You're using the wrong denominator. You should be using the total # of infections and that is unknown. It will be some time before we know the actual mortality rate for COVID-19.
Yes... The response should have been customized to the situation. It seems Cuomo did the right thing for the southeast area of NY. And while the shutdown may be too strong now... He is doing antibody testing and sharing the results... exactly what I believe Govt everywhere should be doing. He deserves high marks for that. Newsome is a disaster here in California. No way the entire state should have been shutdown...and as soon as he knee the hospitals have been empty and dying. he should of started easing restrictions county by count. Much of our state should have been back to work weeks ago.
If California had not locked down in mid-March how do you know that the problem would not have been even worse than New York, Italy, or Spain? We put in place in most states the best policy to address a novel pandemic as outlined by medical experts in the field. What if you took another course and landed up with complete public health fiasco? The German Coronavirus expert had some interesting commentary on the subject of those who thought the lockdown was excessive. Germany's coronavirus lead said the country's restrictions worked so well that people are now angry because they think the government overreacted https://www.businessinsider.com/ger...so-effective-people-think-overreaction-2020-4 Germany's top coronavirus expert told The Guardian on Sunday that he worries about the country beginning to lift its lockdown. Christian Drosten said the country is now experiencing the "prevention paradox" — meaning it has been so successful at combating the virus that the public now thinks the government overreacted. "In Germany, people see that the hospitals are not overwhelmed, and they don't understand why their shops have to shut," Drosten said. The German government's leading coronavirus expert said he's afraid the country's success at fighting the coronavirus will cause complacency, which could fuel a second wave of infections. Christian Drosten, director of Berlin's Institute of Virology at the Charité Hospital, spoke to The Guardian on Sunday, days after the country began lifting some lockdown restrictions. Germany's lockdown started to lift on April 20, with the opening of smaller businesses like car dealerships, bike shops, and book stores. The country plans to start reopening schools on May 4. Drosten said he felt like the government was being pressured to reopen, and that he feared that a blasé attitude toward the relatively tame outbreak in Germany could lead to a new burst of infections. "At the moment, we are seeing half-empty ICUs in Germany," he said. "This is because we started diagnostics early and on a broad scale, and we stopped the epidemic – that is, we brought the reproduction number below 1." The basic reproduction number, also known as R0, represents the average number of people a single patient is expected to infect and is a key figure to measuring countries' outbreak. You can read Business Insider's explainer to it here. "Now, what I call the 'prevention paradox' has set in," Drosten added. "People are claiming we overreacted, there is political and economic pressure to return to normal." "The federal plan is to lift lockdown slightly, but because the German states, or Länder, set their own rules, I fear we're going to see a lot of creativity in the interpretation of that plan. I worry that the reproduction number will start to climb again, and we will have a second wave," he added. Germany currently has the fifth highest coronavirus cases in the world, with more than 157,000 as of Monday. But they have been able to keep their death toll much lower than other countries — 5,976 compared to the US' 54,877 — which has largely been attributed to the country's extensive testing at the beginning of the outbreak. "In Germany, people see that the hospitals are not overwhelmed, and they don't understand why their shops have to shut," Drosten said. "They only look at what's happening here, not at the situation in, say, New York or Spain," referring to two of the most hard-hit areas in the world in the pandemic. Drosten even said he's even gotten death threats. "For many Germans I'm the evil guy who is crippling the economy," he said. Hundreds of Germans took to the streets of Berlin on Saturday to protest against the lockdown measures. According to The Guardian, about 200 people were involved in the protest, and dozens were arrested.
We will wait and see. But when I see the large number of deaths in a few short weeks in New York it is obvious that the death rate of COVID-19 is much greater than the flu. Nobody in my high school class in New York ever died from the seasonal flu. In a mere 5 week period COVID-19 has taken a significant toll.
I "know/believe" because so few people in San Diego died from it. As of last week when I posted the stats... many counties had no deaths... yet.. tons of essential workers were still working and now we are confirming what I and others have been telling you the whole time. The virus had likely already spread around the community long before the lockdown. The lockdown may have been useful in SF and L.A. it was a crazy thing to do elsewhere and it has been a massive under use of medical facilities. And I say this... having a mom in a nursing home that has been locked down. No deaths, no infections.. We could have just locked down the high risk groups.
Exactly and from what I've heard during interviews at CNBC, medical professionals and former government types, is that number is off by a factor of 20 or more. Death rate isn't even close to what is being sold as fact by the doomers ovet at CNN and the like
That's the whole point, we don't know and we never will know because they never even considered it. And that decision was made based on best guesses on what any freshman in a science class would have admitted was very incomplete data. On the other hand what was and still is extremely easy to predict is that when you shutdown the entire economy like a light switch you will then have unemployment through the roof and thousands of businesses going belly up. I'll keep saying it because it's true, there was a middle ground approach that was never tried. That was either due to hysterical fear, which one would hope people in high decision making positions wouldn't succumb to, or gross incompetence of a jaw dropping nature, or people with an agenda to push. My take, it was and still is all three of those things driving this, driving it right off a cliff.
If you want to see how a national strategy goes that only involves locking-in high risk people in old age homes and not locking down anyone else at all - simply look at Brazil. There are clear examples showing how failed strategies work out. I am sure that the various COVID-19 responses and their results will be case studies for many years into the future. I have one prediction about them however - South Korea and Germany will be cited as the best examples of proper responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Totally not the same thing. Brazil and the United States have very different Urban/Suburban/Rural lifestyles.