Live data from Hacker News

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

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

421–430 of 462 posts

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

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861.

Eh... _kind of_. It was abolished in such a way that in practice it kept more or less functioning for a very long time afterwards.

If you mean that peasants still had to rely on the land owned by somebody else to survive, then yes. But this had been the case in every country that had serfdom and abolished it, usually until industrialization funneled all those peasants into the cities.

But serfdom is a lot more than that - it's literally treating people as slaves, selling them etc. That part was decisively abolished.

By 1917, when the Revolution happened, peasants' primary concern was access to and control of the land, not personal freedom.

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

#422
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bruce Aylward's visit to China made it sound like they were testing everyone too. Germany is at 0.42 and South Korea is at 1.24 now that more diagnosed people have had time to die.

China outside of Hubei has a CFR under 1%, actually. And they sure as hell didn't test everyone or even 10% of those infected in Hubei.

They tested every single person in the country who showed up to a doctor with a fever.

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

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Er, you're not trying to figure out how the ship victims already died, you're trying to predict how many other people might die of the same cause. To do that kind of thing well, you need a hypothesis, and then you need to test it properly. What would be the randomized double blind trial that you would run, and what information would it give us? > Basically, an epidemic is not a linear system, so you can't model it…

> What would be the randomized double blind trial that you would run, and what information would it give us? I have absolutely no idea how to design or run a clinical study. > 60% of people will get the virus. All at the same time?? Your extrapolation comparing total critical cases with the number of ICU beds seemed to assume that. Try this interactive model, which plots infections over time and takes into account ho…

> All at the same time??

No, but it doesn't matter. If 10,000,000 people need to use 60,000 beds, and they each use one for three weeks, that's 500 weeks, almost ten years. Even if you could get a ventilator for all of them, Chinese experience is that about half of the vented patients die.

Hopefully in a year and a half or so we'll have a vaccine. Until then we need to keep the case counts low, first by sequestering ourselves to get the numbers down, and then by other, less draconian means once the case counts are in single/double digits.

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

#424
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on going on cruise. People who are bedridden or who can barely walk don't usually do that.

You don't have to be bedridden to have lungs that are one cold away from death. People with advanced COPD etc are everywhere but can walk short distances etc and prefer cruises to schlepping through airports and whatnot. Knowing people who go on large long cruises they tell me they've never been on one where they didn't have at least one death. Indeed I know people with serious health issues who go on these knowing t…

Large ships have a lot of passengers. In the US Men hit a 2% chance of death at 68, which jumps to 3.6% at 75. At 85 that jumps to 9.6%, and by 95 your at 26% and the numbers keep increasing.

This means you can’t simply look at the average age to estimate risk factors. Still a 2% risk of death per year x 3000 people = 1.15 deaths per week ignoring crew. In other words what you’re describing is still a fairly heathy population.

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose central China, northern Italy, Iran, Spain, the rest of Italy, and soon enough France, Germany, New York City, Israel, followed by plenty of other places just happen to be vastly unlucky for “some generic reason”.

The cfr in those areas is not even close. It seems NYC has one of the lowest cfrs in the us.

It typically takes 2.5–3 weeks after the start of symptoms for hospitalized patients to die. It only takes a few days to a week for a positive test result to come back.

Up until recently people hospitalized in NYC has had access to doctors and equipment, but NYC hospitals are already on the verge of being overwhelmed, and the crisis is just starting there. 2–3 weeks ago the “CFR” (i.e. deaths to date divided by known positive cases) was also very low in Lombardy.

The mass social distancing interventions they have undertaken in NYC should hopefully start kicking in, and we can all hope that the situation doesn’t get as bad as Lombardy, but in the mean time there are going to be thousands if not tens of thousands of deaths there, and it looks like doctors may soon end up facing choices about who to put on ventilators.

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

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corvid 19 deaths are doubling every 3 days in US and a few other countries. Do the extrapolation.

In 47 days, twice the population of the Earth will be dead.

Of humans or crows?

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

#427

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.

I'm also in this camp. I feel like it is the rational position too. So much margin for error in about 300 different facets.

Based on my comment's downvotes, and no feedback, I have to assume I've either 1) Misread the article, 2) Misinterpreted the article, 3) Didn't clarify my position sufficiently.

This recent HN post has a pretty good summary of where I think we all are on the given 'mask issue' topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22673242

Suffice it to say, these clap-back articles among the medical elite in supposed positions of authority don't clarify the facts any better than the sketchy policies being made on nebulous data. But I guess we are in a state of 'real-time' peer review, and everyone left guessing the outcomes.

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

#428
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's a difference between IFR and CFR.

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prove that what matters? That they meet tons of working age people? As you say you can expand the circle of isolation. All the at-risk patients (Say people over 65 and all adults with preexisting conditions). Then you isolate those people that they have to interact with. For example all staff at all nursing homes where any such person lives. But you quickly end up where you started. All the people who work in all the…

Then test the caregivers too. That's still far less difficult than quarantining everyone .

When tests are cheap, available and provide results in hours, that might be possible. You’ll have thousands of people who need testing every day.

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

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh... _kind of_. It was abolished in such a way that in practice it kept more or less functioning for a very long time afterwards.

If you mean that peasants still had to rely on the land owned by somebody else to survive, then yes. But this had been the case in every country that had serfdom and abolished it, usually until industrialization funneled all those peasants into the cities. But serfdom is a lot more than that - it's literally treating people as slaves, selling them etc. That part was decisively abolished. By 1917, when the Revolution…

As I understand it, many emancipated serfs and their descendants were still paying off a substantial tax intended to compensate landowners into the 20th century, often by working for the same landowners. It was clearly an improvement over serfdom, but likely a worse situation than contemporary peasants elsewhere.
Post reply on HN