Ugh. Social distancing is dramatically stunting the spread and now the dingbats are going to claim it was no big deal all along and we shut down for nothing and we only 100,000 deaths (they are not people just “deaths”)
I bet this guy is holed up with a loaded gun in his lap 24/7.
Off with their heads!
Models end up looking binary because small difference in the growth exponent or Ro assumptions result in dramatically different outcomes over 60 day type timelines.
Most assuredly not factored in are minute details of demographics like mentioned-age, age of people in lockdown with you, etc.
Comparing Italy to the US is somewhat false. NY to Italy looks pretty damn similar?
No one knows all the variables, decision makers need to use info on the pessimistic side to plan for the worst. It’s completely normal the models were pessimistic (some assuming no mitigation).
Long term the more successful we are at decreasing the spread, the more susceptible we are to further waves (absent treatments and vacccine developments). Small price to pay to save hundreds of thousands of people.
Could have saved Many many more if we responded better like SF area. (Looking at you N.Y. schools, red state govs, and President Dumbo).
Unfortunately for us Boris has spent 99% of his time in power doing the classic dictator move of getting rid of anyone with any competence at all who may be a challenge to his authority and replacing them with ultra loyal (and therefore necessarily moronic) utter sycophants. Plus raab who is competent in a sort of unfeeling, terminator, kill a puppy a day way.
Ugh. I heard a piece yesterday on the 1918 pandemic. The first US case hit in January of that year. Then there was a peak, then a lull, then another peak in freaking October or something like that. It started easing off in November mainly because the virus mutated into a less deadly strain.
Also the Dr. Trumps of that day we’re telling sick people to take between 8 and 31 grams of aspirin, which caused 1/3 of them to hyperventilate and die
Their is even a steak-umm heiress or something here in PA.
I think it was Matt Yglesias that called this a couple weeks ago on Twitter.
On another note, one thing I haven’t seen getting talked about directly (perhaps it’s obvious and people don’t feel the need to point it out) is that it’s entirely possible that moderate wide-spread social distancing practices will make a huge dent in how far/fast this thing spreads. In other words it may not take a China/South Korea-like severe authoritarian style isolation to effectively control this thing. That is not to say that we should not be overly cautious when faced like something like this, but that just because we didn’t implement those type of measures, doesn’t mean we are doomed for a worst-case scenario or even a really bad scenario. /optimism.
Just noticed IHME has projections for most European countries. I think this is a new feature. This one’s for SUB:
I have a 40-something Deplorable who finally began taking it seriously a few weeks ago, but repeatedly has asked me how experts can possibly know when peaks are going to hit.
He can’t seem to grasp the concept of modeling.
Who wants Boris Johnson dead more? People who think he’s a scumbag idiot who’s willing to kill his whole country to support his political career and his death will make the world a better place, or people who can’t wait to cry fake outrage tears and troll and virtue signal everyone for that belief? I’m certain Piers Morgan gets a fully torqued erection just thinking about all the trolling he’ll be able to do if Boris dies.
We have to remember we are looking at the impact of large numbers. NY is dominating the national stats. If some rural parish in Louisiana gets slammed it’s gonna suck for them when 100 olds die and they don’t have a hospital let alone an ICU w vents. But it isn’t going to impact the overall numbers other than a rounding error amount. Only if that happens 100 times. The US is just too big and too varied in density and risk factors to make a blanket statement.
If it comes hard to your town then it’s terrible. If it doesn’t then who cares up the big city and it was NO BIG DEAL, go Donny go!
New York State has started listing some new information on comorbidities. It looks like hypertension (high blood pressure) could be a significant risk factor.
Interesting that autoimmune diseases aren’t on there. There are probably tens of millions of Americans taking immunosuppressive drugs like Humira and Enbrel for autoimmune diseases, and I haven’t heard anything about those people being at high risk. You could come up with a plausible theory that those sorts of drugs could either be helpful or harmful to someone with covid; they could be harmful because they are immunosuppresive and hinder the body’s immune reaction to the virus. But they could be helpful because they are immunosuppressive and dampen the cytokine storm that actually ends up killing people.
It could also be as simple as the US is a lot bigger, less urban, and more spread out than Europe, so social distancing works better. We’re not all jumping on mass transit here, we are a driving country versus Europe which is more reliant on mass transit.
This is a good point, and assuming the omission is not because they didn’t ask/record those autoimmune conditions/diseases, is a ray of hope. My wife, who has myasthenia gravis and likely related eczema, was told by her that she will not be going back to work until everything is done – we have a vaccine, herd immunity, or the virus is eradicated. She can’t take the *quine drugs, because they cause allergic reactions in MG patients. So we’re hoping for the plasma treatments to be validated and approved for prohpylactic treatment for high-risk people. However, if it’s less of a risk than expected for these populations (23M autoimmune sufferers, per Google), then maybe we can ratchet the anxiety level down a notch.
A counterpoint, however, is the study that I posted at the end of the previous thread, which showed elevated IL-6 levels, which you would see in both obese and automimmune disordered patients, are associated with a much higher rate (like 20x, IIRC) of respiratory failure. This could be the obese patients overwhelming the autoimmune ones, too, but it is a data point. We’ll continue to follow developments closely.
I got a question for the economists. How does it feel having everything you know about the markets being disproven by toilet paper?
I’m an economist, but I’m afraid I don’t understand your question.
1918 was an extreme anomaly and there’s a lot we don’t know about it; we need to be careful with the comparisons to that virus.
This must be why Babis is pushing to get the government to extend the state of emergency past April 11th.
If ANO had a majority government similar to Orban’s party, then we’d probably be looking at a de facto dictatorship too.
Anyway, the counter-offer from other parties is a 14 day extension which is their way of saying that ANO isn’t getting an extension after that one.
