COVID: are Texas, California, Florida, and Arizona in trouble?
I keep reading that the above states are in big trouble, but I don’t see it the way a lot of people seem to see it. I suppose it depends on what you mean when you say “in trouble.”
Obviously, I can’t foretell the future, and I may be wrong. But this is what I see.
First, an aside about Sweden, the country that decided not to shut down, but instead to let people decide to social distance or not, and to protect the elderly as much as possible. Otherwise, things were open and life continued more or less as usual. What happened? There was indeed an initial spike of cases and deaths. Sweden’s current deaths per million stands at 532, on the high side but hardly astronomical, lower than some countries that shut down and higher than some that shut down. But most of those deaths were in April and early May. There’s a graph at that link that shows the daily death count, and it’s extremely low now. At the high, the daily counts were in the seventies, eighties, and at times slightly over 100. Now? The numbers have been going down down down, and at present there’s been a string of single-digit days. That’s for the entire country of Sweden.
Now to the US and the states in question.
So let’s take a look at Texas. The first thing you might notice is that the deaths per million is 88 at present . That’s very low. By my count, it’s about the 10th US state from the bottom; about 40 states have higher death rates, many of them much higher. So Texas is starting from a low low figure; until now Texas has done extremely well.
Here’s a more detailed snapshot. If you scroll down to the graph that shows new cases, you can see that number has been steeply climbing since about two weeks ago after a long slow climb prior to that. If you scroll down even further, a very important graph is “daily new deaths” for Texas. That curve is very different from the other. In fact, the death figure has hardly been climbing at all. The daily death numbers there tend to be in the 30s and 40s, not too different from what they’ve been since mid-April.
We do know that deaths are a lagging indicator. So it could be that they will suddenly spike in Texas. I certainly expect them to increase. But by how much? I think it’s very premature to say they will go especially high and that Texas will end up as one of the hardest hit states. Even now, with a rise in cases (not deaths, but cases), the cases per million of the general population in Texas are on the low side.
Texas’ new cases skew much more to the younger end than they did before. Not only do younger people with COVID tend to die very infrequently, but they tend to have milder cases.
So, what of Texas hospitals? Apparently, the MSM is reporting some problems – or rather, projected problems for the future – in Houston (the same article mentions that deaths are remaining low in Texas). What the article doesn’t mention, however – and I’m not the least bit surprised that it doesn’t – is that Houston hospitals are often overwhelmed and that even a flu season can fill them. Here’s an article from January 2018, for example:
Big-city hospitals in Texas have been overwhelmed this week by an influx of flu patients, and state health officials say influenza activity is widespread across the state.
At Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, waiting rooms turned into exam areas as a medical tent was built in order to deal with the surge of patients. A Houston doctor said local hospital beds were at capacity, telling flu sufferers they might be better off staying at home. Austin’s emergency rooms have also seen an influx of flu patients.
But high emergency room volumes and filled hospital beds are “not uncommon” for this point during flu season, which runs from October to May, said Lara Anton of the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Usually, unless people happen to live in Houston, they don’t pay a particle of attention.
Let’s go to Florida. The deaths per million at the moment there are 165, still not very high at all. Just as in Texas, the graph of daily new cases goes sharply up in the last 2 or 3 weeks. And just as in Texas, the daily deaths do not. In fact – and unlike Texas – Florida was doing even worse as far as deaths went back in April and early May. And same as in Texas, a lot of the new cases are in young people. Here’s an interesting statistic:
According to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the median age of positive Covid-19 cases in March was 65 years old. But within the last week, it has dropped to 35 years old.
When I did a search to see whether Florida hospitals are overwhelmed, I got a bunch of “no, not yet, but someday they might be” – which doesn’t tell us much of anything.
Then there’s California. Deaths are now at 156 per million of population, which again is relatively low. The graphs show the same sort of increase in the daily case totals in approximately the last two weeks, although the increase isn’t quite as steep as in the other states I’ve discussed. The daily deaths in California have not increased at all, and in fact they were higher in April and early May, so the California pattern is similar to that of Florida.
But California has a special situation described in the NY Times, which is that some border towns have had an influx of COVID patients fleeing overcrowded hospitals in Mexico. The numbers entering from Mexico have been so great that the border hospitals sometimes have had to transfer patients to less burdened hospitals in the more northern parts of the state (from June 7, but updated very recently):
The swelling numbers of Covid-19 patients entering the United States from Mexico comes as many parts of California have pushed down their infection rates, enabling many counties to lift stay-at-home restrictions and reopen businesses.
“We worked hard to flatten the curve in California,” said Carmela Coyle, president of the California Hospital Association, who issued an appeal to hospital systems across the state for help. “Now we have a surge in the Imperial Valley because the situation is so severe in Mexicali.”
Other parts of the border, including San Diego County, also have been scrambling with a wave of patients from Baja California, the state adjacent to alifornia. Border towns in Arizona are experiencing an increase in infections that health officials believe is tied to people coming in from Sonora state.
“Our E.R. is used to receiving patients from Mexico for things like complications from bariatric surgery and plastic surgery, and alternative cancer care, but this pandemic has brought a whole different dynamic,” said Juan Tovar, physician operations executive at Scripps Mercy Hospital in Chula Vista, across the border from Tijuana, which has been hard hit by the pandemic.
“We’re seeing Covid patients arrive at our E.R. who are very ill, whose disease has progressed to an advanced stage because care wasn’t readily available in Baja California,” he said.
The article goes on to describe other border towns in California. with similar problems. How much of California’s increase is due to patients from Mexico? We don’t know.
But we do know that a great many more new patients in California are now young – just like the other states I’ve described. In fact, an article written on June 26 notes [emphasis mine]:
As of Wednesday, 56% of people diagnosed with COVID-19 were 18 to 49 years old, though they account for only 43.5% of the state’s population. That figure has risen consistently throughout the outbreak but surged sharply in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, people older than 65, who used to make up nearly a quarter of those testing positive for COVID-19, now account for fewer than 15% of positive coronavirus tests, roughly in line with their proportion of the population.
The changes may be due in part to expanded testing. Early in the outbreak, it was nearly impossible to get a test for the coronavirus unless one was sick enough to be hospitalized. Because young people are less likely to get severely ill with COVID-19, they may not have been captured in testing numbers.
Is this what’s happening in the other states experiencing spikes, as well? Very possibly.
You may have noticed that the state of Arizona was mentioned in paragraph three of that Times quote as having a similar situation regarding an influx of cases from Mexico (some of these patients, by the way, are American citizens, and some are green card holders). Arizona presently has 233 deaths per million, which is higher than the others but not especially high; it’s in the middling range for the states as a whole. If we look deeper, we see from the graphs that Arizona’s case numbers have been going up since the beginning of June, and more steeply in the last two weeks. Similar to the others, although not identical. The daily deaths have gone up slightly in the last week, although not very sharply. Are these deaths mostly among the much sicker patients coming in from Mexico, mentioned in the Times quote? I don’t know, but it stands to reason it might be so.
And yes, the “overwhelming majority” of Arizona’s COVID cases are now young:
People age 20-44 account for nearly half of COVID-19 cases in Arizona, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services…
Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, is leading the state by far in cases with more than 39,000.
“Arizona is unique and they have essentially one county that is primarily represented by the depth of the new cases, and this is in the Phoenix area,” Birx said.
The absolute numbers might be high in the Phoenix area, but the highest spikes by far are in the border counties of Arizona.
Hospitals in Arizona are fine so far, for the most part.
I can’t tell how important the cases coming from Mexico are in contributing to these spikes; here’s an article that considers them a significant factor. Most of the articles I’ve seen attribute the spikes to relaxing the shutdowns too soon, but I find it odd that there are other states that did much the same thing at around the same time and are not only not experiencing a spike but are experiencing a continuing decline in cases per day and in deaths per day.
I also find it rather odd that none of the articles I saw discussed the BLM/Antifa demonstrations at all. They started at the end of May, did they not? It would be relatively easy to track their effect, but I haven’t even seen any MSM effort to do so. It’s as though the demonstrations didn’t happen, as far as COVID reporting is concerned.
Wisdom of hindsight, it appears what we might have done is attempt to organize steps to isolate people over 60 and people over 50 with a high body mass index. A lot of government cash has been tossed around to assist people adjusting to the economic implosion. Might have been better spent on alternative housing arrangements for old people who live with younger relations.
“…rather odd …”
Attending BLM and Antifa and iconoclastic rallies are NOT COVID-inducing.
By definition.
(Those doing the protesting, and the rioting, and the vandalism are granted a kind of dispensation—akin to Papal or other forms of holy dispensation—by the gods of wokeness).
So there’s really nothing to report and much to adulate.
On the other hand, attending a pro-Trump rally (where there is no dispensation, nossir, nada), means that there’s lots to report and much to criticize.
By definition.
Barry Meislin:
“Rather odd” was meant to be sarcasm.
Instapundit had a graph a week or so ago that tracked COVID-19 (a.k.a. Winnie the Flu.Like Alinsky said: personalize!) hospitalizations and cases in Austin. Several weeks after there were demonstrations in Austin, hospitalization and cases increased in Austin.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/382959/
As I’ve mentioned, I’m following Arizona data in particular because I have friends and family there; I’ve been tracking data since March. There was a concentrated effort to gin up panic starting in May with this pointless push to expand testing, which would inevitably lead to more cases, at a time when there was an about-face from “OMG, 3,000 deaths by June 1!” to “OMG, look at all of these new cases!” in the general media. As neo notes, people under 45, who are much less likely to get seriously ill, make up a significant majority of positive cases. The other thing going on in Arizona is an attempt to terrify people about hospital usage using “suspected case” figures that are completely out of line with confirmed case hospitalizations. On top of that are rumors I heard that things are being counted as positives which didn’t come from an actual positive test result, and the probability that overflow from Mexico is also a factor there.
As of today Texas has right under 87 deaths per million people, lots of counties have rising numbers of cases as more testing has gone on, our county has 67 cases and zero deaths, we are next to Bexar County, San Antonio with a population of 1.5 million and 111 deaths since the beginning of all of this COVID. People down here in Texas still take this stuff seriously, especially older people like us. The total numbers of course will increase but the rate of fatal cases is decreasing and our numbers of total deaths since the beginning are 2,521 for Texas with 29 million people vs. 31,814 for New York State with 19 million people.
Texas is dealing with this and we are not the problem however the media dislike us because we are red and while our economy is not totally back we are doing fairly well and we are getting well. Twelve times the deaths in New York State and the media is slamming us, the second largest state population in the USA and telling us we are doing the virus all wrong while they are selling fear.
In AZ the cases were around 40 a day in April and May during lockdown. Now they are upwards of 3000 a day as lockdown eases. It would stand to reason that if the goal is to decrease cases then they need to go back into lockdown. If the goal is to continue to get 3000 cases a day and take chances hoping that hospitals won’t overflow and deaths will stay low then they should stay open. But tell me, what governor [regardless of party] wants to do the latter?
I understand what you are writing but it’s counterintuitive at this point and the pressure to ignore the spread are overwhelming. One could only do the Swedish model from the beginning.
Also, unlike the flu there is no vaccine. Note that many who die per year because of flu die because they do not get a vaccine. In other words, people can somewhat prevent getting the flu by getting a vaccine, which is typically 45 to 60% effective and doesn’t spread asymptomatically. With CV19 there is no vaccine so people can only prevent getting it by following guidelines. Unless they want to get it. And who really wants to? I can’t blame governors or people for not wanting to spread CV19.
Montage:
Case numbers are not especially relevant. What is relevant is if deaths go up and if very serious complications go up. What is also relevant – although this point (and the others) has been made over and over and over again – is that shutdowns do a lot of damage. Economic damage, emotional damage, and even physical damage. They not only are not benign, they are harmful.
It is a complex cost-benefit ratio in which rising cases don’t tell us much at all. And no, the Swedish model doesn’t have to be instituted from the start. It can be followed at any point simply by using common sense distancing and sanitizing, and by extra precautions for the elderly. The point of the Swedish model is that after an initial spike (that actually wasn’t all that high), the deaths have been going way down. Sweden’s daily cases have been going up for a month, but its deaths have plummeted in that same month.
Hair on fire scare mongers of the leftist cabal unit! Of course there will be more positive for COVID19 as testing increases. The real thing to gauge is deaths. But that doesn’t fit the narrative of the panicdemic fear campaign. There are many who need to be bull whipped.let there be blood and scars that brand them.
Montage: Anyone who is seriously following this subject pretty much ignores case counts. Case counts are 100% a factor of testing guidelines, testing availability, and the success in scaring people who are not significantly ill, or not sick at all, into going to get tested. Back in March, people who were seriously ill, with actual CV19 symptoms, went begging, hat in hand, to get tested. Now they have testing drive-throughs, so every hypochondriac in town can go do it. And you’re wondering why the case count is up, and why it’s irrelevant? (What’s interesting about AZ figures is the absurd jump in % positive, which would be explained by the rumor I mentioned about counting non-positives as “cases” in certain circumstances. There’s money in it, let’s just say – but I won’t compromise my sources.)
As soon as serology testing came along, it became obvious – though many of us had suspected for a while – that the true case count was tens or hundreds of times the number of “official” counts, because most people were never sick enough to go see a doctor. Now it’s additionally known that serology testing is undercounting, as it’s starting to look like a lot of people shrug off this virus with T-cell immunity alone.
It is now well-known that the majority of CV19 cases result in no symptoms, or minimal symptoms; it’s looking more and more likely that the virus itself causes trivial illness and serious illness is generally the result of susceptible immune systems grenading themselves when encountering it. Because of this obvious fact, they’re re-pushing the “OMG, mild cases result in permanent lung damage!” story from months ago, even though we’ve already seen case follow-ups showing that in people who were actually seriously ill with CV19 who had lung abnormalities, those abnormalities resolved in 2-3 months. There’s no reason to think that it’s “lifetime” in minor cases. Apparently this is a common feature of respiratory viruses, and it generally resolves with no treatment over a few weeks. (You’ve probably always had them after minor colds and flus, but back when it was unethical to subject a person with no symptoms to two years’ worth of radiation to look for ordinary, self-resolving features, no one cared.)
So – back to point – the only stats that matter for serious tracking purposes are hospitalizations, ICU admissions and deaths, lab-confirmed only. All else is BS.
Like everyone here, I am not concerned about cases, rising numbers of cases, etc, at all.
And the death counts appear to be staying low, so that’s excellent.
I admit to being concerned about hospitalizations. If people are being hospitalized FROM Covid not WITH Covid and if they are being hospitalized due to severe symptoms, the authorities will use that to step on our freedom some more.
If the symptoms are severe for many of the new hospitalizations (think of the story of our commenter Sharon) the public will of course consider the renewed shutdown as reasonable.
Thanks, neo, for focusing attention on hospitalization and sketching out what we know so far. This was a really useful article that addressed my exact concerns.
I hope the voters are not as cowed and stupid as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the DNC, and the fearmongering MSM seem to think we are.
Worry, panic and hysteria pay big dividends for some people. The constant drum beat is necessary to maintain the proper level. Expletive deleted.
The constant amplification of anxiety producing news and policy flip flops is taking a toll that I see in my own home. I am sure this is not unique.
Naturally, local TV news, and front page headlines fan the flames. Big news; Gruesome Newsom is shocked that after modest relaxation of the restrictions, augmented by massive extra-legal protest/riot gatherings, and in conjunction with ever increasing testing frequency, there has been an increase in reported cases in certain areas of California. (Other areas remain essentially virus free.) Warnings swarm that hospitals could be swamped; although they never were. So, GN closed the beaches for 4th of July; and he is closing restaurants to indoor dining. What next? He is talking about a return to stage 1. Whatever that means. I am sure that he is not alone in over reacting. So, what is the actual criteria for getting back to business? I don’t think we have ever been told that basic bit of information; or rather, it is what our rulers decide it is on any given day.
It is not lost that virtually none of the economic pain is felt by the officials dictating policy, or even by government drones, uh, civil service. How long are the American people going to put up with this?
There are three possible scenarios at play here. One they want to keep the chaos going until the election. Two, they are simply on a power trip. Three, both of the above. Or do they truly believe that they can clamp down the country and wait out the virus? That is not the basis for any sort of rational policy to promote the public well being.
Neo,
If each state, the CDC and medical community determine that case numbers are relevant then they are. We can argue about the wisdom or lack of wisdom in that determination but that’s what’s happening. So I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with your points. I simply saying that the people who run this country have come to a different conclusion than you have. I can find fault with them, which I sometimes do. But I won’t fault people for wanting to be safe – and what a good number of people want does drive some of the thinking of the government.
Maybe a governor [in a populous state] needs to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing and forge ahead? They won’t though because they fear losing the next election.
To use an old phrase; ‘we’re in a pickle’.
Montage:
We’re not just in a pickle, we’re in an entire vat of pickles.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/texas-government-counting-every-covid-positive-hospital-case
Well Montage no beach for you, enjoy your lock down. Emperor Hair Gel may let you out some day.
Ahhhh, Montage, the voice of reason, or something…. without some real strange occurrence, the swing states will go where they go but the large populations will vote Red or Blue as they always have. In Texas we have tightened up a little bit going into the weekend, more masks required in businesses which won’t hurt anyone and maybe actually protect those who work in those places. Those of us who are shooting competition this weekend are required to wear masks if we are closer than six feet from each other which we will do. Are the masks that effective or not, I don’t know but I do know that the guy in his early 80’s I shoot against who still smokes and hacks and coughs all of the time, I don’t want hacking and coughing on me. Common sense use of masks should not bother anyone, even if it is meaningless protection, since using a mask is not a hill to die on. Literately or figuratively, it is good manners to accommodate your surroundings and help others feel comfortable.
Here in Texas we might be a**holes at times but we are not idiots.
I regret to inform all and sundry that there are NO STORIES found in the New York Times that are at all dependable. NONE .
A Texas hospital administrator has written recently that all the alarmism about ICU beds’ being at 97% capacity is just that – alarmism. He said that a year ago today, capacity was at 95%. That, he says, is how ICUs run – at close to full capacity, because they are expensive and can’t be let sit around empty. He adds that those are base numbers of beds, and that all properly run ICUs report those numbers but have robust plans for expansion in the event of public health emergencies.
IOW, reading between his lines, Texas hospitals are not “frequently overrun” with flu or other patients – they are simply reporting on current base-bed capacity.
I can say that, living just outside Houston, while I have lots of friends who feel anxious, I’m not seeing – at all – the exhausted workers in scrubs at the grocery store as I did at the beginning of all this. (For those who don’t know, Houston’s medical center is enormous – world-class enormous and respected. Oil and gas is still king here, but medicine is queen.) Everyone shopping is calm, no panic buying, and people in scrubs are shopping in as leisurely or as efficient a fashion, on average, as everyone else. I know two people, acquaintances of acquaintances, who have had COVID, both recovered. These are anecdotes, not data in themselves, but enough anecdotes do constitute data – and among my several groups of friends, the number actually diagnosed with COVID (and I’ve only heard of one person who was hospitalized, ironically a young and quite fit guy, so I’m betting there’s an underlying comorbidity even he didn’t know about – he’s one of my original two and is recovered) is tiny, despite the air of alarm.
What is important to remember is that initial lockdown was to “flatten the curve”. There was NEVER a scenario in which the vast majority of the population was NOT going to be infected. People who think that they can prevent any eventual infection are dreaming, unless they run away to the woods and become hermits.
The real end to this pandemic is when a sufficient percentage of the population has been infected, recovered, and thus immunized. The sooner that happens, the sooner the vulnerable sectors of the population will nor need to be protected.
I have been keeping a spreadsheet of selected states that you can access here. The states can be opened at the tabs at the bottom of the page- right now there are 21 of them I have been following. I take 7 day averages of new tests, new cases, daily percent positive, and new deaths. You are free to make a copy and use the columns for all the states to make graphical representations.
Vanderleun – the NYT ads are better than the stories now.
(subject belongs in the Critical Race or Obama thread, but I take my cue lines where I can get them.)
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/07/rename-yale-now.php
If you haven’t already read Kimball’s AG story, it’s a good one.
It might even get some Timers fired, if we’re lucky!
Just one note about my spreadsheet- the 7 day average of daily percent positives is the ratio of the the 7 day averages of new tests into 7 day average of new cases. I did it this way because many of the states have a habit of only reporting positive test results on certain days of the week, which results in some days of 100% positive testing which throws off the 7 day average in a non-informative way.
I’m sure you will all be shocked.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/trump-touted-covid-19-drug-hydroxychloroquine-works-according-new-study
Overall, the spike in new cases doesn’t worry me. One half of the new cases are a direct result of increased testing in all those highlighted states in the media- states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona have more than doubled their testing since the 1st of June, and California has nearly doubled it. In fact, almost every state except for the ones in the northeast and midwest that had the highest death rates have doubled or tripled their testing since the 1st of June.
Additionally, I don’t think the response of increased testing is linearly related to new cases- with contact tracing, you expect that a new case found will result in the next pool of tested to be higher in percent positives because you aren’t randomly testing beyond that point even on people with symptoms- you are literally testing the family members and friends/colleague of people with confirmed cases. For example, in round one to identify the infected, you semi-random test people with symptoms and find, let’s say, 5% positive. The next round of people tested are those with close contacts with that first 5%, and you find that positive rate goes up, let’s say to 8%, and so on. In other words, as your testing capacity gets stretched in the contact tracing phase, the positive rate rises as you reallocate the resource to tracing and quarantining. To relax this constraint requires an additional boost in testing capacity.
However, looking at the data, I think I will predict that Florida, Texas, and California will reach the peak of new cases/day by early next week- in Florida, the 7 day average of new cases/day will peak right around 9K-10K, Texas will peak at around 8K-9K, and California will peak right around 7K-8K.
As for deaths, I think it likely that Florida and Texas eventually get to about 70-80 deaths/day by the 2nd week of July and then decline after that, but will not even come close to killing as many people as Cuomo and Murphy did in New York and New Jersey.
I’m no longer sure this is a satire site. I’ll check with Snopes and see if it’s just fake news.
https://babylonbee.com/news/governor-newsom-orders-californians-to-launch-fireworks-indoors-this-year
https://babylonbee.com/news/democrat-governors-frantically-fund-the-police-again-after-realizing-they-need-them-to-enforce-lockdowns
https://babylonbee.com/news/elca-dropping-problematic-evangelic-lutheran-church-and-america-from-denomination-name
AesopFan,
Thanks for those links to “America’s Paper of Record”. ;-}
IIRC, ELCA was my home Church growing up. They seem to have slowly changed into a slightly more conservative branding of the UCC – United Church of Christ.
One of my children calls UCC …
Unitarians Considering Christ.
“Unitarians Considering Christ.”
That’s pretty good!
Agree that massive testing & the BLM riots are driving this spike. Suggest a third reason, particularly in FL, TX & AZ. It’s hot in that part of the world this time of year. People stay inside in the a/c. Buildings have gotten real tight, energy efficient, and don’t exchange a lot of outside air. So whatever is airborne tends to just circulate for as long as it is active. Perhaps it’s time to trot out the UVC lights, install them in the ceilings pointing sideways, and run a ceiling fan to circulate the air. They can also be installed in HVAC ducting if necessary like humidifier units. Worth looking into perhaps. Cheers –
I look at the number of cases for MY state,but I am also looking at patterns for county, city, zip code, sex, age, and other demographics. I check the number in the hospital & ICU as well as the hospital occupancy & PPE reports. It’s nice that the state also graphs the cases & deaths by date of first reported symptoms (or date of test, if no symptoms). There is a lot of additional information in their daily and weekly reports. The local media reports on the cases and death, but give no more information, so I really don’t listen to them.
This information helps me decide what to do with my life. My age group (65+) used to account for the majority of the cases but the younger groups are taking the lead. The major urban areas have the most cases, but there are some other hot spots, usually explained by a spike in cases in meatpacking and manufacturing plants, prisons, or LTC facilities.
I do not have a problem with the hospitals testing admissions for C19 and then counting them as a Covid case, as long as they are segregating the active cases and using proper PPE. I would not be happy if I went into the hospital for surgery only to find that the patient in the next bed with the same set of caregivers has C19.
WRT deaths, 80% are in the 65+ age group. So if the youngsters get infected and better, then after a while, it will be less dangerous for me to resume all of my activities.
As Stalin is supposed to have said, “its now who votes that counts, its who counts the votes that counts.”
Take a look at this article below, which shows how new ways of defining/counting who is infected with COVID-19 can “transform” what was one case under the old way of counting into 17 cases (1 confirmed and 16 probable) under the new way of counting.
Similarly, how this new way of defining COVID-19 infection can alter the “Cause of Death” on death certificates.
See https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/07/02/explosive-about-all-these-new-positive-covid-cases-state-health-departments-manipulating-data-changing-definitions/
re: AesopFan on HCQ above.
Here is an article of two doctors who have come out swinging at “authorities” who tried to restrict access to HCQ and even prevent doctors from prescribing it.
Also, NY policies that killed thousands of seniors by exposing them to infected patients.
https://theohiostar.com/2020/07/01/doctors-break-down-covid-response-and-the-demonization-of-hcq-doctors-tell-all/
This tweet is from a different doctor but covers the same ground re: HCQ.
Dr. David Samadi
@drdavidsamadi
I want to ensure that everyone understands the gravity of the situation here.
Hydroxychloroquine worked this whole time.
The media said it would literally kill you if you took it simply because POTUS promoted it as a cure.
Thousands of people likely DIED because of this.
The media’s obsession with harming the President literally resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Not to mention state governors who banned this drug simply out of disdain for the President.
I don’t think we have ever seen such an egregious misuse of power in our lives.
9:27 AM · Jul 3, 2020
I know I’m late to this and others have pointed this out but raw covid case numbers are nearly useless in telling you anything because the testing rate has not been constant. For instance California is doing nearly double the amount of daily testing than it was at the beginning of June. So it’s no surprise that they’re see more positive tests but this does not mean that covid is actually increasing in CA – they’re just detecting more of the existing cases.
What really matters is the positivity rate of the tests given. And so far for CA for instance it’s been fairly stable around 5% for the past month (there’s been a slight uptick to 6% in the past week or so but that’s still within the noise level). So in CA covid hasn’t gone away but it also doesn’t seem to be increasing. And the death rates have actually gone down over the past few months.
On the other hand Florida has seen a significant rise in its positivity rate so it does seem that covid infections are truly increasing there.
Any reports of raw case numbers that doesn’t include the current testing numbers is essentially useless in telling you whether covid is getting worse.
For the record, here is a graph from Texas on the **unexpected** rise in COVID cases following the events-that-dare-not-be-named.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/382959/
(forgot the hat tip to Gringo for linking Insty on tomorrow’s Covid thread)
(well, it was tomorrow when Neo posted her essay, but now it’s yesterday)
(and never jam today)
“raw covid case numbers are nearly useless”
As a meme in the PowerLineBlog “week in pictures” comment section puts it–
“There’s a ‘spike’ in Covid cases because there’s a spike in testing.
If we gave more IQ tests, we’d have a spike in morons, too.”
The document I linked to above at 2:16 PM, which redefined who could be counted as a COVID-19 case, was apparently issued by the Texas Department of State Health Services, and to judge by it’s cover page, this copy was apparently reproduced by officials in Collin county, Texas.