I struggle to put much stock in that theory because we are too mobile globally and it really seems it would have made its way to the US in sizable numbers long before it did, unless China had it contained without any spikes. I think this chart would look a lot different if there were significant cases in the US before February with zero attempts to suppress it here.
I’m still not sure how they are going to split excess deaths between direct Covid deaths and indirect due to suicides, not seeking needed medical care due to fear of infection, etc.
So I’m really wondering about the rationale behind the Houston ISD re-open plan. They’ve been nearly all virtual (there have been a few exceptions like special needs) and started up on-campus just yesterday (about 60% chose to stay virtual).
Apparently their plan calls for a temporary school closure for deep clean for ANY positive or presumed case on a campus?!? Do they really think that is sustainable??? I think they’ll be closed nearly as much as they are open?!?
The article below lists 13 Houston ISD schools that have already closed due to a positive case. Other news sources are saying it’s up to 16 or 17 now.
Again, they only re-opened yesterday.
Conversely, our school district is only closing a campus if at least 5% of the population are actively positive? (Our campuses run 600-3000 students.) That just seems like unbelievably different approaches for adjacent districts?
Houston ISD plan, page 22
“Close school temporarily upon confirmation of positive or presumed positive case.
a. Close for recommended number of days to allow for disinfection and sanitization.”
To be honest, I’m not even sure who is running Houston ISD right now. Last November, the state’s Texas Education Agency announced it was going to take over Houston ISD and appoint people to replace their elected officials, which kicked off a huge court battle that I think is ongoing.
As more and more studies come out, there are findings that Covid was more widespread back in the winter in the US than previously thought, at least in some regions in the US. Like I said a long time ago, I know of someone who was hospitalized after Christmas in this area with a strange illness that involved her heart, breathing, and oxygen levels. They thought it was a non-virus illness while she was hospitalized. She later took the antibody test and was positive for Covid antibodies. I think it would be more interesting to see this graph by state, rather than across the entire US.
Even if it wasn’t in China in August, it was definitely there long before the Chinese government reported it.
I posted earlier in this thread about a statistical analysis that was performed to show when the most likely first cases were in each state:
It’s possible, though very unlikely, that some people had it somewhere in the U.S. in early January. But very, very unlikely anyone had it before then.
I mean, there is always a possibility, but more research and data is needed to substantiate.
I hope there is some agreement that this is excellent news:
And this is the former head of FDA who has regularly and publicly disagreed with some statements made by Trump, so I would not cast it as political or some kind of exaggeration.
I have a general question regarding schools. How are positive results reported to the public? I know @amvanhoose_701479 has reported a chart, but how do you know if those are students that are positive from home, or if there is student to student or student to adult transfer?
As the public, we wouldn’t necessarily be told. My understanding is they are watching for clusters among school contacts. I would definitely be mapping contacts within the school if I were admin.
Most of our cases in schools are showing up onesies and twosies. One area district did disclose they had a cluster among their volleyball team, but they did not say whether they thought the transmission was in-school or out-of-school.
Every positive in my kids’s schools, I get an email and it advises I’ll be contacted separately if one of my students was considered a close contact. We’re remote except DS16 cross country, so that’s the only possible close contact we could have.
I think China has herd immunity. Well before it was on the radar screen here, I was watching events unfold in China with horror, before censorship came down hard and fast. Their numbers are seriously under-reported, by several orders of magnitude. So I believe it is controlled there, but only because it burned its way through the population so quickly and thoroughly.
As for India, two things come to mind- their demographics and lack of obesity means their fatality rates are low. I think that may have saved Africa as well. Also, people do pass away without much of a diagnosis relatively frequently, so cases may go unnoticed as well. Remember also, that the victims of this disease are medically frail, and people requiring much medical care will already have passed away from other causes. In countries like that, with limited testing, the only way we’re going to know is to watch the overall death rate. But it may not be as bad as folks might think.
I wish I had it at my fingertips, but I read an article indicating that this is a disease of wealthy countries- where the average age is older and people have more chronic disease due to age and obesity. If the population is young and thin, even if it’s poor, it’s going to work in their favor.
We get emails from the superintendent for every Covid positive person. It names the schools effected and whether the school will stay open. The guidance from the state is also listed in the email as a way to explain the decision. Except for the one situation where a handful of people were positive at one school (there weren’t sure if it was school spread, but they closed for a few weeks to be extra cautious), the positive notifications are infrequent enough to know it is not spreading in the schools. You can tell by the guidance as well.
And we are told in the email that all parties that were in contact with the person would have already been contacted through contact tracing.
Because health care out in the boonies bears little resemblance to what happens in, say, Manhattan. It literally is a different world. And that’s why public health is delivered locally. I remember Gov. Cuomo saying that all states needed to do what NYC was doing, and that terrified me. He was wrong then, and he still is. But he was scared, I get that.
I know many people bemoan the fact that we don’t really have national rules & laws for this epidemic, but it’s that way by design. It doesn’t matter who the President is. The country is too big & varied to have one policy for everyone. In the end, we’ll have 50 different experiments that have been done, and that’s got to help us all get ready for the next one.
I think many would argue it’s more than 50 experiments. I remember the early days and @querty6 was saying how her area of New York was all just empty hospitals, compared to Manhattan, where they were hiring freezer trucks for the dead. Her area of New York was virtually untouched by disease, yet was required to quarantine in the same way that Manhattan was. That may have saved many lives in Manhattan, but did nothing for the people of the rest of New York. And that’s been repeated state after state. The restrictions were too broad in many cases.
You’re right about health care being different in various areas, but it’s not actually the medicine that different, but the dynamics of the spread and the social/cultural ways people live that make it different.
Even within cities things are vastly different, just because people have such different living conditions. The low income areas are going to be hit more than the affluent areas because they are the ones that can’t work from home, have very little area to quarantine, take mass transit and can’t afford the highest quality foods or medical care, which put them in a higher risk for pre-existing conditions.
I don’t know how you govern through a pandemic with that disparity going on in your state, but I do hope there will be a post-mortem to help lawmakers understand the best ways to help people, so those “experiments” don’t have to be repeated.
You are so right, and that’s why it’s public health care that has the most difference from place to place. Our largest town is ranked as having the 6th best health care of all small cities in the USA, and 11th place among all cities of any size. So it’s not the technical aspects that are different out in the hinterlands- you get the same health care anywhere. It’s the social ones, especially things like large distances. Which can be good (during epidemics) and bad most of the rest of the time. And of course, there are demographics, economics, etc. But that’s exactly why you see the greatest differences in how public health care is delivered, because it’s those social factors that are its focus. Epidemics (and any communicable disease) fall in that category because it spreads person-to-person, so how society functions is a critical aspect.
You may be right about it not being the medicine that’s different, tho what rural small towns have that passes for medicine is inadequate.
The dynamics of spread in rural areas can not be compared to areas with multi-floor apartment buildings side by side and public transportation. In the nearest community to me with public transportation - 40 miles away - the city bus system makes its last daily run at 5:30 pm and runs not at all on weekends.
It was amazing to see lines of people waiting to enter stores, earlier in the pandemic when in the county I live in, there’s rarely another person in the store. You can wear a mask, but the cashier is behind plastic.
I hope we are readying for the next one. I’m not holding my breath that studies are being done based on geographical and socio/economic differences.
Speaking of experiments running in 50 states, the Florida vs. California setting has given Disney some very valuable data.
I’ve said it before, but someone had to go first. Florida did and it seems to have been the right move, at least for Disney. There’s just no way to know that unless some state did it. They could have been wrong, too, but that’s not the way it worked out.
I’ve been following Gottlieb since late January. He has correctly predicted almost every twist and turn of the development of this virus. He was regularly saying in February that there were likely tens or hundreds of Covid cases in the US at that point and the US needed to be testing negative flu cases for Covid … or else the US was weeks away from major outbreaks. He was right. This guy knows his stuff.
There’s not that much difference between health care in Montana and in New York City. Or Arizona and California. I trained in San Diego and Iowa City, so it’s not like I’ve only been here.
Unless you have an extraordinarily rare disease for which you need to see a sub specialist, there are good (and bad) medical facilities everywhere. Like I said, our largest city here (120,000 people) has some of the best health care in the country. It’s a regional center that serves people in a 300+ mile radius including southern Alberta- so really the big problem is weather and distance. In terms of ICU beds the northern plains states actually have the best ratio compared to the population. I think its because we can’t just send people to the hospital down the street. There is no hospital down the street- the next one is a couple hundred miles away. So you have to be ready for anything.
So the big cities do not have a corner on good medical care. By the same token, there are crappy facilities everywhere, too, though gratefully those are far fewer.
But public health care is a whole different ball of wax. Because the socioeconomic (and geographic) differences play such a big role, that kind of health care is going to be much different from place to place. In Wyoming, a gallbladder surgery is much the same as it is in Philadelphia, but Wyomingites don’t need to enforce social distancing like they do in PA.
I saved it to my phone and sharing it with likeminded people.