Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tribalism comes for pandemic science

thenewatlantis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 211 posts

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#151

Post by NotSammyHagar »

atomi wrote: post #131
salmon30salmon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but I will assume it is not. It is not this simple. You can't, in our current system, shift wealth that readily and quickly. Even if you could, how would you approach possibly selling this in a democracy? And assuming it was feasible, and we could get popular support for it, how would it be implemented? Rationing cards? Government ran food stores? This is NOT the Spanish Flu.…

One way would be to have a monthly payment similar to Trump's $1200 [stimulus check] every month. The government can later recoup that through more equitable tax policies on the ultra wealthy and massive corporations. This has been proposed by legitimate legislators. https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1270000771132731397 As for your claim to a lack of a second wave, I'll have to defer to the experts on that. I'm l…

I don't know what Trump's $1200 monthly payment refers to, the welfare payments came from the us federal govt and state govts. A better reference is Andrew Yang's proposed $1000/month payment.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#152

Post by nradov »

albybisy wrote: post #14
salmon30salmon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't want to get into a game of who has been most wrong, because that will automatically trigger people to go back to their camps and hunker down. I agree that the "isolate the vulnerable, continue with life otherwise" is most likely the best outcome. The fact that this idea is attributed to the right is going to mean it is DOA, for the most part.

i would like to know how to "isolate the vulnerable"...?! We send to an island? we weld inside home? We should talk only if we have a realizable plan and not a "dream/idealistinc" plan.

There are a lot of empty hotel and dorm rooms right now so that would be a good start. A lot of those who have died so far were infected in family homes with many people living in close quarters. We should focus our limited resources on providing safe living spaces where those at highest risk can isolate themselves if they voluntarily choose to do so.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#153

Post by NotSammyHagar »

PeterisP wrote: post #144
salmon30salmon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we were able to somewhat effectively isolate the entire country, so I would say have modified stay-home orders that target those who are most vulnerable. That, in addition to common sense acts like hand washing, isolating the sick etc. would go a long way to flatten the curve enough to not overwhelm the hospitals, which after-all was the original goal.

The problem is that you can't isolate the most vulnerable fully. The current lockdown works because it reduces the spread through the wider society, including all the people who are in contact with the most vulnerable. If you don't do that, then we have the Sweden scenario where inevitably there's someone young and fit and infected who brings the disease into the institutions that should be protected, because these y…

And has been widely discussed, Sweden has had a lot of excess deaths. Look at death rates compared to Finland, Norway, Denmark.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#154

Post by harry8 »

growlist wrote: post #95
m0zg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But it takes decades for it to do so, and in the initial stages it can appear to be quite effective. And as any communist will tell you, "it's not really communism" if it collapses on itself, killing tens of millions of people in the process.

We need a Russian to comment with some examples of the exceedingly black humour that developed under communism.

As a mere suggestion, Vitaly Vitaliev writes beautifully in English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitali_Vitaliev

I'd recommend "Borders Up," ostensibly about drinking culture around the world. Good fun, but rather more than that somehow.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#155

Post by growlist »

m0zg wrote: post #141
growlist wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a Russian to comment with some examples of the exceedingly black humour that developed under communism.

Soviet-born Russian-American here. How may I be of service? Some of that humor, BTW, could land you in a labor camp if a secret KGB agent (секретный сотрудник) heard it. So it was only shared with very trusted audiences.

Tell me a joke!

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#156

Post by robocat »

PeterisP wrote: post #139
robocat wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 0.5% of the country infected Your own numbers show this is totally incorrect: death rate 0.5% times 40k deaths, means infected is 8 million (or more precisely the count was that number some weeks ago as deaths take time to happen). this has been an obvious calculation from the start and I am not the only person trying to correct the misuse of the confirmed infected count (287k) for your conclusion. Honest question:…

It's a misstatement that's not needed to make the point - if we assume 8 million infected, that's far too few to talk about herd immunity; and achieving herd immunity would involve many times more deaths than the current (already very sad) number.

> It's a misstatement

How do you know that?

My point is that the misstatement is so commonly made, and I am trying to understand why it is so very common, from someone who has made the statement in such a way that it is harder for them to generate an excuse for the mistake (edit: and high karma, so presumably educated, informed, and maybe has nous to self-reflect).

An order of magnitude difference does matter to me, and I think if the infected population is over 10%, then that is significant.

I apologise for being rude though.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#157

Post by throwaway894345 »

PeterisP wrote: post #147
throwaway894345 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This requires a citation. It's intuitively far easier to quarantine 1% of the population than 90+%.

To protect 1%, you need to isolate them absolutely from everyone else who will be infected. To protect 90%, it's sufficient if you reduce the rate of spread below 1, which means that it's sufficient to have a (realistically achievable) "quarantine" that reduces the number of contacts 3-4 times. It's possible to have much less contact with people, it's very limiting to have no contact at all. There's a huge world of d…

It's not at all clear to me how much more limiting the isolation required for the 1% is than the current quarantine measures. I certainly doubt that it means "no contact at all". It's also not clear to me that a very strict isolation for the 1% is overall better than a moderately strict "quarantine" for the remainder (trolley problem). It's also not sustainable to maintain quarantine indefinitely, and the economic ramifications alone will compound (exponential--not linear--decay). At some point, "quarantine" becomes a net negative for the vulnerable 1%, never mind the remainder. Further, as so many things do, these economic impacts are and will continue to be the most severe among the most economically vulnerable. It's certainly sustainable for 1% of people to isolate indefinitely; it's not sustainable at all for the rest of society to quarantine indefinitely and that sustainability falls off earlier for the most marginalized communities than it does for the rest of us.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#158

Post by throwaway894345 »

cma wrote: post #138
throwaway894345 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This requires a citation. It's intuitively far easier to quarantine 1% of the population than 90+%.

I mean isolation of vulnerable while letting infections elsewhere raise to saturation. No (non-micro state) country has gotten close to saturation/herd immunity yet.

I'm not sure if you're trying to refute my post or support it, but your comment certainly supports my point. No country has gotten close to saturation/herd immunity yet, and it would be economically ruinous (and not uniformly so) to maintain current quarantine measures until we get there.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#159

Post by NotSammyHagar »

vorpalhex wrote: post #134
bsder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US never went into an actual lockdown in most places. "Lockdown" is New York where R0 is 0.75. "Lockdown" is not California or Texas where R0 basically sits at 1.0. R0 of 0.75 after the last 3 months would basically mean Covid cases in the single digits basically everywhere in the US. But, no, we can't actually get people's attention before we start piling body bags in the streets. The people in the US who are "O…

Do you have a source for your R0 values? As far as I know there have been no per-state R0s released, though current estimates put ~20% at antibody positive [^1] in New York meanwhile Texas has a very low infection rate in comparison. This likely has much more to do with relative densities than lockdown strategy. Texas is low density, and it was necessary to have looser restrictions in many areas due to distance to es…

You can get per state R0 values. rt.live is a website (that is not part of russia today), the RT url comes from "R0". It's from the people that sold instagram to facebook.

They do have per state R values. This does show that NY is at about 0.8. Texas is 1.02 currently. The one negative with their calcs is their R values seem too sensitive to daily conditions. It's a great visualization of infection rates too, please look at that.

To look at the daily infection numbers, find Texas, click on the "show new cases" tab. Texas has about 1500 new cases per day now. They've had a steady increase in new cases per day since mid April, when they were about 750 new pos cases/day. They are really growing. I'm not sure where your stats about Texas doing well are. It looks to me like the positive cases are unfortunately increasing there steadily, and it's a precursor to increasing hospitilization. I have family there, I'm increasingly concerned.

They get their data feed from https://covidtracking.com/api/v1/states/daily.csv which is downloadable. Look at TX (some days have multiple updates, you have to calculate the delta yourself). US date style, positives: 6/7 74978, 6/6 73553, 6/5 71613, the increases are very clear in daily positive cases; those counts are total pos counts to that date of course.

Another place to see per state (such as Texas) is https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/texas/. Go down to 'daily new cases in texas' click on 7 day moving average. They've really been growing per day in new positive cases. One note, different websites show the current day's data differently (some show values that up dated in the middle of the day, others show one day late, so looking at the very latest rhs data point is sometimes confusing).

Texas absolutely shows the potential of opening up increasing infection rates. Alabama is another state that is hurting but reached a top, see Arkansas too. Florida was down but is now showing highest per day infection rates historically (7 day average, looks like new records beating 2 months ago). Some states are better, plenty are getting worse.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#160

Post by throwaway894345 »

bsder wrote: post #107
throwaway894345 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, the right has been pretty consistent about tailoring the response according to risk—i.e., those who are at risk should isolate and everyone else should resume work. They happened to be right in this regard. The left has also made exceptions in their “lockdown everything” policy, specifically with regard to their own protests (and the response of pandemic experts is a particularly interesting case study o…

> the right has been pretty consistent about tailoring the response according to risk Have we forgotten that "this is all a liberal hoax"? Remember HCQ is a cure-all? That's not being consistent--that's completely ignoring science. The right in the US has been consistent about tailoring its message to AI driven talking points that drive social media engagement. Nothing more. How about a "free market" solution? Give e…

I was very careful to mention that the right was correct about this one point. I was hoping to dissuade this kind of overtly partisan reflex post. Clearly I failed.
Post reply on HN