SnowtoRain

That creates an interesting question than, whether or not a pandemic like this would have registered in the history books because it only has higher mortality in the very old, thus daily life might not have been affected to a degree worthy of cataloguing. This is purely an academic question and has no bearing on current mitigation efforts that I agree with. The other question is with modern medicine (and diet) are we effectively mitigating the effects on the younger population, which in previous times would have succumb at a greater rate to a similar virus.

Actually, there is a grain of truth in this, pandemics are obviously most lethal to more vulnerable populations. Before modern medicine the more healthy and genetically fit survived. Those that survived had, in general, longer lives and those genes were passed down to future generations creating demographics that were more resilient. This played out during the bubonic plague (Dewitte, 2014) and on a catastrophic scale with small pox in the Americas. Fortunately, with modern medicine we do not have to go through such turmoil just to have future generations survive and prosper. As for forest fire suppression, the analogy makes some sense because through fire suppresion it has completely changed the environment that those species live in, allowing certain less resilient species to colonize and allowing other populations to take on traits less suitable to surviving the natural fire cycle that should have been occuring. This creates the opportunity for when fires that do occur to become even more destructive due to more plant material present and less resilient populations. That is why management strategies now have shifted to control burns to allow a more natural fire cycle to reduce material, help sustain native populations that are resilient, and also ensure less damage to infrastructure from uncontrollable fires.

Everybody stocking up on nicotine?

Pretty common, hospitals like beds full, so pre-covid, on a normal day, more hospitals would have been under some sort of alert at some point during the day. For instance, Shore Regional on the eastern shore was on red alert quite often in February. Since quarantine/stay at home started there have been almost no alerts. Although, I would guess the red alerts you see now are partially Covid related especially in PG and MOCO.

Yellow alert- emergency room requests no patients to be brought in due to overload Red alert- all ECG monitored beds are used up in hospital Alerts are fairly common during normal periods ( pre-covid) and there have been less recently due to less emergency room visits because people being wary about going to an emergency room and less activities in general. The hospitals on red alert have been on red alert for a few weeks, my guess is from Covid patients taking up monitored beds. If you go on the website you can query alert history.

1.38", definitely was not expecting those early morning downpours

Laziness, I needed to get the correct term came from Trevor Bedford's twitter, https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1251334241087979521

Not sure if this was posted yet: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/us/california-deaths-earliest-in-us/index.html Not surprising, but helpful to now document, much early community spread and supports some of the new seroprevalence data coming from California.

Hail in Denton per mdot cameras

It's actually not that easy, especially because Covid can attack many different tissues and organs causing severe reactions and deaths that are easily attributesd to other causes. Here is a article from science that details what doctors are seeing with Covid patients and how they are trying to better understand how the virus attacks the body: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/how-does-coronavirus-kill-clinicians-trace-ferocious-rampage-through-body-brain-toes#

I might not have been clear, there are probably (hopefully) official daily tally of deaths for each state that they are certain are from that day, which are used for understanding trends and making decisions. The dump of additional deaths is most likely for accounting purposes not to be used to understand trends but track overall impacts. The tracking websites should differentiate these counts, but have not, thus outside interpretation by a lay audience of these raw numbers would of course be meaningless. I am fairly certain on the daily updates from various states they have made clear of daily deaths vs deaths accounted for that occurred previously without a known date.

I think your word usage in your first sentence might be imprecise. What I think you were trying to relay with those words were, "Death stats from states need to be interpreted correctly to understand the current trends due to additional previously unrecorded deaths being added to daily counts rather than the day in which the death occurred." This does not make the count more worthless because in the general scheme it provide a better understanding of overall impacts. There just needs to be correct interpretation, which I am sure is accounted for when each state is tracking day to day deaths.

Interesting read about the Covid outbreak at the Smithfield plant in South Dakota: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52311877 Similar issues (hopefully not as grave) here on Delmarva with poultry processing, Allen-Harim is having growers "depopulate" 2 million birds due to workers out sick at their processing facilities. https://www.wmdt.com/2020/04/nearly-two-million-delmarva-chickens-being-killed-not-processed-amidst-covid-19-staffing-shortage/ I imagine this is occurring through out rural areas and will be how outbreaks spread rapidly in low pop. states.

Yeah, it seems from the few news reports and hospital alerts from MEMA website, only a few PG and MOCO hospitals are being stretched thin.

That's a running tally, so it is not indicative of total currently hospitalized

+220 hospitalized, is that the largest 24 hr increase?

Nope. Only three red alerts right now. Most of the alerts are for emergency room services so those alerts are more transient. Probably a lot less emergency room stress with less commuters and all social activities being cancelled.

https://www.miemssalert.com/chats/Default.aspx?hdRegion=5

Yeah, I think the red alert status for a hospital on CHATTS website is the closest to usage that can be found right now. Some hospitals in MOCO and PG have been on red alert for days. Johns Hopkins and Bayview were a few weeks ago, but the BMORE hospitals have not been on red alert much over the past week. Again this is for ECG and telemetry beds so it indicates all patients being monitored at the hospital irregardless of disease. You can query data to see how often each hospital has been on red alert, but the website is a bit slow.

I think the only data out there is the MIEMSS CHATS system that details emergency room alerts for all MD hospitals and if the hospital has run out of ECG monitored beds, which I assume would be a indication Covid patient hospital strain.

The MIEMSS CHATS system gives some indication of hospital strain, mostly with emergency room availability, but red alert deals with all ECG monitored beds: www.miemssalert.com/chats/Default.aspx?hdRegion=5 A few hospitals in PG and Moco area have been on red alert for the past week.

Some how that storm missed downtown Easton, rained hard for maybe 5 seconds and passed by to the north.

Pea sized hail with a passing thunderstorm, most winter weather I have seen on the eastern shore this year...

One of the positives from the 10 am update is +47 hospitalizations, I think the past few days it was averaging well over 100.

Nasty out, 41 light rain. Just think a few months ago this would have been an even colder rain.