Time in Century Due to Covid-19

(Bloomberg) -- Life expectancy is falling in Sweden, which the country’s statistics agency says is directly tied to the coronavirus pandemic.

The average age people live “has increased steadily in Sweden from 1900 to 2019,” the agency said in a statement on Wednesday. “The fact that it’s now falling stands out.”

Sweden has suffered a much higher Covid-19 mortality rate than its Nordic neighbors, with its old-age care homes particularly hard hit. The country’s decision not to impose a lockdown remains controversial, and authorities are now shifting gear to place outright bans on some forms of social interaction to fight the virus.

For men, average life expectancy has already fallen to 80.8 in the year through August, from 81.3, Statistics Sweden said. For women, it fell to 84.4 from 84.7.

Based on the development so far, the statistics agency said it expects that “Covid-19 will cut life expectancy this year.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/swedish-life-expectancy-to-drop-for-first-time-in-century-due-to-covid-19/ar-BB1blluD?ocid=uxbndlbing

[StormfanaticInd]

Still managed 1300 deaths with twenty states not reporting and partial data from about 10 others. The data dump is going to be ugly folks

[KokomoWX]

I am solo for the holidays and went to a park to photograph birds and do a hike.  Lots of folks on the road and many houses had family gatherings.  My social media feeds are also representative of family gatherings.  Let's see what happen when stores open for Black Friday sales.  

[dan11295]

6 hours ago, KokomoWX said:

I am solo for the holidays and went to a park to photograph birds and do a hike.  Lots of folks on the road and many houses had family gatherings.  My social media feeds are also representative of family gatherings.  Let's see what happen when stores open for Black Friday sales.  

Was thinking about the start of holiday stopping season as well. Obviously a portion of the population will avoid the stores, but many wont. One question is how well will stores enforce capacity restrictions? They might be reluctant as they don't want to lose the ability to make a sale but making them wait outside for a long time. Too many people shopping and spending lots of time in the store increases the risk.

[NEILwxbo]

Working at Chicago outlet mall & easily thousands of people here today. Mall said they were gonna only allow half of the parking lot to fill up before blocking it off, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Atleast every store is enforcing the occupancy policies, but still kind of unnerving (but not surprising) to see these crowds still 

[dan11295]

30 minutes ago, NEILwxbo said:

Working at Chicago outlet mall & easily thousands of people here today. Mall said they were gonna only allow half of the parking lot to fill up before blocking it off, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Atleast every store is enforcing the occupancy policies, but still kind of unnerving (but not surprising) to see these crowds still 

Of course in some areas of the country stores may slack off on enforcing occupancy rules. More foot traffic in enclosed spaces = greater risk, especially if people spend a lot of time in the stores. Not as risky as in person T-day dinner but its certainly there. Some of the spread in the El Paso area for example was linked to big box stores.

Between the travel, holiday gatherings and now start of shopping season. Then everyone goes back to work in a few days.

[Hoosier]

The Indiana University Fairbanks School of Public Health has been doing an ongoing study of the prevalence of covid-19 in the state of Indiana.  Their latest numbers really surprised me.  As of November 20, they estimate that only 10.6% of the state has been infected.  The reason this surprised me is that it would mean about 715,000 people have been infected, and we had about 280,000 confirmed cases on 11/20.  So, it would seem to imply that since the start of the pandemic, testing in Indiana has successfully caught about 1 out of 2.5 cases (I understand the lag with testing and getting results, but just keeping it simple). That goes against basically everything I have read.  I acknowledge that there is state by state variance on how many cases have been caught, but 1 out of 2.5 sounds like an awfully damn good success rate.  I was wondering if I'm missing something and there's some word gaming, like does a confirmed case not always equal an infection, but I don't know.

If the 10.6% is somehow right, and I have my doubts, it's bad news as the state has already had well over 5k deaths and vaccines are still weeks to months away. 

[nwohweather]

Working at Chicago outlet mall & easily thousands of people here today. Mall said they were gonna only allow half of the parking lot to fill up before blocking it off, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Atleast every store is enforcing the occupancy policies, but still kind of unnerving (but not surprising) to see these crowds still 

I’m kind of shocked. Went to Dick’s Sporting Goods and Target today, deader than a usual day. Crazy slow, let alone for a Black Friday

[OSUmetstud]

1 hour ago, Hoosier said:

The Indiana University Fairbanks School of Public Health has been doing an ongoing study of the prevalence of covid-19 in the state of Indiana.  Their latest numbers really surprised me.  As of November 20, they estimate that only 10.6% of the state has been infected.  The reason this surprised me is that it would mean about 715,000 people have been infected, and we had about 280,000 confirmed cases on 11/20.  So, it would seem to imply that since the start of the pandemic, testing in Indiana has successfully caught about 1 out of 2.5 cases (I understand the lag with testing and getting results, but just keeping it simple). That goes against basically everything I have read.  I acknowledge that there is state by state variance on how many cases have been caught, but 1 out of 2.5 sounds like an awfully damn good success rate.  I was wondering if I'm missing something and there's some word gaming, like does a confirmed case not always equal an infection, but I don't know.

If the 10.6% is somehow right, and I have my doubts, it's bad news as the state has already had well over 5k deaths and vaccines are still weeks to months away. 

The CDC has been doing a Commercial Lab Seroprevalence Survey in each state. In Indiana, as of September 15th, they had 4%. That should be representative of the infections around September 1st. 

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#national-lab

And the caveats on the interpreting the data. 

Interpreting Serology Results from These Surveys

These surveys have limitations to consider when interpreting the results.

• The surveys aim to collect specimens nationwide, although results might not represent the geographic and demographic distribution of the population. Blood samples for the study were not chosen randomly and might not be representative of the US population.
• People who have blood taken for routine medical care or sick visits might not represent people in the general population because of differences in their overall health, their disease exposure risk, because they sought health care and had a blood test, or because of their immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection.
• Seroprevalence estimates for age and sex might not be available for all places. This can occur when there are too few samples to calculate the estimates for a specific age or sex group. Some results could be false-positive results (the test result is positive, but the person does not really have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2), or false-negative results (the person has antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, but the test doesn’t detect them). False-positive results are more likely to change the survey results if it is an area where the percentage of people previously infected is relatively low. This might cause results to estimate that more people are infected in the community than actually are.
• Results from seroprevalence surveys should not be interpreted to mean that people who have tested positive for having SARS-CoV-2 antibodies are immune. We do not know whether having SARS-CoV-2 antibodies provides protection against getting infected again. Other studies are planned to learn more about SARS-COV-2 antibodies, including how long they last, whether they provide protection against getting infected again, and if people get infected again, whether having antibodies can make that illness milder.
• While some seroprevalence surveys study risk factors for infection, such as a person’s occupation or underlying health conditions, this seroprevalence survey was not designed to be able to provide that information.
• Finally, other seroprevalence surveys are designed to show how long antibodies last in people’s bodies following infection. This survey was not designed to provide that information.

[OSUmetstud]

 

[Stebo]

5 hours ago, NEILwxbo said:

Working at Chicago outlet mall & easily thousands of people here today. Mall said they were gonna only allow half of the parking lot to fill up before blocking it off, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Atleast every store is enforcing the occupancy policies, but still kind of unnerving (but not surprising) to see these crowds still 

The shopping center in Allen Park on the way into work was crazy busy, the airport is deader than a slow Sunday though.

[vpbob21]

3 hours ago, nwohweather said:

I’m kind of shocked. Went to Dick’s Sporting Goods and Target today, deader than a usual day. Crazy slow, let alone for a Black Friday

That's certainly not the case around here.  I had a couple stores I wanted to go to today, but saw completely full parking lots so I just kept on driving.