Silvaire wrote:
Infection looks to me to be travelling in a wave, moving west. First Europe grew the disease continent wide from localized areas in Italy, then it traveled to infect the US east coast, now it is slowly traveling westward 4,000 km across the US, hitting densely populated centers harder as one would expect.
Well West and South. Florida looks to be the problem.
@leSving which country is this map for regarding to quarantine? Norway?
there is indeed more indications that outdoor mass events will cause superspreads. It has been written here in BG that the two reasons we see uncontrolled spreading in Sofia and increased infections in Plovdiv are traced to a football game between the two cities. the Stadion this was held in is in no way comparable to the almost closed stadion at Milan which is made responsible for the Italian outbreak.
The rest is attributed to the end of school dance events for the class of 2020…
BG is now at over 300 cases per day, spiralling out of control, with the focal centers of Sofia (over 100) and Plovdiv (over 40) The rest of the country has low local numbers in the singles and teen figures. Where I am daily new infections for the whole Burgas district is between 2 and 4.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
there is indeed more indications that outdoor mass events will cause superspreads.
I’m not into sport at all, but from what I very occasionally see on TV, football (soccer) fans tend to yell and shout pretty much the whole match. Perfect conditions to project little Sars-Cov-2 into the atmosphere. Not really comparable to, say, an outdoor classical concert.
172driver wrote:
Not really comparable to, say, an outdoor classical concert.
If you define your comparison group small enough, you could always find a setting in which there hasn’t been any proven transmissions yet.
If a spread event happens at a classical concert you would still say: Yes, but that was Wagner where the music is very loud and therefore air moves fast. There is no evidence at all that in an outdoor Debussy concert there would be any risk.
That’s not how disease prevention works! We know for sure that gatherings of people (doesn’t matter if indoors our outdoors) where minimum distance can not be maintained are a major thread – therefore we need to avoid them.
172driver wrote:
Not really. The US is a much less homogeneous country than most Europeans realize. Here in CA everything was locked down early and by and large people adhered to the various measures. And yet…. in the last couple of weeks cases the caseload is soaring.Of course you cannot shut a US state down the way you can a European country so that lockdown was always somewhat porous but it worked. Until it didn’t.
Which timeframe are you referring to where “it worked”. Daily new case numbers in California are actually constantly increasing (note that the graph is daily new cases and not accumulated cases although it might look like it). California is clearly still on the increasing side of the first wave…
Source is CDC.
Well, if we take as a given that shutting various parts of the economy down to reduce spread is worthwhile.
Not everyone agrees with that premise.
Silvaire wrote:
Infection looks to me to be travelling in a wave, moving west. First Europe grew the disease continent wide from localized areas in Italy, then it traveled to infect the US east coast, now it is slowly traveling westward 4,000 km across the US, hitting densely populated centers harder as one would expect.
I don’t think so; I’m particularly interested in Texas as I have friends and family there, so I’m watching pretty much in horror.
You can see it was there way back in March/April, but measures kept it somewhat under control. Then around Memorial Day, the state basically shouted “Yolo!” and threw everything open. Shortly after that there is a strong inflection point (upwards) in the rate of new infections, and growth has been exponential since then. Texas’s 7 day rolling average is now higher than the UK’s absolute peak rate of infection, despite Texas having less than half the population and a much lower population density (I used to live in Houston, it is the fraction of the population density of any British city). The 7 day rolling average is almost double the UK’s peak at the moment. You can now see an inflection point in the death rate when the hospitals started running out of ICU space – the 7 day moving average death rate has kinked sharply upwards after around July 4th. It had been fairly flat until then. It has doubled in only 5 days.
This fills me with dread, it’s only a matter of time before I hear of a friend or family member falling seriously ill or dying. It also means all the economic slowdown caused by the stay at home orders they had until Memorial Day have been absolutely for naught; they now have the worst of both worlds – both the economic damage from a lockdown AND the consequences of just letting the disease simply rip through the population.
alioth wrote:
I don’t think so; I’m particularly interested in Texas as I have friends and family there, so I’m watching pretty much in horror.
So does everyone! Comparing Texas/California to European countries, however, is a good illustration of what works and what doesn’t work in disease control. This comparison shows, that only very strict measures (like school closures, etc.) make a real difference. Leaving schools, malls, churches open is unfortunately not a lockdown.
Plus we learned that if we want to control spread we need to keep such measures for quite a long time. Lifting them as soon as the first indications of a slow down in new infections occurs doesn’t do the trick.
@Graham: I fully acknowledge that all of this is under the assumption that we actually want to control the spread. It’s a very valid question if it’s worth it. While I do deeply believe that the answer to that question is yes, there is obviously always an alternative. We could let it spread and could let those elderly and already ill people just die. Would even help our mid term healthcare funding.
We just need to have an open discussion about that and do a conscious choice based on facts..
We could let it spread and could let those elderly and already ill people just die
Not how liberal democracies are expected to operate. Interesting the fault line between populist right wing governments and the rest. Played out at the state level in the Petris dish of a federal USA
