Dispatch from an Emerging COVID19 Hotspot

I'm writing from my home in Indianapolis, a city the Surgeon General recently called an "emerging hotspot" for coronavirus. Since I'm part of a skeleton crew in the office of an essential business, I was able to drive by three hospitals on my way home from work today. (Indiana is under an emergency order to avoid non-essential trips.)

IU Health North Hospital, just two miles north of the Indianapolis city limits, looked like they also had a skeleton crew there if the parking lot at 6 PM was any indication.

Ascension St. Vincent Heart Center a few blocks away had a lot more cars in the parking lot, but a lot of empty spaces, too.

Community Hospital East, a mile from home and the site of Indiana's first COVID-19 death, has a lot of construction going on. It was hard to see how many cars were there, but I didn't notice any parked on the street, and I haven't heard more ambulances than usual.

Here's Indiana's own death map of COVID19 deaths as of today. Indianapolis is the square in the middle that says 12. I'm looking at deaths because nobody really knows how many cases there are.

Here's my graph of COVID deaths in Indiana over time in the popular logarithmic scale.

In news from a week ago, Fox 59, a local TV station, reported that "seriously ill COVID-19 patients [are] expected to flood Hoosier hospitals in the days and weeks to come." Worldometers says 2% of active cases in the US are serious; if that's true of Indiana, we have 41 serious cases in the state. With 910 active cases in the metro area (Marion and Hamilton Counties), that's 18 patients in serious condition in the Indy area. We have 4,500 hospital beds and a gazillion hospitals in the metro area.

The article goes on to say the hospitals are cooperating with each other and preparing for a surge of patients. I'm very happy they're doing that. What I'm not happy with is the panicky reporting. Thanks to media-generated panic like the Fox 59 story, neighbors have had to go from store to store to get all their groceries--not good when there's virus going around in your neighborhood. Thanks, media--especially you, Fox 59. I'll look at RTV6 instead.

I don't know what things will look like in a week--and neither does anyone on the news. Our curve looks like it's already starting to flatten. With the peak of cases expected in two weeks, we'd need a lot more cases to flood the hospitals. It's spring here; it was a mild winter and flowers are blooming. Kale and chard are ready to eat out of the garden; the collards even overwintered on their own. Hopefully I can be one less person at the store.

UPDATE: CBS admits using footage from a crowded hospital in Italy in a hospital report about New York.

UPDATE: Fox59 interviewed local health professionals at hospitals and found them anxious, but not overwhelmed. Maybe the media is tired of trying to find toilet paper amidst the panic they helped create.

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