Everything Southern Humboldt and more
By this account, San Francisco seems to have been extremely successful– so far. They actually began a voluntary stay-at-home a week before it became mandatory and already there were much fewer cars and people downtown.
And this is how well California has been doing compared to other urbanized hot spots. Someone argued that it’s probably inaccurate for lack of testing, but I think the testing for being dead is pretty simple.
This is my old neighborhood! You have to admire the precision of the flying.
As of March 20 there had been 241 COVID 19 deaths in the U.S. As of today March 26 there are 1,222 reported deaths according to the NYT tally.
In one week our deaths of quadrupled. That is one steep curve! And it’s more than 1 percent of confirmed cases.
Scared yet? Don’t effing panic. Stay home and/or take the precautions! Yes, you will probably survive it. But even the surviving isn’t much fun and you don’t want to kill someone else, so please just be empathetic.
Update: The above figures were a few hours ago. It’s now up to 1270.
Yes, we have 5 confirmed cases in Humboldt County. Yes, that’s up from 1 a week ago. Yes, they probably spread the virus before they were tested. Yes, it’s a concern.
But nothing has changed since last week. The virus was here, spreading, long before the latest test confirmations. The only reason we didn’t know that is that we have limited tests with limited criteria for testing. The lack of availability of tests is a national failure, and may even be a local failure – I don’t know what local health authorities have done to acquire the tests.
But it’s been here, spreading, the whole time. If the experts are right, 40 to 60 percent of us will catch it at some point. Some of us won’t even know we had it. Some of us will die.
I’m going to write more about this later, but to those of you who are more scared than they were last week, there’s no point to that. Just take your precautions to help slow the spread and “flatten the curve.” It’s all about keeping the numbers of sick below the treatment capacity for the county.
If you’re under 60 stay away from the older people and those with health issues. But check on your neighbors. Bring them food and supplies and leave them at their door.
This was taken in McKinleyville. This should be our reaction to the situation.
More later.
Third case is another traveler. Still no “community spread” confirmations.
But California is seriously behind in testing! We need the data! We need it to know how to allocate resources and quite frankly there are too many people not following shelter-in-place guidelines very diligently because of the complacency.
I know a few people who have been very sick over the past few weeks, one of whom tested negative for the flu. They have begged to be tested, but the local health care providers seem to be resisting it tooth and nail and in a couple of cases they report the staff telling people that they absolutely do not have C-19 – which is a very dangerous practice if this is true and not a verbal misunderstanding.
I get that they need to reserve the tests for the sickest people who might need special treatment, but it’s the people with few or no symptoms who are spreading it. We can use a few asymptomatic test positives to wake people up and help us to identify the scope of the problem.
This article discussed in detail the reasons our country got a very late start testing and as one expert said, “You cannot fight a fire blindfolded.” California, and in particular, Humboldt County, needs much more aggressive testing.
Update: A fourth case – another traveler. We probably aren’t going to find a community based positive until we get some more test kits into the county and loosen up the criteria.
Second update: A fifth.
I’m not sure that any of us has free will, but I suppose any criminal justice system has assume we do.
Maybe they were raptured and nobody noticed?
Senator Burr should do more than resign. He should turn himself in and go to jail.
And if Feinstein pulled the same stunt, she should be taken down as well.
LoCo has the details. More to come.
Recent Comments