Virginia Gov. Northam imposes new restrictions in response to COVID surge
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| Northam speaks at a briefing on COVID Dec. 10. |
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam on Dec. 10 announced new rules aimed at combatting a surge in COVID 19 cases, including a curfew and stepped-up enforcement.
COVID cases are now at the highest level ever since the pandemic started last winter. Statewide, there are now 4,000 new cases a day. That is way up from the previous surge in May where there were an average of 1,200 new cases a day.
Statewide, there were 54 additional deaths on Dec. 10, and the percent of positive cases has doubled in the past month, reaching an 11 percent positivity rate.
COVID cases are also soaring in Fairfax County, reaching an all-time of 728 new cases on Dec. 8. There have been nine deaths and 104 new hospitalizations in the county since the beginning of December.
Northam modified the state’s stay-at-home order directing everyone to stay home between midnight and 5 a.m., unless they need to go to work.
All social gatherings now must be limited to 10 individuals, down from the current cap of 25. That includes parties, celebrations, or other social events, regardless of whether they occur indoors or outdoors.
The new rules also require every restaurant employee, including those working in the kitchen, to wear a mask.
The new order takes effect at midnight Dec. 14. It will expire Jan. 31, unless it needs to be extended.
The governor is not changing other rules on restaurants, as the existing rules already result in limited capacity. No alcohol sales are allowed after 10 p.m. Bars are already closed.
According to Northam, compliance rates among restaurants and other businesses is about 90 percent, but there have been complaints about restaurants, grocery stores, and convenience stores not following the rules on masks.
Enforcement is handled by the state’s ABC office and Health Department. So far, about 181 enforcement letters have been issued.
In one example, a restaurant in Petersburg was shut down and charged with a warrant class 1 misdemeanor when inspectors found it exceeded the occupancy limit, people were at the bar, and there was no social distancing and no masks. At least three restaurants in Richmond and several in Hampton Roads lost their licenses.
The new restrictions don’t affect education; school districts set their own rules on when to open schools for in-person learning.
Northam, however, is setting limits on spectators at recreational sports – a maximum of 25 at indoor sports events and two guests per player for outdoor games.
The governor encourages faith communities to set an example during the holidays by requiring masks indoors and holding outside or online services as an alternative. “This year we need to think about what is the most important thing – the worship or the building?”
In one piece of good news, Northam said Virginia can start vaccinating people by this weekend if the federal Food and Drug Administration approves the Pfizer vaccine on Dec. 10. The Health Department already has a vaccination plan in place.
Northam read a message from Greg Crowder, the mayor of Hillsville in southwest Virginia, who contracted COVID after bragging about “how I hadn’t let this virus change my life.” Now Crowder says, “I could never imagine how much my muscles could hurt, I can barely walk, I can’t get comfortable, and I can’t sleep more than 30 minutes at a time.”
Northam also shared a video from Emily, a healthcare worker at a COVID ICU at Valley Health in southwest Virginia, who spoke about the toll the virus is taking on her community.
COVID is spreading as people are getting tired of staying home, she said. She has seen many patients who went to a ballgame or birthday party and are now suffering in the hospital unable to breathe. She has held the hand of dying patients because their family couldn’t be there.
“This is real,” she said. “If you could just stay home, we could stop this.”
Good
Good in what way? Please explain.
Are you aware 300,000 Americans have died from covid? Do you give a shit?
No one can explain it….arbitrary methods and numbers. Why 10 people? Why not 9 or 11? Just another glimpse at what's to come.
Don't worry. With that pissy attitude you'll be excluded no matter what number they decide on.
–kda
Anon 12:10 PM
300,000
400,000
500,000 dead
Who cares? Let's have no restrictions and live a little!
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/large-events/considerations-for-events-gatherings.html
Here are CDC guidelines on gatherings. The basic idea is the less people there are the less the virus can spread. Radical concept, I know. Take a few days to meditate on it. Good luck.
It doesn't have to be a binary choice. Everyone can make their own risk assessments without the governor. Your statistics show ignorance. 300K dead from covid or with covid? And if someone dies from a gunshot wound but is tested upon entry to the hospital is that from covid? Or a person in a car accident? Or what about a 102 year old with renal failure and congestive heart failure? The death certs have thousands like this. And how about a PCR test? Isn't a diagnostic test. Picks up so many false positives because it amplifies dead virus in RNA. We can take Covid seriously, but we don't need a one size fits all solution. It is a disease largely of the old and infirm. Let's look to protect them. Otherwise healthy people of just about every age group have little chance of dying from the virus.
“People making their own risk assessments” is why several states no longer have ICU beds and are packing refrigerated truck with bodies. Pass. People are dumb.
My friends and co-workers don't believe me when I tell them this and I want to show them. The best I found is protect-public.hhs.gov but I couldn't find anything on there that shows more than a here or there hospital that was overrun. The trucks with bodies is harder to show since states don't keep track of that from what I can tell. But anything you can provide would be helpful.
Weekly deaths from all causes in the U.S. during Covid-19 compared to the previous 5 years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count?tab=chart&stackMode=absolute®ion=World
Here is the CDC version:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
The spike in excess deaths in these graphs correlates directly to the spike in covid cases. You claim there are ‘thousands' of misclassified deaths. If you have any evidence or statistics to back that up, I’d appreciate a link. Otherwise you’re just another Anonymous internet crank pulling stuff out of your ass.
***
“It is a disease largely of the old and infirm. Let's look to protect them. Otherwise healthy people of just about every age group have little chance of dying from the virus.”
Hospitalizations by age, CDC data (click the percentage option in the top left graph):
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/covidnet/COVID19_5.html
You blithely ignore the fact that persistently over 20% of people ages 18-49 require hospitalization to beat the disease. More than half are under 65. Moreover, these patients take up precious hospital space that older patients desperately need. People living in nursing homes come into daily contact with caregivers who risk infection in areas where cases are spiking. Also, there are millions of elderly who still have to work!
***
“Everyone can make their own risk assessments without the governor.”
Are you kidding? The President is throwing maskless Christmas parties with no social distancing. Is that a model of safe behavior? 74 million people voted for him. I have an acquaintance in South Dakota who was not worried about the virus in April. He thought they were insulated by the remoteness of his state. Now it’s a dumpster fire.
***
I’ll close with a recent quote from CDC Director Redfield:
We are in the timeframe now that probably for the next 60 to 90 days we're going to have more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor.
You need to wake up.
Sorry for the length of this post but Anonymous 1:42 PM had so many absurd and dangerous claims.
Response to Anon 11:17AM
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/index.html
Newly released data from the US Department of Health and Human Services show at least 200 hospitals were at full capacity last week.
And in one third of all hospitals, more than 90% of all ICU beds were occupied. Coronavirus patients occupied 46% of all staffed ICU beds — up from 37% in the first week of November.
Hospitalizations in the US reached a record high of 107,248 on Thursday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
***
Links to HHS are provided in the article. And it's only going to get worse. Keep it locked down people. Mask up. Stay safe.
Hmm, so I think I mis-stated since % capacity != the ability to care for those in the ICU; in a hospital where 100% the ICU beds are occupied, very few are actually being cared for. Apparently 50% ICU capacity is the limit in most hospitals where the staff can actually care for everyone in a bed. Today I learned.
Well done ylee
Anonymous 5:01PM is probably a Trumpster. I could have never imagined in my life that people in this country can be so stupid and selfish. Wear a damn mask, keep your distance and don't be an ass.
How many “lockdowns” do you think would have been implemented if Ralph or any politician or public health expert was forced to stay home and give up their taxpayer-funded salaries?
If your answer isn't zero, then your intellectually dishonest, willfully ignorant, an authoritarian or a politician.
We haven’t had any lockdowns
Can't be out midnight to 5 am in Virginia according to the dear leader of Virginia. Sounds like a lockdown to me. Also tell that to the workers who are losing their jobs because of capacity limits. or Los Angeles county. We can quibble over the technical definition of lockdown, but these are distinctions without differences.
There is absolutely a difference. Why don't you just google what actual lockdowns are around the world to gain a little perspective. Maybe have a drink at home for the next few months rather than complaining about your bar not being open.
It's getting chippy out there and in here too I see!
The shallowness and stupidity of some of the comments here is amazing.
You're in shock by the amount of COVID deaths, but did you learn the numbers for plain car crash deaths? flu deaths? ppl taking their lives due to the ridiculously stupid restrictions?
virtue signaling in this community is sky rocketing.
Unbelievable,
this and the stupidity of Northam.
2300 people died TODAY because of COVID you goddamn moron.
So much for following the guide for commenting on this site…."Avoid personal attacks and vulgar language."
The comments above stimulated my thinking on three topics that I share, not to persuade anyone, or for others to use as ad hominem attacks, but for everyone to think about the information they are reading about. Below, I discuss the sensitivity of PCR tests, excess deaths/correlation and causation and how states count covid deaths. My hope is that people will digest this and think how we can best protect those who are most vulnerable to this most serious virus. I also had to break this up into a few comments due to character limits. I hope the moderator will allow them all in separate posts.
A PCR test is not testing for disease, it's testing for a specific RNA pattern. There is too little when a patient gets swabbed so it is amplified using a and slow cooling (called annealing) process. In other words, you cannot find it unaltered because there is too little to analyze. The PCR test amplifies it over and over until there is an amount to analyze. Each amplification or cycle process doubles the material. In other words, each amplification (cycle) gets you more RNA exponentially. So if you amplify (or cycle) forty times, that is orders of magnitude more RNA than say 25 cycles. In the US, most labs use 40 as the amplification or cycle threshold – you many have seen the abbreviation Ct for cycle threshold. This means that 40 doubling or one trillion times amplification, which is very high. Labs run a test at 40 Cts to find RNA, and then try to culture the virus. But if you cannot culture the virus, then the virus is dead and it cannot replicate, and thus it cannot infect you or others. It's just traces of virus. As I noted above, PCR is not testing for disease, it's testing for a specific RNA pattern and this is where it is important to think about the PCR test vis-à-vis Covid. When you amplify a PCR test to a certain point past 25 Cts, the positive results are not really "positives" in any clinical sense. It finds RNA, but the RNA is fragmented and cannot make people sick. So, if positives are not infectious positives at 25 Cts, any test that sets the Ct at 40 would be 1,000 times as sensitive. The point is the PCR test may be too sensitive and be showing positives for people who are infected or infected in the recent past, but not actually infectious. Pages could be written to more fulsomely describe this so I hope its enough for folks here to think about the efficacy of the PCR test and the Ct level as a tool for detecting and determining whether a person has covid that is infectious. Some states are starting to look into this.
Indeed that was very interesting, thank you
This is my continuation of the 12/14 at 2:26 comments. A few comments above had some discourse about number of excess deaths and the notion of correlation and causation. Again, to keep this a bit shorter I will skip some explanations about correlation/causation, but we cannot assume that a spike in excess deaths means that everyone is a covid death simply because they rise together. In other words, the graphs have a relationship but there is no way to determine if one causes the other without more analysis to see if other factors could be causing the excess deaths or the covid deaths to change or both. There is no way anyone can make this determination now without eliminating other factors. For example, if someone missed a diagnosis or treatment for cancer because they could not get into a doctor or hospital and died sooner than expected (i.e. this year as opposed to next year had they received treatment), that could cause excess deaths to rise. A suicide, a dementia patient, or a senior citizen in a nursing home who wasn’t allowed to have family visit. Deaths from dispair. But we cannot assume that every excess death this year is a covid death simply because two graphs correlate. One does not necessarily cause the other without more investigation to determine if there are other factors making excess deaths rise. The last point is about how deaths are counted. Jurisdictions count differently. NYC officially uses the following definition of a COVID death: “any death from any cause of death within 60 days of a positive SARS-CoV2 PCR.” So, if a person commits suicide and the coroner tested for covid at it is positive that, is counted as a covid death. Maricopa County, AZ uses the same definition as NYC. More investigation is needed about what a true covid death means. Just to provide a bit more information for further analysis, I picked the Milwaukee coroner’s office death certificates (mostly because it is easy to access) and has anonymized death certificates. Here are a few recent ones that listed covid as the primary cause of death. It’s hard to link to the individual certificates but easy for anyone to go on and do what I did. All four of these had Covid as “Cause A” for death. But look at the ages and the “Cause B” cause of death. First one, Age 80 with parkinson’s disease, dementia, chronic congestive heart failure, coronary atherosclerosis, atrial fibrillation. Second, Age 75, Chronic congestive heart failure, chronic renal failure on dialysis, diabetes mellitus. Third, Age 85, Hypertension, diabetes mellitus, hypothyroidism. Fourth, 84 Years , schizophrenia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. I recognize that the response will be that this is too few or that I am cherry picking. But this information is easily accessible. I assure you I could do this all day with people who were deemed to have died with covid and were over 75 with multiple other comorbidities. This tracks with the CDC data that over half the deaths from Covid are over the age of 75, with multiple comorbidities. Even those under 75 who have died of covid have had serious health conditions. Yes, regular, young, healthy people have died of covid. And that is beyond tragic.
Another data point for thought: This time of year approximately 8,050 die each day in the Unites States. Based on the number of deaths reported each day, what states are contending is that on any given day 40% of all death in the US now is Covid. However, CDC excess death is up only 10% during this same time. Either we cured 30% of our past causes of death or something else is going on with reporting. I don’t have an answer yet, but if I do, I’ll post it.
None of what I wrote above is intended to convince readers that there is nothing to be concerned about. There is plenty. The virus is real and it is serious. But we have to be fair about who it is serious for. And we have to be fair to how we are determining who has infectious covid, who is most vulnerable.