Coronavirus in Massachusetts (Boston, Hingham, Hull: damages, forests, house)

[redplum33]

Originally Posted by Shrewsburried

Agreed, it's not a flawless advantage. This said, if you overlay case counts with population density, it indicates some correlation.

It's also a rather obvious position to take. Of note: the high income metrowest towns are 'over performing' their density.

Shrew, nobody has argued otherwise. The issue is that Geoff said it is "very well contained". Geoff is wrong.

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by redplum33

Again, Dartmouth wasn't a hotspot until very recently. UMass is why.

Unclear. They have 41 total positives for the school year. 16 in the last week but that's not in the Massachusetts weekly report. 12 hockey players from an unauthorized practice a few weeks ago. The town had seen 50 positives in the last 2 weeks using week old data and the update isn't until tonight. That doesn't fully explain the hotspot. I suspect it's the county jail but there is no data from the sheriff (who is Trumpkin COVID denial) or the town. The public safety officer who releases town information just updates a chart with the weekly count that mirrors the Wednesday state data. The only time there was more detail was when the jail and the nursing homes had big outbreaks and the nursing home killed 22 people.


...so it's really hard to assess my personal risk due to community spread.

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by redplum33

Shrew, nobody has argued otherwise. The issue is that Geoff said it is "very well contained". Geoff is wrong.

The context was Big Pharma in metro Chicago where Abbott as the biggest is in suburbia 30+ miles north of the Loop and certainly is following hygiene, mask, and distancing protocol. With a car commute from a suburban home to that kind of work environment, I'm totally fine with someone saying it's "contained".

[Serious Conversation]

Originally Posted by BostonMike7

Have to agree here. Having a SFH and your own car (or one per adult) in a household is a huge advantage, but all that goes out the window if you are hosting parties, or going to indoor dining every few nights with different people, or other behaviors that through that advantage out the window.

The more isolated, the easier it would be. But, people are out and about these days like they were back in Feb.

People are becoming fatigued.

We are basically told mask/distance/don't gather, which is the correct public health advice, but there's no sense when, or if, anything may remotely resemble "normal."

I know very few people who wouldn't "do their part" back in the spring. The sense was that the "hard" lockdown was going to be relatively temporary, then things would go back to quasi-normal. Most people will "suck it up" and "take one for the team" for awhile.

However, seven months into this hell, there's no light at the end of the tunnel. The lockdown didn't do that much to suppress the virus and trashed the economy. Heading into winter, it looks like cases will be higher than they've ever been. There's no political or social appetite for another lockdown. With no real improvement on the horizon, people are going to live their lives as normally as they can in the meantime.

We still don't have much in the way of quality therapeutics available to the general public. Basic things like proning and keeping people off of ventilators as long as possible have been learned, but there's no "tamiflu for COVID."

Personally, I don't expect any improvement until at least spring 2021. Depending on how effective a vaccine is, how widely available it is, iand how many people actually get it, we could be in these rolling cycles of cases for years.

[OutdoorLover]

Well, I have just had the sample taken for a Covid-19 test, c/o Lawrence General Hospital. They have walk-in and drive-thru test sampling. I did the latter. They actually had 8-wide sampling lanes, and it still was a half-hour wait! Within a couple of hours I had a link in my email to register at their web portal. Results should be published there, I think in 2-3 days.

[charolastra00]

Originally Posted by Serious Conversation

People are becoming fatigued.

We are basically told mask/distance/don't gather, which is the correct public health advice, but there's no sense when, or if, anything may remotely resemble "normal."

I know very few people who wouldn't "do their part" back in the spring. The sense was that the "hard" lockdown was going to be relatively temporary, then things would go back to quasi-normal. Most people will "suck it up" and "take one for the team" for awhile.

However, seven months into this hell, there's no light at the end of the tunnel. The lockdown didn't do that much to suppress the virus and trashed the economy. Heading into winter, it looks like cases will be higher than they've ever been. There's no political or social appetite for another lockdown. With no real improvement on the horizon, people are going to live their lives as normally as they can in the meantime.

We still don't have much in the way of quality therapeutics available to the general public. Basic things like proning and keeping people off of ventilators as long as possible have been learned, but there's no "tamiflu for COVID."

Personally, I don't expect any improvement until at least spring 2021. Depending on how effective a vaccine is, how widely available it is, iand how many people actually get it, we could be in these rolling cycles of cases for years.

We never had a lockdown. We had a partial shutdown with limited regulations and enforcement, and uneven application across the country. Even that was enough to tamp down the spread for a good long while in states with more severe shutdowns, like New York, Hawaii and here in Massachusetts. And even though we're increasing here in Mass far more than most of us are comfortable with, we're still in the lowest 15 states for new cases per 100,000.



Unfortunately for Mass, people are getting laxer, but it's still unclear that we have the community spread that states like Tennessee and Florida have - certainly not to the same extent. We've been hearing a lot about how most of our spread are from gatherings rather than restaurants or the grocery store.



Of course we don't know when this will end. What we do know is that the more people insist on trying to live normally, the worse it's going to be both economically and for the spread of the pandemic. The worse numbers get, the more people voluntarily stop spending money. So then we have an economy limping along with more than half of the country (half being roughly the number of people at high risk) severely limiting what they do.

[BostonMike7]

Originally Posted by Serious Conversation

People are becoming fatigued.
.

I agree. And I won't be the one to preach as i'm falling into that category myself. However, there are still risks I won't subject myself to, like indoor dining, or informal gatherings with friends. For my family, it's either partake in such activities, and abstain from seeing older, high-risk family members, or abstain from such things, and spend time with family. Neither is as ideal as staying in one's bunker though 2021..but I can't do that anymore.


I don't see gov'ts rolling out any lockdown anytime soon, except maybe indoor dining and it would take a huge surge to even see that IMHO with strong evidence showing transmission is occuring. I don't think any one politician wants to take the blame for crippling the restaurant industry, and in fact I think they've given the restaurant industry a lot of leeway just to give them the ability to survive.

I agree 100% that this is a long term problem. Might be well into 2021 or even 2022 with rolling surges of this coming and going and just living with it day-to-day like we are now.

I thought WFH would be coming to an end in Q1 of 2021, but now I don't see that happening anytime soon. I can see WFH being in place well into 2021 and maybe even beyond that.

[htfdcolt]

Originally Posted by lrfox

You're right, I didn't articulate my point well at all and I'm sorry. The overarching theme that I was trying to illustrate was that possessing a PhD does not necessarily equate to being "smarter" than everyone else about everything. I didn't mean that PhDs are not multidimensional people. However, there are a lot of people who sort of put a PhD on a pedestal and assume that anyone who has one is an expert (or at least knowledgeable) about everything. This isn't always the case. We employ many, and I would certainly describe each of them as being both "smart" and "multidimensional" (and yes, extremely busy). But I wouldn't assume that my coworker with a PhD in Computer Engineering is somehow a better source of information on COVID-19 than any of my coworkers who hold only a BA/BS. Anecdotally, I've had several experiences (though these account for a small minority of my experiences) with PhDs in my office where I've been surprised at the misinformation they've shared or conspiracy-level theories they've embraced. Unfortunately, because of the credentials, people listen more than they would if it's a high school dropout sharing the same info on Facebook. But that's a personal experience and hardly reason for painting a picture of PhDs with broad brush strokes.

No worries and no offense taken. For what it's worth, my PhD has given me data-based thinking...so I'm as far from dogmatic as one can get.

[yesmaybe]

https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1318975105653944321

Ouch, someone who was in the AstraZeneca vaccine trial in Brazil has died of the virus. Did I mention they got the placebo?

[sawyer2]

Originally Posted by yesmaybe

https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1318975105653944321

Ouch, someone who was in the AstraZeneca vaccine trial in Brazil has died of the virus. Did I mention they got the placebo?

So, unfortunate for the patient but unrelated to the vaccine.