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Tribalism comes for pandemic science

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Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#191

Post by tunesmith »

pjc50 wrote: post #17

The people who said that lockdown needed to be limited in length because people couldn't take it for long were right. Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later : hence the UK's delayed lockdown and therefore highest death toll in Europe. The people advocating for "herd immunity" never addressed the death rate; a death rate of even 0.5% in the UK would be thre…

I read everything downthread of this and am flummoxed at how much people are talking past each other. If the UK has 40k deaths, the only way the UK is close to herd immunity is if the IFR 0.05%. People can quibble about how many actual cases there are, but no matter how you slice it, reinforcing the parent poster, we are a long way from herd immunity.

Also, remember that if you want to argue the IFR down, that means you're arguing the R0 up, which makes herd immunity more difficult.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#192

Post by bsder »

nradov wrote: post #182
bsder wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The number of diagnosed cases or positive test results is only loosely correlated with the number of actual infections. Then that just means that we are likely underestimating R0--possibly by a huge amount. Okay, I agree with you. Infections aren't LESS than the diagnosed cases and positive test results. So, all the calculations from data about the estimates of R0 are all a lower bound, not an upper one. As such, o…

You missed the point. There are a lot of cases which are never formally counted as "cases" because people recover without ever being diagnosed. We don't know whether that fraction of unreported cases has increased or decreased over time. Outside of a few limited areas there hasn't been enough random population sampling to draw any reliable conclusions one way or the other.

You have just said that we probably have quite a few cases of Covid which are not counted and are not part of the model because they were undiagnosed. I agree.

If we somehow magically started accounting for those cases the R0 would immediately go up (more cases per unit time means increased R0) unless the number of those cases is zero.

Thus, the R0 estimates we have are currently all underestimates. Covid is likely more contagious than we are calculating, not less.

Now, this doesn't matter to the people who recover, of course. And it effectively is correct in that people who simply recover aren't a big problem and so the R0 is roughly "correct" in the aggregate.

However, that incorrect R0 DOES matter when you start talking about vulnerable populations and how far you need to go to protect them.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#193

Post by NotSammyHagar »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #183
NotSammyHagar wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your words, let's allow vastly heightened danger to those over 40. How about, we have national regulations for safe interactions, rules requiring ppe when appropriate, and available ppe. Your company has to provide it if you work together. It turns out its very very hard to provide ppe that protects people when they work closely together (see the meat packing plants, see hospitals). My families economic safety is…

How many kids die of the flu each and every year? How many kids die of malaria? Of tuberculoses? Where were you during the last strong flu season? Get off your high horse and actually contribute ideas instead of fear.

In [1] it says in the last 10 years the # of deaths from the flu was 10 to 60k, avg about 30k for all americans. I'm not contributing fear. I'm talking about the facts of the situation and the fact is its a serious issue. I'm frustrated that so many people act like it won't hurt them so they dont care somehow. We have to make serious choices between variations of opening up and helping the economy vs saving people. We need to do this in an informed way and not what can ideologically help or hurt various politicians.

[2] is a great article about how different cities in 1918 made various choices about socially isolating and the impact of that.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

2. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-1...

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#194

Post by im3w1l »

tunesmith wrote: post #190
im3w1l wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later. I think you misunderstand the reasoning. If you want to wipe a disease out you lockdown as soon as you can. If you want to flatten the curve, you lockdown just before the peak, so as to prevent it. Or if you are ok with flattening the curve for a longer time, you lock down just before you reach capacity.

I'm sorry, I've been reading and re-reading this. Were you being snarky? With perfect forethought, why would anyone ever choose against wiping out the disease early?

Because you think the virus is too contagious and the attempt will fail. Or alternatively, because you don't realize in the beginning that the disease is deadly enough to be worth a lock down.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#195

Post by bsder »

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…

> I don't believe anyone has been piling bodybags in the streets, though it's an excellent scaremongering claim.

New York was. Although the point wasn't intended to be about scaremongering, it was more about how people don't seem to have the ability to pay attention unless life kicks them personally in the balls.

Most people in the Northeast knew someone personally who died of Covid--when someone's Grandma you know dies of Covid, you'll put your mask on and stay locked down so yours doesn't, and you'll get mad about the people who won't.

That's why I chose California, which nominally has a lockdown, to contrast against Texas, which nominally doesn't, to contrast against New York, which really locked down, to show that the US really didn't lockdown very well.

I was in California after the orders--"Hey, we can't hang out inside the coffee shop. I got it! Let's hang out on the sidewalk outside!" Or, "Hey let's have a Mother's Day party"--two of which now account for more than 50% of the Covid cases in Santa Cruz county.

And all this is because we didn't have a unified response in the US to make people pay fucking attention.

And, even in "Open all the things!" Texas, it's not helping much. Most businesses run until they get a Covid case in the employees and then shut down for several weeks--lather, rinse, repeat. So, instead of everybody shutting down simultaneously and cutting down the number of cases, we have individual businesses shutting down hodgepodge which still hammers people's jobs and as a bonus doesn't help bring the Covid numbers down.

Yes, I'm glad we shut down to prevent overrunning the medical system. However, that was just "Step 1".

"Step 2" was not supposed to be "Do nothing else and then throw up your hands in 90 days."

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#196

Post by pbourke »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #116
_opc6 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safest possible solution would be for the super wealthy pay to keep the population fed and housed while we wait for a vaccine or improved treatments. Otherwise, the virus will continue to propagate, the poor will have to risk their lives and the virus will inevitably reach the rich and their families in a later wave anyway as was the case with the 1918 flu. Addendum: I posted this fully understanding how unpopula…

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.…

> You can't, in our current system, shift wealth that readily and quickly.

The Fed seems to be doing just that

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#197

Post by ithkuil »

ithkuil wrote: post #79
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.

An interesting game theoretical interplay has been an almost irresistible force that draw almost all democracies towards the same behavior: if it was possible for 100% of confidence to separate the group of people at risk from the people whose risk factor is small (e.g. pick some threshold like smaller than the risk dying of any other cause), then sure, it would have worked. But the moment a number of apparently heal…

For example, consider Sweden's approach. I have no idea whether their strategy is right or wrong, how should I know? experts disagree.

But it surely takes a lot of confidence to pull that off, knowing that opposition parties will feast on any opportunity to publicly decry your recklessness.

Covid-19 is real and it kills people, it's effects can be and will be measured.

We do make tradeoffs between economy and safety all the times, but we do that for things we're used to (traffic, pollution, diseases prevention, ...), so some people expect we can do the same kinds of tradeoffs with covid-19.

Again, I'm not an expert and have no idea on how to compute such a tradeoff.

But my point is that there is a inanimate force that is just pulling that card off the table.

It doesn't help that in some countries it also became such a heavily partisan topic.

I'm not from the US. I live in a country whose government has been very proactive and the population is generally supportive of the (re cently lifted) lockdown. And that's a country where rarely the populace has anything good to say about the government (a popular saying "it's raining, damned government!")

Playing it safe seems much more effective politically, that unless you want to play some "strong man" narrative like some governments did, there doesn't seem to be any advantage in taking excessive risks.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#198

Post by pjc50 »

robocat wrote: post #110
pjc50 wrote: post #17

The people who said that lockdown needed to be limited in length because people couldn't take it for long were right. Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later : hence the UK's delayed lockdown and therefore highest death toll in Europe. The people advocating for "herd immunity" never addressed the death rate; a death rate of even 0.5% in the UK would be thre…

> 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:…

> why do you not know this?

Leading with an insult?

I agree that the numbers don't match up and the country is almost certainly more infected than we think, but we cannot know how widely infected we are until we've done the testing! Even the death rate has a factor of two variance between "definitely COVID" and "excess deaths".

The failure to ramp up testing is yet another thing to blame the poor government response for.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#199

Post by TomMarius »

m0zg wrote: post #71
emteycz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism is known for economically collapsing on itself, that's not very efficient or productive.

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.

Are you sure they were not simply spending the riches made by the previous regime? I think that's the case of every European communist regime, not sure how it was outside of Europe.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#200

Post by throwaway894345 »

bsder wrote: post #171
throwaway894345 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A stopped clock is correct twice a day--we don't suddenly consider its accuracy improved. Trying to thread needles like this is disingenuous, at best, and makes you look like an apologist, at worst. You have a set of political leaders actively hunting for a hook that is sufficiently platable and plausible that they can get people to swallow in order to be exploited for their own power gain. Giving cover to that deser…

Show me where I argued that their “accuracy improved”. Like I said in the previous post, I’m only noting that they were correct in this instance. I’m certainly not making arguments that Trump’s administration is doing a good job.
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