Bug. Not feature. Want to know who the bugs are? — Baden

You speak a broken English and you speak in riddles, but, yes, answer that question for me, although I'm not sure what it is.

You have such a poor track record saying true things about the virus and the effectiveness and necessity of policy interventions it's difficult to take what you're saying seriously. You've downplayed the spread of coronavirus and its seriousness at every opportunity. Except the one where you said you shouldn't do it any more, and then continued to. You keep flip flopping without ever losing any of the passion in your arguments!

My prediction is that no one here will die or lose a close family member to the virus. — Hanover

I dunno what to tell you. If you don't deny that "test, isolate, treat" when consistently applied has demonstrably lead to bankruptcy, or that the healthcare system required a policy hotfix towards something much closer to free (at least more affordable) universal healthcare to address the issue by your administration. The US administration acknowledged the systemic issue and took a measure to rectify it. Let's hope it does not get repealed. — fdrake

It's always been the case that emergency care (as defined by the patient) cannot be denied regardless of ability to pay. That rule has led to those without health insurance using emergency rooms to treat for minor illnesses. Inner city hospitals routinely make no effort to collect those fees, and that care has been provided at government expense for some time. That is a shortcoming of the American system, and it contributes to the high dollar expenditure by the government for healthcare.

But, if what you're trying to say is that there are people dying of treatable illness in the US, including of coranavirus, due to inability to pay, or that that has been the case in the past, that is not true. It's also not true that those nations with public healthcare systems in place has fared better than the US in this crisis. If your point is that the US has deployed government resources in response to a health care crisis in a way that goes far beyond how it provides social security in normal times, I agree with that. I don't follow, though, why what we do in an emergency should be expected in normal times. I think I can be expected to provide for myself more in normal times than I do in a state of emergency, just as I can expect to be left alone most days to fend for myself, but I fully expect a county owned firetruck to roll up when my house is on fire.

Showing that you believe policy can actually impact the disease a lot. — fdrake

I do think that. That's obvious.

I put all my hope in a scientific solution, not in a policy one. My trust isn't in some politician of any party of any country to figure out how to fix this.
— Hanover

Contradicting the above.
— fdrake

That's not a contradiction.

I trust scientists more than politicians, even though I accept that government decisions can impact the result.
[/

My proposal is not just to let nature take it's course, but instead to invest the trillions we intend to to prop up the economy on ventilators, hospital beds, and better treatment in an effort to drive down the deaths from the infections, as opposed to the futile battle to control the infection rate, which will just further damage all sorts of lives in the process.
— Hanover

Defending not social distancing or quarantine measures (despite blaming Italy's admin for not adhering to them well enough). — fdrake

I still think that the logic of the social distancing is based upon keeping the serious cases low enough not to overwhelm medical care available. The solution then can arise is two ways, either (1) decrease the number of serious cases at any given time through social distances, or (2) increasing the amount of available healthcare (including ventilators). That's true as far as i can see it.

Currently .02% of the world is infected with the coronavirus (169,387 / 7,771,074,926). The percentage of worldwide deaths rounds to 0.00% (6,513), but if you take it out enough decimal points you will eventually see some evidence of it.
— Hanover

The US is at 41. That's 41/50ths a person per state we've lost. Do you know what it's like to lose just over 80% of a person? It's not pretty I tell you.
— Hanover

And other people already corrected your calculations — fdrake

My numbers are generally correct. If I missed the decimal space one or two spots nothwithstanding, it's very much the case that the raw percentages of people worldwide contracting the disease and dying from disease is very very low. That's just true. But don't spin that into me saying that death is no big deal just because someone died of a rare disease.

. As I watched Italian reports, it seems that country is truly in a state of devastation — Hanover

I don't think so. Numbers are declining there. Here no news is good news. And in Italy the worst hit regions have been in the North, not the South. Single glimpse at the maps below and you can see why not much has been reported from Rome, the biggest city in the country.

(number of cases)


How the pandemic spread in Italy and how the lockdowns were implemented:

I do think that. That's obvious. — Hanover

It seems you think that now that policy interventions have been implemented in the US, and were extremely skeptical of it beforehand. You demonstrably were not convinced they were necessary, even after the first confirmed cases in the US by date; that includes social distancing. You've passionately argued about the necessity of keeping things going, and... what was it... Keeping everything going as normal when the old people are safely locked away?

Maybe you changed your mind! Maybe you didn't notice. Maybe your past positions are defined by your current declarations, who can say? We all do that to some extent.

My numbers are generally correct. — Hanover

You quoted the right numbers, up to some decimal error. But you interpreted them completely wrongly. You used them rhetorically to downplay the virus without checking you had interpreted them correctly, when you could've looked up how epidemiologists were interpreting the spread, and supported what scientific policy interventions they were recommending. Rather than predicting that no one would die from the disease in the US (presumably from the context because you believed it would not reach the US ( when there were already confirmed US cases and the information was publicly available.

An old physics teacher of mine forgot to multiply Plank's constant by 10^-34, instead multiplying it by 10^34, when calculating a photon's momentum, he ran with it, and said "As you can all see, a single photon has a massive amount of energy". Our class later calculated that with that understanding, a normal bit of light has equivalent energy to over 100 Hiroshima nukes. He defended it adamantly when later questioned, and eventually switched to the correct interpretation quietly over the course of months.

It wasn't that you made typographical errors, it's that you've yet to actually demonstrate any predictive understanding of the numbers you're quoting, or shown any skill in interpreting or contextualising their consequences, or shown willingness to actually look up what you're writing about the virus before you post it.

I'm definitely a partisan hack when it comes to their interpretation; though the view that austerity programs creating healthcare access problems, or healthcare access programs more generally, have exacerbated the effects is probably true; but I make sure I get my facts interpreted right when posting.

I still think that the logic of the social distancing is based upon keeping the serious cases low enough not to overwhelm medical care available. The solution then can arise is two ways, either (1) decrease the number of serious cases at any given time through social distances, or (2) increasing the amount of available healthcare (including ventilators). That's true as far as i can see it. — Hanover

It isn't a choice between them, we need quarantines to decrease the load on healthcare resources; unmitigated growth of the disease would almost certainly quickly overwhelm any immediate investment strategy (the beds and buildings and respirators take time to construct and arrive). The best option is to do both, and focus on testing and isolation, while doing whatever can be done to ensure that serious cases get the resources they need despite the huge load increase from the pandemic (which, as was known beforehand, should be mitigated by quarantine measures).

Despite it being commonplace that people in the US avoid healthcare treatment due to its prohibitive cost being well established before the virus, the cost of a mere coronavirus test was 100 dollars; a debilitating chunk of, if not more than a week's minimum wage after tax + rent; which until the emergency bill to fix that glaring problem was coming out of wage earner's pockets. They certainly could not have afforded any further treatment (costing in the 1000s of dollars) if they tested positive! Countries which do not offload the costs of dealing with a pandemic into their poorest' citizens wage packets (which have also not been inflation adjusted for years and years and years...) did not need to hotfix their healthcare system to deal with a pandemic in this way. It exposes a devastating error in healthcare access in the US that even the supporters of this devastating error had to acknowledge and address when it poured gasoline all over and started nonchalantly smoking inside of that lethal dumpster fire you passionately defend as a healthcare system.

The solution then can arise is two ways, either (1) decrease the number of serious cases at any given time through social distances, or (2) increasing the amount of available healthcare (including ventilators). That's true as far as i can see it. — Hanover

False dichotomy. Please reprogram your brain with logic and understanding. Thank you.

Both France and the UK have oddly high mortality rates, but the UK's is substantially worse. I look forward to some downstream analysis of how each country managed.

Specifically, was the UK's result a matter if demographics, treatment strategy, or what? I guess we're too close to it now to make an assessment.

Specifically, was the UK's result a matter if demographics, treatment strategy, or what? I guess we're too close to it now to make an assessment. — frank

My guess is that the UK's is high because testing isn't commonplace. That means that the majority of confirmed cases are serious ones, it's a data selection bias. Lack of testing can also increase mortality out of sample. There are probably demographic factors at work; like our problem with actually intervening in infected nursing homes, we're hesitant to do that. The exact weighting of them will be unknown for some time, or forever.

My bet is that it's largely attributable to the testing though, as the selection bias based on extreme cases has a multiplicative effect (edit: analogy, like the effect of switching between age categories or comorbidity presence/absence on the (log) odds scale in a risk model) on the estimated mortality risk that applies over all demographics. Norway's tested enough to get the observed death rate of tested cases to be very close to the predicted population risk.

Yes, but both countries seem to have lower serious-critical numbers with a high death total. That suggests that instead of lingering toward recovery, they're just dying.

Genetics could also be a factor.

Genetics could also be a factor. — frank

Heredity is unlikely to multiply the death rate within countries by a factor of 6 compared to the predicted population risk when genetic effects are constant over effected populations.

The solution then can arise is two ways, either (1) decrease the number of serious cases at any given time through social distances, or (2) increasing the amount of available healthcare (including ventilators). That's true as far as i can see it.
— Hanover

False dichotomy. Please reprogram your brain with logic and understanding. Thank you. — Baden

It's a false dichotomy only if I presented it as a dichotomy. Purely hypothetically, you might say that if I support Trump, I'm either (1) a mindless Republican, or (2) drunk. There's nothing in that sentence that says I can't be both.

You can't read ordinary conversation like a syllogism, but, for the sake of clarity, please do insert the words "or both" somewhere in my sentence so that I can avoid my embarrassing logical fallacy. Thank you.

Heredity is unlikely to multiply a country's death rate within countries by a factor of 6 compared to the predicted population risk when genetic effects are constant over effected populations. — fdrake

True. I'd be happy to explain how genetics could be a factor.

Oh wait, no I wouldn't. :joke:

Oh wait, no I wouldn't. :joke: — frank

Give me a link then.

I don't have a link. Are you actually interested in how genetics affects the robustness of pulmonary tissue?

Ah. Yeah, I read about that. Attributing the observed risk inflation between countries to something which is constant over those populations is strange. I was hoping for a link that shows, say, Norwegians are way, way more likely to have good heart tissue genetics vs UK people. To my understanding, it's a good tool for explaining the weird what appears to be post recovery heart failure, but explaining such a large inflation of observed risk (on the population level) by something that each population has in approximately the same degree does not make sense.

I have been reading along but my song stopped when I realized that maybe this item was not as well published around America.

I have a father with many commodities and has his DNR card updated monthly and well placed on him and the refrigerator at home. IF something were to happen to him at this point in time, nothing would be attempted per his desire. HOWEVER my MOM would only get one shot if she were to flat line. She with an Afib is taking care of him at home. How the F* is that fair? He is 100% paced with a pacemaker and no desire to live and she has the desire to live long past him.

See where things tend to get 'sticky' when trying to save lives via policy?

And I realize this is RT but it has another view of what is happening, There is a point system as to whom to "save" and as crude as it is, where people's baseline health is plugged into an equation that takes into consideration what the chances are that the person will survive: ie: commodities and what 'value' the person has to the future ie: their profession. It's raw but it happens and I would like to think that our society didn't use such a grading system but it happens.

I'd need access to a keyboard to talk about it more. It would be genetics in combination with other factors, not genetics alone.

I'd need access to a keyboard to talk about it more. It would be genetics in combination with other factors, not genetics alone. — frank

Aye, it would have to be.

Genetics could also be a factor. — frank

It's much, much more likely to be a matter of how data is collected, what counts as serious or critical, and so on. There is no established methodology for estimating the prevalence in the population, no international agreement as to what symptoms are counted as serious and no consistency about the circumstances that warrant tests. At the moment in the UK, the advice is that if your life is not in immediate danger because you have breathing difficulties, you should not even contact the health service, just go online and read the advice (take some paracetamol and take it easy). Other cultures may cry 'emergency' if they sneeze, but we are tough. That and pollution levels, demographics of population age, economic factors, diet, and fuck knows what else.

I would never accuse you of being a drunk!

:up:

I hadn't read any articles on it until just now. I was just looking at the raw data.

Is Hanover drunk?

Nah, he's just a Republican.

It's a false dichotomy only if I presented it as a dichotomy. Purely hypothetically, you might say that if I support Trump, I'm either (1) a mindless Republican, or (2) drunk. There's nothing in that sentence that says I can't be both. — Hanover

The "either" in "either ... or ..." means that it can't be both. You Americans need to learn English.

He can either choose to accept that or reject it, so he'll probably do both.

Speaking of drunks, I've either started drinking at work or I haven't.

If Trump doesn't have the power to reopen schools, businesses, state and local govt. offices, etc. then did he really have the power to close them down? If it is the power of the governors to reopen their states, then wasn't it their responsibility to close them? If so, then why are people blaming Trump for not closing things down sooner?

Politics.