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Steve

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Ugh.

 

We'll do multiple bad numbers.

 

Today:  world deaths passed the 2,000,000 mark.

Tomorrow:  US deaths will pass the 400,000 mark, and cases will pass the 24,000,000 mark.  EASILY in both cases unless tomorrow is wildly idiosyncratic by comparison to the last few days, and the last few non-holiday-hangover Fridays.

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40 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

Ugh.

 

We'll do multiple bad numbers.

 

Today:  world deaths passed the 2,000,000 mark.

Tomorrow:  US deaths will pass the 400,000 mark, and cases will pass the 24,000,000 mark.  EASILY in both cases unless tomorrow is wildly idiosyncratic by comparison to the last few days, and the last few non-holiday-hangover Fridays.


Came here to post this. Note that the US is pushing 4000 dead per day. Also note that the toll was 350k only two weeks ago. If we keep losing 25k per week, we’ll reach 450k by EOM and half a million by Valentine’s, matching the most dire projections from October.  I now believe that we will easily exceed a million American dead by July, let alone 2022. 
 

Not bad for a bad flu. 

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On 1/14/2021 at 8:34 PM, Old Man said:


Came here to post this. Note that the US is pushing 4000 dead per day. Also note that the toll was 350k only two weeks ago. If we keep losing 25k per week, we’ll reach 450k by EOM and half a million by Valentine’s, matching the most dire projections from October.  I now believe that we will easily exceed a million American dead by July, let alone 2022. 
 

Not bad for a bad flu. 

 

The question to me is, how long will it take to rein things back?  If we discount right around Christmas, when testing was likely WAY down, the 7 day average has been 200K+ since Dec. 7th.  Over 150K (including both Thanksgiving and Christmas periods) since Nov. 15th, so 2 full months.  And note that 150K new cases a day is a million a week;  a million cases means 15-20,000 dead.

 

And 5 million cases since Christmas...3 weeks ago...so yeah, 500K dead by Valentine's is looking very possible.  If it takes 8 more weeks to get back to even 150K new cases a day, that's another 125-150,000 dead by the equinox.  

 

A million by the 4th of July...I'm gonna take the under.  Some is a much better organized vaccination effort.  Some is that Biden's going to push basic measures, and therefore *hopefully* mask use improves.  Some is that there isn't the "well we HAVE to see everyone at Christmas!!!!!" aspect, that people will isolate more.  There's 24 weeks between now and then;  to reach 1M, it'd have to stay at 25,000 deaths a week.  I think there are enough factors that will start to help that we should see that start to drop...altho not for a while.  

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Rather like birthdays or anniversaries, I fear we're fixating too much on specific dates and numbers as though they represent some kind of milestone. There's nothing any more magical about 500,000 deaths than there is in 499,000. Any death that could have been prevented is too many, and the only number that will be a milestone is the one that starts going down.

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36 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

Rather like birthdays or anniversaries, I fear we're fixating too much on specific dates and numbers as though they represent some kind of milestone. There's nothing any more magical about 500,000 deaths than there is in 499,000. Any death that could have been prevented is too many, and the only number that will be a milestone is the one that starts going down.

 

Not to get political, but certain authorities once set a benchmark of 200,000 dead below which they would have claimed to have done a great job.  It's also instructive to compare this pandemic to other preventable mass casualty events in history.  For example, 405,399 Americans died in World War II, a toll that we will exceed, like, tomorrow.

 

Meanwhile, Brazil now has a highly contagious variant of its own, while some hospitals there have run out of oxygen and effectively suffocated everyone in their ICUs.

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While I agree that milestones are a bit silly, I think an important one for the US was when we started exceeding the death toll for 9-11 on a daily basis. 

 

That seemed to make it clearer to people on internet forums that there was a real problem. There seems to be a lot less talk of it being a hoax or just another flu. And the few times I see a comment like that, there's no longer twenty people chiming in to agree.

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Oh man....

 

Was just glancing over the WorldOMeters current numbers, and a 4-digit number stood out because it was so much different.

 

UK's situation is extremely bad.  Average number of new cases has been running around 55,000;  average number of daily deaths is over 1000.  Recognize:  they have 1/5th the US population.  So they're suffering maybe 10-20% more cases and 25-30% more deaths per capita than we are...and we know we're a mess.  It hasn't been that bad for as long but still.....

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1 hour ago, Starlord said:

 

I understand the moral hazards involved but there's very real balancing act to be done here. And I really can't think of any nice or delicate things to say at the moment.

 

My great-niece is a nurse in an ICU covid ward, primarily taking care of people as they're gasping out their last breaths of life.

 

She finally got the first dose of her two-dose vaccination three days ago.

 

The US hasn't yet taken care of its doctors, nurses, other healthcare workers, teachers, nursing home workers, and people in nursing homes.

 

And that's before the US is taking care of people in meat-packing plants, prisons, the elderly, first responders, frontline workers, and all the other people who are vulnerable due to health reasons according to CDC guidelines.

 

The US is getting hit harder by covid than most countries. I'd argue that's due to mismanagement of the crisis but the reason why is irrelevant at this point. From a medical standpoint, it's difficult to argue for taking vaccines from a country which is being hit hard and using them instead in a country which isn't being hit as hard. The UK strain is in the US and spreading which is making the problem worse at a very fast clip. The current rate of vaccination, even if it is stepped up, isn't likely to keep pace and get ahead anytime soon.

 

The UK is in worse shape than the US.

 

The EU is needing to use the vaccines it's producing to try to get ahead before the UK strain overwhelms them.

 

Canada will do what it can to be charitable.

 

So India and China are the two other big producers of drugs in the world that I'm aware of. They both have their own very large populations to vaccinate.

 

Who the hell knows what China's policies might be? I'd expect them to try to buy favors with doling out their vaccine supplies, maybe even ahead of vaccinating their own people. That's pretty much what they've been doing with the money from their trade surpluses so it's probably not a terrible guess that they'd do the same with their vaccines. But they might surprise us.

 

I'd expect India to have to use the vast majority of the vaccines they make internally. They have racial and ethnic strife at the best of times. If they add "who gets the vaccine and who doesn't" on top of that, they'll have India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka all trying to burn themselves down to the ground due to all the anger and grudges. 

 

And honestly IMO, every country that can produce the vaccine has an obligation to keep itself intact first. If the country falls apart, vaccine production and distribution will fall apart there as well.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_pharmaceutical_exports

 

That's a link to give you an idea of which country both makes and exports drugs regularly. Doesn't give a full picture, obviously, since places like China makes a lot of drugs but uses them internally and additionally makes a lot of precursors for drugs and exports those.

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53 minutes ago, archer said:

 

I understand the moral hazards involved but there's very real balancing act to be done here.

 

Well put, sir.  There is no single "right" option, only a lot of options that suck to varying degree.

 

I offer my prayers/best wishes/whatever you prefer for your great-niece's welfare, and the welfare of all front-line workers.  On a quasi-selfish note, my baby sister and her hubby are both teachers.  I think they just got their first doses of vaccine.  Not to denigrate anyone else's sacrifice, but in my own mind, I can always appreciate a crisis more if I can put names and faces on it.

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Germany is going to start arresting and confining people who repeatedly flout their new lockdown measures which they're using to try to slow the spread of the UK strain of covid.

 

 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13773701/germany-covid-rule-breakers-refugee-camps-mutant-virus/

 

Their current infection rate is 165 per 100,000 population (apparently the UK still isn't the dominant strain in the country so they expect that rate would go up dramatically without the lockdown measures). Chancellor Merkel is wanting to get it below 50 per 100,000 before lifting the lockdown again.

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