I'd go with a N95 mask, gloves, and a pair of goggles, or some type of plastic face shield.

And change into a new set of clothes every day.

I'd delay your return to SF as long as possible. Currently, there are 340 (known) cases in SF. I'm assuming the numbers are much lower where you are in AZ.

Since the company I work for is considered an essential business, today my employer gave me and my co-workers copies of a letter on company letterhead addressed to "Local, State and Federal Law Enforcement and Government Agencies" stating that we are an essential business, yada yada yada, and we're supposed to show it to law enforcement just in case we get pulled over and asked why we're out and about, in case rules in California get stricter and we're stopped while on our way to/from work.

Death rates are not comparable at all. Italy might have been as much as 1 million people infected right now. They've only been testing people admitted in hospitals which is understandable as their system is completely overwhelmed.

Anedoctatly, the daughter of a coworker of mine, living in a town between Milan and Turin, got a severe flu (or covid19, she'll never knows) that left her in bed for a whole week. When she tried to look for assistance on ER, on the very beginning of the outbreak, she was told to go back home immediately. It was a severe case, with all the symptoms, that was not even got the chance to be registered/tested.

As your post described it, it seems to me it could only exagerate the figures as they are. In the US, anyway, the official cause of death is determined on clinical grounds until and unless there is an autopsy resulting in a pathologic diagnosis. COVID-19, as I said before, is fairly easy to diagnose on clinical grounds and I doubt many patients with it are dying with a cause of death listed as something else. On the contrary, these days a few flu patients might be getting called COVID but not many since we have a quick test for the flu and flu season is waning.

On the other hand, the places with an early onset of the epidemic like China and Italy might have under-reported deaths at first . . . until the doctors there realized what they were dealing with.

So if anything, the death rates in the late comers like the US, Germany et al might be slightly higher than they should be and those in the first-affected slightly lower.

I keep being amazed at the media fixation on testing. Doctors like having objective data to confirm what they are already pretty certain about, but few of them really need a coronavirus test on patients at risk of death to know what is the problem. It's the person with few or no symtpoms who needs the most to be tested because they might have a common cold or even an allergy.

The number of cases relates to those that come back with a positive result while deaths counted would also be those who have received a positive result. No figures in that table relate to infected people that we don't know about. If there are 1 million people infected in Italy it doesn't show up in that table at all.

A similar thing happened to my friend in NYC. She definitely had COVID-19, and even had contact with someone known to have tested positive. She went to the hospital one night because she was having trouble breathing but was not tested because they didn't consider her case to be severe.

I'm aware of it, but the thing is Italy is barely testing, therefore they have hundreds of thousands of unknown positives, which would make their death rate not being so different from other places.

Moreover, I read somewhere today Germany is not testing people who died without being previously diagnosed, so their Covid19 deaths might be a bit underreported.

I get what you're saying. I'm saying that those unknown positives don't show up in that 10,779 death figure for Italy.

Pointing blame is off base not to mention unconstructive and pointless. The first big cluster could have happened anywhere. All it took was one infected person who came into contact with a ton of people very early on before the alarm bells went off. It could easily have been Houston instead.

Almost half of our cases are in Quebec. Quebec needs our help and support.... as does New York state.

Italy has actually been testing aggressively since the end of February, which is why they seemingly had the most cases in the world for so long. I believe they are near among the world leaders for tests per million residents along with South Korea.

I'm not aware of a serologic test being widely used anywhere (except possibly China and who really knows what's going on there?). It's a widely-used, random serologic test you would really need to determine the total numbers in the population who have at any time been infected with the coronavirus. The PCR test, even if widely used, just tells you who is infected now and leaves out the recovered. In places affected earliest like China and Italy, there might be many recovered.

They are testing agressively because they have already many severe cases, and they have many severe cases because they already have many mild cases that never got the chance to be tested.

I guess only the US, Germany and South Korea, relatively speaking, are testing ahead.

Right. And the first big known cluster in the U.S. was in Washington State.

They have been testing aggressively since mid-February, long before other European nations were seeing cases (because they weren't testing) and around the same time American leaders were calling coronavirus a political hoax.

is the hasidic community also shut down in Brooklyn?

https://www.euractiv.pl/section/bezp...-daily-update/

It's very hard to find current test numbers for Italy but I did find this:

https://www.businessinsider.com/germ...lthcare-2020-3

As to the difference between Germany and Italy, I also found this (which makes sense to me, along with the Italina healthcare system being totally overwhelmed) as the main reason for the difference:

https://www.businessinsider.com/germ...lthcare-2020-3

By contrast the US has now done about 735,000 tests which, because of our large population, is still only about 2250/million. That's much more than any European country in total but only about half what Germany has done per million people (and slightly more than the UK).

I'm from New York, I was being factitious. I have relatives who are 65+ with some health issues who easily be susceptible to this virus. I follow more about what's going on there than I do here. The fact remains that New York state's numbers skew the US's overall numbers because the sky high infection rate in Westchester County, Long Island and NYC proper.

As for Houston, there are about a thousand cases here and rising exponentially with someone dying in my neighborhood a few days ago.

its in montreal, its in houston...nyc was hit earlier due to high population density, but it'll show up in other major cities v soon.

and a lot harder to stay inside when you're in an apartment or highrise in the suburbs at least you've got a yard..

Washington state has acted more responsibly than most, and has lately fallen down the list on daily death counts.