Liberty

It is childish to provide a narrative for the thinking of others who are in disagreement with you. I’ll credit him with saving thousands AND with likely killing hundreds of thousands by convincing half the country who listens to him in the early days that it was no big deal, at exactly the time when small actions could’ve alerted the course of things majorly.

How simplistic must one's thinking be to think that because I'd like epidemiological/public health decisions to be made by people who know these fields that I automatically think that organisations like the WHO are perfect and can't be wrong or haven't been politicized (which they shouldn't be, as the US response shouldn't have been turned into a partisan thing by Trump for weeks). I also blame China's politicization of the science, just like in the US. The two can be bad at the same time. Repeating other people's mistakes isn't a good thing, it's bad, and if you held Trump to anything close to the standards that you apply to the things you attack you'd see that.

Meh. Unlikely to be significant. A lot of URI/Sinus infections cause anosmia (taste/smell impact) and not due to brain involvement. Covid-19 binds ACE2 to gain entry in cells. ACE2 as far as I know is primarily expressed in upper respiratory tract and lungs. "neurological symptoms, including confusion, stroke and seizures". You know what else can cause these symptoms? Hypoxia. They're not looking at symptoms, they're predicting this based on the virus itself and where it gets expressed: https://covid.barabasilab.com/2020/03/covid-19-and-network-medicine.html Might be nothing, but I'm glad some people are looking at this too in case it turns out to be something.

Hour-long interview with Chanos (april 2):

Yeah, except it's worse than that in these situation. If the situation had been reversed (by competence), 9 things right and 1 thing wrong might have meant that this had been controlled early (think South Korea) and the result would be VERY different in magnitude. So it's not 9 to 1, but maybe a million-to-one or more in impact.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/02/metro/boston-hospitals-getting-game-changer-machine-that-sterilizes-80000-protective-masks-day/

I'm sure things will be back to normal after the global pandemic.

Because afaik you can ignore sections but not single threads, except by not clicking on them.

Look, if you do one thing right (early China travel ban -- which was probably a fluke done because with the trade war he was looking for any reason to pressure China) but then turn around and call it a hoax and no big deal and it'll go away on its own and airtight controlled and give rallies in arenas and and give no clear direction to states and don't mobilize federal agencies for weeks and have incompetents in those agencies (the war on experts for the past 3 years in favor of loyalists/cronies), pre-announce possible quarantines making sure people flee those areas and spread the virus, contradict experts on TV within the very same press conference, etc, you don't get to pretend that you did the right thing early. You still did WAY more damage than good. The first thing to have done would be to have had smart people able to understand the warnings and react rationally to them in the first place, rather than convince millions of people it wasn't a big deal, which by the time that was turned around, you had daily exponential compounding for weeks.

Video showing the Czech Republic's experience with masks (home-made), going from highly unusual to almost universal in 10 days, and the impact in slowing the virus: Their curves on a log chart:

Don't click on it.

Kasparov:

Quite frankly, that’s a third grade comment. That's generous. The 95% "accuracy" comment is derogatory. The 95% number is often used in statistical analysis (including epidemiology) as a "confidence interval" number. For example, you could say, given this set of assumptions, the value of GSE preferred shares lies between...and...and there is a 95% chance that the real value lies within this range. Some could suggest that the range is quite large, even if underlying assumptions are considered first-rate. One of the problems is that a lot of the decisions being applied now require a confidence interval to be lower (precautionary principle) but the range of potential efficacy (or lack of, on a cost basis) remains very large, because of the underlying weak evidence related to the measures taken. Just last year, there was a good report published about the potential efficacy related to social distancing measures. And there are economic and freedom costs. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0995_article my post is to put into perspective the stupid media reporting, which just goes to the high number to garner clicks...and the devoted attention of many on this thread Nah, you just don't understand how this works. We don't know the R value of this virus, and we don't know how well the measures in place so far will affect it. A tiny change in R value in a daily exponential process can have HUGE impacts down the line, which is why the probability distribution is wide. It's still the best data that we have, and I'd rather be guided by it and an understanding of what each variable does and what interventions best work to best mitigate impacts rather than by someone's gut feeling (see where that has gotten us so far).

Quite frankly, that’s a third grade comment. That's generous.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ua7j979dbqb045/masks_final_n_HF_NA.pdf?dl=0 "The Case for Universal Cloth Mask Adoption & Policies to Increase the Supply of Medical Masks for Health Workers" (April 1 2020) Source:

How to qualify an expert? What if different experts come to different conclusions with the same data? How to deal with fallibility and biases of experts, especially in uncertain situations? What if if policy conclusions are based on values and a subjective aggregation of experts' opinions rather then pure epidemiological data? Disclosure and an example: i'm in the process of getting ready to approach the front line on this thing. As part of the preparation, one of the questions that has come up is: Will there be other waves? The three defining criteria for this question are: 1-social distancing methods 2-the mutagenic potential of the virus and the directionality of that potential 3-herd immunity 2- is unknown and is independent. 1- and 3- are clearly in conflict in the process of policy setting. How do you deal with that? I could provide my own answers but submit that the answers are far from clear, especially at this point. Experts don't know the future, don''t have all the answers, and make mistakes. But they at least know what they're talking about and know what the data means better than laymen and have studied past epidemics (don't have to make all the first-timer mistakes when the stakes are this high, like saying ahead of time you're thinking about quarantining an area, making everybody flee from it and infect other places), and epidemiologists have recommended all kinds of measures forever that were never put in place except in places like Singapore and Taiwan (where epidemiologists are actually now in high offices). They should also be put in charge of the response and best practices should be followed (clear chains of commands and such), rather than have the politicians play reality-TV stars for hours on TV muddling up the message and contradicting them and giving bad advice to populations (it's a hoax, it'll go away on its own, go to restaurants, etc), not coordinating states, not using power to produce equipment fast enough, closing down pandemic groups and offices, making false promises (where are the 5 million tests and fancy websites and drive-through at CVSes etc), no doing statistically significant random testing of the population, etc. If I was going to have brain surgery, I'd certainly rather that a brain surgeon was in charge rather than a TV personality that had never thought about brain surgery until a few weeks ago, or his son in law. Politicians need to get out of the way, every day matters.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/490751-los-angeles-mayor-says-all-residents-should-wear-masks "Los Angeles mayor says all residents should wear masks"

Masks don't work 100%, especially if you live daily with someone who might be infected (and people won't wear masks inside their house 100% of the time anyway). well, shit, let's ignore common sense because it wont work 100%! as if what we are doing now is working 100%....actually close to 100% effective in shutting down economy, so there is your plan! I assumed you were replying to the previous post about multi-generational homes. Masks are useful in public spaces because they reduce R0 if enough people wear them. But they're not real protection for more vulnerable people living with people who go out every day in the population.

New post by Tomas Pueyo, author of the Hammer and the Dance post: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-out-of-many-one-36b886af37e9 If you haven't read the previous post, you should: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

Masks don't work 100%, especially if you live daily with someone who might be infected (and people won't wear masks inside their house 100% of the time anyway).

Sometimes all you have is low tech, and it's better than nothing: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/04/01/national/tottori-cardboard-coronavirus/

Not listening to experts, recently and for years past, is what brought us to this point.

MD showing how he disinfects his groceries and takeout food:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x Also: Also: Here's a map of Coronavirus vulnerability from Bert Sperling, based on density, age, obesity, diabetes, hospitals, ICU beds, and population ...