Well thanks for the hospital CEO to TRYING to stop the massive nationwide sensationalized headings – so sad – https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/06/25/houston-hospital-leaders-discuss-capacity-has-coronavirus-cases-rise/?outputType=amp&__twitter_impression=true
“Leaders from the four largest hospital systems in Houston said Thursday that they are in good shape to handle a surge of coronavirus patients if it happens”
“”There is not a scenario, in my opinion, to where the demand for our beds, especially ICUs, ventilators, PPE, etcetera, would eclipse our capability,” said Mark Wallace, the President and CEO of Texas Children’s Hospital said.
“All four CEOs agreed they are concerned about the increasing number of coronavirus cases and asked Houstonians to do everything they can to help flatten the current curve. However, the hospitals in the Texas Medical Center are equipped to deal with a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations.
The CEOs said they have a sustained surge protection plan in place, meaning other beds in other rooms could be used to house patients if it becomes necessary.
“We have plenty of capacity,” said Dr. David Callender, of Memorial Hermann”
“As for what can be done to have an impact on the numbers, Giordano said the bottom line: a matter of how residents respond to staying safe.
“Really a lot of it is going to boil down to individual behavior. People need to understand that the shut down didn’t make this go away. And the resumption of activities is not resume everything like it was before. It’s resume with precautions,” he said.” (DIDN’T SAY IT STRAIGHT UP – BUT WEAR A MASK is the precaution and not loiter inside with others)
Will anyone be accountable for projecting FALSE rumors and increasing stress and hysteria – I have people from other countries concerned about my family now? Perhaps get more funding for Houston even though our death rates are one of the lowest in the country/world?
There was no doubt in my mind confirmations will rise in CA, TX, FL – they all have less than 10% of the population tested. Even states with the most tested – confirmation/tested is not near zero RI at 22% tested is showing 7% confirmation rate. TX only 6% of population tested – currently 9% confirm per tested. In terms of total populations testing positive sit at 0.5%. IF they test MORE people AND AT BEST you assume the lowest confirmation among states to test with over 10% population tested that would be Alaska at 0.8% confirmed per tested. 25 MILLION more needed to be tested in Texas – 25Million X .008 – this means we could see 70K more confirmations from current level of only 131K confirmed. Once again confirmation is a pointless number once you can accept the virus is out and spreads very effectively….now its about hospitalization mitigation…AND of course minimize further spread but to think that a goal of zero confirmation seems very unachievable without ending society – given the risk for many will be at worse a flu like condition this does not seem like an appropriate reaction. And there are several obvious means to control spread.
Can we stop arguing over the obvious – wear a mask – This paper highlights mask, age, and obesity drivers and potential mechanism why those are important factors. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.22.20137745v1.full.pdf
MASK
“simulation study showed that universal masking at 80% adoption suppresses COVID-19 deaths significantly more than maintaining
a lockdown.”
“The mask non-wearing rate in mid-March alone explained up to 72% of variations of the number of
deaths per million.”
“There was a significant positive correlation between male BMI and mask non-wearing rate in midMarch. Although this does not simply indicate that obese people tend not to wear masks, it is possible
to speculate that when people become more obese, they feel more uncomfortable to wear masks since
obese adult inhale air average 50% more per day than non-obese adults (Brochu, 2014). Also, body
temperature is positively associated with obesity (Bastardot, 2019), and face masks could rise body
temperature (Yip, 2005; Hayashi 2004). Therefore, obese people may feel more heat and discomfort
(Li, 2005) when wearing face masks depending on the temperature and humidity. The small size of
universal face masks may be a simple reason for the correlation ”
“face mask has never been mandated in Japan, despite its high
face mask wearing rate. We speculate that the cultural may be the major reason for the difference.
Many Japanese wear surgical masks on a daily basis not for shedding infections or pollens, but also
for achieving anonymity just like westerners wearing sunglasses, which is referred to as "mask
dependency" in excessive cases (Li, 2017). However, while people may hope to achieve anonymity,
most of them want to avoid making others uncomfortable, and there is a regional difference in what
people feel uncomfortable. Jack, Caldara, & Schyns (2012) mentioned that “whereas Western
Caucasian internal representations predominantly featured the eyebrows and mouth, East Asian
internal representations showed a preference for expressive information in the eye region” . This
tendency may be the major reason why it is more considered rude wearing sunglasses among East
Asia (Gesteland, 2020), whereas it is considered more suspicious to wear face masks in Western
countries. Yamanaka (2020) wonders if Japan has an "X-factor" that led to the low rates of COVID-19
deaths. Although the present study is not intended to show the causal role of face mask wearing rate,
future attempts for intervention may consider the face mask wearing rate as the major candidate for
the "X-factor"”
“most Japanese keep silent while using public transportation, because loud chatter in the
public transportation is considered rude in Japan (Baseel, 2020). This may also be able to reduce the
case of COVID-19 because more aerosols are exhaled from asymptomatic individuals during
speaking than breathing (Buonanno, Stabile, & Morawska, 2020) and it is considered to contribute
largely to spread of COVID-19 (Prather, Wang, & Schooley, 2020)”
Obesity
“respiratory failure is the most
important pathology that contributes to the severity of both COVID-19 and H1N1 influenza
infections. Since obese patients generally show a restrictive breathing pattern and reduced lung
volumes, the obesity-hypoventilation syndrome can lead to respiratory failure in COVID-19 patients,
being a risk factor especially for patients with severe symptoms. Also, obesity has been reported to be
a risk factor for the development of acute respiratory distress syndrome (Zhi et al, 2016), which is a
serious clinical manifestation of COVID-19 (Simonnet et al., 2020). According to Moriconi et al.
(2020), in patients of COVID-19, inflammatory markers were higher in obese group than non-obese
group at admission, and obese group showed a worse pulmonary clinical picture, with lower PaO2”
“potential mechanisms may explain the reason why the association of BMI (male) and the
number of deaths increased May to June 2020. Typical COVID-19 patients are hospitalized a few
days to a week after infection and in some cases the symptom become severe a few weeks after
hospitalization. If the obesity affects the last phase of the transition of the disease, there must be some
delay in the increase in correlations between BMI and the number of deaths per million compared to
the spread of COVID-19. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that obese people have high
chance to be infected because obese adults are known to inhale air average 50% more per day than
non-obese adults (Brochu, 2014), which may lead to increase the chance to inhale the virus.
Age
“age ≥ 80 (male) was correlated with the number of deaths from the onset of the
global pandemic. This may reflect the common etiological feature that old people are more
susceptible to infection and have higher risk of death after infection compared to young people
because of the dysfunction of immunity.
The precise reason why older age contributes to the number of COVID-19-related deaths remains to
be elucidated, while the immune dysfunction has been proposed as a potential mechanism (Mueller,
McNamara, & Sinclair, 2020). Meanwhile, it is controversial whether the reduced immunity simply
contributes to the higher mortality after infection. Excessive immunity could cause the cytokine storm
and ARDS in COVID-19 in some cases (Ye, Wang, & Mao, 2020). Furthermore, two patients with X linked agammaglobulinemia have recovered from COVID-19, suggesting that B-cell response may
not be necessary for the recover from this disease (Soresina et al., 2020). While other dysfunction of
immunity, such as age-related T-cell dysfunction, may be involved in the severity of COVID-19
(Minato, Hattori, & Hamazaki, 2020), the mechanism should be carefully investigated.
Along with immune dysfunction, old individuals tend to provoke unwanted inflammation, which may
contribute to the severity of COVID-19 (Mueller, McNamara, & Sinclair, 2020). This tendency can be
seen in SARS-CoV-infected old nonhuman primate (Smits et al., 2010). Also, To et al. (2020) reported
that older age is correlated with the higher salivary viral load, which is highest during the first week
after symptom onset. Furthermore, as in the case of obese patients, decreased respiratory function of
elderly could also be the reason. In elder individual, both forced expiratory volume in one second
(FEV1) and forced vital capacity (FVC) decrease dramatically (Falaschetti et al., 2004), to almost half
of their lifetime maximum values, especially in males (Leem et al., 2019)”
In a nutshell be healthy and wear a mask. Work on your breathing capabilities and don’t talk too much in public.
Speaking of obvious but not able to absorb it without an EXPERT and a Corresponding study done – https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/does-air-conditioning-spread-coronavirus-n1232175
“There’s some reports that malls, bars, certain social clubs with air conditioning, that air conditioning may not be cleansing the air of the virus, just recirculating the air with the virus.” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a briefing Wednesday. "We’re studying that, and as soon as we get some more information, we’ll make an informed decision."
“But experts say there’s little evidence to link air conditioning to the spread of the coronavirus. Rather, the risk more likely comes from the amount of time spent indoors in close proximity to others.
“The opening up of facilities from my point of view, and I think this is shared by colleagues, that doesn’t depend on the air conditioning, it’s the gathering of the people for long periods of time,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.”
I DON’T get this logic. IF you are inside and someone is contagious via their droplets – each time they talk/breath they are increasing the viral load in the space….IF you take the AC and blow air over them that same droplet moves a little further – IF you take the air AND recirculate it YOU will be exposed to more droplets than IF it wasn’t on. The Chinese restaurant clearly showed this. DO you really need funding to prove the obvious? The contagious person on 14 hour flight and NO one got sick – how that happened BECAUSE of HVAC system and reduction of viral load as the person probably wasn’t talking on airplane. Airplanes recirculate less than 50% of the air. Fresh air = 0 pollutant + recirculated air = Growing Viral load
I am not claiming AC unit will get you sick – no it could ACTUALLY reduce it IF you install a fresh air unit or run the air through UV high HEPA filter therefore DILUTING the total air. But if you just recirculate the air you seem to disperse the droplets farther and ever increasing viral load as long as that sick person continues to breath and talk…..
I guess they all want funding to prove logic.
Big jump in deaths with US holding the top spot 2430 – but most of that all in NJ
NJ has reclassified deaths to Covid – https://6abc.com/new-jersey-coronavirus-death-toll-nj-covid-19-cases-in/6268144/
The data in NJ did seem very optimistic given the curvature Confirmed/capita was higher than NY than all the sudden MidMay it flipped lower….This actually makes more sense.
NJ counties stick out on the county view as expected. I wonder why confirmation did not change I presume reclassify would also mean they confirmed or they were confirmed but didn’t classify death.
All the time charts are now all skewed as those DEATHS did not just happened. US is now above Mexico on 7 day moving average death chart.
