Tracking the COVID-19-Virus in Germany, the USA, Italy and other hot spots in the world

That's not what a lagging indicator is, specifically the deaths themselves don't "indicate" anything. Maybe spare the inapposite finance/economics terms and simply say something like "increases in deaths tend to follow increases in symptoms."

 

What has not been mentioned is that those more than 1,000 cases in Gallup had already started a massive chain of contact (probably also intertwining) and when we already know that it only takes 1 person to infect 100, just imagine what those 1,000+ have already done. That's actually the logic that is behind a quarantine. In other words, the authorities are already assuming (and probably very correctly so) that each one of those 1,000+, during the time that he or she was asymptomatic, had contact to at least 10 other people, who, in turn, have also had contact to others. This doesn't mean that every contact was infected, but surely a lot of them were and are currently asymptomatic.

This is exactly why the German authorities immediately locked-up Heinsberg (the town) in Heinsberg (a small county in North-Rhein-Westfalia) as soon as they had just 40 cases. There was a big Karneval party on February 15th with 400 people. 65 of them got sick quite quickly and tested positive for COVID-19 between February 15th and February 27th. On March 4th, 2020, there were 110 cases just on that day - in spite of quarantine.

Heinsberg is a small city of 42,000 people, in a county, if you will, that is mostly rural. In spite of the quarantine, which began on February 27th, 2020, I believe, the earliest quarantine in all of Europe, within one week of the start of quarantine, the number of cases WITHIN THE QUARANTINE ZONE doubled and eventually ended up at 2,000, 5% of the city, and that WITH quarantine.

The beginning of Quarantine in Heinsberg, which is about a 50 minute drive from my house, shocked me so much that I began to follow the COVID-19 stats that morning. Heinsberg is the reason why I created this thread.

Because the outbreak in Heinsberg was statistically so large, teams of epidemiologists are still there, daily searching for COVID-19 traces on things like doorknobs, bicycle handles, streecar seats, etc, pretty much wherever people come into contact with anything in normal daily life. COVID-19 is still literally everywhere in Heinsberg, in spite of quarantine, in spite of people holing up in their homes for an entire month, etc. 66 people died in that small city.

What sets Heinberg apart statistically is that from age 5 to 58 (there were 15 cases between 5-14) and from 80+, a slight majority of the infected were/are female. Only between 59-79 is a slight majority of the infected male.

THIS is why hermetically sealing up Gallup is an eminently good idea.

 

2.5 hours later, the USA is just under 67,000 COVID-19 deaths.

One model predicted 74,000 deaths by August....

 

Looking at Minnesota: 317 out of a total of 395 deaths are related to nursing homes. That's over 80% of deaths in the state.





Minesota Dashboard:



Minnesota state health detail:




https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/situation.html

 

Now almost 67,000

 

They aren't transmission sources as much as transmission targets. Any place where you have a lot of people confined indoors for lengthy periods of time are targets for infection. Meat packing plants are the lowest on the target list because they aren't housed at work 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Also, prisoners and meat packing employees aren't dying in large numbers. It's the senior citizens who are too infirm to live independently who are getting taken off this world a few months sooner than they would have left us without the virus.

 

Agreed. But I don’t think that people realized how contagious it was. And the nursing homes are not set up to isolate highly contagious persons. Even worse was the policy that NY implemented (and possibly other states as well) where they returned Coronavirus patients to nursing homes. This is all ironic as one of the first breakouts was in a nursing home in Washington state.

But again I come back to the cover up by the Red Chinese.

 

Over 900 cases in the meat plants.
300 in Greeley alone.

 

(I also wish you would stop interjecting "Red" Chinese into as many of your posts, but will respect your right to say whatever you want. I just think the "Red Chinese" bit weakens an otherwise pertinent comment about the virus.)

The nursing home conundrum appears to me to be nothing but a vicious circle. Obviously, with families shut out, asymptomatic employees are carrying the virus into these home when they go to work.

The way this plays out, even with those Covid-positive seniors being carted off to a separate isolation facility, is that those uninfected seniors left at the original residence will shortly be exposed to an asymptomatic employee. Employees will continue to pick up the virus from shopping or from their spouse/sister/brother...whoever they live with at home. Then they carry the virus with them back to the "unaffected" nursing home and start a new outbreak. Where does that cycle end? Unless you force employees to live at the centers 24/7 with the residents, there is no end to the cycle. I mentioned before that I doubt that it would be legal to force employees to live where they work and never leave the facility. If it were legal, how many nursing home employees would quit their jobs. Those homes are usually short-staffed and underpaid as it is.

 

The way people behave, they probably think its over, no virus anymore, or hoax, or what ever.

Expect the numbers to go up and up and up. 100 cases would overwhelm our hospital in the county.
This will be wild.

 

That would be my guess.

I wonder if (when?) they're going to figure out why the virus is deadly for some otherwise healthy people. At the same time, we might figure out how to mitigate the impact on people with preexisting conditions and compromised immune systems.

 

While saying something like "increases in deaths tend to follow increases in symptoms" is accurate, it is also ****ing obvious and non-informative. Saying that deaths are a lagging indicator is both informative and accurate because deaths do come, on average, around 15 days after the first experienced symptoms. The thing that they indicate is the true rate of infection.

If this virus has a mortality rate of 1%, then you can use the date of death to backtrack and estimate the true rate of infection. If one person dies on the 16th, then roughly 100 people were infected on the 1st. You toss in some doubling numbers and then you can get an indication of the current amount of infection as well.

But tell me something Sanskrit, do you have a message to the millions of people who are scared of this virus?

 

So you still are running away from answering the question but post irrelevance instead

 

In Quebec, a notoriously corrupt part of Canada, the nursing homes were a mess before COVID-19 and were so unsafe, employees without decent PPE quit. The federal government sent in the Canadian army because there were care homes with two or three staff for more than one hundred residents.



An absolute disgrace.

 

Excuse me for saying so, but I'm a Yank who has lived in Europe since a good long time. From the get-go I noted that the National Healthcare System was superior to ours because it reached a lot more people who got it when they needed it. And at very, very low personal cost. When I sent my kids to university, I noted once again that the public universities cost in four years what the cost in only one year in the US.

There was simply No Going Back. Yes, I had to pay higher taxes. Much higher taxes - but I got good benefit for the tax-money I paid. (And still built the house I live in.)

 

Don't they have Amazon for the food? Just joking - but truly-truly, just an hour ago on French TV I was watching program about Amazon and its beginnings. (In English, but dubbed in French. I've never seen Bezos speak such good French!)

In one part there was an Native Alaskan woman opening an Amazon-box and pulling out foods she had ordered. (Ok, so some Alaskan towns cannot even be compared to downtown AnyAmericanCity.) But the dichotomy is astounding. In one part of the US Alaskan Natives order food over the Internet and in a part of mainland America the Indians cant even go into to town to buy it?

Be careful America! All countries have a human-glue (some call it shared destiny) that keeps a nation together through thick or thin. That glue is going to be sorely tested in the next few months.

America, with its mighty military, was never prepared for what is about to happen there ...

 

My point on China is that it is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party which is basically an excuse for a totalitarian dictatorship style of government featuring a perceived soft Taoism philosophy hiding a legalistic ruthless governance hierarchy which places the ruling class first, the Chinese society second, and the people of China last. But I will pull back and refer to China as the CCP.

If you are interested these books are very good. The third book was smuggled out of China - it was not meant to be distributed in the western democracies.

Bully of Asia: Why China's Dream is the New Threat to World Order by Steven Mosher

The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury

The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era by Liu Mingfu



Yes, I am not sure how to break this as well although now the situation is clearly understood and it seems that more could and should be done at the local level with support from the state and local governments. This is where the money needs to be spent. Think of all rhe money spent on the hospital ships, temporary hospitals, and facility conversions like the Javitz center most of which were not used.

 

The only way to mitigate is to isolate and there is no way to isolate people in a nursing home or a prison as long as there are employees going in and out of the facility every day, but employees are necessary (for obvious reasons). Eventually one employee will get infected on the "outside" and carry it into the facility.

The flu is most deadly to the elderly and immune-compromised, even with a flu shot. Occasionally, a seemingly healthy person gets and flu shot and dies of the flu anyway. That is very, very rare, but it happens. So do heart attacks and stokes occasionally hit someone out of the blue, when they were in apparent great health. If scientists can figure out why other viruses randomly and rarely strike and kill healthy people, then they can perhaps figure out why Coronavirus does as well. It is extremely rare for most viruses and diseases, including Covid-19, to kill healthy people.

 

I've answered your question. Trump followed the advice of the US medical experts whose recommendations were based on the cover up of what actually was going on in China. Give one example where Trump did not implement the recommendations of the US medical experts.

 

It almost seems as if the nursing homes were abandoned. You read about cutting off visitation but nothing about providing help for the staff treating the residents within.

 

The US medical experts did not tell Trump to say that "everyone who wants a test can get a test" or to say "the flu kills tens of thousands every year, who heard such a number?"

 

Yes, but what happened, as you relate it, is fixable. The food-processing companies just call in the people to work, who will rush to do so.

I do not find that a calamity. What I find devastating is the number of lives lost. Even if most are the elderly. Loss of life hits humans where it hurts the hardest. Because one cannot assimilate that loss regardless of age. Sooner-or-later we will all be of "that age" and thus liable to such murderous vagaries as Covid-19.

Who would like a SARS like this one come around every 20-years - and it takes six-months to find a proper hi-tech remedy ... ?

 

None of that matters in the least. Even on a week-to-week death-rate basis we get a good enough idea of how the threat is worsening or not ..

 

It must have been Fox News that he watches every night.

Dodo is as a dodo does ...

 

This is the order of what happened here. After banning family visits, they started making employees wear masks and have their temperatures taken upon arriving at work and during the day. Nursing home patients were still getting infected (obviously by asymptomatic employees). The last thing was to open a senior isolation facility for infected seniors to recover after discharge from a hospital. None of that solves the problem of an asymptomatic employee going to work today and starting a new round. They could do rapid tests of employees every morning. That might slow things down. Whatever percent of false-negatives those tests have would still allow a slip-up and new infection outbreak, but would perhaps slow the number of new outbreaks. I don't know that there are enough rapid tests in existence to test every nursing center employee every single day, and just one false-negative test defeats the purpose.