There are about 70,000 detected cases a day... it’s certainly the case that widespread US tourism in Canada by people who haven’t been tested or gone through a 14-day quarantine could result in a significant amount of virus being spread.
Various US states have these restrictions on travel from other states as well, e.g. Hawaii and Maine. Massachusetts is currently requiring out of state travelers from about 40 states to get tested or quarantine for 14 days after arriving.
So this is nothing to do with xenophobia. Simply governments trying to protect their citizens from a virus which kills between 0.25-0.75% of those who are infected.
(Dead people)/(recovered people) = (death rate)
Doing the math based on infection ignores the fact that many cases are in progress, outcome unknown. This makes for much smaller numbers, and a less realistic risk perception based on lack of data for the scope of risk being evaluated.
Flat out, we do not yet know whether active cases will turn bad. This also means death rates can and will change over time too. By tracking outcomes we can understand the impact of science and policy, as well as mother nature and how the virus itself continues to mutate.
Further, there is a secondary risk of ongoing, potentially chronic, complications. People may recover, but are changed significantly. Data on that is harder to boil down.
My own outcome is profound fatigue. It is significant and appears very slow to improve. Being sick was no joke. Being more tired for months on end now isn't either.
And I am fortunate, due to fatigue being among the more mild of the potential bad outcomes we know about today.
Surviving the virus does not always mean returning to normal.
Those governments acting to prevent harm are on stronger ground than many may be aware of.
The health care system costs will be serious and endure for a long time, even by measures of what governments consider a long time. In the US, that will be acute, due to our current policy. Other nations are well justified in many of their policies for this reason alone.
Health care impact translates into increased death rates from other causes. Flatten the curve is about that as much as it is being able to manage the death rate direct from COVID down.
Right now, death is understated and poor health outcomes more seriously missing from the policy discussion, as are the timelines and potential costs, efficacy of our potential remedies.
This mess is here with us for a long time. A poorly managed, non global discussion only makes it all worse across the board, risks, costs, quality of life, etc.
It is time to realize COVID is more likely to transition to endemic than we are to return to life and business as it was last year.
That will be true for humans on this planet period.
Of the millions and millions of people who have now had this virus and recovered without incident, only a small fraction have seen the inside of a medical facility. Only a tiny fraction of those have had “recovery” reported, and even when it is reported, it generally lags by months. The only reason you would divide “deaths” by that number is to mislead people and scare them.
The overall IFR for this virus is somewhere around 0.1-0.6%. That is the actual chance a person will die if they catch it. For healthy people under the age of ~50, divide that by ten (at least).
Do you have a good citation for this, because the Biostatics research university at Cambridge have IFR 10 times that.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
Until recently Cambridge had 0.9%, this has increased recently as more evidence has come out. Taking a 0.7% value would mean that 40% of Brooklyn has had it, a figure not backed by serological tests. Even is 100% of Brooklyn had has covid, that would give and IFR of nearly 0.3%
We shall see as more outcomes continue to be known.
We will get better at tracking that because this virus is more likely to be endemic, forced.
Having some healthy respect for this mess, rooted in basic fear and concern for the future, is just not a bad thing.
As we get better at the data related to chronic complications, that info will also give people a more solid reason to live and work differently. Fact is a whole lot more people than we think will suffer a reduction in overall health too.
Also not a bad thing.
Frankly, I believe the outcome based death rates will fall over time as we improve our will and ability to record outcomes. I do not believe it will end up being fractions of a percent.
I also believe complications, organ damage, etc... will be respectable percentages as we improve on capturing that data.
We are finding immunity does not endure. We are also finding repeat cases can vary widely in severity.
Add in the growing reality of it being endemic, and there is a solid basis for real concern.
Ideally, we all remain able to revisit all this after a full year cycle.
Let's put 'em in orbit and assume they survive reentry and land where we can evaluate heads or tails, so we have some flight time in this analogy.
Just for shits and giggles.
It takes a coin anywhere from two weeks to a month to land.
We have tossed all 100 coins, 25 per week over the course of a month.
Our stats could look like this.
Tossed coins = 100 Landed coins = 50 Tail landings = 4
To make it a bit more interesting, we could also say we are tossing 25 new coins per week right now, and that could change up, or down.
New coin tosses this week = 25
Right now, we know the outcome for 50 coins, and 4 of them landed tails.
(4/50) = 8 percent tails rate
We know at least 50 coins are in flight, outcome unknown.
It could be that every other coin toss lands heads. We could also say, there are no more tosses to consider. So let us add the 25 new tosses this week too.
(4/125) = 3.2 percent tails rate. This would be the best case.
It could also be every other coin lands tails too.
(54/100) = 54 percent! That is the worst possible case.
In reality, for this example, we know there are more tosses coming and we also could model poor testing and say we are not aware of all the tosses.
Some error factor could be computed to refine best and worst case too.
The better we are at collecting data, the more those outcomes will tell us.
The more time that passes, the more outcomes will tell us.
We may find tosses at night double risk of landing tails, for example.
Or maybe coins tossed mid week land tails consistently.
Ignoring that which has not come to conclusion biases the risk assessment toward lower risk with a larger error.
Low numbers with high error rates are not all that useful in this context.
Current global stats are:
Coronavirus Cases: 19,725,865
Deaths: 727,548
Recovered: 12,660,022
That's 5.7 percent deaths overall known outcomes with 7,065,865 cases in progress right now.
If people test positive, don't end up in the hospital and we have no death certs filed, they are recovered, but may be harmed in some way. Poor data on that.
Otherwise, we know they died.
Some argue a percentage of those deaths are with COVID causing a death due to other factors.
You can bias that overall 5.7 percent number up or down based on your own personal risk assessment, but dead is still dead, and catching the virus only adds to ones risk. These all count for purposes of policy and understanding danger.
I know at least one person who did that low risk assessment, went to a State with high case load and who has been on a ventilator for a month now.
They may live, and that looks increasingly likely, but will definitely not be the same after it is all said and done.
"I am unlikely to die" carries greater weight in that light, yes?
All I am really saying here is people would be wise to treat this with more respect than we may otherwise feel is warranted.
The basic reasons are simple ignorance (we are doing the science and it takes time) and lack of effective medicine at this time.
Both of those warrant the more firm, lower error numbers we get from actual outcomes.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/08/canadians-fed-up-with-unwan...
It's like they don't understand that things are in control and there are well over 325 million people in the US that are not infected/sick/Covid-19 Free.
I'm an expat in Texas and I can't even begin to tell you the kind of phones calls I've received from friends and family about Covid 19 in Texas. I can't blame them, the hysteria created from the media is driving this insanity of fear.