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I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

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Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#81
post #13

Disclaimer: I'm Irish, working in tech but my hobby that gets me more of a social life is involvement with an Irish political party. The new variant accounted for 10-25% of these new cases over the period of that spike. The spike happened two weeks after Christmas when lock-down restrictions were lifted, as planned in October, so people could have a respite after 9 months of all this. Did the government misjudge just…

Actually the new strain is already responsible for 45% of infections in Ireland (as per yesterday's NPHET briefing) while it was 10% at the beginning of the year IIRC So yeah it's not the whole story, but it is an important part of it.

There really is no convincing evidence in the public domain that new variants have caused the increase in cases, and there is a very convincing alternative explanation that opening up the shops three weeks before Christmas then relaxing the rules over the holidays (the u turn coming too late) would cause it.

If the new variant caused a big increase in R then I doubt the lockdown would have brought R under 1 in the U.K., which it clearly has, surprisingly from just about after Christmas.

I started out healthily sceptical that the new variant was significantly more infectious, and now I’m extremely suspicious.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#82

Assuming all it takes is a strict 3 week shutdown, why can’t we have that? Or is the assumption wrong? Why weren’t we able to produce enough stock for 3 weeks of total halt?

Most supply chains today are measured in days not weeks

The average Grocery will run out of stock in 2-4 days (most being closer to 2 days)

The supply chain network is not setup for allow for a 3 week shutdown, nor can it be easily adapted to allow for it.

Most people, espically in urban centers, would not have enough supplies to last more than a couple of days as well.

Given that most people also can not budget for a $100 emergency they would be hard pressed to walk into a store and buy 3 weeks of food even if we could stock the stores to supply it (which we can not)

That is with out getting into the needs of Power, Water, Gas, Sewer, Public Safety, etc etc etc

you can not shut down a nation for 3 weeks, it is simply not possible

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#83

When I read the headline I thought this article might be about domestic terrorism in the US. When I clicked on the article I saw it it was in fact about COVID-19. This is how I test my assumptions.

I thought the exact same thing- "The Ireland Event" being the Catholic-Protestant conflict in the latter part of the 20th century

I was hoping it involved Guinness myself, or better yet Smithwick's. I'd be okay with multiple events like that.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#84

The article spends a long time complaining about the high "unreported infection" numbers used by CDC models, but doesn't actually address the biggest piece of evidence, which is seroprevalence surveys. For example, https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/01/study-us... claims 15% of US residents had COVID antibodies in mid-November, and if you want to claim a number that disagrees with that, you at least nee…

To be fair, the study you linked suggests 45m have had COVID, and the CDC model assumes 100m have had Covid, of whom 70m were symptomatic. So it actually appears to undermine CDC and support the article.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#85
> More than three times the number of known Covid cases?

Wouldn't detecting 1/3 and missing 2/3 be pretty expected, especially since a lot of the cases were early on? Count backwards from the estimated IFR of e.g. 0.2..1.0% and you get a number of million infections from the ~400k dead. You need to go pretty low in that IFR to get to 1/3 of the population though.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really quck edit: this is probably the most controversial comment that I have posted here. However, without a proper survey I am still not convinced that someone will associate "the Irish problem" with the violence there. Take the discussion below with a grain of salt and I hope that you, assuming that you are in the west coast or Atlantic coast, consider if someone (a random person) in the Midwest will know this. To…

I'm not especially "intune with Europe", and that conflict ended when I was a small child, but I knew the violence extended to civilians. Not sure why you assume people wouldn't know that.

I'm referring to the average American populace and not to the average HN poster. For example, I knew the details of the Tokyo Sarin Gas attacks and know that it was caused by a "new religion" cult but an average person outside Japan wouldn't really remember that as clearly as I am (unless you are somehow in Western Australia since a farm area there was refurbished to produce sarin). It is like 9/11 outside America: an average person knows it enough to remember whatever inconvenience they encountered that day but not the whole details.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#87

I feel like everyone continues to assume COVID-19 infection has an exponential curve but it's been shown by Nobel prize winner Michael Levitt that it actually follows a Gompertz function more accurately. Not only that but the WHO recently released a statement saying that PCR testing for COVID-19 is not suitable as it detects many forms of respiratory problems including the common cold. I feel like the author of this…

All apparent exponential growth is actually sigmoid growth. It's just that the difference doesn't matter until you are on the right-hand side of the curve.

The author of TFA clearly understands this because if 70M people have undaignosed covid, that shifts us to the right of the curve.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#88
> More than three times the number of known Covid cases? C’mon, man.

Actual cases being three times the number of known cases sounds reasonable to me. I protested when the Swedish CDC (Folkhälsomyndigheten) claimed it was 1000x, then 100x and finally 75x. But 3x sounds very reasonable to me, perhaps even a bit low.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#89

The author’s argument for why it’s implausible that a lot of people don’t get tested is literally “c’mon, man.” That not satisfying to me. I was sick for a few days over the summer. Was it a mild case of Covid? I don’t know, or care. Why should I get tested when that information will change literally nothing about my life?

1. It's not literally "c'mon man" it's "look at these graphs, then 'c'mon, man'."

2. They stipulate that lots of people didn't get tested, but believe it to be an order of magnitude less than the CDC estimates.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#90
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly related: 02 Jan 2021 is a part of 2020 week 53. I've noticed a few labeling issues caused by this calendar quirk.

Yep, that's due to someone calling strftime(buf, buflen, "%b %e, %G", &tm); when they should be calling strftime(buf, buflen, "%b %e, %Y", &tm);

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