Alabama Board Coronavirus Thread

Maybe you should just tell us want you want us to say, or maybe you and Boz can have a conversation and we will just watch.

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The coronavirus pandemic is spreading out from urban centers and increasingly infecting residents in small rural counties, even as some of those areas begin to loosen lockdown requirements aimed at stopping its spread.

A new analysis shows nearly three-quarters of Americans live in counties where the virus is now spreading widely. Another 200 counties have seen significant growth in infection trends in the last week, making them high-prevalence counties — areas where the virus has infected at least one in a thousand people.

Like ripples in a pond, the virus is radiating out from its epicenters in large cities.

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“Most of these counties are small rural counties,” said William Frey, the Brookings Institution demographer who conducted the analysis. “Very very few are what you would call inner city counties or inner suburb counties.”

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We will see how this works as we open up the economy more and more.

That said, I don't think we have a choice. Got to open up and take the consequences.

So the ADPH dashboard updated their 5/14 numbers sometime last night, and 5/14 is now the highest daily confirmed cases in the state. Perhaps that will be an outlier, but not a great sign in light of the restrictions being lifted this week. Not saying there is correlation there, but rather that that decision was possibly a bit premature, or too liberal. That of course remains to be seen.

The seven day average has flatlined over the last week or so, so hopefully that means we're at the peak.

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I hope the increase is mainly tied to increased testing capacity.

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That is likely the case, though I read this morning we still lag behind the rest of the country in our testing rate.

And the 14 day average doesn’t show a flattening, but rather a steady increase for the past month. Likely also primarily from more testing, but even still that seems to indicate this virus is more prevalent than the actual numbers show. And a lot of people here in Birmingham seem to have abandoned the safer at home guidelines this past week. Lot more cars on the road, fewer masks in the grocery stores, we’ve gotten several invites to meet for dinner, pools opening, etc. Just seems people are of the belief we are in the clear.

I think something like 35% of the deaths (as of 2 weeks ago so it might’ve gone up) in Alabama were from nursing homes. I know they all shutdown early but it’s inevitable I guess given the small environment they live in.

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I am in the dead if you get it group with diabetes and COPD

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I take immunosuppressants to prevent organ rejection. I don't know how much that elevates my risk, but my transplant doctors made it clear early on that even simple infections could be very difficult or even deadly for me. I'm in my 40's so that probably helps some, but I've been taking precautions because I don't want to try and take on this virus with a suppressed immune system.

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I understand there is no choice but to open things up.
The country can not survive economicaly being shut down for
months. Folks like me just have to stay sheltered. Sucks but it is what it is.

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I realize that most people under retirement age don't have many, if any, of the highest risk factors (age combined with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or lung disease are at the top and account for most of the deaths). It's a shame that 36 million healthy people have had to lose their jobs (it is expected that at least 42% of job losses will be permanent), their financial security, and many weeks of access to important services, and access to preventive and diagnostic health care, over this.

We've known for many weeks which groups were going to account for most of the deaths (98.8% of deaths in MN, 97% in Alabama). That works out to about a 0.1% death rate for healthy people among known cases and as low as .005-.05% (among the otherwise healthy) when accounting for results from antibody tests that have revealed millions of completely asymptomatic cases in places like New York. In hindsight, we should have begun targeted measures for at risk people at least a month ago, while easing up on those not at risk so we didn't needlessly ruin the lives of so many millions of people.

But hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

More and more anecdotal evidence pointing to coronovirus sneaking into the US as early as January. A couple of cases even suggest December.