Covid-19

There is a "death lag, but if you look at the data from the CDC, we should have seen a steady "stream" of deaths based on the sheer number of cases we continued to have. But we have not.

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If Deaths lag by 20 days roughly, then we should have still kept having way beyond the number of deaths we have. A lot of the cases for testing positive are including asymptomatic people as basically anyone can seek a test now.


Purely anecdotal. I had a friend who was real sick with the "flu" in November, she's in shape, competed at IMAZ and had a horrible race. Her agency is putting all of their officers through anti-body testing and she came back positive for anti-bodies.

I think most agree the lag is between 25-35 days, so about a month. Unfortunately the only way to know for sure is to have it play out. I truly hope there is not an increase in deaths, and it is solely related to increased testing, and testing of asymptomatic individuals. I believe we will know by mid August what some of these effects truly are. I hope that the death rate continues to decline, I would rather watch football and basketball and go to class in person, but I doubt any of that will happen.

My anecdotal experience comes from being in the COVID ICU’s at a major medical center, and seeing people very sick for a very long time prior to dying. I am also admittedly in a social media bubble full of nurses and physicians from around the country. Many of them ICU providers, most of them are saying it is getting significantly worse daily(ie units at capacity, non-ICUs being converted and so on). Not to mention the new residents that just started;)

I don’t work in the hospital anymore, and am in school full time, so @Devildoc will have better information than me now anyways. Here is to hoping though!
 
There may be a death lag, but that should be accounted for, almost completely, in hospitalizations/ICU beds, which in MN, anyway, are down significantly as well. Our daily deaths are at early March numbers.
 
@ThunderHorse , be careful not to assume correlation = causation. The number of deaths won't be correlational to the number of cases. It is true that the more we test, the more positives we find but the rate of death decreases (that's our hope, anyway). But the death lag will be correlational to ICU admits and the 'right' age cohort, to @Dvr55119 point. @Blizzard , our census is way up (summer is usually low census), and our COVID admits are as high/higher than at any point.

I will say from a workflow standpoint, I am getting beat. We shut almost everything down mid-March, we were doing nothing but teaching PPE. Then we taught everyone and I really didn't have anything to do for several. Now, cases are up, hospitalizations are up, I am back to teaching what I had been teaching, and still teaching PPE (new house staff as of July 1), and rounding on the COVID units.
 
@ThunderHorse , be careful not to assume correlation = causation. The number of deaths won't be correlational to the number of cases. It is true that the more we test, the more positives we find but the rate of death decreases (that's our hope, anyway). But the death lag will be correlational to ICU admits and the 'right' age cohort, to @Dvr55119 point. @Blizzard , our census is way up (summer is usually low census), and our COVID admits are as high/higher than at any point.

I will say from a workflow standpoint, I am getting beat. We shut almost everything down mid-March, we were doing nothing but teaching PPE. Then we taught everyone and I really didn't have anything to do for several. Now, cases are up, hospitalizations are up, I am back to teaching what I had been teaching, and still teaching PPE (new house staff as of July 1), and rounding on the COVID units.

I'm paying attention to all of it. But the amount of fear porn being circulated by people with their agenda is too much, tell people they can't work, but hey tell people it's ok to protest?

They are, in huge parts of the country, the south particularly.

In part because they went back to regular capacity, in another part because all of the patients that were scared to go to the hospital that had non-COVID related medical problems finally showed up sicker than a cat morphed into a bear.
 
I'm paying attention to all of it. But the amount of fear porn being circulated by people with their agenda is too much, tell people they can't work, but hey tell people it's ok to protest?



In part because they went back to regular capacity, in another part because all of the patients that were scared to go to the hospital that had non-COVID related medical problems finally showed up sicker than a cat morphed into a bear.

Hey, I don't disagree. This thing is been so weaponized and politicized it's crazy.
 
I'm paying attention to all of it. But the amount of fear porn being circulated by people with their agenda is too much, tell people they can't work, but hey tell people it's ok to protest?



In part because they went back to regular capacity, in another part because all of the patients that were scared to go to the hospital that had non-COVID related medical problems finally showed up sicker than a cat morphed into a bear.

I get your first part I really do.

I can only speak to the two academic medical facilities I worked at. Duke increased capacity by opening new units. The hospital i travelled at did something similar. Both started seeing more elective patients in early to mid May. Idk where your experience with these way sicker patients is, but I didn’t witness that in either of my jobs(apart from COVID, and some of them were sicker than shit), one of which was in an cardiac surgery ICU(sickest patients in the hospital), the other of which was on a procedure team(seeing patients everywhere from outpatient to ICU settings). There was a pretty big wave of elective procedures right away in mid May and the clinics were busier, idk that they were “sicker than a cat morphed into a bear.” That is anecdotal though, for sure. I would love to see if that bares out statistically, like longer than average stays, worse outcomes and so forth, again though we will have to wait. But in my small slice of the south, and southwest it didn’t.

I did witness more despair in patients, and in healthcare workers than I’ve seen in 13 years of healthcare. Patients not being able to see family and friends, nurses with depression, being friendfamily and caregiver takes a significant toll, and empathy/sympathy gets drained quicker than you’d think. It is tough to have a dying patient, who’s family can only communicate via iPad. It is really tough to do that for 4 months-indefinitely... it is even more frustrating when patients and at risk folks do not believe that COVID is real. People refuse to wear masks, or even have the slightest amount of self awareness. It is frustrating for those of us who were legit on the frontlines of this thing and can vouch for the seriousness of the disease. I’m not saying you or anyone here is doing that, but it colors my stance on it.
 
There is a "death lag, but if you look at the data from the CDC, we should have seen a steady "stream" of deaths based on the sheer number of cases we continued to have. But we have not.
That is reasonable to assume when you ignore that the initial fatality spike was in relation to the rapid rise of deaths in high metropolitan areas like Detroit, New York City, Chicago, and New Jersey - all cities which have significantly curtailed both their infection and death rates in the past two months. The second important factor is that the average age range of newly reported infections in America - largely across the southern United States and California - is 10-15 years younger than was reported at the start of the pandemic, and the difference is even more pronounced in some of the most recent hotspots like Florida, where the median infection age dropped from 65 in March to 35 in June. This, along with increased reporting and testing, has resulted in rising infection rates, rising hospitalizations, and (eventually) rising but non-concurrent death rates, and particularly not to the same extent as when the average reported infection age was closer to the highest fatality age range (8 out of 10 COVID-19 deaths occur in those 65 and older).
 
That is reasonable to assume when you ignore that the initial fatality spike was in relation to the rapid rise of deaths in high metropolitan areas like Detroit, New York City, Chicago, and New Jersey - all cities which have significantly curtailed both their infection and death rates in the past two months. The second important factor is that the average age range of newly reported infections in America - largely across the southern United States and California - is 10-15 years younger than was reported at the start of the pandemic, and the difference is even more pronounced in some of the most recent hotspots like Florida, where the median infection age dropped from 65 in March to 35 in June. This, along with increased reporting and testing, has resulted in rising infection rates, rising hospitalizations, and (eventually) rising but non-concurrent death rates, and particularly not to the same extent as when the average reported infection age was closer to the highest fatality age range (8 out of 10 COVID-19 deaths occur in those 65 and older).
Excepting that hospital stays have been shorter and deaths haven't surged.
 
Excepting that hospital stays have been shorter and deaths haven't surged.
Of course. The point of the above post was that the lack of a concurrent fatality rate surge with the infection surge (and, yes, the shorter hospital stays) reflects the younger age range of newest surge of the infected (who are far less prone to die from infections) and the significant drop in fatalities in the aforementioned metropolitan areas that were heavy contributors to the fatality spikes in the earlier phase of the pandemic.
 
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