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Could you imagine moving into or out of that building and being on the 10th floor? All I can imagine is trying to get a king sized mattress up that many flights of stairs. Now my back it really hurting.

Pivot, Pivot, Pivot 

I haven't verified the numbers here (to lazy to go to the two website and pull the info), but I find this interesting as to where things are happening. I think it further supports we should be reacting to hotspots and not shut down the whole country.

First, based on what I have read in how they are categorizing Covid-19 deaths, I assume we are overcounting deaths.

Second, many of the "outlandish" (intentional use of the hyperbole) model were created after the social distancing.

One of the key ways to look at this is excess deaths in general. We have pretty good estimates of how many people across the country "should" be dying week by week. Analyzing the trends there are meaningful.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Simple ground rules:

• While cause of death can be questionable, NUMBER of deaths is hard to falsify.
• If more or less people than an average year are dying, those trends are easy to spot. That number is excess deaths (difference between actual and average over a period).
• If during a pandemic, 70,000 people have been declared dead due to COVID-19 but there are 100,000 excess deaths over that period, you're either undercounting COVID-19 or you need another explanation for the 30K extra deaths.
• If during a pandemic, 70,000 people have been declared dead due to COVID-19 but there are only 40,000 excess deaths over that period, you're either overcounting COVID-19 deaths or you need to explain why somehow the expected deaths are mysteriously offset by COVID-19 deaths.

There are ways to go either way. If there are "too many" excess deaths, you could explain that some people who might ordinarily seek treatment for other diseases/maladies, who were afraid to leave their house and go to the ER, allowed something they could have been saved from to kill them. If there are "too few" excess deaths, you may explain that staying home caused fewer people to die--for example I believe that auto fatalities here in CA have dropped over the stay-at-home orders due to fewer people being on the road (and probably fewer drunk drivers because you can't go get ripped at a bar and drive home). 

Either way, right now we're in the position that there are "too many" excess deaths. So it's more likely that we're undercounting. Not guaranteed, but unless we have a way to explain those extra excess deaths, we have to at least entertain the possibility that people are dying of COVID-19 and not being counted as such.


There's a lot of misinformation out there, but it seems clear that more people in excess of normal trends are dying than the official COVID-19 death toll. If you have a better explanation that undercounting, I'd love to hear it.


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Regarding the "outlandish" models, the only one that I know of was the Imperial College of London model which claimed 2.2M deaths in the US if we did NOTHING to mitigate, and only bringing it down to 200K if we had very strict social distancing. 

The people being "out and about" is vastly over generalized, at least around here.  Not much has changed on the ground.

I'm not being forced to dine out, which is good, because most places are still closed.

The people being "out and about" is vastly over generalized, at least around here.  Not much has changed on the ground.

I'm not being forced to dine out, which is good, because most places are still closed.

I agree with this, but if a health club is "open"  there's more chance that a few idiots cause a hotspot.

I'm doubting we have a football season, because all it will take is one team to have an outbreak and it will be shutdown - maybe I'm wrong

yes, they are

They're bulletproof and immortal.