RichardGibbons

You ought to be ashamed. (Actually, it's even worse than that, because by lying about what he said, you're missing the main point. Look what he said--even with his correction. That's the guy you're supporting so passionately, the guy who said that stuff. And keeps saying that sort of stuff.) And why the heck would you throw away your credibility on this forum trying to defend that hill? You seemed kind of reasonable before deciding that this is what you wanted to argue.

Because that would be unfair. If I had to bold, I had to bold "by injection inside, or almost a cleaning" But then he clarified "It wouldn’t be through injection. " But then the overall statement was Trump was addressing the scientist. Trump turned to scientist and said " is there a way we can do something like that" It was a question to the scientst. People say, "He suggested injecting disinfectant", you quote the part where he suggested injecting disinfectant, but bold a bunch of stuff and exclude the part where he suggests injecting it, and then, when called on it, pretend that somehow the part you didn't bold becomes irrelevant if you add more words. Come on. Aren't you above such silly games? Wow.

Also yep. Biden will have a team around him that will be effective even as he struggles mentally, while Trump doesn't.

Yep.

No, this is horrible! The estimated IFR has been 0.65-1% since at least early March. 0.67%* is devastatingly high. If we want herd immunity (say 70% infected), that would be over 1.5M deaths in the U.S. Yeah, this. My best guess today based on what I've been reading is that it's below 0.5%. Like maybe 0.3%. The argument you need make, Cherzera, is that it's 0.5% at most, and we don't really care about the people who die because most of them were going to die in the near future anyway, while the people who die from the economic impact/shutting down society are more likely to be young. That's a pretty defensible position, I think.

The answer is that we know what it looks like when there are hundreds of thousands of cases--like NYC. If one's going to claim that hundreds of thousands of cases were in the USA with nobody noticing, you'd have to have those cases distributed mostly evenly across the country, which is quite implausible (because of density, how people arrive in the country, what subsequent outbreaks looked like, the low number of healthcare professionals who have got sick with it outside of places with a known outbreaks etc.) I think the back of the napkin math assumes roughly even distribution, and that doesn't seem to be at all how disease transmission actually works. So me, the balance of evidence by far suggests that the antibody tests are questionable (the math saying you can't accurately measure accurately if the false positive rate is at all close to the actual infection rate). But even if it weren't, I think it's quite difficult to extrapolate the results to the rest of the country. (It's also worth noting that Orthopa's argument wasn't simply that there were a bunch of cases that were about to cause an explosion because they were asymptomatic and about to become symptomatic. It was that there were already a bunch of cases that had happened, and it wasn't a big deal--implying that a bunch of people had recovered, and the system had handled them without even noticing. So for practical purposes, you'd have to push the timeframe back even farther than March.)

Bill Gates' State of the Pandemic essay. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Pandemic-Innovation?WT.mc_id=20200423060000_Pandemic-Innovation_BG-EM_&WT.tsrc=BGEM Other than the obvious (the content), there are a couple things I find interesting. First, the language is simple to the extent that I find it distracting. Maybe it's written at something like a 3rd-4th grade reading level? I think he wants this to be accessible to everyone possible, even those with poor English skills. Second, the reference to opening churches isn't consistent with the rest of the essay, since there's negligible economic value to opening churches, and therefore it's pretty obvious that they should be among the last things open. Rather, I think he threw that in there so that the religious people have a better chance of supporting the approach he proposes.

This is quite a clever way of moving the goalposts. Nobody was disputing that the virus was spreading in the USA in March--or even in February. The thing everyone disagreed with was that there hundreds of thousands or millions of cases in March. So I guess this is admission you were wrong while trying to rewrite what you said and what the actual disagreement was about? (Like, good grief--why is it so hard for you to say that your speculation was wrong? It was a speculation, and speculations are often wrong. Why the heck would you allow a random speculation to bias you in such a huge way for everything that came afterward, rather than say, "Hey that speculation was wrong, but this is my view on what's happening now"? So brutal!)

Agreed it should've been January. It doesn't matter though--you can't stop COVID-19 from getting into care homes if a large segment of the population is infected. Your "best practices" would roughly be the same outcome as a bunch of COVID-19 patients running around care homes, coughing on people. (Yeah, I know you don't care....)

I find it remarkable that people have lived through two months of this, but, as new information has come in, have not updated their theories at all. Terrifying. But it does show nicely how someone like Trump can maintain popularity. Basically, a large segment of the population--including some doctors!--doesn't care at all about evidence except insofar as it supports what they want to believe.

+1. Note that "making decisions based on the most pertinent observations" basically means "enhancing models based on new information".

This is BS, CZ. People have tried closing down nursing homes. It doesn't work, particularly when the President prevents testing. Your repeated assertions that it would work are silly.

Yeah, models aren't perfect, but I don't really see an alternative. Is there one?

This has some nice quotes from COVID-19: https://thebeaverton.com/2020/04/we-need-to-open-up-the-economy-and-get-back-to-work-says-covid-19/

Nah, that requires math, not just common sense. So it must be wrong.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks, slug.

The odd thing in this article is the R0 of 3.5 for SARS. I always thought that SARS didn't become a pandemic because its R0 was low enough that it was preventable. But the R0 of 3.5 indicates that wasn't the case. Does anyone know why SARS ended up being no big deal? Was our test and track just so much better? Did most people already have immunity? Something else?

ever ask a barber if you needed a haircut? LOL, these guys don't sell masks. I know it's a bizarre suggestion, but, during a pandemic, you might want to consider the idea that some people may want to stop that pandemic for reasons other than profit.

Yeah, the problem is that this common sense doesn't work, and experts know this while non-experts like you and me do not. (Well, I do know it now, but I didn't a few weeks ago.) The actual common sense is that the elderly need more contact with people in society than anyone else except children. If you get a huge percentage of the population infected with an easily-transmitted virus, then it's impossible to isolate the elderly. British Columbia has been among the most successful regions in the world at responding to the virus. Yet 26 Care Home just in the Vancouver area have had outbreaks. A long term care nurse lives with me, and her boss has been fantastic--locking down his care home before every other care facility in BC, preventing movement of employees across care homes early, fever testing everyone every day, PPEing all the staff... Even with that, one of the people there caught COVID-19 in early April, and worked in the care home with patients for several days before she became symptomatic and was diagnosed. And this is with extreme precautions in care homes and low per-capita cases everywhere in the province. Now give 50% of the population COVID-19, and assume that most of the elderly population isn't actually in care homes, but rather living in their own places or maybe being taken care of by their kids. Now, one could say that common sense should allow you to take that information, and extrapolate to a massive death toll among the elderly if your suggested approach were adopted. But I think that's wrong. It think it's more that you aren't educated enough on this topic to understand what would happen in this situation, and so you rely on incorrect "common sense" that would wipe out a large percentage of the elderly. (That said, I don't blame you at all for talking about your common sense approach--speculation is fine, and everyone knows you're no epidemiologist. You'd only deserve derision if you believe that your common sense is superior to the decades of knowledge of the epidemiologists who actually understand the consequences of what you propose.)

Yep, you're right, my argument doesn't make sense. Sorry for mocking you about that.

Yeah, the cool thing is, this was done for us already in Italy. It's fascinating that this huge, insane example of the consequences of a horrible pandemic were right there in Italy--and now in NYC as well!--and for some reason you think the "common sense reality check" was to pretend that evidence didn't exist. Actually, "pretend" is probably the wrong word. I do believe that you are speaking honestly, from your heart, and simply don't see the obvious. Like Westworld, "doesn't look like anything to me." As I've said before, I think Dunning-Kruger effects are playing a large role--something I think the conservatives are particularly susceptible to because of the degree to which their ideology glorifies ignorance. Heck, conservatives hate the idea that decades of education and study might make someone more likely to be correct than someone with a fifth-grade education.

Yay! Misunderstanding #1 again: misunderstanding of exponential growth. I'm kind of shocked that this misunderstanding is so persistent, but I guess if one understands exponential growth, then it basically destroys the "widespread growth in March" thesis, and that would be intolerable. Just to clarify my position, I believe mostly in what epidemiologists and the evidence seems to have indicated--that test and trace seems to be effective. (If epidemiologists abandon that position, then I'll almost certainly abandon it at the same time.) And in terms of it being actually necessary, I basically said yesterday that I wasn't sure it was necessary when I said this: Generally, I'll say that when I'm uneducated in a particular field, if both the experts and the data seem to point in the same direction, I'm happy to believe them and not try to cling to old, speculative theories that have long since been proven false.

I think that this is an extremely good point that has gotten lost over the past month or two. The goal is to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system, not to eliminate every potential death from the virus by remaining shut for a year. (Based on Canadian polling, it's pretty clear that Canadians in aggregate don't get it.) On the "how to reopen" list, it shocks me that they aren't bothering to require masks, since it seems to be a cheap and easy solution to reduce transmission (and deaths and medical costs). I wonder if there was some reasoning behind that, or if they were just writing down stuff on autopilot, and not really thinking. If they decided not to include it for cultural reasons, that puts the US at a competitive disadvantage relative to other countries that are more open-minded about such things.

So, that's the testing half of the numbers. What about the tracing part? Is there some way to quantify the tracing? I've been thinking about it, and have found nothing but anecdotes. One of the challenges is that effectively it's a system with feedback. Like, if you do good tracing, then the virus doesn't spread, which means that there are fewer "high risk" people to test, which means your per capita test rate can be low. This is an interesting discussion, because pretty well everyone accepts after the first explosion of cases, South Korea got the pandemic under control with test and track. So it would be interesting to have something quantitative that supports or contradicts the "track" part of the thesis. I guess one of the other things to keep in mind--which is obvious but tends to be ignored because people are too busy creating things like the 10 Commandments--is that multiple different strategies might work. Like, maybe "masks + handwashing + a culture that does these things when told to" is as effective at stopping the virus as "test + track + lock up people who were exposed".