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Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

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Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#161

Post by berdario »

acdha wrote: post #96
carlmr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If lockdowns were taken seriously from the start, it would had prevented going wild and risking new strains. I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work. Most countries aren't the first world, most countries don't have the resources to test and quarantine properly, most countries can't afford lockdowns. On top of that a lot of countries have much wor…

> I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work. It doesn’t need anything that drastic: imagine an alternate history where the Taiwanese warnings in December 2019 had been taken seriously and international travel was locked down with a mandatory three week quarantine (adjusted by the later availability of tests) on arrival. That would require no coopera…

> Taiwanese warnings

The disease originated in Wuhan, mainland China, not Taiwan.

The emergency was communicated in China (as well as Taiwan):

http://py.cnhubei.com/py_news/2019/1231/3290.shtml

Sure, listening to any official source would've been better than what happened... But shutting down travel to/from the whole of China (since otherwise you'd have to trust every passenger to declare if they had been in Wuhan) while there were less then 30/40 cases of pneumonia, and not a single death would've been a really difficult measure to sell

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#162

Post by danaliv »

dragonwriter wrote: post #154
swivelmaster wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointing out that someone is not an expert at something is not an ad hominem.

Arguing against someone's position by simply stating (truthfully or not) that they are not an expert is textbook ad hominem .

Come on. Evaluating the merit of a source is critical thinking 101.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#163

Post by acdha »

tinus_hn wrote: post #136
acdha wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cases go down when the virus is spreading less. We know lockdowns are effective because that’s happened everywhere which effectively implemented them, but nobody is saying that it’s the only option: for example, if anti-maskers woke up one morning and decided to be decent people the rate would reliably slow, too. What doesn’t help is pretending that the risks aren’t real and haven’t been well-understood for roughly t…

Oh sorry, is South Korea in the ‘everything is going great’ list again? Last thing I remember they were in their third wave with restrictions for 3 months already. They must have forgotten how to wear their magical masks.

Again, the only people saying masks are magic are people like you who took an anti-science position and haven’t been willing to admit being wrong. They reduce cases but they’re not perfect, which is why some activities like indoor dining are inherently risky until we have widespread vaccination.

Currently, South Korea is showing 9 cases per million versus hundreds in most of Europe, the US, etc. so we’re still talking about many thousands of deaths avoided by keeping spread 1-2 orders of magnitude lower. If you only care about the economy, ask how much money in treatment that’s saved or the lifetime economic output of the people who died early.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/south-korea

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#164

Post by ngokevin »

thehappypm wrote: post #91

I really don't think lockdowns have helped a ton in the US. Look at Florida's winter wave of Covid cases vs Massachusetts. The curves are basically identical, despite vastly different pandemic policies. In other countries yes, but in the USA, are there any real data points that can argue that states with strong lockdowns did better than states without? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/massachusetts-co... h…

I don't think we should be giving hot takes on the pandemic with cherry-picked news articles. I knew someone that said COVID wasn't a big deal in March 2020 because 5% of people died on an isolated cruise ship. The curve may be similar, but unclear to conclude that lockdowns didn't affect absolute numbers. Compare Oregon and Washington vs Arizona and Utah. Also account for rural vs urban counties. Is it that controversial that staying away from each other during a pandemic prevents spread?

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#165

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

thehappypm wrote: post #88
ncallaway wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we do have is proof that increased gatherings lead to increased transmission. We have, I think, a pretty reasonable assumption that holidays lead to increased gatherings. So, a cautious assumption until data shows it's not accurate that "holidays lead to increased transmission" seems to me to be warranted. Have you seen data that shows holidays don't lead to increased transmission?

The upward curve started well before Thanksgiving -- really around October 1 we started seeing the summer flatness yield to an upward curve, it was steepest in November, peaking around mid-January. If the holidays were end of November through December, wouldn't the spike have started around December 1?

The upward curve can be attributed to many things and all of it conjecture until it's proven, but the FACT is increased gathering = increased transmission. There's no getting around that fact no matter where you point the finger. It's literally how this turned into a pandemic. Therefor logic is weighted towards holidays (increased gathering) leading to increased transmission.

The upward curve can be a result of school openings and then the sudden steep upward trajectory in the beginning of November being due to Halloween followed by continued Holiday visitation throughout Nov/Dec. There's also the messaging from the Trump administration that encouraged masses of people to ignore rules and treat the virus as if it's "no worse than the flu".

Similarly the reduction in cases can - speculatively - be attributed to better protocols being implemented nationwide; e.g. states that had lax rules having an "oh shit" moment when hospital capacities were at maximum which in turn resulted in stricter measures. Better mitigation strategies in schools across the nation is another reason. Trump's election drama diverted attention away from the "covid = hoax", so people were more willing to accept stricter rules.

Lastly - and this is something that can't really be proven so take it with a grain of salt - people are avoiding testing in order to drive down rates so the schools can fully re-open. I think we might be able to see hints of this last one in hospitalization data if those numbers remain the same while the case numbers drop.

EDIT: https://covidtracking.com/data shows hospitalizations are also dropping (although deaths only started dropping recently), so I would say that last reason for cases dropping is bullshit concocted on social media, but I'm going to leave it on this post so others can call it out as BS when they see it elsewhere

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#166

Post by 40four »

onychomys wrote: post #142
40four wrote: post #140

I'm not sure how much stock I would put into this type of claim in an opinion article, but anecdotally, I've been tracking the daily new cases and percent positive in my area very closely for a while. Especially in the last couple of weeks the percent positive & new cases has fallen dramatically. Seemingly for no good reason. In my state, we are now consistently seeing percent positive less than 10%. After the holida…

It's important to remember that the positivity rate is a measure of how much testing you're doing, not a measure of how much virus is around. Unless you're reading articles about the politics of rapid tests or the like, you should mostly just ignore the pos rate, it doesn't tell you anything useful otherwise.

I'm reading numbers from my states department of health site, and they only report molecular tests. You are right percent positive, and even daily new cases, it's not a measure of how much virus is around, and should taken with a grain of salt.

But they are some of the only metrics we have, and if you keep the caveats in mind, I don't agree that they aren't useful.

What else would you suggest looking at? Deaths? In my state, the daily new deaths numbers are following the same trend. So if you keep in mind percent positive is heavily influenced by total number of tests, and the daily new deaths chart is following the same trend, then that seems like very positive new to me.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#167

Post by edmundsauto »

cafard wrote: post #157
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't OP-ed synonym for what they generally disagree with (e.g. to allow them to claim they're "listening to both sides") ? relevant example from this week is Australia, where editor in chief for the Murdoch conglomerate has no answer to why they banish all articles about climate change science to the Opinions sections. https://twitter.com/ChaplainheArt/status/1363168269599973382

"op-ed" derived from "opposite the editorial page", i.e. recto to the editorial page's verso. In general, the op-eds do not vary that much from editorials. The NY Times always has conservative columnists that it runs, but they are not necessarily that far right.

I always thought it was Opinion/Editorial.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#168

Post by onychomys »

theli0nheart wrote: post #150
onychomys wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to remember that the positivity rate is a measure of how much testing you're doing, not a measure of how much virus is around. Unless you're reading articles about the politics of rapid tests or the like, you should mostly just ignore the pos rate, it doesn't tell you anything useful otherwise.

If one was coming to this conclusion from a single data point, you might be right, but the OP is referring to the period-over-period change. This is a significant trend.

But only if the testing rate (which is the denominator) stays the same. And it never does, because as fewer people get sick, fewer people get tested.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#169

Post by acdha »

EricE wrote: post #121
acdha wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic damage is being done by the pandemic: people aren’t going to congregate when it’s risky and many businesses can’t survive without high in-person volume. Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan). What won’t work is attacking medical precautions or dissembling about vaccine effectiveness — and on…

"Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan)." How do you explain Florida, not locked down, vs. California with some of the strictest lock downs in the country having similar rates of death/infection? It's even more of a puzzler for those pushing lockdowns since Florida has a population tilted way more in the…

The US hasn’t tried anything like a strict lockdown anywhere in the country – we came close for a few weeks last spring but relaxed several weeks too soon – so I think what we’re showing is that this works as well as cutting a course of antibiotics early.

In particular, we didn’t have a good economic plan for people who couldn’t work from home. Absent some alternative, economic necessity will force people to leave their houses and that will ensure community spread goes up without more care than was in evidence in much of the country.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#170

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

carlmr wrote: post #33
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICS this isn’t talked about enough! If lockdowns were taken seriously from the start, it would had prevented going wild and risking new strains. But here we are

>If lockdowns were taken seriously from the start, it would had prevented going wild and risking new strains. I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work. Most countries aren't the first world, most countries don't have the resources to test and quarantine properly, most countries can't afford lockdowns. On top of that a lot of countries have much wor…

> I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work.

It doesn't need that though.

It needs countries to close the borders tightly except to countries that do cooperate, as many Asian countries have successfully done.

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