yes, the state should be tracking and providing that information. As far as I know they are not.
Coronavirus Coronavirus: In-Iowa General Discussion (Not Limited)
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yes, the state should be tracking and providing that information. As far as I know they are not.
I think Reynolds and the people advising her are looking more closely at hospitalizations and deaths than case counts. Are hospitalizations shown per county any where? As of this morning's report, there are 389 hospitalizations state wide, I'm guessing most of the 77 rural counties have very few to zero people in their hospitals with Covid-19.
I agree with this method. Seems with the limited testing, hospitalizations and deaths are the only reliable number at this point. Unfortunately, this number does lag compared to actual infections happening. Maybe there's some stats person that's been able to correlate the two while also accounting for testing rates. I haven't seen any confident numbers about real infection rates since we're still in a reactionary situation as far as testing goes.
Yeah, it's not perfect, but better than just going off the number of confirmed infections. From everything I've read, the actual fatality rate seems to be between 0.3-0.8%. I use 0.5% to predict how many infections there actually were. So, in Iowa we have 175 deaths, so likely around 175/0.005 = 35,000 cases. This is probably a low estimate since like you said, the deaths lag behind the transmission. So, the 35,000 might be the number of people that had been infected as of 2-3 weeks ago.
Most of the 77 rural counties don't have a hospital at all. So that becomes tricky - do you count the person's residence as the county or the location of the hospital.
I do agree its a better stat and I wish they'd include it on the website.
As for your subsequent post - hospitalizations would likely be a 3-4 week lag from infections in many cases, which makes it difficult for reactive adjustments. If you are measuring a spike by hospitalizations, once the trend starts to look like it'll go over capacity, you are too late to do anything about it (I don't know how you get around that without a lot more testing up front)
Spoke with a gentleman this morning who works there. He stated that the response has been about as good as it could get. They have or will have a rapid testing station that will give them results in 5 minutes. They also do not seem to be having a problem with PPE because he was given extra masks and a face shield to wear in public if he saw fit. He is wearing masks as he does not want to bring the infection into the home.
I ran across a website that showed COVID 19 - related patient numbers and ICU beds/ respirators currently in use and I think it was broken down by the regions the state is divided into. Damned if I can find it back though.
We have a family member in the Iowa Veterans Home. Their response and communication during this time have been phenomenal.
Agree, the key would be to watch the trend of hospitalizations. Are they increasing significantly? Steadily? Not increasing at all, or even decreasing? Statewide they appear to be increasing, but pretty slowly. It would be interesting to see a graph of new hospitalizations per day over the last month or so. I don't believe Iowa has the population density and other conditions that would lead to a massive, sudden spike that we can't prepare for like NYC had (likely due to density and the mass transit subway system). So I don't think it's likely that we would get an unforeseen spike without having a chance to react. That's just my opinion.
That info is on coronavirus.iowa.gov
Use the scroll bar at the top and slide over to RMCC - it breaks it down by region - number in hospital number admitted last 24 hours number in icu number on vents - not sure if the number of beds and vents available is on that tab but if it isn’t it’s someplace on that site I believe
Just went there to check - once you get to the RMCC dashboard click on an individual region to see their stats for example Region 2 which is more rural than say Region 6 has 5 hospitalized 264 beds available 1 hospitalized in last 24 hours 18 ICU beds available 3 in ICU 22 vents available 3 on vents
I hadn't looked at that tab - that's good information. It makes it more questionable to me why the "re-opening" isn't on a Region basis rather than a county basis
Region 3 (NW Iowa) is by far the worst and the only one in trouble - they are at 56% (41 of 73) of ICU beds used by COVID-19 patients.
The other relevant piece of information would be how many ICU beds are normally used by non-COVID patients.
Here's the regional break down by ICU bed usage (which seems to be the most constraining metric)
Region 1 (Des Moines): 39 of 220
Region 2 (Northcentral): 3 of 18
Region 3 (Northwest) : 41 of 73
Region 4 (Southwest) : 1 of 27
Region 5 (Southeast / Iowa City and Quad Cities) : 30 of 96
Region 6 (Northeast / Waterloo and CR) : 29 of 118
I believe the % of new cases coming from the 77 "reopening" counties has risen each of the past 5 days. This seems logical, since they make up 3/4 of the state. It's somewhat less logical if the majority of tests are being conducted in a small number of the other 22.
Washington model updated their projections, and added a few things.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
There's some real questions about the body's ability re-oxygenate red blood cells after recovering from a severe case. It's almost this weird conglomoration of a bunch of different viruses. It's both medically fascinating and generally terrifying at the same time.
Yeah I don't know if there's a point you can feel "safe" after having a severe case, which is disturbing.
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