re: Alabama Board Coronavirus Thread

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There must be a handful of micro-outbreaks like this one driving the statewide case count up, because the last couple days we've added a ton of cases relative to the norm. Difficult to pinpoint where exactly based on the dashboard data, but Bullock, Butler, Elmore, Montgomery, Morgan, Tuscaloosa, Walker, & Winston counties have seen cases explode in the past 14 days.

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Can you give me your insight on this weeks Powerball numbers?

I just ran into a highly placed Elmore County emergency services official at lunch. A nursing home here has had 35 test positive in the last few days with more tests still awaiting results. The guard has been sent to sanitize it.

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Hate to tell you but Bama’s rush probably is going to be virtual as well . Not sure it is public knowledge yet

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Are you speaking as someone with knowledge of the situation or are you speculating, assuming, or deducing things? Not trying to be insulting, just wanna know how solid that statement is, because if that's true, we/she may pull the plug on that and try again next year. If it IS true, Alabama and others should just shut rush down and retry in the spring of 2021. A lot of schools make you wait a semester anyway, and that's probably a good idea, especially considering the circumstances.

Alabama isn't alone in numbers blowing up. Florida is escalating too. I don't know why we expected any different. Most folks that were going about their business before the relaxation were at least being a little cautious and were coming into contact with a lot fewer people. Now you have everybody running around like all is well, a majority not taking precautions, etc. All it takes is one positive case out there coming into contact with the increased number of people, people not taking precautions, etc. and Rt goes through the roof.

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Americans are vigorously debating the merits of continuing to lock down the U.S. economy to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A single statistic may hold the key to resolving this debate: the astounding share of deaths occurring in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

Nursing homes and assisted living facilities: The #1 COVID problem

2.1 million Americans, representing 0.62% of the U.S. population, reside in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. (Nursing homes are residences for seniors needing help with activities of daily living, such as taking a shower or getting dressed, who also require 24/7 medical supervision; assisted living facilities are designed for seniors who need help with activities of daily living, but don’t require full-time on-site medical supervision.)

According to an analysis that Gregg Girvan and I conducted for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, as of May 22, in the 39 states that currently report such figures, an astounding 43% of all COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

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Forbes

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Are you speaking as someone with knowledge of the situation or are you speculating, assuming, or deducing things? Not trying to be insulting, just wanna know how solid that statement is, because if that's true, we/she may pull the plug on that and try again next year.

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Well I speak daily with someone close to the situation They have been told the first two rounds will be virtual but this person thinks the whole thing may be but they haven’t been told that officially yet. LSU and Southern Miss have officially announced this and others will prolly follow suit . Other than the interviews , sororities should be normal I guess . This person does not want to influence you either way but thought she should rush anyway . Not sure what the spike in cases will look like in August so it is hard to tell . Bama has such a good home schedule this year , it is really going to be disappointing if nobody can go

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I actually wished the percentages of nursing home deaths were higher honestly . A 1:1 or less ratio is not very good IMO . I think breaking it down by age makes me feel better about my situation

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Yeah I was thinking the same thing. Especially looking at that 13% for New York.

The age breakdowns are more reassuring.

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Especially looking at that 13% for New York.

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New York has been such a bizarre outlier throughout this entire thing. As far as I know pretty much the only place where resources were outstripped and yet somehow has the lowest nursing home death rate in the whole country by a massive margin.

Just really, really odd.

It could just be that it spread so much in the city proper and a lot more nursing homes are in suburban areas.

Agree with Justgetitright that the NY explosion is strange all around but suppose it's similar to northern Italy in that most of Italy had less cases than most southern US states outside of those 3 or 4 provinces.

Just from being here, it seems that it was just all over the city in early March. Already knew a lot of people who got sick with it and now 1/2 of my friends who thought they maybe had allergies or no symptoms at all are testing positive for antibodies (for whatever those tests are worth).


In retrospect, the call to shut down NYC probably came too late. At least seems that way from looking at those few days we were behind SF Bay Area and thinking of the massive difference there.

Bear88, thanks for the heads up. Forewarned is forearmed. I know exactly how this conversation is going to go: the same way the suggestion of a gap year and the suggestion that if classes were all virtual, stay at home and take them went. My daughter is hellbent to get to Tuscaloosa in early August and nothing short of a total lockdown of Alabama will keep her away.

Look at the large majority of case circumstances: nursing homes, industrial workplaces, and large gatherings of people like funerals. All of them have a significant number of people in close contact for an extended period of time. I don’t think it’s quite as contagious as we were first led to believe. Droplet precautions are certainly necessary but I’m really starting to wonder how easy it is to contract it from a box on a shelf or a piece of clothing in a store.

With the nursing homes, it’s got to be coming in via staff or other outside personnel. I’m in the industry and there is a COVID flowchart form that must be filled out with any new admission. One of the flowchart options is “testing not warranted by CDC guidelines.” But most nursing homes are rightly saying to the hospitals “if you don’t test them, they aren’t coming here.” I don’t know of any home that will take a patient that hasn’t been tested. My employer deals with a nursing home in Pensacola that had the highest number of positives in the entire state of Florida. They must being doing a pretty good job handling it though because, to my knowledge, they’ve only had a small handful of deaths so far. And we are talking over 100 cases between staff and patients. But my point was that it’s highly unlikely that it gets in a home now via a patient or a family member since no visitation is currently allowed. It’s got to be coming in with a staff member or outside vendor. And even there most are taking unprecedented caution. They are using contactless delivery in most instances.

There is no doubt it gets in via staff. My point/question was that a nursing home resident that gets infected isn’t the same as a factory worker. That factory worker’s going to infect his coworkers, who are going to infect their families, and community spread is on.

That nursing home resident will infect other residents and possibly staff but outside that they are very limited in who they can expose because they can’t leave and visitors can’t come in. I’m not sure that’s taken into account with these Rt calcs.

Also, just saw where Marshall county now has ZERO covid hospitalizations now. They were a hotbed just a couple weeks ago.

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There's no way that's accurate, unless they're still omitting the patients sent to the hospital prior to death from the nursing home totals. 23,600 total deaths in the state and somewhere just south of 6,000 nursing home deaths does NOT equal 13%.

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Even if it's 20-25%, that's still extremely low.

Now that I think about it, I've read a few local articles that all usually state 20% as the NY estimate of nursing home deaths.

Maybe overall lower rate has to do with something like the amount of NYC programs to fund aid workers for senor citizens remaining at home.