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America is giving up on the pandemic?

theatlantic.com

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Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#861

Post by acqq »

cm2187 wrote: post #850
mrb wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CDC estimate (IFR 0.26%, S-IFR 0.4%) is heavily criticized because it ignores, thus predates, the 3 largest and most reliable serosurveys which all indicate an IFR of ~1% (S-IFR ~1.54%, assuming 35% of cases are asymptomatic): 1.0% in Brazil based on 25,025 samples https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1267670267624476672 1.14% in Spain based on 60,897 samples https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1265405628853305345 0.9…

The wider NY state has an IFR of 0.5%. The IFR should also be very sensitive to the demographics of the infection. Both the UK and NY State had a policy of sending recovering (but potentially contagious) older covid patients back to nursing homes and it would have exacerbated the mortality rate vs regions that did a better job at protecting the elderly. I am also starting to hear some noise that there might be cross…

> Both the UK and NY State had a policy of sending recovering (but potentially contagious) older covid patients back to nursing homes and it would have exacerbated the mortality rate vs regions that did a better job at protecting the elderly.

Isn't the death rate the percentage of population that dies when all are infected? Then nothing can be "exacerbated" by that alone? It then just reflects the death rate which results from the people being infected, no matter the speed?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#862

Post by wbl »

rayiner wrote: post #521
caconym_ wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've heard a lot from black people over the past week or two (and much longer, if you cared to listen) about what typical American policing is like for them. It's not good. It's perfectly valid to see those issues as important but still not worth the risk of spreading COVID-19, but by boiling this down to a contest of how many people each Bad Thing killed in X amount of time, you miss a lot of the nuances in both is…

I happen to agree: several hundred, or even several thousand more people dying as a result of COVID 19 is a worthwhile trade off for the progress and change these protests are enabling. If that’s your opinion, own it. But that’s a political opinion, not a scientific one. Scientists have no business trying to clothe that political value judgment in the garb of expert analysis. The problem the public health sector has…

There is no tradeoff in NZ or Australia. They eliminated the virus. We didn't so will have to continue shutting things down.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#863

Post by MickerNews »

wendyshu wrote: post #610
ken wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black people in America have a measurably lower life expectancy than white people [1]. For people born in 2015, it's down to about 5%, but as recently as 1970, it was over 10%. That's a lot of years of life being cut short. (There are well-known social causes for this which are direct consequences of racism, like access to quality health care, housing, education, credit, etc.) COVID-19 deaths aren't taking nearly tha…

This is a causal claim but you've only adduced correlations.

You can never prove causality.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#864

Post by treyfitty »

Anon1096 wrote: post #460
treyfitty wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the intent... but scale is drastically different. You’re comparing a yearly figure to a daily one that is nowhere near the daily max to begin with.

I believe that is the point of the comment. That one day of COVID is equivalent to a whole year of police killings.

Without context, it’s hard to ascertain if the point the parent is trying to make is either:

1) Police Killings are low. 2) Covid deaths have bottomed.

In the context of police killings, that 1,000 figure doesn’t indicate if it’s innocent killings- sure some may be, but how many are suicide by cop? How many are due to hostage situations? Or how many are due to being fired upon first?

In regards to Covid deaths, 1,000 daily deaths is low compared to the 3,000 we saw at the peak.

So, what point is the parent trying to make?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#865

Post by sfj »

lykr0n wrote: post #12

> Businesses are opening Yeah. We never were going to be able to keep everything closed for much longer. There is a very anti-handout ideology here, and the amount of political will for more bailouts was dwindling. > Protests... Sorry about this one. There are more important issues that need solving right now, and momentum and timing are very important. Right now we're in a perfect storm where a large amount of peopl…

Protests are also the only thing people can do together and not likely to get arrested/fined. I wonder how many people care about the issues vs those that are out there just to have something to do?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#866

Post by [deleted] »

kilo_bravo_3 wrote: post #579
shwoopdiwoop wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like severely limiting access to guns in the US would be great place to start then.

Shh. Don't say that. The crazies will come out and tell you about if we do that we'll end up a totalitarian wasteland like Sweden or New Zealand or something like that.

[deleted]

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#867

Post by arrrg »

ls612 wrote: post #316
Nasrudith wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't a double standard but a fundamental result of judgement of costs, values, and outcomes. Somebody who shoots an armed and dangerous spree shooter is lauded as heroic while someone who shoots a kid thought they was shoplifting a one dollar drink is regarded as a psychopath with no regard for human life. Circumstances and outcomes vary, a form of 'neutrality' that ignores that fundamentally isn't a useful met…

But that’s not a good analogy. The right to protest is important precisely to protect unpopular (but still widespread enough to have many supporters) demonstrations.

It’s important to differentiate.

If someone calls for protests to be illegal in one case and not the other then that’s a double standard and not such a great argument. (There are some subtle differences here, though: The situation a month ago was materially different – both in terms of the epidemiological picture as well as in terms of new scientific evidence about the relative dangers of being inside and outside – so it is possible for someone to argue for a difference on that basis, though I do acknowledge that’s a very shaky one.)

What’s happening here, though is that people judge the content of the protests: The content of the protests against the restrictions was irrational trash, so engaging in them is irresponsible stupidity. That’s a value judgement and it is perfectly valid to arrive at different conclusions with such a value judgement.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#868

Post by [deleted] »

shwoopdiwoop wrote: post #564
cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it's intellectually honest to compare countries with very, very low rates of firearms access to a country where firearms are available to anyone who wants one? You're comparing the USA, which has about 100k shootings per year, 36k deaths involving guns of which 33% (~12k) are homicides, to the UK which has 50-60 cases of homicide involving a gun per year. The fact is that the US police are far, far, far…

Sounds like severely limiting access to guns in the US would be great place to start then.

[deleted]

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#869

Post by arrrg »

neonate wrote: post #258
stonogo wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a double standard. That's just a standard. When one group of people is holding signs that say "stop murdering people" and the other group is holding signs that say "I need a haircut," and you're mad that "the commenters" are not treating them the same, the problem is not with the commenters.

You're making my point. You politically support one side more than the other, right down to belittling the side you unsupport as "I need a haircut". Maybe I agree with you politically, but when arguments from principle pivot from one week to the next based on which way the politics point, it's not really about principle.

One group of protestors makes awful points, so I judge them to be engaging in pointless and risky behavior.

The other side doesn’t, so I’m much more supportive of their protest, even though there might be associated risks.

As long as I don’t call for the first protest to be made illegal this is a perfectly consistent argument.

Sometimes you have to look at the content of a protest to judge if it’s valuable or not. And it’s perfectly ok to judge a protest as not being valuable.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#870

Post by cm2187 »

acqq wrote: post #861
cm2187 wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wider NY state has an IFR of 0.5%. The IFR should also be very sensitive to the demographics of the infection. Both the UK and NY State had a policy of sending recovering (but potentially contagious) older covid patients back to nursing homes and it would have exacerbated the mortality rate vs regions that did a better job at protecting the elderly. I am also starting to hear some noise that there might be cross…

> Both the UK and NY State had a policy of sending recovering (but potentially contagious) older covid patients back to nursing homes and it would have exacerbated the mortality rate vs regions that did a better job at protecting the elderly. Isn't the death rate the percentage of population that dies when all are infected? Then nothing can be "exacerbated" by that alone? It then just reflects the death rate which re…

The rate quoted by the parent, I believe, is the number of deaths divided by the number of people estimated to be infected, by prorating an antibody test sampling to the wider population. So that doesn’t assume everyone got exposed to the virus, and assumes the sampling is a representative sample (but in NY it was sampled in grocery stores, which tells you nothing about infection rate in nursing homes that made up 40% of the deaths).
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