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This is the surge
By adamg on Sun, 04/19/2020 - 9:22pm
Total cases and deaths. State in blue; Boston in red.
With more than 38,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases- and with more than 130 people a day dying from the virus (146 reported today), Massachusetts is now into its expected surge that Gov. Baker had been warning us about. Even the White House is paying attention to us now.
Dr. Robin Schoenthaler, an oncologist at Mass. General - which now has the state's largest census of Covid-19 patients in general and in the ICU in particular - reported yesterday:
The hospitals are brimming over with COVID patients. Seven times as many critically ill patients are at MGH as usual, 349 COVID-positive patients there right now. The hospitals have stopped all but the most critical of surgeries - unless you are an abject emergency there are almost no operations (MGH is using 7 of their 70 ORs), no colonoscopies, no mammograms, no hip replacements - it's all-Covid-all-the-time.
All the hospitals have increased their number of ICU beds, some hugely. On March 13, MGH had 18 COVID ICU beds; now they have 206.
She adds the importance of everybody writing down key contact info and of filling out a health-care proxy form that lets doctors know who they can ask if you're unconscious and unable to make medical decisions:
This exhausted ER doctor wrote: "Bring multiple cards with your family’s name/number…especially for those who are demented, don’t speak English, are in terrible respiratory distress, etc. We do our best to communicate with families….. but please if you have a meaningful relationship with someone like this, please try to have this hard conversation before I have to have it, shouted under an N-95 mask, with an interpreter on an iPad they can’t hear, while they are gasping for breath.“
Nuff said. PLEASE talk to your family members about what you and they would want done if you or they were to get super sick and need a ventilator. TALK TO YOUR PEOPLE.
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Comments
The second wave will be in a week
when all the people who were out today catch it.
Very hard to catch it outside
Not impossible, but difficult.
Restaurants, conferences, trains, buses, very doable. Outside, especially with some distance and lots of masks, very hard.
Ay, there's the rub
Masks and distance, you say? I gather you haven't been to Jamaica Pond recently.
Not for a couple of weeks
Was close today, but not quite that far from home.
But even walking by people doesn't appear to be a major form of transmission. From what the experts are saying sounds like evaporation and UV take their toll, but as we all learn new terms, viral load seems to be a necessary variable. TBD, but most of the major transmission routes seem to be indoors.
Personally not taking chances but not that concerned about walking around. Would appreciate the joggers and millennials respecting the 6 feet recommendation.
How old do you think
How old do you think millennials are? I’m a young millennial and I’m almost 30. We are trying to convince our boomer parents to stay home with us! We’re not the ones playing beer pong at our buddies’ houses. That’s Gen Z.
I ride on the perimeter of
I ride on the perimeter of Franklin Arboretum n Jamaica pond and all are brimming with people
Please share
What is the source of your alleged information?
Stevil...
...by the time this is over, everyone on Uhub will be given an honorary medical degree in doctoring from Harvard. If they haven't gone broke.
or insane
Or insane.. I'm on the edge some days. Some days its so bad, I just shutdown.. like today.
Hang in there. These are hard
Hang in there. These are hard times and it’s okay to not feel good,but you’ll pull through. You will.
I hear ya brother!
I realized how bad I am at self-care, so I made a punch list for things to do everyday. 1. showered and dressed before 9am. 2. Found my address book and send one card/letter/postcard per day to someone I've lost track of. 3. Listen to an entire album on Spotify from any band I used to like back in the day. 4. Clean/organize one small corner of my world. and 5. Like Mister Rogers said, "Look for the helpers." so I find one organization that's making this better (or at least not so bad) and send a couple of $$, even small money helps. So I've got a routine, things to look forward to and, if I can do this one more week, my wife says she'll let me out of the basement.
Some days
Some day like today, I have all I can do it get out of bed and walk over to the computer to work.
I'm glad I am working from home, otherwise I would be out a lot.
Just crushing every single day now.
It sucks
I was in the process of getting transferred when all hell broke loose, so my old department is learning to live without me and my new department doesn't know for sure what I'm supposed to be doing yet, so I have to monitor my email all day without having more than a couple of tasks to do. And my attention span is far too shattered to try to do anything other than press the Twitter refresh button like the exact opposite of a patient calling for more morphine.
Just trying to hold it together for a day, an hour, 10 minutes at a time.
same
I was slated to go to a 3 week vacation extravaganza after being on the road for months for work. I was forced to go, per my boss. And even when I cancelled all the arrangements on March 4th.. a few days before I was suppose to go, I still had to go on vacation
So I sat home, shopped, and prepped to be home for weeks. In that 3 weeks time, work moved to work from home. I came back, my boss had a emergency for one week, and now she is very sick herself (C19 related). I literally have had no direction for weeks. I have tasks to work on but just lost all interest in doing so, and many of my projects were cancelled due to them being all on site visits.
Attention span is horrible right now. I thought it was only me but coworkers are also stating this fact so I am not alone. It's just so hard to even continue at this point.. kind don't see much of the point anymore. I just feel like we're done.. and we are just waiting for the end now.
You are not alone. I am lucky
You are not alone. I am lucky enough to be working from home, but my attention span many days is zero. And it's hard to care about work in general, when there's a pandemic happening. Who cares about reports and budgets when that's happening??
I know
I know. Being employed right now is about the only thing keeping it together, but some days like today. I just can't even work from home. I'm useless if I am despondent and not replying.
But I try to remember that I have a job, where I can work from home and isn't suffering much of a business loss because of it. In fact, we've had lots of up sells lately because our product is useful right now (cyber security related).. not sure how long it will last but we were told "we look good".
Especially when so many of my service workers friends are out of work now. Trying to share the wealth as much as I can while I still have it. I even gave orange FF's blood money check away, others needed it more than I did.
I'm trying to be thankful but it is hard.
Spotify nostalgia
Over the weekend, I started creating an "Early MTV" playlist for no particular reason than getting a few songs stuck in my head, but now both my wife and I find it really soothing to listen to. I'm still tweaking as certain songs trigger memories of other songs.
Even songs that I didn't particularly care for way back when seem to work. As my wife said, it may have been f-ed up back then, but not as f-ed up as it is now.
Many years ago
Many years ago I subscribed to Billboard Magazine online for the sole reason to look at Billboard archival lists.
I printed Billboards' Top 100 lists from 1975 to 1991. Then proceeded to acquire every single song on those lists.There are some real gems that I forgot about. It's made the days better somewhat. But I've listened to them all by now.
And yeah I stopped in 1991 because it just got so bad music wise. Those were my high school years and love a lot of it but ughhhh .
Do you know about 88 Rewound?
It's a terrific show on WMBR (88.1). Every Saturday morning from 6-8am they pick a top 40 playlist from some radio station in the US or other English language country from the 1940s to 1980s and play their list from bottom to top.
It's like a musical time capsule and in the case of the 50s and 60s, fun to hear how different the playlists where depending on where in the country the station was localed. Back then the stations actually selected their music locally. Imagine that?
I do now
Thanks.
I have a calendar just for this type of stuff... radio shows to listen to live.
Mostly different stations that air reruns of Casey Kasem's America's Top 40 . It's always nice to hear what was popular the week of April 15, 1984 .
Then again this is also the same person who's TV watching lately is reduced to those reels of commercials from the 1980s, searching for "wbz/wcvb/wnev 80s" and watching whatever comes up. Been enjoying the Evening Magazine reruns and WNEV's newscasts from the late 80s.
Its been very comforting lately hearing JD Saul's voice again. (along with Liz's on wbz reruns)
Dick Summer
And in the 60s and early 70s the legendary local DJ Dick Summer used to read poetry on the air on his "Lovin' Touch" program, first on WBZ AM and later on WMEX AM. I've even got one of the "Lovin' Touch" poetry books he put out back then.
Chart geekery
Welcome, comrade.
This is a real good list.
This is a real good list. I think I'll steal it.
'...If they haven't gone broke.'
Actually, my concern was for Harvard.
We're all getting free money from the government.
The solution...be Irish.
https://imgur.com/gallery/gAI9JoC
The only reason we’re not
The only reason we’re not reading stories in Boston like they did in Italy and Spain is because of the way the hospitals planned in advance for the surge. I’ve never been so proud of working in healthcare in Boston. Talking to the people who organized this and who’s planning means that there hasn’t been any rationing of care is humbling. They have achieved so much in such a short time.
Our hospitals are doing a great job...
but I also think that to some extent we are not seeing the same catastrophe here because we read those stories about Italy and Spain and it defined for us how bad things could get. The only model Italy and Spain had was Wuhan, and it turns out that dictatorships aren't useful models for democracies during pandemics.
Going to be a long long 2020
Kudos to everyone who gets to see it in hindsight. This new normal is going to fray and wither a lot of social, cultural, and political outlets, refuges, and pressure valves.
Good
It needed to happen, and it could have been a lot easier than it is.
could be 2 weeks
.
Tapering off elsewhere
Which is good. More for other places that might need it.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/04/10/armys-seattle-field-hospi...
Meanwhile, the Navy aid ships might be freeing up.
https://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-may-relocate-one-2-214138011.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/17/nearly-90percent-of-the-us-navy-hospital...
They were there in case things got really insanely bad. They are a really reassuring sight.
"As of Friday, 71 of the USNS Comfort’s 500 beds were occupied.
During a White House briefing Friday, President Donald Trump said the lack of patients on the ship showed that New York City was healing.
“They didn’t need it, that’s a good thing. That’s such a good thing. I think that shows that New York’s making progress,” Trump said."
Let's not get ahead of ourselves
"Tapering off" to me means the end of the curve, where the number of new cases are dropping to soon be a small number. What we are seeing in New York and elsewhere is huge numbers of new cases every day, but not significantly more than the previous day. That's not the tail of the curve, the "tapering off". That's... maybe we'll hit a peak soon, with social distancing measures in place?
The ship not being needed isn't because things got better
The ship was only for non-COVID-19 patients and there were so many restrictions on who could go there that it ended up being virtually useless. It wasn't for lack of need.
Nope...
...that may have been the case at first, but the ship was quickly converted to accommodate COVID patients - not sure if it was due to the initial backlash or because a crew member came down with the virus - but it was converted.
1918 Warning
The worst of the 1918 pandemic was from a second surge after people let up, thinking the bad days were behind them and they could return to normal.
We need to be smart about the new normal untill we can test and vaccinate.
Not really a second surge....
....but the outbreak of a new more virulent & deadly mutation of the flu virus and first seen in returning troops quarantined at the Commonwealth Pier Receiving Station. The first cases appeared in late August. Within two weeks, 2,000 officers and men were infected and the Chelsea Naval Hospital was overwhelmed. Camp Devens experienced an outbreak at about the same time. A “Win the War” parade in early September including soldiers and sailors from the Receiving Station, plus Navy Yard and shipyard employees, became the vector for rapid and widespread transmission in Boston. By the end of September, there were 1,000 cases in the city. Many who survived the first wave contracted the mutation, including, if I remember correctly, Babe Ruth. There was a third Influenza wave, which gets very little attention because the outbreak was brief and much less lethal.
PBS’s The American Experience” had a great segment devoted to the pandemic. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t streaming somewhere. John Barry’s The Great Influenza ( general history of the pandemic) and Gina Kolata’s Flu (history, plus a deeper dive into the epidemiology and the research into the nature of the virus itself) are the two best books I’ve read on 1918.
Barry's book is phenomenal
And has been like a bible during all this.
Just. Stay. Home.
terrifying
I recall some of the stories from those books, read years ago. For instance: Young nurse, healthy in the morning, goes to work. By noon she is coughing. By three in the afternoon she is dead.
Liberty Bond Parade
Life is short but the smartest thing to do is write off your summer plans for this year.
The parade in Philly happened not out of defiance to some perceived grievance against a global shadow deep state of satan worshipping Democrats but because it was out of simple ignorance and to financially prepare the country for WW1.
They just didn't know how bad it could get.
We do know how bad it could get and need to heed those warnings.
Past is prologue and the meek shall inherit he earth.
Have fun at your covid rallies, Trümpettes.
health care proxy witnesses
The health care proxy form wants two witnesses, and the person named as a proxy can't be a witness.
That's a good rule, in general, but I don't see a safe way to do this, for myself or a lot of other people. I can't ask my spouse to be both the proxy and a witness, and nobody else lives with us. There are three people living upstairs, but two of them are school-age children. Do I fill out the form now, and keep it handy so I can ask the EMTs or ER staff to witness? Look for two friends or neighbors who can come over and witness my signature from six feet away?
Yeah, get a friend to come over
They can witness from a distance, then approach and sign the paper—wearing a mask, and cleaning their hands afterwards.
I don't think you want to risk waiting until EMTs show up; there would be a lot happening then, and it would be extremely easy to forget. Also, if you're not conscious, they wouldn't be able to witness.
Email
You can scan/photo and email someone, have them print it out and sign it, and then scan/photo and send it back to you.
Legal contracts are handled that way all the time these days.
DocuSign
DocuSign might be good for this and they offer a free trial.
1. Create an account + setup your signature
2. Upload your file & add the fields to fill in the blanks
3. Send your file to 2 people, have them sign up
4. File will be returned to you, just print out the entire thing (or save to PDF), just make sure you include the paper that shows the electronic paper trail
5. And you're done
even if you don't keep the account, it should be sufficient for this purpose.
Maybe setup a Zoom to do it all over camera (and record the meeting!) and send the document while on the meeting if you are that paranoid, but DocuSign should be enough
How Many Really Have COVID-19??
The most important question associated with COVID-19 is how many people have become infected??
That is a vastly different question than how many people have been tested for the SARS-COV-2 virus, the causative agent for COVID-19 disease, and found to have a positive test result.
We know that for the vast majority of people whose nasal and other respiratory and oral samples are tested for the presence of the virus, the test shows no detectable level of the virus.
Most recent and some earlier MA data*1:
Now the Census Bureau, July 1, 2019, (V2019) estimates that 6,892,503 people live in MA*2
So to date looking at the raw numbers:
We've tested 2.5% of the population and if the current rate of positives (+%=31) is prevalent within the whole population -- then some 2,136,676 people have or had the COVID-19 in MA.
However, the simple fact is that we don't know -- it could be, although extremely unlikely, that we've tested the entire population who have or had the COVID-19. It's also possible that the entire untested population of MA has or had COVID-19 and we've yet to encounter and test them. Or any other possible rate in between. All of this of course assumes that each of the:
But -- Ignoring all of the data issues -- all of the tests were looking for the presence of a measurable amount of virus in nasal and oral a samples. We don't have any data as yet to look for the presence of antibodies to the SARS-COV2 virus in blood samples -- the typical "Gold Standard" for viral epidemiological studies.
And then came the not-yet prime-time release of the "Stanford Study" *4-- which attempted to ascertain how many people in Santa Clara County [aka Silicon Valley] were carrying the antibody to the virus. It is much criticized on various blogs and by pundits most of whom have no knowledge of any of the technical terms used in the paper.
The key findings of the study [my highlights in Bold]:
In the discussion the authors of the Stanford Study mention some additional serological [blood antibody] tests in localities in Europe [# are the references in the Stanford Study]:
There are at least three other situations which could be used to measure the prevalence and spread of the COVID-19 in close quarters [aka inside social distancing]:
Conclusion we should at least double the number of cases confirmed by the existing testing regimen when ever we are discussing the COVID-19 incident -- and it could be much more prevalent even than that
Refs:
*1
MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Cases in MA
As of April 19, 2020
There were 5,435 new tests conducted for a total of 162,241.
There are 1,705 new cases for a total of 38,077.
also same reporting for:
As of April 1, 2020
As of March 24, 2020
*2
US Census Bureau Massachusetts Population estimates, July 1, 2019, (V2019)
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MA#
*3
CDC COVID-19 testing protocol [current]
*4
COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California
Eran Bendavid1, Bianca Mulaney2, Neeraj Sood3, Soleil Shah2, Emilia Ling2, Rebecca Bromley-Dulfano2,Cara Lai2, Zoe Weissberg2, Rodrigo Saavedra-Walker4, Jim Tedrow5, Dona Tversky6, Andrew Bogan7,
Thomas Kupiec8, Daniel Eichner9, Ribhav Gupta10, John P.A. Ioannidis1,10, Jay Bhattacharya1
April 11, 2020
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.
The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1.full.pdf
*5
Pacific Diamond
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7078829/
Euro Surveill. 2020 Mar 12; 25(10): 2000180.
doi: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.10.2000180
PMCID: PMC7078829
PMID: 32183930
Estimating the asymptomatic proportion of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, Yokohama, Japan, 2020
Kenji Mizumoto, 1 , 2 , 3 Katsushi Kagaya, 2 , 4 Alexander Zarebski, 5 and Gerardo Chowell 3
Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer
*6
Biogen Conference
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2020/04/13/biogen-cambridge-coron...
*7
Biogen Conference
https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/coronavirus-biogen-biobank-supersprea...
After 'superspreading' event, Biogen to build hub for COVID-19 patient data
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (2020). "Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2" [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/nihgov/49565892277/in/album-72157713108522....
*8
USS Theodore Roosevelt
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/theodore-roosevelt-crew-antibodies-coron...