Local models used by Public Health to predict the spread of COVID-19 project that if Humboldt County keeps all current social distancing orders in place, it could still see 28 deaths by December, at which point there could be 145 hospitalizations, with 64 people under intensive care and 38 using ventilators.
That’s one of two model projections Deputy Health Officer Josh Ennis presented to the public at a dialogue last night that also included Sheriff William Honsal and Public Health Officer Teresa Frankovich, and was moderated by Lost Coast Outpost editor Hank Sims. The other projection was much more dire: If Humboldt County were to lift all social distancing orders and resume life as normal on May 1, the model projects we would see 188 deaths by July, at which point there would be 976 hospitalizations, with 408 people under intensive care with 251 patients using ventilators.
While both projections seem dire, the first would push local peak infection rates later into the year, giving the county and local hospitals more time to prepare and increase capacity. Ennis said current plans would effectively triple the number of local ICU beds, allowing providers to meet the projected demand. Under the second model, the system would be completely overwhelmed.
“Going forward, we’re going to be navigating the place between those two curves and trying to basically preserve lives and never overwhelm our healthcare system, while at the same time allowing some of that societal recovery we’re talking about,” said Frankovich.
But that’s clearly a delicate dance with a disease that has the potential for exponential spread, as Ennis made clear.
“Spread of the disease can quickly spiral out of control,” he said. “Think of it like a 100-car freight train and it’s speeding along down a railway. If you have to pull a break, it takes a long time for it to slow down.”
Frankovich and Ennis said the availability of testing is both a huge limiting factor in their ability to understand spread of the virus locally and a crucial component to any plans to ease current restrictions and re-open portions of society.
“We don’t have the ability to test everyone we want to test,” Ennis said, prompting Frankovich to jump in.
“To that point, to really understand how much is out there, we have to be able to do surveillance testing,” Frankovich said. “We would have to be able to test everyone who is symptomatic and everyone who is not, and that would give us a true idea of where we are.”
As of yesterday, 1,853 local residents had been tested for COVID-19, with 52 found to have the virus. (The county has seen just two positive cases since April 7 and 50 of those infected have since recovered and been released from isolation.) But the county still has strict protocols regarding under what circumstances someone gets tested, and testing is limited to people who are severely symptomatic, symptomatic with a known contact to a positive case or symptomatic with an underlying health issue. But nine of Humboldt County’s positive cases are believed to have been infected from unknown sources within the community, meaning the virus is circulating undetected locally. And studies have shown that more than 20 percent of COVID-19 patients never experience symptoms but are nonetheless contagious.
And that’s a problem when it comes to discussions of re-opening public life, as only comprehensive testing will allow officials to react quickly enough to counteract a surge in the virus.
“It’s really important we have robust testing in place so we know what’s happening in the community and we can test, we can trace and we can isolate,” Ennis said. “That is a huge piece of this that really needs to be in place … before we can take that [next] step, I think.”
“It’s really important we have robust testing in place so we know what’s happening in the community and we can test, we can trace and we can isolate. That is a huge piece of this that really needs to be in place … before we can take that (next) step, I think.”
But there continue to be supply chain issues with testing, which requires a number of specific supplies, from swabs to chemical reagents, that are in tremendously high demand throughout the state, nation and world. Frankovich indicated there are some signs that some of the supply chain limitations are easing, but offered no specifics or timetable as to when testing would be more widely available locally or when providers might be able to loosen criteria to begin testing mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic people.
Without more representative testing data, the county is taking some small steps toward loosening the restrictions that have been in place for the last month. Earlier this week, Honsal announced that the Sheriff’s Office main station would be re-opening to the public in a limited capacity and called on other government offices to do the same. He also urged businesses that were deemed “essential” under the shelter-in-place order and allowed to continue operations, but chose to shutter instead, to open. But those small steps also came with a mandatory facial covering order that went into place this morning, requiring all people to wear facial coverings when in public unless outdoors in situations where they can stay at least 6 feet away from other people at all times, with few exceptions.
“I know it’s not necessarily popular but we see [the mask order] as a precondition to lifting restrictions,” Frankvoich said.
Thursday’s discussion of local modeling came after Butte County Public Health Officer Andy Miller disclosed the median projections from a state model, based off the Johns Hopkins University model, on Friday. Ennis said that modeling was done based on data that is now a month old but the projection had Humboldt County seeing 40 COVID-19 deaths and 171 hospitalizations by July 1. The projections Ennis presented yesterday were based on more recent data, he said, using a model from the University of Pennsylvania’s open source formula.
Ennis cautioned that models are based on “a lot of assumptions about how the virus transmits” and, at this point, do not distinguish between urban and rural areas or take population density into account.
“It’s guesswork to some degree but it’s an educated guess and it’s based on data and what we do know.”
“It’s guesswork to some degree but it’s an educated guess and it’s based on data and what we do know,” he said.
It’s unclear based on last night’s discussion whether the county has done modeling projections of scenarios between the two extremes presented: keeping all social distancing orders in place for the remainder of the year or lifting them entirely by May 1. But if less extreme models have been done, they were not presented last night.
In walking the public through the more dire of the two projections — the one that would see hospitals overflowing this summer without enough ventilators and ICU beds to treat the hundreds of people who need them and 188 people having already died of the disease — Ennis underscored that without restrictions, the model indicates the local health system would be completely overwhelmed within months.
“We don’t put this up to frighten people but this is what the data says,” he said.
Watch the full dialogue embedded below.
This article appears in Front Window.
Thank you Doctor for using already out of date centrally disseminated Sacrimento approved data to keep the controls in place. Thank you Sheriff for clicking your heals and saluting the Health Officer.
With the current antibody studies, IFR (the more realistic Infection Fatality Rate) has a low / high of 1/10th % to 36/100ths % and deaths are mainly limited to those elderly and a few others with serious health conditions.
The risk to the general population, the workers, is exceedingly low verging on non-existent.
SHELTER THE AT RISK AND FREE THE HEALTHY.
Updated daily CFR and IFR information. Please read this study it’s quite facinating:
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid…
According to to the CDC, 5,138 people younger than the age of 65 have died in the U.S. of COVID-19.
I watched the entire presentation and while the facts presented above are correct to the best of my recollection, the tone of the presentation seemed a bit like the Public Health Officer and Sheriff are being pressured to open up earlier than the rest of the state (probably by people like KeyboardKommander above). This would obviously be a mistake, given the high contagion of this disease and the apparent benefits of sheltering in place. No matter how optimistic, those over 60 and anyone with heart, lung, kidney, or endocrine (diabetes) disease will be forced to shelter, but it’s not as simple as that.
If KeyboardKommander’s request to ‘free the healthy’ is taken seriously, the expected outcome would by more wide spread viral shedding, many by asymptomatic persons. How are people at risk supposed to live in that situation? The risks of grocery shopping can be met by personal shoppers, but what about toothache, doctor checkups, internet service repair calls, etc? Each of these becomes potentially far more treacherous than if the overall prevalence of this nasty virus is kept low in the general population.
The more widespread the virus, the more likely there will be more mutations and difficulty vaccinating against it when there is a vaccine (which will be a while, if ever).
Meanwhile, nothing meaningful has changed with regard to the availability of N95 respirators, ventilators (of dubious outcome in any case) or medical treatments. Why would we even consider lowering our guard at this time?
The oft mentioned ‘roadmap’ to exiting this shelter in place was not clearly outlined, at least to my ears. There was a lot of sleight of hand and ‘nothing to see here’ type of wishful thinking about hopes and dreams, but nothing concrete that made it look like anything except a few disgruntled gad flys are trying to open things up too soon.
We have an older than average population reportedly, let’s take this into consideration. Not all of that population is in a nursing home — many are fully functional and have many years to live — IF our Public Health Officer and Sheriff focus on public health, not economics. Important as money is, it can’t buy life or happiness.
Dell Anderson,
We are not your or the Health Officer’s chattel to be caged for your irrational fears or convenience. The unintended consequence of lockdown is millions will become sick and die worldwide due to health order compelled poverty.
Each family must be free to determine their own precautionary measures based on circumstances and risk levels.
Thadeus, how many people in the US have died with covid, not of covid? Why doesn’t the CDC make that a mandatory discrepancy among deaths? How many doctors have outright said even suicide victims have been listed in their area as covid deaths? How much research do you really CARE to do?
Thad,
Youre going to need to parse out those numbers to have any credibility.
https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views…
The death rate in NYC, the epicenter for the American experience, for 18-45 year olds is 0.01 %.
95% of deaths were over 50 years of age.
99.2 % of fully investigated deaths had an underlying illnesses regardless of age.
If one doesnt already have a chronic preexisting condition, your chance of dying from this is small regardless of age.
SHELTER THE AT RISK & FREE THE HEALTHY!
LOCKDOWN IS NOT SUSTAINABLE!
KeyboardKommander – your right to do as you will ends where other people’s (including my and my family’s) right to live begins. Please educate yourself about community spread, R0, and deadly risk to some.
This is exactly the reason we have speed limits on the freeway, building codes on houses and structures, and FDA regulations on food and drugs.
Oh, and by the way, I have no idea how old you are but you are not immune to dying from this virus. The first California fatality was a healthy 57 y/o woman on Feb 6.
Your sociopathic desire to put others at increased risk for your convenience during a pandemic is not welcome by most people. Have a nice day!
Dell Anderson, I follow the rules. Even if I thought the entire situation was fake, I’d do so out of consideration. But I’m not naive to faulty logic, and there’s more than enough faulty logic involved in the official information provided during this “lockdown” scenario to raise eyebrows. The sudden push for “surveillance” would not fly with elected officials or the general public alike if not for a scenario like the one we’re experiencing. And that’s just the beginning of a long list of very uncomfortable truths regarding what’s happening to what we have always collectively called “freedom” in this country. There’s no reason to list people who have died with a particular virus, as having died of the particular virus, when it’s known that the individual didn’t die from the virus. Yet, as people are realizing, that’s been happening. Not only has that been happening, but “news reporters” aren’t reporting it, aren’t investigating it, aren’t even questioning it. Instead, many “news reporters” are condemning people who are, and that makes people afraid to even question what’s rightfully bothering their conscience. People who are questioning authority are doing so for everybody. People have every right and reason to be upset for all kinds of reasons right now. Thadeus Greenson has essentially said that you are a bad person if you question “lockdown”. That’s not responsible journalism.
Dell Anderson,
My reasons for ending the lockdown are humanitarian and based on sound science and legal tenants.
However, I don’t need to convince anyone actually of the logic behind ending the “lockdown”.
The unintended consequences of government insolvency and bankruptcy, caused by destroying commerce, will force us open. The “essentials” will be made “unessential” if we don’t. Adam Smith’s hand will break open that lock.
Walker Talker – I am very well aware of the talk show hosts and other media promoting the ‘COVID-19 and nothing else’ strict criteria for COVID-19 death reporting. Unfortunately, medicine is not a simplistic as that. TL;DR People who would not otherwise have died will die if this virus is not contained and controlled. This is an inarguable fact with evidence from around the world. These are excess deaths. And it might have been worse had it happened at the beginning of flu season.
I am not naive, but neither am I such a conspiracist to believe that the whole world is cooking their books to make it look like the virus is more much more dangerous than it is.
Thank you for following guidelines, even if, or especially if, you are doing so out of consideration. That is the ethical path here.
There are psychological and demographic reasons why people on both sides have the opinions they do. This event will be source material for textbooks (if there are such things in our digital future) for a hundred years.
Those who survive will have plenty of time to discuss the reporting bias, missed origins, failures, and missed opportunities that everyone has made in this once-in-a-century pandemic. The health profession has been dreading this event for decades. We now have to deal with it the best we can. Hopefully cool heads will prevail and our Public Health department will not bow to the noisy rants of inconsiderate people (trolls?) like KeyboardKommander.
An economy without ethical basis is not an economy, it is a criminal enterprise.
“Projections”, “models”, yeah we’ve heard them all before somewhere, haven’t we?
And just like those other projections using models, they’re just other words for…GUESSES. using software which makes it all seem like such “settled science”.
Dell Anderson, “Those who survive will have plenty of time to discuss the reporting bias, missed origins, failures, and missed opportunities that everyone has made”
We should be discussing those issues right now. Lord knows we have the time. How does “surveillance” work? How many cameras are networked, and where? How are our phones tapped into the network? Because all of our smart devices are looking and listening, that’s a fact you can tl;dr until you’re blue in the face. How are people being cataloged, now and into what future? Etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
Thadeus Greenson is such a great news journalist, he’s been busy shedding light on many obvious concerns regarding permanent changes to our privacy and protocols. /sarcasm
Walker Talker said “We should be discussing those issues right now. Lord knows we have the time. How does “surveillance” work?”
I thought we were! LOL. There are organizations (EFF for one) and news media covering these topics that deserve to be supported. I draw the line at surveillance DJI drones (allegedly donated by China BTW) to check for mask wearing. We are NOT that society. Watch the film “The Lives of Others” (about East German surveillance knock-on effects during the cold war) if you have any doubts about the evil nature of loss of privacy.
Not doing anything wrong you say? Don’t care if they watch? I assume you don’t mind cameras in your bathroom then….
I say all of this NOT because I sense that you disagree with me, but because you seem to think anyone who has any concerns about Coronavirus is part of a conspiracy to take away our freedom. Don’t fall for that argument. We can act rationally yet still preserve needed freedoms. But we must live to fight another day, and to do so, we may have to restrict the freedoms of some numbskull sociopaths who would like to act as if there was no virus.
We as a society have a right to protect ourselves from such miscreants and we will. We don’t allow drive by shooters to roam the streets free, we shouldn’t allow drive-by potential virus shedders to roam the streets unrestricted either until or unless we have
1) Proper respiratory protection
2) Adequate preventive strategies (vaccines)
3) Adequate medication treatments
4) Effective medical devices to sustain ill
5) And some way to identify who the Typhoid Mary’s are and quarantine them until they are no longer a danger to society.
As to Anony Grazer’s sarcasm regarding computer ‘projections’. We obviously can’t predict everything precisely, and even if we could do so, would you expect those predictions to still hold under changed conditions? It’s like the airliner’s computer saying ‘pull up, pull up’ because it “predicts” a collision with the ground. Would you ignore that computer because the last time you pulled up you didn’t hit the ground? Of course not. Unless you were suicidal.
Dell, thanks. Your comments are not tl to r.
” but because you seem to think anyone who has any concerns about Coronavirus is part of a conspiracy to take away our freedom.”
Absolutely not. Never. Reread what I wrote, and please tell me how you came to think that. That’s the attitude I’m calling out the journal for creating and perpetuating. You and I are blabbing on a blog, doing the discussing that our news media should be. I read the journal on a weekly basis, its writers calling people potential killers and crazy conspiracy theorists if we don’t goose step to the beat of the same drum. Simultaneously, they’ll tell us that’s not what to do. Where’s any expose on “surveillance” as it’s being deployed right now? Who are our health and law officers working in conjunction with? Why is 5G being implemented right now in a practically covert manner? So many unanswered questions, yet so many condemnations, while our freedoms ARE being taken away.
Walker Talker “Why is 5G being implemented right now in a practically covert manner?”
Probably because it is a superior technology. But that would be a discussion for the comments section of another article. To the best of my knowledge, it has little or nothing to do with Corona virus. You can read plenty about it elsewhere. Is there some reason you must limit yourself to North Coast Journal? Why not broaden your reading?
IMHO, the primary concern with 5G was the manufacturer (Huawei) and it’s ties to Chinese Government. And from what I have read, the current administration put the brakes on any government purchase from this manufacturer, and arranged for the arrest of a top executive in the company. This naturally made China a angry. Oh, and if I am not mistaken, China is a communist country, not Nazi, so even if 5G were implemented here, goosestepping is perhaps not the best metaphor.
What can I say, Dell, but that you’re not very keen on connecting the dots. Think along the lines of a chain smoker who catches the flu, that happens to be the specific covid flu, will be a different statistic. Etc etc etc.
BTW, the primary concern with 5G is literally what it is. It creates yet another, and exponentially more powerful microwave frequency which, like all other broadcasts, literally vibrates every molecule in your entire body, every second of every day forever. It’s inescapably omnipresent. How does that effect one’s immune system? Will that make more people susceptible to the flu? Since the implementation of powerful broadband the world over, has the world seen an uptick of viral infections? A diminishing of insect populations? The world is becoming survival of those who can drink even more polluted water in their neighborhood, everybody else will die, reasons listed as something other than the new normal polluted water. etc etc etc. Connect the dots.
Walker Talker — what you are talking about is not connecting the dots. It’s paranoid conspiracy. Sometimes that is healthy, sometimes not. And right now, it’s pretty irrelevant until there are more facts to support your theories about ‘5G vibrating every cell in your body’. Ummm…how much power would that take? Have you checked the power supply on any of those 5G transmitters?
Now back to real world. You mentioned smoking and COVID-19. Wasn’t clear what your point was, but if you mean the two are not related, that’s partly right, but not exactly. One may increase or decrease death of the other. Some preliminary reports are suggesting smoking may be protective (I wouldn’t do it because I don’t want cancer, but there’s that).
Everything is potentially related to everything else (if you are Buddhist) but that isn’t how I roll.
“theories about ‘5G vibrating every cell in your body’. Ummm…how much power would that take? Have you checked the power supply on any of those 5G transmitters? “
You’re either embarrassingly ignorant for somebody with such a vocabulary, or trolling. That’s fair. The internet is for porn anyway. Tell us how such signals teleport, please. Have fun, guy.
Walker Talker said “You’re either embarrassingly ignorant for somebody with such a vocabulary, or trolling. “
Nope. Actually believe in making decisions based on factual data, not conspiracy theories from electronically ignorant fear mongerers who thrive on non-sequitur arguments (such as injecting 5G discusions into a comments section on COVID-19! Have a great day!