starting strength gym
Page 40 of 3004 FirstFirst ... 30383940414250901405401040 ... LastLast
Results 391 to 400 of 30035

Thread: COVID19 Factors We Should Consider/Current Events

  1. #391
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    95

    Default

    • starting strength seminar april 2024
    • starting strength seminar jume 2024
    • starting strength seminar august 2024
    Just as I finished my previous post, I was made aware of this seriously impressive epidemic calculator: Epidemic Calculator
    This is still nowhere near as sophisticated as the model used by Ferguson et al, for example, but it gives you at least a flavour.

    And if we're going to be sharing Medium articles all the time, this one would be worth your time: 404 Not Found

  2. #392
    Join Date
    Dec 2013
    Location
    Indiana
    Posts
    1,927

    Default

    I was able to save that post to PDF. I had it in an open browser window last night (Mar 21), and was able to print-to-PDF.

  3. #393
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    95

    Default

    One last thing for today. Words like hysteria are getting thrown a lot on this thread and elsewhere:

    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    Lazygun: Here's some data. It will not be sufficiently hysterical.
    Quote Originally Posted by Culican View Post
    Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19
    Quote Originally Posted by Barry Charles View Post
    When everything is a crisis and/or an existential threat ... the hysteria had to reach a tipping point.
    Yet in the very same thread, we see measured and thoughtful posts like this:

    Quote Originally Posted by Kitsuma View Post
    Agreed, we know nothing. We have been told it is man-made.
    Quote Originally Posted by Kitsuma View Post
    What would have happened had the President taken a more measured approach? 25th Amendment impeachment? No doubt in my mind.
    Quote Originally Posted by Yngvi View Post
    "“We can give orders, but if you don’t follow it, it’s useless,” “We all must do our part.” - Every communist and authoritarian government in history + the comrades in San Francisco government. ... How many hours until we see extreme unrest and possible rioting or looting in SF?
    Quote Originally Posted by Yngvi View Post
    This virus votes Democrat. Don't you forget it.
    Quote Originally Posted by ltomo View Post
    The government is now flexing its muscle at a time that is far too convenient to be a coincidence.
    Quote Originally Posted by ltomo View Post
    The people I work with are talking about making sure everyone of us has a gun and several boxes of ammunition.
    Quote Originally Posted by ltomo View Post
    Your attitude and the people who think like you are directly threatening to harm me. ... What are our options for ending this shut-down? Non-compliance? Contact law enforcement? Find out where my city leaders live and protest while exercising my second amendment rights?
    Quote Originally Posted by Barry Charles View Post
    [G]lobalism, Trump, racism, sexism, and income inequality, had to be stopped at any cost. ... So we’ve readily thrown our economy into the toilet as well as our freedom and liberty over the flu because it sucks being wrong all the time.
    Quote Originally Posted by ltomo View Post
    Nothing gives the government or anyone else the right to force me to do something without my consent. [Well, except for harming other people, of course. Which is pretty relevant here.]
    ...
    The right to freely associate is more important than life. [Sure, as long as those people who associate are aware of the risks of doing it in person and don't inflict those risks on the rest of us.]
    Quote Originally Posted by ltomo View Post
    The governors of these states do not have the manpower to enforce a lockdown without calling in the National Guard. ... Our rights are being infringed on an unprecedented scale. The leaders of our states do not care about our well-being. ... Call their bluff. Reopen your business and resume normal activities. I don't see any other option at this point.
    Seriously -- you think everybody else is being hysterical? You're being asked to sit on your couch while hopefully those irritating experts, doctors and nurses find a way out of this crisis. The humanity!

  4. #394
    Join Date
    Apr 2015
    Location
    Texas
    Posts
    137

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by OldDog View Post
    I'm very interested in this. Can you point me to some specific data please? This is a genuine question. I'm in a higher risk group by age but what I see happening to my community and the economy and the long term effects of all this fear concerns me greatly.

    Full agreement on the travesty.
    I read a Chinese study on transmissibility. It was very technical.

    The point is, social distancing, hand washing, and cleaning surfaces, and quarantine does not mean the state shutting down business and shutting down the economy.

    Here is the WHO report on transmissibilty from China:

    Household transmission
    In China, human-to-human transmission of the COVID-19 virus is largely occurring in
    families. The Joint Mission received detailed information from the investigation of clusters
    and some household transmission studies, which are ongoing in a number of Provinces.
    Among 344 clusters involving 1308 cases (out of a total 1836 cases reported) in Guangdong
    Province and Sichuan Province, most clusters (78%-85%) have occurred in families.
    Household transmission studies are currently underway, but preliminary studies ongoing in
    Guangdong estimate the secondary attack rate in households ranges from 3-10%.

    Contact Tracing
    China has a policy of meticulous case and contact identification for COVID-19. For example,
    in Wuhan more than 1800 teams of epidemiologists, with a minimum of 5 people/team, are
    tracing tens of thousands of contacts a day. Contact follow up is painstaking, with a high
    percentage of identified close contacts completing medical observation. Between 1% and
    5% of contacts were subsequently laboratory confirmed cases of COVID-19, depending on
    location. For example:
    • As of 17 February, in Shenzhen City, among 2842 identified close contacts, 2842
    (100%) were traced and 2240 (72%) have completed medical observation. Among
    the close contacts, 88 (2.8%) were found to be infected with COVID-19.
    9
    • As of 17 February, in Sichuan Province, among 25493 identified close contacts,
    25347 (99%) were traced and 23178 (91%) have completed medical observation.
    Among the close contacts, 0.9% were found to be infected with COVID-19.

    • As of 20 February, in Guangdong Province, among 9939 identified close contacts,
    9939 (100%) were traced and 7765 (78%) have completed medical observation.
    Among the close contacts, 479 (4.8%) were found to be infected with COVID-19.

    They have intensive contact monitoring. Very low transmission.

    From a NEJM editorial:

    In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2

    Quote Originally Posted by lazygun37 View Post
    Do you even bother to think about your own posts? Every single number you have quoted is consistent with the roughly 1% the dreaded experts have been using as typical in modelling and forecasting. Nobody is using Italy's 8% for that purpose. And that 1% is about 10x the CFR of the seasonal flu.

    Iceland is indeed by far the lowest, but it also has the lowest case number, and hence by far the largest statistical uncertainty. Tell you what, I'll make your argument for you: Germany seems to have -- sorry, Rip; fuck, this is a hard habit to break -- definitely has a much better established, and still abnormally low, raw CFR of about 0.4% (84 deaths, 22213 cases). Which is still about 4x higher than the CFR of the flu. And believe it or not, all those stupid experts actually are trying really hard to figure out why that is, because that's important for understanding and fighting the disease. If we're lucky, the low number is a better measure of the true rate (because Germany tests more/better), but there are probably (sorry again) other factors also. For example, Germany's communist health care system turns out to be pretty bloody awesome, and the population who first brought the disease from Italy included a lot of young skiers with high resilience.
    Iceland has the highest testing per capita in the world. Their numbers are the most accurate. Again, you don't know what you're writing about. You seem like you really want COVID-19 to be REALLY BAD AND REALLY SCARY.

    The case number for COVID-19 and all viruses under-counts the true cases.

    The death count is closer to accurate, because all or nearly all critically ill patients will be tested.

    This is exactly how influenza mortality rates are calculated. There are many more cases assumed (the denominator) that actual positive tests.

    So the death rates are looking very close to this year's influenza, once the non-tested cases are factored in.

  5. #395
    Join Date
    Apr 2018
    Posts
    318

    Default

    Here are some things I believe to be true based on what I’ve seen so far:
    1. COVID-19 is pretty contagious.
    2. It’s basically harmless if you’re under sixty, but the risk of death goes up very quickly as people approach eighty and if they have other health conditions.
    3. People in the U.S. are super anxious about all this.
    4. Since the virus can cause pneumonia, lack of ventilators is a problem.
    5. Japan has basically contained the virus at this point.
    6. This disease will have an outsized effect on wealthy people who travel.
    7. People are fairly adaptable.

    The first two points means it spreads easily, since most people won’t show significant symptoms and will just go about their daily business, and that vulnerable populations are very likely to get sick in a pandemic scenario, even as everyone else remains healthy. So there’s justification for doing something.

    But when you look at the third and sixth points, chances of a overreaction are super high. I know plenty of healthy people in their twenties and thirties who are panicked about this and are at virtually no personal risk. But newsrooms run by the exact people who have the most to lose are driving this anxiety.

    The most important things to do are still to practice good hygiene and a degree of social distancing, which should not be new concepts to anyone. Meanwhile, going to places that are bound to get you sick in a normal flu season - stadium events, K-12 schools, department stores, crowded public transport - is not a great idea. This, combined with a focus on finding outbreak centers quickly and wearing face masks in crowded areas, seems to have done the job in Japan, so it is probably all that is necessary. Anything more is likely to do more harm than good. I’d recommend unbanning drinking straws, too.

    What’s probably most relevant to people on this board is that measures of individual action - practicing good hygiene, staying out of obvious disease areas, protecting your own health with proper habits - are much more effective with many fewer drawbacks than intervention by outside actors. Someone said something about squats not helping against the virus, and I completely disagree. Anything that fights against the sick aging phenotype is going to be a positive for fighting a respiratory disease.

    Lastly, I don’t see the economy collapsing based on the last point above. There’s definitely going to be a shock to the system, but people will figure out how to do things online, and some industries may even become more efficient or find new business opportunities due to the outbreak. In my own industry, I’ve seen the disease used as an excuse to push along planned restructuring and increasing the rate of innovation. I think forcing businesses that require on-site labor to close is a bad idea, on the other hand, and I hope this trend reverses soon.

  6. #396
    Join Date
    Jul 2007
    Location
    North Texas
    Posts
    53,559

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by lazygun37 View Post
    One last thing for today. Words like hysteria are getting thrown a lot on this thread and elsewhere:

    Yet in the very same thread, we see measured and thoughtful posts like this:

    Seriously -- you think everybody else is being hysterical? You're being asked to sit on your couch while hopefully those irritating experts, doctors and nurses find a way out of this crisis. The humanity!
    Hysteria: exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, especially among a group of people.

    Who is hysterical here?

    Quote Originally Posted by VNV View Post
    I was able to save that post to PDF. I had it in an open browser window last night (Mar 21), and was able to print-to-PDF.
    Evidence Over Hysteria was obviously racist.

  7. #397
    Join Date
    Sep 2019
    Posts
    765

    Default

    Does it matter what the percentages are? How severe it actually is, etc? This is an absolute numbers game.

    If the health care system can handle 100 people, and all of a sudden, there's 115, isn't there a problem?

    And if one or two of those extra 15 happen to be doctors/health care workers, could that have a lagging impact on the new 15 + original 100?

    Yes, the above is simplistic. But I think it is the crux of one of the major issues here.

    The second... The value of a life. My deceased mom would have been a very very high at risk person. What would I want to do to assure this didn't kill her in 2 days (that's probably what it would have taken)? Almost anything. But YOUR (no one specifically) mom's life... Not as impactful to me. (someone alluded to this in another post). And how much is that person's life worth, in dollars, to me and/or to you? And what am I willing to do to save that person, and what do I expect YOU to do to help me save that life? And vice versa.

    Probably not conveying my thoughts as smartly as other people here (as was pointed out earlier in the thread). I don't have the answers, but this is something I have been thinking about for a while.

  8. #398
    Join Date
    Jul 2007
    Location
    North Texas
    Posts
    53,559

    Default

    Some racist excerpts from Evidence Over Hysteria:

    The data shows that the overwhelming majority of the working population will not be personally impacted, both individually or their children. This is an unnecessary burden that is distracting resources and energy away from those who need it the most. By preventing Americans from being productive and specializing at what they do best (their vocation), we are pulling resources towards unproductive tasks and damaging the economy. We will need money for this fight. At this rate, we will spend more money on “shelter-in-place” than if we completely rebuilt our acute care and emergency capacity.

    Americans won’t have the freedom to go help those who get sick, volunteer their time at a hospital, or give generously to a charity. Instead, big government came barrelling in like a bull in a china shop claiming they could solve COVID-19. The same government that continued to not test incoming passengers from Europe and who couldn’t manufacture enough test kits with two months' notice.
    Let Americans be free to be a part of the solution, calling us to a higher civic duty to help those most in need and protect the vulnerable. Not sitting in isolation like losers.
    People fear what the government will do, not an infection

    Rampant hoarding and a volatile stock market aren’t being driven by COVID-19. An overwhelming majority of American’s don’t believe they will be infected. Rather hoarding behavior strongly demonstrates an irrational hysteria, from purchasing infective household masks to buying toilet paper in the troves. This fear is being driven by government action, fearing what the government will do next. In South Korea, most citizens didn’t fear infection but the government and public shaming. By presenting a consistent and clear plan that is targeted and specific to those who need the most help will reduce the volatility and hysteria. A sign the logic behind these government actions aren’t widely accepted, nor believed as rational by the American people is the existence itself of the volatility and hysteria. Over three-fourths of Americans are scared not of COVID-19 but what it is doing to our society.

    In CDC’s worst-case scenario, CDC expects more than 150–200 million infections within the US. This estimate is hundreds of times bigger than China’s infection rate (30% of our population compared to 0.006% in China). Does that really sound plausible to you? China has a sub-par healthcare system, attempted to suppress the news about COVID-19 early on, a lack of transparency, an authoritarian government, and millions of Chinese traveling for the Lunar Festival at the height of the outbreak. In the US, we have a significant lead time, several therapies proving successful, transparency, a top tier healthcare system, a democratic government, and media providing ample accountability.
    COVID-19 is a significant medical threat that needs to be tackled, both finding a cure and limiting spread; however, some would argue that a country’s authoritarian response to COVID-19 helped stop the spread. Probably not. In South Korea and Taiwan, I can go to the gym and eat at a restaurant which is more than I can say about San Francisco and New York, despite a significantly lower caseload on a per-capita basis.

    None of the countries the global health authorities admire for their approach issued “shelter-in-place” orders, rather they used data, measurement,and promoted common sense self-hygiene.

    Does stopping air travel have a greater impact than closing all restaurants? Does closing schools reduce the infection rate by 10%? Not one policymaker has offered evidence of any of these approaches. Typically, the argument given is “out of an abundance of caution”. I didn’t know there was such a law. Let’s be frank, these acts are emotionally driven by fear, not evidence-based thinking in the process of destroying people’s lives overnight. While all of these decisions are made by elites isolated in their castles of power and ego, the shock is utterly devastating Main Street.

    A friend who runs a gym will run out of cash in a few weeks. A friend who is a pastor let go of half of his staff as donations fell by 60%. A waitress at my favorite breakfast place told me her family will have no income in a few days as they force the closure of restaurants. While political elites twiddle their thumbs with models and projections based on faulty assumptions, people’s lives are being destroyed with Marxian vigor. The best compromise elites can come up with is $2,000.
    Don’t let them forget it and vote

    These days are precarious as Governors float the idea of martial law for not following “social distancing”, as well as they liked while they violate those same rules on national TV. Remember this tone is for a virus that has impacted 0.004% of our population. Imagine if this was a truly existential threat to our Republic.

    The COVID-19 hysteria is pushing aside our protections as individual citizens and permanently harming our free, tolerant, open civil society. Data is data. Facts are facts. We should be focused on resolving COVID-19 with continued testing, measuring, and be vigilant about protecting those with underlying conditions and the elderly from exposure. We are blessed in one way, there is an election in November. Never forget what happened and vote.

  9. #399
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    95

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Dr.T View Post
    Iceland has the highest testing per capita in the world. Their numbers are the most accurate. Again, you don't know what you're writing about. You seem like you really want COVID-19 to be REALLY BAD AND REALLY SCARY.

    The case number for COVID-19 and all viruses under-counts the true cases.

    The death count is closer to accurate, because all or nearly all critically ill patients will be tested.

    This is exactly how influenza mortality rates are calculated. There are many more cases assumed (the denominator) that actual positive tests.

    So the death rates are looking very close to this year's influenza, once the non-tested cases are factored in.
    Please stop. Your post shows that you don't even understand the difference between precision and accuracy. Until you at least make an effort to understand really basic statistics like this, it's just impossible to even have a conversation.

    Let me try one more time. In a previous post, you wanted me to quote confidence intervals on quantities that were *clearly* dominated by systematic uncertainties, rather than random statistical uncertainties. I pointed this out at the time, and you claimed to understand the difference. Well, you clearly don't.

    An estimate is accurate if it has small systematic errors, i.e. if it's pretty much unbiased.

    An estimate is precise if it has small random statistical errors.

    A measurement can be precise, but inaccurate (which is really bad -- it often means you *think* you know what's going on, but in reality systematics are killing you). This is what you are obviously concerned about in the context of CFRs, and rightly so. Nobody who is serious about this stuff would claim that any of the current estimates are unbiased. I have now stated this multiple times.

    But it is of course also possible for a measurement to be accurate, but imprecise. And depending on the level of imprecision, i.e. how large the purely random uncertainties are, a perfectly unbiased estimate can still be useless, if it's simply not precise enough to matter.

    So, Iceland. Let's just say for argument's sake that you are 100% correct that it is the most accurate CFR estimate available. Well, you might have noticed that I provided a purely statistical 95% confidence interval based on the numbers you provided. For the stats geeks in the audience, I just used a binomial distribution for this. And this showed that Iceland's CFR estimate -- no matter how accurate -- is unfortunately also very imprecise. To the point where it is not, in fact, significantly different from other typical estimates. For example, CFR = 1% is within this 95% confidence interval.

    I'm really sorry that this stuff is dry and technical. And I also know that this is all bound to come across as condescending. But without doing at least this level of homework, I just don't know how you can justify having such strongly-held opinions about things like this.

    Can I finally request that you respond substantively to what I've just said before you bombard me with another new set of data and accusations? It would be really nice to know that you are a big enough person to admit when you don't know something. It's always possible that I am wrong, too, of course -- I do this stuff for a living, but we all make mistakes. Perhaps I screwed up the calculation of the confidence interval, for example. But if that's the case, please explicitly point out what that mistake is, rather than just shouting at me.

  10. #400
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    95

    Default

    starting strength coach development program
    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    Hysteria: exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, especially among a group of people.

    Who is hysterical here?
    Rip, for the fourth time: would you please respond to the sunstantive questions I've asked you? Are you 100% certain this is all just hysteria? If so, evidence please. If not, what is your plan for keeeping the economy going once the number of people infected, hospitalized and dead is so large that nobody wants to leave their house anymore?

    I'd also be immensely grateful if you engaged with my simple plots of your own data, which doesn't appear to support your position. (Sorry -- it definitely doesn't support your position.)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •