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I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

epsilontheory.com

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Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#21

When I read the headline I thought this article might be about domestic terrorism in the US. When I clicked on the article I saw it it was in fact about COVID-19. This is how I test my assumptions.

Same. Also a bizarre example of someone coming up with a better analogy than I've been able to muster about my own expectations, when in fact they did nothing of the sort.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#22
post #14

On the first graph, that last label makes me distrust the entire article.

Possibly related: 02 Jan 2021 is a part of 2020 week 53. I've noticed a few labeling issues caused by this calendar quirk.

Yep, that's due to someone calling

    strftime(buf, buflen, "%b %e, %G", &tm);
when they should be calling

    strftime(buf, buflen, "%b %e, %Y", &tm);

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#25
post #13

Disclaimer: I'm Irish, working in tech but my hobby that gets me more of a social life is involvement with an Irish political party. The new variant accounted for 10-25% of these new cases over the period of that spike. The spike happened two weeks after Christmas when lock-down restrictions were lifted, as planned in October, so people could have a respite after 9 months of all this. Did the government misjudge just…

[deleted]

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#26
So the main complaint is that the US Govt model has 70 million symptomatic-but-undiagnosed cases in the US compared to 23 diagnosed cases and the author claims this is wildly wrong. If those numbers were correct, we'd have diagnosed 23% of cases. Do we really thing we've done much better than that? I'm not certain. I'd be a little surprised if it were over 50%, but that's purely based off intuition.

The other point the author kind of brings up: the current Alabama numbers are roughly in line with the "Ireland event" already. So a "rolling series" of these events is kind of what we already have happening, isn't it? That doesn't diminish the toll of the situation or the mistakes in the responses from the authorities.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#27
"that 70 MILLION Americans have already gotten sick with symptomatic Covid, but decided to just write it off as a bad cold and never got tested. I am not making this up."

Based on quantity of people with antibodies in NYC, Italy, etc who never knew they had it other than symptoms they thought were a cold, there's nothing surprising about a number of 70 million.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#28

When I read the headline I thought this article might be about domestic terrorism in the US. When I clicked on the article I saw it it was in fact about COVID-19. This is how I test my assumptions.

To be fair, even Amazon's support team (or robot) have done a similar mistake last November (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/15/amazon-re...).

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#29
The article spends a long time complaining about the high "unreported infection" numbers used by CDC models, but doesn't actually address the biggest piece of evidence, which is seroprevalence surveys. For example, https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/01/study-us... claims 15% of US residents had COVID antibodies in mid-November, and if you want to claim a number that disagrees with that, you at least need to address the evidence.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#30

On the first graph, that last label makes me distrust the entire article.

We really need to get away from this meme of "I found a typo, therefore I'm going to discard the article". In theory it's good epistemic hygiene, but in practice it almost always cashes out to, "I'm going to engage in extremely selective sophistry so I can ignore information that doesn't agree with my existing worldview."
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