NDSU grad

It’s a fair comment, but most public health officials have stated it would take about 3 weeks for those to have any effect. Biology is a better explanation.

Yep. It also seems cases have been affecting the 80+ demographic at about a 40% greater rate than the general population. This is presuming the age demographic data I found in the web is reliable, but it seemed logical. Presuming a large percentage of that demographic lives in long term facilities the 80+ crowd in North Dakota may reach some level of immunity faster than the general population. You’d expect hospitalizations to lag but they seem to be falling somewhat with positivity rate. This may lead some credence to my theory that the elderly were getting infected at a greater rate than the general population. Next 10 days will be telling.

If you believe the models that state actual infections are 4-6 times the true number of cases we’d be at about 39% of North Dakota’s population infected. That’s using the low end of the model projection. True herd immunity probably isn’t reached until you hit 70%, but I’ve read where 40% is where transmission will start to go down. I hope this is the case.

Agreed.

That was yesterday’s numbers. Today’s are even better. Active cases below 9000. I think we may have plateaued in terms of active cases and hospitalizations, but probably need another 10 days or so of data.

This was fear about promoting from the get-go. That it was better than distancing. Every time I'd see 1000 people in a protest with masks on it would make me cringe. But the way mask-wearing was being promoted transmission would be impossible. It was so messed up.

What’s your obsession with hand-washing? All mitigation factors shouldn’t be weighted evenly. Distancing is responsible for about 95% of the mitigation. Mask-wearing about 4.9%, and washing hands about .1%.

Serious question. What’s the penalty for not complying?

LOL

Great news guys. Katie Couric is going to shed a light on the COVID situation in North Dakota. I can’t wait for this fair, balanced, data-driven take on the current situation.

I would add many public health officials to that list. Apparently they don't care about mental health, especially childrens'.

There's been 65967 confirmed cases of Covid in North Dakota. There's many models that try to determine the number of true infections based on positivity rate and confirmed cases. Conservatively, you can probably multiply confirmed cases by 4 to get true infections. That would put North Dakota at 263,868 infections as of today. Thats' 34.7% of the population. About halfway there, but that doesn't mean daily infections doesn't start to drop before that. Also, it appears the 80+ demographic is getting infected at a greater rate than the general population in North Dakota, possibly due to long term care settings. I think this is why hospitalizations will continue their downward trend.

Mitigation efforts, particularly complete lockdowns, will keep case numbers down. But you have to keep those measures in place for perpetuity, or until a vaccine is developed. That’s just not a logical option. We’ve seen all across Europe, the east coast, and Israel what happens when strict mitigation measures are relaxed.

This is a screenshot of the dashboard. Click on the public data download button and it gives you all the raw numbers. The only thing is doesn't break down is deaths and hospitilazations by age, just cases.

Possibly. The total deaths are the same.

Looking at the spreadsheet the NDDOH puts out there was 5 deaths attributed to COVID yesterday. I wonder where the discrepancy comes from. All the other numbers match up with what you posted.

Just wanted to follow up on this. 9 new hospital admissions yesterday. This is the lowest number of daily admissions since September 18. This is despite no significant decrease in daily cases. Like I said yesterday hopefully this trend continues.

Some potentially good news. Daily hospitalizations the past week are at their lowest point since the week of Oct 5-Oct 12, and there were 120 fewer daily admissions this past week than the week before. Hopefully this trend continues to relieve the strain on the hospital systems in the state.

There’s no way high school sports are a go on the 14th. The winter sports season is gone.

In case you don't want to read the article and enjoy playing around with numbers the guy's formula is: prevalence-ratio = 16 * (positivity-rate)^(0.5) + 2.5

Here's another article that proposes to estimate true number of infections. Disclaimer: If we use this dude's formula North Dakota would be at herd immunity. I think one fault in his model is he doesn't take into account the number of tests as a function of the total population. I think as testing rate increases the ratio of true infections/cases has to go down, regardless of what the positivity rate is. But that's just me.

Here's a pretty good link that explains the above. The only thing about this data is that the areas under the curve should be integrated to get an average of their true infection/case rate across time. That would give a much better indication of the total number of infections for a population at a given point in time.

It depends on the model you use to determine the true number of infections. I think you can conservatively estimate the true number of infections to be about 4X the number of cases, although some models put the number as high as 10x.

Same boat here. Except they won’t let my kids return to school with a negative test. But, like you, I’m not going to be a Karen and start ranting about it.

My brother just recently went through some health issues and had to be in a nursing home for about 6 weeks. Miraculously they didn't have any cases while he was in there but can definitely be scary.