tallpilot

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/new...s-15433052.php

Hospitals (for profit or not) are run by business people. They know that empty beds are just like empty airplane seats, hotel rooms and parked rental cars. They are a fixed cost with no offsetting revenue. So hospitals generally operate as close to 'full' as they can manage as a matter of course. Measuring empty hospital beds as some kind of meaningful metric is sophomoric analysis at best and more likely purposefully deceptive.

The ICU beds generate an order of magnitude more revenue compared to other beds in the hospital. Do you think the managers want those beds empty?

Of course there are some second order effects and some people who need treatment for other ailments are delaying it and in some cases even dying because of it. That is tragic but all of this screaming about capacity is really quite out of proportion with the actual problem.

Also the derivative of the death numbers is flat. More people die each day (everyone dies although some people seem to want to deny that fact) but there is no statistically significant uptick in the daily counts.

WutFace

Are you joking? It was 140% the average death rate in April.

Remember, it takes weeks to months for the CDC to verify and tabulate deaths. There's some lag so the most recent weeks will be incomplete. But this has not been an average spring and summer. Stop trying to pretend otherwise.


https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm

Excargodog

And the number of cancer cases that haven’t been diagnosed because of the SHUTDOWN is huge too. You don’t actually think that cancer just decided to take the Spring and Summer off and let Corona handle the Homo sapiens killing do you? Those undiagnosed cases are out there, now more advanced and with a grimmer prognosis than if they’d been diagnosed earlier, which ultimately will cost us more in hospital resources and deaths compared to normal times when people were doing routine Pap smears, mammograms, and screening colonoscopies. And then there are those half million kids in the US that haven’t gotten their MM&R, TDAP, HPV, and other immunizations they would have gotten. There will be a price to be paid for that too.

There was no no-cost option to this situation, much as zealots like yourself would like to pretend there was. This will be studied for decades before the optimum path we SHOULD have taken will be known. And then, in all likelihood, it still will not generalize to the next pandemic which - yes - will come along.

WutFace

You can always tell when you strike a denial nerve when the outrage comes out.

"Well that's.. that's just PREPOSTEROUS! Well, I never.. never have I heard such an OUTRAGEOUS statement!"
I've seen it before. Anytime anyone brings up how this whole catastrophe was preventable under more competent hands, the pearl clutching on this forum is legendary.

The fact of the matter is that we (and I mean the Trump administration) sat on our asses for 2 solid months pretending it didn't exist. Meanwhile allowing COVID to get a solid foothold across the country, from both oceans, undetected. It's a fact that had we entered into lockdown earlier we might have been able to slow the spread to a point where contact tracing was viable.

And in that alternative timeline, there would be less than 172,000 dead Americans in the ground right now. That's a fact.

Flyfalcons

Can you please bold the 2.8 million dead Americans that die each year, or is the bold only reserved for a certain sickness?

WutFace

Only if we can bold the total for 2020. It'll be much higher than 2.8 million.

BoilerUP

What’s your prognostication on percentage higher than 2.8M?

WutFace

That's funny. I was just figuring that out.

IHME has the United States at around 1200 deaths per day or more for the rest of the year. 8400 per week. 19 weeks to go.

8400 * 19 = 159,600 more deaths until Dec 31.
Confirmed deaths as of today: 172,762

Estimated total: 332,362 by the end of 2020

Other considerations:
Death overlap: COVID might be the cause of death for those who were already going to die in 2020 anyway. These will be included in the average, and will not increase the total.

Unconfirmed deaths: A lot of deaths were not counted due to the ways that states set up the rules for counting. Some states will only count confirmed COVID positive patients and no one else. Lack of tests artificially undercounted the amount of COVID deaths. Especially in the early days. These deaths are not included in the average, and they will increase the total.

For the sake of argument, let's have these factors cancel out. 332K is what we'll use.
So 3.13 million deaths. Or 112% of average.

tallpilot

I’m confused. I see a flat to declining trend in deaths, especially compared with April and early May. That indicates to me that treatment protocols are getting better and people with serious comorbitities are either already dead or wisely limiting their chances of exposure. It isn’t sunshine and rainbows but it isn’t an extinction level event either.

The curve was flattened and system capacity is adequate to handle the inevitable increase in cases necessary to achieve herd immunity. This is about the best we can do with current technology.

WutFace

Like I said, you can't use the recent data. It's incomplete. We're actually trending upward starting from the low on July 4. Right now we're losing about 8000 extra per week, or about 15-20% higher than average.