Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[alfred russel]

Your country is putting the world at risk with your fucked up politics.  Fuck tone.

The virus originated in China, which lied and covered up the situation, and it ended up escaping from China.

The current epicenter is Europe.

The third world is going to be hopeless to respond, as is usual in health crises because it lacks the resources.

But CC has determined that the US is the country with the culpability. 

[OttoVonBismarck]

Also, I'm 100% against the way Trump does this, but there actually is a serious bias in the news media with reporting on testing. Trump deserves, and I hope will be, held accountable for his horrible initial response to this disease--because it has literally cost lives. But virtually no articles in the Washington Post or New York Times, written in the last week, will actually tell you how many total tests the U.S. has conducted--because it would show that we've conducted more tests than any other country on earth, and that we are testing more people per day than any other country.

The New York Times actually had a pretty good article that showed this fact (but still gave the appropriate caveat that we were still lagging SK in tests per population, and that we were playing catch up), but I can't even find it anymore.

Meanwhile you can easily find articles like this one: WaPo link, that touts South Korea's top testing numbers and mentions their 394,000 total tests, but nowhere makes available the fact that the U.S. has tested 3x as many total.

There's definitely an urge here in trying to hammer Trump (something I agree with in principle) to ignore that we've made any progress at all, which just adds to a narrative of disinformation.

[merithyn]

Can you provide links to where that information is being reported, Otto? I'm having a hard time finding any.

[Fate]

The U.S. administration is lead by an imbecile and our initial response was bad. But let's not deny reality that we have far more wealth and resources to throw at something like a testing regime than any other country on earth, and the simple numbers are bearing that out right now.

We have nurses wearing garbage bags for PPE. Our country is a failed state in NYC. We're being given 1 mask to use the whole shift and it'll probably get downgraded to 1 mask per week at this rate. All the while the hospital CEO is paid 6 million dollars and is working from home. Our wealth is concentrated in the 0.01% and means jack shit for the troops on the ground. ER docs are getting pay cuts in Boston and hospitals all around the country are laying off staff. America #1.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The U.S. administration is lead by an imbecile and our initial response was bad. But let's not deny reality that we have far more wealth and resources to throw at something like a testing regime than any other country on earth, and the simple numbers are bearing that out right now.

We have nurses wearing garbage bags for PPE. Our country is a failed state in NYC. We're being given 1 mask to use the whole shift and it'll probably get downgraded to 1 mask per week at this rate. All the while the hospital CEO is paid 6 million dollars and is working from home. Our wealth is concentrated in the 0.01% and means jack shit for the troops on the ground.

Not really relevant to anything I had said--but yes that's terrible. We saw the same thing in Italy as well and likely will see it in any country, first world or not, whose health system becomes overwhelmed.

[DGuller]

Your country is putting the world at risk with your fucked up politics.  Fuck tone.

Edit: and your country is too full of Dorseys and Ottos to change.  Fuck it.

Every country has issues.  Everyone here has enough class not to tell BB or Malthus that "their country" produced CC.  What would be the fucking point, except to taunt people who had no control over their countries' respective disasters?

[merithyn]

Per the CDC, the most number of tests that the US has performed on any given day is just over 10,000, and the last time that happened was on March 17.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/testing-in-us.html

[Fate]

The U.S. administration is lead by an imbecile and our initial response was bad. But let's not deny reality that we have far more wealth and resources to throw at something like a testing regime than any other country on earth, and the simple numbers are bearing that out right now.

We have nurses wearing garbage bags for PPE. Our country is a failed state in NYC. We're being given 1 mask to use the whole shift and it'll probably get downgraded to 1 mask per week at this rate. All the while the hospital CEO is paid 6 million dollars and is working from home. Our wealth is concentrated in the 0.01% and means jack shit for the troops on the ground.

Not really relevant to anything I had said--but yes that's terrible. We saw the same thing in Italy as well and likely will see it in any country, first world or not, whose health system becomes overwhelmed.

That 6 million dollar salary could have bought 12 million N95s. We're overwhelmed not because of the number of patients but because of the choices the top echelons make in order to pad their own pockets.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Can you provide links to where that information is being reported, Otto? I'm having a hard time finding any.

http://coronavirusapi.com/

is probably the best one stop shop for that sort of data.

Part of the issue with testing in the United States is the CDC tried to monopolize the process in early February, and then it shit the bed. Then when the disease had spread so much in the community, CDC just lacks the resources to scale up testing. So each of the 50 states is now doing testing in their own way, and in conjunction with private labs. This is part of how we've actually gotten more testing done, but it means our data reporting is fairly bad at this point. My quick take on it is CDC is fine at running tests for a small outbreak as part of contact tracing efforts, but once a disease has entered community spread phase all over the country, the CDC as an organization isn't set up to do massive testing like this, and the lack of institutional shift away from using CDC as the sole source of "approved" tests early is the biggest mistake we've made. Most of our lab infrastructure in the U.S., especially for stuff like sample testing, are not CDC labs, but a huge mixture of both public and private labs spread around universities and the 50 states.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The U.S. administration is lead by an imbecile and our initial response was bad. But let's not deny reality that we have far more wealth and resources to throw at something like a testing regime than any other country on earth, and the simple numbers are bearing that out right now.

We have nurses wearing garbage bags for PPE. Our country is a failed state in NYC. We're being given 1 mask to use the whole shift and it'll probably get downgraded to 1 mask per week at this rate. All the while the hospital CEO is paid 6 million dollars and is working from home. Our wealth is concentrated in the 0.01% and means jack shit for the troops on the ground.

Not really relevant to anything I had said--but yes that's terrible. We saw the same thing in Italy as well and likely will see it in any country, first world or not, whose health system becomes overwhelmed.

That 6 million dollar salary could have bought 12 million N95s. We're overwhelmed not because of the number of patients but because of the choices the top echelons make in order to pad their own pockets.

It could have sure. I'd wager big money if the CEO made $200,000 a year instead of $6m, the difference would not have gone to N95 masks.

[DGuller]

Per the CDC, the most number of tests that the US has performed on any given day is just over 10,000, and the last time that happened was on March 17.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/testing-in-us.html

That seems a little hard to believe.  In NY state alone the number of diagnosed cases increases by about 7,000 a day.  As far as I know, most tests still come back negative, so I don't see how 10,000 tests in US per day can square with 7,000 new cases per day in just NY state.

[Valmy]

Being the CEO of a hospital pays 6 million? What? How is that even...

I am now questioning my career choices.

[Iormlund]

... we've conducted more tests than any other country on earth, and that we are testing more people per day than any other country...

The problem is tests came too late to aid in contact tracing. If half the current capacity had been available 40 days ago the picture would be completely different.

That's not to say tests are irrelevant. They are still important, especially for frontline workers, but the first few weeks were critical and the Trump admin botched that royally.

[merithyn]

I mean, yes, the US is "catching up" but it's really not showing in data that we've caught up and are doing better. We're not. South Korea was testing over 10,000 people a day, and they're a fraction of our population.

Let's face it. The US has failed our people when we needed to step up most. I mean, fuck, at this rate, Fate and his colleagues are looking at 10% of them dying (averaging the Italian (9%) and Spanish (12%) healthcare worker deaths). And we still aren't testing at nearly the necessary rates nor are we producing nearly enough PPEs to improve our circumstances.

You all can bitch and scream and talk about how the US if "finally" stepping up, but the truth of the matter is that it's far too little and far too late. I don't appreciate cc's tone either, especially after his initial reaction to this virus, but he's not wrong. The US isn't going to lead anyone in anything but deaths when this is over.

[OttoVonBismarck]

CDC data set is very incomplete fwiw, their total case count regularly lags the JHU data set by 20-30,000.

Every day since 3/24 the U.S. has reported more than 10,000 total new cases, several of those days we've reported over 15,000 new cases. That by itself should tell you how far off the CDC numbers are. According to JHU data set our confirmed cases grew by these amounts the last few days:

3/28: 19.4k
3/27: 19.8k
3/26: 17.8k
3/25: 18.1k

Now how are we getting that many confirmed cases per day if we only run 10,000 tests or fewer per day? Answer: we're running far more tests, especially when you realize at least some large chunk of tests come back negative, so we have to be testing significantly more than the number of new confirmed cases.