I still find the hospitalization charts that the AZ state government publishes to be some of the most useful COVID tracking charts I have seen. Here is the chart I look at the most, which helpfully distinguishes between COVID beds and non-COVID occupancy
It is a good antidote to the "hospitals are filling up fast" headline that seems to be evergreen in 2020. One of the things I have learned this year is that ICU's always run at high occupancy, so it is important to differentiate COVID beds vs others, and this does that well
We would all be WAAAAY better served by the media if reporters sat down with senior hospital executives in their area to understand how hospital capacity fluctuates and is managed. But as I always say, having fewer data points lets one extrapolate a line with any slope desired.
The reason I watch this chart rather than cases or deaths is that bed usage seems to be the one bit of quality data we get -- case counts are a mess due to changes in testing rates test protocols designed to almost guarantee false positives...
while death numbers have such a long time delay that they're not really a useful real-time metric (a cynical person might say that hospitals need time to test every car accident victim to see if they had COVID so as to count that as a COVID death for higher government payments)
Currently our case counts in AZ are matching our July peaks but we are still less than half the July numbers on hospitalizations -- hopefully that continues.
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If you can find it, I highly recommend stone wrapping paper -- this is paper made from limestone rather than wood pulp. I swear if you try it, you will never go back. Everyone my wife has recommended this stuff to loves it.
The texture of this stuff is fabulous, and I know this is going to sound odd, but the way it cuts is just amazing.
You guys know me - this is not some sponsored thing nor a goofy environmental pitch against traditional paper. This stuff is just awesome.
Now, finding it is a pain. There is a little at Paper Source stores but it is expensive (but you still might try a small buy just to see if I am crazy). My wife gets it mail order in bulk from somewhere and I will try to post where that is.
Another Phoenix sunset, courtesy of megatons of dust in the air. No Photoshop, no filters, straight into the cell phone camera on my run. Zoom in on the second two, the detail is almost fractal like a Mandelbrot set (lol I first wrote Mandalorian set) #phoenix#sunset
I have given up ever seeing the @aclu defend property rights. But I find their abandonment of the First Amendment over the last several years to be depressing and has caused me to cease my long history of donations to them
Not to mention the fact that our government is shutting down businesses, creating night time curfews, locking people in their home, restricting their movement, invading their privacy w/ testing, collecting personal data in restaurants-- and the @aclu has not said a word about it
Abortion rights supporters (I am one) are super-pious about the sanctity of one's body & privacy, except when they are not. If they really believed what they say, they would be opposing many government COVID interventions on the same grounds they oppose abortion restrictions
I don't do much blogging on climate any more because the conversation has become unproductive and at the end of the day very little changes in our understanding of the key questions (and 99.9% of media writers don't even know what the key questions are)
- People are still extrapolating from tail of the distribution weather events and attempting to use these as evidence of climate change
- People are still claiming trends (eg drought or more hurricanes) that don't actually exist when one looks at the data
- Most scientists still think the actual direct sensitivity of temperatures to CO2 is low
- Most catastrophic warming forecasts are still driven by assumptions of very large net positive feedback effects that multiply small amounts of direct CO2 effect many times
We had an amazing sunset tonight. Cell phone camera does not do it justice but look at the detail of oranges and reds in the clouds. This understates what we saw #sunset#Phoenix
This is, by the way, one of the reasons to live in Phoenix. I have lived many places. I have seen sunsets many places, including on the ocean. But nothing matches Phoenix. The secret sauce, I think, is the megatons of dust we have in the air from the desert plus the low humidity.
This is why it is good to always have a batch of cocktails mixed up in the fridge. "Honey, drop everything and bring the cocktails and let's watch the sunset."