minten

Or, alternatively, instead of looking at "Total" (cases or deaths) charts, yoiu look at "Per day" (cases or deaths) charts, and see what those tell you about how things are really going in Europe.

I'm not familiar with payments within the US healthcare system as much as you guys, so I'm sure you understand this tweet better than I do: http://twitter.com/AndySwan/status/1246521069147770881

We must have a different definition of "exponential" I guess Spain: new cases per day: stable number since March 24th Germany: new cases per day: stable number since March 26th Italy: new cases per day are clearly going down now. also, today for the 1st day Italian IC's were less full than they were the day before. US still exponentially going up, I'll give you that. But obviously European semi-lockdowns are working.

Still, this is the exact same thing an enormous amount of the world population is saying right now, with a typical country only having 0.1% or so positively diagnosed. Either, most of us have gotten it already (could be but not that likely), or most of us are super-aware of our bodies because of the news and just had some sort of a flu we perhaps never really would have noticed if not for the corona crisis (more likely).

I don't fully understand why it matters what a country's exact death count is. If it's what's being reported or that amount times three, it's still insignificant on the bigger picture. We've shut the country down to prevent deaths in the hundred of thousands or even millions, so what does it matter if the exact death toll right now is 5000 or 15000?

if an 80 year old refuses to isolate, it's his/her own choice. It's the same now: if someone goes out anyway, it's on them. You can't let your policy be dictated by the notion some might not listen. At least, for that 80 year old you have the leverage there's an actual health threat to that person, while most 20 year olds have a bigger chance of getting hit by a bus on their once-a-day walk to the supermarket than actually dying of this virus. minten, No, it's not. Here in Denmark, this kind of reckless behavior [perhaps inverted compared to the actual context here discussed] is countered by the Danish Epedimic Act, which has been activated about a couple of weeks ago, latest Tuesday last week it was strengthened further, to use force related to reckless behavior. Reporters here have asked for insight in the cases where this has happened [there are a few cases [ less than 5, I think] already here], but insight has not been granted by the authorities. Elder people getting interviewed to the local paper saying "The death has to have a cause" and something like that. People who have been asked to quarantine, but refuse to do so [with proof of that] goes into some kind of box, locked from outside - somehow. Period. Wow.. in that respect Denmark must be way ahead of the rest of the world.

if an 80 year old refuses to isolate, it's his/her own choice. It's the same now: if someone goes out anyway, it's on them. You can't let your policy be dictated by the notion some might not listen. At least, for that 80 year old you have the leverage there's an actual health threat to that person, while most 20 year olds have a bigger chance of getting hit by a bus on their once-a-day walk to the supermarket than actually dying of this virus. Well the problem is not that the 80 year-old might die. I can agree fully that he pays his money and takes his chances, which is exactly what we are generally allowed to do in a free society. The problem is that before the 80 year-old gets around to dying, his family takes him to the hospital where he occupies an ICU bed and a ventilator for a couple of weeks. When you have enough 80 year-olds behaving like this, there are no ICU beds remaining for your young healthy person who does get hit by a bus. In other words, there are externalities associated with the decisions being made by the 80 year-olds. One way to internalize those externalities could be to deny healthcare services to them, but as I suggested, that's a bit of a toughie in a free society. Well, not sure how things are in the US at the moment, but I'm pretty sure in Italy right now the 80 year-old is taken off of the ventilator the moment the 20 year old comes in. As a side note, a doctor said on my national television yesterday the survival percentage of any IC-patient with corona in Italy is 5% (while 50% in my country, elder people are strongly advised not to choose the IC at all). I doubt if that's correct, but if even remotely so, a ventilator appears to be overrated anyway for the very sick and very old.

if an 80 year old refuses to isolate, it's his/her own choice. It's the same now: if someone goes out anyway, it's on them. You can't let your policy be dictated by the notion some might not listen. At least, for that 80 year old you have the leverage there's an actual health threat to that person, while most 20 year olds have a bigger chance of getting hit by a bus on their once-a-day walk to the supermarket than actually dying of this virus.

Any post-lockdown plans will surely involve mass serological testing of those who are vulnerable and isolating those who test negative, while the rest of us will take care of herd immunity. there's no other way. You all post some interesting counter-points as to why this solution is sub-optimal. Of course it is sub-optimal. But imo, it is the only way. Any other way will involve very, very long lockdowns with questionable expected success and much much more quality life years being lost over the cure than over the illness. And of course, we should listen to the advice of epidemologists, but we should also balance that with the advice of economists. an epidemologist will only care and know about the epidemic, not about the economic aftermath.

Any post-lockdown plans will surely involve mass serological testing of those who are vulnerable and isolating those who test negative, while the rest of us will take care of herd immunity. there's no other way.

The sniffing initiative seems to have been a good idea like a month ago (but also then very non-scientific and arbitrary). By the time this gets any traction, we will have widespread serological tests anyway.

They closed down their entire country to limit deaths to that level. I'm not saying you can't make a case that it was a global overreaction or whatever, but be consistent. If you are going to point to cost per excess death then you should look at originally predicted deaths, less actual deaths, divided by cost. I'm not opposed to skepticism, I'm opposed to cherry picking data. We don't know original predicted deaths as predictions vary enormously. We can look at a doomsday model that predicted endless compounding into the millions and millions with no stop till a significant part of the population is dead, or we can look at Sweden as a model who did virtually nothing to contain it but still somehow follow the rest of Europe in number of infections. Anybody will select a model that fits their own bias best. Anyway, i'm not saying it's a global overreaction thus far from a policy standpoint (it has been from a media standpoint though). A semi-lock-down of say, three weeks or maybe a month at the absolute most, seems somewhat reasonable, as every country got completely blindsided by this (even though after China they had sufficient time to prepare). This allows stocking up on ventilators, on IC availability, on drugs, on protective clothing, whatever, and to make people aware. Also, it's reasonable to assume an economy will quickly recover from this with little structural damage and we avoid a prolonged recession, as most consumers and small businesses will be able to survive one month of isolation and a government can afford to support the ones that don't. I'm just extremely sceptical of the doomsday-scenario's I keep reading (here and elsewhere) that this lockdown will take much longer than expected and how that is somehow a rational course of action in the first place. Well into the summer perhaps, or even longer. And how that's worth it; cause if that's what it takes to kill this virus, then that's what it takes. And one month definitely won't be enough to kill it, we all know that, only to get the numbers down. I strongly believe more than one month of lockdown will structurally kill off parts of your economy though, as some parts will just disappear and a government will quickly run out of ammo trying to support everybody. After a month the rational play would be to manage this virus, which on a macro scale is just not that deadly in the first place, while we're better prepared for it and continue with our lives. I'm just extremely worried the hypocrisy surrounding deaths and the hype that surrounds this corona crisis will prevent governments from taking that course of action.

Michael Levitt, Stanford professor, won a Nobel prize etc, tweeted this two days ago: "Italy seems to be past the midpoint. We predict this will end with 140,000 to 150,000 cases and 17,000 to 20,000 deaths. As terrible as this is, there are normally 1,765 deaths in Italy on a average day. This means that over the 6 week period in which COVID-19 deaths have occurred in Italy, the excess due to COVID-19 is no more than 25% of the number of natural deaths. It may be less, if some of those who died, would have died normally in the 42 day period."

9000 lives a week is 468.000 lives a year (very "back-of-napkin", I know). Every year. And I'm betting the average age of this hypothetical person isn't past retirement like with COVID. Exponential sure sounds scary but it doesn't automatically exceed stable, if that stable number is large enough. You need a pretty dark runaway exponential COVID process to come even close to 468.000 deaths each and every year, considering COVID is a one-time scenario, and also considering the average COVID-death is 80 years old and in bad health. We have been in trouble for so many years, and nobody cares. Hospitals have been over-run multiple times, and nobody cared. We've had waves of much larger excessive death (just look at that excess morbidity graph that was posted yesterday) that nobody really noticed. Where did these much larger amounts of people die? In the hospital? Apparently not. At home? In a nursing home? And next year we'd just cut our healthcare budgets even more. But this time it's "exponential", I get it. Kind of like wishing for world peace, isn't it. Ofcourse we won't. We all know it intuitively, but nobody will do anything about it because the dead have no face. Polution for example would be an easy one to fix, but nah, the economy. And yeah, the economy! While some die along the way, others have a life to live, that's how it's always been. But somehow with COVID everything is different, and every death is reflected in a large ticker on our television screen and it saddens us and reminds us how that person could have been someone we knew. Not addressing anyone in particular here, but it's utterly hypocritical to state COVID is more important than daily life, and if we need to shut down the economy for months over this, so be it. If you apply the same standard to all else around us, we need to stop everything right now and lock ourselves in our houses forever.

Another statistic that puts all of this in perspective. https://twitter.com/billsweet/status/1244602155262246912 Shouldn't we lockdown the economy ALWAYS? I mean, 9000(!) lives a week, 9000 people that could have been you or someone you love; lives before profits right? We all agree, right? Or now suddenly we don't?

I'm looking at new cases per day. These have stabilized almost everywhere in Europe. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries is a good source on this, click on the name of the country, scroll down a bit and look for "daily new cases". This shows a graph of how this is trending for any particular country. Total cases will continue to go up obviously as they can't mathemetically possibly ever go down. Every day new cases get added to it, and nothing ever gets deducted. Not sure if this is such a great number to track. Active cases would be a better indicator, if countries would actually keep track of the number of recoveries (as these would get deducted). No country in Europe actually tracks this though, probably because their health staff has better things to do than call mild cases and ask how they are doing (if they were ever registered at all).

What news from Europe has been "not so good"? Naturally thowed can reply for himself, but do you think the WHO COVID-19 sit report #69 looks good with regard to Europe? What stat in particular doesn't look good? Since Wednesday/Thursday number of new cases have levelled off in virtually every European country, including Italy and Spain. No more exponential growth, no more growth at all, but a flat line. I'd consider that great news honestly.

What news from Europe has been "not so good"?

I agree. Results of an independent trial (with control group) backing this up are hugely important. This French Dr. Raoult does appear to be somewhat of an idiot with a questionable past. We need to take out the risk that he's just faking it all.

Well, to be fair to Musk, while cause of death can indeed be reasonably determined, Italy isn't doing it (or at the very least, their statisticians aren't). For some mysterious reason, any death in Italy that ever tested positive for covid-19 is reported as a covid-19 death in their statistics regardless of anything else. Source: quite a few, but for example https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/ten-points-to-remember/2020/03/24/15/33/case-fatality-rate-and-characteristics

wow... As far as I can find it is the only timely mortality data we have. CDC publishes a weekly report but I cannot find underlying data for USA (that is recent - public datasets only go through 2018). I have not checked for Asian countries. As to the European data itself, I won't make any conclusions, just presenting the evidence. Draw from it what you will. Seems everybody completely ignores the link when you don't draw any conclusions from it and that would be a huge waste, so I'll go anyway. Because the link, http://www.euromomo.eu/index.html, is really worth a click. No anecdotes or opinions, just stats. What the hell happened in January of 2017 and January of 2018 that all those people died (that, by these graphs, so obviously are not dying now; most European countries appear to have BELOW average mortality currently)? I'm guessing it was the flu, but I don't want to be a flu-bro, so I'll keep my mouth shut on that. Why didn't we shut the economy down here in Europe then, we could have saved so many lives! Oh, yeah, I forgot, nobody knew so nobody cared. Goes to show a corona death is worth at least a thousand other deaths. Also goes to show any doomsday scenario must be based on what this virus could do in the future, not what it is doing now (because as you can see in the link, on a grand scale, it isn't doing much). Also goes to show the well meant but unintended hypocrisy of mourning the dead you see, and ignoring the much, much larger numbers you don't. And then a question to this board, looking at these stats again, shouldn't we close the economy down every winter? We care about saving lives don't we?

wow...

it's my understanding (but perhaps an MD can correct me) the flu is quite unique in being able to mutate so fast and is therefore so succesful, while corona viruses, like most viruses, aren't. This isn't the first corona virus we have dealt with. But of course, this one might be different, who knows. There has been plenty of talk there are already two different strains of this virus, one contagious and mild, one not so contagious and harsh. But it's not really clear to me if that's fact or speculation at this point.

Come on, this is turning things upside down. Credentialism is unnecessary unless you first bring it up yourself; nobody here knows my profession as I've never told you what it is. When someone first comes out saying he's an MD while making medical statements therefore sounding like someone who knows what he's saying, then later deletes that comment because perhaps he's really not, then of course that's on him. Not on the person who noticed and comments on it.

https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-03-27-Abbott-Launches-Molecular-Point-of-Care-Test-to-Detect-Novel-Coronavirus-in-as-Little-as-Five-Minutes " delivering positive results in as little as five minutes and negative results in 13 minutes. " " Abbott expects to produce about 5 million tests per month. "