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Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

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Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#241

Post by ssijak »

koyote wrote: post #207
collyw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am stuck in my flat in Spain for the 5th week now. Just read they extended it another two, to 8 in total. I am wondering how other countries can be a bit more relaxed (UK and Belgium are allowed out for an our for exercise), or in the case of Sweeden a lot more relaxed, and are still managing to flatten their curves.

This is something I have not seen discussed or explained anywhere: Spain has such a hard lockdown and yet even after 5 weeks there are still thousands of cases every day. How are so many new people getting infected? The same has been true in Italy.

Household infections. Infected person in its infancy of the infection gets locked down with the familly and they get infected too. So you must go through all of that for the numbers to slow down and fall.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#242

Post by greedo »

koyote wrote: post #207
collyw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am stuck in my flat in Spain for the 5th week now. Just read they extended it another two, to 8 in total. I am wondering how other countries can be a bit more relaxed (UK and Belgium are allowed out for an our for exercise), or in the case of Sweeden a lot more relaxed, and are still managing to flatten their curves.

This is something I have not seen discussed or explained anywhere: Spain has such a hard lockdown and yet even after 5 weeks there are still thousands of cases every day. How are so many new people getting infected? The same has been true in Italy.

It's extremely difficult to tell whether the number of cases are increasing, or if testing is revealing more cases. It sounds like a tautology, but unless you have a very strict, consistent testing rubric, the outcomes are hard to measure in terms of growth. At best you can determine total case count.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#243

Post by greedo »

botten wrote: post #215
pnw_hazor wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to healthdata.org (IHME), Sweden has 79 ICU beds. If this is true, it seems that slowing the curve may not be worth it with so few ICU beds available. https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden

Sweden has more than 79 ICU beds.

This article seems to imply that Sweden can surge to 480 ICU beds when conducting disaster drills.

https://sjtrem.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s13049-02...

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#244

Post by greedo »

rhino369 wrote: post #214
joe_the_user wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly we (in the US) need quarantine now when things are out of control (and we need adequate PPE equipment for those working and financial support for those not working, two things that seem to be failing, likely to our extreme detriment). But once the "fire" has burned far enough, we will testing and contact tracing. And so we need to be getting these up and running NOW so they will be ready when the "fire" has s…

There doesn't seem to be much of a plan in place to test and contact trace in the USA. As you said we need to be getting these up in place now. And they should already be in place in areas without a lockdown. But I don't see much evidence we are really trying to do that. I also wonder if its possible to test and trace if its every minor city in the country in low numbers. We will have a million patient zeros.

We don't have the political will to do track and trace, nor the trained manpower. We would need roughly 300K people employed doing just this.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#245

Post by fspeech »

beagle3 wrote: post #232
pps43 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paper? "I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error." https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...

While Gelman does point out to issues that may invalidate this paper (test specificity, mostly, and noisy weights, potentially) there does not seem to be any "cherry picking" involved.

I would say even if the study is merely statistical error, using it to give an implausibly low estimate of the IFR that just happens to fit the agenda of one author qualifies as cherry picking. A priori you can not use a test with high false positive rate to do a study like this unless the prevalence is much higher than the false positive rate.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#246

Post by pps43 »

lonelappde wrote: post #226
pps43 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one really knows Healthcare workers wear masks. I'm pretty sure they have a pretty good idea whether masks work.

Tools work, of course. But they don't always work well when handled by untrained amateurs.

They don't have to always work well. If Alice's mask stops half the particles and Bob's mask stops half the particles, the chance of Alice infecting Bob is now 4x lower. 50% is not as good as 95%, but surely better than 0%.

All we need to do is bring the reproductive number below 1, not necessarily all the way to 0.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#247

Post by ssijak »

BubRoss wrote: post #87
bb2018 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it would indulge the conspiracy theories too much - but I'd kinda love to see an actual breakdown of how something like this could ever make him money. Think of the huge amount of money he has lost from this in the other businesses he owns and think of all the money he invested in this for decades he could have invested in other lucrative industries. How much would he need from this supposed plan to even brea…

These things usually break down with one or two questions that the person can't answer. Just like the 5G connection nonsense, if you ask how electromagnetic radiation in the spectrum that 5G uses has a connection to a virus (the most basic question possible) you will just get someone angry with you. It's almost fascinating how people can develop emotional attachment to something that fails a droplet of investigation.

I try with such questions and people still grip to their 100% nonsense claims even when you show them that they dont know what are they talking about and is not even logical for various reasons. But, I still mostly do it for other people who read or watch that and have still not fallen for dumb conspiresies so that they would hear a reasonable contraargument. We need more logic, reason and critical thinking in this world.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#248

Post by tooltalk »

hadtodoit wrote: post #233
bamboozled wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan apparently has a much lower death rate and number of infections too. Should we trust those numbers? I'm going to say no.

In that case I wouldn't trust any country not to fudge the numbers. As far as Japan goes, I believe the numbers are close enough. They have a very high population of elderly and smokers. People would be dropping like flies and making a lot of noise about it if the numbers were far worse. Social distancing, wearing masks, staying home when sick, cleaning all fomites frequently are things the Japanese were doing before…

Japan had been under-testing and under-reporting to save their face -- or the Olympics. As recent as last week, their health official confessed they had a testing capacity for only 200 per day in Tokyo. Japan's case number and death started skyrocketing since the Olympics postponement on March 24 and nobody thinks it's just a coincidence.

Also note Japan has a large elderly population, or about 32+K, who die unnoticed in solitude every year.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#249

Post by greedo »

narrator wrote: post #195
joe_the_user wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between their treatment protocols and everyone else's? It's mind boggling anyone has to ask now this has been going on so long but here goes. 1) They had an approach plan beforehand because they had observed the previous SARS epidemic and took the danger seriously. 2) They had "quarantine hotels" freely available for those who were positive to prevent them from infecting others. (Seattle has a f…

The thing I don't get is this explains how people didn't get sick. What it doesn't explain is how so many got better after getting sick compared to other countries.

Well, their CFR is currently around 2%. I tend to think this will be roughly the best that can be achieved considering their investment in both T&T as well as an excellent healthcare system.

If you are effective at preventing the spread, then you can get lucky in terms of protecting the more vulnerable. I'd love to see some demographic breakdowns of deaths/infections in SK to see if they mirror the general population, or skew a different direction.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#250

Post by pps43 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #201
pps43 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paper? "I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error." https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...

I'm skeptical whenever I see a teardown like this which fails to mention that the offical case counts have all the same problems. Maybe we should dismiss this paper - but that means committing ourselves to radical skepticism about the prevalence, not going back and believing the numbers printed in the news.

PCR tests are asymmetric. Positive result almost certainly means that this person has the virus, but negative result might mean a number of things. Bad swab (less than 3000 virus copies), temporary remission (Korea has at least 160 such cases by now), etc.

Test kit availability adds another layer. At some point New York had 200 confirmed cases, and two weeks later 400 deaths, yet CFR is unlikely to be as high as 200%.

So yes, all statistics should be taken with a grain of salt, but magnitude and direction of that grain may be different.

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