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Coronavirus hits new fall high in Massachusetts
By adamg on Wed, 11/11/2020 - 7:03pm
Near future not looking good, based on Deer Island sewage sampling.
Massachusetts reported 2,495 new Covid-19 cases, a new high for the fall and a number not seen since late April.
The state reported 659 people hospitalized for Covid-19, up from 618 the day before and 314 on Sept. 1.
Also reported: 37 deaths, compared to 4 on Sept. 1.
The latest results of sampling from the MWRA sewage-treatment plant on Deer Island suggest no immediate end in sight: The samples, taken three times a week are now showing numbers as high as seen just before the peak surge this past spring. The data is considered a leading indicator, because it can show when people are becoming infectious before they realize they have the virus.
Gov. Baker said yesterday the state is getting ready to re-open the field hospitals it closed as cases fell earlier this year.
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Comments
Amazing to think
That our coordinated federal/state policy of "hiding under some coats and hoping everything works out" didn't pan out
That plan
That plan got me through college!
Federal policy?
Federal policy?
I mean...
...they DID hide.
Under golf umbrellas.
When I hear of someone being removed...
... from public transit for refusing to wear a mask, then I will believe Baker is serious about public health.
You mean
The video of a nonwhite person getting assaulted by the Transit Police for not wearing a mask? Because I will bet anything that’s how it will play out.
No sorry...
but everyone has to wear a mask. No exceptions and NO excuses! TPD should hand out mask when giving 1st warning, but after one warning, fines and ejection from system.
There are signs saying face covering required.
Why are so many fucking retards refusing to follow it? It's fucking mind boggling as hell.
Disability slur
Idiot or fool will suffice. No need to use slurs.
Race
Why is race important here?
I'm going to admit
Not too happy about my comment, but it's true. My thinking was an incident in New York City a while back. I just see this happening in Boston, and it ending up being a whole thing on this website when it does. Not happy that things work out like this, but they do usually.
When I hear of a T worker being removed
then _I_ will believe it.
Any option outside of complete lockdown...
Of non-essential businesses is not going to cut these numbers down enough
Do the right thing Baker - shut it down, March-style
Hey, look!
Thanks to that Donald Trump's criminally irresponsible handling of the Covid-19 virus pandemic, we're in this whole fucking mess! Had a 2-4 month lockdown been done on a national level, rather than leaving it up to individual state governments to carry it the fuck out as they saw fit, we would've been back to normal by now, or at least close to it.
Does anyone know whether the
Does anyone know whether the community level interactive map will return to the mass. COVID reporting site? I know they changed the color coding but now the map itself is gone.
There are more Americans in
There are more Americans in the hospitals now with COVID-19 than there were during the first surge of the pandemic. Hospitals in the west have reefer morgues on standby. They ordered them early.
One question
I've noticed that a lot of cemeteries that have expansion areas have been digging out bunches of graves in tight rows.
Is this a standard practice in the fall regardless of the pandemic? I'm assuming that they are doing this to get ahead of winter freeze, but it is something that I have not noticed before.
Numbers are a joke
Why in the world do people take these numbers with any seriousness? Every study is showing that the reported cases are off nearly a factor--the actual numbers are 70-90% higher than the reported numbers. The only numbers we can take with any truth are the number of hospitalizations and the number of deaths. Even those can be manipulated since one can consider anyone testing positive and then being hospitalized or passing away for any reason as having been a Covid death. But at least those numbers are close to reality. The number of reported cases are entirely meaningless since they are off nearly a factor of 10!
OK
But the hospitalization and death numbers suck throughout the country too. MA not as bad as peak from that front because the nursing homes aren’t getting decimated in the same way, but I really don’t want to find out what will happen if we stay the course for another month.
That also ignores the long COVID issues.
Going to be a long winter, there is a reason one of Biden’s advisor is starting to preview a six week national lockdown. A real one, not lockdown light we had in March, but a stay the fuck home and one person goes to the store once a week lockdown
So, I'm supposed to sit on my ass, not go for walks, or anything
Fuck that!
There are too damned many assholes who insist on not wearing masks and who insist on violating the rules against having large gatherings of people. It takes only a minority of people violating these rules to fuck everybody else the hell over. It pisses me the fuck off, no end.
Yes
You are.
I hate it too. I don't want it either. It isn't fair.
Sorry, but that is where we are at now due to a complete lack of federal leadership, guidance, support and a complete surplus of stupidity and obstruction. None of it caused by us.
In fact, other than wearing a mask, it really isn't a single behavior at this point that matters because transmission is so widespread that contact tracing has become almost impossible. There is no reason we should be sacrificing the lives of essential workers and elders because it is your turn to be upset about restrictions or my turn to freak out about being stuck at home.
And please stop with the intellectual disability slurs. There are plenty of perfectly cromulent words to describe willful stupidity.
Sit on your ass or don't...
...but stop using the word "retard", which is a word only used by willfully pig-ignorant assholes.
Please don't repeat unthruths
No one (or a vanishingly tiny aberration) is being classified as a COVID death when they died of something else but had tested positive. I've heard people tell me how their friend who is an EMT "sees it all the time." BS. There is no reason for anyone to do that (no they don't get to charge a higher rate) and classifying a cause of death is a pretty sacred thing that people don't mess around with.
Yeah. When they are falsely
Yeah. When they are falsely describing would be fraud, a crime. And at scale, massive, widespread fraud. Any accusation of crime made without firsthand observation or evidence is absolutely baseless.
While hospitals will treat sick people because that is what they do, I'm sure that they would much rather have no patients who are known or suspected COVID-19 cases coming through their doors. The extra PPE (which we still do not have an abundant supply of) and additional precautions, isolation rooms, dedicated staffing all adds up to more costs.
How death certificates work
To follow along with this ...
The first and important thing to know is that THERE IS NO SINGLE CAUSE OF DEATH on a death certificate.
Death certs list multiple primary and contributing causes, and incidental conditions. When I worked researching the fate of people who had been treated for a certain cancer, I found death certificates listing that cancer as incidental because the person died of a heart attack twenty years later.
In the current situation, someone my age dying of COVID who had preexisting diabetes might have otherwise lived another 20 years or more with proper treatment and care. That person would have COVID as a primary cause, with diabetes listed as contributing or incidental.
If someone dies with kidney failure from uncontrolled diabetes, and happened to test positive for COVID too, that would be coded with the specific form of kidney disease AND diabetes as the primary causes, and COVID would be contributing or incidental.
So to say that everyone with COVID is listed as dying from that is every bit as full of bullshit and devoid of factual reality as it is to say that anyone dying from COVID with a comorbidity died from that comorbidity. That isn't how any of this works.
Does the "cause of death" on
Does the "cause of death" on a certificate impact a close relative's "family medical history" for risk and insurance premiums and the like? Did it ever - or does it really depend on honesty from a party in providing medical history?
I recall a conversation with my mother's brother about their father (who died young - cancer, discovered to be inoperable, died soon after of heart failure). Uncle was intelligent and not given to paranoia, but they did not have an easy childhood (the word "poverty" was never used, but then again neither was "wealth"). Uncle told me that the doctor carefully wrote the cause of death as one and not the other so that they (he in particular) would not be unduly saddled with a risk flag on a hereditary factor*.
* big caveat being this was 7 or 8 decades ago and different understanding of risk factors
I'm pretty sure....
I'm pretty sure that family members disease history is never used to calculate insurance rates for another family member. Your OWN history is obviously taken into account, but if you mother, father or brother had cancer (etc) that has no bearing on your insurability.
Thank you.
Thank you.
[citation needed]
If "every study" shows that the actual number of people getting sick, being hospitalized, or dying from Covid-19 is seventy to ninety percent higher than the numbers being reported, please point to some of these studies. Studies, not "my college roommate's sister told me" word of mouth.
The other thing is that "numbers are a joke" isn't relevant here--the sewage testing numbers aren't being gamed or tinkered with, as far as we know, and the trend is scary. If twice as many people as we think are getting Covid, that might be good news (if it means the case fatality rate is lower than thought) or bad (if it means sick people are being neglected)--but still, more people are dying from this now than two months ago. More people are being hospitalized than two months ago.
The incentive is to underestimate--if there are fewer cases, government officials have a better argument for keeping things like restaurants open. Hospitals wouldn't have to postpone or cancel the non-emergency surgeries and other procedures that they.make money on.
Here you go
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32009-2/fulltext
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7297691/
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.07.20208660v1
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.12.20211227v1.full
You obviously did not do well on reading comprehension tests as I decidedly did not state that the number of hospitalized and deceased from Covid are what is off by a factor. I said the number of POSITIVE TESTS are what is off.
And the data the government is using to validate the number of deaths is not necessarily coming from death certificates as Swrrls suggests. It is coming from varying sources in each state--mostly hospital records.
I'm not denying the problem of Covid. I'm saying infections are much higher than the number of positive tests. Some people around here need to take a deep breath.
MWRA numbers
I think the point of this post by Adam is to show that the MWRA numbers, which aren't subject to politics or whatever you find on facebook is showing an increase to the numbers Mass had in the spring.
So much fertilizer for my garden here!
Credentials needed.
Do you prefer ICD-9 or ICD-10 coding systems? Also, explain how death certificates are coded and reported and what defines a "reportable" disease.
I'm betting that you copied and pasted this off Parler, since it sounds assertive but your ignorance is frankly reeking off the page here. This is NOT how the system works or how death certificates work or how any of this works.