another important data point no journalists seem to be covering - the data about hospital conditions in affected areas. we read a lot of anecdotes about despair and death. these are awful stories. but how affected are we and how are the models playing out? *with data*
as of today, the wait times for most ERs in seattle is still under an hour. as of this tweet, UW at 40 minutes.. hospitalstats.org/hospital-ratin…
we have been seeing tweets and articles for two weeks that have repeatedly said that we are out of ICU beds in seattle but that doesn’t appear to be true. no administrator or doctor has verified this statement in full.
UW Virology has been testing symptomatic patients for coronavirus. they publish tests and results, in aggregate. here is the latest chart: 
despite increasing testing capacity 10x over two weeks positive test results have held steady at <100 per day. the expectation has been for an explosion in cases based on lack of containment but the data doesn’t seem to indicate an expected growth in positive cases
no one is asking and investigating “why?”.. despite no isolation policy and a high positive count two weeks ago in seattle. why are there still ventilators and ICU beds available, and why are daily positive results static (despite an R0 of 2.5)?
several possible explanations... 1) social isolation happened fast enough (not likely as people were in groups in seattle yday) 2) the virus is not that viral (unlikely - lots of data to counter this)
3) hasn’t been long enough to see an explosion due to incubation (unlikely due to starting count and data on incubation from elsewhere) 4) many more patients are asymptomatic - the average age in seattle is 35 and symptoms are non-linear with age (possible.. see previous tweet)
5) generally, symptoms aren’t bad enough to warrant hospital visit (why? age? we need broad sampling and interviewing to know, not just anecdotal already-severely-ill data)
bay area, LA, and NYC hospitals setup overflow ICU tents last week and the week before. we were expecting to use them. it seems we aren’t yet and containment only started yesterday. do we have the data/model wrong? we should be answering this question as a priority right now
