RichardGibbons

OK, now this really starting to feel like a game of Plague, Inc. Add on morbidity risks after half the world is infected....

Yeah, it's clear that they were giving out inaccurate information. The real question I wonder about is whether they were doing that because they're corrupt or because they knew that if they gave out accurate information, China would screw them, potentially making their response even worse. Did they choose the lesser of two evils, or are they just bad? Across all of this, the one definitive lesson to be learned is that the CCP is a big problem and big western nations ought to distance themselves from China, even if it costs money. It's a shame that America isn't in position right now to step up and take international leadership in doing that.

Yeah, I think that epidemiologists who have spent decades of their lives studying diseases are a bit more sophisticated than just copying the HIV strategy. I think they've probably spent a fair amount of time analysing about how our reaction to a disease should be impacted by the way that disease is spread. Like, maybe you're thought about this stuff for three hours a day for the past two months. If that's the case, many of them have probably spent well over 100 times that much time thinking about the issues, and they actually been educated on this topic specifically. At some point, you might want to consider whether the Dunning-Kruger effect might be relevant in this situation.

Further to your point, cherzeca, I actually think the comparable disease isn't HIV, but ebola--I imagine that was more of focus for experts recently than HIV. If ebola were airborne and transmissible by asymptomatic people, you could justify doing almost anything to prevent the spread.

Yeah, I don't think it's possible, and think that this is pretty much to the last hypothesis than anyone should actually test because it makes no sense. But it would be fun to write a science fiction story where this was the case. (Like some sort of scenario where everyone is infected by a disease, and the only way to avoid death is to interact frequently with people who have different genetics--all the people with type A genetics have to interact with types B, C, D, E, and F at least once a week or they die, etc. Figuring that out for the first time would be a bitch.) Empiricism is good, but you are much more efficient and maximize the value if you include some reasonable thought as well. (E.g. why wasn't your theory that infection rates are based on the number of letters in the name of each country's capital city? Or the per-capita number of people in the country who have one leg?) That said, analysis unsupported by data is as pointless as data without reason, so I like your dedication to empiricism.

Hard to know what to read into that article, since Trudeau's hedging all over the place (fair enough--I would be too). IMO, two weeks after each province is passed its peak, he should allow any business with fewer than 200 people in a room to open up, provided that all that businesses' employees and customers are willing to wear a mask for all interactions (except restaurants). (Two weeks is a relatively short time past the peak, but, just as the delay between infection and symptoms is bad on the upswing, the delay is actually good on the downswing since it effectively means four weeks between the peak and when a large number of new cases might come into the hospital as a result of any decrease in social distancing.)

Ok, why don't you walk me through where my proposed theory doesn't match the data (note: I'm assuming your numbers are accurate--I've spent no time looking at India.) My theory is that lockdowns make no measurable difference to diagnosed cases for a minimum of two weeks, and no measurable difference to deaths for at least four weeks, and more realistically five weeks. Why does your "we had exponential growth in deaths for 2.5 weeks after the lockdown" data contract my theory? 2.5 weeks is much less than five weeks, so what am I misunderstanding? Thanks!

The big change in my mental model over the last few days is that the numbers in the USA might not be as accurate as I thought. I was assuming that because USA has a decent healthcare system, it would also have decent data. But, while I thought USA would have more deaths (per capita) than comparable countries with socialized medicine because of people being reluctant to seek medical help, I foolishly didn't clue into the fact that this discrepancy would cause almost all the numbers to be low compared to countries with socialized medicine. (Kind of like China--if we lock someone in their house, they die, and we don't test the body, it doesn't count in the COVID-19 stats!) That New York "at home" deaths comparison is quite eye-opening. It would be useful to get year over year deaths numbers for a variety of countries to get a rough idea of how many COVID-19 deaths are missed in different places.

It actually kind of does look like we were heading for 500,000 deaths in the USA. New York City has 4,111 deaths. And daily "at home" deaths spiked from 20/day to 200 per day when NYC was having 240 recorded COVID-19 deaths. If we assume another 2/3rds of "unattributed deaths at home", then we're talking about 6,500-7000 COVID-19 deaths just in New York while taking precautionary measures. So yeah, when you start extrapolating it to the rest of the country, 500K seems easily achievable if no preventative actions were taken. Low, in fact. This demonstration of how broken your mental model is might humble some people. At least it should.

So you're saying that the shutdown caused exponential growth of deaths? Like, your expectation would be if you isolate people into groups of 4 and never let them have any sort of contact with any other group, your death rate from COVID-19 would be higher than allowing everyone to intermix to their heart's content? Huh. That's kind of a strange theory, but OK. Yeah, I included those in there because I thought you wanted an explanation of when deaths should be decreasing, not to discredit your "quarantining causes order-of-magnitude spikes in COVID-19 deaths" theory. My mistake.

+1. I can't believe he thought that people were ignoring those questions because they were so good that they refuted everyone. (As opposed to what actually happened--everyone recognizing that the questions were so stupid that everyone would know they were stupid, so nobody bothered to reply.)

Let me repost my 5 things that people don't understand. [*]Exponential growth [*]It takes weeks between infection and hospitalization and death [*]Hospitals are not infinitely expandable--if enough people come in, hospitals run out of resources [*]If you're in the ICU with this, you are likely in there for weeks [*]That without ventilators, the death rate increases dramatically The things you don't understand are items 2, 3, 4, and 5. When you put in the lockdown, it seems like it's about 2 weeks until cases fall (assuming similar testing criteria, which seems to rarely be true.) Once someone is symptomatic, it seems to take somewhere in the range of 2-3 weeks for them to die. Hospital resources, and in particular the ICU, fill up and the death rate increases as this happens. So, if your ICU isn't filled, you'd expect to see deaths decline between 4 and 5 weeks after lockdown. If the ICU reaches capacity, you'd expect deaths to decline even later than that, since the percentage of people dying because they can't get access to ICU treatments will increase.

I just got a phone survey from the (Canadian) federal government. The first question was, "What do you think the Federal government should be focused on today?" (My wife suggested I should've answered, "They should be focused on opening more dog parks.") The other questions were basically asking whether I though the government was doing well, whether I'd heard of what the government had done, which things I though were the most important, and how stressful various aspects of the government response were to me. One of the questions was basically, "Are you stressed that you can't go to hockey games right now?" It did make me wonder about the degree to which the government cares the perception of its actions relative to the value of its actions. Too bad there wasn't a question on that....

I've said it before Richard. I voted for Obama in 2008. I did not like Trump at all during the election process. I could not stand Hillary. But it's Ground Hog Day once again - Russia Hoax, Ukraine Corruption, Kavanaugh, Stormy Daniels, etc, etc, etc, Another shot to get rid of the dictator - where the opposition party and/or media share no responsibility for the state of the country. In spite of being voted in - from Day 1 - the resistance began - the enormous bitterness - I've never seen anything like it. I'm in favor of moving the country forward - which the President has done - love him or hate him. Now Trump is a BLUNT INSTRUMENT for sure. Many, many people love him - although many also do not approve of his tactics. So you are free to keep going. There is an election right around the corner. It will all be settled soon. OK, I think I understand from this response what you'd do. Thanks for the honest answer.

I'm surprised that the undercounting of COVID-19 death is this dramatic in the USA--basically missing almost half the cases in New York. https://gothamist.com/news/surge-number-new-yorkers-dying-home-officials-suspect-undercount-covid-19-related-deaths That makes it pretty hard to compare stats (though I suppose everyone is undercounting.)

Hey, I'm curious cubsfan. If Trump transfers all $2 trillion of Coronavirus money to his own bank accounts, how will you defend him? (I doubt he will, but I am curious how you will defend him, so I figured I'd just ask directly.)

This is a very nice summary of where we are, with a realistic balance of optimism and pessimism, IMO. Thanks, Dalal.

It's pretty interesting that some people have the "no big deal" perspective still, just as New York City is considering creating mass graves in parks. https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-new-york-city-considers-temporary-burial-sites-as-the-death-toll-rises

Yeah, I think it will have an effect, but not that big an effect. One of the nice things about Canada is that our population isn't under the influence of propaganda networks to the extent that the USA is, which makes our politics less polarized and our populace better able to understand that the world is filled with shades of grey. So, I think most Canadians will be quick to condemn Trump, but far less quick to condemn most Americans, and continue to see them as friends and neighbours. Strong Trump supporters will get contempt and derision from Canadians, but I think that's a pretty small percentage of Americans who visit up north, and even for Trump supporters, the contempt and derision often won't be that openly displayed.

I think you could be roughly right about this date, though I think it'll be on a state by state basis, with most coming after this date. (That said, as far as I can see, there still isn't evidence for your "COVID-19 is widespread" theory. I think it'll open up based on declining cases, quarantine fatigue, and the balance of pain shifting from dying people to a dying economy. So we end up in the same place, just with different explanations.)

To me, this answers your questions--the projections on the high side are still less than a 10% increase in business, and funerals are gatherings of people which are discouraged. It might a small net positive to them or even a small net negative, but it certainly doesn't seem like it can be a large net positive. So, possibly good for defence, but probably not good for offense.

I'm perplexed as to why anyone other than an oil worker or politician would see any benefit to bailing out the oil industry (or even the aviation industry, for that matter). They're not like the banks, where multiple failures can potentially break the economy. The productive physical assets will still be there after bankruptcy. So, let the companies die, and give the next guy a go. (I think this is probably true for almost any industry that derives its production primarily from physical assets.)

Nah, Trump's already been proven wrong. If there's a hurricane, and everyone boards up their windows and takes shelter, and few people die, it would be pretty stupid to say, "Hey, the deaths in the last hurricane weren't that bad--the threat was way overblown. So let's just ignore the hurricane the next time."

For me, work would certainly be included in the mask-wearing normalcy. I'm not sure about sporting events--I think it depends on how effective masks are at reducing the R0 in such venues. I suppose international travel falls into this category as well. That said, to me, the normalcy that matters is work. The economy is a big deal, and if we can get back to a normal-ish economy (including malls, restaurants and most service businesses, but maybe not including theatre, sports and other events that bring together groups of hundreds of people), then I feel like we'd have a good degree of economic and health stability. Basically, we should aim for South Korea without the creepy mobile phone tracking.

I'm actually pretty optimistic, not based on a return to complete normal, but rather a return to normalcy. I think the frequently posted Hammer and Dance article describes nicely what can happen. If you take the Hammer and Dance article as the medium-term objective, you just need to look for ways to reduce the impact on lives. Based on results in Asian countries, everyone wearing masks dramatically reduces the R0. That makes the dance phase much easier. What's more, as each week goes by, we add to our knowledge of how to treat this disease. If we can reduce the transmissibility through masks and reduce the severity and length of time in hospital through new treatments, then we're basically back to the flu. So, I think there's a decent chance we're in a normal--with the addition of people wearing masks--by July.