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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsUS blows past coronavirus record
By Antonia Noori Farzan, Teo Armus, Rick Noack, Brittany Shammas, Lateshia Beachum, Derek Hawkins, Hannah Denham and Adam Taylor
July 17, 2020 at 9:51 AM EDT
... 40,000 coronavirus cases in a day seemed like an alarming milestone ... less than three weeks ago.
... On Thursday, the daily U.S. caseload topped 70,000 for the first time ...
Record numbers of covid-19 fatalities were reported in Florida, Texas and South Carolina on Thursday, and officials throughout the Sun Belt are worried that hospitals could soon reach a breaking point ...
An unpublished report from the White House Coronavirus Task Force suggests that nearly 20 hard-hit states should enact tougher public health measures ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/17/coronavirus-live-updates-us/?outputType=amp
struggle4progress
(118,379 posts)By Charles Piller
Jul. 16, 2020 , 2:20 PM
... In 4 months of the epidemic, collecting millions of records, no one in California or at the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has done the basic epidemiology. Other states also fail to share highly specific information for their COVID-19 cases, which some scientists warn is hampering efforts to identify targeted measures that could stem the spread of SARS-CoV-2 without full-scale lockdowns.
Bhatia and other epidemiologists, in California and across the country, are especially aggrieved after recent news reports revealed states are feeding the same data they desire to a federal contractor, Palantir Technologies, that has drawn criticism for data work supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations. For a data platform dubbed HHS Protect, Palantir is aggregating information on the spread of the new coronavirus on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), drawing on more than 225 data sets, including demographic statistics, community-based tests, and a wide range of state-provided data.(This week, sparking widespread concern among public health experts, epidemiologists, and others, HHS also directed hospitals to provide data on COVID-19 cases and patient information to the Palantir systemlargely via a second contractor, TeleTracking Technologiesrather than to CDC as they have for decades ...
Aggregated COVID-19 case and death data by county, and often by age and race, is publicly available in much of the country. But few locales link those cases and deaths to other information typically collected on the individuals, such as their ZIP codes, occupations, living conditions, and known contacts with others ill with COVID-19. And according to the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer organization launched by The Atlantic, no U.S. state or territory publicly provides a complete set of even such basic COVID-19 measures as total and pending tests; deaths and recovered patients; and current and cumulative hospitalizations, patients in intensive care units, and those using ventilators.
Bhatia and colleagues say detailed COVID-19 case data could be mined to find the combinations of factors most responsible for the biggest bundles of hospitalizations and deaths. He hypothesizes the data would, for example, confirm that even as commerce opens up, hospitalizations and deaths still primarily emerge from widely cited flashpoints, including elderly care facilities and large households that include infected essential workers who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms and pass the disease to relatives who have risk factors making them more vulnerable to severe illness ...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/us-epidemiologists-say-data-secrecy-covid-19-cases-cripples-intervention-strategies
Alex4Martinez
(2,198 posts)Expect those numbers to drop significantly.
struggle4progress
(118,379 posts)BY EMILY BARONE
JULY 17, 2020 9:21 AM EDT
... Over the last five months, states and municipalities have issued a hodgepodge of lockdown and quarantine measures, many of which shut down bars, or limited them to take-out-only operations. The orders tightened, then loosened, and, in some places, like Texas and California, tightened once again. As politicians try to balance economic benefits with health risks, bars have become canaries in a very dangerous coal mine ...
Crucially, in many cases, whether people are returning to bars in a given state seems to be having a notable effect on that states COVID-19 outbreak. By comparing rates of positive coronavirus cases with business traffic, Cuebiq analysts found strong correlations between bars opening and spikes in positivity rates about one week later in some hotbed states, including Arizona, Florida and Georgia. Meanwhile, states like New York and New Jersey, which delayed the reopening of indoor leisure venues like bars, have had lower rates of positive cases recently ...
https://time.com/5867751/bars-covid/
struggle4progress
(118,379 posts)... Experts estimate tens of millions of Americans contracted coronavirus but are not included in official tallies because of testing errors, misdiagnoses, a sluggish public health response, and ignorance about the disease during its early days in the United States.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Thursday that there have been about 3.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 nationwide and at least 136,000 deaths. The actual number of infections is likely 10 times the number of reported cases, CDC Director Robert Redfield said in a news conference on June 25 ...
USA TODAY interviewed dozens of people who were diagnosed by a doctor after a presumed false negative test or who were unable to get tested for coronavirus at all, as well as the friends and family of some who might have died from undiagnosed COVID-19 early this year ...
Accurate and available testing is critical, not only to better treatment for patients like Brumley, but also for tracking, tracing and stopping coronavirus spread. If people with COVID-19 can be identified and isolated before they infect someone new, communities can avoid widespread shutdowns, hospitalizations and deaths. Often the virus is spread before people develop symptoms as bad as Brumleys or without showing any signs of illness at all ...
https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/5407855002
struggle4progress
(118,379 posts)Opinion by Kent Sepkowitz
Updated 7:44 PM EDT, Thu July 16, 2020
... We have seen the governors of Georgia and Florida be accused of inaccurately reporting data to show it in the cheeriest light ...
The alleged interference in Florida was so heavy handed that the lead data analyst for the state, Rebekah Jones, claims she was fired for refusing to manipulate data ...
n Brazil, the Supreme Court had to step in to stifle Bolsonaro's plans at complete data suppression. But their current reporting remains, to my eye, suspicious. As with Russia, the amount of reported cases and deaths have dipped at times despite a lack of sufficient resources or governmental attention applied to the problem.
It is easy to imagine that this sort of tough-guy domination of the data is increasingly appealing to President Trump as the US struggles with the realities of a disastrously mismanaged, raging pandemic ...
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/07/16/opinions/cdc-hhs-covid-19-data-chaos-sepkowitz/index.html
struggle4progress
(118,379 posts)Thursday, July 16, 2020 at 5:08 PM
By Jairus Hallums
I am an African American male educator who teaches eighth-grade English Language Arts in the largest school district in the state of Georgia. One thing I always want my students to be able to do is keep their fingers on the pulse of the culture they live in. While they are young citizens, they still are citizens; therefore, their observations, their thoughts, their feelings should be acknowledged and fleshed out ...
... The federal government is in disarray. Our state government is inconsistent. Local governments are fledgling entities because there is no clear, compassionate, trustworthy state leadership ... COVID-19 cases have been increasing, consistently ...
... how are so many people who claim to be pro-life walking around with no masks, and encouraging the full reopening of schools? ... Pro-Life essentially means, my life.
... How selfish can one be? ... To encourage but not require masks is to contradict an often quoted mantra of this red state: we are pro-life. Frankly life is too precious for territorial temper tantrums. All life is either sacred, or it is not ...
https://www.ajc.com/education/get-schooled-blog/gwinnett-teacher-why-are-leaders-denying-science-and-math-of-covid-19/VPOHL2L5DVGITPTGYB45AF7LSI/?outputType=amp
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,917 posts)It's shocking how many people are proud of being bad at math.