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California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

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Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#171

Post by cjbprime »

zachkatz wrote: post #165
cjbprime wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference in density and sprawl between pre-car and post-car cities is staggering, and is not about the width of streets. You can't get around Los Angeles without driving on freeways.

Except Los Angeles is actually a pre-car city, and at one point had the biggest streetcar network in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Railway With investment in public transit (i.e. approximately rebuilding the original streetcar network and building out the existing Metro system) and a high-quality protected bike lane network, LA could be truly amazing.

It had the highest per-capita car registration in the world at the same time, though.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#172

Post by dennisgorelik »

amalter wrote: post #154
zaroth wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting also to note that even hospitals are going bankrupt during all of this, as the vast majority of the money is made on “elective” procedures. Elective in this case doesn’t mean cosmetic, it means an appointment was booked at a certain time. The procedures are still necessary. Hospitals are in fact mostly empty . It’s just the COVID units which were overwhelmed, and even there, most EDs across the US we…

I live around 10 blocks from Brooklyn Hospital Center and I assure you the entire hospital, including atriums, waiting rooms, hallways and even meeting rooms are packed with patient beds. If your hospital is empty, it’s because of the actions you took. Stop doing those actions, and your neighborhood will soon look like mine soon. This thing of going to come in so many waves because humans seem to be incapable of not…

> because of the actions you took

What actions do you mean? Move out from downtown to suburbs?

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#173

Post by dennisgorelik »

eanzenberg wrote: post #115
mediumdeviation wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems unlikely given that in the week of April 6 to 12, Covid 19 has risen to the 2nd leading cause of death in the United States[1]. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/16/coronaviru...

This is bad analysis which uses historic numbers and plops COVID against them. Everyone right now is dying of COVID and not much else. Apparently it’s healing cancer and heart attacks. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm

I understand why total number of deaths decreased a little bit due to quarantine.

But sudden drop in total number of deaths from 52,992 down to 35,863 in the last week - looks suspicious.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#174

Post by genofon »

rags2riches wrote: post #94
evandijk70 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the Netherlands, definitely not: The first Figure in this article (Dutch) shows the number of deaths from any cause. https://nos.nl/artikel/2330786-oversterfte-door-corona-blijf... During the Corona outbreak, almost double the amount of people are dying compared to the same time last year.

There must be some sort of "flushing the pipeline" effect involved, provided that the virus kills the vulnerable to some extent. So I wonder how that will affect the numbers in the near future.

of course everyone has to die at a certain point, when does make a difference and COVID is making a HUGE difference as you can see by the spike in mortality rate

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#175

Post by dennisgorelik »

arcticbull wrote: post #68
lisper wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your risk of dying from a COVID infection is 0.37% I'm 55 so I'm pretty sure my risk is higher than that. Also, the covid risk is highly front-loaded. If I'm gong to die from covid, I'm likely to do so now whereas if I'm going to die in a car crash that might happen now or it might happen later. I don't really care about dying per se. Sooner or later it's going to happen. What I care about is dying sooner and more…

Not really actually! In your age category 50-59 your case fatality rate is 1.3% [1] and given the way it affects the older end of the band more significantly than yourself in the middle of the band, it wouldn't be at all unlikely that your case fatality rate is right around 1%. Further, we have been seeing anywhere from 30-80% of cases are asymptomatic or result in mild flulike symptoms and therefore not accounted fo…

> In your age category 50-59 your case fatality rate is 1.3%

Most of the passengers on the Diamond Princes cruise ship were 65+ years old.

Only 0.23% of the passengers died after Covid-19 outbreak.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#176

Post by amalter »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #172
amalter wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live around 10 blocks from Brooklyn Hospital Center and I assure you the entire hospital, including atriums, waiting rooms, hallways and even meeting rooms are packed with patient beds. If your hospital is empty, it’s because of the actions you took. Stop doing those actions, and your neighborhood will soon look like mine soon. This thing of going to come in so many waves because humans seem to be incapable of not…

> because of the actions you took What actions do you mean? Move out from downtown to suburbs?

Given enough time, an unchecked virus with the attributes of this Coronavirus will saturate through semi-rural and even rural populations. It’s it might take more time, but that’s usually coupled with more spread out medical services.

Without significant efforts to lower the R value (Aka the actions I alluded to; facial covering, social distancing, track and trace) - it’s only a matter of when, not if.

Minus a wonderful medical breakthrough, come find me next winter and let’s see how sure you are with such a quip.

Oh, and by then, a great expense to life, the cities will likely have reached herd immunity, but I won’t quip back, as it would be in bad taste.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#177

Post by dragonwriter »

arcticbull wrote: post #125
dragonwriter wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if we'll see a big drop in flu deaths The flu season overlapped with a period that included initial reports and fear of a novel respiratory disease and then historic, mandatory countermeasures (for the vast majority of the population) against communicable respiratory disease; it would be bizarre if there wasn't a big drop in flu deaths.

I meant in following years, as those who likely would have succumbed to the flu in following years succumb to COVID now. For the current period, there's absolutely no way flu, car and so on deaths don't plunge.

Even in vulnerable groups, the case fatality rate doesn't seem high enough that it would make a big impact in future statistics for that reason (probably bigger impact through lasting behavioral changes.)

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#178

Post by arcticbull »

greedo wrote: post #160
arcticbull wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your risk of dying is, accepting the 0.37% for the sake of argument, 0.37% if you're infected. The actual chance of anyone, even of someone in a more dangerous demographic, of dying of Covid in their lifetime is significantly lower than that. I personally believe that given the R0 and the large number of asymptomatic cases, there's no putting this genie back in the bag, and I agree with prominent epidemiologists th…

You support Sweden's model of ignoring the issue? Not only do they still have a high exponential growth rate, as well as exponentially increasing death counts, but their CFR is atrocious. Also the link in your footnote is extremely outdated, and doesn't mention anything about Sweden.

Sweden has actually leveled off and had flat new case growth over the last week [1], same as in Canada where they have shut the world down (in terms of flatness not numbers). Further CFR is almost exclusively based on age of acquisition and the extent to which hospitals are available. In Sweden hospitals are available. The disease is exactly the same everywhere so it’s much more to do with demographics.

I mean they’ve had 15000 recorded cases (of course since they’re letting the disease roam free without a general population testing regimen that’s going to be a minuscule fraction of the denominator which they expect to reach 7 million ish) and 1500 deaths. Crude CFR is 10%.

Bloomberg and the government as of 10 hours ago claim their strategy of “ignoring” a disease that’s just not that fatal is working great, and that unlike the rest of the world they’ll never have to deal with it again as they’re en route to developing herd immunity. [2]

IMO it’s becoming more and more clear that we collectively lost our minds in panic over something that’s just not that bad. The Swedish model is one to replicate.

[1] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/

[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#179

Post by mirimir »

gpm wrote: post #74
carbocation wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 0.5% of GDP isn’t nothing! Wow! Are you saying that you disagree that California losing 500% of its GDP seems impossible?

I doubt we are even near 500%, but I'll go ahead and say I think it's possible in the short term for California to be lose 500% of it's GDP. It's possible to borrow against our future, both literally with money, and figuratively by decreasing future productivity. For instance, we're (probably) negatively impacting kids education, that's going to have a negative impact on the economy for the next 50+ years. If we fuck…

That's a sobering argument. But I wonder how it compares to other major disruptions, such as major wars. Or even the 2008 recession.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#180

Post by greedo »

nostromo wrote: post #169
greedo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your calculus is off. The $2T spent (not $6T) is not for the 40k deaths, but for preventing 400K additional deaths. At $5K per saved life, well worth it. If you want to fault the spending, talk to Congress and the WH about why it's so misallocated.

You’re not including the fed balance sheet, which is much larger than the stimulus.

Assuming that none of the $4T added to the balance sheet won't be recovered (highly unlikely), then we spent $15K per life. Still a bargain.
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