Haven't had time to post in a couple of days.
This is an excellent article demonstrating just how abnormal the current hospital situation is:
The state has 130,000 coronavirus cases, and hospital workers say it didn’t have to happen.
www.thedailybeast.com
Perfect demonstration of the current situation in hot zones:
"Inside the hospitals, doctors told The Daily Beast they were working more than 100 hours a week, and “countless” nurses were out sick. At one Tucson-area hospital, a secondary ICU that closed when things leveled off over the spring recently reopened, and the post-anesthesia care unit was “cannibalized” to house coronavirus patients, according to emergency physician Larry DeLuca. Snyder said one of the hospitals where he works had started housing adult patients in its pediatric towers, and the emergency department was also shuffling beds to make room for COVID-positive patients.
One ICU physician in Tucson, who asked not to be named for fear of employer retaliation, said the official numbers actually underplayed the severity of the crisis. When hospitals reported that 90 percent of their ICU beds and half of their ventilators were in use, the physician said, those numbers included the extra beds and machines they’d brought in for the pandemic. If those percentages ever reached 100, there would be no feasible way for the hospital to scale up."
There is some good news, along with lots and lots of bad news:
The good news: Despite the lack of statewide mandate for masking in Arizona, 90% of people are under local mask mandates.
More good news is that the cases have leveled off and even slightly started to decline in Arizona, with hospitalizations starting to potentially decline.
The bad news is that the state is very much still in a flashing red danger zone, they can't afford for things to get any worse. And being "stable" at such an exceptionally high level is still horrible.
Similarly, in Texas, which enacted statewide masking, it appears that cases and hospitalizations are starting to level off. While that's certainly better than increasing, it's still a horribly high level. Death counts will likely to continue to increase for the remainder of the month.
Florida -- still too early to say whether there is any real progress. The good news is that the number of daily cases has started to possibly show some decline. But positivity rate still stays way above 5%, even way above 10%. Deaths and hospitalizations remain on a steep upward trend. In other words, Florida may be at the early stages of a peak. This is not a level you want to plateau at. Florida is paying the price for failing to take much more aggressive action to combat the virus. With proper actions, Florida would currently be having under 10 deaths per day, not 100+ deaths per day.
The entire Southeast continues to be an area of grave concern. Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama all continue to show very high and growing per capita positive cases.
To get a sense, change in hospitalizations since July 1st:
Alabama: 96% increase in hospitalization
Florida: 36% increase since July 10th (prior to July 10th, data not available)
Georgia: 103% increase since 7/1
Louisiana: 89% increases since 7/1 (especially disturbing, because they were hit early and got a huge drop.. for them, this is a second wave).
Of course, this all poses a danger to having Disney World open: Driving visitors from Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana, spreading the virus.
Nationwide, we have some good news and bad news. The really bad news: Rest of July will be ugly. We will start having 1000+ death days again. Hospitalization rate is very close to our peak.
The good news: Despite the high case count and hospitalization, because of improved therapies and lower average age of infected, the death count is unlikely to get as high as what was happening in New York. The fatality rate appears to be dropping slightly.
The biggest caveat and unknown: Many experts believed the virus would hit a lull in the summer, and strengthen in the fall. So if this current disaster is the summer lull, we could really be in big trouble in the fall as schools re-open, people spend more time indoors, etc. It's really an unknown. But the big danger is: By not totally squashing the virus now, by "accepting" high plateaus as "normal," we could potentially be in for a total disaster. Of course, the current plateau levels already are a complete disaster.
