Originally Posted by Deech View Post
Since I have a condo in Florida, I have been reading and researching about the virus in the Southeast. As we are all aware, anyone that leaves the Northeast to go to the Southeast, must quarantine for 14 days upon return. The numbers are not good. Florida residents were polled recently and 57% disapproved of the job Gov. DeSantis has done regarding the virus and 61% have stated that he opened the state prematurely.

Gov. DeSantis has stated the numbers are trending favorably. On June 12th Florida hit a high of 1,900 new cases of the virus. That was an excellent apex at that point for a state that big. From July 10th -July31 (the new numbers came out) the minimum has been 9,200 (excluding one day). Usually, 10,000 to 11,000.

From March 1st through July 13th there was only one day that Florida experienced 100 death in a day. Since July 14th 13 of the 18 days have had 100+ deaths. Sadly, a record high in each of the last two days.

I am not picking on Florida specifically, but, yeah, self bragging about their early success was ill advised. The state is the number one poster child on how not to handle a pandemic virus.

Miami/Dade county has 146% of ICU beds utilized. Five counties have exhausted their bed availability. 51 hospitals have no ICU availability whatsoever. The numbers were out of whack two weeks ago. Either the governor did not ask the federal government for help or the federal government lapsed.

Both Harvard and the Trump task force agree on the 13 states that have the worse numbers of cases per 100,00 people. All are southeastern states outside of Texas, Oklahoma, and Idaho. Florida leads the pack at 48 per 100,00. Arkansas is 13th at 26 per 100,000. The low end of the spectrum is within the 6 New England states, NY, NJ, and Hawaii. They run between 0.9 and 5.6 per 100,000. Harvard has a stronger view that the Trump task force. They say these 13 states at the top end of the scale should shut down. While I have not had the opportunity to review each individual state, a safe assumption is that most came back too early and too fast. The fact that the northeast states are requiring a 14 day quarantine for the other 31 to 42 states (depending on the individual state) puts traveling on a major standstill.

Globally, the world have roughly 15 million cases of the virus between January 15th and July 20th. In the last 8 days there have been 2 million new cases. Might as well forget about international travel for a while.

Now, why do I bring this up? My original guess is that the US would shut down on March 18th (to let us celebrate St. Patrick's Day) and then maybe open up for Memorial Day or by June 1st. I was close to Reditz's estimate. I am way off on everything else. I thought the second wave would come in mid October. Then, again, the experts are stating that we are still in the first wave.

I hate coming out of the bleachers and start spouting numbers but I would say this regardless of our government set up. No president would have handled this in an optimum way. Optimum would have banning travel from UK to the US. No one does that. What everyone has to realize is that there is no safe outing once you leave your house. There are many states that are a mess right now. As I indicated earlier, my mother in law recently broke her hip. I cannot jeopardize my wife who will probably be her primary care giver for a while. Yes, these are unique times.

It's still the first wave. If you look up Michael Osterholm, he's had everything pegged pretty accurately the entire way.

This wasn't hard to figure out as it went along. Unless you were watching Fox News, which happens to be the most watched news network (by Americans). Anyway, one last blog promo -- if you check my blog entries going back to the beginning, I was way ahead of the news cycle for many things. But it was not hard. Just had to review international news the early months, then put epidemiologists' opinions together. The guy in charge of the South Korea infectious disease institute, who is a Fauci equivalent, was ready to retire until covid-19 came along. He actually was very forthright and accurate, better than Fauci, in fact. Now he can't retire.

Anyway, at some point I'll do a blog entry of "Bob's greatest predictions" and contrast them with the White House. I had a little bit of a head start on most civilians as my late wife was a demographer and archaeologist who studied Native Americans at time of contact, which featured pandemics. I knew what "pandemic" meant and how this would work demographically. I think most Americans were in the dark.

I'm actually reasonably proud of the blog. Anybody following it wasn't fooled by much. Here's the blog address and the latest entry:

https://theskepticalgambler.blogspot...s-of-note.html