D&D and the rising pandemic
ad_hoc
(they/them)
That is promising.
According to this site there are still 18 000 active cases which is a lot I think for the population.
United States COVID - Coronavirus Statistics - Worldometer
United States Coronavirus update with statistics and graphs: total and new cases, deaths per day, mortality and recovery rates, current active cases, recoveries, trends and timeline.
www.worldometers.info
ccs
41st lv DM
Yeah, I heard the BBC piece. He deserves it. Overall he's doing a pretty good job.
The question is how they determine the number of "active" cases. The page you gave lists a dashboard I'm familiar with as the basis for its numbers, but that dashboard does not give "active cases" - that's not a number the state tracks, because it is not well-defined. So, your website is deriving that result, and I'd need to know how to comment.
As of two days ago, we had 1,415 cases in hospitals.
Massachusetts has a population of 6.9 million people.
Istbor
Dances with Gnolls
I have a concern.
While the number of new cases each day in the US seems to be slightly going down (some days spiking back up), it is mostly pretty consistent. ~20k a day.
The number of deaths though seems to be dropping much more dramatically.
Does this mean we have a handle on it, and enough space in hospitals to adequately care for our serious cases? Or perhaps we are in for a rise in deaths as well, but haven't hit that time threshold. OR! Even darker are we running low on at-risk people. I don't think the last one, that is just obligatory hyperbole. I would expect we would have had much more death if that were the case.
I suppose I don't know for sure how to feel. Positive that we are finding our stride in this, or worry that things will take a downturn, or worse, that data is being deliberately manipulated to show that re-opening is the correct choice and is working.
Apologies, but I can be a bit of a negative Nancy about certain things.
While the number of new cases each day in the US seems to be slightly going down (some days spiking back up), it is mostly pretty consistent. ~20k a day.
The number of deaths though seems to be dropping much more dramatically.
Does this mean we have a handle on it, and enough space in hospitals to adequately care for our serious cases? Or perhaps we are in for a rise in deaths as well, but haven't hit that time threshold. OR! Even darker are we running low on at-risk people. I don't think the last one, that is just obligatory hyperbole. I would expect we would have had much more death if that were the case.
I suppose I don't know for sure how to feel. Positive that we are finding our stride in this, or worry that things will take a downturn, or worse, that data is being deliberately manipulated to show that re-opening is the correct choice and is working.
Apologies, but I can be a bit of a negative Nancy about certain things.
Isbor, deaths lag infections by about 2 weeks, give or take.
Right now, the "heavy hit" areas pulled off successful distancing (like NYC). Their numbers are falling. The "less heavy hit" are making up for it, and have relatively explosive growth; but because we are adding, BIG NUMBER shrinking plus SMALL NUMBER exploding = BIG NUMBER shrinking slowly.
In the hard hit areas, the most vulnerable and exposed got burnt. The remaining vulnerable are hiding, because they where selected for hiding. Meanwhile, less serious cases who hid from ERs are getting tested, reducing the rate at which their numbers have fallen.
The future problem lies in either reignition of a hard hit area (NYC is about 25% infected, so it can repeat what happened before if you reopen), or more likely that areas that haven't been hard hit and haven't eliminated the virus continue to have numbers explode.
With deaths lagging infections by 2-3 weeks, and diagnosis lagging infection by a week, deaths are a 3+ week trailing indicator of things getting bad. And you have to pay attention to regional deaths, not national; national deaths are dominated by the areas the virus has done a burn-through wave of. The next areas likely to burn are ticking up from 1 death per week, to 1 death per day, to 2 deaths per day. With no effective distancing, and a 3 week lag, if an area has a doubling time of 3 days, that is 7 doublings "baked in"; there could already be enough people infected to be killing 100+ per day even if lockdown was perfect today.
OTOH, if their modest social distancing spreads doubling to 5 days, that is only 4 doublings, or 16x "baked in". A large swing, and leaves time for policy to change if there is an explosion of cases starting.
NYC burned brightly because it had a crazy spread rate of 2x every 2 days or something. By the time they hit 1 death/day, there where 10 doublings "backed in" (21/2 = 10.5), or a 1000-fold increase in deaths.
Background caution and spread out population gives time for a response to an exploding local epidemic. And it doesn't have to be perfect for this to be useful -- even if your measures result in Re over 1, so long as an epidemic doesn't sleep its way to 1000s of dead per day, you can choke it off.
Now, what happens if Re floats just above 1? You get a constant simmer and burn of dead people, but no spikes.
Right now, the "heavy hit" areas pulled off successful distancing (like NYC). Their numbers are falling. The "less heavy hit" are making up for it, and have relatively explosive growth; but because we are adding, BIG NUMBER shrinking plus SMALL NUMBER exploding = BIG NUMBER shrinking slowly.
In the hard hit areas, the most vulnerable and exposed got burnt. The remaining vulnerable are hiding, because they where selected for hiding. Meanwhile, less serious cases who hid from ERs are getting tested, reducing the rate at which their numbers have fallen.
The future problem lies in either reignition of a hard hit area (NYC is about 25% infected, so it can repeat what happened before if you reopen), or more likely that areas that haven't been hard hit and haven't eliminated the virus continue to have numbers explode.
With deaths lagging infections by 2-3 weeks, and diagnosis lagging infection by a week, deaths are a 3+ week trailing indicator of things getting bad. And you have to pay attention to regional deaths, not national; national deaths are dominated by the areas the virus has done a burn-through wave of. The next areas likely to burn are ticking up from 1 death per week, to 1 death per day, to 2 deaths per day. With no effective distancing, and a 3 week lag, if an area has a doubling time of 3 days, that is 7 doublings "baked in"; there could already be enough people infected to be killing 100+ per day even if lockdown was perfect today.
OTOH, if their modest social distancing spreads doubling to 5 days, that is only 4 doublings, or 16x "baked in". A large swing, and leaves time for policy to change if there is an explosion of cases starting.
NYC burned brightly because it had a crazy spread rate of 2x every 2 days or something. By the time they hit 1 death/day, there where 10 doublings "backed in" (21/2 = 10.5), or a 1000-fold increase in deaths.
Background caution and spread out population gives time for a response to an exploding local epidemic. And it doesn't have to be perfect for this to be useful -- even if your measures result in Re over 1, so long as an epidemic doesn't sleep its way to 1000s of dead per day, you can choke it off.
Now, what happens if Re floats just above 1? You get a constant simmer and burn of dead people, but no spikes.
It can be hard to say - looking at the overall number in such a large country as the US can be misleading. An overall trend could be level, while it is rising in one place while dropping in another. Boston, for example, has a stead decline in its number of cases per day. Meanwhile, Texas and Florida are trending up.
As others have said - deaths lag behind detected cases. SO, those areas of rising cases are apt to see deaths also rise in the not-too-distant future.
I'd be surprised if you were sure how to feel. It is a still-developing situation.
Levistus's_Leviathan
5e Freelancer
There are definitely areas of the country where cases are falling, but there are also places where they're raising steadily. In my home county, we're still increasing by around 200 cases every day, and we've been on lockdown for more than 3 months now.
