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Peak Fall Covid?
I’ve been keeping track of some Covid-19 metrics. I’m particularly interested in the percent of new tests that are positive (%+) and the change in the number of hospitalizations. Those metrics indicate that the fall surge of Covid that’s been brewing up since late September might be topping out. The following graphs are based on data from the Covid tracking project. The calculations and graphs (and any errors) are my own.
The red line in the graph below is a seven-day moving average of %+ over the past 60 days. It appears to be forming a top and rolling over. The last three daily data points ( not the moving average) have actually been going down very slightly.
This is being mirrored by the seven-day moving average of the change in hospitalizations. Again, it appears that the recent surge might be topping out.
Let’s hope this continues. Fingers crossed.
You would not be included in the case fatality rate calculation. I’ve been tested twice, so assume I’ve been counted twice.
For an infection fatality rate a theoretical version of you might be included. That rate estimates the total amount of infections (whether or not you’ve been tested) to calculate the rate.
Thousands of unneeded deaths, by definition, changes the outcome…. and there is good reason to believe that Cuomo’s obstinacy cost more than 10K lives. His nonstop attempts to thwart an accurate appraisal is telling.
In the past several months we would meet with clients in the office, and if we had a zoom hearing would sit next to each other for the zoom hearing, unmasked. Last week we stayed masked during the hearing. But now we have now stopped seeing clients in person, and our clients will need to zoom in to hearings from their own homes.
We would go out to eat daily. Then we started to go out to eat only outside. Now we do curbside pickup, paying in advance by credit card, and popping the trunk for the food to be placed there.
We are getting a iPad to my Mother. I will host a giant Thanksgiving zoom session with my Mother, her 3 Great-Grandchildren, most of her 10 Grandchildren, and her four children. We will have Thanksgiving, just not all in the same place.
We have locked down. Only a couple of weeks ago, the highest new COVID cases was less than 100,000 a day. Now the new infection rate is 200,000 a day. We are in a race to hang in there until the vaccine is available.
Nowhere. At least not in the numbers I’m following.
New numbers as if the 22nd.
The positivity rate definitely looks like it’s started rolling over. (Caution – past performance is no guarantee of the future)
And the change in the number of Covid ICU cases has rolled over as well. The total ICU and ventilator numbers are still going up, but by smaller and smaller increments.
Again, past performance Yadda yadda yadda
This could change. But at the moment it looks hopeful.
Is there any Soylent Green still on the shelves?
The case numbers are peaking all over so it seems reasonable to expect the hospital numbers to also begin to decline. Barring some surprise mutation, it would seem that the bug will run out of high social-contact, low resistance potential carriers, and so a major third wave is less likely.
I can’t help but wonder if we had not locked down and done all that gratuitous closing stuff would the first wave have been any worse and this second wave much smaller? The worse the deaths in the first wave, the fewer in the second in the graphs I am looking at. NY, NJ and MA got hammered in the spring but the death rate is constant and minuscule in those states now despite a big uptick in recent “cases.” Cuomo even personally killed 5,000 -10,000 to take them out of the mix for the second wave. So that probably has helped NY’s current very low death rate.
And this study is interesting: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full
They found that the various interventions and mandates had no effect and that the prevalence of a lot of old people at or near the life expectancy figure was the best predictor of COVID death rate.
If folks are stocking up on SPAM (shudder), maybe they won’t have an appetite for the Soylent Green.
Ditto for NJ’s Murphy. Over 40% of NJs deaths are from long term care facilities. He had much the same policies as Cuomo.
The thing that’s especially infuriating about Cuomo is that back in May, when he was starting to get flak about this, Cuomo had them change the way they account for nursing home Covid deaths. Every other state counts Covid patients FROM nursing homes no matter where they die. NY now counts only Covid patients who die AT the nursing home. So a nursing home resident who catches the virus in the nursing home, gets sick, goes to the hospital and dies there would get counted as a nursing home fatality in 49 states. But not NY. So now, by the revised count, NY has the 46th fewest nursing home deaths in the country. And Cuomo trumpets that as a great success. The man lies like he breathes.
Interesting. I am in the same quandary about the uptick. On Cape Cod, we have done everything recommended in terms of masks, shutting down restaurants, no large gatherings, and social distancing since last winter. We did not get hit hard last winter, even though we were so close to Boston, which did. We have a higher humidity stuck out here in the Atlantic Ocean, but we’re close enough in climate that it would be logical to assume it would have been worse than it was. We don’t have the population density of the Boston area, so that probably kept the caseload down. That said, this past spring and summer, we had tourists and new residents (a lot of new homeowners here! people fleeing the cities, understandably), but no uptick. In fact, in my mid-Cape town, we had exactly three cases throughout the late summer and early fall.
Now suddenly, these past two weeks, the uptick in case numbers has been dramatic. It doesn’t make sense to me. We have never stopped doing all of the control measures. One cannot help thinking that if these measures were effective, then why are we seeing such a dramatic uptick in case numbers? Perhaps there’s something wrong with the testing, perhaps it’s the weather, perhaps it’s a little bit hypochondria that did not exist last summer and fall. When people didn’t expect to have the virus, they didn’t get tested. But now they think it’s a stronger possibility, so more people are being tested than before. So many possibilities come to mind to explain why Cape Cod right now. Especially since we have been careful to follow most of the CDC guidelines.
Not to be argumentative with the doctors, it seems to me from my narrow vantage point that if the controls were effective, Cape Cod would not be seeing this rather dramatic uptick. Our local health departments think we should be doing more of what we’ve been doing all along. I’m shaking my head at this point. That strategy does not appear to be working.
At this moment, I am thinking that there has been the dreaded and predicted asymptomatic spread that occurred between the first and second waves of the Spanish flu. It certainly seems that way to me today. Millions more are carriers this November than last winter. The result could be truly brutal. I pray I’m wrong. And I’m grateful for Operation Warp Speed. It was exactly the right answer.
@CACrabtree
Any publication/outlet talking case numbers without mentioning numbers of tests done is knowingly fearmongering or just math-ignorant. Back in March there were 50,000 tests being done per day. Now it’s 1.6 million … 1.8 million per day.
Let’s suppose that 10% of the population has the virus and that % doesn’t change. If we do 100 tests on day 1 we’ll find 10 cases. If we do 1000 tests on day 2 we’ll find 100 cases. If we do 100,000 tests on day 3 we’ll find 10,000 cases. If we do 1,000,000 on day 4 we’ll find 100,000 cases. Are the number of cases exploding? No. The volume of testing is exploding. We have found a constant 10% positive cases.
If the percentage of positive cases goes up (or down), that should be indicative that there is more (or less) virus out there to be found.
@caroljoy
I think the overall case mortality for the seasonal flu is .21%
I’ve been trying to find breakdowns by age group and can’t find national Covid numbers. But I can find California’s. That should be a big enough data set to be representative. And it probably skews less fatal than the national numbers because the early NY, NJ, PA,CT numbers were pretty bad. The CA numbers won’t have that. Anyway…
CA Covid mortality vs 2018/2019 seasonal flu…
I get that, overall, CA’s Covid mortality rate is 1.70%. vs seasonal flu .14%. That makes Covid about 12 times as lethal as last cycle’s flu. For folks 18 and under, Covid is flulike or even less serious than flu. But for some age groups, it’s particularly deadly. For age group 50-64 Covid is 30 times as deadly as last cycle’s flu.
Deleted. Duplicate.
First, take a look at two graphs. First, the feared rise in Massachusetts “cases.”
Then the number of MA deaths attributed to COVID:
Here are the obvious questions:
OurWorldInData still has it at 2.1 percent for the U.S. and 2.4 percent for the world as a whole. It used to be higher in most countries, so if by “overall” you mean over the whole year, then I don’t know, but the numbers used to be higher. Be glad we aren’t in Canada, where it’s currently 3.5 percent and for a while was over 8 percent. Or the EU where it was over 11 percent for a while.
If people had gotten their covid data from ourworldindata.com rather than the news media, Trump would have been the clear winner by now.
Edit: Make that ourworldindata.org
So when @eb stated the text below, over on my topic about “Insight as to why people won’t get the vaccine”
@caroljoy Since you are talking about treatments, you should actually be looking at the fatalities per case, not the fatalities per million population. Looking at the US and Turkey (per your example) we have to make the assumption that the definition of a COVID “case” is the same in both countries. Here are the stats of fatalities per case in the US and Turkey.
US: .021
Turkey: .028
You might have offered that information about the misplaced decimal point. up at that time. I adapted to her stats as it seemed to me that she knew what she was talking about.
Plus further more, that data seems to be what Delores Cahill, scientist extraordinaire has stated, and it is also similar to what John Ionnadis of Stanford told Peter Robinson, during Robinson’s interview of Ionanadis.
The statistics match those of perhaps another five or six people I trust as well. (Just so that it doesn’t look like I am putting all the onus on eb)
Also there is a huge difference in what segment of the population that an individual happens to be in. If a person is under the age of 70 and healthy then the individual could assume they qualify for a low ball range of fatality risks.
But as Dr Zev noted in his recently published protocols using HCQ, people over 45 and under 60 years of age face problems if there is a comorbidity. Those individuals, if infected with COVID, have a mortality rate of a frightening 5 to 10%. Whereas Dr Zev doesn’t have much concern at all for younger healthy people, especially healthy children.
It is not unusual to peg different segments of the population with different risk factors. Doctors who tried to tell people to quit smoking often were met with “Well I don’t work in a factory, and don’t have asthma, so I’m not sure I have as much to worry about as you think I do.” Which statistically speaking carried some weight.
In many cases, the ICU case number is irrelevant, unless it is carefully separated out as to whether the COVID is incidental or actually responsible for a decline in the patient’s overall health status.
As I have posed in several other discussions on Ricochet, they now test everyone coming into any hospital for any reason with the COVID test. The test is defective and there are plenty of false positives. (The man, Kary Mullins, who developed the PCR test stated it is worthless for the type of situation it is now being used for.)
So then the critical heart attack patient is in the ICU, with COVID, but might not have any COVID symptoms. The data that our Big Pharma-run reporting agencies are collecting are not fact checked about a truthful portrayal of what is going on.
Also from reports I am getting, patients are still being pressured into agreeing to be intubated, which is pretty much game over. (Only 5 to 15% of all patients who ar eintubated survive.)
Now it is also my understanding that rocephin is being prescribed, once you test positive for COVID. This was a drug put on the back burner back in 2012 as it was detrimental to patients suffering with respiratory issues, which is exactly the type of flu that COVID is.
Rocephin might well be responsible for all the many “cataclysmic side effects” that patients who survive their hospitalization report weeks later. Side effects of rocephin and of the “COVID symptoms that are major and unrelenting, but don’t show up for day s and weeks after the hospital stay” are identical.
Your age and relative health are extremely important.
Also a military study published in 2017 indicated that having a flu shot upped a person’s chance’s of dealing with a corona infection by quite a bit – some 37%. A second study done in 2020 found the same indications.
My thoughts on this, compiled from listening to videos featuring Dr John Ionnadis, Delores Cahill and others are in reply 46.
The difference in the numbers between what CA’s COVID mortality rate and what others state about that rate is explained by the age difference, and how the Big Pharma/Big Financial interests want to have everyone terrified of COVID so we submit to their grand design. So I am glad to see your mention that if a person thinks about their situation in terms of the fatality rate for their age group, that is a far more accurate measure than the compounded figure.
That’s exactly what I’m wondering. It’s like that cartoon where someone keeps knocking his head against a stone wall.
It doesn’t many sense.
Exactly. I agree.
Yup.
The entire world is really not thinking clearly.
I could understand the panic measures last winter and spring, but at this point, we know now that they are not effective. Better to focus on, as you’ve said, people who are very vulnerable, and we know who those people are by now. There’s no reason not to act on that knowledge.
The mortality rate for regular seasonal flu – not COVID-19 – is about .21% overall. Overall being the average mortality rate across several years. The 2018-19 seasonal flu was about .17.
Yes, COVID-19’s mortality rate is 2.1% in the US.
That means that Coronavirus is about 10X more lethal than the average flu season. Age group matters A Lot..
Actually, the difference is that the national numbers include NY NJ CT PA where the early spring deaths were bad. (See Policy of putting Covid patients back in nursing homes)
Ah, right.
Being intubated does NOT worsen outcome from COVID- it is only a marker of a severe infection. That is like saying the craniotomy killed the patient who died of a brain cancer months later- rather than people with brain cancers get craniotomies. I have not seen any reputable data showing Rocephin causes “cataclysmic” side effects-again you are confusing therapies taken in gravely ill situations with the resulting bad outcomes- as a wise MD once said “sick people die”.
Simple answer: This is not about a virus. It is about a Global Re-set.
Already due to businesses being shuttered, 40% of lower and middle classes’ wealth has been transferred to the One Percent. If people do not think that the Elite knew this would happen, they need to be tested for their IQ, not their COVID status.
100,000 covid deaths at long term care facilities according to WSJ today.
That’s 40% of the total.
Have you noticed age is omitted from all covid stats in media?
Surge in cases, what is the median age?
Surge in hospitalizations, what is the median age?
Yep. And you have to pencil in another 6 or 7 thousand from NY. They changed the way they count LTC fatalities after Herr Cuomo started catching flak. Since May they only count fatalities as LTC fatalities if the person actually dies AT the LTC facility.
If we could get a handle on those facilities the whole thing would look A LOT different.