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America is giving up on the pandemic?

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Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#881

Post by gizmo »

1bc29b36f623ba8 wrote: post #840
claudeganon wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, Sweden is fairing badly next to their neighbors, and horrendously compared to countries like Taiwan and South Korea (who also didn’t have lockdowns). I don’t think people hate the country so much as they’re assessing the relative failure of their approach.

Sweden failed to protect their own elderly, mainly because national authorities simply assumed that local authorities were ready to fight a pandemic, when they were in fact hopelessly underfunded and staffed by underpaid staff with no PPE and who were expected to do stay at home on their own initiative and without payment if they got sick. The same happened in a few places here in Finland, and I am quite certain that…

Sweden did screw up the retirement home situation somewhat, but in terms of excess deaths all Nordic countries look identical. Finland, notably, doesn't even count covid deaths outside hospitals according to the THL, so comparing Swedish and Finnish covid stats is a bit silly.

The Swedish catastrophe is always another 2 weeks away, and secondary effects of a lockdown (like delaying non-critical medical procedures and not screening for cancer) are likely to be much more significant than anticipated. Let's not forget that lockdowns were a knee-jerk reaction enacted by scared politicians, not a carefully considered and data-backed policy.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#882

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #685
neonate wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is the double standard with which some protestors were condemned while others were lauded based solely on which causes (and which classes of people) the commenters happened to politically support. It's transparently unprincipled, to the point of being a sad joke.

I'm torn, a little bit. Against your point: The current protests are at least mostly respecting the fact the disease exists, and encourages masks. Also, these protests are much more organic than the "re-open America" protests. And the left-wing who got mad at the anti-public-health protests never called for cops to shoot them or round them up. IOW: We respected their freedom to be out there, no matter how fucked the…

The first sentence of your second paragraph gets to the root of a lot of political polarization in the US. (and the converse is obviously true, too).

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#883

Post by acqq »

cm2187 wrote: post #870
acqq wrote: post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both the UK and NY State had a policy of sending recovering (but potentially contagious) older covid patients back to nursing homes and it would have exacerbated the mortality rate vs regions that did a better job at protecting the elderly. Isn't the death rate the percentage of population that dies when all are infected? Then nothing can be "exacerbated" by that alone? It then just reflects the death rate which re…

The rate quoted by the parent, I believe, is the number of deaths divided by the number of people estimated to be infected, by prorating an antibody test sampling to the wider population. So that doesn’t assume everyone got exposed to the virus, and assumes the sampling is a representative sample (but in NY it was sampled in grocery stores, which tells you nothing about infection rate in nursing homes that made up 40…

> the number of deaths divided by the number of people estimated to be infected, by prorating an antibody test sampling to the wider population. So that doesn’t assume everyone got exposed to the virus

To get the rate one can indeed calculate it with smaller representative sample, but that just doesn't imply that the vulnerable people would somehow never become infected if the epidemic continues, so the deaths of the old can't be avoided then. That the old die much more is a fact, and nothing that by itself "exacerbates" the rate.

Edit: I haven't seen any argument that estimated more than 20% of NY population that were supposedly infected were somehow specially skewed sample to hit only old people, and I'd argue that if the sample is that big it's quite improbable. If the argument is that the virus got faster in the nursing homes, one can also argue that all the old people outside of nursing homes skewed in the another direction by managing to initially not get the infection, but that as epidemic progresses they would indeed eventually become infected and suffer.

Edit2: "the virus is rather showing signs of going away" claim is very curious to me. I don't see it "going away" looking at all the statistics across the different parts of the world. I see only the slowdown of the spread, which corresponds to people generally changing their behavior to slow it down.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#884

Post by roenxi »

orange8 wrote: post #789
nappy wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not apples to apples at all. This is the average daily COVID-19 deaths with extreme restrictions - so imagine comparing this heart disease with large-scale mandatory exercise, or cancer if cigarettes were eliminated entirely.

I'm comparing actual stats of natural deaths that have happened , and you are saying it is better to compare hypothetical/imagined stats with the real ones to be more accurate? Should we now also imagine/project the homicide death rates if all civilians were peaceful and happy and compare it with that of the real deaths caused by the police?

> Should we now also imagine/project the homicide death rates if all civilians were peaceful and happy and compare it with that of the real deaths caused by the police?

Almost. We'd need to compare actual homicides to an imaginary world where everyone cooperated with the police while being arrested.

The police killing someone is, on the face of it, a significant problem. But some percentage of police-caused deaths are justified and would be acceptable after careful review of what happened.

I think everyone would prefer 0 police-related deaths, and all options are on the table to get there. But to compare oranges to oranges properly it would be necessary to split the category into police abuses of power vs unavoidable/reasonable uses of force.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#885

Post by joenot443 »

grey-area wrote: post #802
NateEag wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether it's a good idea, it cannot be done. I believe the last number I saw said there were about 300 million guns in the US - one for each person. There's no way to just make those disappear into government hands.

Of course there is. There are legitimate reasons for owning a rifle in rural America (hunting), there are no legitimate reasons for owning an assault weapon, and guns can easily be made gradually less attractive. If you don't accept this even as a possibility you are part of the problem.

What do you think that way (of the government collecting 300m firearms) might be?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#886

Post by raxxorrax »

scarmig wrote: post #453
metrokoi wrote: post #90

Quoted from a letter from 1,000 health professionals on the virus and protests [0] >However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from…

They're being flagrantly irresponsible. If nothing else, messaging and public trust are key parts of any epidemic response. Right now, a conservative might look at this letter and come away with the impression that this is a case of quarantine for thee but not for me. An opinion that wouldn't be unjustified: can you imagine them doing the same thing to provide cover for abortion protests? The right to religious gathe…

Not only conservatives...

It is a straw-man but I think the woke circle isn't that different from religion for some proponents. Different dogmata, same zeal.

And while I don't like people being too sensitive that you refrain from stating anything substantial in public without PR support, this statement is particularly bad.

The lockdown protesters make clear that experts don't decide about their freedoms. This statement just provides evidence for the validity of their point in my opinion.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#887

Post by mrb »

cm2187 wrote: post #850
mrb wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CDC estimate (IFR 0.26%, S-IFR 0.4%) is heavily criticized because it ignores, thus predates, the 3 largest and most reliable serosurveys which all indicate an IFR of ~1% (S-IFR ~1.54%, assuming 35% of cases are asymptomatic): 1.0% in Brazil based on 25,025 samples https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1267670267624476672 1.14% in Spain based on 60,897 samples https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1265405628853305345 0.9…

The wider NY state has an IFR of 0.5%. The IFR should also be very sensitive to the demographics of the infection. Both the UK and NY State had a policy of sending recovering (but potentially contagious) older covid patients back to nursing homes and it would have exacerbated the mortality rate vs regions that did a better job at protecting the elderly. I am also starting to hear some noise that there might be cross…

NY State does not have an IFR of 0.5%. You are probably quoting Cuomo's press briefing https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2020/04/23/governo... which claims 0.5% based on this math:

15740 deaths ÷ 2700000 infected = 0.58% (they round to 0.5%)

However they note that the official state death count (15740 deaths) «only indicates deaths that happened in a hospital or a nursing home, and does not include coronavirus-related deaths that occurred in a home, which means the official death count is likely higher than that official number»

The true number of deaths, including home deaths, is 20759 as of the date of Cuomo's press briefing, April 24 (source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/mast...)

Furthermore, all the figures quoted by Cuomo were provisional, mid-study. The serosurvey actually completed on April 28 and was published here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.25.20113050v... The final figures as of this date were:

22777 deaths ÷ (19450000 state population × 14.0% infected) = IFR of 0.84%

It is important to take deaths as of April 28 in order to minimize right censoring.

«Both the UK and NY State had a policy of sending recovering patients to nursing home»

Spain and Brazil did not do this and still exhibit an IFR of 1% add per the serosurveys I referenced.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#888

Post by hef19898 »

blub wrote: post #825
deanCommie wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I can't speak for anyone but myself, however I now no faith in anything that the WHO, US surgeon general and to some limited extend the CDC and RKI say, because of the way they lied or hid the truth in the past. I have much more faith in the KCDC for example and otherwise I want to see studies. And anyway, people are unfairly accused of hoarding masks. It turns out that in the US, Australia, Germany (and probably oth…

Who do you trust instead? Seriously asking, because dismissing somethig is always the easy part.

Regarding the masks, I went deepy down that rabbit hole in February and March. Most production happens in China. China didn't produce anything, needed what was there for themselves and had closed down a lot cities and ports and such. At the same time, demand increased by orders of magnitude around the world. hence the shortage. China didn't buy masks en mass from other countries, they didn't need to. A ,ot of fraud happened as soon as production resumed. No, people who, with a financial interest, tried to help sort out the shortage once the German government failed to do so, are sitting on tons of masks they bought in good faith for 5 - 10 times the normal price. Currently prces are down to roughly 2x the pre-Covid-19 prices. See the problem? People hoarding made the issue even worse.

Hordng mass during that period for retail sales or your own use, thus preventing PPE from getting to medical care professionals, is the deffinition of hoarding.

All of your mentioned institutions are publishing or using studies. Go look them up. But maybe accept that the people behind them know more about the subject than you do.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#889

Post by ethanbond »

blub wrote: post #813
entee wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re right. I don’t understand the general tendency of assuming malice when a combination of uncertainty about the virus, poor supply chains, and not-very-good underlying data would do just as well. It’s also unclear what “masks” meant in the initial phases. An N95 respirator? A surgical mask? A homemade cloth mask? Each of these has different uses and effects. I seriously doubt most people knew the differe…

This isn't complicated at all, it's only been made to look so by governments and organizations caught with their pants down. Not wearing a mask offers zero protection from an illness which is mainly transmitted through droplets and aerosols. Wearing a mask offers some protection, ranging from little to very good depending on the type of mask. In the mean time we know that surgical masks offer pretty good protection i…

You are assuming that people’s behaviors are identical when wearing and not wearing masks.

This is what we do not know (still).

There are plenty of results in life science far more counterintuitive than the hypothesis, “people are less strict about social distancing when wearing masks.”

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#890

Post by orange8 »

roenxi wrote: post #884
orange8 wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm comparing actual stats of natural deaths that have happened , and you are saying it is better to compare hypothetical/imagined stats with the real ones to be more accurate? Should we now also imagine/project the homicide death rates if all civilians were peaceful and happy and compare it with that of the real deaths caused by the police?

> Should we now also imagine/project the homicide death rates if all civilians were peaceful and happy and compare it with that of the real deaths caused by the police? Almost. We'd need to compare actual homicides to an imaginary world where everyone cooperated with the police while being arrested. The police killing someone is, on the face of it, a significant problem. But some percentage of police-caused deaths ar…

> Almost.

What do you mean by almost? Just do it already. Then post all the imaginary/alternative stats here below.

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