In November it sound like SARS, which was supposed to be a global pandemic, but fizzled out.
Now in March it sounds like it's essentially a lock that 50,000-150,000 people in the US will die.
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In November it sound like SARS, which was supposed to be a global pandemic, but fizzled out.
Now in March it sounds like it's essentially a lock that 50,000-150,000 people in the US will die.
The death rate of 80+ years old is 15-18%, for 70-79 7-8%. High blood pressure seems to be the worst pre-existing condition to have, followed by cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.
I thought the first case was reported in December..?
It's pretty bad, but it's too early to know what the actual death rates of the coronavirus are.Quote:
Originally Posted by CoccoBill
This link is a few days old, but I've found it and shared it with others on this topic, so I'm just lazily linking to it again.
https://www.livescience.com/is-coronavirus-deadly.html
The first official case was Dec 1st, but there was an unconfirmed case in Wuhan on, I think, the 17th Nov.
Are we at the point yet where the damage to the economy is worse than the virus itself?
Quote:
Complicating the matter, mortality numbers lag behind infection numbers simply because it takes days to weeks for severely ill people to die of COVID-19
That number is now up to 8, with 14 still in serious condition.Quote:
The Diamond Princess cruise ship provided a look at an isolated, well-observed population exposed to the new coronavirus. On that cruise ship, 707 people caught the virus and six died, for a case-fatality ratio of 0.8
This is such an elementary error in science that even a psychologist like me can spot it - don't do your calculations until all the numbers are in.
My advice is not to get your epidemic science from science writers, get it from epidemiologists. If there were a crisis in any other field, we'd want to know what the experts in THAT field are saying, not what some journalist is saying.
Michael Osterholm is world-renowned. Nicholas Christiakis is also. Even Fauci has some grip on the facts - if you can ninja the mute button while Trump or Pence or talking, so you only take in what he is saying, you will probably get a better idea of what's going on than from nearly all other sources.
poop, the economy is not just about money.
Suicide is going to go up, that's a certainty. But even if we coldly ignore self inflicted deaths, people are going to be poorer, hungrier, less hygienic. Old people are being left in isolation alone, who knows how many have fallen over and are waiting to be found?
At what point does the social and economic damage become more dangerous than the virus itself?
I guess we really need a control group - i.e., a country that does absolutely nothing to contain CV, and see where they are a couple of years from now.
Since even the UK and the US have given up on that experiment now, it seems we'll never know.
Member of Pence's staff just tested + for CV.
I don't understand much but from what I think I do, the main issue is the large number of patients requiring hospitalization and ventilators. This applies to almost all age groups, not just old people. People under 50 and without pre-existing conditions have a far better chance of survival, but almost the same percentage of them require intensive care as old ones. If the hospitals can't tend to everyone, people start dying en masse, like in northern Italy.
For example, Finland's intensive care capacity is 400, which is now being raised to 1000. While things so far look with our 500 confirmed cases and 1 death on the surface manageable, we're expected to have 10000-50000 people needing intensive care by May. By my calculations that's more than 1000. And those are just the needs for covid-19, I'm afraid people won't have the decency to delay their other illnesses, accidents etc. till after the outbreak.
It's not an easy problem to solve. But this is just the start. If the panic buying doesn't stop, looting is next. When that happens, all bets are off. At the extreme, this could cause revolutions around the planet. Governments could be toppled. Some might be military coups, others perhaps popular uprisings. This could be the end of capitalism, which many people might want, but most will likely change their minds when the reality of the alternatives hit home.
This could all be history in six months, but this could also change the world. We might end up thinking we'd have been better off just letting it run rampant through the population.
The further in the future we go, the less reliable our estimates will be.
I doubt though that this will lead to widespread revolution. Spanish Flu was much worse than this, and people were too busy trying to stay alive to turn on their governments. Afaik, there was no rioting, much less revolutions. Popular revolutions in particular, with large crowds of people joining en masse, seem extremely unlikely, since their desire to stay out of the path of the virus will checkmate their desire to revolt against the government that is also trying to keep them alive.
Just out of curiosity though, what do you think will be the motivation for people to riot?
There's two potential motivations. A food shortage caused by continued stockpiling, and then there's bored twats. The latter shouldn't even be a factor, but it is. Remember that guy who got shot in London? There were riots around the country. Nobody actually gave a fuck about that guy, it was a bunch of twats who just wanted an excuse to kick off. That could happen again, we've seen it doesn't take much.
I imagine people feared Spanish flu more than this virus. Spanish flu was a ten-percenter, this isn't even a one-percenter. I'm more afraid of the panic than the virus.Quote:
Spanish Flu was much worse than this
Food shortages seem unlikely. There's only so much pasta people can hoard before they run out of money because they're unemployed, remember?
TP shortage maybe.
We don't know what the death rate for CV is yet. Estimates of SF range from 2.5-3%.
Well, we are one of the countries that isnt well-equipped to handle this. It's just starting and there's already at least one hospital in London that is short of ventilators.
Still waiting for that extra £350b a week for our national health service from Brexit to turn up, I guess.
I don't think there will be a food shortage, but it's not out of the question.
As for the death rate of Spanish flu, I got my figure from Wikipedia, which suggests 500 million people were infected, and between 17 and 100 million people died. I basically assumed a rough median of 50 million. With regards to CV, it's very clear that there are a lot of cases with mild symptoms not being confirmed. Of course, the same will be true of SF. Maybe this is comparable, time will tell. But there's a long, long way to go before we get to SF level death rates.
And let's not forget, swine flu was basically a new strain of Spanish flu. That was ten years ago, we might have dodged a bullet there because of improved immunity to it due to historical exposure. This is a virus we've not been widely exposed to yet, but it's clearly not as nasty as SARS or MERS, related viruses. Being exposed to this might be of benefit in the future, where it could be a much more serious virus. If this were MERS, then the panic we'd be seeing right now would be entirely justified.
It is nearly impossible to compare this virus with SF at this time though, we can only really begin to do that when it's over.
Give the Brexit talk a rest. It's a complete irrelevance at this moment in time. We're finding the money to get out of this mess by borrowing, just like every other government in the world. This will cost trillions. The £350m (not billion) a week figure is probably nonsense anyway, I'd guess it's how much we spend without taking into account how much we benefit.
We'll see after this is all over how fast the UK recovers outside of the EU. We can talk about this matter then.
You are right, it could have been a flu. Nobody knows. Interesting to note: one of the people I know who got sick from the same one I did, had the exact exclusive covid19 symptoms and nothing else.
There was a noticing of a "bad flu season" that wasn't been tested. People were just getting sicker than usual.
The first cases in WA were early. Even though we never heard about it spreading from those, the probability that it did spread is very high.
You think like an economist. That's very cool.
Getting back to first principles (my favorite thing), money is a representation of morals and values. Sometimes it seems like money is some godlike thing in the human world, and the reason is because it's the way we store and distribute "stuff" and "work" and even "ideas" that we value.Quote:
the economy is not just about money.
I wonder if the government will hold off on release employment and real growth figures. It might be the best of the two worst ideas. What we don't want is the figures to show some crazy growth decrease, like -10% in March. If those were released and there wasn't clear recovery from the virus on the very near horizon, the economy would crash unlike we've ever seen IMO.
And we have no idea what the numbers are now. Could be -25% real growth. The lowest we got in 2009 (percent change from previous quarter) was -2%. We could be ten times worse than that right now. People have never seen anything like it.
The one silver lining is that stuff will come back online as quarantines stop and the virus goes away. The longer it takes, the more disruption and "permanent" real value will be lost.
Yeah I mean that's probably because what's happening right now is a great deal worse than even the most pessimistic remainers thought Brexit would be. If I thought for one minute Brexit meant an economic shutdown then I would have been more concerned about the economic impact. I anticipated an economic shock, but then this happened and now it's a completely different discussion.
It's not a productive time to be debating this. We'd be in the shit right now whether or not we voted to leave.
If we really want to minimize the effect of this on the economy, we'd be mass-testing everyone. You get a test once a week, if it's -tive you go about your business, if it's +ive you stay inside and lock the doors. $35 per test per person per week is a lot less than the hurt the economy is taking now.
Too bad certain countries aren't seeing the clear benefits of large-scale testing.
Interesting about the covid numbers is how they're what you can think of as a Halfpinion (half-opinion). The data is not contrasted to the other most relevant data, which means that we don't have much of a way to understand what the data has to say.
Possibly the most important data to help us think more clearly about covid deaths would if they were contrasted to the most likely other outcome. Example: seeing 100 new deaths from patients with covid can be scary, but it would be much less scary if the data also showed those patients had advanced heart disease.
It's possible we wouldn't be freaking out about this and we wouldn't be causing intense suffering through wrecking the economy if we presented the data that would allow us to have a full opinion about what's going on.
I wish I still talked with my Humanities professor who leaned toward the Huxleyan view of society. Are we entertaining ourselves into doom? The COVID-19 pandemic might be real eye opener.
I think you're misunderstanding the concern that prompts the shutdown(s). Sure, older people, people with compromised immune systems and other preexisting health problems are most in danger-- and sure most cases in the general population are mild, but some number of otherwise healthy young people require an ICU stay. With an ICU stay their death rate will be very low, but if the healthcare system is overwhelmed by a spike, we're in triage territory.
In short, if we don't shut shit down, the most vulnerable will fill all the beds, and the unlucky won't get the treatment that otherwise almost surely would have kept them alive. So the contrast you're calling for is not particularly helpful.
There are less than 100K ICU beds in the US. There's an order of magnitude greater number of people who are in the high risk group. This makes the data you're seeking irrelevant.
It was an accident, I assure you! It just annoys me a little when people think a debate about economics is a debate about money. It's not. It's a debate about peoples' jobs, the structure their lives are built upon.Quote:
Originally Posted by wuf
It's easy to take a moral stance that money is not as important as health, but whether we like it or not, the two are very much linked.
Economics is holistic. When you said you have to weigh things like the expected increased suicide rate from a worsened economy to the expected decreased death rate from COVID-19 when worsening the economy, you're engaging in a very smart type of thinking that many popular fields DON'T train. Some do train it, usually hard-science ones and engineering. Economics puts the type of thinking at forefront because of how key it is to the philosophy.
I think I'm a sociopath, which helps with cold thinking. Shame I'm not educated on the matter, perhaps I could have been an economist!
I do think I'm sociopathic. I'm more excited by these interesting times than I am scared. I'm not an asshole, I do worry about other people, which is why I offer to help. But there's something in me that enjoys crazy times, even if it's a disaster. I've watched so much tsunami footage I couldn't even begin to guess how much.
That must be a mental illness. I should be shitting myself.
I find it interesting, but I'd much prefer it wasn't happening.
And if we want to be calculating about it, we could just let this thing run wild and save the treatment for productive members of society (i.e., not retired or infirm). I mean, who cares if a lot of these people worked their whole lives, fought wars for their country, raised kids, and whatever else they've done in their lives for society. Now they're old, so fuck 'em.
Funny that's not a popular attitude to have.
/sarcasm
This is interesting: "75% of people who tested +ive for CV were completely asymptomatic."
Mass-testing is the answer.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/coron...taly-1.5504780
You don't need the information you were looking for to know what would happen otherwise. Without locking things down, the curve is much steeper. A steeper curve overwhelms the healthcare system, causing deaths outside of the demographic that would otherwise be the main deaths.
Essentially, just going on as normal and letting it happen won't simply cull the extremely old and sick.
If it helps, we can imagine we have unlimited ICU capacity. In that case it may very well make more sense to let the economy keep on keepin on.
This should be a strawman, but unfortunately a lot of first level thinkers, who discover logic, land on "self evident" solutions like this. As wuf said, economics is (or, in practice, strives to be) holistic. So if we knew that sacrificing 10 babies a year would ensure peace and prosperity, we'd have to include the cost of being a society that is ok with baby sacrifice.
The strange thing is that this cost only seems to be applied when the sacrifice is explicit. For example, chattel slavery is explicit in the condemnation of a people from cradle to the grave. There was a very real cost to being a slave holding nation in the 1800's. Share cropping is slavery v2.0, and although the effect it had on sharecroppers was barely indistinguishable from chattel slavery, for a time people were just fine with it and the cost was not born out. You could argue that now, our current capitalist'ish system is slavery v9.12(or whatever)-- yet you're probably reading this now, rolling your eyes, the same way a poor white person in the south was hostile towards the idea that slaves should be free.
I'm not rolling my eyes at all, I agree there are many parallels between the current system and slavery, or at the least feudalism/exploitation/whatever. The prison system, where people are working for 12c an hour or whatever the ridiculous pay is they're getting, is a solid example. So are the overseas sweatshops.
My entire point is that we as a society have already chosen our path on this. We're not going to let (mostly) old people die just because it will cost the rest of us some prosperity. Every single country in the world has taken that position, and thankfully (imo) views similar to what Wuf and Ong are expressing are a tiny minority.
Even this twat lost the argument (eventually)
https://twitter.com/johnharris1969/s...303296/photo/1
I'm not expressing a view, I'm considering the options. I don't know which path is best to take. I just understand that there comes a point where the lesser of the two evils becomes the greater.Quote:
views similar to what Wuf and Ong are expressing are a tiny minority.
Guys, please stop reading this crap. Read or listen to what the experts are saying. This guy is, in places, making arguments and then providing links to data that directly contradict his argument.
e.g.citingQuote:
Additionally, recent data suggests that US cases are more severe than in China.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/...cid=mm6912e2_w
from the article:
The authors of the study at least have the humility to not state their conclusions as facts.Quote:
Since February 12, 4,226 COVID-19 cases were reported in the United States; 31% of cases, 45% of hospitalizations, 53% of ICU admissions, and 80% of deaths occurred among adults aged ≥65 years with the highest percentage of severe outcomes among persons aged ≥85 years. These findings are similar to data from China, which indicated >80% of deaths occurred among persons aged ≥60 years (3)
So basically, this idiot is out of his depth and/or outright making shit up in places where it suits him. Is he right in his overall message? Probably, but only inasmuch as it agrees with the message from people who know wtf they're talking about.Quote:
This report describes the current epidemiology of COVID-19 in the United States, using preliminary data. The findings in this report are subject to at least five limitations.
Watch the experts, not the journalists/bloggers/engineers/math whizzes/morons on twitter/ etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP_lx9N8xQg
You get early insight from me. You get what others aren't seeing yet.
I was the first person I know of who said to shut it all down very early. If the experts weren't picking their butts at the time, the virus would probably be nearly finished by now.
On the econ side of it: there are very smart people on both sides of the question of whether or not the cure is worse than the disease.
Now that we know the virus is a big deal but not an existential destroyer, we have elected to crush the lifeblood of civilization, and nobody knows what the fallout will be.
Only right now?
I'm just waiting for someone with a degree in history to message me on twitter to inform me that I know nothing about neuroscience and that they should come give my lecture on Monday.
Edit: And by 'inform' I mean write a several page long treatise on neuroscience based on what they've learned from searching google scholar over the last two weeks.
This is actually pretty funny:
"Excuse me, but where the fuck are you going?"
https://twitter.com/davidrkadler/sta...41594195304452
What are people using to claim US is 2 weeks behind Italy?
Well that idiot sure has some people fooled then
https://twitter.com/GabrielScally/st...90964707676160
https://twitter.com/brad_spiller/sta...71484211937281
https://www.uu.nl/en/opinion/covid-1...ing-statistics
He comes to the 'right' conclusion (inasmuch as it agrees with those people you linked to) but uses poor arguments and/or distortions of facts to get there. So yeah, he might be applauded by others with an interest in sending the same overall message, but what's he doing is rhetoric masked as science.
And it's not that I'm picking on this particular guy, because there's hundreds out there like him - people with no knowledge or experience on the topic who are suddenly coming up with all the answers.
Did you know you can kill CV by using a sauna?
https://twitter.com/marcelcrok/statu...85485510389761
NB: You can't, it's bullshit.
A little bit of math and a lot of ignoring unknown variables.
They are basing it on the number of reported cases in the US being roughly the same as Italy two weeks earlier. Some (not all) are also correcting for differences in population by considering cases per million rather than total number of cases.
Another problem is case numbers depend heavily on number of people tested. The US may be closer to Italy in time than it appears, given the laxity in testing.
A third problem is that it assumes a similar spread rate. This may be true for heavily populated areas of Italy such as Lombardy vs. the New York-D.C axis, but overall the US is more sparsely populated than Italy, so spread should be slowed by that.
A fourth problem is it assumes equal amounts of intervention (e.g., social distancing), but the US is lagging behind Italy in this respect by more than two weeks afaik, and spread should be sped up by that.
Putting all the unknowns aside, a best and very crude guess may be you are going to have an experience similar to Italy, but no-one can say when. And I know nothing so take that with a grain of salt; I can just see that their estmates include a lot of guesswork.
A lot of guesswork indeed.
I believe WA (and a few other US locations) is ahead of Italy
Why do you believe that?
https://twitter.com/realDailyWire/st...51504853200897
What businesses will still be open after 3 months of shut down?
As far as numbers I've seen, we got our first confirmed infections about 1.5 weeks before Italy. The safe assumption is that it has been spreading like "normal" since. It has been very, VERY, hard to get tested here, so there has been no tracking. Then it was once an old folks place (in Kirkland IIRC) got super sick that some tests were thrown at it. They found COVID there and only then did people start doing much about it.
As far as the question for why we haven't seen uptick in hospitalization if it has been spreading before we knew it: well, it sorta has. We've been having a "bad flu season" for months now, and COVID could possibly have been in that (because, again, we don't test). And Americans never go to the doctor with cold-like symptoms. In fact, we avoid hospitals because "that's where you get sick". Given that the real death rate of COVID appears to be very low, it is feasible that it's been going around for a while without seeing a major uptick in hospitalization.
Now that COVID is on everybody's mind, the hospitals almost certainly will overflow. The psychological effect is monumental.
The death rate in Italy must be as high as it is because their health system cannot cope. Once you run out of ICUs, fatalities will rise sharply, as many people who would have survived if they had access to intensive care are now likely to die.
At the moment, we don't have enough ventilators to cope with the expected demand. It's a race against time to create the capacity we will need. That's what will determine if we go the same way as Italy.