Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[crazy canuck]

Another article to counter Trumpist Bullshit

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/27/coronavirus-testing-us/

[merithyn]

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.

That's shown on the link from the CDC.

[merithyn]

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.

Except that as I understand it, a large number of those "confirmed" cases are based on symptoms, not testing.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The covid testing project showed 96,000 test results came back yesterday and 109,000 the day before that fwiw.

Our test rate per million is in the 2500-5000 range (WA being the only to hit 5000 so far), with it trending upwards in every state.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/26/us/coronavirus-testing-states.html

also has some good graphics.

FWIW I haven't seen new South Korean testing numbers in awhile, but when they were being touted as "tops in the world" they were testing around 3600/million, so WA state's 5000, New York State's 3300, NJ's 4000 are pretty good. I think a number of non-South Korea, OECD countries are doing quite poor in these metrics fwiw.

[merithyn]

The covid testing project showed 96,000 test results came back yesterday and 109,000 the day before that fwiw.

Our test rate per million is in the 2500-5000 range (WA being the only to hit 5000 so far), with it trending upwards in every state.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/26/us/coronavirus-testing-states.html

also has some good graphics.

FWIW I haven't seen new South Korean testing numbers in awhile, but when they were being touted as "tops in the world" they were testing around 3600/million, so WA state's 5000, New York State's 3300, NJ's 4000 are pretty good. I think a number of non-South Korea, OECD countries are doing quite poor in these metrics fwiw.

That's incredibly helpful, thank you. As is the earlier link. I appreciate it.

It doesn't change my concerns, but it is really helpful to see that we're not as pathetic as we once were.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Another article to counter Trumpist Bullshit

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/27/coronavirus-testing-us/

No one is spouting Trumpist bullshit here. What some of us are saying is you're a giant douche piece of shit, for jerking off to Canadian nationalist anti-American bullshit in the midst of a global epidemic in which thousands of people have died and many thousands more will die.

[PDH]

As OvB said the problem isn't that the USA isn't testing now, but rather the criminal lag in starting this.  The US rate should have been at this level 3 weeks ago and should have been growing each day from there.

[Razgovory]

Umm, I don't personally know anyone named Dom (nor would I refer to my husband as my Dom).

That's Dominic Cummings that I meant, the would be Varys of the UK.

Oops! I don't know your husband's name, so assumed it was Dominic.

I thought he just had some woman come in and whip him from time to time.

[OttoVonBismarck]

There's also epidemiological issues with the U.S. response, much of it structurally related to us having 50 state governments. For example Maryland and Ohio are almost exclusively reporting positive test results only, with limited or no data on the number of negative results. The Covid tracking project has 9 states identified as only sharing "partial data sets" which clouds our ability to assess the numbers epidemiologically. Ohio's Department of Health had never previously required the reporting of total negative results for any prior infectious disease, so for weeks they've been doing tests in Ohio and we basically aren't collating the number of positives at all--the individual labs and the companies that own them might have that data, but it's not been collected by a centralized state resource and thus can't be tracked.

[Barrister]

Video has been circulating on Alberta-based social media which is titled Premier Kenney announces liquor stores to close... only to be a rickroll.

Kenney replied on Twitter 'ha this is very funny, but no were not closing liquor stores.  Go out and buy some locally made product!'

I'm curious - how many places have taken this step?  I can see legit health arguments against closing: don't want alcoholics going through withdrawal showing up in ERs, don't want health consequences of people trying to moonshine or whatever, but the other side is of course alcohol is not necessary for life, is another vector for transmission, and alcohol might just exacerbate the problem of people being cooped up in tight quarters for extended periods of time.

What's happening elsewhere?

[Sheilbh]

They've been declared essential shops in the UK 

[bogh]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/29/alcohol-sales-banned-in-greenland-capital-during-lockdown

[katmai]

Essential stores here in Alaska still open are Food, beer, weed, guns.

[OttoVonBismarck]

So Pennsylvania is an ABC state and they shut theirs down. Virginia is also an ABC state as is Ohio, and theirs have stayed open.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Explainer for the foreigners--17 American states are "ABC" or "control" states, meaning the state government exercises some form of monopoly right over the sale of alchol.

To highlight the different schemes:

Ohio: Beer and Wine retail/wholesale is entirely privatized. Spirits are sold on-consignment through private dealers who must be licensed to operate a retail spirits store. Not a single bottle of liquor in the state of Ohio is sold from a private business to a consumer, the licensed stores order how much of a product they believe they will need, and it remains state property until sold, i.e. "on consignment", the proprietor gets to collect a consignment fee for moving it, but the state gets the wholesale/retail profit.

Pennsylvania: Beer is now privatized and sold at private retail locations. "Malt beverages" and wine can be sold in limited quantities "carry out" by hotels, restaurants, and other licenses, wine is limited to like 3 L and beer is limited to like a 12 pack. All liquor is sold in state owned and run stores, so every liquor store in the state of Pennsylvania is staffed by government employees, there are no private liquor stores.

Virginia: The state licenses retailers on an individual basis to sell wine and beer, all distilled spirits are sold in state owned "ABC" stores.