191–200 of 208 posts
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I really don't understand why people immediately want to discredit the idea that US patient zero was not the first in US. Or that this virus was around earlier and that there are limitations in contact tracing capabilities. This seems to have the toughest aspect of gaining consensus. Need antibody tests now, and ones that work reliably.
This hypothesis has already been tested by Stanford and found to be false.
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People don't advance a hypothesis without enough anecdotes to say "look over there" People like you can help fill gaps of savants saying "this isn't a constructive methodology but it isn't inherently without merit" versus "I don't want to believe that because thats not consensus right now" versus "hm thats interesting maybe worth a look sometime before the 2022 congressional committee to fund the epidemiologists?"
> People don't advance a hypothesis without enough anecdotes to say "look over there" They do so all the time. They'll advance hypothesis even without ancedotes on the vaguest of hunches, and bias towards Type I pattern recognition errors ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AjLmU0Sfu4 ). This is in fact half the problem - why anecdotes alone aren't terribly useful, and must be treated with so much caution and skeptici…
Thanks for the invitation. Lets see where the goal post is here
> Either the ancedotes form useful data or they don't - you can't have it both ways.
In this case they do if you test for antibodies. We can't test for antibodies. It has been gaslighting from you to willingly ignore what the limitations of data are and how to solve them, if this is a term that bothers you make sure to look at it from my perspective as well, are you recycling this argument for everything epidemiologists aren't currently doing and everything that doesn't currently have consensus? Or is it just for me, either way I don't think you have factored in the exact argument here and I'll get to that:
> Does our political and epidemic policy really change if, say, technically this started several months earlier than we realized in Russia?
Yes it does, because it means the bay area is safe and can change its own policy. I don't see how you missed this in your effort to convert the word hypothetical into a pejorative.
> But since you seem to be hypothesizing about 2022 congressional committees
This was hyperbole but also likely what is going to happen. After the dust has cleared, Congress makes committees to see what exacerbated dysfunction - and they may then notice this discrepancy in the bay area as well. Meaning that it has nothing to do with a national policy decision because my hypothesis is relevant on a local level for the Bay Area as this whole thread made abundantly clear. For everywhere else it is merely interesting.
The difference is that one major economic center of the US can resume with a level of certainty and forward guidance.
My primary point of this exercise is that you are rejecting this possibility out of principle, recycled from rejecting a wide universe of possibilities, without factoring in what this one actually could change. So I hope thats clear now.
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Iceland’s peak was significantly more recent than China or South Korea which continued to have regular deaths over a month after their peak. So, my expectation is their deaths will likely double in the next three weeks. Which would be consist with ~1/2 their ICU cases dying. That said it’s a small sample size so significant variability is possible. Just compare new cases vs new deaths here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w…
Just a point on the comment "~1/2 their ICU cases dying". The University Hospital handles most of the cases (and all except two deaths). According to their statistics* a total of 25 have been in ICU ("Á gjörgæslu frá upphafi"), total of 13 on ventilators from the beginning ("Í öndunarvél frá upphafi"), with as-of yesterday 3 still on ventilators ("Í öndunarvél") and 6 deaths ("Andlát samtals vegna Covid-19"). So that…
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The U.S. has more resources per capita at its disposal, but if everyone is starting at zero tests, I'd still expect smaller countries to be able to ramp faster relative to their population, and all the countries you've listed are indeed smaller than the U.S. There's the old adage "nine women can't make a baby in a month". Sometimes there are real-world limits to scaling, and the U.S. does have an incredible amount of…
Yeah. One big reason I'm not counting small countries (that is, anyone much smaller than Germany) is that there's a limited global supply of pretty much every consumable you need to test for coronavirus, and smaller wealthy countries can get a major boost in per-capita testing by just buying up more of the supply. So there's a whole bunch of smaller countries with really substantial per-capita testing advantages over…
And it's not like Portugal, Italy, Spain, or the Czech Republic are particularly small or particularly wealthy.
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Where are you getting that data? The 'Our World in Data' site says reporting is inconsistent, but the data they do have shows per-capita Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Austria doing more than the US, and France, the UK, and the Netherlands doing less. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-cumulative-tota... (I'm using cumulative because the daily numbers are missing for Germany, France, and the Netherlands)
It's certainly possible other countries have passed the US since I last looked, the exact leaderboard does seem to vary depending on things like which country is hitting the biggest roadblocks in their test rollout right now. (Though Italy's lead in total per-capita tests is mainly because they were the first Western country to have their outbreak hit catastrophic levels and they ramped up testing fairly aggressively…
I ask because the data I have shows the US solidly in the middle for the big EU countries over the past month (Germany and France don't show up on the daily graphs)
- Italy started earliest, but the daily per-capita tests have been higher every day except Apr 4: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...
- Austria, Czechia, and Portugal have been higher than the US more often than not: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...
- Belgium is on par; the UK & the Netherlands are definitely worse: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...
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Don't take my word for it. Here is an article by a Stanford epidemiologist calling for random testing a month ago: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... We need data to act objectively. As far as I can tell US state governments are doing all they can to prevent random data from being released.
What's the motivation? I see plenty of motivation in some states to try to minimize the potential magnitude of the problem, or avoid "bad" numbers of infection rates. I don't see a motivation for "milking" the crisis. The current actions by governments are restricting economic activity and revenue streams. Many states only make money on sales tax and that's probably not going super well right now. I agree that there…
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I don't know if people are aware of this, but there's an increasing suspicion that countries still using the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis might be seeing [1]way lower infection rates. If that's the case, it'd explain why developed countries are bearing the brunt of the pandemic. A very interesting example of similarly developed countries with comparable (but not equal) populations and population density, but differen…
The map in [4] suggests that every adult in France would have received the BCG vaccine, as they only stopped in 2017 (and receive it as an infant). There are so many confounding variables here, I don't think anyone should be deriving any evidence by looking at the case charts like that.
As someone else pointed out, the BCG needs a booster. While growing up I was given the initial one and two boosters. Most countries stopped doing that, which could also explain the effect. There's also the matter of which strain was used to create the vaccine: apparently some strains were better at fighting tuberculosis than others, so the same might apply (if the BCG vaccine actually made a difference) to COVID-19.
Anyway, my objective wasn't to start a conspiracy theory. We already have enough of those going around.
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I don't know if people are aware of this, but there's an increasing suspicion that countries still using the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis might be seeing [1]way lower infection rates. If that's the case, it'd explain why developed countries are bearing the brunt of the pandemic. A very interesting example of similarly developed countries with comparable (but not equal) populations and population density, but differen…
Thanks for the 4th link, I couldn't really understand the really sad images and videos coming out of Guayaquil (Ecuador) when comparing them to the rest of South America. Apart from Buenos Aires there are also big metropolises like Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro where you couldn't see the same things that were happening in Guayaquil. That vaccination map for South America partly explained the difference for me, at least…
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> People don't advance a hypothesis without enough anecdotes to say "look over there" They do so all the time. They'll advance hypothesis even without ancedotes on the vaguest of hunches, and bias towards Type I pattern recognition errors ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AjLmU0Sfu4 ). This is in fact half the problem - why anecdotes alone aren't terribly useful, and must be treated with so much caution and skeptici…
> On the off chance that I'm wrong, it invites a proper useful rebuttal or counter-argument. Thanks for the invitation. Lets see where the goal post is here > Either the ancedotes form useful data or they don't - you can't have it both ways. In this case they do if you test for antibodies. We can't test for antibodies. It has been gaslighting from you to willingly ignore what the limitations of data are and how to so…
> In this case they do if you test for antibodies
I'm not sure if this is a disagreement in framing or what. I encourage retroactive testing for antibodies, however, I do so in spite of ancedotal data failing to form useful data that suggests such tests will contradict the currently understood origins of the virus. Finding antibodies for samples taken in December, for example, sounds like it would be interesting and potentially useful science - for the very reason that it contradicts the data formed by said ancedotes.
>> Does our political and epidemic policy really change if, say, technically this started several months earlier than we realized in Russia?
> Yes it does, because it means the bay area is safe [...]
Wait what? How the heck would that conclusion follow? If there was some safer first wave originating from outside of China, and we're now in the middle of a dangerous second wave, then we're still dealing with a second dangerous wave! Are you... assuming some confounding variable is what's causing this to be dangerous, and assuming said confounding variable isn't present in the bay area? On what basis? For how long? There are confounding variables - the age of the victims, societal mask use, possibly weather conditions, and more to boot I'm sure... but I'm completely unaware of any that would suggest the bay area is somehow "safe", regardless of the origin of this thing. If anything, it might suggest that the confounding variables are changing to make this thing more dangerous.
The worldwide spread is giving us a huge sample size under varying conditions, the better to understand said confounding variables. It seems like a bit of a stretch to assume that any additional hypothetical early sample points are going to give us terribly much more insight as to what said confounding variables are, when we've turned half the planet into an involuntary testbed already - if there are indeed such confounding variables that would make parts of the world "safe" - and a stretch beyond the breaking point of common sense to assume that those insights will automatically make the bay area specifically safe when this thing is killing people just up the coast.
> [...] and can change its own policy. I don't see how you missed this in your effort to convert the word hypothetical into a pejorative.
Hypothesizing is great, and a fundamental part of the scientific process - which is why I don't wish to sully the term by conflating it with biased wishful thinking and conclusion jumping. I also haven't missed e.g. the bay area and California at large joining the Western States Pact, and their ability to make/change their own policy.
What I have completely missed is even the hypothetical logic train to "the bay area is safe". I have attempted to guess at it above, but it has so many holes that I fear I must be (unintentionally, I promise!) strawmanning you - and that you clearly must have some other train of logic leading to that conclusion that I'm simply failing to synthesize on your behalf. Perhaps you stated it elsewhere and can simply point me to the right part of that thread?
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> In the US, we're now doing significant amounts of testing, but we're still primarily testing only those with severe symptoms Its not a significant amount of testing if we're only testing those with severe symptoms Here in SF at least there are scores of people I know who all were sick with a "weird flu" at some point from February to now who would all kill for a test to show that they have COVID immunity. These are…
Go do the Stanford drive-through blood antibody tests. It takes five minutes it’s free and they do it for everybody.
it’s free and they do it for everybody