Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
This is one of the things I've been wondering about. Since I haven't been doing any traveling, of late, I don't know what is normal in other states. My sister, over in the Seattle area, talked about people being pretty strict with masks. She hinted at there being a fair amount of mask shaming if you weren't wearing one.
In Idaho, I would say that stores like Home Depot never had more than 40% mask wearing by customers. Staff wore masks for a couple weeks, then stopped. Almost no customers wear masks there. Wal-Mart peaked around 70%, with all staff required to wear them. By now, though, while the staff is still masked, that's pretty nearly an indicator of an employee, as mask wearing by the public is probably below 10%. One other supply store, has probably 70% staff wearing masks, while only a few percent of customers are masked. Mask wearing outside of stores appears to be 0%.
We're one of the states seeing a dramatic increase, at least in this area, though we are starting from a very low base (~25 cases two weeks back, 125 the next week, then 300). Still, I feel like the public health organizations are struggling to get people to believe there's an issue. As a percentage of the population, 300 is insignificant, but the problem with an exponential increase is that it isn't significant...until it very much is, and the change happens fast.
Are other parts of the country paying more attention?
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Is there a way to known if there are more cases because the virus is spreading or because there are much more tested people because just looking at the number of new cases is not enough
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Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Originally Posted by Delaney
Is there a way to known if there are more cases because the virus is spreading or because there are much more tested people because just looking at the number of new cases is not enough
it depends. if they report the number of tests, sure.. if they don't, then no. Here inSouth Carolina, they report daily thee umber of new cases in the last 24 hrs, deaths, as well as the testing rate.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
We can never know how many people have it, unless we test everyone - and for a mixture of reasons that isn't going to happen.
Increasing the amount of testing means you get a clearer picture, but because only a tiny fraction of people are tested the picture is still full of gaps.
The best measure we've got is how many people need to be in hospital because of it, and from what I understand most countries aren't sharing that information (many aren't even listing excess deaths, which would help count people who weren't tested for the virus).
In terms of mask wearing, in my neighbourhood we did have about 20% of people wearing masks a few weeks ago, but now it seems to only be me
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
I can't say much about general mask usage, since I have avoided getting out often.
But that unmasked kid in a stroller... I had mentioned to the Mom that masks on people must confuse little kids since they can't see faces. We all know kids process faces just as we all do. She said he just can't keep it on, but she was wearing one herself.
The doc and I also had a brief conversation on the problem of masks and speech comprehension. She said it was a particular issue for her with older patients. She has an East Indian accent. I was thinking lip-reading is used by all of us more than we always realize. I have worked with many Indians, have an Indian family right across the street, another around the corner, etc. Maybe "old" to her is a lot older than me, but she is very young (still in Residency).
Small and pretty (Horace Wimp reference, sorry)... and no, I'm not a dirty old man. Just an old man who doesn't get out. My neighbors have a son her age though and they've asked me to keep an eye out. I think they are kidding. They are ELO fans.
Last edited by dilettante; Jun 25th, 2020 at 04:49 PM.
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Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Is there a way to known if there are more cases because the virus is spreading or because there are much more tested people
Yes, you look at excess deaths. Data sampling shenanigans can't really affect that figure.
For now you can still look at the reported cases per day:-
Taken from the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. So the US really isn't over its first wave in any meaningful way and should not be opening up at a National level at this point. I do think state/localised opening up is feasible if you can control people travelling between zones but I don't know how feasible that is.
The noises I'm hearing coming out of Trump indicate that you really won't be able to look at anything other than excess deaths soon. He is saying that he wants to stop testing because testing finds more cases (well... dur) and will be defunding 13 testing centres from the end of the month, including 7 in Texas which is undergoing a spike as we speak.
Last edited by FunkyDexter; Jun 26th, 2020 at 03:16 AM.
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Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
The old way to solve problem by hiding it... or by replacing it with a new problem...
The best friend of any programmer is a search engine
"Don't wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom" (J. Rohn)
“They did not know it was impossible so they did it” (Mark Twain)
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
@ Shaggy : That's true. Forgive me, I forgot about the USA structure with the states that are like small countries with their own laws and government. In fact that gives interesting independence to the states.
The best friend of any programmer is a search engine
"Don't wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom" (J. Rohn)
“They did not know it was impossible so they did it” (Mark Twain)
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
There are factors like the "Commerce Clause" of the US Constitution which courts have declared restricts the States in many ways.
It can be hard to regulate business, impossible to have tariffs on imports, etc. That's why the "tri state travel ban" imposed by New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut recently is all but ignored. Legal precedent makes such bans easy to challenge.
This also caused a lot of agriculture and industry to move from North to South to flee labor and environmental protections before the next phase that moved them offshore.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Yeah, there's a constant tension between states and feds, different regions, and so forth. The net result is that each state is like a leaky petri dish running experiments on various things.
There have been border closures due to this virus, but they are more suggestions than reality, and that's the only way it could be. Even for a state with so few border crossings as Idaho, actually closing the border would be nearly impossible. For states like CA, it wouldn't even approach the realm of possibility.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Yeah Federal - States laws have never been clear to me.
Take Marijuana laws - Fed = Illegal Some States = Legal - within those states, cities Legal/Illegal hell I don't know. In Modesto we dispensaries, then they close them, then they open back up. lol
The Fed do hold the purse strings on a lot of different programs so if they want to get their way they threaten to withhold money.
It does, however, state that it hasn't been peer reviewed (which is basically everything related to covid19 so far), and that it is potentially a false positive.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
Are bats in the US manufactured in China?
Taking a swing at that question, I would say no. China couldn't get to first base against American bat makers. They would be three up and three down when it comes to that...
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
Are bats in the US manufactured in China?
Originally Posted by TysonLPrice
Taking a swing at that question, I would say no. China couldn't get to first base against American bat makers. They would be three up and three down when it comes to that...
I thought everyone knew that bats are made in Louisville...
Of course these charts still aggregate dissimilar areas within States. One urban megalopolis will dominate an entire State though it might reflect less than 5% of its area, and be diluted by the rest of the State's better numbers. Nothing separates out mob populations like the mass march participants and gin-mill habitues clustered in big cities and near colleges.
So they don't really tell you much you can use in real life. You need county-level numbers and preferably county-cluster numbers since that may be too finely divided.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Yeah, I pretty much stopped looking at state numbers. What's the point? Several counties in this state have zero cases, yet the state, as a whole, is seeing a rapid rise in cases. It's all the "gin-mill habitues", according to the contact tracing, or at least that's what started the spread. By now, the spread has gone farther afield, yet remains concentrated in the high population parts of the state.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Even those State maps color-coded by county are a joke.
In order to keep down to 10 or more colors they choose to use a log scale. Otherwise they would show just the hotspots with the rest of the State looking all but free of cases. Can't have that, it isn't politically correct.
Slightly better maps show per-capita figures by county. No need to use a log scale then, yet you retain a useful Statewide presentation. It can amplify for counties of very low populations because you still have to use coarse granularity to avoid needing hundreds of colors/shades.
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Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
they choose to use a log scale
Ugh, honestly, I wish people would stop doing this. Outside of academic papers I don't think I've ever seen a log scale used to do anything other than mislead.
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter - Winston Churchill
Hadoop actually sounds more like the way they greet each other in Yorkshire - Inferrd
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Yeah, just measure the board feet and be done with it. There's no point in using a log scale, the weight depends on....oh wait, that's not the type of log scale you were talking about.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
Yeah, just measure the board feet and be done with it. There's no point in using a log scale, the weight depends on....oh wait, that's not the type of log scale you were talking about.
You should weigh your thoughts more carefully...or at least scale them back a bit
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
Yeah, just measure the board feet and be done with it. There's no point in using a log scale, the weight depends on....oh wait, that's not the type of log scale you were talking about.
Unless you're in Louisville, making bats... then you would want to use a log scale...
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Just got back from some stores, and it has been a bit eye opening, though the real results remain masked.
I reported, not too long ago, that Home Depot was almost entirely mask free. That's no longer the case. Employees are once again entirely masked and customers were probably between 20-40% masked, which is by far the highest level I have seen since the outbreak began in Idaho. The same seemed to be true everywhere. Wal-Mart has long had higher compliance than other places that I've been to, and they're up to around 50-70% compliance, which is a strong resurgence from where they were just a week back.
I'm not sure I can account for this. While it is true that Idaho has seen a surge of cases, the levels were down around 25/week and are now only 300-500/wk. That's a large increase, but that's for the two most heavily populated counties in the state with around 600-800 K people, so we're really at a very tiny percentage. Of course, an exponential increase can go from low to high in an awful hurry, but what really intrigues me is that the state was never all that keen on masks, and now seems to be coming back around to them, and I'm not sure why. I haven't heard any strong statements from any leaders in the state, as there was back in April, so this seems to be something of a community spread of a viewpoint.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
The media seem to have been on a bit of a rampage raising the alarm. CNN is good about misleading graphics, as below.
Not only do they use a compressed 5-color palette to exaggerate, they say misleading things like "Week vs. Previous Week" when their graphic is really comparing figures a full month apart.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Yeah, one place I tried today, which had opened last week, was closed completely. It's just weird.
You didn't point out another issue with that graphic. Idaho certainly is up by more than 50%. It's up by far more than 50%. In fact, perhaps 500%, but that's largely because the rate was so low to begin with. You've pointed that out before, as have others.
It's kind of pandemic porn....with statistics. Everything is about making it a bit more shocking.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Don't know where you got that little headline but doesn't seem right.
This is just one of many responses if you Google the question, that say the same thing,
How much do COVID-19 tests cost?
ANSWER
The COVID-19 test should be free, as it is covered by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. However, if you get a bill, you should reach out to your insurance or Medicaid, or Medicare.
This one is from WedMD
I image that there might some private medical labs that you can go to outside of what the government covers and they can charge what ever they want. don't know that for a fact.
Last edited by wes4dbt; Jun 30th, 2020 at 01:41 AM.
Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Yeah, there are a number of common vaccinations that cost me even after insurance if I get them at the doctor's office. But I can get them at a pharmacy and they're free after insurance. Not so sure what they might cost without any insurance.
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Re: Corona virus, China major city lockdowns, etc.
Well, if you guys are bouncing, we're bouncing with you. We've got our first localised lockdown in Leicester.
Excellent opportunities for alliteration aside, this is not quite as bad as I just made it sound. They're not actually locking down at this stage but rather they're not going to proceed with lifting some of the measures such as opening pubs and restaurants. Whether it should be locking back down remains to be seen I guess.
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter - Winston Churchill
Hadoop actually sounds more like the way they greet each other in Yorkshire - Inferrd