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CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

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Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#331

Post by Natsu »

H8crilA wrote: post #220
Natsu wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's effectively the complete opposite of how to actually eliminate errors. The way engineers do it involves depersonalizing it to get away from blame games, assessing all contributing causes, doing proper risk modeling and working to improve the systems so that they rely on human frailty as little as possible. Skin in the game is an easy concept we're all familiar with, but it generally leads to adverse behavior l…

I don't think the concept is easy for people to understand at all. It's just darwinism really, but people think it's about punishment. Note that darwinism doesn't just reject bad ideas, it has a rather high and variable false positive rate. I.e. it's unfair, for example Ramanujan died prematurely despite being a genius and a gift to his species. But it is overall also quite effective. If you can game the numbers ther…

You seem to believe that "skin in the game" guarantees the survival of the fittest leaders. This is only true assuming that the selection criteria are good ones and ones that cannot be cheated.

As long as anyone is capable of gaming their numbers, it floods out honest people in favor of cheaters. It's very powerful at selecting for whatever your metrics are. When you have the wrong metrics or ones that can be cheated, it's very powerful in an extremely bad way.

In addition, the general public and the media are absolutely not good at this, or we would have far better leaders than we do.

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#332

Post by rovolo »

lurquer wrote: post #322
rovolo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deaths per capita will be most important at the end of the pandemic. Right now you're better off looking at case-fatality-rate, day over day rate of new cases, and the current number of cases. Right now the US is at 52K cases and ~650 deaths. That is ~1% fatal, but that can decrease by more testing or increase because it takes time to die. Currently 0.01% of the US has tested positive and 0.0002% of the US has died.…

US is 18th in deaths per capita. (And falling.) In a thread criticizing the US, it is odd that this simple fact isn't mentioned. Or, alternatively, the importance of the fact is minimized. (Even more odd that the US per capita death from covid is less than U.K., Netherlands, France, Sweden, Denmark and many other countries whose health-care systems are routinely praised on this site.)

Because the virus is spreading exponentially, the rankings for per-capita cases/deaths are going to be highly dependent on how long the outbreak has been going on in that area. Is the US's health care system worse than Palestine, Honduras, Cuba, and Pakistan?

I see you're using https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ for your rankings. The per-capita rankings are very sensitive to small populations. I think these 9 should be considered outliers:

San Marino (basically Italy): 21 deaths; Andorra: 3; Cayman Islands: 1; Luxembourg: 9; Iceland: 2; Channel Islands: 1; Curaçao: 1; Norway (half the pop of Sweden, but the cut-off has to be somewhere): 14; Slovenia: 6.

That leaves 10 places which I agree are currently doing worse in deaths per-capita: Italy, Spain, Iran, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, UK, Denmark, Sweden; and 5 places doing roughly the same: Portugal, Austria, Germany, Ecuador, Greece.

However, the number of deaths per-capita is doubling every 3 days in the US. If we do 3 days worse then other countries, we'll pass Denmark and Sweden. A week worse and we'll pass the UK. 10 days and we'll pass France, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium.

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#333

Post by lurquer »

rovolo wrote: post #332
lurquer wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US is 18th in deaths per capita. (And falling.) In a thread criticizing the US, it is odd that this simple fact isn't mentioned. Or, alternatively, the importance of the fact is minimized. (Even more odd that the US per capita death from covid is less than U.K., Netherlands, France, Sweden, Denmark and many other countries whose health-care systems are routinely praised on this site.)

Because the virus is spreading exponentially, the rankings for per-capita cases/deaths are going to be highly dependent on how long the outbreak has been going on in that area. Is the US's health care system worse than Palestine, Honduras, Cuba, and Pakistan? I see you're using https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ for your rankings. The per-capita rankings are very sensitive to small populations. I think these…

>The per-capita rankings are very sensitive to small populations. I think these 9 should be considered outliers:

I agree.

Time will tell about the final rankings.

But, the US health-care system is far more robust and creative than many of these other systems.

Health-care COST is a legitimate debate. But, at the end of the day, when it comes to care, you are generally far better off in a US hospital than one of the others.

In any case, we shall see...

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#334

Post by tobltobs »

watertom wrote: post #321
tobltobs wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When community spread was detected in Washington state ... Testing wasn't the problem. If you detect community spread without testing you are too late anyway.

Not for the rest of the country

You are two weeks behind with testing. There is no rest of the country anymore.

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#335

Post by nocorpwelfare »

Kye wrote: post #304
nocorpwelfare wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you are so obsessed with testing? In the US, if you have a medical problem, you go to the doctor. The doctor may order tests. If you are not sick, or the doctor doesn't think you need certain tests, they don't order the tests. It was never possible to ramp up test kits for 350M people and it's not going to help anyways. You test negative one day, then...what? You can still catch the virus! It's a fal…

>> "without idiots posting on web forums about their non-expertise and not giving in to who can yell the loudest." What are your credentials?

PhD Mathematics/Computer Science

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#336

Post by Kye »

nocorpwelfare wrote: post #335
Kye wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "without idiots posting on web forums about their non-expertise and not giving in to who can yell the loudest." What are your credentials?

PhD Mathematics/Computer Science

So nothing that qualifies you to speak as an expert on matters of medicine. I refer you back to your own words:

>> "without idiots posting on web forums about their non-expertise and not giving in to who can yell the loudest."

I don't think you need credentials to learn enough about a topic to discuss it intelligently, but I do think people should be consistent in application of their own standards.

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#337

Post by [deleted] »

lurquer wrote: post #329
sd8f9iu wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has been far behind other Western countries in testing: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/us/coronaviru... The per-capita chart is most notable. Other Western countries' responses haven't been stellar either, but the US's is particularly flawed.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ US is 21st in per capita deaths (and falling... that is, it was 18th a couple days ago.) Spin all you want about testing and the like. But, the fact remains that the US's medical system is doing a better job than the other western countries. Its striking that Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Belgium, UK, Sweden, Denmark, and Austria have more per capita covid…

[deleted]

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#338

Post by sd8f9iu »

lurquer wrote: post #329
sd8f9iu wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has been far behind other Western countries in testing: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/us/coronaviru... The per-capita chart is most notable. Other Western countries' responses haven't been stellar either, but the US's is particularly flawed.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ US is 21st in per capita deaths (and falling... that is, it was 18th a couple days ago.) Spin all you want about testing and the like. But, the fact remains that the US's medical system is doing a better job than the other western countries. Its striking that Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Belgium, UK, Sweden, Denmark, and Austria have more per capita covid…

There is no sense in comparing per-capita deaths this early in the pandemic, especially when the spread of the virus in the US trails a few weeks behind that in Europe. Talk to me in a few months. Furthermore, per-capita figures are meaningless when comparing areas of substantially different population size and density (e.g. Austria, Switzerland) to the US. _I_ do not see how a "rational and objective analysis" like yours can ignore these basic mitigating factors when making such comparisons.

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#339

Post by wutbrodo »

atq2119 wrote: post #285
wutbrodo wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an odd conclusion to draw. You're saying that people call the government incompetent, and now they're demonstrating incompetence, and you're convinced that the causality flows from the former to the latter?

As an external observer, I think it's not so much about whether the current US government is incompetent or not, although of course that does play some role. The key point is that a large fraction of USians have a purely ideological belief that government cannot ever be good. As a consequence, too large a fraction of the population and of political leadership don't even try to make government institutions better, and…

> As an external observer, I think it's not so much about whether the current US government is incompetent or not, although of course that does play some role. The key point is that a large fraction of USians have a purely ideological belief that government cannot ever be good.

I'd be wary of outgroup homogeneity bias here. I'm a fairly big-government guy; there are plenty of things the market is sorely ill-equipped to handle where active, competent govt can do tons of good.

But unlike most people on the big-govt side of the discussion, I don't think that it's blasphemy to question why the US govt is so especially incompetent in certain areas (infra construction is a glaring example, etc). Waving it away as "they don't have enough funding to do good things" is undetermined, the kind of answer that people reach for because it seems obvious, not because it's correct (or rather, complete).

While I've decided that big govt is, in many cases, worth the inefficiency, it's still worth asking _why_ it's inefficient and whether we can improve this. I also don't begrudge some very smart friends of mine who've decided that its inefficiency means that decentralizing power is a better path forward. I can guarantee you that all the people I've talked to who feel that way have given it far more thought than the simple-minded stereotypes the GP comment engages in.

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