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Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

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Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#361

Post by leereeves »

Symmetry wrote: post #350
leereeves wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Korea, with one-sixth the population of the US, peaked at 10,000 cases. We haven't passed that per capita case load - and even if we do, lower population density should make it easier to get the virus under control in the US (except in NYC).

We're still a long way from Korea's testing capability. Mass use of surgical masks in public probably also helps.

On Friday, March 20, The Atlantic said over 100,000 people in the US have been tested.[1] More recently, Mike Pence said 250,000 people have been tested.

We're a few days away from Korea's testing capability, if we haven't already matched it.

I think southeast Asia in general handles pandemics better. The people know how to respond and do so more quickly than Americans. Wearing masks, not going on spring break, etc.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-...

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#362

Post by nkohari »

bugzz wrote: post #204
Barrin92 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why would we use the Diamond Princess CFR instead of China's, or Italy's, or South Korea's? because everyone on the diamond princess was tested. So we know for sure how many cases we are dealing within the sample. ~0.3 and ~0.9% are also not optimistic guesses but the current numbers for Germany and SK. Italy sits at 9%. So the situation is either that Italy is vastly underestimating cases, or Germany and South Kore…

Go check South Korea's numbers again. As their cases have resolved, death rate has steadily increased, and it's now at 1.33%. It will continue to rise. Same with Germany, it just takes time to die. South Korea had already found majority of their current cases 2-3 weeks ago, but deaths are only now picking up. Edit: now 1.37%, up again since I checked a couple hours ago. The same rise in death rate was observed way ba…

The opposite happened with H1N1 (swine flu) in 2009, though. The CFR was estimated to be significantly higher during the pandemic but afterwards was estimated at 0.02% with 60M American cases. [0]

Policymakers should use conservative estimates to be careful, but we still just don't know how deadly COVID-19 is.

[0] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/ese.14.33.1...

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#363

Post by rvnx »

kgwgk wrote: post #298
giantDinosaur wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noted exactly that in my comment. Yes, not all the population can go on a cruise. No, it's not like it's only the healthiest 20% of the population that can. If I randomly sampled the population I'd expect the majority to be capable of a cruise. What do you think cruises are like?

If you agree that they are not a random sample of the population - they are healthy enough to be fit for travel (like the majority of the population) you are not trying to contradict ant6n's comment as I thought. I misunderstood, my apologies.

and it's not a small travel (e.g. the British tourists that went on board the Diamond Princess).

If you are not in good health at the beginning, you don't adventure yourself 10 hours+ from your home. So this group is likely in better shape than average population.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#364

Post by klmadfejno »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #128
rootusrootus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm becoming considerably more afraid of the social and economic consequences from the pandemic countermeasures than of the virus itself.

You do realise that, given no countermeasures, there will be deaths of millions of people, plus half the country I'll. It will collapse the economy. Tou cant save money by ignoring the disease.

I don't argue for no countermeasures due to moral reasons, but I think this is highly misleading. More than half of the deaths from this disease are from people over 80. The majority of people over 80 contribute nothing to the economy, but do receive social services, take up housing, have expensive healthcare, etc. If thanos snapped away everybody over 80, I think the economy would IMPROVE because we suddenly have an enormous chunk of resources that can be used for more useful things than care for the elderly.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#365

Post by cycomanic »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #353
bmn__ wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prof. Drosten who developed the test says that cannot happen in practice. One would get a false positive result with SARS-1 (de facto extinct) and related coronavirus strains in Asian bats (that have not crossed into humans). Source: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript132.pdf#3

> Prof. Drosten who developed the test says that cannot happen in practice. Obviously not true False positives are always possible in practice even if they aren't possible in theory Get a bunch of tired lab techs running tests 24/7 and one of them will accidentally write down the wrong result at some point

I would not consider that a false positive in the test, maybe in the procedure, but that's quite different.

Moreover it is statistically irrelevant, that would maybe account for 1%, but only if they would only note false positives.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#366

Post by rightbyte »

nopinsight wrote: post #307
Barrin92 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why would we use the Diamond Princess CFR instead of China's, or Italy's, or South Korea's? because everyone on the diamond princess was tested. So we know for sure how many cases we are dealing within the sample. ~0.3 and ~0.9% are also not optimistic guesses but the current numbers for Germany and SK. Italy sits at 9%. So the situation is either that Italy is vastly underestimating cases, or Germany and South Kore…

0.3% & 0.9% are optimistic. South Korea's naive case fatality rate (CFR) is already 120 deaths/9037 cases = ~1.3% today, gradually going up from ~0.5-0.6% a few weeks ago. Why? People in a functioning healthcare system take time to die and these people were infected during an expansion phase of spread which rapidly increases #cases (denominator). SK's cohort CFR is even higher. More properly, we should use the infect…

If you have the raw data you can easily estimate CFR even though the number of infected are increasing by doing a culminate graph over "death share vs time since symptom onset or diagnosis" for the cases.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#367

Post by Fjolsvith »

Someone ought to research out the number of cell phone accounts that have been terminated in China in the last three months. I saw a video last night claiming it was on the order of 2.1 million.

If you didn't know, the Chinese government tracks their citizens movement, social activities and pretty much everything through their phones. If you don't have a phone in China, you are a non-person, or perhaps you've died.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#368

Post by [deleted] »

joe_the_user wrote: post #181
Barrin92 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, and if any of those other viruses caused a world wide pandemic, I missed it. They do actually. Several of the outbreaks studied among the papers were influenza pandemics, coronavirus pandemics, and SARS. (page ~110-120) This rhetoric you're starting here about bringing out the war drums to fight invisible enemies is exactly what Ioannidis is afraid of. It is not scientific, it is not based on evidence, and it…

This rhetoric you're starting here about bringing out the war drums to fight invisible enemies is exactly what Ioannidis is afraid of. It is not scientific, it is not based on evidence, and it does not, weigh the tail risk of a global economic breakdown. Science is a means of discovering the most likely state of things and an always uncertain one. Other human institutions have to come into play when it is necessary t…

[deleted]

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#369

Post by kgwgk »

seppel wrote: post #347
nopinsight wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.3% & 0.9% are optimistic. South Korea's naive case fatality rate (CFR) is already 120 deaths/9037 cases = ~1.3% today, gradually going up from ~0.5-0.6% a few weeks ago. Why? People in a functioning healthcare system take time to die and these people were infected during an expansion phase of spread which rapidly increases #cases (denominator). SK's cohort CFR is even higher. More properly, we should use the infect…

>South Korea's naive case fatality rate (CFR) is already 120 deaths/9037 cases But the denominator in this formula strongly depends on who and how often you test. In other words: You don't know the number of cases. Obviously, people who are severely affected are tested more often. People with mild or no symptoms might never be tested, even if they want to (I'm not sure about South Korea but for sure this is happening…

For what it's worth, South Korea has 9k confirmed cases after performing 349k tests.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#370

Post by Symmetry »

leereeves wrote: post #361
Symmetry wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're still a long way from Korea's testing capability. Mass use of surgical masks in public probably also helps.

On Friday, March 20, The Atlantic said over 100,000 people in the US have been tested.[1] More recently, Mike Pence said 250,000 people have been tested. We're a few days away from Korea's testing capability, if we haven't already matched it. I think southeast Asia in general handles pandemics better. The people know how to respond and do so more quickly than Americans. Wearing masks, not going on spring break, etc.…

300 tests per million people is much, much better than we were a week before that.. But South Korea is at 6,000.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid19-tests-per-million...

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