I’m guessing that the overall deaths in the USA will be down this year compared to previous years. My line of reasoning is that all of the social distancing and hand washing and soaking ourselves in sanitizer will shut down the regular flu to such an extent that those lack of fatalities and related issues will far overcome any Covid related deaths.
Dan from Madison
At What Point…
I have small businesses in two counties here in flyover country. In one county the death rate from covid is .0000035 – thirty five ten thousandths of one percent. In the other, *much harder hit*, .000020 – twenty thousandths of one percent. And this is taking the death tallies at face value, as if the people died FROM covid, vs. they died WITH covid.
In Illinois, Gov. Pritzker is talking about curfew, temp taking, and a number of other ridiculous lock-downy things.
Eventually, they have to let everyone get back to work, or there won’t be any “work” left.
I’m wondering at what point will the citizenry call “bs” on this and just do whatever they want.
Sure, there are hot spots and sure, there are problems, but if we didn’t know about covid in these places mentioned above there would be no panic whatsoever as these aren’t even rounding errors. And the economy is trashed? It’s far more dangerous to drive your car to the store than, well, going inside the store.
To make it all worse, I can’t have a birthday party for my daughter, but it’s ok for the State of Wisconsin to have an election, and for the mayor of Chicago to go get her hair done.
One Million Health Care Workers
As I was driving to work today I heard on Bloomberg that presidential candidate Andrew Cuomo requested a million health care workers to help with the crisis in New York. “A million!” I said to myself in my car.
I looked at the population of New York City and it looks like there are around 8.5 million people there, where most of the problems are. Lets say ten million to make the math easy. So one health care worker per ten patients, assuming every single person in New York City gets sick. Really?
Where would you put them all? Aren’t most of the hotels closed? That would be importing a city the size of San Jose or Austin into New York. Of course it is stupid, so my question is why does Cuomo say something like this?
Stuff Is Going To “Fall Off The Truck”
In my previous post I hinted that perhaps Mr. Cuomo doesn’t really need forty thousand ventilators for the Covid-19 crisis in New York. A lively and interesting discussion ensued and I thank the commenters for that.
Today I had on the Trump presser and I was doing other things until Trump said the following, (speaking of mask usage per day at a certain hospital) – and my ears perked up:
“How do you go from 10 to 20, to 300,000 — 10 to 20,000 masks to 300,000, even though this is different. Something’s going on, and you ought to look into it, as reporters,” Trump said.
As an aside, he really does speak in stream of consciousness, no? Anyways.
I love math problems and would like to see the actual numbers of staff/masks if those numbers exist – that could be interesting. Trump could have been fluffing the numbers a bit to make a point on something he has heard. But Trump isn’t stupid and brought it up for a reason.
Of course the Washington Post can’t have Trump doubting for a second that anyone in a democratic controlled area would…well…maybe…”borrow” some of the supplies – and they said that Trump was touting a “conspiracy theory”.
When the books are written about this episode, I am fairly confident that waste and fraud will be two of the more interesting aspects. Some of it will be on purpose, and some of it will be just because this is a large project run by the government.
Ventilator Math
So Andrew Cuomo says that they need up to 40,000 ventilators in New York City.
But “the number of ventilators we need is so astronomical,” Cuomo warned, pegging the “apex number” of ventilators that could be required in New York at 40,000.
So, I like math and I enjoy trying to suss out these types of problems. I’m assuming that a normal “joe” can’t just wake up and intubate someone, and that probably your run of the mill nurse who checks your blood pressure can’t either. I found this list of physicians in New York State as of 2019:
Psychiatry 6,759
Surgery 4,293
Anesthesiologists 4,262
Emergency medicine 4,560
Radiology 3,999
Cardiology 3,149
Oncology (cancer) 2,213
Endocrinology, diabetes, & metabolism 902
All other specialities 18,771
Total specialty 48,908
My guess is that at least half (more?) of these doctors probably aren’t able to intubate someone. So…I’m wondering (paging Dr. K), looking at these numbers of doctors that are up and running with their practice in the state of New York that are qualified, how would they even be able to use 40k ventilators? Maybe I am missing some legislation that would allow doctors from other states to practice in New York State right away. Perhaps it is easier than I think to intubate a patient and Joe Radiologist can do it. Anyone?