Liberty

orthopa, none of that is convincing. There are many epidemic tracking units that flag unusual disease activity by tracking statistics across hospitals and clinics around the country (and many countries have them). Even just one doctor noticing a weird pattern in their cases and going to social media or writing an op-ed. Even if it had been missed at the time, it would have surfaced in the past couple months that the whole world has been looking at this from all angles. We know the mortality rate for the flu quite well, and we're seeing what COVID19 does to various age groups.. it would stand out quite clearly. And a study of 509 people in one heavily-affected district of Germany is too little to extrapolate from, I'm afraid. Some places are hit hard while others very little; if you study one of the hard-hit place, it doesn't tell you about what immunity might be elsewhere.

They test for the flu. The disease isn't the same. Why the resurgence now if this was on the loose without any containment measures last fall? This is getting really stupid.

I don't think looking at people's as groups (by age, gender, skin color, whatever) is productive. You'll find "boomers" of all positions and views on all this, so lumping them all together is stupid and muddies thinking rather than make it clearler. Same for any stereotypes or prejudices about millennials or Gen X or whatever.

Some stuff that comes to mind immediately reading this: We know what COVID19 from Sars-COV-2 looks like, right? If we started getting infections in November and in the interim had had millions and millions of infections, in such a scenario, why did nobody notice clusters of anomalous multi-day fevers, pneumonias and deaths, especially in older populations? X-rays and CT scans showing glass opacities? Why nothing until the WA infection clusters and such? Why hasn't healthcare system been sounding the alarm much sooner? And would all other countries also have not noticed? South-Korea and the US had their first cases at the same time (showing how much different they've handled it), were they both fooled by the virus for months and just happened to notice at the same time? Infections started in November in China, but at that point the number was so small for a country of 1bn+, what are the chances that infected people happened to travel on a plane to the US? If this started in November, then China would still be ahead on getting herd immunity, right? And if this thing was so asymptomatic, then the whole country would've gotten it before they could've locked down Wuhan, right? Much easier to move around China than to fly across the world to the US. Yet why hasn't the rest of the country seen the Wuhan experience replicated everywhere with fevers and pneumonias and deaths? Is China that good at hiding it around the country with lots of western companies watching locally and people on VPNs able to leak info? And why did things only start in Wuhan that late if the R0 is high enough for infection to proceed as fast as you theorize? Coronavirus isn't the influenza. The influenza has a way of mutating and evading vaccines that the coronavirus isn't known for, so trying to compare flu shot effectiveness to theoretical corona herd immunity doesn't work. Seems like the facts on the ground don't line up with your theory. i think there's clearly a lot more people infected than people who got tested positive, that's not controversial at all. Experts have various estimates, I've seen 10x, 30x.. But to think that the number is 100x or 200x over many months and nobody has noticed sounds implausible. Early serum tests seem to show low single digit positives, but time will tell. And trust me, I really want to believe that this is way more asymptomatic and that we're way closer to herd immunity than it seems. That would be AMAZING. But the data doesn't show that, afaict. Also, guessing this will be one of Time's photos of the year, or it should be:

“Omg the libtards actually hold their own leaders accountable for their shortcomings...wonder what that’s like...” Maybe Cuomo will start trying to pass the buck to WHO or a NYC councilman in Queens... Glad the NYT doesn’t emulate the Hannity model of “journalism”... Ha! Some people have ZERO self-awareness. They've been holding double standards for so long that they forget how transparent it looks to the rest of us.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/fxoxti/coronavirus_deaths_vs_other_epidemics_from_day_of/ Day 1 to 100 of various epidemics from the past 20 years.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/trump-admin-pulls-funding-for-drive-through-covid-19-testing/

He may still be looking for the exit to his parents' basement, who knows? Both places have elevators, right? Visa and Sears both have revenues, basically the same company.

Are you actually trying to be this obtuse just for the sake of arguing every single obvious point, or it just comes naturally?

You know what they say. Keeping an open mind is good. But don't have it so open that your brain falls out... Herd immunity could be an end state if we can't suppress and contain it long enough for a vaccine. It's actually not unlikely, sadly. That's different from saying that California already has herd immunity because it has fewer deaths than NYC. It's also very useful to do serum tests for antibodies to random samples of the population to try to better nail down the R0 and CFR of the disease, but I don't think anyone seriously expects that we're already at herd immunity and we just don't know it yet.

You don't understand exponential growth and R0. Places that are set up in a way that R0 is higher emerge first. Other places take longer, but they still get there. Remember how in exponential curves it looks like nothing happens for the longest time and then it all happens in a very short amount of time? Rural places still get colds and the flu, right? In fact, they can potentially be hit harder per capita than big cities because their healthcare isn't as advanced and their populations tend to be less healthy (more obesity, diabetes, etc).

Nice peak into your mental model of what different places look like. NYC has very widely used public transportation, lots of international travel and close proximity living, making it more likely to have a higher R0 and so to emerge first. California would emerge latter in any case unless it got unlucky, because the conditions aren't as favorable to the virus as NYC. It can't be herd immunity, because to get to herd immunity with a disease with a R0 between 2-5 you need maybe 40-80% of the population to be infected. But if we already had herd immunity this quick, the R0 would have had to have been much higher, like measles or pertussis, right? But with a R0 of 12 or more, you need over 90% of the population to be infected before you get herd immunity. If 90% of california had SARS-CoV-2, believe me, it wouldn't have happened without anyone noticing it. So in short, your theory doesn't make sense. Not to mention that so far, testing in random population samples seems to give results closer to 1% for antibodies, nowhere near enough for herd immunity.

Japanese study on micro-droplets that hang in the air as a potential infection vector:

A lot of places in California were early with social distancing and shutdowns. A lot of techies over there saw this coming early (and I remember some derisive articles about it at the time, about the paranoid VCs having "no handshake" policies and taking their kids out of school)... I think this helps explains why California has done better. Any action done very early in a daily exponential process will have HUGE consequences weeks down the line. I doubt we're anywhere near high enough to have herd immunity yet, as early serum tests I've seen are still low single digits and we'd need much higher numbers to get there. There might be more asymptomatic people than we think, but that has pros and cons, as they still can transmit to vulnerable people and are harder to spot.

Considering they cancelled all elective procedures and appointments (or doing them by phone or video) and everything else, and people are probably doing EVERYTHING humanly possible to avoid going to the hospital right now, that makes sense.

Agreed. It pays to be very humble. But being humble mostly should mean being very prepared ahead of time (it's not about predicting rain, but about building arks), studying the issue deeply and trying to understand it as well as we can and learning best practices from others that did good jobs in the past, because we're fallible and should put all chances on our side when the sh*t hits the fan, recruiting the very best people and getting them to work together on the problem, over-reacting early rather than under-reacting so that we have a 10000x bigger problem later that costs way more than any early over-reaction, getting started as fast as possible on any measures like defense production act because we can't be sure how bad it'll get and how long it'll take to get going rather than dither for weeks, etc. All of that is being humble, IMO. Being arrogant is thinking you don't have to prepare, you'll just whing it when the time comes, that you can BS your way through it, you don't have to listen to epidemiologists and virologists and hospital heads but rather get advice from TV personalities and your son-in-law, that you have a "gut feeling" it'll go away on its own, that it's all others fault, muddying the messaging to the population because we like the attention and airtime and the sound of our own voice rather than let the people who know what they're talking about have the mic, etc. So yes, humility very much so, and arrogance is what got us here.

What did they do? Please describe it to us. I don't think you understand what measures were deployed there to get good results.

1) You're not doing what you're saying your doing. You're not some epistemology geek trying to refine our thinking. You're just trying to score points with a few questions that don't really add any insight to the discussion, because we're clearly already aware of what you're saying here and then some. Meanwhile, you ignore all the other points that have been made to you and have no response for them and haven't updated your thinking on anything even when people point out the obvious flaws in what you say, so this isn't good faith discussion, just BS trolling on your part. Deaths from driving don't compound daily for weeks and weeks and risk destroying the healthcare sector of multiple countries by overwhelming it with patients while shutting down international travel and supply chains, btw. 2) The US definitely was on track for something in the magnitude of 500k deaths or more a few weeks ago when those numbers were floated, but changes in policy have changed the trajectory (mostly thanks to governors and mayors deciding to shut down in the face of a vacuum of leadership at the federal level, but many states were still much slower than they should've been if there had been leadership at the top, and they'll have bigger outbreaks than they otherwise would've -- was it the governor of Georgia who recently said he didn't know symptomatic people could transmit it and then shut down because of it?). There's reflexivity here, as high predictions lead to bigger actions which lead to fewer deaths (and then to dumbass saying "well, we did it for nothing, see how it wasn't as bad as initially predicted?"). It's Y2K all over again. If we do it right, the early predictions don't come to pass, but it doesn't mean that we should've done nothing. The variables are linked, not independent.

What is the real forward total return on your portfolio? How many people working for companies you own have done something illegal in the past month? Thanks. (It's not because you can't know something with precision that you know nothing about it and should just do random things... you can look at past experience, base rates, mechanistic understanding of the situation, etc, to determine what's the best course of action based on the best available data at the time, while adjusting constantly as new data comes in and as what you're doing has an impact on the trajectory, and with probabilistic models (note the wide outcome distribution). Otherwise, if you really believe the line that you're trying to sell here, why are you investing at all? You can't know everything about what you invest in and you can't know the future, so might as well give up, right?)

You know that every other country started with just 1 case and 1 death, right?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-dangerous-coronavirus-mission-accomplished-moment

As opposed to? As opposed to before March 22nd. Isnt the shutdown supposed to reduce cases and deaths, at least after 2 weeks? If it went down, the curve wouldn't be flattened. Their goal was to flatten it. That implies no decline in the case load. It takes more than two weeks to see an effect because no shutdown is perfect, and those who catch it then infect their families with whom they're quarantined (they stay asymptomatic for days), and it then takes weeks for those people to fight through the disease, and hopefully they don't in turn don't infect too many other people.. For India: Looks like as of 2 days ago, India did 18,000 tests a day. So even if somehow 100% of tests came back positive, they couldn't have more than a few tens of thousands of reported cases in a country of 1.35bn. People shouldn't confuse reported cases with actual cases. https://www.bloombergquint.com/coronavirus-outbreak/india-aims-to-scale-up-covid-19-testing-to-one-lakh-daily This here has even lower numbers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107370/india-coronavirus-covid-19-tests-per-day/ 12k at peak, and in the 1-2k range just a week before that. This official release seems to say that capacity is now 18k, and that total cumulative tests so far for India is 96k. https://www.icmr.nic.in/sites/default/files/press_realease_files/Press_Brief_6April2020.pdf

I don't think this tool does what you think it does. I think you are wrong. I referenced the part of the FAQs that explains the question I posed to try to avoid this response. You misinterpreted my reference to AIDS as well. The point of my original post was that experts recommend different actions for different threats. You said I was wrong and then repeated what I wrote in a specific instance (as opposed to general). I think you are fighting with idiots too much 8). My point isn't to suggest that the model is saying we are eradicating the disease in 2 months of social distancing. My point was that expectations have been lowered to the point that the public is going to be disappointed in the future. I didn't misinterpret your reference to AIDS, but maybe mine wasn't clear. I was also pointing out that different threats necessitate different response, reinforcing that with an illustration. And if your point was that "that expectations have been lowered to the point that the public is going to be disappointed in the future", then I didn't get that from what you wrote at all, but I agree with it if that's what people are taking from it. But I hope people are smart enough (well, futile hope, maybe) to use the model to try to get a ballpark for the peaks in deaths, resource usage, etc, but don't use it as a comprehensive model for the whole epidemic.

They could show zero on that chart if they just didn't test too. Ramping up of testing is finding infections that were undetected before, it's not caused by the shutdown. Also, whatever cases you're seeing tested are infections that happened many days before, as people usually get tested by the time they have bad enough symptoms to go to a hospital/clinic. You're like a guy who has read one investing book coming to an investing forum and trying to tell everybody why they're wrong about everything while obviously making all the newbie mistakes. It's just embarrassing.