April 22. It’s all about Coronavirus reopening.
Using the IHME model, CNN has made a map of the reopening dates of the 50 states, which we show below. The different color bins are for weeks of opening starting May 4-10 in dark Green, May 11-17 in medium green, May 18-24 in light green, May 24-31 in bright yellow, June 1-7 in medium yellow, and after June 8 in dark yellow-brown. California is in the May 11-17 group.
I’m going to add a clearer version here, but its earlier two date groups are two weeks in length. Since the IHME uses a given error function curve to fit the data which is close to other countries more advanced in the infection, it is not really 100% predictive. In any case, data fluctuates for many reasons. Their criteria is to get down to one new case per million per day. Nobody is going to wait that long. If you have a team to do contact tracing of 100, say, you probably could stop at 20 new cases per day per million. The model assumes that every state and every person is isolating. People travel, and as states open early, the virus will start respreading. The Las Vegas Mayor wants to open, regardless. Since it is a major tourist spot, it could send new cases all over the country. New York is in the May 18-31 category. Georgia is after June 8. Trump disagrees with the Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, opening up now. But he is letting him make his decision.
A 2007 paper in the Journal of the AMA, JAMA, traced the number of cases and histories of major US cities in the influenza pandemic of 2018-19. It shows second waves in cities that did not lock down long enough. I’m just going to show one graph from the paper itself, that compares the history of three sectors of the US. The complications this fall will be having both the flues and the Coronavirus cases impacting our public health facilities. Dr. Robert Redfield, CDC Director, really want’s us to take the flu vaccine, and I want all to take the pneumonia vaccines.
All three had a late surge or second wave, but the West Coast, shown by circles in the curve, had the worst. National Geographic showed curves for separate cities.
The 1918 pandemic was called the “Spanish Flu” since that was the only country not censoring its occurrence during the First World War. (Sounds familiar.) It is not known where it started. It was an H1N1 flu virus. Many people died from ordinary pneumonias, which we now have vaccines for, as well as for different H1N1 viruses each year. The strategies used then were closing schools and theaters, closing churches, and banning gatherings.
The JAMA paper estimated total US deaths at 500 per hundred thousand, or 1 death per 200 people. At present, the US has 45,153 deaths, out of a population of 320 million, which is 14 per 100,000, or 1 death per 7,000 Americans. In the 1918 flu, New York City had 452 deaths per 100,000. The Coronavirus in New York City now has 170 deaths per 100,000o. In 1918, Los Angeles had 494 deaths per 100,000 people.
The JAMA paper is Aug. 8, 2007, Vol. 298, No.6, pp 644 -656 , by Dr. Howard Markel et al.
The much touted 15 minute (10 minute, 5 minute) test by Abbott labs, turns out to give 15% false negatives. This is used to test everybody who has contact with the President.
