381–390 of 462 posts
Sadly, my takeaway/tl:dr Everything you've heard or read is fake news, we know almost nothing. Ironically uses 'gone viral' when he crits a fellow doc (cite 12) on the mask 'issue', and clearly we can't even get these experienced pros on this very topic to agree on much of anything, but will print regardless.
So much margin for error in about 300 different facets.
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Many cases in SK and Germany have not resolved yet. I don’t think you can use those numbers so definitively.
Actually South Korea is a perfect place to look for a nation which kept it under control. Germany just lost control last week, so I expect a lot more death starting next week. Hopefully Germany's plan of isolation will reduce the spread enough, but we will see...
We must stop confusing the outbreak of diagnoses with the outbreak of cases. That's the mistake every government agency in the West has made, and it's why it spreads faster and better in the west than in South Korea or Taiwan.
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Many cases in SK and Germany have not resolved yet. I don’t think you can use those numbers so definitively.
I think SK's numbers are becoming more reliable by the day though. The new case rate has stabilised to a small number in the range of 50 to 150 per day and the active case count is dropping at a rate of over 200 per day. The daily death rate has been below 10 the whole time I believe. If that trend continues then SK's CFR will be well known soon and I would guess not dissimilar to current estimates. Though it's alway…
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>> An economy is not something that one should have to shovels lives into to keep going. I mean I want to agree in principle, but this is just an incorrect statement. It's a matter of what is a good-enough tradeoff of risk and reward. If you make people drive to work, some will die. If you want to mine lithium, some people will die in industrial accidents that wouldn't have died if you never built a lithium mine. If…
There is no trade-off. Exponential functions are pretty binary. We contain this (R0 A core problem is that we're not looking at how to mitigate damage to the economy. We can handle a month or two of the economy shutting down, no problem. You'll get your new car 2 months later. Most of the damage is auxiliary: businesses going bankrupt, people defaulting on mortgages, etc. All of that can be mitigated with the right m…
That is a tradeoff? I don't understand how you are disagreeing with what I said. You are literally spelling out what we are trading off, the fact that its a very good trade (in your opinion, which is based on expert advise and almost certainly correct, but there are no guarantees) doesn't make it stop being a trade. In fact, that is how all tradeoffs work, one option is better than the other so you pick it.
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>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.
One thing that seems really important is that we get testing right. Here is a paper stating up to 80% of false positives: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32133832/ If that was true it would make all the stats nearly useless. I have also heard that the so called 'quick tests' are even worse.
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>> An economy is not something that one should have to shovels lives into to keep going. I mean I want to agree in principle, but this is just an incorrect statement. It's a matter of what is a good-enough tradeoff of risk and reward. If you make people drive to work, some will die. If you want to mine lithium, some people will die in industrial accidents that wouldn't have died if you never built a lithium mine. If…
> It's a matter of what is a good-enough tradeoff of risk and reward. This also sounds very short-sighted. Yes, people die in a lithium mine, but in most countries, I'm the one taking the risk to become a miner or not. Understandably, the situation isn't that easy: in some countries, you may indirectly or directly be forced to risk your life for the economy. Yet often, I don't see the physical risk-takers being parti…
Well, not really. Lots of people would fail to prepare and rely on their community, and during times the community couldn't afford to help them, they would starve to death. Lots and lots and lots of people just starved to death. They didn't prepare enough, and then they slowly and painfully died from not eating anything. Lots of rich people said "they should have prepared", but it's hard to imagine what it's like to have to decide whether your children will have to be barefoot all winter, or just not go to school at all this year if you don't decide to sell a few extra potatoes instead of saving them.
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Stepping on the breaks perfectly align with what we know scientifically. People think of science as something very narrow – but it's also evidence and rationality. What China and South Korea have done works. What other alternatives do we have?
Except China and South Korea did different things.
I published a paper on outbreaks in a hospital setting and the problem is there is not a single RCT on methods to stop outbreaks. The problem is no organization is willing to approve a trial where you don't follow your protocols and commonly accepted methods to control the spread (ex. closing common areas, isolating patients, cohorting staff, enhanced cleaning). There is a good blog post about 'Riding the Wave' that…
South Korea got their infections down and their economy isn’t in the toilet. Compare to Italy’s reactive policy and subsequent failure. Or look to Taiwan and Japan with economies running and infection rates under control (at present). Your “perhaps the outbreak would have ended itself” will be shown to be false in multiple countries that lack the resources to manage their infection transmission rates... We have heard…