Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Turn it up to 11.

The only two states with R0 values currently under 1 are Hawaii (0.96) and Oklahoma (0.99). Oklahoma is in far worse shape that Hawaii in terms of positivity (2.3% vs. 12.4%) and ICU usage (15% vs. 87%). I question how accurate R0 values are at this point without adequate contact tracing and testing.

I am not sure how accurate the R(0) numbers are. Particularly when, as they are saying, many people spread to few/no one and a much smaller number spread to many people (10% responsible for 80% of spread). Contract tracing is critical but it seems spotty at best. And depends on people being honest.

https://rt.live/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/science/how-coronavirus-spreads.html

Contact tracing is where the Federal Government had the opportunity to have the greatest impact in the epidemic (outside of the President modeling the correct behavior). The fact that no robust contact tracing program was created is, perhaps, this Administration's greatest failure.

If a really robust program had been created, do you believe the population would have successfully engaged in one anyway?

I think it would be contingent on the president's leadership. If he kept saying, "Hoax. Fake. Flu. China" then no. But if we had contact tracing and he said "Help out. Be honest. Save lives" then I think people would participate.

I agree with Andy. Would some people have resisted? Of course. We still have people who don't respond to the census. But, even if a significant majority participated it would have helped. In fact, any significant effort, particularly coming out of the Stay at Home period, would have had an appreciable impact on the spread...in my opinion.

The point is...the President's own plan laid out a very systematic and thoughtful program. Test, contact tract, open the faucet a little bit a time...but close it again if the numbers indicate trouble. I don't praise the President often...but it was a good plan and I assume he signed off on it since his name was all over it.

What happened come summer? The campaigning was about to kick into high gear, the Coronavirus Task Force stopped meeting regularly and communicating with the public...and the plan was abandoned.

Today the numbers haven't been higher (and no...it isn't simply attributable to more testing for the knuckleheads who want to claim that as so) and the President says, "we are rounding the curve". If by rounding the curve he means it is a blind curve and the bridge ahead is out then...yes...we are rounding that curve.

Well any plans that interfere with a campaign won’t happen. Reminds me of the churches up here, they held services outdoors only and spread apart. Until the snow came. Then right back inside they went. So either there was no risk of being inside in the first place, or they didn’t want to stop services so infection took a back seat.

Same thing will happen or is happening in plenty of other places. So hence why I say just let that crap spread and get it over with. We aren’t doing anything by our half attempt at mitigation, so why drag this out any longer.

Why drag this out any longer?

Well...that says everything you need to know why America is #1 yet again. USA! USA! USA!

ApolloAndy said:

I think it would be contingent on the president's leadership. If he kept saying, "Hoax. Fake. Flu. China" then no. But if we had contact tracing and he said "Help out. Be honest. Save lives" then I think people would participate.

I feel like this line of thinking applies to so many aspects of the pandemic. One leader with the potential and the means to be a unifying figure could have made a difference with respect to so many efforts: social distancing, masks, tracing, or just a consistent response from state to state.

All he had to do was try.

And there are so many people who, no matter what, line up behind him, that if they were to follow advice that was actually helpful they’d have their re-election all sewn up without a lot more effort.
Maybe his mistake is in thinking that he needed to follow them rather than asking them to follow him.

I can’t promise I’ll try, but I’ll try to try.

TheMillenniumRider said:

We aren’t doing anything by our half attempt at mitigation, so why drag this out any longer.

I know we've kicked this dead horse in circles, but there are two very good reasons to try:

a) Health care capacity - if we exceed it, the mortality rate will go up dramatically

b) Potential vaccine - if it is really 6-12 months away from wide spread distribution, we could potentially escape with a small fraction of the population ever being infected. Right now we're at about 2.7% of the population is/was positive (though 100k cases a day is not a promising start). Herd immunity estimates are anywhere from 50-70% so even if you think we're undercounting by a factor of 10 (given the volume of testing we're doing it's probably lower than that), we're still looking at 2-3x the current death toll at least if we just "let it run its course."

In my own estimates based on the Ohio numbers I have assumed a 70% undercount based on early (and very flawed) research (the Santa Clarita study that when extrapolated to NYC concluded that 139% of New Yorkers had been infected or something like that) But researchers at OSU did a prevalence study in July and the numbers they came up with were surprisingly close to the admitted WAG I was using.
But something has definitely changed in October and I haven’t figured out what it was. Usually when there has been an inflection point in the new case curve, there is some event that corresponds to it. I can’t think of anything that explains the sudden change. In addition we have been seeing the higher case counts for some time now, yet the hospitalization numbers have gone up only slightly and the ICU and death rates have been steady. The only things I can think of are increased testing and faster test results.
A week or so ago, Ohio started setting new one-day records...daily case counts doubled overnight then stabilized at the higher level. So I checked the aggregate data file and learned we had not set a new single day case record; our highest day so far had been 2,700 cases on April 26, the day Marion Correctional was tested...but at the time it took a week to get all those cases reported. Right now (I mean literally right now!) I am processing the 98,000 records in the data dump to get a better look at reality. That data is corrected for testing date instead of reporting day and may give a better indication of just how serious an increase we are seeing, and when it really got started.
But what I really want to know is, are we reducing that undercount through more widespread testing.

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

That was entirely too much detail and logic for a 4am post.

To Dave's point...what I think changed in October was the impact of kids going back to school finally being felt. I'm not sure what is going on in Ohio but in Florida we do know that the kids in the extracurriculars (football and so forth) are being tested when teammates are positive. And, we are seeing signs of that spread.

Yes, and for example, every student at Ohio State gets tested every couple of weeks. But we are being told that the result of that testing is that there is not a lot of spreading going on at the schools and Universities. So why the sudden bounce in new cases? There is a ton of testing going on right now that is probably catching a lot of cases that were missed before. There also seems to be a change in the reporting; I know a 24-hour reporting requirement was enacted just last week; prior to that some of the data being reported each day could be up to 180 days old.

AppleScript is a slow beast so I am still crunching yesterday's data (and it's almost time for today's data to be released!). What I am investigating right now is all about timing. The data I am looking into right now (see: https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/static/COVIDSummaryData.csv ) will show the same grand totals as the "front page" numbers on the State website, but it's corrected for onset or testing date rather than reporting date. It's also broken down by county, gender, and age range, so there can be 1600 records per day, so there's a lot to go through, and I just got the script working at about 3:30 this morning. Yes, that's after the 1:00 hour went by twice.

--Dave Althof, Jr.

You can't look at RØ in isolation and start commenting about why it's accurate or not. If 10 people in the state of Alaska give it to 10 people, the RØ is 1.0. If 10,000 people give it to 10,000 people in Florida, the RØ is 1.0. That's why it matters to look at it with daily case counts, because then you have an idea about whether or not the spread is accelerating or decelerating. It's particularly bad in rural places. There's a county in South Dakota that only has about 7k residents, and the RØ is 1.5, and they have the equivalent of 1,000 cases per 100k, literally every day. Half the population could be infected within a few weeks.

By contrast, the entire island of Kauai has 0.8 cases for 100k, to the point that you can't even calculate an RØ. With a population of 72k, it's basically, "Stay away from Carl, he's the one with Covid," and strictly quarantine anyone coming to the island, and be very careful with the people unloading things off of planes and ships.

Genetic mutation may have made Covid more contagious.

https://scitechdaily.com/its-evolving-coronavirus-genetic-mutation-...ontagious/