News from the guy to 30+million ppl.
Positives in US are dying out since the 8th of march.
End of April US will be out of the story.
Perhaps something doesn't work in this guy's head.
Elon Musk on Twitter
Elon Musk on Twitter
Overall the US is testing more, but the testing is uneven across the country. The Northeast, especially NY, is testing heavily now, but a week ago the biggest tester in the country was Washington state followed by California. New York was getting on the ball with a huge percentage testing positive and there was some testing in Florida. The rest of the country had very little testing.
NY has jumped into the lead in testing, but they also have the most positives. Washington and California are still way up there in testing numbers. Most of the states that were testing heavily a week ago were also putting into place the most restrictions on movement which slowed the spread of the virus.
But slowing the spread does not mean that everyone is out of the woods. With no herd immunity the virus will come back as soon as people are allowed to congregate again.
Michael Osterholm was recently on the Joe Rogan Experience. He's an expert in infectious diseases and how the spread. He expects China to have an increase in cases again now that they have let people move about again. The Chinese may cover it up, but it will probably happen.
With a percentage of people infected being contagious, but completely symptom free, it's impossible to stop the spread without testing everyone everyday and forcing anyone testing positive into quarantine. That's an effort that even the best medical systems aren't going to be able to pull off. Spot testing people for fevers is about the best societies can do, but people who have it without a fever will slip through the cracks.
The social isolation is not intended to stamp out the disease, it is intended to slow down the spread to give hospitals a chance to keep up with the case load.
The last couple of days I've been thinking more about how this is a lot like a forest fire. With an isolated fire, like one house, or a car fire, fire fighters can drown the thing on fire with water or other fire fighting chemicals and completely put the thing out in a short time. With a forest fire it's too small to put out at once and fire fighters have to set backfires (a destructive measure) to starve out the fire and slow it down. They also have planes dumping retardant and water on the fire to slow it down. Ultimately you get the fire contained until it burns out all the fuel and starves to death.
With an epidemic like this, when most of the population has immunity one way or another, it can no longer spread. But because about 20% of cases will require hospitalization, you need to slow the spread so there will be enough hospital resources to go around. When hospital resources get overwhelmed is when the death rate shoots up because a lot of people who could have been saved with hospitalization don't get the care they need and die.
The backfire is doing a lot of damage to the economy, but it's an attempt to keep the death toll down.
About 80% of the population are at low risk for anything more than feeling about as bad as they might with the common flu or less. That's good news for the 80%, but if they spread the virus to the 20% vulnerable, they could kill the vulnerable people in their families and neighborhoods.
In about 2 weeks we'll find out how bad the spread from spring break is going to be. All those college kids congregating together, spreading it between them (even though many may never know they had it), then going back home because a lot of colleges are closed. Their parents, grandparents, and the neighbors back home are going to be exposed. This is like embers from a forest fire drifting on the wind for many miles while still hot and starting new fires. The embers themselves are harmless if they land on something that isn't flammable, but is dangerous if it lands in dry grass or among the needles of a very dry fir tree.
