321–330 of 381 posts
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this is a good example of people saying the response was overblown, because the response had its intended effect
Yeah, it's similar to (what I'll call because I don't know a real name) the security guard paradox. If a security guard is doing their job well, then they shouldn't really be noticed and so seem unimportant. They'll only really be noticed if they fail in their job (or don't exist at all.)
As soon as I read that the antibodies tests were showing that approx. 1/4 of NYC most likely already had the virus, and did a little basic math with the latest data on death rates, I realized that the lockdowns no longer make sense in NYC.
I guess that means I am now in the same bandwagon as Musk, Trump, and all the other supposed idiots or deniers that think this virus is not as deadly as it first appeared.
Back to work.
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> I should learn to never read anything from random people working in areas they don't have any expertise in. This is one clear lesson that can be drawn from the pandemic.
I don't think so. Consider that many governments with professional public health departments, including those of the richest countries in the world, downplayed the unfolding disaster, completely blew it on containment as a result, and are now reduced to using _extremely_ expensive lockdown measures to try to buy time until someone can come up with a better idea. Meanwhile, plenty of randos on the internet did the str…
Plenty of epidemiologists did the math and were talking about the situation on Twitter in January and February. I know because I was following them before China locked down. There were articles and interviews in the press from actual experts (Marc Lipsitch, Neil Ferguson, Michael Mina, Michael Osterholm) during that time.
There were science journalists (Helen Branswell, Kai Kupferschmidt) writing back then who were great at contextualizing the emerging information about the epidemic.
Dr Nancy Messonnier at the CDC warned that "Disruption to everyday life might be severe" on February 25th.
Meanwhile, randos were racking up karma across the internet with their back of the napkin bullshit.
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Fortunately at will employment works both ways. I can't be forced to come to work. They of course can refuse to allow me to come back in a few years after this is over but if they want someone today they need to entice them somehow. If things are now risky than they may need to offer hazard pay. Note that a company giving a bad reference because you refuse the terms is likely to lose a lawsuit (in the US) since court…
> Note that a company giving a bad reference because you refuse the terms is likely to lose a lawsuit (in the US) How often do these kinds of lawsuits happen anyway? I'm imagining that engaging in one is also a career-limiting move in itself, but maybe the situation is better? > Fortunately at will employment works both ways This pandemic is really turning the world upside down; things that were favoring one group of…
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Yeah, if you model New York with an appropriate epidemiological model using just mortality (which is more reliable than cases), the lockdown event is massive and trivial to detect. Anyone who claims otherwise is either dishonest or foolish.
In the EU there are graphs showing the "daily deaths / day" over the last 2 years. One can pretty easily see the impact of COVID-19 there, even on countries that are not testing and therefore not reporting any cases... Unfortunately I haven't been able to find that data for the US.
They include "deaths per day" in one of the charts. Early on I found their stats to be consistent with other trusted sources; but I've not confirmed that recently.
New York City has seen over 18,000 deaths directly attributed to Covid-19. The actual number may be higher, but probably isn't lower. How many actual (including undetected) cases would there have to be in NYC to produce the given number of deaths at any given IFR? Figures at the low end suggest a number of cases far in excess of the total population, so they are naturally impossible. The real IFR is somewhere between the lowest plausible number based on the total population and the implausibly high case fatality rate (based on detected/confirmed cases).
Anyone want to do some math on that?
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this is a good example of people saying the response was overblown, because the response had its intended effect
Then why, after lockdowns were in place, did we build all those field hospitals and ventilators that never got used? I suspect it’s because we expected the “with-lockdown” numbers to be far worse than they actually ended up being. In other words, there was an overreaction, only the degree to which we overreacted is in debate.
WCGW. /s
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> 1. The true IFR is hard to estimate at this point, but looks to be around 1%. This is a very difficult question to answer with the data we have and all the limitations. An IFR of 1% seems too high. This doesn't seem to line up with data from the Diamond Princess (~1% IFR in a population biased towards elderly). We can also look as a lower bound at the Theodore Roosevelt (the navy ship), which had I believe 840 posi…
> An IFR of 1% seems too high. This doesn't seem to line up with data from the Diamond Princess (~1% IFR in a population biased towards elderly). The Diamond Princess has 13 deaths for 712 cases, so 1.8%.
As you can see in your quote, I was talking about IFR. In general - and this is a theme of the writeup BTW - we should be looking at IFR and not CFR. With IFR we can reasonably extrapolate how many deaths we'll have before new infections halt, whereas CFR is borderline impossible to use because we'd need to know how many cases we would expect per infection. At which point, why not just calculate the IFR anyway, right?
See https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v...
> Adjusting for delay from confirmation-to-death, we estimated case and infection fatality ratios (CFR, IFR) for COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess ship as 2.3% (0.75%-5.3%) and 1.2% (0.38-2.7%). Comparing deaths onboard with expected deaths based on naive CFR estimates using China data, we estimate IFR and CFR in China to be 0.5% (95% CI: 0.2-1.2%) and 1.1% (95% CI: 0.3-2.4%) respectively.
You might also want to look at https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
The premise of this post is extremely flawed: > Weeks and months later, facts on the ground show that the purported collapse of the healthcare system did not occur. Yes, because we locked down population centers quickly. That's the whole point. ICUs have still been over capacity though. Without the lockdowns, it's obvious we'd have a lot more dead people the past month. > Moreover, this was not due to success in seri…
Your argument for lockdown is unfalsifiable. Any good outcome is attributable to lockdown, and any bad outcome is because we did not lockdown soon enough. What piece of evidence could you possibly see that would convince you you were wrong?
> I’m a software / site reliability engineer okay, thanks. Seriously, the list of scientist and medical organizations advising through this period is so long, I don't know why anyone who isn't at equally experienced tries to counter-claim their insights. I'm not saying we shouldn't do our own research and arrive at our own conclusion, but if you arrive at a different conclusion, you're almost certainly the one whose…
And scroll down to the section on hero worship to see where the author anticipated and addressed your objection.