Here are Iowa's cases. The 12-day lag between cases & hospitalizations means people in the blue portion will be trying to enter those full ICUs over the next 2 weeks.
HOW?
I say Iowa, but you could do this same analysis for any number of states, especially in the Midwest. The near-term future is already baked in, which is why you have to act *ahead* of the virus. (See Problem #8 in this story about 9 intuitive fallacies.)
Another way to think about these lags is that some of the people who are infected on Thanksgiving will enter the hospital in the middle of December, and the morgue around Christmas.
Don’t forget the long-haulers, many of whom are still struggling with lasting symptoms from COVID-19 infections in *the spring*.
A lot of the 1.5 million Americans who were infected this month—many young & prev healthy—will still be sick well into 2021.
You’ve seen the huge numbers. Here’s what they can mean.
➡️36-hour shifts
➡️Docs on standby in case a colleague and their substitute AND their substitute’s substitute get sick
➡️“We’re all running on fear”
➡️“There’s only so many bags you can zip” 2/
🥳It's a weird time for good personal news, but I’m proud to have won a AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, in the In-Depth Reporting category for 3 of my pandemic pieces. 1/
To continue a trend, I’ll be donating the prize money from this one to the Capital Area Food Bank, the Native American Journalists Association, the South Asian Journalists Association, the Trans Lifeline, and the Trevor Project. 2/
Thanks as ever to my editors @andersen, @thebanderson@slaskow@PaulBisceglio for improving my work, and to the Atlantic for giving me the time, space, mandate, and support to go big. 3/
🚨I wrote about the rampant use of "strength" and "fighting" metaphors following Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis, the history of such language when talking about disease, and why it misleads, distracts, and makes things worse. 1/
I spoke to doctors, immunologists, linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists about what we're really talking about when we talk about "strength" in the context of "beating" disease, and whether there's any truth to that (very common) idea. 2/ theatlantic.com/health/archive…
On Trump specifically, what he & his supporters are calling "strength" is really 2 things:
- the performance of a specific toxic version of masculinity that prizes aggression, volume, stubbornness, overconfidence, & mockery
- *enormous* privilege 3/