171–180 of 381 posts
I for one love it when mouthy oncologists get picked to talk about epedemiology in the Journal. Next week, tune in for a sculptor's hot take on the Mars lander.
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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 .
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"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…
If one football team got beat 8-0, and another football team got beat 9-1, should we really be spending time arguing about which team is better when they're both pretty obviously not very good?
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…
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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 m…
I for one love it when mouthy oncologists get picked to talk about epedemiology in the Journal. Next week, tune in for a sculptor's hot take on the Mars lander.
s/We'll have/I really really want/ These sadly arent the exclusive purvey of the journal. plenty of other dog-trainers and nightly consumer-news shows often feature what amounts to a thinly-veiled quarantine tantrum masquerading as insightful critique.
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It's pretty weird actually. The news desk for the WSJ is among the best out there. Their news stories tend to be really dry in a good way - full of facts and figures, with very little in the way of click bait hyperbole. Their subscriber model is all about business people who want the details and not opinion... Which then makes the opinion desk at the WSJ a real oddball. It's consistently right-leaning, sometimes to t…
Isn't that the point of Op-Ed sections, at the end of the day? It's always been a way for newspapers to host what's effectively a glorified collection of Medium posts. Even the New York Times' Opinion page is consistently partisan.
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What I love about the news right now is that they've perfected the alchemy of turning every holiday into its own news cycle. Gatherings feared... Experts fear another spike . No proof at all that holiday -> virulence, of course. You should try turning off the news for a bit.
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?
Not necessarily. They also removed one big set of gatherings: Work.
Workplaces and the commute to them are massive contributors. Many people are in (loose) contact with many more people at work than at a large Thanksgiving dinner, and contact tracing is a lot more effective for the Thanksgiving dinner (everyone there is a close contact) vs. work ("oh, but they were more than 1.5 meters apart, so it doesn't count" because you can't quarantine everyone in a 100+ people open plan office that you've been saturating with infectious aerosols for 8 hours).
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I presume you have never been in Europe. There barely any borders to close and a lot of people live in one country and work in another. You can’t block that for a year. In Baarle Nassau in the Netherlands there is a store, and half of it is in the Netherlands and half of it is in Belgium. By the way, air travel has been ~0 for a year now. Unfortunately it has not in fact stopped the pandemic. Must be the no true lock…
Canada closed some of the internal borders between its provinces; something that has never happened before. Some road blocks, some of its based simply on the honour system. Here in Ontario, I cannot legally visit anywhere east of Quebec right now without quarantining on arrival for 2 weeks. And some remote communities are literally barricaded from entry.