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

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

#91

Post by ricardobeat »

boffinism wrote: post #84
HALtheWise wrote: post #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 nee…

To be fair, the study you linked suggests 45m have had COVID, and the CDC model assumes 100m have had Covid, of whom 70m were symptomatic. So it actually appears to undermine CDC and support the article.

It's from mid November. Since then, at a near 200k/day rate, another 10M+ diagnosed cases have been recorded.

In other words: that article extrapolates from the CDC report of 10 million cases in November, and that is now sitting at around 23M. If anything, the estimate should be way above 70M.

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

#92

Post by cesarb »

cperciva wrote: post #22
quesera wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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);

In Java it's worse, for SimpleDateFormat (the most often used date formatter in Java) YYYY (uppercase) is "week year" (strftime %G), the correct way to get the year (strftime %Y) is yyyy (lowercase). It's very easy to get it wrong; the correct way to get the full ISO timestamp is "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSXXX".

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

#93

Post by tgb »

avs733 wrote: post #72
tgb wrote: post #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 t…

Information on US COVID-19 seroprevlance surveys can be found on the CDC website [0]. There are also a number of more locally sampled sero surveys going on concurrently right now by state/city/county public health departments. 'Sero' surveys are a commonly used tool in infectitious disease research to understand the difference between identified and total case numbers. They have tons of pros and cons (see [1] for som…

Wasn't [4] widely criticized for messing up basic statistics? Either way, numbers from April might as well not exist for what they tell us about today.

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

#94

Post by perardi »

zinekeller wrote: post #20
brundolf wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the exact same thing- "The Ireland Event" being the Catholic-Protestant conflict in the latter part of the 20th century

Really quck edit: this is probably the most controversial comment that I have posted here. However, without a proper survey I am still not convinced that someone will associate "the Irish problem" with the violence there. Take the discussion below with a grain of salt and I hope that you, assuming that you are in the west coast or Atlantic coast, consider if someone (a random person) in the Midwest will know this. To…

I am a very average American, born in 1983, and I’ll admit that I have only the vaguest idea of The Troubles. My first real concrete memory of hearing of Ireland’s issues was the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

If you were born after 1990 in America, I am doubtful you have much knowledge of that era at all.

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

#95

Post by stretchcat »

zinekeller wrote: post #64
whatshisface wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess that the average American (I really mean average here, not average among HN posters) will have heard of nothing on that list, but also not heard of any US political violence in that time period.

This. The HN crowd vastly overestimates how unknown these can be on an actual person. Even when they knew about the explosions in the (London) Docklands and in Manchester, they would only knew it to be terrorist attacks, not specifically the provisional Irish Republican Army (unrelated to the Irish Army). Edit: definitely not the Australian city of Docklands (and not any city named Manchester ouside England!)

I think the [Provisional] IRA is well known in America. Every other American seems to think they are 'part Irish' and I think the average American's awareness of The Troubles is high, at least compared to other foreign conflicts (at least for Americans old enough to remember the 90s at least anyway.) Furthermore 'Irish car bombs' are a tactless but popular bar drink in America, which indicates an awareness of the conflict.

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

#96

Post by bpodgursky »

ricardobeat wrote: post #91
boffinism wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the study you linked suggests 45m have had COVID, and the CDC model assumes 100m have had Covid, of whom 70m were symptomatic. So it actually appears to undermine CDC and support the article.

It's from mid November. Since then, at a near 200k/day rate, another 10M+ diagnosed cases have been recorded. In other words: that article extrapolates from the CDC report of 10 million cases in November, and that is now sitting at around 23M. If anything, the estimate should be way above 70M.

Also, antibodies often don't linger more than a few months, and the immunity is handled by memory cells instead. So that 15% is just a window.

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

#97

Post by selimthegrim »

kaczordon wrote: post #47

I feel like everyone continues to assume COVID-19 infection has an exponential curve but it's been shown by Nobel prize winner Michael Levitt that it actually follows a Gompertz function more accurately. Not only that but the WHO recently released a statement saying that PCR testing for COVID-19 is not suitable as it detects many forms of respiratory problems including the common cold. I feel like the author of this…

There is a lot of pushback on Levitt's predictions that keep moving the goalposts. Let's just say his Nobel Prize wasn't in curve fitting.

https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2020/09/21/the-lethal-nons...

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

#98

Post by lern_too_spel »

jdminhbg wrote: post #33

This is really poorly reasoned. To take a couple examples: > Using data from flu monitoring programs in prior years, the CDC models project 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. Why is this hard to believe? Covid testing, especially depending on where you live, can be difficult to obtain.…

The author makes the point that the assumption behind that number is that people test for Covid-19 at the same rate as they would test for the flu. I know of very few people who have tested for flu but many who have tested for Covid-19.

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

#99

Post by nradov »

scarmig wrote: post #80
jdminhbg wrote: post #33

This is really poorly reasoned. To take a couple examples: > Using data from flu monitoring programs in prior years, the CDC models project 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. Why is this hard to believe? Covid testing, especially depending on where you live, can be difficult to obtain.…

>> ...the CDC models project 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... > Why is this hard to believe? I don't agree with the article more broadly, but it does make the point that 70 million prior infections isn't consistent with hospitalization numbers over the summer vs now. The only way I can reconcile those numb…

There is really no reliable evidence that symptom severity is correlated with initial viral dose. It's a plausible hypothesis but remains unproven.

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

#100

Post by drcross »

I'm Irish in Ireland, I've been following the matter closely.

Ireland had one of the strictest lockdowns in most of Europe since March, no pubs, nightclubs, limited restaurants, churches, limited sports, 5km travel restrictions were on and off. We masked up early and our national broadcaster was constantly warning everyone non-stop. Schools were open however.

We were the poster boy for lockdown success up until at least November. Other nations were commenting on our achievements. You can see what has happened since.

The WHO warns that lockdown should only be treated as a last resort, to truly flatten the curve and no more. We ignored that.

It's my sincere opinion that we've tried to push back a virus through our lockdown measures and social distancing that eventually cannot be controlled.

Holding back a virus is like holding back a damn, eventually something will burst and typically at the wrong time.

If we had listened to the WHO by not locking down, gaining natural immunity during the summer (when coronaviruses aren't as prevalent) we wouldn't be in the mess that we are in now.

The median age of death of this virus is 82. Please conceptualise this. Less than 20 people under the age of 44 died from covid in 2020. With our current technology dying is a part of life that cannot be avoided. The people who are dying from covid at the moment are people who were going to die this year, remember, people have to die, most of them have already made peace with this idea.

If we didn't try so hard to prevent these aged people from dying we wouldn't have our resources stretched thin which is compounding the death rate further.

I'm sorry to be the person to tell you this but we all have to die, we shouldn't be stopping the living from enjoying their days on earth. Lockdowns are hurting the young and middle age to a drastic degree. You may not care because you work from home and are still guaranteed a paycheck. It's easy to virtue signal that you want to save everyone from the comfort of your keyboard. You aren't impacted by business closures but if you had any shed of humanity you would disagree to these lockdowns because they are causing more harm than good.

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