Jovanski, I like your style, brosef. Now that the objective conditions are ripe, time to mobilize the subjective forces. Does South Africa still have the second largest Gold reserve? If so, its you and me, Tovaresh--Foco 2.0!
This situation hurts my head. Why are the libertarians the only ones acting out of character?
At least suicide is painless. Not like that nasty, awful, painful kung-flu when it karate chops you in the throat.
From the opening line of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx's historical analysis of the French Revolution:
"Hegel remarks somewhere[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
The essay is brilliant and worth a read. Regardless of how you feel about Marx's economic or political writings, his historical analysis is inarguably the best there ever was and appeals to intelligent people across the political spectrum. I remember reading an interview with Steve Bannon where he quoted this essay. I was fucking shocked at how well-read the guy is.
We are a nation of weakness and decadence, and I don't mean the 1%. There is no more courage because we haven't made it. There is no more daring or seeking fresh frontiers because we have willingly given over our agency to the government for decades. There is no more bulwark of the good citizenship against the chaos that was always waiting on the periphery. There is still a thin corps of men and women who have voluntarily subjected themselves to rigor and tragedy, and a few more who, despite their bad fortune, have chosen to conquer and thrive instead of just surviving. It's no wonder the suicide rate amongst returned veterans and working people is so high. Their toil and suffering, though necessary, is wasted in the face of the hubris and weakness of their fellow countrymen. I never felt so alone as when I started working and interacting with civilians. All sense of purpose, pride and shared missioned immediately vanished.
I earnestly hope this fiasco is the final trumpet call that wakes up the nation to their sad reality. Maybe they'll learn that everyone has to shoulder their own load, grow their own strength and resilience... because there are still threats and problems bigger than what we are today. Whatever happens, though, it will be exactly what we deserve.
Interesting data for sure, but unless I've missed a detail, it doesn't answer the question I'm getting at since the numbers are pooled across an entire year.
I'm looking for something akin to peak instantaneous death rate due to influenza related deaths (if the death rate is measured in deaths/day this is the same as daily deaths).
Here is data I've plotted for Italy showing daily Covid-19 deaths:
Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Perhaps more telling would be peak [stress on Italian/Spanish hospitals], maybe measured in units of in-patient flux, or level of ICU demand.
If it turns out that the numbers are not that much of an outlier, then there's some explaining to do from Italian health care workers who are pleading with the rest of the world to learn from their mistakes so as to avoid the horror and trauma they are experiencing.
If it turns out that the numbers are an outlier, and that the situation in Italy is an emergency worth worrying about, then action must be considered, and the question becomes "what action is appropriate"?
Thanks for sharing this, it's helping to shed light on the question I've been trying to get at.
Table 3 shows an estimate of ~25,000 deaths during the worst winter season out of all the periods they studied (2016-2017).
Looking at figure 2, you can see that the 2016-2017 'death season' lasted about half a year.
That's an average daily death rate of ~25,000 deaths/~180 deaths = ~140 deaths a day.
But we can do better. The daily death rate isn't constant, so an average doesn't tell us what the peak daily death rate was. If we (lazily) model the shape of those 'mortality bumps' as a triangle, then the peak daily death rate (height of triangle) can be calculated as follows:
area of triangle (total deaths) = 0.5 * width of bump (duration of death season) * height (peak daily deaths).
25,000 = 0.5 * 180 * peak daily deaths.
peak daily deaths = 277.
However, if we look at figure 2 again (bottom right, showing across all age groups for 2016-2017), the biggest distance between the smooth middle black curve and the red curve is about 6.5 deaths / 100,000 / week. If the population of Italy back then was ~60 million, the is equivalent to a peak of ~560 deaths per day.
So one of my estimates is off, and it's much more likely the first one (I've almost certainly overestimated the duration of the death season when using the triangle model) so let's go with a peak of ~560 deaths per day, due to influenza during 2016.
That's about 60% of the current peak daily death rate (919 yesterday I believe).
The other comparison is the 25,000 deaths during that 180 day period in 2016 vs the 10,000 deaths due to COVID-19 over the last 4 weeks if I'm not mistaken.
Here's what looks to be an open access draft of the WSJ article. In there, they use three case studies to provide estimates, and arrive at the following three figures:
0.1%, 0.03%, and 0.01%
(for reference, the seasonal flu is ~0.1%)
These estimates have to be squared with the daily death rate data we're seeing in Italy and Spain. Not saying they can't be squared, but they do have to be reconciled.
The next few days in New York are going to be very telling.
And as Jeff Riperda discusses, it's likely that different populations are going to be affected differently. I do hope we start to get some good data that will help governments and citizens refine their actions.
Let's wait and see if gold will actually be worth anything once the libertarians are done with it. I am currently spending all my time mourning the fate of King Putin. It seems that the obliteration of energy prices has not only led to the end of the Islamist era, but it has also seriously dampened his march towards becoming Tzar of the East.
Plus, it's got a wicked title.
They can very easily be squared, because all the deaths you've been looking at in those past analyses are excess deaths. As mentioned earlier in this thread, the Italian Health Minister admitted last week that in only twelve per cent of all cases making up the published COVID19 death toll was COVID19 actually listed as the cause of death. In the other eighty-eight per cent of cases, although the person died with the virus, he may not have died of the virus. As a result it may be the case that up to eighty-eight per cent of the published Italian daily death rate are not in fact excess deaths caused by the virus.
Just thought of something else that’s worth consideration: China did a lockdown and now the U.S. is trying to do a lockdown. But the consequences are going to be totally different. In China, more than half the population lives in mega cities. Factory workers for large companies live in dormitories attached to the company. Restaurants have made more money from delivery service than customers on site for a while now. Banking and investment are all done online. Most advertising and sales are done through online platforms. While the construction and real estate industries have been hit hard, for most of the country the lockdown was basically a big nuisance.
I was last in the U.S. in January. Online shopping and delivery are slow and comparatively expensive. People often go to restaurants and move theaters. While I was there, I had to go to a phone store to buy a phone card, to offices when I needed to do paperwork, into downtown for food and groceries, etc. The lifestyle and infrastructure in the U.S. are not at all suited to being on lockdown. A lockdown is much less useful, too, since people don’t live clustered in mega cities and are therefore not going to transmit disease at the same rate, with the possible exception of those in New York. In my daily life in New Jersey, I’ll run into fewer people in an entire week of going to supermarkets, restaurants, gyms, and other public spaces than I would in a single one-way commute or supermarket visit in China. As I said earlier in this thread, I wouldn’t advise going to rock concerts, sporting events, public schools, or other disease-transmission hotspots if it can be avoided. In China, that’s pretty much everywhere outside your own apartment building - I routinely get in close quarters with about fifty people crossing the street at the closest intersection, and I don’t live downtown.
So even if a lockdown was useful in China, with 60% of the population living in similar population density to New York, that doesn’t mean it’s a good option for the USA or anywhere else. This could have a pretty big influence on the models, too.
Not that this is about the models or the spread of disease at this point, as many others have pointed out.
If you don't want to lock down solution is very simple.
Just decide beforehand who will access hospitals' who ICUs and who will die at home. Age, comorbidities, taxes paid in the last year's
Criteria can be dynamic in base of hospital workload or just static in base of economical considerations.
If China fails after reopening the whole world will need to do so