KidDoc said:

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RandyAg98 said:

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I don't pretend to know all the answers, but, in my opinion...

Open up everything, using social distancing, masks, reasonable occupancy limits, and other precautions until we are well into the downswing (estimated by me to be 3-4 weeks from now in Houston).

School should be able to start, in person (for those who want or need it), for AT LEAST K-5 grades, with all adults practicing social distancing protocols with each other, but teaching kids normally.

Avoid large gatherings in tight quarters until we reach 50% of the peak hospitalizations.

Continue to take every precaution to protect high-risk individuals.

Then get on with life.

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I agree with Randy 88- Randy for Governor!

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What about Randy98?

My extreme hope is that Keegan99 and Randy98 are correct!

RandyAg98 said:

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I don't pretend to know all the answers, but, in my opinion...

Open up everything, using social distancing, masks, reasonable occupancy limits, and other precautions until we are well into the downswing (estimated by me to be 3-4 weeks from now in Houston).

School should be able to start, in person (for those who want or need it), for AT LEAST K-5 grades, with all adults practicing social distancing protocols with each other, but teaching kids normally.

Avoid large gatherings in tight quarters until we reach 50% of the peak hospitalizations.

Continue to take every precaution to protect high-risk individuals.

Then get on with life.

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That would be a 0.33% rate for the entire population. The other 43% more than likely had a form of immunity already.

Love data. Thanks as always.

Fitch!

Border countries still looking bad.

Overall, Texas new cases seems to be rolling over and hospitalizations seem to be leveling off. Unfortunately, the continuing uptrends in border counties threatens to mask the progress made in other regions.

San Antonio has an odd fall off on active cases. Not sure I believe the shape of that curve. But we have seen stranger things on active cases. Seems counties just decide to randomly purge their active cases.

Quite right. The data set includes this footnote related to the removal of cases:

"San Antonio Metro Health District has clarified its reporting to separate confirmed and probable cases, so the Bexar County and statewide totals were updated to remove 3,484 probable cases. The local case count previously included probable cases identified by antigen testing but not those from antibody testing or other sources."

Fitch said:

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Quite right. The data set includes this footnote related to the removal of cases:

"San Antonio Metro Health District has clarified its reporting to separate confirmed and probable cases, so the Bexar County and statewide totals were updated to remove 3,484 probable cases. The local case count previously included probable cases identified by antigen testing but not those from antibody testing or other sources."

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That doesn't completely explain it. They lost about 10,000 active cases over a couple days.

By the way, Cameron County says they are about a month behind in counting deaths. They are currently overwhelmed.

HotardAg07 said:

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While I do think that 20% infection rate PLUS other mitigation measures (whether government enforced or not) may be enough to have sustained R_t < 1, it is worth noting that there ARE areas that had >20% infection rate.

In Bergamo, Italy -- one of the first hot spots that was late to shut down after experiencing their outbreak, had 57% of their residents get coronavirus.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-antibodies/over-half-of-people-tested-in-italys-bergamo-have-covid-19-antibodies-idUSKBN23F2JV

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20067074v3

The death rate of the entire population was 0.58%, which means that if 57% of the entire population was infected, then the infection fatality rate is about 1%, which lines up with the calculated IFRs of similar early-breakout locations when treatments were still in their infancy.

That doesn't suggest to me that something like that could happen in the US now, by and large their outbreak happened before people took the virus seriously and they were extremely late to react. They also had the issue of multi generational housing and an older population. They were probably undergoing something close to the true R0 of 2.5 during their outbreak, whereas in the US the places that are "outbreaking" are peaking at R_t of 1.1-1.3.

But, to me it is reasonable evidence that there is not some magical barrier at 20% infection where the virus dies out regardless of what behaviors we pursue. I think we are just seeing that 20% infection of the population, in combination with other behavior changes, testing, tracing, etc. is probably enough to have sustained R_t <1.

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I don't want to agree, I've hoped there was something to this 20% infection thing. And I still do hope, but I have questions. When rate of new cases rises quickly is when societies tend to enact measures to slow the spread, it's not an unmodified petri dish were only one variable - the virus - is introduced.

I've been watching Brazil and wondering when they might hit the downside of new cases and deaths. What is always unknowable is how many people REALLY had the virus, we only know how many have a confirmed case (and I guess you could even question that) and have to estimate how many we think have contacted it. Because NYC antibody testing seemed to indicate 10x those who had tested positive actually had antibodies (2% vs 20%), I started using the 10x number - but it's going to vary based on degree of testing in a country or region.

In the US, 51.2 million tests have uncovered 4.1 million cases. In Brazil, only 4.9 million tests have been run yet 2.2 million cases - they've been running at a nearly 50% test positive rate for most of this time. That makes me thing they have maybe 20x the actual cases. if looking at their death - 83,000, and assuming an IFR of 0.5, That would mean 16.6 million have contracted the virus - less than 8x actual confirmed. I guess they are targeting their tests well or have run way more tests then they have revealed. 16.6 million is not yet even 10% of their population, so they have a long way to go.

Using US deaths of 146,700 and assuming an IFR of 0.3% (better health care), that would mean maybe 49 million americans have had the virus, roughly 15% of population.

Of course IFR matters hugely, I've seen recent estimates of 0.1 to 1.2% and that would drastically change any attempts to calculate a true infected count from the # of deaths.

Brazil is close. Sao Paulo is the "holdout". Would be nice to see more granular data.

Do the city charts also perhaps indicate some underreporting of Covid deaths?

That doesn't matter, the curve of both excess and Covid deaths does and they've peaked and declined. IS the thought the decline in rate starts at 10% of population infected and then by the time 20% is hit new cases and deaths is very low?

# of tests and % positive declining

# of TMC tests fell off a cliff

cone said:

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# of tests and % positive declining

# of TMC tests fell off a cliff

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To me # of Tests falling is good sign- since you have to be screened. Less people think they have it

eventually we're going to go back to the "problem" where they can't get enough people to go get tested to sustain sentinel surveillance volume

RandyAg98 said:

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Those more well-versed...is R0 affected by population density, social dynamics, etc. Or is it theoretically a constant for a given pathogen?

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I didn't see it answered but i believe technically R0 is a theoretical constant for a pathogen assuming essentially a new outbreak while Rt is the adjusted value accounting for things like changing social dynamics and growing immunity in the postulation. I may be wrong because my knowledge base is extensive google research in the last few months but that's what I have taken away at least.

Yesterday's drop in reported tests is in part because of the bad weather earlier in the week. People don't go to the mobile testing sites in the same numbers in the rain, and they're closed altogether if there's lightning.

At least for my lab, we were back to our recent normal load yesterday after receiving half the number of expected tests Tue/Wed. Reported tests will likely be low again today, and then pick up a bit Saturday.

Kind of wasted my time tonight, but figured I'd share it here.

Graphed Houston's deaths -- one line being the cumulative deaths on the day it was reported, one line being the cumulative deaths on the day it actually happened. I found that the average lag right now is 22 days from death to reporting.


This link explains why there is such a delay:

I stumbled across this cool graph for Florida. Basically, what you are supposed to see is that the steeper the lines are, the more deaths that are coming in a faster time frame. Therefore, you can estimate if you are peaking or past the peak real time.

I tried to do the same for Houston. Too little data to make it as cool and I didn't bother to color code since it would be work intensive (I could have written a script in VBA to do a rainbow, but lost motivation because it didn't look that cool). Anyways, what you'll see is that there were 4 lines steeper than the rest between 11 and 17 days ago. Hoping that was the actual peak in deaths in Houston. The peak in deaths reporting is probably still yet to come.

NM

Good job Houston

In Travis county, the ICU beds occupied and newly admitted flattened, if not started to trend down, and I was happy to see that. However I learned just today that, at one Covid designated hospital at least, they had tightened their criteria for ICU admissions because they were having a hard time staffing due to ill health care workers. Definitely not a good thing to hear, in fact it was said one patient that was sent home died a few hours later. Trying to get staff from other geographic areas, and those sick should be back over next week or two, so it's a temporary condition. Was not told of any deaths among the ill health care workers.

kag00 said:

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I don't believe that report. The Austin mayor, council, and county judge are doomsdayers and would be yelling at the top of their lungs about this. I have been watching the daily mayor report for a while and he is actually somewhat positive in the last few days as everything appears to be coming down.

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Your thought process about why to be skeptical makes sense to me, I get that argument. And, I do not work in this hospital so I can't personally vouch for what I was told. However, it was a first person report from someone who works in a hospital, and this particular person I feel can be trusted. I have good friends or family who I love but know I have to filter things they tell me a bit, I wouldn't consider this source a poor one. Even if true, I'm sure it's temporary.

Average daily positive cases drop by 548/day for the last week. That my friends is great to see. Let's hope it falls even more next week and we can get back to living.

https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-updates/average-daily-new-covid-19-positive-cases-by-week-monday-sunday/

Eager to see today's stats from TMC. Some really positive trends lately. The biggest problem with the surge is most hospitalizations aren't quick in and outs so to see them continue falling off is huge.

Nvm

Quote:

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After months of undercounting coronavirus deaths, Texas' formal tally of COVID-19 fatalities grew by more than 600 on Monday after state health officials changed their method of reporting.

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https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/27/texas-coronavirus-deaths/

Anyone know the specifics on how the official reporting method changed?