Are the USA really doing that bad?

[Forgone90]

Now this is compared to the uk, not in general. People are going crazy currently with 60-70k new cases a day in the states.

However (and I'm happy for people to tell me my maths is shit etc) when we look back to June the 20th in the uk there was said to be an antibody positivity rate of about 6.8% with a 95% certainty of this.

That's 4.6 million of the population that have caught the disease between January 29th and June 20th (142 days). That is a crazy average of over 35,000 cases a day.

With that being the average, during our peak infection its likely our cases were anywhere between 60-100k cases a day. That's with our population of 66million. I wouldn't want to imagine how many cases and deaths we would have had if our population was 5x bigger like the USA. The simple maths says that our average cases would be 175k cases a day which is terrifying.

My point being tho that it doesn't really seem they are doing any worse than we were and most likely slightly better in terms of cases and much better in terms of death rates.

The most alarming thing out of this is that our reported highest daily cases was under 10,000 when it seems the average daily number of actual cases based on antibody figures was more than triple that number.

The jail's and prisons in USA doesn't bare thinking about. Sadly the inmates will be left to get on with it. There will be no records or treatments, their death certs will not mention covid and because they are all privately run by companies no company will admit failings.

I also just noticed this bit of your post. Around 8% of America's prison population are in prisons run by private companies.

However, four US states have total deaths per million above Belgium - in fact all four are over 1000 cases per million, with New Jersey topping the table at 1751.8 per million, more than double that of Belgium.

Bottom line - the densely populated states with a lot of international transport hubs have been hit disastrously badly. (That sort of death rate - over 0.1% of the whole population, not case fatality rate - also explains why it's quite plausible to believe New York, second on the list, really has reached the herd immunity level of 70%).

Very interesting - I hadn't looked at it from this perspective but I think you are correct.

It's also heartening to see that even if a densely populated state is hard hit, they can recover and bring their cases/deaths right down through lockdown followed by cautious reopening.

Latest news in the US is that the hospitals have to send their Covid data to the trump administration First and not the CDC . You couldn’t make it up. We did expect our governor to issue a lockdown today but instead he’s going to through some more money at the problem

throw

@HoldMyLobster all unemployed are getting $600 a week?! What about health insurance?

HoldMyLobster all unemployed are getting $600 a week?! What about health insurance?

As I said, it's on top of their regular state unemployment insurance, so they're actually getting more than $600 a week. It's part of the CARES Act, and the goal was to keep people at home during the pandemic.

send their Covid data to the trump administration
ah yes the old 'catch and kill' technique to make inconvenient things go away

Donald Trump Isn't the Worst Covid President. Just Ask Brazilians. | NYT Opinion

How Coronavirus Spread Across the U.S. | WSJ

Look at it another way - they will reach herd immunity and come out the other side long before the rest of us.

Herd immunity ....for as long as immunity last and when it comes back and the immunity has worn off
Not to mention all the long-term health consequences for those who became infected because the virus was allowed to rip unfettered through the population

@HerRoyalNotness

Latest news in the US is that the hospitals have to send their Covid data to the trump administration First and not the CDC . You couldn’t make it up. We did expect our governor to issue a lockdown today but instead he’s going to through some more money at the problem

How sneaky is that - OMG I'm so shocked at what's going on in the States.

The death and infection rates in the UK are higher per million citizens than the USA.

678 per million vs 422 per million in the USA.

Even allowing for differing counting rates, the UK is hardly a beacon of hope.

Infection and death rates vary across the country. The overall rate here is high because of a few states where rates are exceptionally high. Most states have rates much lower than Europe. My state has fewer than 200 deaths per million, less than half the national average and less than a third of the UK death rate. You can’t really lump us all together. Each state’s governor is responsible for managing this situation themselves as they see fit. It doesn’t make any sense to say “in the USA they are doing this, that, etc”. What’s happening in California is different from Kentucky, for example. It might help you understand how it works here if you think of the USA as a collection of countries with their own governments, not too dissimilar to the EU.

Prison systems are also run by the individual states with the exception of a handful of prisons that form the BOP federal prison system. In my state, prisoners over a certain age, with non-violent crimes and who were due to be released within the next year anyway have been released to free up space in the prisons to create more isolation cells. Cases in prisons in this state most certainly are being reported. Recently the main story on the local news was an outbreak at a state prison here and what they were doing to control it, which hospital the inmates were being moved to (those who needed hospital care), etc.

I’d love to know where people who don’t even live here (and clearly have no idea how government works here on a state level) are getting this information from.

You can't compare death rates anywhere. The methodology for counting deaths varies so wildly.
Even Matt Hancock is ordering an enquiry into ours which count anyone who has EVER tested Coronavirus positive in the stats even if they recover and then die 3 months later in a car crash. Which may be one reason why the UK is so high (though probably not the only one)

But anyway. Viruses do this. Look at excess deaths across Europe for the past few years. Some countries will have peaks coinciding with flu seasons in a certain year and others won't, and will have the peaks in different years. Nobody is locking down or anything, but excess deaths still vary.

And don't get me started on "cases". A case means being unwell. But with COVID it means anyone who has had a positive test, which of course you will get more of if you test for it and pick up the asymptomatic. Antibody studies have shown that as many as 80pct of flu "cases" each year can be asymptomatic but we don't go looking for them or getting ourselves in a panic,

I was going to say the same as Britwife, you can’t take the whole of the US and compare it to a country like the UK, the analogy of states compared to countries is better. The US is so vast and population density varies so massively between states eg Texas is the size of France with less than half its population. In some states, social distancing is practically a normal way of life because it’s largely farm country and there will be few visitors, few social facilities like nightclubs, whereas states like NY, Florida and California get millions of leisure and business travellers from all over the world.

You can also argue about how you compare testing/cases between countries, but the one thing it is possible to look at as raw data is deaths (particularly excess deaths). What does seem to be the grim case is reports of morgues in Texas, Arizona etc that are at or above capacity and tens of refrigerated units are being brought in to store bodies. On that basis, yes the US is doing very badly indeed.

Antibody studies have shown that as many as 80pct of flu "cases" each year can be asymptomatic but we don't go looking for them or getting ourselves in a panic
I can well believe it but previously I hadn't given much thought to flu because I have only had it rarely, I used to (smugly) attribute that to a strong immune system but now I see it's because I'm someone who naturally socially distances!
From now on, post-covid I will make a conscious effort to avoid social contact during flu season, rather than just let nature take its course because I'm much more aware of the damage that can be caused by a chest infection.

No idea how government works here on the state level
I think you're right Britwife and I'm not trying to excuse it but I think it's partly because Trumps antics drown out everything else, so unless people have a reason to look more deeply into the news all they get is the headlines which are completely dominated by .... him☹️

Re flu..PHE estimate around 17,000 deaths a year from seasonal flu. Which does fluctuate but...Even if we disregard the excess deaths figure in the uk, around 65k now I think, Covid has killed 45,000 since March. And if we hadn’t have locked down that would definitely have been much higher (added to which, the knock on effect on hospitals would have meant higher deaths from other causes because of lack of care available). We need to identify as many cases as possible, including asymptomatic, in order to track the virus, not to shock everyone with the number of positive tests. So comparisons with flu, at this stage of the virus at least, are daft. That may not be the case in a few years time - it could be a similar thing we love with when there is a vaccine and higher levels of immunity, but right now? No.

live with

@Forgone90

You are comparing "extrapolated numbert of cases" wih "number of people tested and found positive."

This is not meaningful.

Compare one with the other.

The most meaningful figures are "number of excess deaths"

Just looked at US flu stats and the CDC says the range is from 12,000-61,000 deaths per year. Covid deaths in US to date = 140k and climbing at just under 1,000 per day at present.

Somebody upthread mentioned herd immunity & that the US approach means it will get through this faster than countries that pursued lockdown.
There’s no meaningful herd immunity through infection as it’s a coronavirus - immunity can be as short as 3 months, median is 9 months. Then there’s the risk of ADE in those who are re-infected - the reinfection leads to more severe disease - there are already well-reported cases of this in the US and elsewhere. It’s a high risk public health strategy.

Immunity can be as short of 3 months, median is 9 months
Whilst I agree that relying on herd immunity in the absence of a vaccine seems like a bad strategy I don't think what you are saying is necessarily correct
I presume you are making a guess based on extrapolations from other coronavirus?