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NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

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Re: NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

#161

Post by xienze »

ceejayoz wrote: post #159
xienze wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not like every country is getting a ration of the same number of units - so it shouldn’t be harder for large countries. It is though. Again, if a country with 300M people wants to test as many people per capita as a country of 30M, it needs _ten times as many tests_.

Sure, but it likely has ten times the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver them. The US is, in many ways, a bunch of ~30M person countries, akin to the European Union. Freedom of movement, no customs between them, powerful state-level governments, etc.

> Sure, but it likely has ten times the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver them.

Yes, in theory, but we're talking about trying to produce 10x of something limited by a resource in short supply the world over, with every country's government vying for their own cut. Instead of "reagent", pretend I told you the limiting factor was "Unobtanium." Hey no sweat, just find 10x of it! See how silly that line of reasoning is? Again, to put it in terms the HN crowd might understand, the production of physical goods isn't like spinning up servers in AWS.

Or are you just understand the impression that the US, who has produced by far the greatest number of tests (in absolute numbers) of any country in the world, just doesn't have the desire to obtain greater and greater numbers of tests?

Re: NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

#162

Post by ceejayoz »

xienze wrote: post #161
ceejayoz wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it likely has ten times the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver them. The US is, in many ways, a bunch of ~30M person countries, akin to the European Union. Freedom of movement, no customs between them, powerful state-level governments, etc.

> Sure, but it likely has ten times the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver them. Yes, in theory, but we're talking about trying to produce 10x of something limited by a resource in short supply the world over, with every country's government vying for their own cut. Instead of "reagent", pretend I told you the limiting factor was "Unobtanium." Hey no sweat, just find 10x of it! See how silly that line of reaso…

> Or are you just understand the impression that the US, who has produced by far the greatest number of tests (in absolute numbers) of any country in the world, just doesn't have the desire to obtain greater and greater numbers of tests?

Yes. (I've answered this in more detail in the other comment thread, but Trump has repeatedly complained that testing = detected cases = bad look for him.)

There's no indication the Trump administration has invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up reagent production. They'd be wise to do so, if it's a genuine bottleneck.

Re: NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

#163

Post by xienze »

ceejayoz wrote: post #160
xienze wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it something we have started or not even that? I would assume so. Are you under the impression that the US simply doesn’t want to test as many people as possible?

> Are you under the impression that the US simply doesn’t want to test as many people as possible? Absolutely. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-says-too-much-coronavi... > "So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad." https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-on-allowing-grand-pr... > "They would like to have the people come off. I’d rather have the people stay [on the ship]. But I’d go…

> "So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad."

He's not wrong though, look at the rest of the quote in context:

> "So the media likes to say we have the most cases, but we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn't have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad,"

The correctly identified problem with increased testing is that lots of super geniuses, who apparently can't look past "big number is biggest" w.r.t. corona deaths, try to tie "most deaths" with "worst handling of the situation", completely ignoring, as I pointed out, that the US is doing better on a deaths/million basis than several European countries. Countries that supposedly have superior healthcare systems, healthier populations, and leaders not named Trump. Buuuuttt, no one wants to tie context like that to any of the numbers, so he's absolutely right that increased testing => increased reporting of infection => increased whining about how bad the country is doing.

And of course, this is all ignoring that it's not his call to make as far as how many tests are performed, otherwise we wouldn't be leading the world in absolute numbers of tests administered by a staggering degree. No, we'd be content to test nobody at all and brag about how no one is infected.

Re: NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

#164

Post by Marsymars »

mirimir wrote: post #130
Marsymars wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW my province of 4.4 million is stalled on tests being run because it's run out of additional symptomatic people to test at around 30 tests per 1k per 30 days, even though testing capacity is about double that, and still increasing.

Why not start testing randomly chosen asymptomatic people?

They did this week, but it has some limitations:

1. You can't actually randomly choose people, so it's being done on a fist-come, first-serve basis. 2. Testing all asymptomatic people on any regular basis would take orders of magnitude more tests, so it's not useful as a containment measure, just as a data-collection measure.

Re: NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

#165

Post by esoterica »

redis_mlc wrote: post #150
esoterica wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how herd immunity works. If the bay area was close to herd immunity, you would see >NYC level death numbers from there.

No, the Bay Area corona ramped up starting Dec., so you won't see NY-style weekly death rates. Let me put it this way. If you live in the Bay Area, you know people from Wuhan. We got a huge head start on the rest of America.

Enough people in NYC have died that you would see the excess mortalities very clearly even if you smeared them out over a few months.

Also tests have shown that almost no people in the Bay Area were infected prior to mid-Feb and only a low single digit percentage had antibodies in Santa Clara county as of early April.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/04/testing-poole...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v...

There is no evidence supporting your theory and plenty of strong evidence contradicting it. "Lots of people have Chinese friends and therefore everyone is already infected" is not a convincing line of argument.

Re: NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

#166

Post by CydeWeys »

CydeWeys wrote: post #98
lonelappde wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the Federal Government is for, though, even in theory. The Federal government handles foreign affairs and interstate disputes.

A pandemic is very much an interstate problem, so it's in scope even using your narrow and outdated definition of the US government structure.

I just found this very relevant history:

1799 The first quarantine station and hospital in America was built in 1799 at the port of Philadelphia after a yellow fever outbreak in 1793.

1878 The National Quarantine Act was passed in 1878, shifting quarantine powers from state to federal government.

1944 The Public Health Service Act formed the federal government’s quarantine authority in 1944.

1967 CDC (National Communicable Disease Center) took over federal quarantine functions in 1967.

1970s CDC reduced the number of quarantine stations from 55 to 8 because infectious diseases were thought to be a thing of the past.

2004–2007 Number of quarantine stations increased to 20 because of concerns about bioterrorism after World Trade Center attack in 2001 and worldwide spread of disease after SARS outbreak in 2003.

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/quarantine-stations-us.html

So fighting pandemics officially became a function of the federal government almost a century and a half ago.

Re: NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

#167

Post by tathougies »

bsder wrote: post #141
tathougies wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exponential growth is never vertical. Why must we resort to hyperbole when the truth is scary enough?

To a first order approximation it is. And the reason we need to try analogies and hyperbole is because even people who are arguing in good faith don't get exponential growth . Normal people look at 2 on day 1, 4 on day 4, 8 on day 7 and think "Oh, about 4 every 3 days. Shrug. No big deal." Horizontal. Epidemiologists look at that and go "AHHHHH! Doubling every 3 days. Shut everything down or we'll have a million in 2…

> Normal people look at 2 on day 1, 4 on day 4, 8 on day 7 and think "Oh, about 4 every 3 days. Shrug. No big deal." Horizontal.

Yeah well HN is mostly a bunch of software engineers who spend most of their day relying on the fundamental that at the end of 32 days in your example, there'll be 4 billion, so...

On the other hand your example is extremely contrived, because exponential growth in epidemiology is mostly not possible except for short periods.

Re: NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

#168

Post by tqi »

KoftaBob wrote: post #46
tqi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the information that is on the dashboard... what are people supposed to do with that information?

All the employers need to know this information so they know when they can reopen. It's not like they all have some direct hotline to the governor that will call them when they can open. This is a good way to keep workplaces up to date so they can let their employees know to come back. Especially since the governor is letting every one of these regions handle reopening themselves, so it won't be some statewide announ…

But this dashboard has no information / makes no claim about potential timelines. For example, Mid Hudson has a 28% share of total beds available vs 30% threshold. There is no way for a non expert to know if a 2% delta is small or large gap.

There is a difference between having a lot of data and knowing what any of it means. Business owners are (by and large) not health care experts, and I think it's a bad idea to implicitly encourage people to make their own conclusions on a very complicated issue.

Re: NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

#169

Post by Closi »

xienze wrote: post #161
ceejayoz wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it likely has ten times the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver them. The US is, in many ways, a bunch of ~30M person countries, akin to the European Union. Freedom of movement, no customs between them, powerful state-level governments, etc.

> Sure, but it likely has ten times the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver them. Yes, in theory, but we're talking about trying to produce 10x of something limited by a resource in short supply the world over, with every country's government vying for their own cut. Instead of "reagent", pretend I told you the limiting factor was "Unobtanium." Hey no sweat, just find 10x of it! See how silly that line of reaso…

The claim was that it’s harder for the USA to get the required levels of unobtanium than a smaller country because it needs more.

In reality the USA has more purchasing leverage because it can exploit (and is exploiting) geopolitics, and can obtain at least as much reagent/unobtanium per capita as other countries right now.

To put it in terms you might understand, the USA has a better ability to source reagent than you do - see if you as an individual are able to procure even 1 litre of the stuff!

Re: NY launches live dashboard of each regions progress hitting 7 reopening criteria

#170

Post by ceejayoz »

xienze wrote: post #156
qotgalaxy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But none of that matters. You have x number of people, you need y number of tests. Just because it's harder to do doesn't mean you need to do it any less.

> But none of that matters. Yes it does, it’s proportionally more difficult. If you want a country of 300M to have as many tests per capita as a country of 30M, you need _ten times as many tests_.

That's not what "proportionally" means.
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