COVID19 Tracking App - would you use one?

[BobL]

regional population here is about 1/10 of all of australia, and covid confirmed cases are about the same as the australian total.

Not really a very good comparison.

Australia is most definitely not a regional country as we are more "urbanised" than nearly all other countries on earth with about 90% of Australians living in 0.22% of the land area. The majority of Australian 100 or so COVID19 deaths have occurred in Melbourne and Sydney, with cities of 5 million plus.

Australia with 25 million people has has fewer COVID19 deaths than about 40 of the 50 US states.
The 10 or so US states with similar or fewer numbers of COVOD19 deaths than all of Australia all have populations of about 1 million or less.
The total deaths for these 10 states so far is currently about 625 and they represent <10 million people.
Australia at about 25 million including 5 cities of more than a million people each has a total of about 100 deaths.

[D.W.]

I'm not looking to make australia equivalent with any US state.

I'd imagine that your early exposure was far less than NYC's, which is where our outbreak started, along with NW areas like washington state. I don't know of those were introduced by european and chinese tourism like NYC and the eastern seaboard. You could see the spread quickly here in those areas and they fared the worst in the initial outbreak (NY, massachusetts, NJ, philadelphia).

Most of the urbanized areas that had much travel or tourism (the wealthy areas of italy, london, etc) fared very poorly early on. I'm not sure what tourism is like in most of australia, but I'd bet the total for the country is less than New York City is alone.

We referred to it as a virus of means here early on, because it generally affected areas (even here in pittsburgh) where the affluent folks live, those who can afford to travel a lot or have guests who travel a lot. It's gotten further than that, but the sentiment here is past the idea of universally controlling it. Nothing is universal, especially when politics are involved, but one would have to guess that if early data suggests antibodies may not last that long, the idea of creating a vaccine for the virus isn't looking that great.

In the second wave, places like NJ and Philadelphia were much slower to see numbers increase than we were here in western pa. Our numbers increased quickly, but the virus is here - despite the news, it's not really as if people just have no idea what's going on. I'm included in that group - I find my own comfortable level (Which involves not being in bars or enclosed spaces with dead air), but have zero interest in seeing everything shut down for a year or more. I think this virus is permanent and will be added to the flu virus types and rhinoviruses, etc.

[woodPixel]

...the new cases came mostly from outside of the region. It's easily controllable, just not convenient.

D.W. I've read your posts here with considerable interest. They show that the experience you have (and perception of it) doesn't match the breathless hysteria we see reported here... and that I see on Reddit by your countrymen (personal posts of personal experiences).

Its interesting. Many of the things I see and consider factual are rebuffed pretty strenuously and rather convincingly by your long and detailed posts.

They have made me think and re-evaluate what might be "True", but create a cognitive dissonance as they so directly contradict what others within the USA write.

Perhaps this is the nature of the USA! A constant near-chaos of options, opinions, contradictions, half-truths, misdirection, lies, spin, dogma, politics and doings, that eventually(?) settle into what may be a Truth... or truth?

Please do keep writing them.

These are the sources I use:

-- Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)
-- COVID-19
-- Coronavirus Update (Live): 13,229,711 Cases and 574,981 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Pandemic - Worldometer
-- World News


Last night, at the dinner table, I ruminated upon the report that 1% of all USAnians now have COVID19. What IF that number becomes 5%.... 10%.... 25%.


Speculation 1 - What happens IF 10% of the country becomes incapacitated? 20%? Where do the resources come from to handle this? Nursing, health, recovery, beds, jobs, economic fallout? Pretty big picture stuff.

Speculation 2 - If a country were not to have the interests of the USA at heart, how might one use this? Attack? immobilisation? Revenge? Hostile takeover?

Speculation 3 - One simply DOESN'T recover from this thing like a cold, flu or random lurgie... it affects the lungs, kidneys, immune systems, brain, CNS.... there are months-long hangovers with listlessness, tiredness and an all-pervasive depression. There are some harrowing stories out there. Multiply this by (??) TWENTY MILLION......



I'm only saying all this as D.W. (and fellow citizens) has a view that is different to literally every other country on earth. Are there OTHER countries that aren't treating this like the emergency it is?



edit - a few links to make it interesting....

[D.W.]

you are right, we like the salad bar of discussion rather than just "this" or "that". People here, aside from those who make memes of themselves, most of us are tolerant of idiots and the term here is "with freedom comes responsibility".

Memes are easy to make of a country as large as this one with as many different regions. The south is not remotely like the northeast, the eastern seaboard isn't remotely similar to the west, and the seattle and portland area isn't even similar to LA.

As far as cases go, I'm guessing based on what's been described in the news here - 10% so far. You are right, some folks will have permanent damage. And in greater numbers than would occur with the flu.

Our news likes to make things polarized (that's pro-wrestling psychology), but much of the country is somewhere in between. Academia tends to try to develop more consensus and then chide other people, but the average citizen here doesn't really like that.

This country is made much of people who fled from Britain and Germany due looking for freedom from the government and the notion of that is still relatively strong in many places. Underneath the surface and aside from having to listen to one idiot president after another (some more polished than others), the levers are pulled by federal, state and local agencies and things do actually work pretty well. What I see with the viruses is this - the bulk of society wants to be as open as possible. They don't want to see the elderly exposed, so care homes and such here are closed. When the second wave came here, everyone was pretty much on board - OK, opening bars and restaurants and events seems to have brought a second wave, shut it down again ,and we'll wait.

The acid test for most places is when the ICU beds are full, we shut down. It's not good enough for the news (e.g., houston, where some hospitals had full ICUs, but we don't see bodies in the streets - the news needs 'there will be bodies in the streets, we just know it!!').

The country becoming incapacitated more so than, let's say, Aus is shut down, just isn't going to happen. We have the resources to shut areas down when they get too hot. Regional culture makes determining what that point is a little different from place to place,but full ICUs seems to be the stopping point for all, and closing restaurants, bars and schools seems to be all that's needed to bring the spread to a halt.

We should all be thankful for that much.

Testing is available here, too - all over the place. If you want a funded (insured, covered) test, you have to have some reasonable exposure. Some folks are trying to fib their way into it just because they want to visit elderly representatives, but with as many cases as there are, the system sniffs them out. You can, of course, pay a few hundred bucks and get a private test performed (while we have a gigantic overpriced insured medical system here with seemingly a million payers, there still is even another layer - a fully private system of docs and labs). When someone says, sure, we'll test you "$700 for the test and results", most people boasting about getting tested hell or high water decide they'll just stay home. That stuff is for the wealthy, and if they have the means to get tested without draining the more public system, more power to them.

I'll tell you who this virus really sucks for, though - kids and other folks who have no idea that they've got an underlying illness (e.g., leukemia) and find out that they do by dying. That really sucks.

[BobL]

I'm not looking to make australia equivalent with any US state.

I'd imagine that your early exposure was far less than NYC's, which is where our outbreak started, along with NW areas like washington state. I don't know of those were introduced by european and chinese tourism like NYC and the eastern seaboard. You could see the spread quickly here in those areas and they fared the worst in the initial outbreak (NY, massachusetts, NJ, philadelphia).

Because of timing early exposures/case numbers were quite similar across many OECD countries.
Below shows the case numbers in early Feb just before both the US and AUS closed borders to China.




Around that time many Chinese college students were arriving back in Australia from Summer vacation to commence the new academic year in Feb. The number of Chinese college students that study in Australia is about 160,000, the number in New York is ~360,000 BUT most of those would have already been in NY.

What seems to have mattered was what was done after that.
Aust went thru a coordinated national lock down sequence unlike other countries with dithered and directed blame elsewhere.

Anyway all it takes are a few infected people and an over relaxed population and it can start over as the folks in Melbourne and many US states are finding out.

[D.W.]

I guess i'm a little suspicious about early numbers (we didn't test much here, and even in a very liberal places - NY - the mayor was under pressure from the labor unions not to shut anything. That turned out to be a bad decision in my opinion, but we have a long way to go before we know how this thing ends).

I'd guess the people flow through New York and the proximity of everyone there makes them more susceptible to an explosion in numbers there, especially in the manhattan area (there is a lot of youth and a mindset that isn't safety first).

You're right about the spread - it's exponential. The lead time is weeks before 100 cases become 10,000.

Just guessing (and this isn't confrontational) on the mindset here, nobody will tolerate a long term lockdown except for a few (regardless of who is president), but I think most folks here are getting conditioned to the idea that a shutdown closes the valve for a while. But instead of saying "we need to stay like this for a while", we are using that turning of the valve to buy time for the next reopening.

Care homes took a huge hit initially because they implemented tough visitation rules, but predictably, they didn't do that much about the employees. Only one vector is needed, of course, and employees were that vector. In a care home here with 340 beds, 80 deaths occurred (it was one of the lower-tier homes and they just didn't think). The other homes acted appropriately and, for example, may have had 10 deaths for 500 residents when they had an outbreak.

Many of those in those care homes are WWII children, and we've introduced some to devices they'd have never used and their reaction is surprising "it's just the way it is, you can't let it bring you down".

As we've already discussed, my personal view is that I will make a reasonable effort to not be part of the problem. If older people are around, or people we don't know well in a very small group, we are outside, and even most of the folks we know well, we can congregate outside. It's summer. Let the virus blow away into the air.

I have asthma, so my wife hasn't allowed me to grocery shop, but I wouldn't feel that unsafe in a large building. The data on asthma (mine is relatively minor) isn't that clear, so I'm playing it safe. I do go to work from time to time, but there's almost nobody there.

It's interesting that as similar as many of us are (most of us originating from eastern europe and western europe), how we came to our destinations (many in the US fleeing for religious reasons - some of my ancestors were sent to an area in Germany to starve for not being Catholic - the palatinate. Others went to switzerland and were chased out from there for the same reason - they arrived here in the states in the mid 1700s. Some were amish (but not in quite some time), and all of those folks have some distrust of government and may of us don't like the idea of an unjust war (and the bar for just war is VERY high). The american revolution found some of my relatives facing a decision of hauling war bits or going to jail as they absolutely weren't going to fight on behalf of any government.

While I don't have such a disdain, cultural lines until ease of travel and the internet came along really has left a long mark. We are very loathe to tell someone what to do, and enjoy someone telling us what to do about as much - especially if our intentions are good.

[D.W.]

There's an old dutchy (amish / pa dutch) saying around here, "it's OK if we disagree as long as we're friends in the end".

That means more or less I don't expect you to agree with me and don't want to tell you what to do, but we need to make sure we don't get carried away with any disagreement and think we should ever not be friends because of it.

Hard to explain.

Not sure if the word amish ever gets to TV in austrlia other than sensationalism, but pa dutch here refers to the amish and anabaptists, but also to protestants who are much the same (it's not uncommon to hear german at a protestant funeral in parts of pennsylvania - despite a settlement date of the communities being mid 1700s, sometimes earlier).

My ancestors before the american revolution got stuck riding a wagon to philadelphia (100 miles) to profess their loyalty to the king. Apparently, a german speaking area was perceived as a potential problem for separatism, but the King of England misjudged it - the region had no interest in conflict at all.

when it came to the revolution, I suppose my family became 1700s draft dodgers of sorts. We were agrarian types so later world wars spared most of us due to the necessity to keep farmers in the fields producing food. Some volunteered, anyway, but most had the very high bar in mind of not wanting to raise arms against someone else without being absolutely sure that what they were doing is right.

I've moved four hours away to Pittsburgh since childhood and there are germans here, but even those folks were entirely different (urban, mill labor, etc, far more social and less conservative with money and drinking).

[woodPixel]

Amish culture is well known here, I believe. Most would be able to give you the highlights and some detail - fine nuances, perhaps not. But that's not the point, it is known, say compared to that of Mozambique or the cultures of Estonia.....

DW, the insight you provide is important. I'm aware of a vast number of people in the USA being of German ancestry. The escape from Europe to avoid persecution and war isn't overly mentioned (I believe)... when you explain it, it certainly does give a good raison d'être behind the psyche of the USA.

On a slightly different matter, I think many here follow many of the same philosophies of your ancestors. The early lot were dragged here against their will (convicts!) and formed a new life in a harsh and unforgiving place, but modern immigrants come here for the same reasons as yours... freedom and peace.

I wouldn't mind returning to agrarianism, my father certainly pushes me a lot to "buy a farm"!!!! ..... it would give me a quiet and serene place to do my woodworking


On a note, BE SAFE everyone.... the plague looks to be getting out of hand again and people are being bloody stupid.