Posted on 03/16/2020 4:13:06 AM PDT by EyesOfTX
The 60,000 figure seems to be an overestimate.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-flu-usa-idUSN1223579720100212
Add Washington state to the list of shutdowns. What Mao, Hitler or Stalin couldn’t accomplish, Chicken Little will.
Total social unrest and breakdown....right before an election.
Typical way to vote your nation into the abyss.
Chicken Little with the full force of the media behind her.
Trump should release an EO stating that these measures cannot be implemented until such time that certain national death toll threshold has been met, say....100,000 deaths.
We may have to delay the election. (Until after RBG croaks). Never let a crisis go to waste.
It would be interesting to run some estimates. How many hospitals do we have? Say 60,000 give or take? With almost a million beds. How many “blue people” per hour can a hospital manage and still function? 6? 60? I’m guessing no American hospital can continue to function with one blue patient per minute. Let’s take half that because I know of many hospitals that couldn’t handle one an hour. 30 times 60,000 is what? 1.8 million? We can probably handle 100,000 new cases of seriously ill people a day but somewhere between that number and multiples of that number there could be massive social dislocation.
It’s like piloting a star ship. You have to look out the back window to obtain navigational data. We won’t know what any of the real numbers are until we see what the death count is in three weeks. Let’s hope we can keep the “new cases per day” of really ill people South of 10,000. I don’t pretend to know and all my numbers are just made up but I don’t see anybody having this discussion.
Everybody touts our heath system as the best in the universe but nobody is willing to find out if this is true. Let’s sit back and watch it in action.
A good analogy is a Diesel engine in a commercial setting. If you keep the RPMs down the maintenance schedule is less expensive. If you have to run the hospital at “140% of recommended RPMs” the “maintenance costs” are going to go up rapidly. The next month or two are going to be fascinating. Historians will argue for decades.
Testing is the key to improvement.
Or martial law to prevent it. My bet is that martial law is imminent by my conversations with military reservists who are getting called up.
When you order a test you have to first ask “Why?” And then, “How will the answer change management?” Testing could potentially give data but with testing there are “Alpha errors” and “Beta errors”. Death is a “hard fact”. There are no “false” positives or negatives. Sure, testing gives us a better idea of “where the virus is now” but the death rate is just a week or so behind that and the data is irrefutable.
The Roche announcement seemed to have the promise of greatly increasing the testing possible.
I’m not talking about testing people, I’m talking about testing systems...the US healthcare system in particular.
So i would argue testing doesn’t mean much and does little to help make decisions. But I have spent decades wrestling with the complexities of “testing asymptomatic people”. In reality the “helpful” part of “testing” is going to be at autopsies.
Yup. Bars, restaurants and gyms now. Beautiful place to live, but it is chock a block with fascists ghouls.
Oh, our systems will be tested alright. Even under the rosiest of scenarios the next couple months are gonna be hell for people who work in hospitals.
You are right that 60,000 is high but after 10 years the CDC still deals in ranges with 12,000 the midpoint. They really don’t know how many died with the top figure being 18,800. I’m betting we won’t reach that with 19.
And H1N1 is still with us as part of the annual flu. It is 50-60% of the flu cases and probably kills about the same as it did in 2009-2010.
That was were my thinking was.
We closed everything to spread out the infection rate to not overwhelm the Hospital system. If Hospitals get overwhelmed, death rate goes up by ~10X. Appears maybe based on # of sick, that we got a jump on that maybe.
So based on infection positive, sick & dead, rates - WHEN DOES the SHTF? 3 weeks???
When does the ALL CLEAR sound and we go back to normal - 2 months??
Is hot summer weather what we need? As this becomes a super infectious late Flu season?
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