H- wrote:
I don't live in Georgia. But I'm next door in Alabama and have spent much time in Florida lately.
I follow the numbers fairly closely. Oddly, while Alabama and Florida have seen a mild (so far) increase in daily deaths, Georgia still
has not. Alabama and Florida have seen death rates double their prior highs (but not approaching NY, NJ, Conn levels). Georgia death rate still flat and lower than before.
Do you think the curve for Georgia, Alabama, or Florida will spike up like the earlier NY curve?
2 things are keeping it from spiking up sharply, so far:
1) avg age of people infected is lower as more younger people are getting it and the nursing home, etc hotspots that we saw early in the NE are better aware/prepared than before; however, now that a greater share of the total population has been 'seeded,' how long will it stay that way before the kids end up infecting their parents & grandparents? A lot of folks who are fairly dismissive will just say things like "the elderly and high-risk will need to be extra careful but the majority shouldn't have to worry about taking all these added precautions." How long can they maintain those bubbles, and what other health effects will that trigger (like delaying other surgeries & so on) that maybe aren't caused by Cv, but will become more lethal because of Cv-related rationing of medical care?
2) we've managed to avoid overloading local ICU capacity; again, so far... But, it doesn't take a huge spike to get there, just a steady increase, including the cumulative strain on staffing (especially if/when some of them get infected too), and then you hit an inflection point where the mortality will increase sharply again because there won't be enough medical care to meet the increased demand. That's when they start to call in the reefer trucks because the bodies are piling up too fast (already starting to get there in parts of TX now). Some people won't survive who would have if they just didn't all get it at the same time.
Taken together, I see the current trend as simply resulting in a broader, more delayed 'pop' ~ maybe it doesn't look sharp enough on a graph to call it a 'spike' but that's getting to be just semantics. Call it a 'mound' or whatever, the death count may well lag more than it did in April, but it will begin to track up more closely again than it is right now.
This isn't even considering the likely compounding effects of kids going back to skool and more people returning to indoor activities in the fall/winter (although that part is less of a factor in the sun belt, but some of that seasonal behavior is still driven more broadly in response to colder regions too).