jamesmadison
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Posts posted by jamesmadison
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Not one reply or comment yet. Odd given how much members are willing to comment on just about anything (Grocery price increases turned into a 10 page thread) ;).
May be too hot too handle or just too depressing to contemplate. Or maybe no else wanted to listen to the whole thing, especially given the terrible fidelity. That said, it's pretty unreal to watch someone from 36 years ago describe what's going on (or at least a pretty credible interpretation) as if he had access to a time machine
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Anyone else notice meat prices going through the roof lately? We started to order meat in bulk from Baldor who used to supply restaurants. There are enough people in my house, so we would buy 15lb ribeye at a time. Prices were $13-14 per lb and they are now $22-23. I have read a lot about slaughter house having Covid issues. I haven't been to Costco as we have opted to order via delivery. Anyone else seeing large food inflation?
I think Baldor figured out that they can upcharge by selling directly to consumers. Since restaurants operate on such slim margin, Baldor has to watch their pricing. Anyone who switched over to buying from Baldor is buying in bulk, i.e. 15 lbs of ribeye, they can afford to pay up for the convenience and quality. I think Baldor is increasing pricing to pad their margins. Or there could be a serious sourcing issue for these prime ribeyes from small farms.
I have also used Baldor. Have placed 4 orders with them since they started consumer deliveries. I agree that you may be right about their realization that they can raise prices. However, I also noticed that their prices seemed to change with each and every order. I think that they have a much more dynamic pricing model than supermarkets or Fresh Direct, which generally keep things pretty constant in comparison.
In particular, the meat prices have definitely increased. I finally went to Costco for the first time this weekend since late February. Their meat prices are better than Baldor's and can be purchased in more manageable quantities. You also need to be careful when ordering from Baldor. In my last order, I purchased a side of strip loin. Was charged for 14.5 lbs. After carving it up, I thought it looked like less. Weighed the individual steak on my food scale. Was 8.5lbs!! Talk about getting shorted. They did credit me, but still not a good thing.
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Let’s hope “this time is different” and mortality stays down...
On the path to Greatness, obviously...
Do you have any graphs of daily deaths?
Sorry, that doesn't fit their narrative. You know what they say, however, "wait two weeks"
I wonder what happened in late May and early June that could have been a catalyst for the increase??
Of course, “this time is different”, we should not worry about mortality going up because covid is not a real threat, right?
Yes please tell me what happened in late May/early June in AZ, FL, TX...
Well, if you want to ignore the protests, then the answer is nothing. Nothing different happened. The increase in social interaction has been continuously increasing since the middle of April.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ebb02WuUEAIUcmb?format=png&name=medium
Lol! The huge protests in AZ, TX, and FL? Why you leave out NYC, DC, MN, cities in the EU which had by far much larger protests tho? Contradicts the narrative?
The cult is strong with this one.
Note how cultists can’t even bring themselves to name their Daddy anymore...a sign of shame
It's at this point, when someone starts using epithets and insults, that I stop engaging.
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Let’s hope “this time is different” and mortality stays down...
On the path to Greatness, obviously...
Do you have any graphs of daily deaths?
Sorry, that doesn't fit their narrative. You know what they say, however, "wait two weeks"
I wonder what happened in late May and early June that could have been a catalyst for the increase??
Of course, “this time is different”, we should not worry about mortality going up because covid is not a real threat, right?
Yes please tell me what happened in late May/early June in AZ, FL, TX...
Well, if you want to ignore the protests, then the answer is nothing. Nothing different happened. The increase in social interaction has been continuously increasing since the middle of April.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ebb02WuUEAIUcmb?format=png&name=medium
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Let’s hope “this time is different” and mortality stays down...
On the path to Greatness, obviously...
Do you have any graphs of daily deaths?
Sorry, that doesn't fit their narrative. You know what they say, however, "wait two weeks"
I wonder what happened in late May and early June that could have been a catalyst for the increase??
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I will give your video a chance.
Well, that was a mistake. Everyone knows Flu is seasonal (and experts assume Covid will have a second wave in the fall). The thing that doesn't make sense is that Flu season is over! Even in Arizona and Florida.
????
As are Corona Viruses
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200407164949.htm
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It's hard to know exactly what's going with the increase in positive testing in the warmer states. There are a number of theories out there. I strongly recommend watching the video below.
Assuming some level of immutability of virus behavior, we may simply be seeing what happens in a very large country with dramatically different geographies.
Perhaps ...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbTNx76UwAA6mZV?format=jpg&name=900x900
It is very curious that U.S. is the only country showing these dynamics.
Canada, as an example, has increased testing but decreased cases and hospitalizations despite reopening. And our cases are also skewing younger.
And it is very strange how the sunbelt was largely spared in March but seems on the edge of a major outbreak now.
So weird.
Are you being sarcastic? It's hard to tell.
Regardless, the video literally answers your question. There's no part of Canada that's tropical, while large swaths of the US are. Thus, the US is partially like Italy (NYC) and partially like tropical regions (Tx, AZ, etc.) and we may be seeing the death curves regionally match up.
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What's been shown in the past is that beds and ICUs are fairly easy to create more of - it's healthcare staff that's the binding constraint.
Anyway, hospital bed utilization for the whole of Harris County (which Houston is a part of) is currently at 82%, which is within normal ranges of 80-85%. Seems like ICU utilization is particularly high at one specific hospital, Houston Medical Center. Don't think this is as dire as it has been made out to be.
Agreed. Anyone worried that hospitals are running at 82% utilization doesn't know anything about the way hospitals operate. ICU utilization is frequently 90-100% as well under normal circumstances.
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It's hard to know exactly what's going with the increase in positive testing in the warmer states. There are a number of theories out there. I strongly recommend watching the video below.
Assuming some level of immutability of virus behavior, we may simply be seeing what happens in a very large country with dramatically different geographies.
Perhaps ...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbTNx76UwAA6mZV?format=jpg&name=900x900
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It's hard to know exactly what's going with the increase in positive testing in the warmer states. There are a number of theories out there. I strongly recommend watching the video below.
Assuming some level of immutability of virus behavior, we may simply be seeing what happens in a very large country with dramatically different geographies.
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Neil Ferguson is a charlatan.
Maybe not a charlatan, but he is a hypocrite. He broke the lockdown rules himself to be with his lover. A definition of a limousine liberal?
Not mutually exclusive. He's both. Take a look at his historical record of predicting 7 of the last 1 pandemics.
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Neil Ferguson is a charlatan. Injecting bleach is genius! Trump supporters at their best.
I can see why college educated women would not date Trump supporters!
You stay classy, vinod
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Your critiques are totally reasonable about his work. With a 2-3% false positive rate and a 2-3% prevalence, who knows what's going on. Are you sure, however, that all 23 studies are similarly flawed?
However, I think it's a bit "strange" for you to use NYC - literally the hardest hit area in the entire country (maybe the world?) as a counter-point. Do you really think NYC is a good proxy for the entire country? That seems like quite a stretch. Furthermore, if you are willing to use the estimated 25% prevalence rate in NYC to do your calculations, why are you resistant to using the others?
What's interesting is the lack of recent news about sero-prevalence studies. There hasn't been much on that front in well over a month.
Many seroprevalence studies have the same faults as the Santa Clara study. I've read a number of the studies he's included, and the bottom line is, seroprevalence studies are just not a great way of estimating IFR when the false positive rate of the serology tests is so high.
NY just has some of the better statistics I've seen available--I just included as a proxy for general IFR estimating. I wouldn't hang my hat on those estimates, but even the population level death statistics show that it's higher than he's estimating.
New tests are much more accurate. More serology large scale tests should be done.
It provides 99.8 percent specificity,
Yes, that's my point. We should be looking at serology studies that used high quality tests. Not a meta-analysis of all serology studies (with varying quality in study design and test used). I'd rather read one good study than find the "median" of crappy studies.
Agreed. As opposed to what that charlatan, Neil Ferguson, did with his POS useless model in which he used the median of all the crappy outputs to help justify the lockdowns. ;)
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Median Infection Fatality Rate Of COVID-19 For Those Under-70 Is Just 0.04%
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v2.full.pdf
Caution: Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
John Ioannidis is the author of the discredited Santa Clara serology study. There were multiple issues with the study, including sampling bias, not adjusting for the sensitivity and specificity of the serology test, poststratification, and others. This new study aggregates his original study with a bunch of other seroprevalence studies with similar flaws, and gets the same as his original results....but with the same limitations.
Perhaps the bottom line is best summed up by Nate Silver:
There are a lot of well-intended and well-written critiques of the Santa Clara Co. serology study but at some point it's not that complicated. A test that *could* have a false positive rate of up to ~2-3% isn't saying very much if it detects 2-3% positives in some populationWhen you look at locations with larger outbreaks, you see worse mortality rates. Why? Because if the false positive rate is 2%, then if the base rate of the population is 20% who have COVID, the error is only 10%, while if the base rate is 1%, it could be 200%. Serology surveys are used to tell us approximately what proportion of the population has had a disease, not typically to estimate the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR).
There are numerous threads by good sources on Twitter from back in April on this by Trevor Bedford, Natalie Dean, PhD, and many others.
One such thread here walks through a number of the limitations:
A Columbia statistician named Andrew Gelman discusses the problems here:
Natalie Dean thread here:
If you want an estimate based on less noisy data, you can look at the NYC population level deaths and you can calculate some back of the envelope estimates. Pretty clearly COVID hits older folks much harder, but I think the rates are higher than Ioannidis claims based on serology studies.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
Citywide, the death rate is .21% (that's of all people in NY, not just cases), with 75+ having a death rate of 1.57%, 65-74 0.63%, 45-64 0.19%, and 18-44 0.02%. That's on a population level, in a city with an estimated 25% prevalence, these numbers would have to be multiplied by 4 if you want to estimate the IFR, giving you approx 0.84% overall IFR, with subgroups 75+ 6.28%, 65-74 2.52%, 45-64 0.76%, 18-44 0.08%.
Based on the data I've seen, those numbers look more realistic than Ioannidis.
Your critiques are totally reasonable about his work. With a 2-3% false positive rate and a 2-3% prevalence, who knows what's going on. Are you sure, however, that all 23 studies are similarly flawed?
However, I think it's a bit "strange" for you to use NYC - literally the hardest hit area in the entire country (maybe the world?) as a counter-point. Do you really think NYC is a good proxy for the entire country? That seems like quite a stretch. Furthermore, if you are willing to use the estimated 25% prevalence rate in NYC to do your calculations, why are you resistant to using the others?
What's interesting is the lack of recent news about sero-prevalence studies. There hasn't been much on that front in well over a month.
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According to Worldometer, USA had 267 Covid deaths yesterday. That's the lowest figure since March 23rd, yet for some odd reason I can't seem to find any headlines at any major media outlet talking about it. Weird.
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And to be clear, given the staggering economic and social costs of the lockdowns, those arguing for them must demonstrate their worth, not the other way around.
It's not possible that you have your causation backwards?
Physdude makes an excellent point. Almost nobody is talking about Vietnam. A country with 90MM people and 0 Covid deaths.
Europe and the Americas failed to control the virus. And they paid the price with heavy lockdowns, deaths, and staggering economic and social costs.
How many times do I need to make the following point. I am NOT arguing FOR causation. Therefore I cannot have something "backwards". I am arguing that there is a LACK of [demonstrated] causation. Big difference.
I am not particularly familiar with Vietnam or the mitigation efforts they pursued. You might want to consider two more basic attributes, however:
1. Demographics - Vietnam has a much much younger population than all western countries; and
2. Weather - Hanoi is 21 degrees north vs NYC 41 degrees north
You know who else avoided Covid: Eritrea, Syria and Zimbabwe. These are barely functioning countries. I doubt there was much of a well coordinated lockdown strategy. It's something else.
Perhaps it makes sense to then learn about their approach if you don't know much about it? Zero fatalities and a very small number of cases are not explained by latitude or weather or age profile - good polices and governance are the only reasonable explanation.
Why don't you also consider other places that avoided Covid - Taiwan, HK, Macao etc.? Those three are very much highly functioning countries (and have one thing in common - they constitute Greater China which means that they have a lot of interaction with China) but are inconsistent with your narrative.
Here's how Taiwan responded according to Time Magazine. Seems consistent with my narrative, which is that lockdowns don't appear to the driving source of success or failure, either anecdotally or analytically (acknowledging the limitations of data we are dealing with).
Taiwan (443 cases; 7 deaths)**
In the initial days of an outbreak, the only thing as bad as being the epicenter of a global pandemic is being right next door to one… especially one that has it out for you (politically speaking). Despite that, the self-governing island has managed a truly admirable response in less-than-ideal circumstances; as of this week, Taiwan has registered just 443 cases and seven casualties.
Rather than shuttering its economy for weeks on end in an attempt to slow the virus, Taiwan went another way—after quickly closing its borders and banning exports of surgical masks, the government used contact tracing and mobile Sim-tracking to identify and ensure those in quarantine were actually abiding by the rules. Taiwan has a single-payer healthcare system, medical officials held briefings for the public daily, and businesses were kept open by using aggressive precautionary measures like taking temperatures and providing sanitizer before patrons could enter business establishments. Throughout, the government’s centralized response was seen as convincing and credible—it certainly didn’t hurt that Taiwan’s vice president is an epidemiologist.
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You are, however, absolutely right about the importance of good governance and policies more broadly, which have been sorely lacking in the USA. As I have previously mentioned, the four worst states in per capita deaths all mandated that nursing homes take back Covid+ patients. That's bad governance and policy. I also would acknowledge and argue that various countries started with vastly different circumstances. Taiwan is tiny and homogenous, with a centralized government. The USA is huge and diverse with a federal system of government. No surprise that Taiwan was able to quickly put in place policies that probably had no chance of working in the USA.
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Have people been following the latest HCL disaster to come out of Great Britain?
The RECOVERY study. They administered near fatal doses of HCL to patients. Apparently, the doctors confused Hydroxychloroquine with hydroxyquinoline. Oops.
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KC: You are way too kind. The fact that The Lancet published that POS after peer review is not an argument in support of peer review.
Gato's work is being vetted much more thoroughly - the entire internet instead of a bunch of likeminded physicians/scientists who were credulous enough to believe that an entity like Surgisphere would emerge out of thin air with a global data set that would better than anything ever seen in history.
Also, I think this is the guy who got the ball rolling on blowing up The Lancet. Another twitter nobody like El Gato.
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Lol! For some reason, there is a strong "correlation" between whether one favors Trump and their willingness to dismiss the pandemic--the (former politics section Trumper) brigade is out in full force in this thread. Anyone want to run a regression on it? As I said--you get the "analysis" you deserve, CoBF.
Here's one for people who are not beyond the level of reading graphs:
Nothing to see here folks--just fake news alarmism and another dumb graph! Clearly it's just a blip of a "second wave" for FL, not a surging first wave at all! After all, it's been in the millions since January!
And ignore those like me who disappear and then come back to warn like I did in early March. After all, I am focused on cases which in my flawed view are leading indicators of what's to come...Remember, we should ignore cases and focus on hospitalizations and mortality. Clearly mortality is going down when you divide by cases. And of course hospitalizations and mortality are the predictive indicators to look at right now, they are not lagging indicators, amirite? We clearly don't understand what lagging indicator means anyway on here...derp.
Also, those claiming it's been here and "millions were infected" and that they saw many patients who had it in January--so strange that it is only surging now in FL in June. Weird--if it was widespread in January, what took so long to get to FL? Top level analysis. Keep it up.
Florida seems to be doing just fine
You really should stop posting positive test case stats. Absent context, they aren't particularly informative. We all know that testing rates have increased and there's plenty of other targeting going on that's changing the dynamic. The massive decline in average age of positive cases is evidence of that.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbDdVccUwAAgRvw?format=jpg&name=medium
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Reposting a handy guide to keep track of all the ways the data's being salted
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ea_by3WXQAE0dKE?format=png&name=medium
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After Flu vaccine is given, number of cases of flu go down, not up.
After lockdown did cases go down or up?
I find that surprising since the CDC recommends getting the flu vaccine by the end of October each year. Then the number of flu cases rise afterwards.
Because we all know that summer time respiratory diseases go down and winter they go up. Thats why they give flu vaccine in October.
Nevertheless. Cases rising X amount after locking people down does not show that it was ineffective. For example, let's say one person in my household was just exposed on the morning the lockdown began. That person doesn't test positive for 10 more days, and then 10 more days after that a couple more people in the household come down with it. That's 20 days of lockdown and an explosion in cases within my household.
Did you just accidentally make a case against lockdowns? ;)
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^In the spirit of balanced analysis and go-forward perspective, the recent rise in US and Sweden "cases" needs to take into account the rising number of tests. Also, it appears (at least in the US) that the median age of people with positive tests has been coming down, which would imply some mitigation for the number of hospitalized and ICU patients to come.
However, these adjustments only help slightly given the VERY unusual trend in curves in the US, compared to similar advanced economies and the heterogeneity in results will make it very hard (impossible?) to test and trace effectively. Calculated Risk produces regular updates related to this aspect and the author suggests that 3% rate of positive tests is a relevant threshold. The 3% is not a cause and effect criteria ie a low positive test rate does not cause the caseload to go down, it is associated with it.
https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2020/06/june-20-covid-19-test-results-most.html
See goal 4.
A concerning aspect is that the rate of positive tests has started to go up versus the number of tests done, suggesting community spread to a degree which may become uncomfortable and which may render a "V"-shaped recovery (to previous economic trends) less likely.
A question: Why were frail CV+ patients sent back to nursing homes from hospitals?
A possible solution to this difficult question may be to avoid ending up in a situation when the question needs to be asked.
Glad you mention the declining age of positives. I would posit this is directly a function of the type of "targeted" testing now going on. Lots of employers requiring test prior to returning to work. Some employers pre-screening with temperature checks. Negative temps aren't counted in the figures, which distorts the testing results. You also have examples like this - which should be hard to believe - but there it is.
https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1274432160682831872
https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1274426886194515968
Hat tip to the bad cat, once again.
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In light of your comments, how would you attempt to prove or support an argument for lockdowns? The economic costs have been staggering - trillions of dollars. The social costs have been terrible as well. And what for us - rich people in a rich country might count as inconvenience, is for poor people in poor countries devastating. A compelling must be made by those who argue for them.
Agreed, that much of the data is messy and inconsistent and as I previously pointed out, likely getting worse here in the USA. We should all be in favor of wanting it to be as clean and consistent as possible. In the absence of that, we either have to (a) ignore or (b) adjust it. In the case of China, I would argue that "ignore" is the right strategy. What's your suggestion?
James, I wouldn't start by attempting to prove anything. That is a sure way to introduce confirmation bias. I would read peer-reviewed journal articles. I would understand the real world is messy and there is an enormous amount of uncertainty. It is unethical to use deadly viruses in experiments, so we will never have high quality data.
But you miss my main point. The economic costs weren't caused by the lockdown. They were caused by an uncontrolled epidemic of a deadly disease. Countries that had uncontrolled epidemics and didn't have formal lockdowns are also facing staggering economic costs. Countries that controlled their epidemics (by luck or skill) minimized the economic costs.
Marten Bjellerup, chief economist at the debt office in Stockholm, said he thinks Sweden will fare “somewhat better” than others, but acknowledged “the difference is marginal.”You don't believe that when governments want to implement a policy that will cost trillions of dollars and have a staggering human cost, that they need to prove they will work? You are placing far too much trust in the competence and good intentions of government bureaucrats and their scientific and health advisors, who have done nothing to earn it in recent months.
And please, please stop with the belief in "peer reviewed" journals. The Lancet and NEJM peer reviewed the crap they recently published on HCL and had to withdraw it within a couple of weeks. Nowadays, it seems that "peer review" is shorthand for a study that confirms to current orthodoxy.
We will need to disagree on the source of the economic costs. I believe that they were absolutely caused by the lockdowns. When all is said and done, Covid will end up having an IFR of somewhere between 0.1%- 0.5% for the entire population with a massive weighting towards the elderly and infirm. It's not the disease, but the "cure" that's caused the suffering.
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My point is that the trend line is clearly improving in the US and that there is no hospital crisis, notwithstanding the panic porn doomsayers' claims to the contrary.
Point well taken.
-Do you agree that this net positive trend line hides the feature that many states are improving while many other states are not, even at this stage of the game, post-peak?
-What do you think of the fact that the closest "comparables", in terms of the trend of hospitalized and ICU cases post-peak (once basic adjustments are made for population size, testing, etc) are Brazil and Russia?
Conceptually, this virus wants to spread and persist and there are 'natural' reasons to prevent that. Why would you be satisfied with a process that helps the virus to stick around while slowly mutating?
"Lockdown" measures have huge costs but, so far, the economic damage hasn't been proportional to the degrees of lockdown measures. So far, it appears that countries and regions that reacted slowly are the ones opening up too fast and (this leading to that) are the most likely to react slowly if there is a second wave. Isn't that bizarre?
Given the size of the USA - both area and population, there will absolutely be differences in different regions. Eg, early on, NYC metropolitan region and city in particular was a total disaster while the rest of the country was essentially unscathed.
I don't have a point of view on Brazil and Russia being "comps" for the USA
I think we will need to agree to disagree on the massive costs of the lockdowns. As I previously noted, they are in the trillions of dollars and the human cost around the world has been staggering. Also, given my prior statements, no surprise that we will also need to agree to disagree on the benefits of lockdowns.
Understanding the Political Scenario
in General Discussion
Posted
Indeed. As opposed to current affairs, which we are all scared to touch with a ten foot pole ;)