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A case for ending lockdown

ryankemper.io

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Re: A case for ending lockdown

#351

Post by grumple »

ryankemper wrote: post #334
ausbah wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a good example of people saying the response was overblown, because the response had its intended effect

Note that this classic "pro-lockdown" talking point is an unfalsifiable claim. I don't think there's any figure I could pull out that might sway you otherwise, right? Simply put, this argument is invalid. Why? Because my writeup went into the IFR. Therefore we can calculate how many deaths might occur in the "do nothing" scenario, and compare that to lockdown-induced deaths. Also we should note that social distancing…

As I replied elsewhere to a similar point about falsifiability:

> Note that this classic "pro-lockdown" talking point is an unfalsifiable claim.

If you want to get down to epistemological arguments, then we should be clear: we can't know ANYTHING about the real world for certain and all no claim about the natural world is falsifiable; the only claims we can make are those that are tautological or conceptual only. The scientific method itself does not stand on anything more than sand from an epistemological perspective.

Obviously, that's a ridiculous way to think about the world and not helpful. What we CAN do is see the changes in trajectory of the virus growth rate caused by the lockdown; and extrapolate based on the data that we've seen about how it would grow without the lockdown. This is what a large number of domain experts (including data scientists with domain knowledge) have been doing, and they believe the lockdown has been necessary (and will continue to be, at least in part).

> Also we should note that social distancing and lockdown are different things, and it _appears_ that the former is much more responsible for the slowed rate of transmission.

For someone talking about the falsifiability of claims, you should take note that this is a unfalsifiable claim, and one that's intuitively ridiculous (as the lockdown causes more social distancing than would happen otherwise).

Obviously, we can't lock the entire civilization down forever, and nobody has made such an argument - there will be a gradual easing of restrictions over the coming months, but there's an expectation that we might see another wave of virus transmission in the fall.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#352

Post by zeusly »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #325
fluffything wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/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.

I think he's talking about all deaths, not the death's of positively tested, which allows you to guess the number of corona deaths even if you have few tests. This is also known as mortality displacement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_displacement

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#353

Post by wildmusings »

wheelerwj wrote: post #176

> 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…

The "experts" get it wrong all the time. They have the same dysfunctions as any other community of people, including orthodoxies, group think, and other defects to their capacity to solve problems.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#354

Post by URSpider94 »

ryankemper wrote: post #101
URSpider94 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two comments. One, saying something that is 300% larger than another is “similar” is stretching the definition of similarity. Two, both the numerator and the denominator matter in the death rate. In a given year, maybe 20% of the population get the seasonal flu. We could potentially see 80+% of the population contract covid. That’s another 4x multiplier of fatalities, but also hospitalizations.

The latter point is precisely why I was careful to say "pandemic flu" when responding to the above. But yes, the point is very valid. A novel disease with the same IFR of an established disease will kill a lot more in the year that it is introduced. (BTW, something that occurred to me is that the fact that infants are largely spared from COVID-19 is even more of a blessing than it already seems. Once this passes thro…

So, I just went and took a look. US deaths from influenza have ranged from 12,000 to a high of 61,000, with an average of more like 30,000. So, if we had prior knowledge that we would have a season with 150,000 deaths, which would be unlike anything we've seen since at least the 1950's and maybe longer, I expect that the government would indeed take some evasive action. But that's still not the right comparison. For covid-19, we were looking at somewhere between 750,000 and 2 million deaths. In other words, 20-50 times more than a typical flu season.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#356

Post by 30001 »

wheelerwj wrote: post #176

> 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…

since when are scientist ALWAYS right? they can't even determine if this virus effects respiratory system or circulatory system. they can't even agree on where the virus leaped from (bats! pangolins! snakes! WIV!). since when are scientist immune from biases?

and why should the nation take economic advise from a epidemiologist? they probably know as much about the economy as an economists knows about programming. not much.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#357

Post by shkkmo »

ryankemper wrote: post #342
shkkmo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When have some expertise, you should absolutely evaluate ideas on their merits. When you lack the expertise to do that effectively, you should listen to the experts (ideally those that demonstrate that they are evaluating ideas based on their merits). The trick is determine which questions you have the expertise to evaluate for yourself and which you are better of relying on experts to evaluate. Unfortunately, this i…

> Credentials are not the only way to acquire or demonstrate expertise. You say you are a "dude that likes to read research papers", how many epidemiological research papers have you read? How much time have you spent discussing those papers with epidemiological experts? Did you reach out to any of those experts to have them take a first pass as fixing any mistakes you made before you decided to post it publicly > In…

> This is not a fair characterization; I was very clear that this represented my "first draft" and that I was looking for feedback specifically to have people poke holes in it.

Where was this made clear? The closest I can see is at the very end where you call it a living document and will accept pull requests that match the "style and intentions of this document" which to me sounds like you are only interested in meeting pull requests that strength your argument to further your intended narrative.

I appreciate your adding a disclaimer about your lack of relevant experience, but even it says nothing about this being a "first draft" that you expect to have holes poked in.

So I fully stand behind my characterization and I find your use of the term "sanctimonious gatekeeping" to far less of a "fair characterization".

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#358

Post by shkkmo »

ryankemper wrote: post #343
shkkmo wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Analysis done by informed laymen is essential in breaking intellectual logjams in established fields. Which is why it is important that people with the expertise evaluate those ideas on their merits. What doesn't help is when less informed laymen think they can accurately judge the validity of ideas put forward by slightly more informed laymen. What active hurts is when those less informed laymen start spreading th…

> without making an effort to get their ideas validated by people Me posting this is literally me doing that, so your visible irritation is very oddly placed.

HN is a platform dominated by laymen in this field. Posting this article here is an attempt to publish and widen distribution. It is not an attempt to reach out to people with expertise prior to publishing.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#359

Post by danieltillett »

ryankemper wrote: post #103
danieltillett wrote: post #72

Ryan since you have asked for comments here are some from me. 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. 2. There is little evidence that we can reach herd immunity levels of infection with a Coronavirus like SARS-CoV-2 as both the unconstrained R0 is too high and the immunity too short lived.…

> 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…

1. Estimating the IFR is difficult because of difference in populations infected - in the end you need to make an estimate based on the best data possible. The Diamond Princess data was not biased towards the elderly as much it would appear as a large number of the positive case were in the crew who are younger. We also don’t know the true death rate as many cases were lost to follow up.

Even if the IFR turned out to be 0.5% in the end (I hope it is) this is still a lot of dead people.

2. Coronavirus are rather unusual for pathogens in that our immunity to them fades very quickly (less than a year on average) and you can get reinfected again. The question is if SARS-CoV-2 the same. We only have limited data so far, but if you have a look at figure 3 of this pre-print paper [0] you will see the antibody response has faded significantly 60 days post infection.

3. I think it was pretty dramatic in Wuhan, Northern Italy and NYC, but I guess this is one of personal opinion. What is certain is if the number of cases had doubled the system there would have broken down completely.

4. We seem to be in agreement.

5. The reports coming out of Sweden suggest that the economic damage there is just as bad as those countries that went into an official lockdown [1,2]. All Sweden seems to have accomplished is the killing of a large number of elderly Swedes.

Most people are not idiots and they won’t put themselves at risk of getting COVID-19 if they have a choice, but there are enough idiots that won’t self isolate to cause problems. If the economic difference of going into lockdown is the same as not, then why not help idiots not be idiots.

0. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v...

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-t...

2. https://www.thelocal.se/20200428/swedens-central-bank-leaves...

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#360

Post by ryankemper »

grumple wrote: post #351
ryankemper wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that this classic "pro-lockdown" talking point is an unfalsifiable claim. I don't think there's any figure I could pull out that might sway you otherwise, right? Simply put, this argument is invalid. Why? Because my writeup went into the IFR. Therefore we can calculate how many deaths might occur in the "do nothing" scenario, and compare that to lockdown-induced deaths. Also we should note that social distancing…

As I replied elsewhere to a similar point about falsifiability: > Note that this classic "pro-lockdown" talking point is an unfalsifiable claim. If you want to get down to epistemological arguments, then we should be clear: we can't know ANYTHING about the real world for certain and all no claim about the natural world is falsifiable; the only claims we can make are those that are tautological or conceptual only. The…

I'm going to hold up on responding to the points about unfalsifiability for now and focus on addressing this part:

> Obviously, we can't lock the entire civilization down forever, and nobody has made such an argument - there will be a gradual easing of restrictions over the coming months, but there's an expectation that we might see another wave of virus transmission in the fall.

So, the fear of the "second wave", in my opinion, is precisely because of practicing Containment as opposed to practicing pareto mitigation and letting the virus run its course in non-at-risk individuals. Or more accurately, since we're talking about still quaranting ~40% of the US, we would still see a small wave but it would not be nearly as significant.

In other words, the potential for the wave exists because having "protected" everybody from infection, there is now a huge differential pressure for SARS-CoV-2 to exploit. i.e. there are still plenty of vectors and thus the second wave is absolutely a concern.

Given how low prevalence in places like California is, I absolutely think we will see that wave. But again I essentially view it as a sign that we handled the situation wrong.

Given our current Containment policies, the resurgence of the wave might be met by a new wave of lockdowns. I certainly hope not, but that seems very likely. Hopefully by that point though people have mostly went back to work and thus it _might_ be politically untenable.

--

I guess I'll address the unfalsifiable point really briefly (I won't do it justice) - I think the claim that social distancing did/does more than lockdown is definitely falsifiable. Maybe not perfectly so, but we can see movement data and try to correlate that with waves of infection via projecting deaths backwards in time. It's certainly fuzzy given we'd be using average time until death as a proxy, but the claim is much _more_ investigable than the infamous "lockdown worked, end of story" line.

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