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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

#161

Post by soneca »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #146
DoreenMichele wrote: post #145

Is there in any way a brighter side to this? Something I talk about a fair amount: It's incredibly hard to measure what didn't happen but should have. Humans are really bad at that, and understandably so. If we had adopted a lot of the practices being advocated currently and avoided the epidemic, no one would know or believe we had accomplished anything. Having a pandemic and defeating it is the only way humanity can…

I’m sorry, you sound like you’ve been through a lot, but what does this have to do with the article, or even the sentence you excerpted?

I believe she is saying that the humanity will be better prepared to handle threats after the pandemic. That's a brighter side to things.

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

#162

Post by choward »

iamgopal wrote: post #142
yread wrote: post #72

165M deaths actually sounds plausible for covid19, if it overwhelms health care in India and developing world countries...

I'm in india and may be I do not understand gravity of the situation, but I'm more worried about USA, here people are already scared as shit and most things are in lockdown, which helps the situation.

Trump already gave advice for calming down scared Americans. https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/03/20/trump-message...

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

#163

Post by jmull »

DennisP wrote: post #95
w1ntermute wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We have plenty of flu tests. Covid-19 is also pretty distinctive on chest CT scans, if it's advanced enough to kill you. The numbers may be wrong in that article but the math itself seems straightforward. It's certainly true that we need more tests to be sure of the numbers. Here's a pretty interesting simulation from a research group at the University of Basel: https://neherlab.org/covid19/

> Covid-19 is also pretty distinctive on chest CT scans, if it's advanced enough to kill you.

I guess you're suggesting that when people die of Covid-19, we'd know it and count it?

That's not true.

First, CT scans (and other expensive tests) are not generally performed on people who have died of pneumonia, apparently due to the flu (or other causes). Second, the radiologists reading those studies would have to train to make the distinction.

Now, going forward, we have an increasing need to know whether the virus that caused the pneumonia that killed the patient was Covid-19 or not, so maybe such testing will become routine. (I doubt it will be CT scans though, because there will be much cheaper and reliable ways to do it.)

But so far we've been undercounting Covid-19 deaths for the same reason we've been undercounting cases: lack of testing.

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

#164

Post by Consultant32452 »

logicchains wrote: post #58
monkeynotes wrote: post #43

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?

Merkel publicly estimated 40-70% of the population of Germany would catch Corona this year. Let's assume that holds true for the US. The most reliable public numbers so far suggest 1-3% death rate. Let's assume that holds true in the US also.

US population is 330 million. The lower bound of the estimates above (40% catch, 1% of those die) is 1.32 million people die. The upper bound (70% catch, 3% of those die) is 6.9 million people die.

Just to put the above numbers into perspective. A fairly normal number of deaths in the US without Corona is 2.6 Million from all causes. We're looking at potentially more than tripling the number of people who die this year.

I don't care to get into the debate any deeper than that, just want to make sure we all understand the stakes.

edit: corrected doubling to tripling

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

#165

Post by mynegation »

ithkuil wrote: post #82
ct0 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Until recently Ontario had very stringent testing pre-requisites: 2 or more symptoms, history or travel in the last 14 days. Even then, on average, only 2% of tested people tested positively for SARS-Cov-2. In my opinion that makes the notion of much more larger population having it and not noticing due to the lack of testing, at least at this stage, highly unlikely.

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

#166

Post by DoreenMichele »

soneca wrote: post #161
ComputerGuru wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, you sound like you’ve been through a lot, but what does this have to do with the article, or even the sentence you excerpted?

I believe she is saying that the humanity will be better prepared to handle threats after the pandemic. That's a brighter side to things.

Better prepared and will know the value of it.

We already have remote work. It may have already reduced our vulnerability and lessened the impact of this pandemic.

I'm not seeing that talked about. We have no means to measure how much worse this pandemic would have been without remote work, without the internet, without credit cards and PayPal and a zillion other things that already exist.

In most cases, we don't even try to measure the disasters that didn't happen. That gets viewed as talking out your ass, basically.

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

#167

Post by bsaul »

mrfusion wrote: post #136
yotamoron wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how many deaths would a greater-then-the-great-despresison depression will cause?

Yes. No one is asking this question.

That, IMHO is the point that was only implicitely made by the original article : massive testing lets you keep the economy at least partially work, because you know who can go to work safely and who can't.

I really hope someone makes a deep study of the decisions that were taken regarding testing facilities in the various european countries, because i have the feeling, at least here in france, that doctors gave up a little too fast on that option (and i still don't understand why)

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

#168

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

gdubs wrote: post #155
andrepd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I get that your comment is coming from a good place, because the threat of misinformation is real. But this is an “Appeal to Authority” argument. I’d rather have an informed discussion among smart people, even if they’re not experts in the specific field. I’d rather be able to weigh the input of many people. Especially in a case where the experts haven’t done a great job at communicating or understanding the severity…

Thank you. To me, that's what it's about. I'd rather try and fail and learn from that, but people just telling me to put a sock in it isn't something I can learn from.

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

#169

Post by bsaul »

yotamoron wrote: post #138
logicchains wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how many of those people would have died anyway? Somebody over 80 has around a 10% chance of dying every year. Somebody over 80 with Corona has a 20% chance of dying, so the risk of dying is doubled.

This is an excellent point. I'm from Israel, and yesterday it was announced that the first corona victim has died. The poor guy was 88 years old, suffered from multiple background illnesses - and suffered a heart attack a few days before he died - it so happens that in addition to all of the above he had corona. Now, honestly - is this REALLY a corona victim? Now check the data from Italy - most deaths were like that…

i don't understand why you got downvoted. We don't consider someone dying from a cold if he's 80yo with heart attack.

We're introducing a novel way of counting casualities, and this is problematic whenever we want to account for the severity of the virus.

Now on the other side, hospitals usually aren't flooded the way they are at the moment, or at least that's my impression. So there is definitely something special about the epidemic (although we don't know why : maybe it's just extremely contagious, and makes everybody become sick about the same time, instead of a natural spread for the flu ?)

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

#170

Post by DennisP »

jmull wrote: post #163
DennisP wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have plenty of flu tests. Covid-19 is also pretty distinctive on chest CT scans, if it's advanced enough to kill you. The numbers may be wrong in that article but the math itself seems straightforward. It's certainly true that we need more tests to be sure of the numbers. Here's a pretty interesting simulation from a research group at the University of Basel: https://neherlab.org/covid19/

> Covid-19 is also pretty distinctive on chest CT scans, if it's advanced enough to kill you. I guess you're suggesting that when people die of Covid-19, we'd know it and count it? That's not true. First, CT scans (and other expensive tests) are not generally performed on people who have died of pneumonia, apparently due to the flu (or other causes). Second, the radiologists reading those studies would have to train…

I was more thinking that CT scans would happen in advanced cases before the patients die. I did a bit of googling and found CT scans are not a definitive diagnosis but they are distinct from flu at least (just as koheripbal said).

But it's a good point that we might have more deaths than we've counted, and this might just mean we're further along that we realize. The rate of growth is probably not just an artifact of more testing; it's similar to the growth rates in other countries that haven't gotten control of the disease. And we definitely don't have it under control.

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