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Texas COVID hospitalizations up 150%

Texas COVID hospitalizations up 150%

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Fast and Curious

slatington, pa, usa

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@Mott-The-Hoople
So 600 THOUSAND dead from C19 in the US alone and 4 MILLION dead world wide and your pithy rebuttal? THE BORDER IS OPEN? SO FUKKING SAD.

no1marauder
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@sh76 said
I didn't realize I had to spell out the whole years' cycle in every post.

First, seasonality is regional. Houston may be warm in the winter, but it's heavily connected to more inland regions that are cooler. Winter is prime season for all flu-like diseases and it's axiomatic that COVID will be no exception. I don't know precisely why this applies in warm winter cities, but it ...[text shortened]... o lifting mask mandates (which they hadn't been taking seriously anyway for a long time) is a reach.
Color me unconvinced. The spikes in December and January were attributed to people gathering for the holidays without masks and social distancing and with increased travel for the same. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/03/covid-us-air-travel-hits-pandemic-high-over-new-years.html

sh76
Civis Americanus Sum

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@no1marauder said
Color me unconvinced. The spikes in December and January were attributed to people gathering for the holidays without masks and social distancing and with increased travel for the same. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/03/covid-us-air-travel-hits-pandemic-high-over-new-years.html
Did you ever wonder why the entire upper midwest seems to have missed the post-Thanksgiving spike? I know you know how to do this, but for everyone else, Google "[state] COVID" and you can see an insta-graph that shows, for every upper midwest state, sharp COVID decreases throughout December, then a slight hump after New Year's (probably a function of getting back to full reporting after the Christmas/New Year's lull) and then another decline throughout the rest of the winter.

Red State. Blue State. It doesn't matter. The entire upper midwest shows exactly the same pattern (except for Michigan's odd bimodal distribution that nobody seems to be able to figure out).

The northeast, on the other hand, spiked about 4-6 weeks later than the upper midwest, and again, followed pretty much a uniform pattern throughout the region.

Seasonality is a thing.

no1marauder
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@sh76 said
Did you ever wonder why the entire upper midwest seems to have missed the post-Thanksgiving spike? I know you know how to do this, but for everyone else, Google "[state] COVID" and you can see an insta-graph that shows, for every upper midwest state, sharp COVID decreases throughout December, then a slight hump after New Year's (probably a function of getting back to full report ...[text shortened]... and again, followed pretty much a uniform pattern throughout the region.

Seasonality is a thing.
I wasn't aware the upper Midwest had different seasons from the Northeast.

Chicago has almost the same average highs and lows in December and January as Albany, NY.

sh76
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@no1marauder said
I wasn't aware the upper Midwest had different seasons from the Northeast.

Chicago has almost the same average highs and lows in December and January as Albany, NY.
I don't have the kind of granular data to prove this, but I would imagine the northeast numbers are driven primarily by the big cities like New York, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia and their suburbs, where the weather is more moderate due to proximity to the Ocean. The north central gets colder faster than the big cities in the northeast.

sh76
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@no1marauder said
It's a "HCQ would have saved everybody's life but for Fauci" saga.

You know what the scientific evidence regarding HCQ is, so there's no reason to bother.
I skimmed the letter a little. (It was hard, but I owe it to MB, maybe.)

MB (and others), let me tell you about my HCQ journey.

I was terrified of COVID when it first hit the US in March. Being perhaps a bit naive, my spirits were buoyed when Trump announced HCQ as a miracle cure. They did it! They found a random generic drug that could be repurposed and stop this scary pandemic in its tracks before it really got started. I eagerly consumed the French doctor's study and that guy from upstate NY (Zelenko, I think) who had found the miracle that was 90% effective! I felt the weight fall from my shoulders and the surge of hope course through my veins.

Hard to believe now, but in March things were much less partisan. Andrew Cuomo, in his daily presser, said there had been positive anecdotal evidence about HCQ and that the NY hospitals were going to start running trials immediately. David Boulware of U Minn started running multiple randomized clinical trials as early as mid-March! I eagerly subscribed to his Twitter feed and anxiously awaited the good news.

Then the VA study came out positing that HCQ was useless and possibly dangerous. But hey, it wasn't an RCT and was poorly conceived. My hope sagged a little, but wasn't extinguished. Then the NY studies came out and found that HCQ didn't seem to have much of an effect. Cuomo kind of shrugged it off "didn't help; didn't hurt" were his exact words. Then the meta studies came out showing HCQ useless against COVID. But the data behind them were called into question (and one was shown to be fraudulent). So, okay, there's still hope.

Then the first Boulware study dropped right after Memorial Day. No benefit. One HCQ proponent on Twitter tried to show how the study really showed HCQ works by re-doing the crosstabs. Boulware calmly called the analysis "creative, but incorrect."

Then that hospital in Michigan came out with a positive HCQ study in June, which gave me my last surge of hope. But most people analyzing the study showed that there were too many confounders to really put too much stock in it.

Then in the summer, the big study organizations started coming out with the meta-analyses of all the studies and they all basically showed a range from slightly harmful to slightly helpful, with no statistically significant conclusions either way.

Yes, there are always going to be some people who need to dig in their heels and keep fighting for a lost cause, but it's time to cut your losses and move on. We have better stuff than HCQ now. Aside from vaccines, we have monoclonal antibodies. Time to let HCQ go.

vivify
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Trump claimed he took HCQ. I'd love for him to name the doctor that allegedly gave it to him.

sh76
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@vivify said
Trump claimed he took HCQ. I'd love for him to name the doctor that allegedly gave it to him.
I don't think it's unlikely that he took it. When says he took it (I think it was May, 2020, but it may have been June), it was being heavily studied as post-exposure prophylaxis and based on data from countries that use HCQ in big numbers, there was reason to be optimistic (alas!). Trump had been exposed to a member of his detail who tested positive and I don't doubt a competent doctor would use it as post-exposure prophylaxis at that time. (My doctor told me he used it in March and April even though he was never convinced of its efficacy.)

Note that when he did get COVID in October, he did not end up using it. Times had changed and the data on HCQ was much stronger.

no1marauder
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@sh76 said
Not necessarily in a post-vaccine world. Or at least the relationship is greatly decreased.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-coronavirus-vaccines-have-weakened-link-between-infections-death-says-2021-06-27/
It turns out "necessarily" even in a post-vaccine world:

"COVID deaths have begun to flatten out in the UK, on schedule with when you'd expect them to based on an earlier decline in cases. "

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1423243926421614595

Ponderable
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@eladar said
Evidently 11 people died of covid in Texas yesterday,
318 yesterday, witha peak of 402 on September 9th. Seems that Eladar was a bit too relaxed on this.

w

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@sh76 said
Did you ever wonder why the entire upper midwest seems to have missed the post-Thanksgiving spike? I know you know how to do this, but for everyone else, Google "[state] COVID" and you can see an insta-graph that shows, for every upper midwest state, sharp COVID decreases throughout December, then a slight hump after New Year's (probably a function of getting back to full report ...[text shortened]... and again, followed pretty much a uniform pattern throughout the region.

Seasonality is a thing.
You are right about climate playing a role.

But, red states and blue states in the upper midwest for the most part also did not have anti- mask mandates or other prohibitions on public health measures. Governors generally let individual mayors and school boards decide what made the most sense for their towns and schools. In effect, the larger midwest cities kept distancing and masking in place and the rural areas did not. This seems like a much saner approach than what desantis and abbott did with their mandates which amounted to virtue signaling.

There's plenty of data showing masking/distancing work to prevent hospitalizations and death. The best evidence IMO is in states where there was the county - level variation in adopting guidelines. Invariably in these studies, masking/distancing/capacity limits etc. worked as intended.

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