Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

i went to the doctor for a wonky foot before I did any depredations from covid.
Not minimizing the awful disease that it is, but it feels like it's been beat to shit after 2.5 years and its imitators just can't do the job.
I am just glad it didn't catch me (or I it) when I was 30 pounds overweight.

 

PCR tests probably still get automatically reported. Home tests not unless the individual figures out how to report them. Even with severity, unless people are going to the hospital, they probably aren't self reporting these days.

When we had it in January our county still wanted us to report, and that was easy to do after calling in sick from school. Just a few weeks later they stopped doing that. I just looked and I can't find their online form anymore, I'm sure it exists somewhere, but they do have an outbreak form. So maybe that is more of a focus now anyway, not individual but more widespread cases.

Case reporting has always been funky. From no tests early on to everyone doing it at home (and most people getting it). Hospitalizations and deaths are still the numbers that really matter.

 

No, that's not what those numbers say. The "hospitalized" numbers have to do with how many people right now are hospitalized w/Covid*. The "new cases" numbers have to do with the average number of daily new cases over the last X days. So take the middle set of numbers ... per them, over the last seven days a total of about 734K new cases have popped up, and as of those numbers' printing there are 42K-ish people hospitalized. You'd need a lot of additional information -- say, how long the average hospitalization is -- before you could cipher up the kind of ratio you're looking for.


*I don't know whether that number has to do with hospitalized w/Covid vs. hospitalized because of Covid. My godson's wife delivered her second child last week, and on admission she was discovered to be Covid-positive (all parties concerned are perfectly fine). I don't know whether she would be in that number or not.

 

Numbers re: the average hospitalization are all over the place, but a ballpark-ish number is 8 days. So if the "inventory" of hospitalized patients is 42,000, by a rule called Little's Law* we could cocktail napkin an average hospitalization rate of 5,250 a day. So given those "new case" numbers, that's about a 5% hospitalization rate. I would assume that's a ceiling, as those "new cases" are only the reported ones.

Note that the percentage of cases requiring hospitalization and the average hospitalization duration are inversely related.

*i = Rt, where i is the "inventory" in the system, R is the "rate" into the system, and t is the average flow time through the system.

 

Well good on you for losing that weight. Hard won, I'm sure. But guess what? I found it! Gladly give it back.

 

And the number of reported positives has cratered, as many more people test at home and many fewer report those results to county health authorities.

 

That would also point to a much smaller percentage-requiring-hospitalization.

 

I think the distinction I made there was mistaken.

A 'case' is classified as a reported positive test - with symptoms. At least it seems to be.

I was thinking the number of 'reported positives' would drop way off once people started testing at home, rather than as part of a city- or county- or statewide health initiative.

 

I don't think you're off-base as a practical matter. Unless those dashboards you're linking model in an estimate for cases that aren't reported, it's entirely reasonable to think the "new cases" number is well below the actual number of new infections.

 

I agree, but I think that's been true for several months now if not longer.