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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

#121

Post by scarmig »

godmode2019 wrote: post #112

A point not many people are raising is its winter in the northern hemisphere, so naturally the R0 will increase. Why this new strain is so prevalent? My personal opinion is since schools opened up they have acted as the main vector. Going undetected for an extended period, I read children are 'being hit the hardest' ie their is a lot more asymptomatic children. The latter point is just conjecture but the note on wint…

One seasonal question that I'm pondering:

It's currently summer in South Africa, but death rate is spiking there, more than during its winter. This surprises and concerns me. What's the explanation? Thankfully, other obvious Southern Hemisphere countries aren't seeing a big spike right now.

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

#122

Post by zinekeller »

stretchcat wrote: post #95
zinekeller wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> Furthermore 'Irish car bombs' are a tactless but popular bar drink in America, which indicates an awareness of the conflict.

In the Atlantic parts, sure. But someone saying that others knows the history of Ireland because they knew a drink is a stretch at this point.

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

#123

Post by potshot »

cactus2093 wrote: post #37
Fordec wrote: 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…

What everyone seems to be assuming is that this new strain will cause a constant increase in the reproduction number R of ~50% in every situation. I haven't really seen any discussion of if and why that is actually a good extrapolation to make. So for example in a specific situation, with a specific type of intermingling of a population in which the R value was, say, 1.2, we think the new strain caused that to increa…

> The health department has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine

I'm in San Francisco and a family member runs a specialty clinic here. They worked directly with the health department last week to get their staff vaccinated as part of Phase 1a described here: https://sf.gov/covid-19-vaccine-san-francisco

I'm not saying the performance so far is outstanding or good, but it's simply not true that the health department "has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine".

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

#124

Post by randompwd »

Fordec wrote: 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…

Also let's not forget the porous border with Northern Ireland, which is suffering from London's stupid rules.

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

#125

Post by krona »

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…

Isn't it trivially true to say it's impossible for any natural process to sustain exponential growth for a sustained duration of time?

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

#126

Post by avs733 »

tgb wrote: post #93
avs733 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't seen a particular critique of that paper so can't comment.

Bigger picture, I wasn't commenting on the particular validity of that paper as much as what this type of study could tell us...hindsight I should have picked an example from another disease.

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

#127

Post by randompwd »

secfirstmd wrote: post #55
lynchdt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Irish. +1 on your assessment here. The virulent strain narrative was peddled by the Irish government who went against medical advice and tried to deflect blame. The evidence doesn’t support the narrative. I think the COVID-fatigue angle is quite interesting though. As critical as I am of the government they were under a lot of pressure from the populous to provide some sort of respite.

Agreed. To be honest the minute Fianna Fail came into government things slipped a bit and it feels like the pressure from business was allowed overwhelm the health advice. It was plainly obvious what was going to happen when they opened up. The annoying thing was that the last year was wasted by not increasing emergency capacity in ICU and getting the correct processes in place to create a fast roll-out of vaccinatio…

Any Irish response or strategy is gonna be hobbled by the Northern Ireland lax response. We can't just shut the NI border, either legally or politically.

Which is unfortunate.

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

#128

Post by second--shift »

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…

I'm usually a flag-carrier for epsilon theory here and elsewhere, but I think this is the closest approximation to reality.

What's happen(ed)ing in Ireland is Bad capital B. But that just puts into context USA's reality for the last ~3 months or so. We have been living an ongoing Ireland event since people gave up in the Fall.

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

#129

Post by DSingularity »

drcross wrote: post #100

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 le…

The lasting psychological damage from these lockdowns is going to take years just to understand. Especially on kids.

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

#130

Post by mschuster91 »

mam2 wrote: post #113
Barrin92 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Representative government caving to demands when the demands are terrible, like in this case, is not a good thing. In that moment what is needed is enough guts to see the measures through and fend interest groups off. Loss of leadership and movement towards "the customer is king" politics is responsible for a lot of mistakes in the response to this virus.

Hindsight is 10/10.

Uh, there was and is no "hindsight" involved here. The scientific consensus about coronavirus and how to fight it (wearing masks, lockdowns and contact tracing) was clear pretty shortly after the whole drama began.

The problem was politicians, not just in the US, didn't have the guts to tell and explain their citizens that. The governments that did (New Zealand) or had prior epidemics experience / a population with a high compliance rate/trust in government (Japan, Taiwan) fared pretty well, as did the governments that resorted to authoritarian scale (China, Vietnam, Thailand).

For what it's worth even European countries such as Italy showed that hard lockdowns were and are effective, but politicians chose to disregard that evidence and prayed for the second wave to never appear...

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