45catfan

The RNC convention is moving from Charlotte. Politics aside, this will be a blow to the local economy already missing out on revenue from all the other cancelled events. The new city and state has yet to be determined.

Probably coded a COVID-19 death too since was somehow related. As for the furloughs, yep, heard that from nurses too. You would not believe the number of surgeries that are elective, it's a huge portion of the hospital surgeries. Once elective surgeries were cancelled or delayed until deemed "safe", hospital staff had to be cut. They have budgets to meet like any other business.

In SC we are down to 6 deaths a day from 10 at the height of pandemic statewide several weeks ago. Still too high, but at least the numbers are going down despite no vaccine being available.

Italian doctors are now say COVID-19 is losing it's punch. While still transmittable, not nearly as lethal as the early/original strain. Virus Losing Lethal Potency in Italy

OH SNAP! We got ourselves a UPS-USPS smack down! I'm taken wagers....who ya got?

About 95% of the deaths are 60+. Again, it illustrates that demographic should use the utmost caution. Granted everyone should, but especially these people.

So 11% between 40 and 60. Under 40 was 1%, therefore 12% under the age of 60.

True and why the denominator is smaller than it should be in calculating the death rate. We know there's a LOT more people out there that have/had it and never got tested. The 1.7 million confirmed cases is way off as to the number of people who contracted this. How off? Nobody knows.

Get the data form the health departments, not news agencies. That's where I get SC's COVID info. It's purely data driven with ZERO agenda.

It's not a confirmed case unless you have been tested and it comes back positive. Think of the people that have been turned away because they weren't "ill enough". There was a co-worker of mine whose daughter had a high fever and a dry cough, but since the daughter was young they turned her away saying they needed to take in older and more ill patients. This was back in early April. The daughter felt better after about a week. Sound familiar?

In SC the number of deaths by age group is 99% over the age of 40 and 88% over the age of 60. The young have fared very well at 1% of fatalities, and Gen X has only a 12% mortality rate here in SC. So nearly 9 in 10 deaths are over the age of 60.

Possibly up to 80%. That's scary part as far as contracting it, but the silver lining is the death rate is no where near 6% if asymptomatic people that have been exposed is that high. It's literally impossible. Take 80% of the confirmed deaths/positive cases and that's probably closer to the real number: 1%-2%. Still unnervingly high, but more in line with the actual contracted number (known & unknown) compared to the number of deaths. Right now the figures are strictly going of confirmed positive cases only.

Where at and has death rate spiked? SC has a great site for very detailed information like this. Right now, the main problem areas are Columbia and Greenville. The rest of the state is in relatively good shape...even Myrtle beach and Charleston. The death rate has stayed fairly consistent since the spike of late April/early May. *knocks on wood it doesn't get worse*

This pandemic is hurting countries across the globe, we are hardly the only ones. America goes through some crisis roughly every decade. Some of which are worse than others, but the still cripples the country to some extent either through war, stock market woes, certain industry bubbles busting, inflation, pandemics, etc... A global pandemic is hardly our fault though and we are not shouldering the burden alone. Hopefully we get through this sooner rather than later and have a 10 year respite for before the next shoe drops.

A survey? I wonder how accurate a survey can be? Who did they survey, the health clinics or people themselves? Either way, that's a horrible measure of people who have the antibodies because they are probably going off of submitted tests results. As mentioned previously, if people don't know they are sick, why would they take a COVID-19 test? Typically they don't. The only way we will ever get a true measure is if the government sends out saliva kit and people return it like they would a census form in the mail and hopefully get 90%+ compliance. Anything less is sticking your finger in the wind and taking an educated guess, but a guess no less.

That was well before test kits were readily available too. I've seen a clinical study saying nearly 40% of COVID-19 patients were asymptomatic, but going back to the cruise ship article where a real life setting unfolded and 80% of the positive cases were asymptomatic???? Extrapolate that out and there's a sh!t-ton of people out there that never knew they even had it! The magical variable in this is how many people in America have likely got exposed to this virus and that will get you much closer to the true number of cases. Again, the 1.7 million confirmed cases is likely no where close the actual number of infected people considering asymptomatic folks range from 40%-80%.

My biggest take away from that article is that a helluva lot more than 1.7 million people in the U.S. have or had this virus.

No point to be made here, just an interesting read. Here is an excerpt: "Meanwhile, the second study, from Australian researchers, looked at 217 people on a cruise bound for Antarctica. The ship set sail in mid-March, just after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic. The first fever on board was reported eight days into the voyage. Over the following two weeks, eight people had to be evacuated from the ship because they fell ill. All of the 217 people who remained on board were tested for COVID-19. More than half (59 percent) tested positive, but just 19 percent of those patients had symptoms. The other 81 percent were symptom-free." Article on Asymptomatic People The reason I highlighted this section is these vacationers were confined to tight quarters with COVID-19 people and probably did not take immediate measures (quarantine, hand washing, social distancing, mask wearing etc...) to mitigate it as the WHO had just recently called it a pandemic. So this is more realistic than clinical studies because it occurred outside of a controlled setting without any preconceived notions or hypothesis. The article did not say if any of the medi-vaced patients or those that did show symptoms died from the disease.

That's the thing, people are much more likely to catch it from family than say spending 20 minutes in the grocery store. Folks tend to let their guard down around people they know well such as family members, not to mention spend longer periods of time with them. We were going to go to my in-laws over Mother's Day, but since they are getting up there in age, decided against it. Chatted on Zoom with them instead.

New York and New Jersey have green-lighted Pro teams to return to their facilities! This was a MAJOR hurdle. The League wasn't going to allow players back into facilities until all 32 teams were allowed by their respective state officials due to a perceived competitive advantage. I'm not sure how many other states still have restrictions on Pro facilities, but NY/NJ giving the go ahead is huge. I figured they would be one, if not the last, to do so. NY/NJ Pro Teams Permitted Back Into Facilities

True, which if you think of it that way would be even more terrorizing. So for someone scanning this article would see one city with death rates higher than other countries. I'm sure that would scare the absolute poo out of someone that didn't know that NYC's numbers were completely out of whack compared to the rest of America.

Why was NYC being compared to other countries? Why choose the grossly mismanaged epicenter of the American outbreak when clearly NYC was the statistical outlier in all the data. Why not places like Alaska, North Dakota, Oregon, Nebraska, South Carolina etc...? Simple, it was for maximum shock effect.

People dying at home were largely assumed to have COVID-19 if autopsy's were foregone. It was easier at the height of the pandemic in places like NYC just to code deaths COVID-19 and move on. Sure a sizable portion of them were deaths due to the virus, but not in every case.

Widespread fraud? Not completely sure how widespread it is, but it's happening. In the early weeks of the pandemic, positive cases were grossly under-reported (as you stated) and if there is fraud, laziness or just assumption of COVID-19 contributing to inflated deaths rates (as put on death certificates) with simple math...what does that do to the death rate? At this point, unless the number of positive cases skyrocket and the deaths stop, will the death rate shrink in any meaningful way. This is a bad pandemic, there's zero doubt about it, but these 4%-6% death rates are not realistic.

Georgia did go a bit fast, I won't deny that. However, folks in the healthcare field have said the actually death count is probably lower because the hospitals get a government subsidy for having treated a COVID patient that ultimately dies. To that end, some deaths have been coded COVID-19 just to get money that weren't even COVID related at all. A local hospital is being sued because they coded a heart attack victim COVID-19 to get the money and the family found out about it through a whistle blower at the hospital.