Yesterday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (seen here trying to put on a face mask after gathering in a group of people), re-opened the beaches. Here’s a photo of Jacksonville beach from yesterday afternoon.
Gov. Abbot’s order to allow certain businesses to open, we will see this happening in Texas. In places like Houston, where multiple jurisdictions overlap its urban sprawl, we could see different rules applying in different parts of the city. This will unflatten the curve for everyone, and kill some of us.
There’s an excellent site called Our World in Data where they have collated more data than you’d care to shake a stick at, provided in animated graphs which let you control the data sets you see, and allow you to share your results.
For example, here’s one I created for no. of tests per 1,000 of population, in which I compared the US, Spain, Italy, France, Germany and UK - as the worst six countries by case volume (China is 7th but, yeah, right).
Abbott’s orders override some of Harris County’s restrictions.
The county’s stay-at-home order required most businesses closed, but made exceptions for certain retailers such as supermarkets, pharmacies and stories selling sporting goods, liquor and furniture. Abbott’s order, which supersedes any rules set by cities or counties, allows any retail business to reopen, albeit with restrictions.
It seems to me you really couldn’t pick a worse time in Houston to loosen restrictions than immediately as we are about to enter our peak rate of infections.
…and we remain second worst (ahead of only Kansas) in our testing rate.
How can you order restrictions on businesses lifted - allowing employers to force their staff to work in publicly accessible places - when you can have no idea of the extent of the infection?
This is firmly in the “some of you have to die to protect my stock portfolio” camp, which is fucked up thinking on its face, and also fucked up thinking because failing to maintain the lockdown will increase the spread.
This is the new talking point from Republicans. Basically death happens so why should we shut down the economy to save the lives of a few people. Noted epidemiologists such as Dr. Phil and Laura Ingraham have been comparing this to deaths from car wrecks and smoking; ignoring the fact that none of those are communicable and that we spend a shit-ton of money on preventing more deaths than actually occur.
Remember when we spent over $1 trillion (and counting) in fighting two wars over 3,000 deaths on a single day in 2001 and, nearly 20 years later, you still can’t carry shampoo onto a plane? Remember when they has 16 separate congressional investigations into the deaths of 4 Americans in Benghazi, and made the former Secretary of State testify for 11 hours about it?
Yeah. Now we are losing 2,500 people every day to COVID-19, and it’s no big deal, apparently.
I heard about this site rt.live on bloomberg TV this morning, which displays the number of people infected by a CV-19 carrier. This is one metric to monitor as there are limited re-openings and the lock down becomes less strict.
Besides the inherent difficulty of determining the R number, due to garbage data, I would also think applying it or assigning it to what is basically an arbitrary boundary like a state line is also problematic. Assuming there was good data, it is better to apply it to semi-contained economies like an economic area within the state. For example, is it below 1 in the Houston area and above 1 in the Lubbock area? That would be more honest than saying it is 1.05 in Texas and treating Houston and Lubbock equally for the important purpose of policy decisions.
Also, listened to a podcast where the guy was describing types of COVID models. I always assumed they built them from the ground up. You know, estimate the cases, assume an R number, and proceed in that fashion into the future. While there are models like this, they are afflicted with the difficulties of unknown cases and unknown R numbers. Instead, this guy said that many models basically fit either cases or deaths (a more certain number) into curves (for example, the basic bell curve) and re-update the curves on a daily basis when new data comes in.
It surprised me as I know little about epidemiological models.
I totally agree with this the concerns presented. I think the charts could be useful to “paint a picture” but the actual r-squared figures are probably meaningless at face.
Overall I agree that more testing could and needs to be done statewide. Although, the percentage of .7% of Texas population tested vs 1.2% nationally could be skewed with a higher percentage for a more densely populated state. Texas is a big spread out state.
Take for example my hometown. There have been a total of 3 positive tests. One recovered and 2 currently positive. Those 2 current positives have been quarantined almost 2 weeks now. With the small population there are currently not any issues with testing or getting a test if needed. A friend that is a cancer patient came down with pneumonia like symptoms. She was able to get tested (She tested negative thankfully!) that day at a designated testing site for our area.
Right now there isn’t an abundant need for a lot of testing in my area…That’s if we’re only testing symptomatic cases, as I believe that’s what those percentages you listed are showing.
Speaking of testing. I’ve trained several of my own duck hunting retrievers and find them incredible how they perceive the world around them with their nose.
What do you mean? Roughly 18mm of the 29mm Texans live in the Houston, DFW, and San Antonio areas. Texas may have a lot of rural residents in total, but, on a percentage basis, the population is pretty concentrated in large, urban areas.
