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A Third Solution

paulbuchheit.blogspot.com

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Re: A Third Solution

#511

Post by marcell »

astrophysician wrote: post #318
marcell wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of gish gallop and vitriol here. First, the .75% mortality rate is a one-time hit. It likely pulls some deaths forward, so the incremental death rate is maybe .5% in a single year. Again, this is terrible, and sad, but we should be mindful and accurate with numbers. Second, people make lots of choices that increase their mortality risk by .5%. For example, lots of people eat at McDonald's on a regular b…

Again, you realize debating the true value of the fatality rate is a bit silly when we already know healthcare systems will be overwhelmed (and have been overwhelmed already!!) if we hadn’t and don’t continue to manage this with severe measures? Do you agree with that statement? It doesn’t matter what the incremental mortality rate is. It doesn’t matter. We don’t know the true fatality rate, yes, but we do know it’s…

> we already know healthcare systems will be overwhelmed (and have been overwhelmed already!!)

This isn't really true. It depends a lot on the state. The healthcare system in my area, California Bay Area, is completely underwhelmed. Here are some numbers from San Mateo:

(1) 40% of standard ICU beds are open

(2) 91% of ventilators are unused

(3) 91% of "surge beds" are unused

Source: https://www.smchealth.org/post/san-mateo-county-covid-19-dat...

If our goal is to flatten the curve to slightly below hospital capacity, current policy has flattened the curve way too much.

Current number suggest that only 1-3% of the Bay Area has been infected with covid-19. If you wan to get to 70% infection rate for herd immunity, it would take multiple years to get there at current rates.

Re: A Third Solution

#513

Post by joe_the_user »

anon9001 wrote: post #355
joe_the_user wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been one major argument. The others have been: "flatten the curve - just extend the time until everyone gets it" (obvious problem, exponential growth can't work that way), "shelter in place 'till a vaccine appears" (not very practical) and "it's really not that bad, there are so many asymptomatic carriers that in the end it's not actually worse than the flu after all or at least there's nothing we can do." (…

> "flatten the curve - just extend the time until everyone gets it" (obvious problem, exponential growth can't work that way) Just to nitpick a little here, it's more like "flatten the curve - stretch the time while everyone gets it, so we don't overwhelm hospitals". Even with exponential growth, you would rather deal with it over a longer period than have a massive spike where all services are overwhelmed.

The characteristic of exponential is that things tend to come all once. In the final double period, you get as many cases as all the other doubling periods combined.

Which is to say, you can stretch out exponential growth a lot and still not have enough. If you exponential growth from 1,000 to 1,000,000 cases over a year, the last month will overwhelm your services entirely and constitute the bulk of both cases and death.

There's a reason all those early graphs showed parabolas, not actual exponential curves, you can't even give plausible visual representation of this process, because it isn't plausible.

Re: A Third Solution

#514

Post by repied »

evross wrote: post #493
repied wrote: post #474

> Catching this virus is a bit like playing a round of Russian roulette. Well, the comparison is a bit unfair, recent studies [1] give : P(death | infected) = 0.05% overall which is order of magnitude less than Russian's roulette where P(death | play) = 16% [1] https://death-proba-website.appspot.com/

Russian roulette might be an unfair comparison, but it may only be one order of magnitude different to this virus IFR. With probability a number between 0 and 1, percentage is between 0 and 100. From the study in your source [1] the P(death|infected) = 0.005 And Russian roulette P(death | play) = 0.16 In percentages: Covid19 - IFR = 0.5%, Russian roulette = 16% From this calculation based on the recent New York antib…

> Covid19 - IFR = 0.5%, Russian roulette = 16%

Thanks for the correction and the new study link.

Re: A Third Solution

#515

Post by joe_the_user »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #351
joe_the_user wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been one major argument. The others have been: "flatten the curve - just extend the time until everyone gets it" (obvious problem, exponential growth can't work that way), "shelter in place 'till a vaccine appears" (not very practical) and "it's really not that bad, there are so many asymptomatic carriers that in the end it's not actually worse than the flu after all or at least there's nothing we can do." (…

""flatten the curve - just extend the time until everyone gets it" (obvious problem, exponential growth can't work that way)" Huh? One goal is to flatten the curve so that we don't have exponential growth. Another is to flatten the curve so much that, even if might still be exponential growth, the growth is slow enough for our health care systems to absorb the peak.

One goal is to flatten the curve so that we don't have exponential growth

The aim of mitigating measures is reducing the growth rate of the disease. But the mechanism of the disease is that you generally have a basic situation where X people infect at time t results R*X people at time t+1. That's fundamentally exponential process (even though you can extra factors, the process doesn't change 'till you get close to having infected everyone). If we can make R small enough, this become exponential decay, a good thing but still an exponential process. But when you do exponential growth. you have a doubling and on the last double, you get more cases than all the cases combines. So the peak is just MUCH higher than the rest of the curve and you can "flatten" a lot and still wind-up overwhelmed in the end if the growth process continues.

Re: A Third Solution

#516

Post by lend000 »

laumars wrote: post #419
lend000 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On average, sure. And that may be a rational reason for a busy investor to reject a pitch meeting, but that's never a reason to dismiss an idea once you've read it, or in a forum where there is no cost to that idea existing (such as HN).

It’s a reason enough to be skeptical. How often have you read on here someone saying “can’t you just do x y and z” to a problem that is grossly more complex than the commenter initially appreciates? A better stance would be to take such pitches as an interesting take but one which still requires peer review. Edit: Remember when Musk tried to pitch a submarine to save those children stuck in a Thai cave and how local…

It's an excuse not to think. Now, if you feel that YOU are not qualified to evaluate the idea, that's a different story. Don't act on the idea until it comes from someone you trust. But that's no reason to tell others it's unworthy of their evaluation.

Re: A Third Solution

#517

Post by lend000 »

luckylion wrote: post #422
lend000 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one aeronautical engineer phD who deserves more credit for giving America the ability to put humans in space next month than Musk. He's quite involved with technical decisions. His social media behavior is irrelevant here -- this is about the ability to innovate outside of physics or economics, which is what he learned about in college.

> Name one aeronautical engineer phD who deserves more credit for giving America the ability to put humans in space next month than Musk. Why limit it to them? Without the Internet, there would have been no X.com, no PayPal, no billion dollar paycheck. If "funding" a large project is the equivalent of "being a scientific genius", I think we'll add a lot of geniuses to the books, and we should probably include every g…

Marx was a bit further removed from day to day decisions on rocket architecture than Musk if I understand correctly.

Re: A Third Solution

#518

Post by selimthegrim »

timr wrote: post #348
selimthegrim wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you're ignoring the organ damage in even younger survivors like it's rosacea or something.

Cite something -- anything -- legitimate that points long-term organ damage in young, otherwise healthy people. Newspaper anecdotes don't count. All evidence so far is that a small fraction of people sick enough to be in the ICU end up with some sort of non-lung organ involvement. The vast majority (>99.98%) of young ( https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/24/strokes-cor... (TL, DR: NEJM next week)

Re: A Third Solution

#519

Post by danieltillett »

krrrh wrote: post #288
danieltillett wrote: post #170

I hope everyone has noticed that if this approach could wipe out COVID-19 it could wipe out influenza and even the common cold.

Imagine how naive our immune systems would become. It could have unpredictable effects, like increasing the rate of novel zoonotic disease transmissions. Maybe something like this is what set the stage for the common cold wiping out the aliens in War of the Worlds.

We would still be exposed to a wide variety of diseases even if there were no more common cold viruses floating around. The common cold viruses haven’t helped us deal with COVID-19 :(

Re: A Third Solution

#520

Post by perl4ever »

zaroth wrote: post #389
perl4ever wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two things that don't make sense to me about your original post. One is that cash is not a resource. It's even less of a resource when it's not only not metal, but mostly not paper either. The other is that the flu comparison doesn't make sense to me on multiple levels. Given deaths from COVID at the moment are nearly ten times flu on an annualized basis, given the partial shutdown, obviously they would be…

Thanks for the feedback! I’m not quite sure what to say to “cash is not a resource”. Even if just a proxy for attention cash is obviously a resource. But really, cash in itself is a resource. $10 trillion dollars can do a lot of things if spent wisely. $10 trillion dollars can also be destroyed for practically no benefit at all. I agree it’s not strictly $1 spent on A means $1 less to spend on B. But it’s at least tr…

"$10 trillion dollars can also be destroyed for practically no benefit at all."

$10 trillion is probably over twice the (financial) cost of WWII adjusted for inflation. Having numbers of that size written down, deleted, moved around, doesn't mean we are suffering that level of loss.

As far as comparing covid to flu, I was talking about annualized daily deaths from covid, compared to a normal year of flu. That was deliberate. I'm saying, if it neither increases nor decreases from this point on, it's nearly ten times the rate in the long run.

You are comparing the total deaths from covid, assuming it declines and goes away in due time. That would be fine in a vacuum, but you're using the consequences of trying to stop it to argue the efforts to stop it are unnecessary. What is the point of this sophistry?

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