Emerging Hotspots
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DON’T let them eat cake.
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@jon-nyc said in Emerging Hotspots:
Well the obvious answers would be ‘it’s to early to tell’.
Why? I think the comparison to the 1918 flu is meaningless. Those waves emerged due to mutations of the virus. But the wave we are speculating about is about the same virus but with relaxed lockdown measures. Analytically, it should only take a very small number of weeks to see effects.
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The point wasn’t ‘this will be just like the 1918 flu’, rather just that lags between waves are common.
I suppose it’s possible that remaining distancing measures and maybe some seasonality allows the virus to die out altogether. That would be awesome, though it seems a little too much to hope for at this point.
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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/28/rising-icu-bed-use-red-flag-287552
Intensive care units in Montgomery, Ala., are overflowing with Covid-19 patients, pushing them into emergency departments that are not primed to care for them. And Alabama’s capital city could be a harbinger for other parts of the country.
ICU beds are also starting to fill up in places like Minnesota’s Twin Cities; Omaha, Neb.; and the entire state of Rhode Island, according to local health officials and epidemiologists tracking such data, a warning sign of possible health care problems down the road. The availability of ICU beds is one measure of a hospital’s ability to care for its most vulnerable patients — people with severe illness who require more staff to treat them and may need life-support equipment such as a ventilator to breathe. And it's served as a metric for whether the local health care system is able to handle a coronavirus outbreak, albeit a constantly shifting one.
Some state leaders deny there are problems, saying they are prepared to convert regular hospital beds to ICU beds, if necessary. In the meantime, they are pressing ahead with reopening plans.
But Paul Biddinger, director of Harvard's School of Public Health Emergency Preparedness Research, Evaluation and Practice Program, says it's “a big red flag that when you see increasing numbers of ICU patients with Covid.”
“Our greatest fear about not being able to blunt the peak of illness, not being able to flatten the curve, is that ... people will be exposed to the virus, become ill and potentially die because too many people became sick too quickly and it overwhelmed the health care system," Biddinger tells POLITICO.
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@George-K said in Emerging Hotspots:
Epidemiologists were alarmed over the Memorial Day weekend when ... viral videos showed raucous pool parties at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri..
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I'm watching the riots in several cities this evening.
These people are not practicing social distancing.
Good thing the pandemic is over, otherwise this could be a catalyst to that exponential growth of the virus in urban areas.Whew! That was a close one.
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@Rainman said in Emerging Hotspots:
I'm watching the riots in several cities this evening.
These people are not practicing social distancing.
Good thing the pandemic is over, otherwise this could be a catalyst to that exponential growth of the virus in urban areas.Whew! That was a close one.
Yeah, but many of them were wearing masks...
