COVID19 Factors We Should Consider/Current Events

[RKC]

We could make a wish list?

Looks like Idaho has now joined the club...

[m s]

I read through this. Not every word, but a whole lot of it. I'm tempted to tell my family to be on lockdown for 1 week, with the exception of attending our church services, after reading that. I'm certainly going to let my assistant work from home when she returns from her spring break trip, for at least one week.

Of course, it's probably too late. (I'm in Tampa)

Surprised no one else has responded directly to your post yet, either.

I'll respond. I think the article is wrong about the fatality rate, and the real fatality rate is much lower than stated in the article. A large percentage of cases go unreported. A large number of carriers do not even know they are infected. How can the author suggest a fatality rate solely based off reported cases and deaths? And you're going to have your family be on lockdown except for attending church -- a large social gathering? You might as well just as forego your silly lockdown then.

[Soule]

Just double dose the testosterone this week, boys, and everything will be fine.

Or at least you’ll be swole for the impending apocalypse.

Fuck you asshats who bought all the TP.

[mpalios]

1) said I was tempted, not that I was going to do it.

2) what are your credentials to state that the article is wrong?

I'll respond. I think the article is wrong about the fatality rate, and the real fatality rate is much lower than stated in the article. A large percentage of cases go unreported. A large number of carriers do not even know they are infected. How can the author suggest a fatality rate solely based off reported cases and deaths? And you're going to have your family be on lockdown except for attending church -- a large social gathering? You might as well just as forego your silly lockdown then.

[zinedine kilbane]

Old people and those with underlying medical conditions. This has some good data summaries of death rates by age and medical condition
The coronavirus pandemic: visualising the global crisis | World news | The Guardian

[Kitsuma]

Regarding data...
Potential false-positive rate among the 'asymptomatic infected individuals' in close contacts of COVID-19 patients - nih.gov

The pandemic is only as real as the tests & resulting data

[dalan]

Just double dose the testosterone this week, boys, and everything will be fine.

Or at least you’ll be swole for the impending apocalypse.

Fuck you asshats who bought all the TP.

My man![emoji106]

[spacediver]

I'll respond. I think the article is wrong about the fatality rate, and the real fatality rate is much lower than stated in the article. A large percentage of cases go unreported. A large number of carriers do not even know they are infected. How can the author suggest a fatality rate solely based off reported cases and deaths? And you're going to have your family be on lockdown except for attending church -- a large social gathering? You might as well just as forego your silly lockdown then.

Yes, estimating case fatality rate is very difficult at this stage, for reasons including the one you state. The author does, however, give a fairly good discussion, and the point about case fatality rate being much lower when a community prepares, and flattens the curve, seems solid, even if the absolute values may be inaccurate.

The two ways you can calculate the fatality rate is Deaths/Total Cases and Death/Closed Cases. The first one is likely to be an underestimate, because lots of open cases can still end up in death. The second is an overestimate, because it’s likely that deaths are closed quicker than recoveries.

What I did was look at how both evolve over time. Both of these numbers will converge to the same result once all cases are closed, so if you project past trends to the future, you can make a guess on what the final fatality rate will be.
This is what you see in the data. China’s fatality rate is now between 3.6% and 6.1%. If you project that in the future, it looks like it converges towards ~3.8%-4%. This is double the current estimate, and 30 times worse than the flu.

...

This is what you can conclude:
Excluding these, countries that are prepared will see a fatality rate of ~0.5% (South Korea) to 0.9% (rest of China).
Countries that are overwhelmed will have a fatality rate between ~3%-5%

[spacediver]

I read through this. Not every word, but a whole lot of it. I'm tempted to tell my family to be on lockdown for 1 week, with the exception of attending our church services, after reading that. I'm certainly going to let my assistant work from home when she returns from her spring break trip, for at least one week.

Of course, it's probably too late. (I'm in Tampa)

Surprised no one else has responded directly to your post yet, either.

Yea, it's a sobering read. I think some of his analysis is a bit off, but I believe the fundamental points are solid.

To be clear, I have little concern about myself contracting it (I'm healthy, early 40's). My primary concern is that our health care system isn't overwhelmed. "Flattening the curve" should be a meme that everyone absorbs.

I'm very encouraged that at least over here in Ontario, serious measures are being taken, and that the public's behaviour has radically shifted, even in advance of the storm that's approaching our hospitals (one of our biggest liabilities as a species is how we tend to react rather than prevent).

Nassim Taleb recently co-authored an interesting short piece.

His argument, as I understand it, is that given the huge uncertainties early on in an outbreak, the precautionary principle should be invoked, since over the long run, it just takes one pandemic to ruin us, and we can't afford to play Russian roulette.

A relevant quote:

It will cost something to reduce mobility in the short term, but to fail do so will eventually cost everything—if not from this event, then one in the future. Outbreaks are inevitable, but an appropriately precautionary response can mitigate systemic risk to the globe at large. But policy- and decision-makers must act swiftly and avoid the fallacy that to have an appropriate respect for uncertainty in the face of possible irreversible catastrophe amounts to "paranoia," or the converse a belief that nothing can be done.

Another seemingly good source of info:

Don’t Panic: The comprehensive Ars Technica guide to the coronavirus [Updated 3/13] | Ars Technica

[Mark Rippetoe]

2) what are your credentials to state that the article is wrong?

My god, man! Credentials allow a person to refute an argument??? What kind of stupid comment is this? Do you know where you are? Does your doctor know you are squatting?

Old people and those with underlying medical conditions. This has some good data summaries of death rates by age and medical condition

Exactly. People who die. Of the flu. Of pneumonia. When the rest of us are just sick for a while. Like in 2009 with the H1N1 Swine Flu, which infected 61 million people and killed 18,000.

A relevant quote:

It will cost something to reduce mobility in the short term, but to fail do so will eventually cost everything—if not from this event, then one in the future. Outbreaks are inevitable, but an appropriately precautionary response can mitigate systemic risk to the globe at large. But policy- and decision-makers must act swiftly and avoid the fallacy that to have an appropriate respect for uncertainty in the face of possible irreversible catastrophe amounts to "paranoia," or the converse a belief that nothing can be done.

This cannot happen, for this reason:

Did Disagreement Over Abortion Slow Coronavirus-Relief Talks?