Question: Has anyone here changed their mind about COVID19 in a major way as the data has become more complete? Just wondering. I have sensed in myself tribalistic tendencies of not changing my mind when the data changes. I'm trying hard to look at myself and recognize it and experiment with different thoughts. I find myself bouncing between thinking we have overreacted to then thinking that my perception of an overr…
Tribalism comes for pandemic science
201–210 of 211 posts
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're saying makes sense, thank you. I'm wondering though, are you saying it because the study did indeed fail to account for all those factors or are you basing it my (probably poor) interpretation/description of it? :-) If you're going off my comments, I may have done a disservice as my laypersons understanding of the topic is pretty rudimentary. FWIW, the study does indeed model other countries like the US a…
Hey, Not sure if you are comfortable with R or Python, but you can look at the code here: https://codeocean.com/capsule/1887579/tree/v1 They do not seem to be taking cultural or demographic information into account. A lot of the data is sourced from the Johns Hopkins data set and fed into an SRI type model, with some data about when and how strict lockdowns where. It is actually pretty sloppy to be given so much weig…
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. W…
My point is, if you stratify death rates by age[1] you see that children are at a very, very low risk from COVID-19. This is the nuanced approach that universal lockdowns trample over.
You literally employed the "think of the children" fallacy[2] (technically appeal to emotion) when you know well that children are at a low risk.
I mentioned flu, TB, and malaria because they kill legions of children every year. TB killed 200,000 children in 2018[3]. Malaria kills .5 million children a year worldwide[4]. So don't tell me you care about the children. Unless of course you mean American or European children, in which case make your case but admit to yourself that you are viewing the world through a lens of personal risk, not actual risk.
Either you want to save the children, in which case we need to dedicate 20% of our GDP to combating TB, malaria and flu worldwide, or you only care about local children, in which case you are okay with burning through 20% of our GDP to prevent kids from getting a disease which isn't dangerous to them.
[1] https://twitter.com/daniellevitt22/status/126945491074919628...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
[3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosi...
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
The testing rate has also increased. Raw number of positive tests is a shit metric used to spread FUD and taken out of context
What you say is not true - it could be true potentially but the data shows that's not the case. Tests counts relatively stable recently but pos counts went up and percent of tests that were positive also increased . See https://www.covidexitstrategy.org/ . As you see on this page, many states are increasing absolute number of tests - Texas is actually steady for a week at around 18k tests per day. But the % of people…
Oregon recently had an outbreak at a seafood plant, and retirement center. The seafood outbreak infected around 125 people, the retirement center around 35. There is also a smaller outbreak at a food processing plant in Washington County, with I believe 5-10 infections.
Here is the secret, Oregon is _now_ doing contact tracing. So _everyone_ at Pacific Seafood was tested, despite a vast majority showing no symptoms. These people would _not_ have been tested two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, testing was generally voluntary and people would request tests if they felt they needed one. Now, people who have confirmed interaction with infected individuals are being tested by state mandate. So of course, now Oregon will have more cases discovered and more positive tests.
You see how your "actual numbers" still don't tell the whole story? There is context in every single state, city, county that you miss just looking at raw numbers. Without that context you make generalizations about what the data is telling you. Stop that.
Yes, Texas should be watched, but the health authority in Texas does not seem to be worried. My own governor, Kate Brown, who has taken this (imo) too seriously, has stated publicly that she _fully expects_ an increase in cases over the coming weeks as we reopen. But now, we have the hospital and treatment capacity to handle it.
And about the Texas example, where ICU beds are decreasing. The site you linked does not seem to really mention what those ICU patients are in for. When states reopen, so do car wrecks, workplace injuries, major surgeries etc. A bypass surgery will require a few days in an ICU, so now that major surgeries are happening again, of course ICU capacity would be taxed. Again, as I've been saying, you lack context. This time last year, what was the ICU bed utilization in Texas? Now that we see that intubation and invasive ventilators actually worsens outcomes, how many COVID patients can be treated _outside_ of an ICU?
As I said in my original post, we are not updating our metrics to meet new understandings. ICU beds are a silly metric now, but they sure are scary!
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. W…
You are creating a Sophie's Choice in your dichotomy of "opening and helping the economy vs. saving people". It isn't that black and white and I would hope you understand that. It is "saving people vs. saving people". That is the stark choice we have to make. It isn't "getting a haircut vs. killing children" or even "helping small business vs. giving old people another year or two". It is literally lives vs lives. If…
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#207Science as you know it is dead: https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/
That was a really poor read. Anxiety from lockdown is going to kill more people than coronavirus? Like, I'm not exactly an ardent supporter of lockdown but it's clear we've saved many lives by keeping hospitalizations minimal. Even if that estimate is below what initial models suggested, it's inept to suggest it was useless. Likewise you fail to actually link to any stats to support claims about increased suicide rat…
Currently there are about 40,000 deaths by suicide in the US each year. We know that deaths by suicide will increase because of economic downturn. We have some understanding of this after 2007 and similar. No-one working in suicide prevention thinks we'll come anywhere near doubling the 40,000 number.
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#208The 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…
People deciding that a certain arbitrary fatality rate would be unacceptable, and lockdown adversely affecting basically everyone was preferable, usually do so without any kind of reasoning but hide behind the notion that life has near infinite value.
Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#209Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science
#210Earlier 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?