Originally published at: 1 in every 75 Tennesseans has COVID-19 | Boing Boing
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This seems like a lie spread by Big Ivermectin to sell more sheep paste.
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They have to get those microchips implanted somehow!
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I bet I can guess where the next COVID variant comes from. 
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I read that headline and thought “surely, that is for the whole pandemic period, right?” Nope. 1/75 currently infected. Holy shit, I just can’t even…
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Those poor kids.
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What is the tipping point where the infection rate is more or less guaranteed to get everyone? 1 in 50? 1 in 40?
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In related news, Washington has now notified Idaho not to bother sending patients to Washington, no beds available.
Implied but not stated: there are drawbacks to cutting taxes and expecting others to clean up the consequences.
ETA: Not just cutting taxes, but also turning down Medicaid expansion and consequently closing rural hospitals. They were sending patients to Utah, Oregon, Washington, and even Montana even before COVID.
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Yeah, about that
(cross post from Covid thread)
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Whereas I read that headline and thought, “It’s not remotely a high enough number to cover the whole pandemic - it must be those currently infected.” I’ve been reading too much about how many Americans have gotten unnecessarily infected, so I’ve become bitterly cynical enough to assume the worst when I read something like this. Unfortunately that interpretation is usually correct now.
If people aren’t social distancing, wearing masks or getting vaccinated? Pretty much any number at all, I would think. It just means a slightly different starting point for the exponential spread. Since the increase in case numbers is an exponential growth, whether it starts at 1 in 200 or 1 in 50 makes little difference.
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I was reading something about a hospital, I think it was in Idaho, looking for open beds to which they could send patients, and the closest hospital was in Connecticut.
Someone made the case that this isn’t a health-care system undergoing a failure, it’s already failed, past tense. Now it gets really ugly.
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Makes you wonder where all the money have gone, because the US health system certainly isn’t cheap. Maybe smoe more people will realize that a fundamental reform is necessary.
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Less than 2% of Tennesseans are involved in agriculture, per TennesseeAg.org, and more than 1% of Tennesseans currently have Covid-19, per this item.
So, will the state soon replace :“Agriculture” with “Covid-19” on the state seal?
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At this point, my guess is that everyone is basically guaranteed to get covid in the next handful of years. The question is when, whether you will be vaccinated or not, and whether there will be a hospital bed available at the time. If everyone gets vaccinated and continues physical distancing and masking until everyone is eligible to be vaccinated, serious cases will be rare and few enough will happen at once that those who need it can get treatment. If people don’t get vaccinated and cough in each others faces, we are going to have what is happening now, i.e., hospitals deciding which life threatening cases they have to turn away. Thanks to the party that decried “death panels”
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Maybe when whiskey production is halted maybe some in ‘murica will wake up and get vaccinated.
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This is insane.
Also population of Tennessee is 6.95 million (yes I could have done the math but I wanted to look it up)
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I did the math too. Trying to estimate how many dead people that will be. Assuming the death rate of 1.6%, that’s ~ 1480 people. 
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Just to put a different number on it, and assuming that people only get it once for the sake of this mathematical operation, over the whole pandemic roughly 1 in 10 US residents have gotten covid.
Currently , with 9,000,000 cases or so active right now in the US, on average, 1 out of every 40 people actively have COVID unless I did my math wrong.
Also, California is basically 1 out of 20 people.
EDIT:
Clearly this data is incorrect.
It’s incorrect because most places are not reporting recoveries, so cases linger in active states. This may include Tennessee.
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I liked life better when only kids believed in fantasy and fairy tales and wise older adults comforted their kids saying “don’t worry, those stories aren’t real, they’re just made to laugh at”. Now the kids are tasked with telling their elders they better worry because the fairy tales really are gonna kill them.
Attention Kids! not all of us adults believe in fairy tales. Many of us care about you and your deluded older folks. Stay safe, wear masks, get vaccinated as soon as you can. Many of us old folks do love you and care for your health
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I don’t think that is happening here. Tennessee has reported ~100,000 new cases in the last 2 weeks. I’d guess that tennessee is doing something like counting people as recovered 10 days after a positive test unless they are hospitalized. If you want a number for active cases that is probably a reasonable way to do it, although active cases just isn’t a great metric for a disease that has both a large number of mild cases and a significant minority of very serious or deadly cases.
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