Most experts as expressing significant concern of how high our current baseline level of infection is in the US as a whole going into a period when it was always predicted that it would get worse. In that context, there are now reports that testing is actually down in large sections of the country despite the rapidly increasing case number.
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Even here where apart from the occasional ratlicker, our governments are generally lined up, falling testing has become a problem. Testing lag times and lines became a problem in September, testing criteria were tightened up as a result, and so the absolute number of tests has dropped. Positivity rate has moved up, though still not in the red zone above 5%, but at 2% way above the 0.1% it was in August.
Yeah, you dont have Scott I’ll scan your brain Atlas running tings there though.
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Is there a big difference between having the virus present in your nose on the two separate occasions that you are tested and having “caught it twice” i.e. having symptoms twice. In theory surely you could have the virus in your nose on 50 separate occasions when you are tested. Isn’t it more to do with the timing of your body’s immune system killing it? It could have arrived there just an hour before your body had zapped it, couldn’t it, but you are again testing positive?
In fact I have just read that one woman tested positive multiple times over a period of 10 weeks before she finally got a negative and could return to work.
One of the things that is really standing out in comparing the US with almost all other health systems is just how much redundant capacity the US has compared to anyone else. Governments are so sensitive to accusations of waste that health capacity just isn’t anywhere near what it needs to be a pandemic. I was shocked recently to compare the number of ICU beds in North Carolina to Canada. Canada characteristically is running at about 85% occupancy, NC at less 33%. The case numbers in NC are far worse, but the hospital system is just now starting to really feel the stress - in a comparable situation, our system already would have collapsed.
Unfortunately, I think our governments applied the same thinking to test and trace capacity this summer.
That surprises me. One of the characteristics, governing principles even, of a for profit healthcare system is that empty rooms/beds is lost revenue/profit. It is one of the reasons that an MRI in a hospital is so much expensive than at an outpatient radiology clinic, because it isn’t used at anywhere near capacity in the hospital and so is charged at a rate to justify its lower useage. given that, I would assume that our hospitals would run at baseline at far closer to capacity than in other places and be less able to handle an unexpected increase in numbers.
Or am I reading your post incorrectly?
No, and I would have guessed the same. But if you think about as a profit maximizing capacity problem, rather than an operational one, the absolute worst case for a for-profit hospital is turning away a fully-insured potential occupant. Empty beds actually have relatively little opportunity cost, particularly if the staff can simply be re-allocated or just laid off. All the ‘marginal bed’ of a given hospital has to do is cover direct costs, and hospitals have an incentive to build capacity to the ‘marginal bed’. That last bed may have quite low occupancy. Aggregated into a system, you would expect redundant capacity. Individual unit managers may be held accountable for lost revenue/profit from those beds, but when it comes time to invest in capacity, it will happen anyway.
By contrast, public systems will be constantly measured against some aggregate occupancy target, and simply denied resources to stray very far from it.
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We have gone from 90k daily cases to 80, to 70, to 60 to now under 50k cases. According to many
experts here,wee have peaked.
The numbers: 7.5 million cases of which 6.8 million have recovered. 110k deaths.
However, what’s happening in Europe concerns me. We will too have a second wave. And the upcoming major festival of Diwali will be a test.
So you’ve pissed the worst of it?
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What are test numbers like? One of the manifestations of ‘pandemic fatigue’ seems to be populations just not bothering to go get tested.
Cumulative numbers might look good, with us being the third most in testing department behind China and the US. Again cumulative.
But daily testing rate is on the lower sides. Something which has existed from the beginning - a norm for a country that’s poorer than US, UK, etc coupled with huge population.
We have still relied on tracing and quarantine. And that’s kinda worked, though with the country being largely opened from August, I think it’s more down to kind of herd immunity. Most of the asymptotic patients might never be acknowledged, though antibody testing is showing that.
What we have done well is tracing contacts and minimising deaths for a large population like ours and with inferior infrastructure. So props to the healthcare workers on that.
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Haha, unfortunate typo.
So if you thought a three tier set of restrictions was hard to understand, Nichola has announced that Scotland will have a 5 tier system. You really couldn’t make it up… 
There is the paradox that places like India are actually better equipped to deal with the contact tracing the rest of the developed world has failed so badly with because of their recent experience with issues like small pox and polio.
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It’s the same as our 3-tier one but with two additional deep-fried layers.
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France has a 5 tier system. I think it’s all about the temperature cutlery has to be washed in a restaurant and then how many people can sit at one table. I don’t know what happens if they put 2 tables together though. 
good for them, it’s clear in England that 3 isn’t enough
It’s well documented that the more complex you make the regulations the more people follow them.
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You know what…I really doubt that 
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True. The reason is that we need such systems to deal with things like polio (as you rightly pointed out) or encephalitis etc. Look up how well the state of Uttar Pradesh got rid of yearly encephalitis outbreaks that caused hundred of deaths amongst kids, employing this system.
Also, all that work is done by ASHA workers, which is basically a group of largely women, who do all the ground work of gathering information and educating people, before reporting the findings to the doctors. So, the doctors only take part in the process when they are required ie. to treat actual patients.
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