No Man Is An Island - part the second

Well, it had to happen, as I said it would. Bermuda records its first deaths. What next? Certainly can't say for sure, but remains proof that no moat is wide enough. Just how much trouble Bermuda is in remains to be seen, but it's clearly deeper in the muck than when I last typed about them. Will a 14 day shutdown make a difference? How long, should it happen, until the hospital is overwhelmed? Yes, that's singular; there are two outpatient facilities in addition.

KEMH has 120 acute care beds
...
There are nine beds in the ICU

And so on. If 120 beds for 71,000 citizens seems a tad short, well it is. Works out to 1.69/1,000. That's about where Colombia is. If Covid progresses as it does everywhere else, that ICU won't last long.

Wayne Caines, the national security minister, said the public should reduce their movements as much as possible.

He highlighted there were still people who were "not taking this seriously" and leaving their homes.

One aspect of Bermuda that I found unexpected when we visited is that Bermudians cleave to the USofA as much, if not more, than the UK, of which it is, sort of, a member. And Southern USofA, at that. Bermuda of the 1860s cleaved to the Confederacy. It appears it still does. Much of the import shipping comes from Charleston, SC. And, of course, the governor just, finally, made a sieve-like 'work or home' order. Yeah, that'll work. I guess our influence rubs off even at a distance.

An Ounce of Brains Is Worth... not much?

There's that old saw, "the clap, the gift that keeps on giving". May be a bit naughty. There's also this, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".

Well The Orange Shitgibbon sorta, kinda blends the two: "an ounce of brains keeps giving death". Here's his take on the 8 Republican governors who refuse to lockdown

"We have a thing called the Constitution, which I cherish," Trump said Saturday, praising the decision of the governors. "Now in some cases we'll supersede ... it depends on the individual state that you're talking about. ... If I saw something wrong, if I saw a massive outbreak, of which there's not, I would come down very hard."

Of course, he's spent 3 years shredding the Constitution, and, or course, 'a massive outbreak' means that the horse has long since left the barn. A fucking moron of a President. Putin must be laughing his ass off.

Just Venting

The Orange Shitgibbon and his minions keep evading the obvious. How do we know that the number of deaths will skyrocket? Because the number of patients who get a ventilator and survive is well below 50%. It's too early to have exhaustive data, but here

A paper from China involved 710 Covid-19 patients; 52 were admitted to an ICU. Of the 22 who eventually required mechanical ventilation, 19 (86%) died. Another early study reported 31 of 32 (97%) mechanically ventilated patients died.

and here .

And a study of 18 ventilated patients in Washington state found that nine were still alive when the study ended, but only six had recovered enough to breathe on their own.

So, if we're lucky, half of ventilated patients make it. So, how many ventilated patients are there right now New York City?

Right now, there are 6,500 ventilators deployed in downstate New York, according to the John Bruno, the Director of Public Information for the NYS Department of Health.
[byline date is 3 April]

and this should keep your attention

The Society of Critical Care Medicine, a health professional organization, recently pointed to one estimate that projected that nearly a million patients would require ventilation during the COVID-19 outbreak.
[that million patients is USofA, not global]

If that million comes to pass, then ~500,000 will die. Just a cold, right Rush?

Small Town Justice - part the second

One might suppose that vacation places have a higher proportion of absentee (i.e. much less than 12 months residency) houses than your standard subdivision. Block Island is such a place

Block Island has an unusually low housing occupancy rate, in that the majority of housing units are considered vacant because they are not occupied year-round. As counted by the 2010 Census, the number of seasonal housing units is 1,253 out of 1,808 total housing units, nearly 70%.

I suspect that's approaching Nantucket territory.

The censuses have been topping out at 1,000 true Islanders for some years. The last count I can find on the innterTubes puts the count at 971. The Ground Hog Day census hasn't been posted for some time, alas. One day we'll go over to be counted.

These scraps of demography are mentioned because of another story in 'The Block Island Times'

An island resident has been arrested on a misdemeanor charge for what New Shoreham Police Chief Vin Carlone termed as an incident of "harassment" of a long-term, multi-generational island homeowner who was driving in a car with out-of-state plates.

Paranoia strikes deep, as the lyric says. It's worth mentioning that many Islanders have made fun of their own. To wit: when the mainlanders have left after the off-off-season (people like us, for instance), Islanders go into drinking mode. They line up at the Red Bird for their daily bottles. Now, that might just be exaggeration to tickle the naive mainlander. But, given the level of isolation in normal off-off-season and now Covid-19 limiting travel twixt the mainland and the Island, one might suspect that further isolation, a bit more hooch than usual, and a presumed mainlander bringing disease...

Keeping Count - part the sixth

Let's continue the tally of states that The Manchurian President is setting up to toss him out in November.

-- 4 April

A bunch all at once. Just read up the report. Nothing to add. It'll curl your hair. If you're lucky enough to have any. Hopefully the few that still live in November will rid us of The Orange Shitgibbon and their governors.

North Dakota
South Dakota
Iowa
Nebraska
South Carolina
Utah
Arkansas
Wyoming

Georgia again. And Kemp goes wild! No, not that old football player from New York, alas

As the Pentagon ordered 100,000 body bags to store the corpses of Americans killed by the Coronavirus, Governor Brian Kemp dictated that Georgia beaches must reopen, and declared any decision-makers who refused to follow these orders would face prison and/or fines.
-- Shirley Sessions, Mayor of Tybee Island

These right wingnuts have no shame. I guess they won't kill so many citizens, that the survivors won't notice.

Deadly Future - part the fourth

Well, here we go again. If you saved the Kinsa maps since at least 31 March (or if not; it will still work), you'll notice, as I did, that the Atypical map looks identical since then. How can that be? My guess is that they're using some historical time-series estimate of flu fever baseline, and flu fevers are running somewhat below that. I finally decided to choose the Trends display, since back on 31 March and 1 April they didn't imply much. Today, 3 April data, is a whole nuther story. The Spring Break Covidiot explosion is clear as a bell.

Lesson Learned

We'll never know, really, how it came to be but Bermuda's administration has called for a 24/7 14 day lockdown. Last I looked, there were 'only' 32 confirmed cases. Population is ~71,000, but kind of in the middle of nowhere. If only The Orange Shitgibbon had as many smarts.