At what point will the federal government step up and realize the entire country needs to shut it down. And why are they not mobilize the national guard to set up crash sites and drive through test sites to mitigate hospital overcrowding and the potential risk of transmission to doctors, nurses and other health workers? Every day that passes without a federal response to the issues stated above, the longer it will take to flatline the virus and get the economy back on track.
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You don’t. That’s why you test. I heard anyone that wants a test can get a test. That was weeks ago. 
Then again, the person that said that also said on February 26 (3.5 weeks ago) that we’d be near zero cases by the end of February:
“We’re going very substantially down, not up. Going very substantially down. Schools should be preparing. Get ready just in case. The words are ‘Just in case.’ We don’t think we’ll be there. We don’t think we’ll be anywhere close. When you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
Three and a half weeks ago we should have been anticipating and preparing for this, not assuming that it would just go away.
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My previous post was venting, not really helpful.
A friend just sent this link, which does give helpful advice: Covid Act Now
Based on these calculations, we need to institute “shelter in place” within the next 1-2 weeks to prevent us from overwhelming available hospital beds.
With the current status quo we’ll overwhelm available beds within 4-6 weeks.
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Italy has been on near total lockdown for the last 2 weeks and their death rate is still rising. 800 more today. Yes they have an aged population, so their rates are likely to be fairly higher than that in the US.
But even if US rates 1/4 the Italian one, we are looking at 200 per day. That’s about as much as the flu kills per day (according to the CDC, 30,000 have died of the flu between Oct 1, 2019 and March 01, 2020, that makes the flu death rate just under 200 per day).
If we are lucky our death rate might be 1/4 that of Italy in terms of actual number of dead. But even if it’s 1/4 rate adjusted for population size (60M v 360M) we are looking at 1,000 - 1,200 dead per day! That means in just 30 days the number of dead will be 1/2 of what the flu kills in 6 months!
I don’t even want to think about the death numbers if we able to drop the rate to just 1/2 of Italy’s! God help us if we aren’t able to drop the rate much lower than that!
And the idiot British PM after weeks of saying they’ll just ride it out, is now warning people to expect the worst!
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Average 23-24 days from infection to death. So 2 weeks is not enough time to see any results in the growth rate of new daily deaths from the lockdown.
The lag time is shorter from infection to diagnosis. More like 10 days. You are starting to see signs that the growth rate of daily new cases is leveling off in Italy.
Lockdowns work.
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I saw an article earlier that talked with a CEO of a company that made ventilators.
He said he could satisfy demand in 2 to 3 months. BUT nobody’s ordered any additional units. He’s waiting for the order. There seems to be a leadership void. This is something the feds need to take over, take charge and start giving orders/directions, IMO.
You really need to read the articles cited by Dallas Coog. It offers more insight into the source of the Chinese Virus then any thing I have read. It bothers me that so many of our leaders seem ignorant or refuse to accept China’s role in this epidemic. China is a threat to our country on many levels.
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LMAO… nah.
The epicenter of this is Wuhan which has a population of 11 million people. Given how fast this spreads and they were the first city to have it before anyone knew the virus existed, you have to guess that 95-100% of the Wuhan population was exposed to this. 2,169 people died in Wuhan, the largest part of those were elderly. So that is a death rate of 0.02% (not 2% but 0.02%) when you let it run its course. If you quarantine the elderly, I am sure that number could drop dramatically. So if you apply it to the state of Texas which has 28 million people that would mean 5,521 people would die from this. Horrible for sure but that is about how many people die of diabetes each year in Texas. In the United States 62,168 people would die from this but that is in a country that 2.8 million people die every year. That is a 2% increase.
I know these are morbid calculations.The first case in Wuhan was December 10 and they didn’t lock down the city until January 23. So the entire city was exposed.
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In other news, Prince Albert of Monaco just became the first royal, that I’m aware of, to get the virus.
if any of those things you mentioned were contagious you might have a point but when someone gets in an auto accident it doesn’t spread to others. Imagine if every auto accident set off a chain of events that caused an exponential growth in auto accidents.
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Reminds me of the puking pie boy in stand by me.
It’s amazing how easily you can tell someone’s politics from the amount of time they spend trying to minimize this pandemic.
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Eric, I think you would surprised by my politics or lack there of. I am a political agnostic, I don’t believe either side of the aisle.
But Wuhan should be our data point.
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That would surprise me 
And conversely, how some try to maximize and place blame for something no one can control.
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Controlling what can be controlled is what I am on favor of. Politics aside. And there is plenty of that. It’s a sad day that that reveals my politics, but that’s where we are.
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So it went from 1 infection to 11M infections in 44 days? That’s a growth rate of 44% per day.
Everywhere else, the growth rates are much smaller. Why assume so large in Wuhan? Not very scientific.
In reality, with the Princess cruise ship and the vast testing in South Korea, we have two data sets that suggest that the death rate from all those infected is best case scenario 0.8%. 1 in 125. Roughly 10-15x more deadly than the flu.
If your figure of 2,169 deaths in Wuhan is correct, that implies 271,125 infections there. Not 11M.
The critical thing is that China saw the death growth rate curve (both total deaths and new daily deaths) start to flatten about 20-30 days after lockdown.
Which is what you would expect. Because for those that die, it takes an average of 23 days from infection to death.
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I said exposed, I didn’t say infected. No body knows the infection rates because the testing is not available.