Economic Shutdown Is Estimated To Save 600,000 American Lives (bloomberg.com) 447
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: President Donald Trump is considering easing health directives that prevent the spread of the coronavirus in an attempt to contain economic fallout. A new analysis suggests that those measures are helping to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Economists led by Northwestern University's Martin Eichenbaum wrote that keeping social-distancing measures in place before the number of new virus cases declines -- in other words, before a peak in the infection rate -- could limit infections and prevent as many as 600,000 additional U.S. deaths. While the economic damage is deeper when optimal health measures are taken, a recession is unavoidable even without them, as infected people would stay at home to recover and millions die, the report shows.
Under a worst-case scenario, with stores remaining open and no social isolation policies, as many as 215 million Americans could become infected and 2.2 million could die from the spread of the virus, the economists' data shows. That's based on an estimate from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that up to 70% of that country's population could become infected without a vaccine. It also matches the worst-case global estimate from Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch.
Under a worst-case scenario, with stores remaining open and no social isolation policies, as many as 215 million Americans could become infected and 2.2 million could die from the spread of the virus, the economists' data shows. That's based on an estimate from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that up to 70% of that country's population could become infected without a vaccine. It also matches the worst-case global estimate from Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch.
which one of those assholes is paying my rent? (Score:2, Interesting)
when the courts shutdown the landlord can't kick y (Score:3, Interesting)
when the courts shutdown the landlord can't kick you out
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when the courts shutdown the landlord can't kick you out
But when the police shut down you can't do anything about it if you go out and when you come back he's thrown all your stuff into the street and changed the lock.
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Re:which one of those assholes is paying my rent? (Score:4, Interesting)
At some point we *are* going to make some kind of "lives vs. the economy" decision. Even in normal times we don't prioritize lives saved absolutely. We allow vehicles to emit a certain amount of pollution even though we know that statistically there'll be a certain number of excess deaths among vulnerable people.
The thing is, I don't think there is any unambiguously right way to make that tradeoff. The collapse of society would probably kill more people than the virus, so that's at least one hard constraint, but when it comes to weight lives vs. dollars, we do it all the time but don't like to think about it.
Is taking a 1% hit on everyone's lifetime income acceptable to save a half million of our countrymen? Sure. We probably spend a lot more than that already on a dollars per lives basis already. But what about to save a single life? Where does the dollars/lives-saved proposition transition from reasonable to unreasonable?
Cue the Russian trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
The pattern is becoming clear.
If you want to maximise the damage to the US with covid-19 epidemic, it would be useful to confuse the public, make them reluctant to follow government advisory, and to downplay the seriousness. Then the virus would spread wider, increasing the damage done, and make it last longer.
Not surprisingly, in the last few days, even as the US infection count shot up like a rocket and on-track to be #1 in a few more days, more and more AC are yelling how these predictions are false, how it is just like the flu, etc.
Cue the trolls who will come out in force claiming these estimates are bunk and there is nothing to worry about.
Re:Cue the Russian trolls (Score:5, Funny)
The pattern is becoming clear.
If you want to maximise the damage to the US with covid-19 epidemic, it would be useful to confuse the public, make them reluctant to follow government advisory, and to downplay the seriousness. Then the virus would spread wider, increasing the damage done, and make it last longer.
Not surprisingly, in the last few days, even as the US infection count shot up like a rocket and on-track to be #1 in a few more days, more and more AC are yelling how these predictions are false, how it is just like the flu, etc.
Cue the trolls who will come out in force claiming these estimates are bunk and there is nothing to worry about.
Deserves the insightful mod. Apparently the trolls are running low on mod points? Going to go ahead and quote you [khchung] as a precaution against their censorship...
Re:Cue the Russian trolls (Score:5, Informative)
January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”
February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
February 25: “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
February 25: “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
February 26: “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
February 26: “We're going very substantially down, not up.”
February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
February 28: “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
March 5: “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
March 5: “The United States has, as of now, only 129 cases and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 6: “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
March 6: “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”
March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”
March 9: “This blindsided the world.”
March 13: [Declared state of emergency]
March 17: “This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
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You forgot the one where he blocked flights from China and people called him racist.
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You forgot the one where he blocked flights from China and people called him racist.
Except people didn't call him a racist. People claimed other people did and have yet to actually provide a citation for it. Maybe you can do better than all the previous people on Slashdot I've asked for actual evidence.
Re:Cue the Russian trolls (Score:4, Informative)
You forgot the one where he blocked flights from China and people called him racist.
Except people didn't call him a racist.
I know it's fun to gaslight, but, you know, Google exists, right?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0... [nytimes.com]
Doesn't actually call it racism directly, but this "article" has aged like a ripe banana:
https://www.politico.com/news/... [politico.com]
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday that widespread travel bans and restrictions weren’t needed to stop the outbreak and could "have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit."
https://www.theguardian.com/co... [theguardian.com]
"Or did it spring from a crudely racist worldview that divides the globe into a clean, acceptable Anglosphere set against a tainted, diseased “abroad”?"
https://thehill.com/homenews/h... [thehill.com]
“The Trump Administration’s expansion of its outrageous, un-American travel ban threatens our security, our values and the rule of law. The sweeping rule, barring more than 350 million individuals from predominantly African nations from traveling to the United States, is discrimination disguised as policy,” Pelosi said in a statement.
https://lulac.org/news/pr/Trum... [lulac.org]
"Trump Continues To Fulfill Racist Agenda With Addition Of New Countries To Travel Ban"
Should I stop now?
Re:Cue the Russian trolls (Score:4, Informative)
Do you know the difference between a "widespread travel ban" and a targeted one?
And some of your links are regarding Muslim-related bans which have nothing to do with this statement.
Re:Cue the Russian trolls (Score:4, Interesting)
I know it's fun to snarkily reply and lie, but, you know, reading your citations exists, right?
Of all your links, only one references any coronavirus related travel at all (the politico article) and that refers to EU restrictions. None refer back to the original point you are responding to about the restrictions on flights from China being considered racist. Was that because you weren't willing to read your own sources, were you confused, or did you think you could put one over on everyone?
Most refer to Trump extending his anti-travel restrictions in his Muslim ban, and most of those only prohibit permanent residency, not temporary visits. That is, even if it was Coronavirus related it wouldn't stop people from visiting the US, bringing it, and going home.
The politico article asks why the restrictions weren't broad enough to include the UK and Ireland. It posits several reasons being thrown around as rumors, including that Trump has extensive business investments in the UK and Ireland. But it also includes the option that Trump believes the virus is somehow "foreign" and therefore feels safer letting people in from English-speaking countries. Was that the reason? I honestly don't know. But the question was "why weren't the UK and Ireland included." Again, very different from what you are claiming "direct flights from China was called racist."
The Politico article also points out the disaster of his speech. Accidentally saying that all cargo was going to be cut off instead of saying the exact opposite which was written in thespeech. Or that US citizens were going to be unable to reenter instead of the exact opposite, which was also written in his speech. The main point was it was a badly delivered speech at a time when it needed to be a good speech.
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Re:Cue the Russian trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
You might want to add that 1918-20, the world just went through a war the world has never seen before, full of deprivation, that left vulnerable and susceptible people in its wake. People who were shattered, broken and beaten, no matter whether they won or lost that war, malnourished and devoid of resistences, where a breeze would have been sufficient to fell them.
Today we have way more favorable conditions, yet we see this epidemic flood over the countries.
Re:Cue the Russian trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
So, the 20-year-old has an untimely bout of appendicitis. Normally, a clean-cut surgical procedure (pun intended). Unfortunately, the hospital's supply of surgical masks, gowns, rooms, and other resources have been depleted by a tidal wave of corona virus victims. Surgery performed in undesirable conditions and infection sets in. Oh, and the 20-year-old caught corona virus while in the ER. The 20-year-old is battling two infections- bacterial and viral.
People, the president included, equivocate that many die from the normal flu and car accidents. Yes, this is true. Corona virus grinds the available healthcare for those other ailments such that even more people will also die from normal flu and car crashes.
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You know a bunch of elderly Americans ?
Re:Cue the Russian trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cue the Russian trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't look at the number of infected, look at the number of dead people. You can't not notice them, and it's usually quite easy to determine whether they died of Covid. Then go and compare that with other countries (of a similar medical standard, of course) death:infected rates that had/have better testing records. You will notice that the US would still have about 2-4 times the number of infected compared to the official numbers.
The infection rates are also up. You can tell by the number of people dying, as cynical as this may be, it's the best indicator you have for the actual figures.
they are making things worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:they are making things worse (Score:5, Informative)
Vis-a-vis: I spoke to a Winco employee when I was in there 2 weeks ago. He told me that even then they were having to restock 2000 cases more every night than they'd do during the Thanksgiving holiday. It's gotten worse since 2 weeks ago, too, if you haven't noticed.
So again: They're limiting hours because otherwise they'd never be able to keep up with the demand, and never have time to sanitize the store so the store itself doesn't become a vector for the virus.
Re:they are making things worse (Score:4, Interesting)
During the war the UK had to introduce ration books because of this. If people keep panic buying that is where we are all headed.
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Essential items can be home delivered instead by administrative volunteers to mitigate crowding and panic.
Have you heard about curbside pickup? Many grocery stores offer it, as well as delivery.
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Why does that work here and not in the US?
I'm not sure where 'here' is for you, but in the UK it's only mostly working, to the extent that the Government's had to impose more stringent rules due to the 10-20% of the population that were indeed acting like idiots.
In the US there's a cultural curiosity at play that probably complicates things. The US is both extremely individualist, with people prioritising personal outcomes, and also deeply community focussed, with people selflessly supporting their community.
The complications arise because their co
Does anyone think Trump understands maths? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, that's just Trump as a stand in for most Americans not understanding exponential growth, but especially the ones who voted for Trump. The country is clearly in the bad part of the exponential growth curve. So far no country has gone all the way to the top of the S-curve, but the US is apparently going to be first. While the politicians are squabbling about the money, it appears that the only thing that's going to stop this thing is when the coronavirus runs out of fresh Americans to infect...
Did y
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Actually, that's just Trump as a stand in for most Americans not understanding exponential growth, but especially the ones who voted for Trump. The country is clearly in the bad part of the exponential growth curve. So far no country has gone all the way to the top of the S-curve, but the US is apparently going to be first. While the politicians are squabbling about the money, it appears that the only thing that's going to stop this thing is when the coronavirus runs out of fresh Americans to infect...
Did you know that the penalty for not understanding exponents could be so high? I think I do, but I also think I can't live in a cave long enough for it to blow over... I just have to hope that I don't get too sick, eh?
Let's be optimistic and hope the mortality is only in the 1% range, even after the hospitals are completely overwhelmed. That's only 3 million dead Americans, more or less. But probably more, when the gun-play starts.
Lots of censorious trolls out today, eh? Not surprised. Or maybe it is surprising that Slashdot seems to be attracting so much of their attention? Even as a soft target.
Re:Apparently Trump Haters far worse at math (Score:5, Informative)
For the sake of those who would like to see the rates that makes sense adjusted for population.
Here's a graph of the rate of infection of 100 days, where the important bit is the angle of the line (basically showing how many days it takes to double).
https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
Here's a graph showing the number of tests done per million people https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
People reading this are free to interpret those graphs as they'd like, but for a true insight into big-brain understanding, I enjoy this graph
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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Not a single Trump Hater I've seen yet seems to understand you cannot compare infection rates directly without adjusting for population,
Infection rates, by definition, adjust for population size. Infection rates are quoted as percentages, as in number per hundred.
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Not a single Trump Hater I've seen yet seems to understand you cannot compare infection rates directly without adjusting for population
Huh?
I'm trolling with this, but you really did ask for it- maybe because Trump Haters understand percentages?
Sticking with 215 million report? (Score:2)
Under a worst-case scenario, with stores remaining open and no social isolation policies, as many as 215 million Americans could become infected and 2.2 million could die from the spread of the virus, the economists' data shows. That's based on an estimate from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that up to 70% of that country's population could become infected without a vaccine. It also matches the worst-case global estimate from Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch.
And again, the 215 million number is useless, because WE ARE closing stores, practicing social isolation policies. IF we were not doing anything, the 215 million number might be relevant. It is oddly fascinating that the US and Germany - two wildly different cultures with very different lifestyles and living situations/customs have the IDENTICAL 70% infection rate.
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It is oddly fascinating that the US and Germany - two wildly different cultures with very different lifestyles and living situations/customs have the IDENTICAL 70% infection rate.
I haven't spent a whole lot of time in Germany, but it seems to me that the US and Germany are pretty similar culturally....I mean, Germans drink beer and Americans drink piss-beer.....and Germans wear these weird pantaloons and Americans wear cowboy hats, but other than that.
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Seriously, even the half-truth jokes aside, a large part of America is Germanic by background. It is not that different, unless you're comparing, say, Miami.
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What percentage of Germans live in apartments vs. percentage of Americans in apartments? What percentage live on farms? Ride public transit? Germany has single-payer healthcare, America does not, etc.
Thinking about the vectors that this virus exploits to be transmitted between humans, America and Germany have some significant differences.
And if it takes WWIII to get out of the next (Score:2)
We can't just shut down the economy and leave it at that. That means the moderates and right wing will have to either accept the fact that every retail and restaurant worker is getting a 3-6 month paid vacation. But good luck getting folks to go for that. Not after decades of Neo-liberalism. It just doesn't sit with people that they're getting up and going to work everyday at a job they hate while somebody else gets to stay home and play XBox.
I s
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But like I said, I don't know how you're gonna get 80% of Americans to agree to let 20% of Americans sit on their butts for 3-6 months.
What you describe is nothing more than 20% unemployment - normal unemployment provides 26 weeks of payments, just as you describe.
I think the 80% is OK with unemployment benefits - they might object to the government assuming their student debt AND monthly bonus payments as some politicians are proposing.
Normal unemployment isn't enough (Score:2)
The assumption with normal unemployment is that you've got a house with 2-3 breadwinners of which 1 is unemployed at any given time. This will likely be everybody in the household out of work.
Also baring emergency action (that hasn't happened) you're limited to 6 months of unemployment in your lifetime. A sizable percentage have blown through that. The economy has sucked since the
Trump is Using the Zapp Brannigan Playbook (Score:5, Funny)
Actually that would be the worst thing to happen (Score:2)
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A study in Iceland showed that 50% of people with no symptoms tested positive for SARS Covid. That indicates that a large percentage of the population is immune to the virus.
I am sorry to confuse everyone with facts: https://www.government.is/news... [government.is]
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I'm not sure how the test "could have a high false positive rate" when deCODE is not simply testing for the disease, but outright tracking specific strains by their mutations.
A completely unrelated study in Vò, Italy, also found A) that the disease was far more common in the population than "confirmed case" would imply, B) 50-75% were asymptomatic, and C) most of the rest had only mild flu/cold symptoms.
FYI, in case anyone is curious: South Korea is still open (and got bad before Italy did). Taiwan is
Economies need to move to survive (Score:3)
One cannot really keep an economy shut down for long, certainly not 18 months like the White House was throwing out there. You wouldn't have an economy (or country) to return to - literally there would be no production left, no economic worth left - no one but a very sliver of society would have the purchasing power to buy anything (and even fewer still would have survived up to this point). Sure, you might wait out COVID19, but the starvation, rampant crime, disorder and sociopolitical chaos would likely consume the nation - killing tens of thousands of people. Without jobs, people have no purchasing power, without purchasing power, they can't acquire necessities without stealing it from others, those who won't or can't out-muscle the haves will die. Handing money to the businesses doesn't really solve the problem - they will just store it and wait. Without consumers, most companies won't survive - they'll die out. All that production going idle will mean supplies will dry up. It would make Detroit look like a summer vacation on Fantasy Island comparatively. Think Somalia or the world of Mad Max - except without all the hope.
About in line with assigned value of human life (Score:3)
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It is being reported that Italian doctors are being told not to put any patients over 60 yrs old on a ventilator - they have apparently determined the older patients are not worth that level of care, they need to focus scarce resources on younger patients.
Pretty poor article (Score:2, Insightful)
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As we can see here in this example, people have no idea how the disease spreads and would do so.
Read some of this before getting too cocky ... (Score:2)
... about whatever random numbers you feel like pulling out of your ass today:
https://cmmid.github.io/topics... [github.io]
bull fucking shit (Score:2, Insightful)
The testing in the United State is so far behind the "spread" that the data it generates - and the conclusions reached by use of this data - is pure bullshit. Just like sampling a signal to slow [wikipedia.org], the COVID-19 testing in the US is only measuring aliasing - bullshit data.
To be meaningful at this point, testing should include the presence of anitbodies, here [unitedbiomedical.com] and here [prosci-inc.com], and probably many others available as well. Only then would we really know how far and wide this has already spread, how many have already re
Billionnaires don't care (Score:3, Insightful)
They want those people slaving for them, no matter how many die.
These damage estimates are highly optimistic (Score:3)
"Under a worst-case scenario, with stores remaining open and no social isolation policies, as many as 215 million Americans could become infected and 2.2 million could die from the spread of the virus, the economists' data shows."
I don't understand why these estimates are so low. In China, they had 70,420 recoveries and 3,245 deaths with the rest of the confirmed cases still in progress. The number of new cases each day there is nearly zero. They've also instituted mass testing so the number of actual cases shouldn't be vastly greater than the number of confirmed cases.
3245 / (3245 + 70420) = 4.4% mortality rate
Even if the confirmed cases are an underestimate of the actual cases by a factor of 2, then we are still looking at a basic mortality rate north of 2%.
But if 215M Americans catch this, then the mortality rate is going to be far worse than that because with something like a 14% hospitalization rate, you are looking at more than 30M Americans requiring hospitalization and/or intensive care beyond normal. The average Covid-19 case stays in the hospital for WEEKS before they either recover or die. The number of open hospital beds in the USA is a few hundred thousand. The number of open ICU beds is a few tens of thousands.
Simply put, our hospital system will implode. Virtually no one will be able to access a hospital bed, much less intensive care. So, either your body will clear the infection on its own without medical help, or you will die. In this situation, the mortality rate could easily be north of 5%.
215M * 0.05 = 10.75M dead
If we don't do what China did in Hubei followed up with a testing regime similar to S. Korea's, then we are headed for that kind of disaster.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/20... [cnn.com]
7 million = 6 Gorillion plus one ???? (Score:2)
Ay Tone. [bing.com]
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Re:Economic collapse to claim 7 million (Score:4, Insightful)
There isn't any mythical "they" that put Trump into power, it was a weak Democrat candidate, a sore loser in Bernie, the Electorcal Collage, and a bit of shove by Trump's master in Russia.
And after going through several bankruptcies, Trump doesn't see what the big deal would be if the U.S. were to default on its debt. He simply is too stupid and inept to understand the ramifications. He'll make the Covid-19 recession worse. Trump destroys everything he touches.
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The farms work. Farms get ready for next year. The trucks to the farms drive out. The food is ready for sale. Shops sell the food.
Workers keep the water, power, gas, ISP on.
The police protects the citizens. The mil protects a nation.
Really really smart people work towards better testing, medical care and a long term vaccine.
ie citizens go to work every shift and most of that wi
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Well of course Italy won't even get close to that number. Italy is on a lockdown enforced by the military [fox4kc.com].
"That kind of number" presumes that we didn't shut down at all. Of course, you can get "even close to that kind of number" by undoing control measures too soon [cnn.com]. So sorry, "for a while" is going to remain at least two to three weeks, not barely a week as
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...the majority of people are immune to some degree...
That's nothing but wishful thinking.
Re:Bullshit Estimate (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you understand what immunity means? also do you understand the concept of evolution and cross species transmission?
There is zero evidence that anyone is immune to it, nor is there any precedence that there is anyone that is immune to it (except those that have already recovered from it).
Also it has been less than a week since the majority of the country took a social distancing policy.. so lets be honest if we as a nation or even world can't pause for a few weeks without everything failing apart, then we where living in a house of cards to begin with.
Re:Bullshit Estimate (Score:4, Informative)
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If they were immune they wouldn't test positive. (Score:3)
Your comment is based on a false premise. The tested positive, therefore they were infected, therefore they were not immune.
Re:Bullshit Estimate (Score:4, Informative)
Lots of people get it and dont get sick. What else does 'immunity' mean?
I think you have confused immune with asymptomatic which is seemingly what you're describing.
Re:Bullshit Estimate (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably not.
Asymptomatic means that there are no symptoms of the infection, not that infection did not occur. It is entirely possible for one to "get infected" and mount an effective immune response without displaying "symptoms". "Symptoms" are usually "signs of immune response" and not direct effects of the pathogen itself.
So to use a sea-faring analogy. Sometimes the "pirates" (virus) wants to come and "board" (infect) your ship. You ship has sentries posted to keep watch and prevent the pirates from getting aboard. However, sometimes they manage to slip past the sentries and board your ship and they start to plunder the goods in your hold. You don't really notice this for a while, but eventually you do, and you deploy armed marines to try and kill all the pirates (mount an immune response). However some of the pirates decided to kill some of your crew and start wearing their clothes so you could not tell for sure who was a pirate and who was your crew. Slowly your marines get better at telling the difference and kill the pirates wearing your clothes or that have subverted your crew with money and jewels.
This battle results in dead bodies laying about everywhere and the gunnels overflowing with blood so you start throwing the dead overboard -- this is what sniffling and sneezing and runny nose is -- your body getting rid of the dead soldiers and pirates. Hopefully you can manage to kill off all the invading pirates before you are overrun, and hopefully you only kill pirates wearing your crews clothes and that have been subverted by the pirates and not loyal crew members. However, sometimes the only thing that works is to "kill them all and let God sort it out". Unfortunately, when this is the alternative you often kill things you shouldn't (like the cook, the radio operator, and the helmsman).
In any case, eventually you either kill off all the pirates and win (clear the infection) or the pirates overrun your ship and you lose (die). Sometimes the best you can manage is to trap the few remaining pirates in the fo'c'sle where they can do no harm.
If you did win, then you have to "clean up all the dead bodies". This is called coughing and sneezing and snot and whatnot, all being "thrown overboard" to clean up the mess.
In any case, if you manage to win you then photocopy a shitload of pictures of the pirates and their vessels and give them to your sentries so that they will know better what they look like next time they approach, and you lay in a "stash" of the type of cutlass and mortar shells that were particularly useful to defend against the pirates, and build machines that can be "thrown in to use in short order" to churn out those weapons in case that particular type of pirate returns (immunity) -- so that you can kill them in quick short order before they cause a mess of dead bodies on the deck and before they can board your ship.
"Natural Immunity" is different entirely. Natural Immunity is when you have a sentry that thinks those persons in the row boat approaching are up to no good and decided to kill the them pre-emptively, even though they do not exactly match something that they have seen before because each of the sentries, in addition to pictures of the actual boarders that they have seen before, has pictures of what an invader *might* look like that they were given at birth (all the sentries have the same book of pictures, but each ship in the fleet has different books).
Sometimes the pictures in the book are actually of things which would be better off not being killed. For example, some ships in the fleet have pictures of the oilman that is in charge of oiling the rudder. When the sentry signals to kill all the joint-oilers we call this "arthritis". Sometimes the book contains pictures of various other things and we call that "lupus" or any of a number of other names.
Re:Bullshit Estimate (Score:5, Insightful)
the majority of people are immune to some degree
Which is exactly why people no longer get the cold. Good grief, it's like people fail to understand what weak convenience of immunity means. Roto and Corona types all give a weak immune response, typically because of some binding with CD8+ T cell receptors and blocking messaging between them and CD4 T carriers. The exact trick employed differs. Guess what, this is no different.
One obvious action is to only isolate the old and the infirm
Not even remotely possible. The whole self isolation isn't "oh yeah 100% of the population will isolate and thus we'll be done with it!". It comes with the built in assumption that at least half of the people are going to selfish asshats.
and tell them to tough it out
Which like the people who are told to self isolate but don't, people won't do that either. The second they become sick they'll tizzy themselves into the hospital sucking down resources faster than an Exxon well on an oil reserve. The only difference here is that self isolation hurts the economy which we can sort of build back. The just get out there and tough it out hurts the medical healthcare system that will also hurt the economy along with lowering this countries ability to provide medical care for things not related to COVID-19. So one option tanks the economy. The other option tanks the economy, the healthcare system, and society's ability to provide modern medicine.
Excuse me if I kindly tell you to go shove your "tough it out" attitude up your ass. Perhaps doing so will provide some company for your head that seems to be stuck there too.
Re:Bullshit Estimate (Score:4, Interesting)
6k already dead in Italy, rising by about 600 a day. Not at all hard to see that 15k people will die in Italy by the time (if) they get a handle on it. Adjusted for population that's 80k in the USA. And that's with a country in complete lock down, so it's not the worst case scenario, it's just the worst demonstrated scenario so far. Without that lock down the spread would be an order of magnitude greater. The effect of reducing your own personal exposure has a huge knock-on effect even after only a few degrees of separation, so by not having those measures in the place the number infected would be easily 5 - 10 times larger. So Italy not sticking to those severe lock down conditions could very easily see 50-100k dead and it would barely take a few months to get there. As it stands they actually are getting some downward pressure on that spread rate but that's only because how severe the restrictions are. America isn't even there yet and there is talk of backing off.
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61,099 in the US for the 2017-18 period https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/... [cdc.gov]
So it's not proportional to population
Re:Bullshit Post (Score:3)
According to this article from a local news site [thelocal.it] 2017 was the worst flu season in 14 years leading to ... 30 deaths!
I don't know where you get the idea that COVID-19 is anything like a common flu, while clearly it is not!
Re:Bullshit Estimate (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue is not the just number of people who die from the covid-19, either directly or due to complications. But without action there will be too many cases for hospitals to deal with. That means lack of beds for people with other problems who need hospitalization, long delays before being able to see a doctor, shortages and delays getting medicines, and so forth. Even if no one dies from covid-19, it could cause a huge number of deaths from other causes.
The point of these severe restrictions on movement and socializing, whether voluntary or due to government decree, is not to stop the spread of the disease but to slow the spread so that it becomes manageable.
With luck, what we end up with is something like Y2K where everyone not really understanding the issue laughs because nothing happens, or rages at the governments because nothing happened, and only a fraction of people understand that a bullet was dodged.
Re:Bullshit Estimate (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you think the "worst is happening" in Italy? Their number of cases was growing exponentially until they enacted very strong shutdowns, and now the numbers of new cases are declining slowly. With great effort they are just managing to beat this back.
The only places that have stopped the exponential (China, S. Korea, now Italy) have done so by implementing very strong policies of various sorts. The places without strong policies still see rapid growth.
All I can say is please remember your post 2 months from now.
I hope you are right, I really do, because if I'm right, we are going to see death on a truly horrifying scale
Re:Bullshit Estimate (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignorant contrarian as always, our Kendall.
The estimate is not "bullshit", unlike your misguided opinion.
Of course, it describes the worst case situation - that is, an uncontrolled spread which swamps the healthcare system completely.
Let's see what we can do with a simple model. ATM, the US data suggest exponential growth in SARS2 cases with growth coefficient of ~0.3 if you put the time variable in days.
Since you mention Italy, I'll point out that if you employ the same logistic model, with all other things equal, the fit gives a growth rate of 0.17, which is roughly half that of the US.
Now, one has to take these with a grain of salt, as testing is not good enough in both countries, but we have to work with something. So, what do these give us? They give us rates which, if left unchanged, will cause half of the population to be infected in just few weeks.
We know that roughly 5% get the serious form, and we know that for them the time from contagion to getting intubed is roughly two weeks.
Putting all these together means that the health system will be swamped with many millions, and that there will be a very uneven distribution with a sharp peak.
Some smart people have even put up a graphical tool that estimates how hospitals across the US will be swamped under different scenarios, here https://covidactnow.org/ [covidactnow.org]
A lot of the people in the yellow and red parts of those graphs will die because they will be really sick and need prompt help.
Economic hardship is also a huge risk, but it can be mitigated more easily than the lack of hospital beds, at the least because you don't need expert economists watching over every single case if proper measures are undertaken; whereas you definitely need doctors caring for every single patient to give them a chance for survival.
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I'm not saying we should not have shut down for a while, I think that was a good idea for some limited period of time to be sure of how things will go, and give time for good treatments to be found. I am just saying the 600k figure is absolute garbage
I agree absolute garbage.
1% death rate is wishful thinking and totally unrealistic given medical system would completely collapse and those with conditions requiring hospital admission are more likely than not to die waiting for care that will never arrive.
and the real number saves, is more like 10-30k.
This idiotic 10-30k figure won't even cover people who die waiting for care for causes having nothing to do with the virus.
Re:My confidence is based on facts and statistics (Score:5, Informative)
You do have a good point about the importance of a rudimentary understanding of statistics in order to make sense of scary headlines like this.
However, I think the key phrase that people are overlooking is "as many as." Interestingly, that phrase is present in the body of the article but the headline simply says "Economic Shutdown is Estimated to Save 600,000 American Lives." While the journalist may not be to blame for the headline—that would be the editor—it represents a persistent problem seen here on slashdot because journalists who have not taken statistics do a poor job of translating statistical information they're tasked with communicating.
Looking at the original article:
This optimal containment policy saves about 600,000 lives in the U.S.
Note that this is assuming that the strategy is optimal—which it is not since things vary so much state to state—and that it is projected to save 600,000 lives compared to if no containment strategy was implemented at all. So, I disagree with your original post that states that it's a "bullshit estimate." It's just not a very helpful figure when taken out of context, as the summary and Bloomberg article used it.
Looking at the actual conclusion of the article is illuminating:
The central message of our analysis should be robust to allowing for those complications: there is an inevitable trade-offs between the severity of the short-run recession caused by the epidemic and the health consequences of that epidemic
So the reporter took a statement that wasn't the central message of the paper and required context to make sense, and then framed it out of context as the central message of the article. When it comes to these types of journalism pieces where a scientific paper is the original source, it's always best to be skeptical of the journalist rather than the scientist. In these cases, shoot the messenger because the information gets distorted like in a game of telephone.
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Because you can so accurately assess mortality rate by looking at number of cases and number of deaths, taking into account the time it takes for a person to die from the disease and the weighted averages that result from an exponentially growing population. Because you have the age distribution of the population in your head, and the mortality rate of each, and can therefore calculate mortality rate so much better than the top epidemiologists in the world. Because not only that, but you already assessed th
Re:My confidence is based on facts and statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
I am in fact vastly confident that my numbers are more accurate than the person throwing around a 600k figure it, regardless of what scraps of paper he may have,
You might be right, but you haven't explained your number anywhere, how you derived it. If we just believed you, then we would be unscientific.
Re:My confidence is based on facts and statistics (Score:5, Informative)
Here, read what a real expert has to say:
https://twitter.com/T_Inglesby... [twitter.com]
Basically, he says you are wrong. Very, very wrong.
Re:My confidence is based on facts and statistics (Score:5, Informative)
Remember, it's one thing to know very minute details about something, and quite something else to apply those numbers to large-scale real world situations. You know this to be true in technology, why do you assume it is suddenly NOT true when it comes to epidemiology?
At least 1 in 10 infections require hospitalization. The average stay for those admitted is 11 days.
In the US there are about 930000 total hospital beds 65% of which are occupied on average. These are radically simplified understatements that completely ignore distributions of beds relative to need and availability of intensive care resources. It also ignores provision of new capacity built out to handle higher number of concurrent patients.
If 60% of the U.S. population got COVID-19 magically at a rate equal to current hospital capacity it would take two years to clear everyone.
What we are seeing all over the world is a few thousand confirmed cases and hospital systems get maxed. In a week and a half New York will be royally fucked all with only a miniscule percentage of residents having it.
We have plenty of supposed scientific articles that are not even adjusting numbers for population... I may not have taken much epidemiology in college but what I DID take that not many people seem to have an understanding of, is statistics.
All I ever learned was damned lies.
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Read the link; what the fuck are you talking about?
Maybe quote something from the link that you think supports your argument, because damned if I can see it.
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Well the article says their testing has resulted in 48 positive results. So If the total population of Iceland is around 96 people...
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The tests are pro-viral RNA Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction tests (RT-PCR). This tests for the presence of pro-viral RNA fragments. In the absence of observed an immune response (ie, exibiting "flu like symptoms"), RT-PCR results are of no significance whatsoever. pro-viral RNA may be present without infection. Furthermore, infection may be present without displaying observable immune response (ie, "flu like symptoms").
90% of the population will test positive for the presence of Streptoc
Re:My confidence is based on facts and statistics (Score:5, Informative)
RT-PCR results are of no significance whatsoever. pro-viral RNA may be present without infection.
What the hell is "pro-viral RNA"?!? There's proviral DNA which is a part of a lifecycle of retroviruses - it's the viral DNA that is inserted into the host's genome and later transcribed into the viral DNA/RNA. SARS-COV-2 is not a retrovirus, there's no DNA anywhere in its lifecycle.
And no, you can't have viral RNA without being infected by the virus.
90% of the population will test positive for the presence of Streptococcus organisms and DNA fragments on a throat swab, however, only those happening to display symptoms of Streptococcus infection are actually infected.
That's because 90% of people are carriers of Strep and a host of other bacteria, with immune system keeping them in check. SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus, so this situation doesn't apply.
Re:And ruin 316 million (Score:5, Insightful)
"I support saving lives so long as there's no downside" means you don't actually support saving lives. You just lack the balls to be honest.
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You just lack the balls to be honest.
You appear to lack the self awareness that you just lied about what he said.
Brutal reality: Lives have value. When the cost of saving those lives exceeds the value, difficult decisions must be made.
Almost all governments veer heavily towards saving lives, but pretending that economic impacts aren't relevant is naive at best.
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...and ruin 316 million lives due to economic collapse and putting the country into a depression. I am all for saving lives but that needs to be done without the public panic, job losses and economic collapse. It took the US 10 years to get over the 2008 depression we don't want to go through it again!!!
~331 million US 2020 population minus ~15 million US millionaires equals 316 million.
And when this is all over, they'll have to build a new memorial on the mall in Washington DC to honor the all those brave citizens who made the ultimate sacrifice so that you could enjoy a lack of a serious economic downturn.
(It'll have to be a really big memorial, because it could be dedicated to more people than the dead from all of our wars combined.)
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The recovery from the 2008 downturn took 10 years because Obama burdened business with crippling regulations, typified by his proudly proclaimed war on the coal industry.
Do you SERIOUSLY believe this crap? Really?
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California got it right... or close to it. (Score:3)
Exactly. I'd say California started a week too late. The SF Bay could have shut down earlier but probably got it as close to right as could be expected.
I started urging customers online on 3/7. The following week, physical attendance dropped by about half. On 3/12, I forced the issue. 3/13 was the last day my kids went to school, me allowing them to for mental health/social reasons. That weekend, they shut the schools. On 3/16, the county announced the shutdown. On 3/19, Newsom shuttered the state.
No. It will be the disaster we should have stopped (Score:5, Insightful)
The story will be the hysteria that came too late, and was not strong enough. How authorities knew about it with a month to act, and did nothing. Despite having plenty of evidence of how long incubations and exponential growth work. How the U.S. Muffed the testing systems, so, three months after the virus emerged, they still didn't have adequate testing to know how many are infected.
The hysteria will be remembered as the only thing we got right.
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I also wonder if the history books will describe the subsequent *growth* of globalisation? We the people of the world will no longer accept any country trying to hide a contagion, we the people of the world will not accept any country attempting to blame another for a contagion and we the people will not accept any country ignoring science/the majority and go it their own way in response to a contagion. We the people demand global action for global problems.
Or maybe we'll just go back to where we are, with
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What kind of straw man is that? Adequate testing isn't the same thing as testing literally everyone thee times within a month.
It's definitely possible and necessary to do better than what happened. South Korea tested almost 300k people vs 60k as of last week, and managed to significantly slow the virus down already.
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So, you're one of the people who believe that manufacturing and distributing one billion test kits (the absolute minimum required to evaluate everyone in the US) in a month would have been trivial, if only the authorities had been smarter?
Isn't America always telling everyone it's the 2nd biggest manufacturing nation in the world. And the richest. With the best medical system. Best technology. Best doctors.
How come all the other countries managed orders of magnitude better?
Socialized medicine or just general competence?
Re:A generation from now... (Score:4, Interesting)
Mass hysteria? Dude, in my country there's currently the height of the infection cycle, with sick numbers doubling and tripling daily. Yet stores are open, delivery services work, people work from home where possible and go to work where it ain't. We take care of our old people and make sure that they're safe at home, there's a relevant social network at work to keep them fed and sheltered, and most of all out of harm's way. We don't have perfect testing, but apparently sufficient since the death numbers (i.e. the ones you can't hide by not testing) are about on par with what we see from countries that test everyone (unlike, say, the US where death numbers suggest that the number of sick people is somewhere between 2 and 4 times higher than the official one, which pretty much ensures that those 600k are anything but off the table).
People are generally doing what they're told and they heed the recommendations of official sources. This works because people still have faith in their government and science, despite constant bitching and moaning (basically, it's a very common trait here to bitch and moan about anything and everything. Not that anyone would want to chance anything, mind you).
If you have a population that has neither faith in government nor science, then yes, you do have a huge problem at your hands.
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The biggest problem is that half-assing it is the worst of both worlds. There's obviously diseases that are lethal enough a total shutdown and eradication is justified like ebola. There's obviously diseases that are harmless enough we just let it run like the common flu. The corona virus is not obviously in either category, the costs of eradication are huge and the costs of letting it run are huge. And then there's a third option of slowing it down easing the burden on the healthcare system, isolating just
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