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Medicine Stats

Sheltering in Place Works: New Statistics Show Fewer COVID-19 Hospitalizations In New York, California (yahoo.com) 247

Posted by EditorDavid from the good-news dept.
Yahoo News shares an encouraging report from former Newsweek correspondent Andrew Romano: Until very recently, nationwide data about how many COVID-19 patients are currently receiving treatment in hospitals was hard to come by. It's still incomplete and inconsistent. But on April 7, researchers at the University of Minnesota launched the U.S. COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, which is just what it sounds like: the first effort to capture, track, visualize and compare daily data on the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations from the 37 state departments of health that are reporting this information (so far).

The reason this information is so valuable is simple. Because hospitalization typically occurs a week or so after infection, it's less of a lagging indicator than the death count (which trails by two to two and a half weeks) and more directly tied to the trajectory of the epidemic than the testing-dependent case count. It's also a measure of the most pressing public health concern of all: how close we are to exceeding the capacity of our hospital system, which can make COVID-19 much deadlier than it would otherwise be.

Which brings us to New York and California. Chart each state's hospitalization data over the last seven days or so, and two different narratives emerge. Both are encouraging...

On Wednesday, New York's daily death count hit an all-time high: 799. But that reflects infections from weeks ago, before the state's lockdown started. The number of people testing positive stayed relatively flat. Meanwhile, there were fewer new hospitalizations — just 200 — than on any day since March 18. It wasn't a blip. The amount of new daily hospitalizations has been declining since last Thursday: from 1,427 on April 2 to 1,095 on April 3 to 656 on April 6 to 200 on April 8. (There are some questions about inconsistencies between the data from New York state and New York City, but the trend line is the same.) Previously, the total current number of coronavirus patients in New York hospitals had been increasing by at least 20 percent a day for weeks. Now the overall number of hospitalizations is barely increasing at all...

The good news in New York is that the state might be peaking now. The good news in California is that the state might not peak for a long time — but its path to that peak will be so incremental, its curve so flat, that coronavirus patients will never come close to overwhelming the hospital system.
The numbers do look encouraging. (Click on the "Currently Hospitalized" rectangle and then select each state's two-letter abbreviation from the dropdown menu.) In fact, the San Francisco Bay Area recorded its fourth day of declining ICU patients on Saturday. "Home-sheltering efforts may well be paying off, at least according to the number of hospitalizations and patients in ICU," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup.

And SFGate noted Friday that the statewide hospitalization figures "have also been relatively flat in recent days, with Governor Gavin Newsom expressing guarded optimism after the number of individuals in intensive care units decreased Thursday."
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Sheltering in Place Works: New Statistics Show Fewer COVID-19 Hospitalizations In New York, California More

Sheltering in Place Works: New Statistics Show Fewer COVID-19 Hospitalizations In New York, California

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  • Health and Politics (Score:3, Informative)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Sunday April 12, 2020 @01:40PM (#59937392)

    And of course Trump is going to take full credit for keeping the death toll far below what the experts were predicting would be the case if we did nothing.

    Fox News is already celebrating this fantastic achievement on his part. I haven't seen statements from OAN yet but I don't think it will be much different.

    And of course I know this post will be modded Troll in no time flat because there are too many people here and everywhere who just cannot stand how terrible media and the reality are so mean to Trump. After all this is all about Trump, isn't it.

    But I had to post this anyway.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 )

      Yes, the same guy who just over a week ago was musing that America might have to end isolation and sacrifice granny and granddad to save the economy will now claim he's a total genius.

      The fact is that most of the isolation and quarantine measures put in place are at the state level, and about the only involvement Trump had was in apparently convincing a few idiot Republican governors like DeSantis to put off shelter in place measures. For fuck's sake, Trump's own chief medical adviser basically counters eve

      • To be fair, Trump wasn't talking about sacrificing granny and granddad - that was the idiot governor of Texas.

        Trump does enough douchebag shit, you don't need to project other douchebag's actions onto him.

    • And of course Trump is going to take full credit for keeping the death toll far below what the experts were predicting would be the case if we did nothing.

      I'm afraid you're late to the game. Trump already said [theguardian.com] that he would consider it a good job if they kept deaths below 100 000 two weeks ago. Naturally the media and Democrats were full of scorn and ridicule at this suggestion. That number is well below what the experts were predicting at the time. Obviously Trump was setting the number way too low just to put a positive spin on things. He's not taking it seriously.

      Of course now that the projections show that there will be around 60 000 deaths it's time to a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      In reality, it's the state and local governments that deserve the credit. Stay home orders mostly started with local government, then state governments got on the bandwagon.

      Banning travel into the country might have been effective if it hadn't been so tightly selective and yet porous (seemingly in an effort to not scare Wall Street)..

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by quantaman ( 517394 )

      And of course Trump is going to take full credit for keeping the death toll far below what the experts were predicting would be the case if we did nothing.

      Fox News is already celebrating this fantastic achievement on his part. I haven't seen statements from OAN yet but I don't think it will be much different.

      And of course I know this post will be modded Troll in no time flat because there are too many people here and everywhere who just cannot stand how terrible media and the reality are so mean to Trump. After all this is all about Trump, isn't it.

      But I had to post this anyway.

      I'm so glad to live in Canada.

      Here the ruling Liberals and all the opposition parties (including Conservatives) at the federal level quickly got in agreement about what needed to be done and presented that to the public with a united front.

      There's been minor disagreements about things like the scope of some of the emergency powers, but that's been relatively muted.

      At the Provincial level it's largely the same story. Opposition parties will throw some criticism about the state of the health care system going

      • The US is spending a lot more per-capita on economic relief, and our government was united in passing that quickly.

        You might have more nationalistic hyperbole than observation.

    • Thanks for sharing some of the crazy conspiracy theories being spread. However you missed some of the others, such as the original number was a fake one put out by trump so that when deaths were less he could claim credit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      Yeah, Trump will take credit for anything good, and his opponents with blame him for anything bad.
      That's the absolute basics of politics.

      It is not just about Trump, any president in any country is like that. Id doesn't have to be heads of state. In any structure of maybe 100 of more people, a leader will take credits for every success, and it can happen with less.

    • And of course Trump is going to take full credit for keeping the death toll far below what the experts were predicting would be the case if we did nothing.

      Fox News is already celebrating this fantastic achievement on his part. I haven't seen statements from OAN yet but I don't think it will be much different.

      And of course I know this post will be modded Troll in no time flat because there are too many people here and everywhere who just cannot stand how terrible media and the reality are so mean to Trump. After all this is all about Trump, isn't it.

      But I had to post this anyway.

      Um ... you made it about Trump.

  • What's going to happen when the shutdown ends. Surely there will still be a lot of people that still have it, and a zillion people with no resistance.

  • Of course sheltering was going to slow it down. NO ONE DOUBTED IT. But that is all it did which is slow it down. And fewer people are doing to die because they had a resperator available. But 50 percent that are going on resperators are dying anyway. The same number of people are still going to get it. There is still no firewall of immunity because 80 percent people haven't had it yet. Sheltering in place is not an active strategy. It like throwing the covers over your head and wetting yourself when you thi

    • Re:Was this written by a 6th grader? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday April 12, 2020 @04:59PM (#59937988) Homepage Journal

      "Get the homeless off the street and into camps with policing."

      Fucking A what? Hotels are closed everywhere. Put the homeless into hotels. Putting them into camps does not isolate them from one another. Homeless shelters which haven't closed are cluster locations, and camps will be the same but without roofs.

      If that's not acceptable to you, we have more than enough empty homes in this country to house every homeless person without any sharing beyond families. I'd be surprised if the banks alone didn't own enough homes to solve the homeless problem. Let's take away the homes from the banks which have been bailed out, which deliberately wrote subprime mortgages, and which refuse to sell those homes at their CURRENT fair market value.

    • Re:Was this written by a 6th grader? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Sunday April 12, 2020 @11:27PM (#59939224) Journal

      Of course sheltering was going to slow it down. NO ONE DOUBTED IT.

      There was an open question whether the level of social distancing that could be achieved by western democracies could slow it enough to actually cause the base of the exponential growth to drop below 1, causing cases and fatalities to actually decrease, or whether the most we could do would still leave the number above 1, still growing exponentially, just slower. It seems like we've succeeded, though just barely. We're not seeing the precipitous drops in numbers that we'd really like to see.

      The same number of people are still going to get it. There is still no firewall of immunity because 80 percent people haven't had it yet.

      The firewall of immunity will come when we have a vaccine, and if we can keep people from getting it over the next 1-2 years until we get a vaccine, fewer people will get sick.

      Sheltering in place is not an active strategy. It like throwing the covers over your head and wetting yourself when you think there is a burgler in the house.

      No, it's like hunkering down in your room and dialing 911 (hopefully with a gun in hand, though I don't know how that fits into the analogy) -- buying time until a better solution can be obtained (and, no, shooting the burglar isn't a better solution. I have several guns easily accessible from my bedroom, but I'd still rather let the cops deal with it). The purpose of sheltering in place is twofold: (1) Push the replication ratio down to well below 1, to cause the active case count to drop off to a level that you can manage with (2) an aggressive testing and tracing regime, which you set up with the time you buy by sheltering in place. Sufficiently-effective testing and tracing allows you to identify and isolate a sufficiently-large percentage of those who get the disease that you prevent it from spreading without having to shut everything down.

      Of course, test-and-trace is also just to buy time, time for the actual, final solution: A vaccine. When you get that, mass produce it and innoculate most of the population, then herd immunity effects will push the reproduction rate down far enough that the disease will die out even without any active measures.

      Action would have been isolating only the people most at risk.

      No, that would be very, very foolish with this disease. It would allow it to rip through the bulk of the population like a wildfire, overwhelming the healthcare systems. Keep in mind that a non-trivial percentage of young, healthy people get it and get cases that are serious enough to require hospitalization, without which a large percentage of them will die.

      Then asking for volunteers and intentionally exposing them to the virus.

      The technical term for this strategy is "variolation". If we can't develop a virus, we may indeed need to use it. But it has to be done in a controlled way, which means we need to keep the spread in the general population under control... and that means shelter-in-place until we can ramp up testing and contact tracing infrastructure.

  • This first peak came from a small number of cases introduced to a country that wasn't totally aware of what was happening.

    The greatest danger is that we'll loosen up too soon, introducing a much larger number of new cases to a country that's aware, but fatigued by current measures and overly eager to re-open.

    That 2nd introduction might have a similar growth to the first, but with a much larger base. Think 100^x instead of 2^x.

    In other words, no peace until unconditional surrender. We need to have full ins

  • Is anyone actually surprised that reducing contact between people reduces the growth rate of a virus?

    Of course "works" can have different meanings. Shelter in place reduces the growth rate, and may even drive it negative. When you relax it though, of course the virus will grow again.

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