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LOS ANGELES (AP) – When Gov. Gavin Newsom presented a disastrous view of the out-of-control spike in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in California this week, he referred to projection models of future death and misery that, according to him, were becoming more “alarming” precise.
If this is true, then over the next four weeks the state’s hospitals could overflow with 75,000 patients – about five times the current level – and an average of 400 people will die each day.
Hospitals were on the verge of being overrun with nearly 15,000 COVID-19 patients when Newsom made the announcement on Tuesday. The hospitalization projection is based on cases that continue to rise at the current rate of infection without people taking extra precautions to prevent the spread of the virus.
On that trajectory, it doesn’t take long before the state finds itself in dire straits, said Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
“One thing that’s worrying is that for a while in California we’ve had exponential hospitalizations and cases,” Kilpatrick said. “It’s pretty terrifying.
Models posted online by the California Department of Public Health largely show a key indicator – the rate of transmission – improving in recent days. But that number remains at a point where each person infected with the virus infects more than one other person, resulting in an uncontrollable spread.
The state uses several models to try to predict hospitalizations. When combined into a “big picture” projection, the total is less dire but still shocking as of mid-January: over 33,000. That would still create an overwhelming burden on hospitals.
The increase in deaths model does not include an estimate based on the current rate of infection. But an average of dozens of different models shows that deaths have risen by about 25% from the current figure to almost 27,000 as of January 9.
Other models on the chart predict a range of deaths as low as 22,000, which the state will likely surpass on Friday, reaching a high of 43,000 in about three weeks.
The country’s most populous state, which for months maintained a very low number of infections per capita amid criticism of other states, is facing its own crisis with record numbers of cases and deaths on a daily basis .
On Thursday, a record 379 deaths were recorded. There have been over 1,000 deaths in the past five days and over 100,000 new confirmed cases in the past two days.
Most models posted on the state’s website show the situation worsening before an improvement, as the fallout from Thanksgiving gatherings and travel is borne by hospitals that have already started to run out of beds.
“Our modeling is getting more and more precise, which is alarming,” Newsom said on Tuesday, when he also announced that 5,000 more body bags had been ordered and that more than 50 refrigerated trucks were ready to serve as temporary morgues. .
At the start of the pandemic, some models were totally wrong. In March, Newsom said the state of nearly 40 million people was on track to record 25 million cases of COVID-19 in two months. Nine months later, the state has recorded more than 1.7 million cases, the highest in the country but a small fraction of the earlier forecast.
The large variation in some models is due to the use of different data and mathematical formulas and more weighting of some data.
Bradley Pollock, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Davis, said recent models were more accurate. He said the value of the models is that they help guide public policy, showing likely trends unless action is taken.
“What we are seeing right now is exactly what we predicted,” Pollock said. “The main use of models is to tell you what might happen and not what will happen.”
As cases have exploded since November, Newsom has taken action that has upset businesses and frustrated some residents. He put most of the state under a new stay-at-home order that cut restaurant meals and put an end to haircuts and manicures, and shut down many other types of businesses. The capacity of retailers has been reduced.
If these prescriptions have an impact, it will likely take weeks to show up in the number of cases and even more in hospitalizations, as there are delays between infection and detection until such time as an illness is severe enough to occur. result in a hospital stay and usually even longer for death to occur.
While the models have been useful to public health authorities, they could be more accurate and useful to the public if they compiled a larger pool of available data, said Dr Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego.
Topol criticized for not having a national approach to tackling the virus in the United States and said that extended to not taking a tiered approach to collecting data for modeling. He called the various efforts “solo acts”.
He said there was so much data available that could be used to create better models – from data on the mobility of phones that shows whether stay-at-home orders are being tracked to data pulled from smart thermometers to see where fevers are recorded until even the sampling of the sewage. where virus peaks can be detected several days before cases are reported.
“The modeling is based on so many assumptions without complete data,” Topol said. “You have raw data to see that people are in big trouble.”
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