Coronavirus Outbreak

[nett]

This is good news if hospitalizations and deaths do not go up. These people will have T cell immunity.

Perhaps. Those are lagging indicators so we probably need to check back in 2 more weeks to know. Also, of course there are 600,000 people potentially carrying Covid back from Sturgis to their home counties right now.

Latest from Sturgis: https://www.thedailybeast.com/sturgis-r ... e?ref=home

“In western South Dakota’s Meade County, more than one in three COVID-19 tests are currently returning positive, and over the last three weeks, seven-day average case counts have increased by 3,400 percent. This exponential growth in cases is likely attributable to the 81st Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which drew an estimated half a million visitors to Meade County and its environs from Aug. 6 through 15, potentially acting as a superspreader event.”

“The state more broadly has witnessed a 686.8 percent increase in daily case counts over the past three weeks, currently more than 10 times the nationwide rate.”

Why are you so obsessed with Sturgis?

[Ken]

Perhaps. Those are lagging indicators so we probably need to check back in 2 more weeks to know. Also, of course there are 600,000 people potentially carrying Covid back from Sturgis to their home counties right now.

Latest from Sturgis: https://www.thedailybeast.com/sturgis-r ... e?ref=home

“In western South Dakota’s Meade County, more than one in three COVID-19 tests are currently returning positive, and over the last three weeks, seven-day average case counts have increased by 3,400 percent. This exponential growth in cases is likely attributable to the 81st Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which drew an estimated half a million visitors to Meade County and its environs from Aug. 6 through 15, potentially acting as a superspreader event.”

“The state more broadly has witnessed a 686.8 percent increase in daily case counts over the past three weeks, currently more than 10 times the nationwide rate.”

Why are you so obsessed with Sturgis?

I'm not particularly. The moderators here criticized me last week for calling it a "super-spreader event" prematurely before we had any evidence that was the case. So now I'm just circling back to check in and see how things are going.

[mike]

I'm curious why the worldometers chart for covid deaths in Florida apparently doesn't show the daily deaths like the NYT chart does. Weird.

[Dan Z]

Something looks wonky with the Florida Worldometer death numbers and chart - especially the disconnect between cases and deaths. I'd be surprised if the Florida death numbers are collapsing like that, especially in relationship to case numbers that are plateaued.

[Ken]

Florida is deliberately misreporting its death numbers to obscure the reality of what is happening. There has been discussions about that here and plenty online if you want to google.

[Soloist]

Florida is deliberately misreporting its death numbers to obscure the reality of what is happening. There has been discussions about that here and plenty online if you want to google.

Debatable. That is the primary problem. There is no single agreed upon way to record it across the nation and states have changed the way they record the data repeatedly to skew it one way or another.

[Soloist]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/us/o ... eeler.html

Ms. Brown, in the interview, said part of the challenge in states such as Oregon that largely contained the virus early in the pandemic was little natural immunity in the population, allowing the more contagious variant of the virus to run rampant.

She also acknowledged that, a year and a half into the pandemic, one of the challenges is fatigue.

This is a problem when the "flatten the curve" becomes "stop the disease" The goal should have been to maintain a manageable level of disease for months rather then drop it too low. The states with early heavy spikes didn't run out of nurses... Now we will for this heavy spike.

https://www.kezi.com/content/news/Hospi ... 67101.html

According to hospital officials, there are about 5,400 PeaceHealth workers in the state and 85%, are either fully or partially vaccinated.

That leaves roughly 810 workers in Oregon that could end up on unpaid leave. PeaceHealth officials said this is in accordance with Governor Brown's mandate for health care workers.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Oregon Nurses Association said they want all workers to get vaccinated, but there could be around 300 staff members at Riverbend alone who could be put on leave.

Those 300 are not all nurses, but if 1 ICU nurse is lost, thats 2-4 beds... If a few CNA 2's are lost, that could reduce the ICU nurse to only 1-2 beds... These are very serious problems and my work is going to suffer pretty bad too. We will lose 2 nurses for sure, maybe 3. I'm the only one that actually would likely get an exemption and none of these fired nurses could work at my facility.
We are all tired and wore out. Many nurses are leaving and have left just due to management problems... a major hospital is hiring LPN's to work the floor, something that hasn't been done in years but LPN's are even less vaccinated then RN's.

https://www.oregonlive.com/business/202 ... efits.html

The Oregon Employment Department said Wednesday that people who lose their jobs because they bucked a vaccine mandate probably aren’t eligible for unemployment assistance.

“In broad strokes, requiring somebody to be vaccinated during the midst of a worldwide pandemic is a reasonable policy,” David Gerstenfeld, acting director of the Oregon Employment Department, said on his weekly media call Wednesday.

“So, if somebody doesn’t follow that policy, and they don’t have a good reason, it very well could result in their not being eligible for benefits,” said Gerstenfeld, who is also an attorney. He said there are “narrow” exceptions for people with a medical exemption or a “sincerely held religious belief.”

This wouldn't be necessary to state unless they already planned on using the narrow escape clause the Fed title 7 permits for hardship denial of religious/medical...

https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/DISEASESC ... 8-2021.pdf

New healthcare worker mandate

https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/DISEASESC ... 9-2021.pdf

New school teacher mandate

[Ken]

Florida is deliberately misreporting its death numbers to obscure the reality of what is happening. There has been discussions about that here and plenty online if you want to google.

Debatable. That is the primary problem. There is no single agreed upon way to record it across the nation and states have changed the way they record the data repeatedly to skew it one way or another.

What they are doing is only reporting deaths for the day that they occur, not when they are reported like everyone else does. What that produces is the downward pointing tail on the graph above. That is because it takes about a week for a death report to work it's way through the reporting system in Florida. So if 500 people actually died in Florida yesterday, the report will only show a tiny fraction of that number, only those deaths that happened yesterday and worked their way through the reporting system. As time goes on they will eventually get reported but then entered into week-old data. The effect is to make it look like deaths are always declining, when that isn't at all the case.

[ken_sylvania]

Florida is deliberately misreporting its death numbers to obscure the reality of what is happening. There has been discussions about that here and plenty online if you want to google.

Debatable. That is the primary problem. There is no single agreed upon way to record it across the nation and states have changed the way they record the data repeatedly to skew it one way or another.

What they are doing is only reporting deaths for the day that they occur, not when they are reported like everyone else does. What that produces is the downward pointing tail on the graph above. That is because it takes about a week for a death report to work it's way through the reporting system in Florida. So if 500 people actually died in Florida yesterday, the report will only show a tiny fraction of that number, only those deaths that happened yesterday and worked their way through the reporting system. As time goes on they will eventually get reported but then entered into week-old data. The effect is to make it look like deaths are always declining, when that isn't at all the case.

And you know they are deliberately doing it to mislead, correct? And you know that how?

[Soloist]

What they are doing is only reporting deaths for the day that they occur, not when they are reported like everyone else does. What that produces is the downward pointing tail on the graph above. That is because it takes about a week for a death report to work it's way through the reporting system in Florida. So if 500 people actually died in Florida yesterday, the report will only show a tiny fraction of that number, only those deaths that happened yesterday and worked their way through the reporting system. As time goes on they will eventually get reported but then entered into week-old data. The effect is to make it look like deaths are always declining, when that isn't at all the case.

Lets assume they are actually doing this, eventually these deaths have to be reported right? so the data is getting reported and even if they delayed every death by a week, would it not still reflect an upward climb at some point?