40westwx

I simply stated that we might not have enough information right now to truly know what impact our actions have had on communal spread. I don't think that is inaccurate. Questions like this are what good science is based on. We are missing step 5 below. The scientific method has five basic steps, plus one feedback step: Make an observation. Ask a question. Form a hypothesis, or testable explanation. Make a prediction based on the hypothesis. Test the prediction. Iterate: use the results to make new hypotheses or predictions.

Which parts? The section about the "unknowns"?

It is really hard to say whether or not what is going on right now is evidenced based.. this is a first for pretty much everyone involved... I guess we do have some historical reference.. but the Spanish flu had a mortality rate that was 10-20 times greater than this.

We might be over the hump in places like NYC.. but we really dont know if we are over the hump in other areas.

I agree that social distancing is fine.. but to what extent.. this is the real question at play. What if social distancing was as simple as a few common sense suggestions: If you are immunocompromised or have significant risk factors, self isolate. No visitors in nursing homes and certain units in hospitals. Extensive testing and monitoring for employees working in nursing homes and with the elderly. If you think your sick, don't go to work. Don't go to the baseball game. Don't go to the club. Suggestions like these of course spur on the expected response - What about incubation periods? You can be infectious and not be sick. Simply staying home from work is not good enough. What if you are immunocompromised and you live with a some millennial who insists they continue to go to the bar 3 nights a week. The truth is that we really do not know the true relationship between mitigation efforts and communal spread. Who on earth can tell you definitively that an increase in mitigation efforts would have a proportional decrease in communal spread. Of course you have the cookie cutter answer of.. "Every expert in the world agrees that this works" This is @psuhoffman favorite. But if you really think about it.. group consensus doesn't equal fact. The world's control groups suggest that the impact of mitigation efforts on communal spread is more or less unknown and sort of chaotic. What we do know for sure is that there are hotspots. The only way we will ever know the answer to this question is through years of studies, statistical analysis and peer review of such studies. Maybe postmortem (no pun intended) will supply these answers. I hope so.

If you look at the model.. herd immunity (ie no preventative measures) suggests that both the increase and decrease in infections happens at a geometric rate of change.. social distancing disrupts the trip back down the curve. But no social distancing/ herd immunity is not a viable option given the ethical principals at play.

I think that the issue here is that there is still a lot of unknowns with this Virus. We have no idea where we are in terms of overall infections in major populations around the country. If we take New York as the absolute worst case scenario.. where (based on tests conducted 3 weeks ago) approximately 1/5 of the population was infected and as a result around 20,000 people died, then one could argue that they have 80,000 deaths to go. If you then look at other major metropolitan areas like Chicago, LA, Houston, Dallas, etc... where we really dont know how many people have already been infected.. there is an argument that these cities also need to go through the New York experience in order to get over the hump. This might be a reality, with or without lockdown mitigation. It are these "unknowns" that make it so hard to make policy decisions right now.

I really do hope that people stop dying soon. I love this topic because it is the most interesting philosophical debate of my lifetime. But at the end of the day.. death is terrible. I worry about my mom and dad. Hopefully this wains with the change of seasons.

I deleted a really bad post this morning a couple minutes after posting it.

If this guy was younger he would be attacked on Social Media and forced to resign. Since he is old, the crazies will just write him off as some quack.

"A UPMC doctor on Thursday made a case the death rate for people infected with the new coronavirus may be as low as 0.25% — far lower than the mortality rates of 2-4% or even higher cited in the early days of the pandemic." This is hilarious.. I think everyone here understands that the actual mortality is 4%. Thats more or less just common sense. But when I say that in statistical modeling 0.01% is actually the same as 0.25% given erratic variability people go ape shit and say stuff like I am not worth replying too.

I dont watch Fox.. can you give me some examples?

yes.. but does "more manageable" mean less overall infections or preventing unnecessary deaths from running out ventilators. I feel it started out with the ventilator thing.. but slowly morphed in the this "we can beat this thing" mentality.

oh yeah.. think about it.. basically half of the country was ordered to "work" from home.. to do their "non essential" jobs.. and on average these are the people that get paid more than anyone in our society. The vast majority of people I work with push electronic forms of paper in some form or fashion. And they typically push that paper in some nonsensical bureaucratic circle to support some regulatory policy that was made up to support the bureaucracies that they create.. and then have meetings two or three times a day to figure out ways to make the bureaucracies more complex to make them feel better about themselves This Corona Virus phenomenon is beginning to make me think that our jobs are more or less a "front". That the service industries that our economy are built on (like housing, food, transportation and entertainment production) are so efficient that all you really need are a core group of skilled blue collared workers to keep it going. Think about it.. the federal government sent home 80% of its workforce and nothing happened. I always had this fantasy that maybe one day we simply paid the rest of America to go home and do nothing and keep getting paid (forever).. we could probably increase efficiency that way. But there is one problem... who would we be sending home for the free ride? White Collar America ie - all the electronic paper pushers who have "earned" their way in to a comfortable living by either college education or privileged. And there is another problem.. how can we justify paying people for doing nothing? You can't... because at that point the real Americans.. the skilled blue collar workforce.. would call bullshit.. With this Corina Virus stuff.. I am wondering how they havent called bullshit on it already.

The only way you could accurately compare what is going on today with what happened in past (recent) pandemics would be to rewrite history. Basically you would need to: 1- Get the rna sequence of the strain of flu that was causing a spike in deaths during that year. 2- Perform a PCR analysis on every single person who dies who to see if that person is carrying the an active virus. If you could go back in history and do that.. then you might be comparing apples to apples.. Right now it is like we are tracking record high temperatures a couple weeks after inventing the thermometer.

Exactly.. and the published estimates of ~50,000 flu deaths in 2017-2018 failed to capture the full impact of the pandemic that year, when the overall death rate increased some 20% on average per week for several weeks.. but only a couple thousand flu deaths were actually reported during the same weeks. You can go look at the data your self. It was a crazy anomoly in the data.. and noone batted an eyebrow

I told everyone he was dead on the COVID thread an then the post went poof.. It was pretty obvious it happened last week.

This is trending on the news now.. the same thing happened in 2018 but the net difference was 12,000 extra deaths per week. https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEKAk47voJsqSgZyPRY31AJIqGAgEKg8IACoHCAowjtSUCjC30XQwzqe5AQ?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

And I think that there is some truth here. The corona virus is absolutely abominating nursing homes. The longer the virus sticks around the better the chance that it skip traces through every single nursing home in a given population.

I really recommend reading the book I linked above. It is called the Control of Nature by John McPhee. It tells a handful of stories about man's failed attempts at controlling nature. Take the levy system of the Mississippi River (as this was discussed at length in the piece). The Mississippi river naturally shifts its banks of time. To combat this, people attempted to build levy systems to control the natural process. Over time, the levy systems actually caused an increase in potential energy... and when they broke.. like in 1993.. those downstream of the levies experienced more severe flooding than they probably would have experienced if left alone. It is the same with Forrest Fires.. Containing todays forrest fire.. means the next fire is going to be worse.

I agree (kinda) but I think we might see this even if we continue the way we are heading. In otherwords, the area under the sharp curve is equal to the area under the flattened curve. Nature is gonna take its course one way or another.. and this virus will continue to spread until we reach optimal immunity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Control_of_Nature

Fair enough. WRT my flu comparison, I think I have seen enough to be convinced that this is more lethal than the flu. Especially in elderly populations. The number of deaths will be greater than in a bad flu year like 2018. However.. and this has been the point that I have been trying to drive home for weeks now is this: A sharper curve would mean a faster path to eradication which could likely mean that there would be less overall deaths. In other words.. we are not going to cure this by hiding.. nature has a way of balancing these things out. I trust that way more than I trust anything else.

your point is valid.. I think I did mistakenly use the state numbers.. but that wasnt on purpose. One thing that we can assume however is that if the antibody test showed 1 in 5 people (~1.6 million) infected n NYC a couple of weeks ago.. then this number should have grown geometrically since then (hopefully at least)

Are you fine now? If so.. just ignore that.. you dont have to do anything to your body that you dont need or want

I huffed a sh!t ton of Glade back when I was a teenager.. maybe it kept me from getting a cold!