jm1220

201k cases so far today, so we’re still going up. Meanwhile Europe has plateaued or is declining now. Deaths there are still very high but should also start declining in 10 days or so. Here still much more pain to come and much will be self inflicted.

It happened here in April and was quite grim with morgue trucks outside the hospitals. Really hope the rest of the country isn’t headed that way.

Yep. Unfortunately that’s the consequence of the overwhelmed hospitals-quality of care goes down due to the staff shortages, filled facilities and burnout. We have better treatments now than when it was horrendous here in NYC in April but we can only take care of so many people.

We need Congress to get their collective head out of its ass and get to work and pass a stimulus that would allow businesses to close without going completely belly-up. Right now there would be mass layoffs and closures that businesses wouldn’t be able to recover from this time due to no help. Food lines and the need for help are already the greatest since the 1930s. We definitely should shut down again but we don’t seem to have the will to take care of employees and businesses to do so unlike in Europe (where they seem to have plateaued and are decreasing somewhat in new cases now). Unfortunately what we’re headed toward is the overwhelmed healthcare system along with a collapsing economy anyway.

Also over 2000 deaths today. When hospitals become overwhelmed like now, care can be significantly improved generally but fatalities rise because of the burden. Unfortunately more of this to come. Horrible failure all around, from the feds on down.

NYC closing schools and allowing bars/restaurants to stay open is totally counterproductive IMO. The bars/restaurants are where the virus spreads, much more so than schools according to evidence, and it has huge economic repercussions when parents can’t go to work and have to care for their kids. Much of the reasoning must be teacher union pressure as well as pressure from bar and restaurant groups to stay open since there’s no government help coming, and it’s another black eye for De Blasio. It’ll do nothing to stop the spread and it causes tremendous headaches. We have some additional leeway vs other states for new cases but it can get bad here again very fast.

Maybe we can start having stay-at-home watches and warnings?

Also in general as weather cools down, respiratory viruses in general survive longer and spread easier.

In the summer, people in the South (where the outbreak was worst by far) go indoors to avoid the heat. The recirculating A/C air and lack of mandates I'm sure made it much worse.

It can take off to a massive outbreak here again like nothing given the population density. We’ve done much better since April but can’t let our guard down. Also numbers are coming back up here like anywhere else.

Deaths are tragically trending back up too. We’ll be back over 1000 daily average next week most likely. If hospitals start getting overwhelmed I’m sure it’ll trend upward significantly faster. Seeing the death trend in Europe spike, unfortunately that’ll be us in 1-2 weeks. Understandably the election is top news but this is the other huge story.

Excellently written. I obviously hope it’s wrong and it would be a winter of pure misery here but hard to argue.

It is curious to me how the cloud tops are so cold south of the eye but there's no rain.

Not terribly shocking unfortunately. The levees in New Orleans were reinforced but not sure if the same work was done on all the other SE LA levees. The “land” in much of that area is alligator-laden swamp.

We had plenty of wind here on the right side of Isaias with only a few showers total east of the center with hundreds of thousands of power outages/trees down, strong winds behind Irene 2011 with the sun coming out, etc. Sometimes the winds behind the center even without rain can be as strong as the front end. Up here the dry air and rapidly increasing pressure have something to do with it usually.

Makes sense the water would rise fast in a quick moving storm. In my town during Sandy the water rose VERY fast as the storm was still moving NW at 25 mph into Atlantic City.

Bourbon St is definitely sheltered in many places. I’m sure downtown where there are many high rises will have substantially worse wind damage. People were expecting a minimal hurricane or cat 1 this morning so definitely a worse impact than thought.

The eyewall is headed right for the city and if anything the center may go just west of downtown. Not sure how the city misses much of anything windwise. They're in for the full impacts.

Lots of dry air being entrained into the south side. These half dried out type of N Gulf coast landfalls are much more common than an exploder like Michael. Dennis, Ivan, Katrina, Rita, etc etc.

Hard pressed to call any of what it's making its way through now as land, really. Really won't be until it's N of New Orleans.

Well it certainly doesn’t look like New Orleans ends up west of the eye. Headed NNE and still possible the eastern eyewall comes through. Certainly St Bernard/Slidell look to get it.

Not good either way since the land south of them is just swamps with smaller lakes/rivers like you said. Hopefully it works out.

I would think it’s not coming from the worst direction for N.O. which would be NW or NNW to pile the water up the Mississippi and Lake Borgne/Pontchartrain most effectively. The NNE direction would certainly funnel water in but maybe not as much. Also it hasn’t had the longest time to build up a surge. But it’ll be a very rough evening regardless.

Yikes. New Orleans in for a rough few hours. Hopefully the surge impacts aren’t too severe.

France over 40k cases today (equivalent here of over 200k cases). Could get much worse here and probably will. Probably not entirely a coincidence that the cold weather so far has been focused over the northern Plains and Rockies, which is where the worst of the new outbreak is. Eventually it will come East. Hopefully all this tracking and tracing NY has put into place ends up being worth something in a couple months.