re: OT: Alabama Coronavirus Thread (see link in OP for case numbers and death totals in AL)

How’s this going to end? Even after the numbers go down, things aren’t going to get back to normal. A vaccine will take forever to come to the market and be mass produced. If everyone starts going back out again, there’s worry about a second wave. But you can’t quarantine for several months and people won’t do it. The longer this goes by, the more frustrating it becomes

Not allowed to come and go. Must wear mask and gloves in the shelter. Bring a snack and water. Drink your water and eat your snack while wearing a mask?

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Wow. Not sure how I’ll ever recover from this.

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You probably won't.

The most recent stuff I've seen is that we are at the crest of the wave of deaths right now. The spread is slowing, it's no longer doubling every 3 days, probably due to the measures having some effect and probably a little bit is due to the law of large numbers just starting to come into play. But the slope of the curve is very steep going up, and very gentle coming down.

Let me speak to the vaccine question. There are over 100 companies working on a vaccine right now. Some will work, some won't. But probably multiple ones with different modes of development will. J&J appears to have a promising one fast tracked that should be starting testing any day, if not already started. They are already ramping up production capacity for it and will have the capability to produce 1 billion doses in the first quarter of 2021. They hope to have testing completed and be green lighted by January. That seems like a long way off. But that will be the fastest something of this magnitude has ever been accomplished. That's just one company. We will beat this thing, just give it a little time.

Testing is still the bottleneck. We need more, faster, better testing and we need it yesterday. Once we get testing in place, test everyone frequently, isolate the positives, treat with hydroxychloroquine and let's get back to our lives. It seems to me that's the only way we can approach normal until a vaccine and/or an anti-viral specific for COVID19 is developed.

I’m trying to see a time that we will open things back up where the virus cannot flare up again and start this process completely over

That’s what happens when someone fat fingers a couple of extra zeros for one day’s totals and doesn’t bother to look at the graph.

Might want to view that Hopkins data as a little suspect. Right now the show Germany with a total of -31 deaths.

LINK

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I’m trying to see a time that we will open things back up where the virus cannot flare up again and start this process completely over

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Short answer - that time is when a vaccine is developed.

Of course, you can't wait that long so what you do is take steps to minimize the impact on the healthcare system and reduce the chance of large outbreaks until a vaccine is developed. You're going to see that start to happen really soon. By the end of the month if not sooner in most of the US.

It will probably be something like keeping store capacity reductions to something like the 50% already in place for another month or two. At large events, it could mean something like Disney has already announced where they're going to check temps of all the guests coming into their park.

There will be localized outbreaks, but now with point of care tests that give quick results are being rolled out they'll do just like they do when some restaurant worker tests positive for an infectious disease - contact trace and test everyone they exposed and test those people too.

It will be a little PITA for a while but life will go on mostly as it did before this all started.

As a somewhat related aside, I read a story a couple of days ago where UAB was down significantly on the number of inpatients they've got not going to look, but it was 40-something from a high of 60-something. That's real, meaningful progress.

I think we might need a special weather thread for today. That way we can keep everyone up to date, even folks in other states that post here and live other places that might get hammered

Even Fauci says stuff should start opening up next month LINK

To be honest, outside of a few metro areas he was actually right then too. Even here in Alabama the impact has been nowhere near what the doomsday people proclaimed (and IMO probably secretly wished for).

Last time I looked NY/NJ had almost half the cases in the entire nation. They have a problem. Most of the rest of the country could start a rolling reopening tomorrow and would be fine.