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Thread: COVID19 Factors We Should Consider/Current Events

  1. #1591
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    Quote Originally Posted by spacediver View Post
    This is a point that I have not seen addressed (although I may have missed it), and it's a strong one, if the premise is true.

    I've seen people estimate that given what we (think) we know about the virus's transmissibilty, that the entire globe would be infected in 2 months if unchecked.

    But if the virus actually has been here since, say December or even January, then why hasn't the entire US population already been infected, since it's had a huge head start before we began physically distancing?

    Here are some possibilities that I can come up with:

    1) It hasn't actually been here since Dec/Jan.
    2) We are overestimating its transmissibility.
    3) We are overestimating its IFR.
    Well sir, why the fuck is there a flu SEASON?

  2. #1592
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rob Waskis View Post
    My God man, is your attention to detail really that poor? Did you actually click the link or just read the hyperlink title? The page lists total deaths on the line RIGHT BELOW CASES
    What the hell is wrong with you? Your linked page gives the *total number of deaths*, while we -- specifically *you* -- were talking about the *daily number of deaths*. Let me remind you:
    Quote Originally Posted by Rob Waskis View Post
    The worst day as reported by the CDC was back on April 6th (reported on the 7th) with 3154 deaths. The following days were 690, 1942, 1900, 1920, 1970, and 1456 as of noon today.
    Those numbers are *nowhere* on this page. And no reputable source has ever cited an actual daily death count anywhere near 3154 so far. The correct link to the CDC mortality statistics is this one: Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) -- which of course also disagrees with your numbers.

    BUT, I think I've managed to reverse engineer where your number comes from. What I think you've done is grabbed the total number from that page on every day and called the difference between successive dates a "daily death count".

    This, of course, is ridiculous. The number of deaths reported on any given day do NOT just refer to the number who died that day -- reports keep coming for a long time after any given day, reporting on weekends may be sketchy, etc etc. The CDC death count page I linked to above starts by saying "Death counts are delayed and may differ from other published sources (see Technical Notes)" and if you then look at the technical notes -- which I'm sure only one of us has done -- you also find this: "Provisional counts reported here track approximately 1–2 weeks behind other published data sources on the number of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. (1,2,3)." (And citation number 1 refers to the JHU data base I am using.)

    Christ, if there ever was a better illustration of why armchair epidemiology is a bad idea, this is it. "Analysing" data you do not understand is a fucking recipe for disaster.

    For the love of all that is holy, could you please just acknowledge that you fucked up?

    Quote Originally Posted by spacediver View Post
    You're missing a crucial variable here - physical distancing. The German study infection rate would be higher were it not be for physical distancing.

    So yes, theoretical US infections with same physical distancing as Germany (and timed similarly) would be 15%.
    I just want to briefly add to this obvious point. People are acting as if this 15% is some sort of upper limit on what you might get in an unchecked outbreak, or with just ordinary "common sense" personal hygiene. I hope this is true, but I don't see evidence for this in the actual numbers. Specifically:
    • The carnival event in Gangelt (the town we are talking about in Germany) happened on Feb 15.
    • The state mandated serious social interventions no later than March 16, when schools were closed, for example.
    • The town has a population of about 10,000 people, so 15% means about 150 infected people.
    • So the number of infection doubled a little over 7 times from the single first index case.
    • If we thought the growth from the index case to those 150 infections was exponential and happened between Feb 15 and March 16, what doubling time would be implied? Well, it's about 4 days -- which isn't particularly crazy at all compared to what we've seen elsewhere.

    Obviously, this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation to gain some intuition. For example, the very initial spread may have been faster because of the carnival event. And of course people will have started to adopt more than common sense social distancing measures well before the schools closed. Those would pull in different directions.

    So my point is not that we know that 15% would definitely have become 70% or whatever. My point is simply that there is no reason to think from this that 15% is an upper limit.

  3. #1593
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    Quote Originally Posted by lazygun37 View Post
    As I'm writing this, the number of deaths is already higher than that in the second lowest flu season in the last 7 years for which there is complete data. And yeah, that's "fairly standard" in my book. (Would replacing "fairly standard" with "not unusual" make you happier?) As I'm sure you know, an outlier would be defined as something like 1 in 20 or less. But whatever: if 2 in 7 makes it an outlier for you, give it another week or two.


    Look Rob, you're just wrong on this. We are talking about *deaths* but the site you're linking to is about *cases*. (The numbers on that page also don't match those you mentioned, but that's probably a typo or something.)


    I don't know what to tell you, other than to read the paper. Tables 4 and 5 show a huge range of scenarios and their impact on things like the number of deaths. The actual number in the table are for the UK, but as the Table 4 caption explicitly states "Results are qualitatively similar for the US." The table shows that, depending on which exact strategy is adopted, the number of deaths will be reduced by factors between about 5 and 50 (for their reference case of R0 = 2.4 -- they even show numbers for other values of R0). In the US, where the detailed strategy is decided at state level, there is obviously no single "correction factor". (Maybe this is what you mean by granularity?) But you can still tell pretty easily that the numbers they predict are perfectly reasonable. As a country, the US is going to be somewhere in the middle of the severity of those restrictions. So that would be about a factor of 15 or so. So 2.2M for an unchecked outbreak then becomes 150,000 (with obviously significant uncertainty). And, as they explicitly state, the IFR they adopted at the time was 0.9%, so if we think it's 0.4% now, that number becomes 65,000.

    I know that everybody here is now going to jump up and down about how useless models are that are that uncertain, etc etc. But that's just a misunderstanding of how models work or what they are used for. Everything you need to vet what they've done is provided for you. If you don't like the IFR -- or better data becomes available -- you update it. That's the point of models. It's not a flaw. And the fact that different suppression measures produce different degrees of suppression is just that -- a fact. It's not a flaw of the model -- it is what it is.

    OF COURSE, all models are wrong in detail -- but some are useful. At the level at which this one is intended, it's pretty good -- it allows you to make better informed decisions.



    You may not have noticed this, but it's a little unrealistic to expect me to respond to every poster on here who thinks I'm wrong. But fuck it, here are a couple of questions you apparently wanted answered:
    • [W]hen schools need to close because of a snowstorm, should that decision be made by the principal, the superintendent, the school board, the board of freeholders/county legislature, the state governor, Congress, the President, or the United Nations?
      • This may shock you, but snowstorms aren't infectious. I am totally comfortable with localism where it's appropriate. It's appropriate for a snowstorm. It isn't for a pandemic. Ask Nassim Taleb (who I would have thought you'd like better than I do, even though we can probably both agree he's not stupid).
    • [Do you think the] only answer [to the epidemic] is martial law, ankle bracelets, movement tracking, etc.?
      • No, because that would be stupid. What I said was that, if and when a suppression based on social intervention has worked, we will need a strategy to avoid major second (and third, and fourth...) waves. And that strategy will probably have to include mass testing and contact tracing. But there should obviously to strict rules: (a) all of it needs to be temporary, ceasing at the very latest when a vaccine becomes available; (b) testing and contact tracing should be done in an anonymized/encrypted way, with anonymization only relaxed to allow actual positive tests to be contacted and traced; (c) if the numbers are kept small enough, it might even be possible to ONLY contact trace new infections. And no, I'm not actually comfortable with any of this at all. But I'm still waiting to hear better alternatives.
    • Are you ok with the government telling Walmart what they can and can not sell?
      • Yes, in an actual emergency, why the hell not? If it stops a bunch of idiots going out to buy a nicer pair of shoes during a pandemic, great. It's not about those idiots, it's about everybody else those idiots may put in harm's way. In fact, I think it was *workers* in those stores who complained they were being put at risk by bored idiots browsing the stores.


    I'll probably take another break from posting here for at least a few weeks, though I would still like to hear your (and Rip's!) response to three questions:

    • (1) What's your best estimate of the number of deaths you'd if the outbreak wasn't suppressed? If it's substantially less than, say, 1 million, what was the assumed IFR and fraction of the population who was infected? And where did those numbers come from?
    • Regardless of what your estimate for COVID-19 is, if *some* epidemic could be expected to produce, say, 1 million deaths without strict social interventions:
      • (2) Would such interventions be justified?
      • (3) Do you think the economy could continue to function more or less normally while such an unchecked infection goes on?
    3rd time of asking:

    In which State do you live Lazygun?

    Quote Originally Posted by lazygun37 View Post
    This is pretty rich, considering that pretty much all I've done in this thread is vet data-based claims *you* have made. I've yet to find a single instance where the data actually supported your view. I also think it's telling that every time this happens, you immediately switch topic. You don't even try to justify your incorrect claims (and God forbid you might acknowledge that they were wrong.)

    You know, the only reason I'm even part of this community is that I've always valued what you've done for strength training. Specifically, that you logically and rationally analysed both the technique of the basic lifts and the way in which they can be efficiently programmed. As you might expect, there are many aspects of your "Corporate Culture" statement I couldn't sign up to, but I could sign up to this: "We value reason and logic over feeling and emotion, since quantification and verification are preferable to subjective assertion and whim.". But this is not what I see in this thread. All I see is subjective assertion and whim -- and then getting pissed off when anybody actually does use quantification and verification. This is not how the scientific method works.
    4th time of asking:

    In which state do you live Lazygun?

    A reminder of the definition of Cowardice, Oxford English Dictionary:

    “A person who is not brave or who does not have the courage to do things that other people do not think are especially difficult“.

  4. #1594
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    Quote Originally Posted by spacediver View Post
    This is a point that I have not seen addressed (although I may have missed it), and it's a strong one, if the premise is true.

    I've seen people estimate that given what we (think) we know about the virus's transmissibilty, that the entire globe would be infected in 2 months if unchecked.

    But if the virus actually has been here since, say December or even January, then why hasn't the entire US population already been infected, since it's had a huge head start before we began physically distancing?

    Here are some possibilities that I can come up with:

    1) It hasn't actually been here since Dec/Jan.
    2) We are overestimating its transmissibility.
    3) We are overestimating its IFR.
    4)We don't have a clue how many people get it with mild symptoms or none at all.

  5. #1595
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rob Waskis View Post
    Because the data doesn't exist to confidently claim otherwise
    Some data recently made available would support the claim that this is not a simple flu:

    From Italy:

    http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/cal...si_2020w13.pdf

    That's number of deaths for people over 65, by week, un to March 31st, compared to average for the last five years, adjusted for ageing population. The spike is undeniable.

    From the UK.
    The stats office has just released some data that point to a similar dynamics:

    Coronavirus: One in five deaths now linked to virus - BBC News

    (see picture mid-way through text).
    Bear in mind this is only for the week ending April 3rd;

    Couldn't find the same numbers for Spain, or France, yet.

    Is a similar data set available for the US? Could be useful to compare the trends.

    IPB

  6. #1596
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    Quote Originally Posted by lazygun37 View Post
    First, Sweden vs Norway shows that interventions do something.
    surely a smart guy like yourself realizes that population density matters, right? Why do you keep bringing up sweden vs norway? Its like new york vs los angeles.

  7. #1597
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    Taking this number crunching a bit further let’s analyze the current total mortality model predictions and determine an infection rate. We’ll stick with the .5% IFR because it still has that nice 5 TIMES AS DEADLY AS THE FLU! ring to it and matches several citations and data sources. So:

    Formula:
    Infection rate = mortality / IFR / total population

    US mortality = 68,841 projected
    Sweden mortality = 18,322 projected
    Norway mortality = 811 projected
    UK mortality = 23,791 projected
    China mortality = 3,341 actual
    S Korea mortality = 222 actual

    US infection rate = 4.2% projected
    Sweden infection rate = 36.6% projected
    Norway infection rate = 3.2% projected
    UK infection rate = 7.2% projected
    China infection rate = .05% actual
    S Korea infection rate = .09% actual

  8. #1598
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    Quote Originally Posted by spacediver View Post
    This is a point that I have not seen addressed (although I may have missed it), and it's a strong one, if the premise is true.

    I've seen people estimate that given what we (think) we know about the virus's transmissibilty, that the entire globe would be infected in 2 months if unchecked.

    But if the virus actually has been here since, say December or even January, then why hasn't the entire US population already been infected, since it's had a huge head start before we began physically distancing?

    Here are some possibilities that I can come up with:

    1) It hasn't actually been here since Dec/Jan.
    2) We are overestimating its transmissibility.
    3) We are overestimating its IFR.
    4) Most (or a great deal of) the entire population of the US HAS already been infected.

  9. #1599
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    Quote Originally Posted by Soule View Post
    Well sir, why the fuck is there a flu SEASON?
    I don't see the point you are trying to make.

    But as far as the COVID19 thing that is going around.
    It is "novel", and it's first go around might not behave the same way as the seasonal flu.
    No one had an immunity from being previously infected (or via vaccine obvs.) before hand. Everyone is a virgin.

    IIRC 2009 N1H1 was this way. It hit in April/June and peaked in August (dead of summer) in its 'first year'.
    Then was abruptly tamped down, then peaked again quickly in winter, as you would expect.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    Same thing back in the 80s with AIDS. Same fucking thing.
    I have tried (very unsuccessfully) to google an article or quote for this. I also recall someone, somewhere in this thread, mentioning it (it may have been you). Do you have a link, easily at your fingertips, to find an article, etc. quoting this from the 1980s? Thanks.

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