He got a feeling...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVWICpzU3fE
When you're adding 50,000 cases per day, news on hydroxychloroquine is not exactly worth celebrating...
Well, it is six of one, half dozen of the other. We are discovering cases each day. They are relatively new cases (infected any time within the past two weeks).
The greater testing means that we are catching a greater percentage of these new cases than before. But they are still new cases. And we are almost certainly still not capturing all of the new cases.
CDC says the actual number of cases may be 10 times higher than reported. https://www.washingtonpost.com/healt...-times-larger/
Let that sink in.
Last edited by Bob Green; 07-03-2020 at 05:06 PM.
So, the bottom line is we have (almost) no clue how many people are currently infected with Covid-19 AND how fast it is spreading to new individuals? Will we ever know the answers to these questions?
In theory, you could work backwards from deaths.
But then you'd have to have states that weren't scrambling to misrepresent the deaths low, and you'd have to have a reasonably sound mortality percentage.
My wife can't believe how low the case count for Saint Louis City is. I forget the numbers now, but showed how much more sense the caseload number would make if we built estimates from the known deaths, at 0.5, 1, and 2% mortality. Any of which seems more plausible than the absurdly low case reported case count.
Last edited by throatybeard; 07-03-2020 at 04:03 PM.
Check the hospitals in a few weeks and the morgues in a another month. That should give numbers for an estimate.
In the meantime we really don't know how big the problem is. I have peanut butter to last 6 weeks and I just got a Costco delivery of canned goods. I hope I'm overreacting. But then I live in SC where I can go from my home in the upstate to Charleston and remain in a red risk zone for the entire 3 hour drive.
SC-NC-risk-20200703.jpg
Last edited by camion; 07-03-2020 at 04:17 PM.
The number of people hospitalized with COVID in the South and West has doubled since mid June and shows no signs of letting up. So, it is pretty likely that the virus is more widespread in the South and West today than it was in May.
Here is a plot of new cases and current hospitalizations among the 16 Southern and Western states which are responsible for ~80% of new cases in the US.
Cases and Hosp - 3 July.jpg
The hospitalization curve seems to match the curve of new cases. The only difference is that the rise in hospitalizations seems to lag the rise in cases by ~10 days.
Here is what you get if you shift the hospitalization curve by 11 days.
Cases and Hosp 11 day offset - 3 July.jpg
The increase in hospitalizations between June 15 and July 2 is almost an exact match of the increase in cases between June 4 and June 21. If you consider that the number of new cases in these states has more than doubled since June 21, it seems reasonable to predict that the number of hospitalizations will continue to increase, even if the 1:1 relationship with a 10 day offset doesn't continue.
EDIT: I just realized that these graphs are misleading because Florida reports new cases but not hospitalizations. If you remove Florida from the "new cases" curve you still see a relationship between increase in cases and increase in hospitalizations. However, the shift is closer to 2 weeks than 11 days.
Agree that this is of limited value since it was a retrospective study. Earlier administration of HCQ could help but there are too many confounding variables to know if the difference was due to HCQ. They also pre-selected their patients without known heart issues to receive the HCQ. In the other studies, that caused the FDA to remove emergency use status, the increased risk of cardiac events was the big issue.
Here is a CNN link raising many of the issues and a link to the paper itself.
I don't think should get much press going forward because it is not a sound, controlled study. The fact that they administered early and found benefit could be of use to warrant a further study.
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