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Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

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Re: Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

#51

Post by dragonwriter »

whb07 wrote: post #7
kingkawn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of this moment America has a little less than 17,000 dead from this. We could’ve used more competence and seriousness about this threat for the sake of everyone, not petty indulgences of performative outrage about a concept of freedom that feels hollow as we all are forced to hide.

And in that time span about the same people died from the "regular" flu. Speak for yourself, the "concept of freedom" that you talk about is one of the many reasons the U.S is what it is. The freedoms we have do have costs at times like these but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs.

> And in that time span about the same people died from the "regular" flu.

We're past the seasonal flu peak and coronavirus is still on the upswing and hasn't peaked, it's not only killing more people per day than the flu, but it's actually now reached the status of leading cause of death in the US.[0]

Even with countermeasures, covid-19 is, short of a literal miracle, going to kill far more people in the US than the flu this year.

And it's also going already contributing more to deaths by other direct causes by clogging hospital systems, consuming resources like ventilators, etc.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/coronavirus-bec...

Re: Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

#52

Post by dragonwriter »

scottlocklin wrote: post #44
ceejayoz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point: Comparing annual flu deaths when we don't shut down the whole world to COVID-19 deaths when we do (especially to make the claim they're similarly dangerous) is insane. If 100 people drown in lakes, that's not really odd. If 100 people drown in the middle of the Sahara a thousand miles from the nearest water, that's weird.

Looked to me like he was comparing flu deaths now to corona deaths now. If indeed those numbers are comparable or the same, we've probably made a terrible mistake. Maybe looking at total pneumonia deaths for anomalies is the right thing to do?

> If indeed those numbers are comparable or the same

Well if you mean now now and not just annual totals or totals over the 2019-2020 flu season, they aren't the same or comparable, Covid-19 is the leading US cause of daily death, flu is way back in the pack.

Re: Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

#53

Post by alistairSH »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #45
justin66 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cities that can lay claim to being the greatest city in the world without getting laughed out of the room can - unless I'm missing a few - be counted on one hand. I wonder what other cities in the United States you believe qualify.

Most communities don't aspire to be the "greatest city in the world", especially given the criteria upon which NYC would win such a contest. Most people are more interested in living a peaceful secure life than having the prestige of hosting Wall Street or having the most fusion restaurants per square mile. The best cover ever put out by the New Yorker was on the March 29, 1976 issue that showed just how myopic the c…

The two largest metro areas in the US have 10% of the total population.

The top ten metro areas have about 25% of the total population.

So, not a majority, but an absolutely massive number of people.

And that myopia goes both ways.

Re: Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

#54

Post by justin66 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #45
justin66 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cities that can lay claim to being the greatest city in the world without getting laughed out of the room can - unless I'm missing a few - be counted on one hand. I wonder what other cities in the United States you believe qualify.

Most communities don't aspire to be the "greatest city in the world", especially given the criteria upon which NYC would win such a contest. Most people are more interested in living a peaceful secure life than having the prestige of hosting Wall Street or having the most fusion restaurants per square mile. The best cover ever put out by the New Yorker was on the March 29, 1976 issue that showed just how myopic the c…

> Most communities don't aspire to be the "greatest city in the world"

Undeniably true, but honestly, what's your point? The OP's words were "the best America's got." I think in the context of the conversation we were engaged in, a suggestion as to what is the greatest city we have in general, or the greatest city we have in terms of public health, might both be interesting. I'm surprised by these "who cares about how good a city is, mannnn?" comments.

Re: Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

#55

Post by pharrington »

kingkawn wrote: post #2

I live in nyc and have a brother who lives in Vietnam. When a person in my brother’s building tested positive for the coronavirus the government quarantined the building, tested every single person who lives and works there, stationed police outside to enforce the lockdown, and delivered food for two weeks. If someone had tested positive they would be relocated to a hospital facility for treatment. When the tests for…

"America is finished if this is the best we got"

I am 100% sure the Donald Trump administration's nation-scale coordination is not the best we've got.

For example, see the CDC's Ebola response in 2014 https://www.cdc.gov/about/ebola/timeline.html .

Re: Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

#56

Post by ModernMech »

scottlocklin wrote: post #30
ceejayoz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It only killed as many as the flu” is a weird talking point. It killed that many with an unprecedented shutdown of the entire global economy to mitigate it.

Do you think the flu doesn't respond to the measures taken against corona-chan?

Surely it does, but the CDC estimates that there have been 24k-64k deaths so far this season from flu [1]. That's over a 5 month span so that averages 4.8k - 12.6k deaths per month. Lockdowns really only started going into effect in that last month of the 5, so most of this time the flu was running around unmitigated by social distancing.

Now compare to coronavirus, where we were late to start but eventually locked everything down, and we still have 17k deaths in less than a month, and we know that's a lower bound. We're not even a month past the first 100 deaths. The death rate now represents infections 2 weeks ago, which we measured at 14k. After that we started measuring 30k+ new infections daily, so the death rate is likely to get worse by the time we hit 1 month.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

Re: Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

#57

Post by School-Cotton »

justin66 wrote: post #49
School-Cotton wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I liked living in Tucson, AZ better than New York. Yes NYC has a unique grandeur but different people like different things; it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale. (That said, I don’t endorse GP’s flippant dismissal of NYC either.)

> it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale I think very old, classic measures like economic activity, the number of great works of art that come out of a place, the influence of a city on its surrounding region and its world, and the progress toward better public health and safety measures (highly relevant here) are a lot more quantifiable than one might at first believe.

Yeah, NYC is better than Tucson on all those metrics. Tucson is better on metrics like "I subjectively think the landscape looks nice", and "I like the sort of people who live there". What's your point?

Re: Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

#58

Post by whatshisface »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #47
whatshisface wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't demonstrate that I have the right proposal, but I can demonstrate that one's imagination can run beyond what's presently being considered. Since we're talking about liberty, let's start with he Libertarian canned talking point: "liability and torts." Making individual people liable for spreading the virus would only really work with our imperfect court system for knowing super-spreaders and corporations with…

> It's possible that if you pursued corporations and a small number of individual defectors with the liability system and asked normal people nicely, you would be able to handle it. So, this doesn't seem like an approach that has a materially different desired effect from what we're already doing. The policy's goal is to achieve temporary shutdown of businesses and prevent transmission of the virus. You're just using…

>I guess what I was asking was whether you have any ideas that have any likelihood of being more effective than current approaches.

Well, what we're talking about is how to keep civil liberties while also effecting a quarantine. I think if we came up with a solution that was as good as the current solution but that had less risk of giving the government abusable and sticky power, that would satisfy the goal of the discussion.

I could offer some changes to the idea I proposed that would address some of your concerns (as well as argue that there are some effectiveness benefits over the current policy to balance out the downsides), and we could have an insightful discussion going over it, but that would distract from the broader point of "if we put our heads to it we might be able to avoid an expansion in government power while not making any unacceptable sacrifices."

Re: Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

#59

Post by ceejayoz »

scottlocklin wrote: post #50
ceejayoz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If indeed those numbers are comparable or the same, we've probably made a terrible mistake. No, probably not. The seasonal flu infects a billion people a year, and still doesn't do things like collapse Italy's healthcare system.

You're changing the subject: if indeed the number of deaths from flu and covid are the same, during a quarantine, we have made a terrible mistake. I have no idea if they are the same. Do you?

You need to reconcile the "no worse than the flu" idea with "collapsed the northern Italian healthcare system". If you're proposing they're similar in impact, you need to explain why their actual real-life impact is not similar.

The CDC estimates somewhere between 24k and 63k flu deaths since October. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

The previous season was estimated at 34,200. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

COVID-19 has killed at least 16k in the US, starting on Feb 29, with significant mitigation efforts that are not done for flu. Almost all of that is in the last week - the death toll stood at only 1.8k on 4/4. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm

Comparing the two is like claiming a bicycle is winning a 10 mile race versus a Ferrari because it got a head start and got to mile #1 faster. (It's also likely some estimated flu deaths are actually COVID deaths.)

Re: Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

#60

Post by ModernMech »

School-Cotton wrote: post #37
whb07 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah....no. Funny how this line of thinking goes. Serological studies starting to come out and they are showing rates above 25% of the population being infected. Study out of Germany reports that CFR is 0.3%. Theres a news article out of Chicago where the drive thru testing reported more people had the antibodies than tested positive.

Got a link?

Probably this? https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tes...
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