As someone who sells to grocery stores and convenient stores I can tell you this has been the busiest stretch of business I've ever seen in the 19 years I have been running my business. Clearly large numbers of people are out and not at home in stores touching things (shelves, doors, product, carts). While 60-70% of people are social distancing in the stores a good chunk are not ,and to assume that stay at home orders are the reason numbers are better is at best specious reasoning. Saw two studies today that lead one to believe that it has spread more than thought. Random 200 participant study in Chelsea MA found about 30% tested positive for covid19. Study in Bay area in CA leads researchers to believe numbers are 85 times higher than thought. If so it shows that the disease is not as bad as thought which is great but we've also overreacted in the response which sucks for a lot of people and businesses. Not saying we should have done nothing, but I am saying blanket restrictions seem overdone and unfair. We have counties in our state with none or very few cases yet have shuttered businesses.
here's a link to a decent model for states and European countries. It's updated every few days. Its predictive ability is based on deaths/beds/ventilators, not positive cases/death rates which can really skew the results (based on testing robustness). IHME | COVID-19 Projections According to these models deaths should be reduced significantly in 10 days to 2 weeks, and almost done by early June. The last deaths will be the ones infected days/weeks before the death. Our state is lagging behind a couple weeks. It was predicting 32 total deaths by the first week of June and then upped it to 147 yesterday, but the sample size is not very big, so the unreliability of the model for our state is high. The model says we should be at 14 today but the actual number is 9 so far this year. We have about 110-150 die each year from flu in our state. New York is outpacing the model a little. The question that everyone wants to know is how low does the infection rate get and how long does it have to stay there before isolation gets eased up and travel to Mexico is permitted? China is still getting new cases everyday and they are a couple months ahead of the rest of the world.
The novel coronavirus in the U.S. This is a good source that lets you click on a state, and you can see how many counties have barely been effected. I get that some measures had to be done, but this blanket overreaction, and lock down of the entire US has been fueled politically by nevertrumpers, and a media that will never turn down a good story. There is some truth that if you just shut down the hot spots, and let us country folk still have a life, then we would get city folk coming out to the country and spreading it. Iowa hadn't closed their golf courses as of a week ago, and Illinoisans from Chicago were driving there to golf. We can't shelter in place this thing till we are down to zero cases. Heck the factored in a certain amount of death in the building of the Hoover Dam. Pretty sure we haven't found the balance point yet, and are still on the emotional side. I really haven't read much about exactly herd immunity works. I suppose nobody wants to predict how many will die while attempting it?
I did not say that stay at home orders are the reason the numbers are better. Nor did I say that blanket stay at home orders were the correct approach. All I said was that it was fallacious to say that the reaction to the pandemic was overblown by pointing to what the numbers have turned out to be after we stayed at home.
That "flattening" the curve chart has been out for a while. I wish they could overlay it with actual numbers from previous days, to show it's accuracy. Some of their predictions with that chart in New York have been really off.
I think that is the 1M to 2.2M range Trump has stated for the US. That's was his experts were saying would happen if the US did nothing.
The biggest hurdle in testing in the US is our testing guidelines. From stories I've read the US, and most developed countries don't use those faulty test, and make their own. We seemed to have a problem getting accurate test out. Using test that produce false results really aren't any better than having no test at all. Plus it's pretty hard to test 330 million people every day in the US. Which is what you would pretty much have to do, since you can not have it today, and asymptotically be spreading it tomorrow. Other Asian countries solved that problem by simply taking away your civil rights, and placing you in isolation. We would have pretty large civil unrest in the US if we tried that. Hell, Trump took crap just for trying to ban flights from China. Imagine if he was behind taking peoples temps, particularly black people in Chicago where they are dying at a tremendous rate, and isolating them? I think pretty much the whole world has had a pretty stacked deck against them thanks to the uniqueness of this virus.
There isn’t a blanket stay at home order in the US. It was left to the Governor’s to make the decisions for their states. Never Trumpers? That has nothing to do with it. Some states have Republican Governors some Democrats that have issued stay at home and other measures. In fact the President and his administration are issuing the recommendations being used.
I do not understand the Reference to “North American governments “ are you suggesting that only US, Canada and México were not keeping abreast and the rest of world was. I think this would contradict the facts.
