Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Cancel the cowardly WaPo and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Thursday/Friday, March 26/27 (Domestic Edition)

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Thursday/Friday, March 26/27 (Domestic Edition)

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Required disclaimer: China is almost certainly lying about its stats, which in no way improves ours.

How many Americans have coronavirus? New Reuters poll might offer a hint:

… In the nationwide poll, 2.3% of Americans surveyed said they’ve been diagnosed with the coronavirus, a percentage that could translate to several million people.

Of course, it’s impossible to know if the answers are a result of misinformed self-diagnoses, untested professional diagnoses or test-confirmed infections. But Carnegie Mellon University professor Baruch Fischhoff, who studies risk perception and analysis, said that the poll results shouldn’t be viewed as merely a collective neurotic reaction to the pandemic.

Given the shortage of coronavirus test kits, it may well be a broadly accurate estimate of the extent of the infection across the United States, he said. “It may be the best available data,” he said.

A further 2.4% of those polled said they have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive. And in an illustration of the degrees of separation with the deadly virus, a further 2.6% said they knew someone who has been in close contact with a person who has tested positive.

The poll, which surveyed 4,428 adults between March 18 and 24, shows a dramatic increase in those saying they have tested positive for the virus from a similar poll conducted just a few days earlier. In the Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,115 Americans conducted March 16 and 17, about 1% said they were infected.

The latest poll also suggests that Latinos are far more likely to come in contact with people who may be infected than whites; the same appears true for younger people compared to older Americans. The disease appears to be concentrated in the Northeast, according to the poll, but the survey also suggests it’s widespread throughout the country…


Just to get it in the record…

ABCNews: “New York approves ventilator splitting, allowing hospitals to treat two patients with one machine”

… The practice is controversial, and the move drew immediate criticism in a joint statement issued by several medical associations advising clinicians “that sharing mechanical ventilators should not be attempted because it cannot be done safely with current equipment.”

New York has approximately 5,000 – 6,000 ventilators — used to help some of the sickest COVID-19 patients breathe when they are unable to do so on their own – and recently purchased an additional 7,000 machines. The state has also received 400 machines from the federal government’s stockpile…

Other states are conducting experiments of their own: Tufts University Medical Center in Massachusetts is working on a similar protocol that could allow up to four patients to use a single ventilator at once.

But connecting multiple patients to a single ventilator carries its own risks, according to experts, and should only be attempted in serious emergencies…

On Thursday, the Society of Critical Care Medicine joined the American Association for Respiratory Care (AARC), American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (ASPF), American Association of Critical‐Care Nurses (AACN), and American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST) in issuing a statement following Cuomo’s announcement that warned of the dangers of the practice and recommended ventilator triage instead…

TL, DR: Patients sharing a ventilator will die or be permanently damaged. Under normal circumstances, the potential legal liability would make this practice unthinkable. But if the choice is keeping more patients alive at least until another vent can be scrounged, and making people sign forms in advance allowing doctors to decide which (older, sicker, weaker) patient dies immediately, at least some doctors are gonna try and split the baby ventilator.

Back to the Oval Office Occupant:

Reader Interactions

29Comments

  1. 1.

    Lapassionara

    As always, thanks, AL, for putting all this together. So depressing.

    Sleep. What is it.

  2. 2.

    JoyceH

    I saw that Trump interview clip and was just gobsmacked. So HE determines that the governors are requesting more ventilators than they need? What does he think they intend to do with them? Is Cuomo going to stack all the unneeded ventilators into a big pile and then sleep on them like Smaug?

  3. 3.

    Chyron HR

    “the young, a woman governor, you know who I’m talking about, from Michigan.”

    Joe Biden’s senile dementia strikes again!

  4. 4.

    Sloane Ranger

    J did cynically wonder if someone in the Federal government had ordered FEMA to keep back the ventilators and PPE for use in Red States. They will need a lot of them if they go back/stay at work to MAGA, after all!

  5. 5.

    JPL

    Craziness.   This is really like a horror version of the movie Groundhog Day.     So is trump going to tell North Dakota and South Dakota to open up for business before Easter and call it a win?

  6. 6.

    Martin

    4K-8k? Is he for real? We’ll be there well inside the week. The only way I see we stay under 100K is if one of these experimental treatments works really well. And that may well happen.

  8. 8.

    WereBear

    @Sloane Ranger:

    J did cynically wonder if someone in the Federal government had ordered FEMA to keep back the ventilators and PPE for use in Red States. They will need a lot of them if they go back/stay at work to MAGA, after all!

     
    There’s no thinking involved in this. Trump won’t allow it.

    This morning it occurred to me that one infuriating part is how all that was required, at first, is doing nothing. Just leave the protections in place!

    But no, they were all “government bad” and killed or handcuffed everything they could reach. Just what Republicans always said they wanted. And then, they really are saying “let the free market sort it out.”

    Just as all the red states said they wanted.

  9. 9.

    WereBear

    @Martin:  I see the gamma globulin approach holding the most promise. But that’s quite time/material intensive. With unavoidable increased contact. Unless we can grow that antibody.

  10. 10.

    JoyceH

    @JPL: 

    When I saw that plan to open up areas by county, I figured out what they were up to. It will be like that map the MAGAts like to show of the counties that voted for Trump; since he got all the big low population counties, it looks like he was widely supported, so long as you don’t think it through.

    So they’re going to declare those enormous Western counties with a population of about 20 as out of danger and opened for business, chart them all on a map and go, look, most of the country is open! Isn’t Trump a great success?

  15. 15.

    OzarkHillbilly

    In a time of uncertainty and fear I’m reluctant to pass on startling information based on first pass looks at statistics. But this seems sufficiently compelling and concrete to merit our attention. Here is an article from the Italian daily Corriere Della Sera. It’s written by the mayor of Nembro, a town in the northern hot zone, and health care entrepreneur, both of whom are physicists.

    Here are the relevant statistics.

    Nembro, in the province of Bergamo, is the town most hard hit in per capita terms by COVID-19. Currently the town has 31 deaths attributed to COVID-19. But when the two authors looked at the total number of deaths registered in the town in January, February and March and compared it to the average for that period in previous years they found the number was dramatically larger. 158 deaths have been registered in the town during that period this year compared to an average of 35 in previous years.

    The math is simple: the average of 35 plus the 31 COVID-19 deaths gets you to 66. But the town has recorded almost 100 more deaths on top of that. As the authors say, “The difference is enormous and cannot be a simple statistical deviation.”

    The authors applied the same analysis to two other towns and in both came up with anomalous deaths 6.1 times the number officially attributed to COVID-19. The ratio was even higher for Bergamo as a whole.

    As I said, these numbers are so stark that I don’t think you need a lot of training in statistics to see that something very big is happening with these numbers and it is almost certainly tied to COVID-19.

    Don’t get sick.

  17. 17.

    p.a.

    @Sloane Ranger: Can anyone think human filth Stephen Miller (not to mention rethugs as a whole) wouldn’t try to use covid-19 as a dumb bomb against blue states and poor and minority communities?  Major cities are highly ‘blue’ and naturally more vulnerable to infectious disease.

  18. 18.

    mrmoshpotato

    I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be flippant about this, but where’s the line between Biden’s AG charging these fuckers with mass murder vs genocide?

    I’m just beyond words here. I honestly believe all of this could’ve been avoided but millions of selfish shithead children just HAD to tell Hillary to get fucked. They just had to. I mean, ya know, “Ewwwww Hillary!”

    And that doesn’t even get into the 62 million racists and fascists who voted for one of their own.

  26. 26.

    Anne Laurie

    @OzarkHillbilly: Two factors I’d stress about this article:  As Josh says, when there’s a plague, there’s an uptick in people dying of ‘unrelated’ factors.  Not just the heart attacks & strokes that don’t get treatment in overcrowded hospitals, either; when every family has multiple victims, the sheer stress is going to accelerate mortality for the elderly & infirm.

    Second, there’s a point after every calamity where the local authorities switch from minimizing the number of casualties, to rounding the figures up (because they need whatever relief money they can get, and both donations & government aid are usually based on mortality numbers).   Not necessarily making things up, just… massaging the data.

  27. 27.

    Geminid

    From the Navy Times: 35 new cases yesterday among Navy personnel, on top of 144 previous. The carrier Theodore Roosevelt is headed to port in Guam. It made a port call at Da Bang, Vietnam two weeks ago, and it is thought that sailors picked up the virus there.

  28. 28.

    VOR

    @OzarkHillbilly: There are thoughts that China is like this too. If someone died and there wasn’t a COVID-19 test prior to the death, then it isn’t recorded as a COVID death. For example, someone has a heart attack while dealing with a COVID fever and dies. Then the stats say they died from heart attack, not COVID.

    This is like Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria. Only a small number of people died directly from the hurricane, but around 3000 died afterwards from other reasons. You have to look at the bump in the overall death statistics, not just the deaths directly attributable.

  29. 29.

    joel hanes

    Fecke:

    “we’re all but certain to have 4000-8000 deaths”

    Failure of imagination and numeracy.

    We’re all but certain to have over a hundred times those numbers.

Comments are closed.