coronavirus

[DonaldD]

And... for the first time ever - more than 300,000 new cases reported in a single day.

[yossarian22c]

Several Republican members of Congress refused to wear masks while sheltering with others Wednesday. Video shot from inside one room shows Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., offering blue surgical masks to six Republican lawmakers. They all declined. It's unclear if those unmasked Republicans were in the same room as the one referenced by the attending physician.

Wow. Sheltering in place with someone and refusing a mask. Too bad they couldn't shove them back out the doors to spend time with their mob.

[msquared]

Well my wife tested positive this morning (test was Friday).  Not surprising really. 

My oldest son tested positive a few days after I did (we have not seen him in person since Oct, so this was independent of me getting it). My youngest son gets his first vaccine shot today and my mom got hers last week (in the Cayman Island so part of British socialized medicine.

[TheDrake]

A third US lawmaker has tested positive for Covid-19 after being involved in the emergency lockdown at the US Capitol last week.

Congressman Brad Schneider, from Illinois, confirmed in a Tuesday statement he had tested positive - just one day after telling US network MSNBC he was "very concerned" about possible exposure after being stuck in a room with a number of Republican officials who refused to wear masks.

"Today, I am now in strict isolation, worried I have risked my wife's health and angry at the selfishness and arrogance of the anti-maskers who put their own contempt and disregard for decency ahead of the health and safety of their colleagues and our staff," his statement said, before calling on punishments for lawmakers ignoring safety protocols.

"Those that flout public health guidance should be sanctioned and immediately removed from the House floor by the Sergeant at Arms for their reckless endangerment of their colleagues."

[TheDrake]

4400 deaths in the US yesterday. That's up 49% from two weeks ago, and in case you'd like to do the math, if it stayed on that pace it would be 1.6 million in 365 days. There's ample reason to believe it won't stay on that trajectory for an entire year, particularly as vaccine gets distributed, but wow.

[yossarian22c]

Current 7 day moving average is sitting around 245k/day. We had a big spike in the daily numbers a week after new years and a small decline after. With 4k+ deaths per day right now probably as a result of the 180k/day numbers in late December we should expect to see 5.5k deaths per day by the end of January. I think we'll see as least 80k people die just between now and the end of January. And that's assuming you don't see more places get as overrun as California is now.

[DonaldD]

Some time tomorrow, the USA will see its 400,000th COVID-19 death.

I remember when some people here were mocking the models for projecting 60,000 deaths - granted, that was by the end of the summer.

[DonaldD]

BUT.... since you brought it up.   The POTENTIAL of a large meteor ending all life on earth this year is actually much lower than the POTENTIAL of 400,000 people in the US dying from COVID 19 this year.  That would be a whole lot more than the 32,000 that died from the flu last year.

That was... suspiciously accurate, 10.5 months in advance, and considering the expert was claiming that "it was going to be down to almost zero within a couple of weeks".

[TheDrake]

The 1918 Spanish Flu had 675,000 deaths, and that was without all the modern interventions we have available today. For scale.

[Lloyd Perna]

The 1918 Spanish Flu had 675,000 deaths, and that was without all the modern interventions we have available today. For scale.

Don't forget the US population in 1918 was about 1/3 of todays.  So not only is that number much larger proportionally, but the sparser population and lack of easy long distance travel must have made spreading harder.

[msquared]

2 million dead world wide.  In less than a year.  But it is no worse then the flu.

[TheDrake]

2 million dead world wide.  In less than a year.  But it is no worse then the flu.

Yeah, but they never said which flu.