Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[merithyn]

My guess is that in order to get the virus to show up in the sewage it must have been present for a while (the samples that tested positive were collected on Jan 15).

.......Why does Barcelona city council collect monthly samples of sewage? Is this normal city council behaviour? How har back do the samples go?

Look, some people have very odd fetishes, and sometimes they end up in positions of power.

This is Spain, not Germany.

[DGuller]

I've taken a look at the detailed data just now, and ran a few quick analyses.  Data can be spotty and should be cleansed when you do something like this, but I wanted something quickly. 

I think we can now conclude that in some states diagnosed infections are picking up steam.  Florida, South Carolina, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington all seem to be going in the wrong direction.  South Carolina and Oregon in particular are looking rather alarming.  These are diagnosed infections we're talking about, so it could always be a result of more widespread testing that we're seeing rather than actual infection flare-ups, but that's the only credible data I can go on.  If you're waiting for US numbers to turn bad again, don't despair just yet.

Doesn't quite fit the expected (hoped for?) pattern of red state dimbulb hoaxers dying in droves and right thinking blue states happily skating by, does it?

I left off some states that are more borderline, those are more reliably red.  Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah are in the next tier.

I refreshed my analysis with a few more days of data, and things aren't getting any better (which I guess is not surprising given the spike in Covid news recently).  More or less every state in Southeast and Southwest looks alarming to one degree or another.  South Carolina, Arizona, and Oregon continue to have the most alarming growth rates.  The only states that seem to be moving in the right direction are the states that were already devastated, such as the Northeastern states and Illinois.

[PDH]

In California there seems to be a stark North/South difference.  The southern counties are all being hit very hard (3/4 of the state cases there)  The only two bad northern counties are Alameda (which has a lot less wealth and lot more crowded conditions) and Santa Clara (which was the first hit in the state), and the new cases there are nowhere are large as the south.

Laid back, hippy culture wins again.  Where's my speedo?

[merithyn]

I refreshed my analysis with a few more days of data, and things aren't getting any better (which I guess is not surprising given the spike in Covid news recently).  More or less every state in Southeast and Southwest looks alarming to one degree or another.  South Carolina, Arizona, and Oregon continue to have the most alarming growth rates.  The only states that seem to be moving in the right direction are the states that were already devastated, such as the Northeastern states and Illinois.

Governor Kate Brown in Oregon put a pause on reopening because of the increased cases. Oregon isn't doing so hot right now, but at least our governor is being proactive to the situation.

[The Larch]

Seattle coronavirus survivor gets a $1.1 million, 181-page hospital bill

Remember Michael Flor, the longest-hospitalized COVID-19 patient who, when he unexpectedly did not die, was jokingly dubbed "the miracle child?"

Now they can also call him the million-dollar baby.

Flor, 70, who came so close to death in the spring that a night-shift nurse held a phone to his ear while his wife and kids said their final goodbyes, is recovering nicely these days at his home in West Seattle. But he says his heart almost failed a second time when he got the bill from his health care odyssey the other day.

"I opened it and said 'holy [bleep]!' " Flor says.

The total tab for his bout with the coronavirus: $1.1 million. $1,122,501.04, to be exact. All in one bill that's more like a book because it runs to 181 pages.

The bill is technically an explanation of charges, and because Flor has insurance including Medicare, he won't have to pay the vast majority of it. In fact because he had COVID-19, and not a different disease, he might not have to pay anything — a quirk of this situation I'll get to in a minute.

But for now it's got him and his family and friends marveling at the extreme expense, and bizarre economics, of American health care.

Flor was in Swedish Medical Center in Issaquah with COVID-19 for 62 days, so he knew the bill would be a doozy. He was unconscious for much of his stay, but once near the beginning his wife Elisa Del Rosario remembers him waking up and saying: "You gotta get me out of here, we can't afford this."

Just the charge for his room in the intensive care unit was billed at $9,736 per day. Due to the contagious nature of the virus, the room was sealed and could only be entered by medical workers wearing plastic suits and headgear. For 42 days he was in this isolation chamber, for a total charged cost of $408,912.

He also was on a mechanical ventilator for 29 days, with the use of the machine billed at $2,835 per day, for a total of $82,215. About a quarter of the bill is drug costs.

The list of charges indirectly tells the story of Flor's battle. For the two days when his heart, kidneys and lungs were all failing and he was nearest death, the bill runs for 20 pages and totals nearly $100,000 as doctors "were throwing everything at me they could think of," Flor says.

In all, there are nearly 3,000 itemized charges, about 50 per day. Usually hospitals get paid only a portion of the amount they bill, as most have negotiated discounts with insurance companies. The charges don't include the two weeks of recuperating he did in a rehab facility.

Going through it all, Flor said he was surprised at his own reaction. Which was guilt.

"I feel guilty about surviving," he says. "There's a sense of 'why me?' Why did I deserve all this? Looking at the incredible cost of it all definitely adds to that survivor's guilt."

There also are special financial rules that apply only to COVID-19. Congress set aside more than $100 billion to help hospitals and insurance companies defray the costs of the pandemic, in part to encourage people to seek testing and treatment (including those with no insurance). As a result, Flor probably won't have to pay even his Medicare Advantage policy's out-of-pocket charges, which could have amounted to $6,000.

The insurance industry has estimated treatment costs just for COVID-19 could top $500 billion, however, so Congress is being asked to step up with more money.

The writer David Lat got a $320,000 bill for his COVID-19 treatment, and also ended up paying nothing. Yet he heard from dozens of cancer and leukemia patients who have been hit with big bills or co-pays during this same time period.

It's like we're doing an experiment for what universal health coverage might be like, but confining it to only this one illness.

"Suffering from the novel coronavirus as opposed to cancer shouldn't make a difference in terms of your financial burden," Lat wrote, in Slate. "What you pay as a patient shouldn't depend, in essence, on whether your disease has a good publicist."

Flor said he's hyper-aware that somebody is paying his million-dollar bill —  taxpayers, other insurance customers and so on. "Fears of socialism" have always stopped us from guaranteeing full health care for everyone, he said. But there's also the gold-plated costs here, twice as expensive per capita as anywhere else in the world.

"It was a million bucks to save my life, and of course I'd say that's money well-spent," he says. "But I also know I might be the only one saying that."

[The Brain]

So much for the Swedish model being fundamentally different.

[jimmy olsen]

[jimmy olsen]

Not good
https://twitter.com/prchovanec/status/1271991768309997569
https://twitter.com/prchovanec/status/1271992991608188934
https://twitter.com/prchovanec/status/1271993718988513281

The official number of Americans, military and civilian, killed in any way in World War I was 117,466.

The US reported +702 new coronavirus deaths today, bringing the total to 117,527.

The US had +25,302 new confirmed cases of coronavirus today, bringing the total to 2,142,224.

California had over +3,000 new cases today, for the third straight day in a row. Florida and Texas had over +2,000 new cases each. Four other states (Arizona, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia) had over +1,000 each.

Today was Florida's first day reporting over +2,000 new cases, its highest daily total so far.

Today was also Georgia's first day reporting over +1,000 new cases since late April, and Louisiana's first day reporting over +1,000 new cases for over three weeks.

Next on the list, Union KIA in the civil war 140k.

Also, I believe the number of US cases is now large enough to roughly fill all NFL stadiums simultaneously.

There are 31 stadiums, average capacity of 69,444, equaling a full capacity of 2,152,764‬.

So, think of 31 NFL stadiums full of sick people, except wait, on closer inspection, 1.69 of the stadiums is full of dead people.

[crazy canuck]

It is very concerning,  most of the US didn't isolate enough to stop the spread and then started lifting containment.  So all of the economic harm for little containment benefit.

[The Minsky Moment]

The problem is obvious in the very way we are talking about it.  We talk about COVID in Spain, in Germany, in Canada, etc.  But we talk about COVID in Florida, California, Illinois, etc.  We are half a year into this and still the US is dealing with this as 50 different countries.  We knew back in February that what is needed is a robust nationwide testing regime to identify and then track (contact tracing) cases through a unified national database using national level resources.  Here were are in June and still no progress has been made. It is catastrophic political and policy failure.

[Sheilbh]

And there's not even, by the looks of it, local test-and-trace efforts. It seems like large parts of America just stopped lockdown because they got bored and are now just okay with this

[Syt]

"Experts said we'd have 3,000 dead per day in June, and we're nowhere near. Let me have my haircut and go to Golden Corral with my extended family! At the same time!"

[Monoriu]

Yeah it looks bad.  Unfortunately, I won't be really safe until the US is safe.  So I hope your politicians fix this soon. 

[Zanza]

The US federal and state governments don't seem to have sufficient political will and capital to design a coordinated response. With the free movement of US citizens, it will be hard to even keep local successes at fighting the virus.

[Tamas]

Well in the UK test and trace is hardly existent but this fact does not appear to impact the tempo of lockdown-easing.

The current bruhaha is around the 2 meters rule. I don't think it matters that much, Hungary has had a 1.5 meters rule since the beginning and have faired far better than the UK despite having a shambolic healthcare system.