RichardGibbons

I thought last Presidential election had two awful choices, but this one's far worse. Biden's dementia makes him a terrible choice to lead a country.

This response to Trump's blocking of medical equipment to other countries is quite good not just because it's true, but also because it seems like a much more productive way to react to the situation than the more natural anger: While it's easy to become very angry about this, let's keep one thing very clearly in mind: however much damage this Republican government does to Canada's response.. the amount of damage they've done to America and Americans is an order of magnitude higher. Remember that the US hasn't even hit the peak yet. Remember that Republican senators were trading stocks on the COVID response before they were alerting the public. Remember that the situation in NY hasn't peaked, and the situation in Florida and the rest of the south hasn't even started. Remember that rural America hasn't even started to feel this yet, and they have far worse health resources than urban America. Remember that the American health care system never needed the capacity to provide health insurance to all of its people - unlike Canada's public system which has been serving all Canadians for a long time. Remember that their states are fighting with each other and with the feds in trying to obtain medical supplies. Remember that their Republican president and media were literally asking them to die so that their economy could be restarted. So as much as we can get angry at the American government, and the Republican government that's running this response.. let's keep in mind that the American people are the first and primary victims of this feckless administration, and they will feel pain far greater than Canadians ever will. Canada will get through this. We'll get through a large part due to the fact that we're working effectively together, and we have a government we can largely trust, both provincially and federally. Let us be thankful for what we have, and get through this. Source

Mcliu - what a pleasure it is to have someone with some intellectual honesty here. Much too rare. Wow, I've been reading this site for about two decades, and this is the most ironic post I've ever seen on it! Good job, cubsfan!

The fun thing is that two can play this game. The pulp used to make the N95 masks comes from BC. It's not the right move for Canada to effectively kill a bunch of American healthcare workers just because Trump wants to do things that will kill a bunch of Canadian healthcare workers. But then again, if you're playing a game of iterative Prisoner's Dilemma, and your opponent keeps choosing betray, the right option is to start choosing betray as well, and keep doing it until the other side realizes that co-operation has better outcomes than betrayal. So is the right long-term option for Canada to halt America's production of N95 masks?

This is interesting data, even if it is totally creepy that Google has it. https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/

I think you're not really interested in an answer. If I'm wrong, the answer has been all over this thread. Go look it up. I'm surprised that you have so much faith in the transparency of the Chinese Communist Party in sharing the number of deaths. (It's still noteworthy that USA has a 5x per capita death rate compared to Canada. If you think Canada's managing this poorly, you must think that the USA is managing this horrendously.)

Yes, if they act like idiots (beachgoers). No, if they don't (healthcare workers, people stuck in long-term care, etc). That said, I'm not quite sure where you're going with this question. Even if someone got it by being reckless, if they get send to hospital, they're using up resources that could be used for people who got it without being reckless.

Yeah, this is a really great question, and I think Wabuffo's answer is an interesting one. Up until now, I've always assumed that it's actually a demand shock--that there's a fixed weekly schedule of deliveries but the demand surge has led to empty shelves. Then, after people have seen stuff sold out, the next time they see the items in stores, they stock up more than they would normally, causing empty shelves again. Or, it could be that there really is a demand shift. Restaurants could be a significant amount of food consumption, so if people stop going to restaurants and buy from grocery stores, then grocery stores can no longer get enough supply to deal with the demand.

OK, but Trump didn't do this, some of the states did. Recently, he's said he won't stop social distancing until the end of April, but he didn't start it. He's pretending that if he jumps in front of a parade people will think he's the leader. (FYI, Al Gore didn't invent the Internet.) In fact, it's not even clear to me that he could stop social distancing if he tried, since he didn't start it. Forcing? They kind of were already. I'll give you "encouraging", though. Basic minimum. Is this seriously the propaganda channel's spin on things? By firing the pandemic response team in 2018, he was reducing bureaucracy? Or do you mean cutting CDC budgets? It's shocking to me that anyone would believe this is a good thing. On the other hand, it's amazing what a modern-day propaganda network can get people to believe. (Maybe he should do the same thing to corporations--increase the corporate tax rate to force them to get rid of bureaucracy so that they can really get something done.) He is, but he's giving them misinformation. In a pandemic, misinformation is really problematic, because it kills people. His daily briefings have been a net negative (well, except from an entertainment perspective.) Yep, Trump's the only politician on the planet who's figured out that there's both a medical emergency and an economic emergency. This is a good idea, though I imagine it won't have much of an effect for this pandemic. I don't think he's done this before this pandemic, but he deserves kudos for doing it afterward. The fact that these items are the only thing a passionate Trump supporter can come up with kind of shows how awful he's been.

Because I was curious, I calculated the per-capita deaths of the countries with the top 20 GDP excluding China, Russia, India, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. (I excluded those countries because I doubt they'll have reliable data. I imagine all of them will grossly underestimate COVID-19 deaths.) Here's the current results. It's pretty amazing to me that USA is already #9 considering it's early in the process. It's also noteworthy that it's over five times worse than the country with the most similar culture, Canada. #CountryDeaths ...Per 100K 1Italy13157 21.76 2Spain9053 19.36 3Belgium828 7.14 4Netherlands1173 6.85 5France4032 6.18 6Switzerland378 4.37 7UK2532 3.73 8Sweden239 2.37 9USA5138 1.55 10Germany872 1.04 11South Korea169 0.33 12Canada109 0.29 13Mexico37 0.15 14Poland43 0.11 15Brazil241 0.11 16Australia21 0.08 17Argentina31 0.07 18Japan57 0.05 19Taiwan5 0.02 20Thailand12 0.02

Well, the thing is, I don't believe you. Because people have told you at least 10 different concrete things that Trump did that were terrible, and you disregarded them all in order to cheer for Trump and repeatedly trumpet the one thing he did properly. So, I don't buy that the problem is that people aren't giving you enough concrete information. I think the problem is that you don't care at all about concrete information, but rather care about defending your favorite team to the exclusion of reason. So, let's go with the per-capita deaths metric. It's not really fair, but it's clear that you don't care about ways it's not fair except insofar as it bolsters your case, so I'm OK with ignoring unfairness, and just assuming that it balances out between countries. (It doesn't really, but it's very clear that any for any discussion that involves any degree of analysis of what leaders did right and wrong, "Trump blocked flights from China" is far more important to you than "Trump went on National TV, and said only 15 people had it, it wasn't a big deal, and it would vanish by April". My hypothesis is that the numbers will show that the latter is more important than the former.)

OK, cool! All those countries are doing better than the USA, but I understand that you're not actually concerned about analysing which countries did better than the USA. So instead, I'll take this as your commitment that the only metric that matters is per-capita COVID-19 death rate. Let's revisit this thread in a month or two, and see how many countries USA did better than. I imagine that delights you, as you think Trump has done a superior job and the outcome from here will be nothing but rainbows and unicorns, and the privatized American healthcare system is superior to all others! It's a no-brainer that USA will do better than basically everyone else, right? Now remember, no shifting the goalposts!

Well, you seem to think Trump handled the disaster well. So on that basis, I'll assume that you'd be satisfied with the name of any leader who handled it better than Trump. I'm pretty bad at naming world leaders, but if I'm allowed to look them up, Italian Prime Minister Conte has handled this disaster better than Trump. Really, the hardest part of this game is naming the leaders, because almost every country's federal leadership did better than the USA. So let's add Trudeau, Ardern, Moon, Tsai, Obrador, Merkel, Frederiksen, Macron, Sanchez, Abe, Johnson.... Maybe that's a better game--who did worse than Trump? Perhaps Xi, but unlike most leaders, he didn't have 3 months warning about the effects of the virus before it attacked his country. Maybe Rouhani, but I'm not that sure about Iranian response. Really, if we're allowed to use the Internet to look up world leaders, I'm not sure why you think this is a challenge. If not, then it's pretty close to the challenge of "name world leaders who have bankrupted fewer casinos than Trump."

Evidence supporting the "it's impossible to isolate the vulnerable" theory is BC long-term care facilities. They're trying really hard to avoid it in long-term care facilities including shutting down against visitors, stopping staff from moving between facilities, doing remote diagnostics when possible, and taking the temperature of everyone who enters the building. Yet 21 facilities have it. (The lower mainland--an area with about 55% of BC's population--has about 55 facilities.) And overall, BC has been fantastic at dealing with the virus, cutting off exponential growth very early (see the yellow line, and note that the Y-axis is linear, not logarithmic, unlike almost every other chart like this you'll see).

To me, this is a very odd thing to say, assuming that these really smart people who have spent decades of their life focusing on this problem are completely missing something so simple, that they need some everyman to direct their efforts. That said, I think there would be value in epidemiologists explaining the consequences of adopting the model you describe, because I've wondered about it, too. I suspect the answer is that it's essentially impossible to isolate the vulnerable population if everyone else gets sick.

The two-week and one-week lag analyses are deceptive because of 1) the staring points and 2) the logarithmic Y-axis. For instance, you wouldn't say that UK and Canada were on the same line, but one week offset, if you looked at this graph instead: Canada was better at responding to COVID-19 initially. So on these graphs that start at, say 100 on the Y-axis, that means that the X=0 point for some countries--including Canada--was pushed weeks out in time. It looks like we got the disease way later, when actually what happened was we got the disease at the same time, but measures we took slowed things down so much that it now looks like we're weeks better than others. What's more, the exponential growth on a logarithmic axis minimizes the difference between countries, making it seem like Canada has a better slope, but only a bit better slope. But over time, that means a massive difference. (e.g. What's $1 compounded at 15% per year for 50 years verses $1 compounded at 25% per year for 50 years?) I agree with you that Canada's curve is likely to flatten because of social distancing, and the fact that the growth was flatter up to now will likely mean way fewer (per capita) deaths. Effectively, I think the net result will be flatter curves initially (this is where our "test and track people" stuff really helped), allowing us to get to the social distancing up at the right time to flatten curve before overloading our hospitals too badly (now that "test and track" becomes less feasible because of too many cases). I also agree with you that it's the untested people that is really worrisome. On Mar 30, we had done about 222K tests, while today USA has done about 1065K tests (still well behind Canada per capita.) But I think this (and the PPE, as you mentioned) is where the supply chain stuff will really start to bite. I feel like the game would be completely different if there were a 5 minute drive-through covid-19 test, and I think USA will get these way before Canada. I guess the other thing that both countries did wrong was not tell everyone to wear masks. If they did that, I imagine both our curves would be way lower. But I think the authorities in both countries didn't encourage that because the supply of masks was too limited.

Nope, I don't have a timeline, but if you want to spend a couple hours putting one together, I'd love to see it. I vaguely recall the restaurant thing. It was a long time ago, probably associated with Chinese New Year on Feb 2, not late Feb/early March. The primary things Canada's done very well is data collection, testing, and tracking cases--for weeks at the beginning of the outbreak, BC was ahead of USA, and as of March 16, Canada had done 50% more testing than USA. Second, Canada did the lockdowns at roughly the right time. The combination of these two things has had the result that nowhere in Canada is completely overloaded now, with per-capita cases way lower than the USA, and growth rates lower, too. Closing the border against the primary country where COVID-19 is skyrocketing (USA) was also well-done, both in terms of timing and diplomacy. In terms of actions the countries will take over the next few months, I'd expect that USA will ramp up faster/better than Canada, both because USA will be better at ramping up supply chains, and because USA will need it more.

Nope. I'm not a Trudeau fan, but what he did was mostly right. The biggest mistake he made was waiting too late to close the borders (perhaps taking into account the recommendations of the WHO, under the influence of China). The second biggest mistake was shoving support for Canadians through the EI system, but he rectified fairly quickly with the 75% salary thing. In contrast, other than the smart closing of the border to China, Trump has done more than anyone else on earth, except possibly Xi, to maximize the deaths caused by the pandemic.

4 or 5 labs outside France really need to duplicate this experiment. https://techstartups.com/2020/03/27/coronavirus-cure-new-results-french-study-shows-combination-hydroxychloroquine-plaquenil-azithromycin-successfully-treated-80-coronavirus-patients-significant-dr/ If this works, I think this is hugely important, not just because it would reduce deaths, but because it would greatly reduce loads on hospitals. Heck, Trump would even be able to claim he discovered the cure, since one of the two drugs is hydroxychloroquine. :)

Cool, this is misunderstanding #2 on my list of misunderstandings. (#2: It takes weeks between infection and hospitalization and death.)

Well, the hysteria increases the chance that people will practice social distancing, which is a very good outcome if you're worried about overloading hospitals. People making more phone calls doesn't worry me much. (One potential ironic political outcome of this is that as a result of Trump's actions, a bunch of old people will die. Old people tend to be Republican, so this could potentially result in Millennials superseding Boomers as the dominant political demographic. Sure, Millennials don't vote, but then again, neither do dead people.)

Yep, I agree completely and have said this from the beginning. If one is a complete psychopath who cares nothing about people, and only about the economy, doing nothing is the optimal response. In fact, "coronavirus + no response" might have better economic outcomes than "no coronavirus at all" because if COVID-19 kills retirees now, those retirees won't be unproductively consuming resources for years or decades. (The Logan's Run guide to maximizing the economy.)

Yeah, I think the people that have this view are basically misunderstanding five things: [*]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 Everyone I've seen who's taken a "there's no problem" position seems to have basically missed at least one of these points. In that post, he's certainly completely misunderstanding points 1 and 2. He'll probably miss points 3, 4, and 5, but hasn't got to that point yet, because he's so busy missing 1 and 2.

That's not why he was treated roughly. He was treated roughly for ignoring evidence and continuing to push a narrative that was completely refuted by the data. On message boards, encouraging people to draw obviously incorrect conclusions almost always leads to people being attacked, and even more so during stressful times when incorrect conclusions can cause people to die or lose money. That said, I agree we should try to be nicer. I try, and often fail. :(

Yeah, everything you say in this paragraph after the first three sentences is pretty silly, so it's good that you don't care about people disagreeing with it. I find it very strange that some people are convinced that in a massively complex environment, shades of grey do not exist.