411–420 of 489 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s why overall excess deaths are a better measure. You really can’t game them.
Not really. Excess deaths certainly are not entirely caused by the virus, so you still need to try to subdivide them somehow, which is once again a ripe opportunity for "gaming" / creative statistics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 15%/month didn't sound that bad to her This is why when economists talk about consumers acting as rational market participants I just laugh and shake my head. Have they met people?
Has it occurred to you that people taking payday loans don’t have a lot of options? This isn’t someone deciding between 15% monthly and a nice 4% annual personal loan. This is someone deciding between 15% monthly and homelessness. Choosing the interest rate is rational.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The community I grew up in in California purposefully threw rallies and went out of their way to rebel against every single restriction. I keep this in mind when people say California's restrictions didn't work. Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.
Still, the vast majority of cases in California have been in the metropolitan areas that have also had the strongest restrictions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The community I grew up in in California purposefully threw rallies and went out of their way to rebel against every single restriction. I keep this in mind when people say California's restrictions didn't work. Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.
Just in case anyone thinks this was confined to rural areas it was not. I had to go do business in LA specifically around Manhattan Beach and Inglewood, and the folks that live there were taking me to strip malls where all the businesses looked closed but we're all actually open. They just had their windows covered. I'm talking about an MMA gym next to a hair salon next to an Ethiopian restaurant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to a study in PNAS, shelter-in-place policies in the US did not work: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e2019706118 Another study in Eur J Clin Inv had similar findings comparing countries: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484 COVID went wild basically everywhere. There were a few strong exceptions: China (apparently), Australia, New Zealand and some others. What these had in common was v…
Here in Japan they've never really had lockdown. Restaurants have remained open the entire time, just asked to close at 8pm. I could/can walk by them at 7pm and see them full of people talking and eating without masks. I was invited by Japanese friends the entire time (didn't go) and would see them posting pictures of their restaurant dinner gatherings on Facebook. Further, as a comparison, Tokyo Metro has 38 million…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The community I grew up in in California purposefully threw rallies and went out of their way to rebel against every single restriction. I keep this in mind when people say California's restrictions didn't work. Edit: This was in Orange County CA, not rural. And when I say "rallies" I'm talking thousands of people, not small gatherings.
Still, the vast majority of cases in California have been in the metropolitan areas that have also had the strongest restrictions.
So are the vast majority of people, and greater population density makes it harder to control the spread of communicable disease. So you’d expect, all other things being equal, not only thr vast majority of cases but the highest per capita cases to be in the metro areas.
But, actually, the highest per capita infections (both total and current) were mostly in rural, not metropolitan, counties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sweden's early success with their 'herd immunity' experiment was short lived. They failed to actually achieve 'herd immunity' and did not avoid the eventual virus death toll: https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/sweden-cris... By comparison Finland, it's neighbor took a much stricter approach and never reached the same level of death. Finland: 931 deaths at 168 per million with a 1.0% death rate. https://…
Can we then talk about the economic disruption felt by each respectively compared to the 0.4% difference in death rate? I don’t have insights into either county.
Sweden: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/gdp-growth-annual
Finland: https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/gdp-growth-annual
Looking at those charts they show very similar economic outcomes for the two countries.
Of the last 4 COVID effected quarters Finland won two and Sweden won two.
And Sweden actually felt the highest quarterly contraction at -7.7% compare to the -6.1% for Finland.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If being an island state was really the only thing that mattered here, why is Hawaii not at Covid zero? Why is Alaska not at Covid zero? (Despite not being an island, AK is still highly comparable to OZ.)
It’s hard to appreciate just how strict the lockdown measures in places like New Zealand and Taiwan have been. People are driven from the airport directly to a hotel, then someone comes and checks on them and they monitor the front door. Even in Hawaii, the arrival quarantine was just in whatever resort you were staying in, and was almost entirely self-imposed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>And the U.S. couldn't close its land borders even if it wanted to. Given that until recently the US was quite militant in refusing to act upon the outbreak, and it's a country comprised of hundreds of million of people among which about a third showed themselves to be quite defiant towards even the most trivial emergency public health policies, I don't think it's fair to refer to border control as a relevant factor…
> Given that until recently the US was quite militant in refusing to act upon the outbreak Factually untrue. The US was the first country to shut down China travel. And we got called Xenophobic for it. The mayor of Florence even held a “hug a Chinese” day in response. https://rmx.news/article/article/fears-of-being-called-racis...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alternative was not closing schools while cases and incoming patients were increasing exponentially. Is that a theory we should be testing when we've already paused elective medical procedures due to the already high numbers of people in the hospital?
Education is essential so yes that is a hypothesis we should be testing.
Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them.