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The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

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Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't argue with the fact that hospitals can't take the pressure even at negligible death rate. Hospitals fucked = lots of other people are screwed as they depend on unrelated treatments. Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society.

>Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society. Worse than the huge cascading problems caused by making a double digit percentage of the population unemployed indefinitely?

Well, there are a bit north of 1.2M Americans who die of heart disease or cancer every year.

That's deaths. With a functioning, advanced health care system.

Those numbers don't get better without that.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#82
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Want to have a less steep curve? Lower the amount of testing. That works only at the beginning.

A more interesting view would be the number of positive tests over the number of tests preformed.

Often tests are not performed on a random sample of the population but only on people that are symptomatic.

But not all symptomatic people receive tests.

Knowing those two number (number of symptomatic people who would have qualified for a test, were it available; number of test performed) could paint q better picture.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't argue with the fact that hospitals can't take the pressure even at negligible death rate. Hospitals fucked = lots of other people are screwed as they depend on unrelated treatments. Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society.

>Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society. Worse than the huge cascading problems caused by making a double digit percentage of the population unemployed indefinitely?

You think there would not be widespread panic if we just let the health system melt down?

What do you think a world without a health system would look like? Unemployment is going to be very hard to deal with, but it really feels like the best option out of the very difficult choices we have in front of us.

Fact is, shit is seriously bad whichever way you look at it.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#84
post #69

This is bad. I've been graphing the exp curve for Italy, UK and USA and the USA curve is fearsomely steep. Italy has more cases now but the USA is growing fastest and looks like it will match Italy's on ~March 28th (looking at the most recent 10 points, see below) The rate of growth in the USA, extrapolated, is just huge. Looking at the whole curve it does not match an exponential well, I think the early part is skew…

>I've been graphing the exp curve As you can imagine, there's more to epidemiology than this. I'm a big fan of letting the qualified people do their work, while we do ours: shut up and do not spread misinformation. In fact, at the risk of being rude ill even go so far and say that it's quite arrogant to pretend to pontificate about this when your knowledge about this issue is 0, and also when one major problem in com…

counter points:

Many doctors lack training in epidemiology. Many epidemiologists aren't actual doctors.

Healthcare in general is horrible with generating accurate raw data (JHU data comes often from scraping websites and the CDC itself has stopped publishing number of daily tests weeks ago). You don't have to be a Dr. med in order to see gaps and problems with statistics and a large part of the conjecturing actually comes from gaps and flaws in the sources and the way data is presented. A background in an isolated discipline (only med, only statistics, only Math, etc) is not enough to harness and make sense of complexity.

Finally research papers themselves are all pre-print and not peer-reviewed which is a trade-off in accuracy for speed.

We're all finding solutions as we go and the more eye-balls from different discipline this gets, the better the outcome!

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#85

From what I read in this article and other sources, performing more tests seems to be a very promising approach to get this pandemic under control. The number of positive tests and death rates are published every day on all channels. I wish the number of performed tests would be also published daily. What gets measured gets managed. I wonder what limits the number of tests that can be performed. How much would it cos…

This site shows the number of tests performed in each state in the US:

https://covidtracking.com/data/

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#86

This is bad. I've been graphing the exp curve for Italy, UK and USA and the USA curve is fearsomely steep. Italy has more cases now but the USA is growing fastest and looks like it will match Italy's on ~March 28th (looking at the most recent 10 points, see below) The rate of growth in the USA, extrapolated, is just huge. Looking at the whole curve it does not match an exponential well, I think the early part is skew…

You're basing your curve off faulty data. We haven't been doing testing so we don't really know. Until a week ago no one was doing anything about it and staying home like they are now. Again that will vastly throw off your curve. It's still too early. Give it a week and re-run your model.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#87

From what I read in this article and other sources, performing more tests seems to be a very promising approach to get this pandemic under control. The number of positive tests and death rates are published every day on all channels. I wish the number of performed tests would be also published daily. What gets measured gets managed. I wonder what limits the number of tests that can be performed. How much would it cos…

Which is scary because Japan seems to have had the virus for a long time and is hardly testing at all. Really makes me wonder how the Olympics will or won't look.

"We're virus free! Our strategy of extensively not testing has eliminated cases of the disease! Come to the 2020 Olympics, stay long, and please spend money here."

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#88
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The death curve is also quite steep. Seven days ago we were at 57 total deaths, now it's 276. Daily deaths has gone from eight people seven days ago to 49. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ Here's a good article on estimating current number of cases from number of deaths: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

The death curve is also deceptive - there were likely many patients who were recorded as dying of the flu, or of influenza-like illness, that actually died of COVID-19, due to a lack of testing. The bottom line is that it’s very difficult to make a conclusive statement based on the data collected prior to widespread testing. As for that Medium article, it’s written by a tech exec with zero education or professional e…

The death curve is a lot less deceptive than the number of cases.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#89
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society. Worse than the huge cascading problems caused by making a double digit percentage of the population unemployed indefinitely?

Well, there are a bit north of 1.2M Americans who die of heart disease or cancer every year. That's deaths. With a functioning, advanced health care system. Those numbers don't get better without that.

In America at least, the functioning, advanced health care system is a barely accessible to people who are unemployed, and the government doesn't look like it's going to do anything to change that soon.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#90

This is bad. I've been graphing the exp curve for Italy, UK and USA and the USA curve is fearsomely steep. Italy has more cases now but the USA is growing fastest and looks like it will match Italy's on ~March 28th (looking at the most recent 10 points, see below) The rate of growth in the USA, extrapolated, is just huge. Looking at the whole curve it does not match an exponential well, I think the early part is skew…

Yesterday's evening jump was unexpected. We jumped yesterday, instead of 1.5x the day before, all of the way to 2x.n If 10k is the new baseline and we return back to 1.5x we're going to exceed Italy in cases by Monday and exceed China by Wednesday.

Then, I fear, St Patrick's day partiers will only be measured by next Wednesday; 5 days incubation + 5 days to have test results.

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