ramblinwreckguru
Banned
- Messages
- 899
- Location
- Savannah, GA
Americans really don't need to be going to the EU during a pandemic anyway.
Americans really don't need to be going to the EU during a pandemic anyway.
@GTNavyNuke @bwelbo The news is confounding. Woke up to “cases in Florida still rising” yet daily total is 60% of the peak & progressively lower the last 3 days. Can’t trust anyone to write anything half accurate anymore. Thank God the actual data is available to look at with our own eyes in many cases.
Whoever coined the phrase “media porn” nailed it.
From an article I read this morning ---
In Texas the “second wave” propaganda has gotten so bad that the leaders of the four major hospitals in Houston took the extraordinary step late last week of holding a joint press conference to clarify that the scare stories of Houston hospitals being overwhelmed with Covid cases are simply untrue. Dr. Marc Boom of Houston Methodist said the reporting on hospital capacity is misleading. He said, “quite frankly, we’re concerned that there is a level of alarm in the community that is unwarranted right now”.
From an article I read this morning ---
In Texas the “second wave” propaganda has gotten so bad that the leaders of the four major hospitals in Houston took the extraordinary step late last week of holding a joint press conference to clarify that the scare stories of Houston hospitals being overwhelmed with Covid cases are simply untrue. Dr. Marc Boom of Houston Methodist said the reporting on hospital capacity is misleading. He said, “quite frankly, we’re concerned that there is a level of alarm in the community that is unwarranted right now”.
Ok, now read pages 4 and 5, the part where they describe their data. The dataset of weekly customer visits - what their analysis is based on - runs from March 1 to May 16. They used data that included before SIP, after SIP, and local SIP orders; they emphasize county SIPs as well. As you will see, the span of the data is adequate to meet your objection and state-wide SIPs are deprecated in favor of local restrictions. And the estimates support their analysis.Just did. Now I know why their conclusions are so wildly incorrect. They’re using the dates of the “legal” lockdowns. So for example - that would be mid April for South Carolina, as that is when we imposed a fine for being out. But the executive order to shut down businesses of many types came a month earlier. So let that sink in. Bars and restaurants close mid-March, theatres, etc. They closed, trust me. Then the fines for stay at home orders was mid April. Those orders were to keep people home, not to force businesses to close who were ignoring orders. We still had more people out and about than they wanted, and so they wanted to lock it down further. This is even more proof the study has it backwards.
@RamblinRed I’m extremely familiar with the daily ups and downs, moving averages, etc. I’m mocking blatantly misleading headlines & people’s propensity to not read past the top 2 lines. Sunday and Monday are Florida’s lowest 2 days of the week because they report Friday’s cases on Saturday, etc plus you got the results of the early week testing being received. The newspapers, etc just want people to read news so they can generate advertising revenue. A headline that reads “cases going down” is not click bait, it’s about as simple as that. People fall for it hook, line & sinker. There’s other agendas, but that’s primary.
Death data and case data are going up and down every day until it stabilizes somewhere after about 2 weeks. It’s amazing how this works because the hospital is allegedly reporting every C19 death daily & case to the Dept of Health, deaths thru the county Medical Examiner, their statement not mine. With contact tracing supposedly being what it is, it’s baffling how bad the data is. The ME says it’s because people after the fact are telling him the person had C19 when the listed cause of death is heart attack or car accident & stuff like that. Not that many people die in my county so it should not be rocket science. Just sloppy. They could be the worst government department in my county & that in itself is quite an accomplishment.
I do wish FL would include hospitalizations with their public numbers, though it is publicly available if you know where to look for it. (FL has a public Tableau workbook).
Using those numbers FL isn't at a crisis point yet, it is at a point that it should be concerned. As of this afternoon that workbook has ICU availability in the state at 19.81%. Some counties are worse than others Hillsborough is showing 11.67% of ICU beds left (49), Orange is showing 17.43% ICU beds left (57). The numbers in this workbook jumped up on average about 5-6% last week when they changed how they counted utilization and are not back to where they were before and due to the reporting change they are undercounting by it looks like about 5% the utilization.
The news porn over rising cases like reporting 36 states have increasing numbers obscures a lesser but still very serious situation. in my own tracking (where I look at a combination of how fast cases are doubling, how much positive test % are increasing, how hospitalizations are increasing) I currently have 9 states in a red zone and 11 in a yellow zone and not all of those are created equal. But we do have serious issues and have a multitude of states that are currently not in control of their outbreaks, FL and GA would both fall into that for me. Both are in a place where they are not overwhelmed today, but if they don't get control of it in the week or so in about 3 weeks they are going to be in really bad places. What i really like to look for are graphs where the cases and hospitalizations are almost vertical lines. Those are places where they have lost control of any containment and are really going to have to work to get it back under control. Hospitalizations are the most important thing to track if they have good measurements. When hospitals get full that is when deaths will take off as then they can't devote the same amount of time or resources to patients.
I pay basically no attention to deaths as they are such a lagging indicator that they are completely unreliable if you actually want to manage an outbreak in real time. COVID Tracking Project has a great blog on tracking of deaths and the issues with it. First, from infection to the actual reporting of the death takes an avg of 28 days, so if you are waiting on seeing deaths rise than you have lose a month. Second, just the reporting of a death can take 7 days (4-5 business days) - there is alot of bureaucracy in that reporting, alot of steps that have to be gone through.
https://covidtracking.com/blog/why-...raphics-in-the-us-make-death-trends-harder-to
The only reason (my opinion) hospital beds at this point have any interest is as a predicting indicator of possible deaths. States have been through so much planning that they have a ton of overflow capacity available if they have to use it. So if the ICU fills up, patients don’t end up staying and dying at home like they did in other countries. They have surge capacity they will bring to bear. But it of course is concerning because regardless of whether beds fill up or not, it’s just a matter of math that a higher certain number of people will be dying as more and more people go to the hospital.
Florida has every source of information anyone’s wanting, albeit not very organized but it’s there.Thanks Liberty, that is the site I mentioned that I use for hospitalizations in FL.