COVID-19 confirmed in Hawaii: 607+ cases 16 deaths

[PaulW]

My trips got cancelled.

Good to see social distancing is having such an effect.

[Guest]

Note, this prediction is based on maintaining stay-at-home efforts..

Oh, now you too are going for standup? I can only imagine where this all devolves to in a week or two...

[knieft]

quote:

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Originally posted by ironyak

https://covid19.healthdata.org/

IHME has updated their projections to take into account the initial effects of stay-at-home efforts in the U.S. Hawaii's peak now moved up to about mid April and greatly reduced in total resources required and likely deaths. Similar changes in projections seen for many other states.

Note, this prediction is based on maintaining stay-at-home efforts indefinitely. How to move out of a stay-at-home posture safely without triggering a new wave of infections is not known currently, although Italy and Spain and starting to consider how this might be done.

For now just gotta chill and keep saving lives.

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Wow. That’s good news. Models change but this is good news!

Cheers,
Kirt

We’ll see how it goes...

[ironyak]

me - Note, this prediction is based on maintaining stay-at-home efforts..
hokuili - Oh, now you too are going for standup? I can only imagine where this all devolves to in a week or two...

You seemed to have cut off my punch line - indefinitely. If people abide by the stay-at-home mandates indefinitely we can keep the deaths to a minimum.

Without a vaccine or wide-spread instant-result testing there is no way to safely resume levels of normal activity without possibly restarting the exponential growth of infections and deaths.

Hopefully Italy and Spain and New York can tip-toe across this ground before we have to and help figure out the dance moves needed. We could look at South Korea who already is doing the can-can-can-can-can-can-can-can-can on this event, but that might be considered unAmerican or something - we have to figure it out for ourselves the hard way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsHS-Rpnh1E

[Guest]

indefinitely

Yeah, until we get started indefinitely is a long way to go. Sorry, I kind of stumbled on that getting started part.. I'd love to see that happen.

I vote for island wide testing.. every single soul.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ty/608590/

Why a Tiny Colorado County Can Offer COVID-19 Tests to Every Resident

San Miguel County in Colorado has, in ordinary times, fewer than three full-time employees in its public-health department. It has no hospital. Its total population is only 8,000. And yet last week, the county became the first in the United States to announce that it would be offering all its residents a new kind of test for COVID-19.

The tests are being donated by United Biomedical, a multinational biotech company whose executives, a married couple, happen to live part of the year in Telluride, the resort town that is also San Miguel’s county seat.

“It’s a small community,” Mei Mei Hu of United Biomedical told me on the phone from Colorado this weekend. “Very small,” her husband, Lou Reese, added. “Whether it’s just getting a donut or walking by on the street or on the ski hill with the ski patrol,” he said, “we know and have met or interacted with almost every member of the medical or emergency community here throughout the course of our lives.”

Hu and Reese—along with Hu’s mother, Chang Yi Wang, who is United Biomedical’s chairwoman—are the founders of the company’s new COVID-19–focused subsidiary, c19. United Biomedical has facilities in New York, China, and Taiwan, and it develops animal vaccines as well as diagnostic kits for human diseases. So when the novel coronavirus first appeared in China, the company started working on testing, and when cases started showing up closer to home, Hu and Reese thought of their community in Telluride. They floated the idea of testing the county to an old family friend, who also happens to be the area’s chief paramedic. Like they said, it’s a small community.

At that point, San Miguel County was, like everywhere else in the United States, having trouble getting tests for every patient who needed one. This particularly worried Sharon Grundy, the county medical officer, because Telluride had so many visitors coming and going. “We’re a high-risk area because we are a resort community,” she told me. (A group of skiers visiting another Colorado resort town, Vail, ended up seeding a coronavirus outbreak in Mexico.) The county was able to test some people through the state health department and a commercial lab, and got its first positive result on Friday. But when I spoke with Grundy on Friday, she also said the whole county had only two swabs left. “It’s not just us,” she hastened to add. “It’s the whole country.”

Without testing, San Miguel County’s health workers would be unable to track the virus’s spread. They would be, to use the words of the World Health Organization’s director-general, fighting “a fire blindfolded.” So United Biomedical’s offer to donate the kits came as a relief. “This gave us some hope,” Grundy said.

United Biomedical’s COVID-19 test is different from those typically being run on nasal swabs collected around the country. Those tests use a technique called RT-PCR to look for the virus’s genetic material in a patient’s nose and throat, but United Biomedical’s test requires a blood draw. It uses a different technique, called ELISA, to look for antibodies, the proteins the immune system makes to neutralize the virus. Antibody tests, also known as serological tests, don’t always pick up early viral infections, but they can tell if someone has ever had a particular virus—maybe even if they were asymptomatic...

More at the link above..

Yeah yeah, I know, maybe Yak or knieft can synthesize that down to something palatable.. but does it not hold out hope that we, in our closed system with a finite number of people, could look forward to testing everyone and pinning this virus to the wall?

[ironyak]

Widespread testing with rapid results is the key as you can tell who is safe to resume work and also quickly catch any new infections and isolate them and their immediate contacts. (Cuomo brings this up nearly every day as they only way to bring this event to an end). That's how South Korea nailed this to the wall early on and never had a major outbreak situation like New York.

As an interesting historical note, Gunnison Colorado (just a hop, skip, and jump up from Telluride) is the poster child for demonstrating what it took to avoid the carnage of the 1918 Spanish Flu (4 month total lockdown, multiday sequestering of any essential visitors, etc). Those independent mountain folk have a way of taking the initiative to care for themselves and each other. Lessons worth learning?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/m...u-pandemic

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

I vote for island wide testing.. every single soul.

I’m not sure what that would accomplish. Even if every Big Island resident tested negative for COVID-19, and we then locked down the entire island, no one enters or leaves, the virus could easily (and quickly) become reintroduced again.

Easing travel restrictions, mask usage, reducing 6 foot safety zones, etc will be a guessing game at best. Unless, as ironyak suggested, we find a model that’s been successfully tested elsewhere. Additionally we would also need someone like Dr. Fauci to step forward, take control, and provide the citizens of this country with consistent leadership, medically sound recommendations, and clear protocols, rather than the hodgepodge daily 180 whiplash approach currently in vogue.

[TomK]

Ironyak wrote:

"IHME has updated their projections to take into account the initial effects of stay-at-home efforts in the U.S. Hawaii's peak now moved up to about mid April and greatly reduced in total resources required and likely deaths. Similar changes in projections seen for many other states.

Note, this prediction is based on maintaining stay-at-home efforts indefinitely. How to move out of a stay-at-home posture safely without triggering a new wave of infections is not known currently, although Italy and Spain and starting to consider how this might be done."

Thanks for this. I looked at the site a couple of days ago and today's projections seem to offer a little more hope. However, I really fear those in charge, i.e., the feds and our state's government will try and reopen things too quickly and not wait for new infections to reach zero around the world, and we'll just get a second wave.

[Guest]

Ah, so indefinitely doesn't have to be that long! Cool. Now if we could just get started.

I love our numbers. I really do. I know testing has failed us miserably but regardless a certain percent of all that get it end up in hospital and we aren't seeing that many here (oops I said it, cross your self quick!) so there's a real chance, minus the bozos, we have this buggah. But damn those bozos, they make this so much harder, longer, uncertain.

I'll add: How do we end this? There's obviously got to be some science based answer. When x happens we're free! Or at least we can take our first steps back towards freedom. I'd love it if we could have our on island freedom back and still have closed borders. We could get on with redefining our lives. As such, without blanket testing, I can not imagine the science we're going to use? What guiding principle do we have?

[ironyak]

hokuili - I'll add: How do we end this? There's obviously got to be some science based answer. When x happens we're free! Or at least we can take our first steps back towards freedom.

This is a pretty good read on South Korea's success with this event, as well as some of the reasons why US may have decided we couldn't learn from THEM.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/con...ientalism/

The short answer is you don't need to test everyone but you do need to quickly and reliably test those who are symptomatic and sample enough of the general population to find most of the asymptomatic community spread. With newer antibody tests you can also check who has already been infected and recovered and therefore likely have immunity for at least the next few months. What exactly is this minimum number of people to test is an epidemiological question that I do have some faith Sarah Park and her team at HI DOH are capable of answering.

But first we need those rapid tests which are still in the mail? (snark aside several manufacturers are making both ~2 minute RNA and ~5 minute antibody tests which *should* be coming online *soon*...)