Your initial read was wrong. Simple as that.
From some guys playing around with the data to compare current deaths with expected deaths. They show Kentucky pneumonia deaths with a huge spike thatās assumed is due to a ton of misidentified COVID deaths.
It is concerning that it wasnāt just laziness that had so many people solely relying on going to a gym for exercise. Instead it seems the pandemic has shown us that many, many, many, people are unable to figure out any other way to exercise.
I am curious as to why you hiked the first few days with your penis exposed.
It is hard to see the true value of a person until they have really been tested.
Not going to lie, my jaw dropped open.
Honestly this is all trump probably needed to do to secure reelection say stuff similar to what Hannity said there.
Thatās so Raven
that would require great undersea cables that somehow transmit video across the world back to each individual city. theyād never do it.
This is just idiotic imo. Iām in Mexico City and Iāve got news for the people here: itās already here bros. Mexico is a bit behind USA, b/c international travel is way less common, so the peak will probably come in early August, but per capita Iād say thereās little doubt it will be worse than what the USA has experienced thus far.
Mexico City is interesting. In the affluent areas, where I live, people are doing a pretty solid job of following quarantining protocols, but thatās a small part of the city. In the less affluent areas, people have been crammed into metro stations like sardines and living their normal lives basically the entire time, and traffic on the streets isnāt down much at all. The only saving grace might be that the Harvard weather data seems to indicate that due to the climate across the country, the devastation wonāt be as bad as the northern parts of the USA.
Result 
I donāt think itās always that simple. People are complex. Some are good at hiding the deplorable underbelly, sure. But many are smart in certain areas, and dumb in others. Many are moral in certain areas, and immoral in others. Many are guided by emotion.
UPers are, by and large, in the top percentiles for analytical ability, principles of fairness, and being well informed. And even here people have talked about how they were tricked by propaganda earlier in their lives! Whether by their families or friends or conservative media or whatever. That shit works.
Regular people ā even pretty smart and moral ones ā are going to fall for this stuff sometimes. I think itās easy to imagine a sheltered suburban white dude whoās a truly great dad but also feels emotionally pulled toward machismo and thinks wearing a mask is weak.
I was talking to my wife tonight about what colleges might do in the fall. I thought this piece by Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue U, was pretty compelling:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-we-have-a-responsibility-to-open-purdue-university-this-fall/2020/05/25/da3b615c-9c62-11ea-ac72-3841fcc9b35f_story.html
The argument is that there is an obviously high-risk population, but that college students are roughly the opposite of that population:
The most salient discovery the world has made during these terrible two months is that covid-19 is a very dangerous disease, specifically for the elderly and the infirm, particularly those with diabetes, hypertension, other cardiovascular illnesses or the obesity that so frequently leads to these disorders.
The companion discovery is that this bug, so risky in one segment of the population, poses a near-zero risk to young people. Among covid-19 deaths, 99.9 percent have occurred outside the 15-to-24 age group; the survival rate in the 20-to-29 age bracket is 99.99 percent. [ā¦]
This is fundamental information for institutions with radically skewed demographic compositions. If youāre running a nursing home, it means one thing. [ā¦]
But if youāre running a university, the science is telling you something diametrically different. Our campus, including its surrounding community, has a median age of 20.5. More than 80 percent of the total campus population is 35 and under. We may have the population density of New York City, but we have the age distribution of Uganda. The challenge for Purdue is to devise maximum protection for the unusually small minority who could be at genuinely serious risk in order to serve the young people who are our reason for existing at all.
Iām not saying Iām convinced, but I think thereās a reasonable argument that we should be focusing on protecting the highest-risk groups while shifting to low-risk groups returning to their normal schedules. Thatās interesting to me because I work at a university and Iām not sure what my teaching will be like this fall.
But what Iām more curious about is K-12. I think thereās a similar argument here - that we should focus on keeping the at-risk students and staff safe, but return to normal schooling. (Iām of the opinion that online schooling has been completely unsuccessful so far, and is unlikely to be different this coming year.) But my wife said if schools were open, she wouldnāt send our kids unless there was a strict plan in place where every individual wore a mask and there was appropriate spacing between everyone.
I definitely appreciate caution and the fact that studens could transmit the disease to at-risk adults, but at the same time public school serves as de facto childcare and feeding for a lot of people. Not to mention the fact that online learning is likely to be substantially worse than in-person learning. So thereās an incredible cost of keeping schools closed.
So Iām curious about what UPers think, particularly those with K-12 kids. If you were in charge of your school district or state or whatever, what would you do?
- K-12 should open as normal
- K-12 should open as normal with normal capacity, but kids have to wear masks and maybe thereās extra spacing at lunch and in classrooms
- K-12 should open with reduced capacity, like restaurants (e.g., 1/2 the school attends Monday/Tuesday, Wednesday cleaning, other 1/2 attends Thursday/Friday)
- K-12 should remain closed for 2020-2021
september has always been if shit really hits the fan projections School is going to be in session then too in most states if not all of themāIām sure thatās just a coincidence.
The problem here isnāt the kids in the schools, itās that a lot of old people work in schools (teachers/custodians/bus drivers/lunch ladies/etc/etc) plus parents/guardians of kids. (well for college this changes slightly but you get the point)
I think everyoneās gonna open it back up though; itās just not doable to have no school for years but some places are going to have a bit of a worker shortage.
There isnāt going to be a āeveryone wear a maskā policy simply because I donāt know how you could enforce it reallyāwe struggle at getting adults to wear one.
I worked in a cubicle with a girl with small kids who never took sick days and by Christ I caught every single bug that made the rounds; little kids are disease magnets, I hate them. Having said that, thereās probably less of a risk for colleges.
Remember this posted by Faux News back on March 31? It was a massive, absurd goalpost shift saying 100k-240k would be doing a āgreat jobā based on all the rhetoric weād been hearing up to that point. Well weāve already reached 100k and are looking at a 2nd, deadlier wave.
Now theyāre saying anything under 1-2 million deaths would be job well done by the president.
Itās all so fucking absurd at this point. We could hit 2 million deaths and they would still find a way to spin it.
I find myself increasingly angry at the people who let this happen and are as so easily manipulated, like certain members in my family. They have the intellectual curiosity of a goddamn field mouse.
i like how the low curve is 100-240,000 deaths. canāt possibly have an intervention curve lower than 100k
A friend of one of my coworkers does modeling for some government agencies and some private businesses in DC. This is his model:
Hereās his full update. He sends these out every few days:
May 25th COVID Update ā the 100K Edition:
On May 10th, my models predicted that without additional mitigation efforts, we would see 100,000 dead Americans from COVID-19 by today, May 25th. I am extraordinarily sad to see this model proved true. In the unlikely event we donāt pass that milestone today, it will be in the early hours tomorrow. Globally, we are expected to pass 350,000 dead from the pandemic soon as well. Strap in, tl;dr as always.
The number of Americans that have died from this pandemic so far has gotten so large that the sheer scale of it has become difficult to fully appreciate. As of Today, IN JUST OVER TWO MONTHS, the COVID-19 death toll is more than DOUBLE the average annual seasonal flu death toll and has now surpassed the entire 1968/69 flu season to become the USā second deadliest pandemic in the last 100 years behind the 1958/59 flu season which we are projected to pass in the next three weeks. In my continued effort to make these unthinkable numbers of dead more relatable, here are other things which have killed fewer Americans than COVID-19 has so far:
- The COMBINED capacity of Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Madison Square Garden (100,169)
- The full capacity of the Darrell K RoyalāTexas Memorial Stadium (Home of the Longhorns: (100,119)
- The COMBINED death toll of the Vietnam and Korean Wars (92,077)
- ANNUAL alcohol related deaths (~88,000)
- ANNUAL Diabetes deaths (~84,000)
- ANNUAL Suicides and Murders COMBINED (~64,500)
Another way to think about this is that only about 1.5% of incorporated cities in the US have populations larger than 100,000. For example, the number of people who have died from COVID-19 so far is larger than the ENTIRE POPULATION of College Station, TX ā the home of Texas A&M University. For more depressing comparisons, please see my updated data visualization comparing COVID-19 to other leading causes of death at: COVID-19 vs. Leading Causes of Death | Flourish
Because the country as a whole has moved much farther away from the full mitigation model rather than in any way towards it, Iāve moved that model start out to Mid-June. As before, Iāve, Iāve decided to abandon the āwhat if we do things rightā models because they have become so unlikely that theyāve simply become misleading to represent. Unfortunately, our best-case scenario (full mitigation starting in mid-June) still has a massive death toll and is, by far, the least likely to occur. The others are much worse. At the request of about a dozen of you whoāve been reading these updated, Iāve also added in a new model that represents what would happen if the various Memorial Day mass gatherings spark a 2nd wave earlier than the anticipated Fall wave. Here is an article showing a number of horrifying reminders of our collective ability to ignore impending catastrophes. Big Memorial Day weekend crowds raising virus-linked concerns - CBS News
I did NOT create a model with both a Memorial Day 2nd wave and a Fall 3rd wave, because I was too damn depressed watching the coverage of the Memorial Day mass gatherings to build it.
On that note, thanks again to everyone whoās visited the Facebook group Angela Bryant and I put together called Kindness During Crisis Group. KDC is intended to serve as a place to tell stories of kindness and humanity during tough times. Seeing all of your posts about the good things happening has really helped me sleep better. Seeing how the projections keep getting worse, please keep them coming! Itās been a lifeline for me.
What we are looking at in the graph above is what I believe are the most likely future scenarios and models that predict COVID-19 mortality by the end of 2020. Assumptions underly each of these predictive models, and so they are only as good as those assumptions hold. Please keep that in mind. Other important caveats: These projections DO NOT include spikes in the death rate that will occur should regional health services be overrun and unable to provide life-saving care for all of the other critical cases that come through the door ā donāt forget that the new flu season starts up again in October. I am also not taking into account ancillary deaths, patients that would have ordinarily received life-saving care for non-COVID issues such as stroke or heart attacks were it not for an overrun, exhausted, and depleted health service. Finally, please donāt forget that Iām NOT an epidemiologist, just pretty good at math. If what Iām saying conflicts with someone like Dr. Fauci or the CDC (not Trumpās interpretation of the CDC) believe them, not me. Seriously.
MEMORIAL DAY MODEL
In this first, and worst case of all the scenarios here, there is a rapid acceleration in the reduction of mitigation efforts in addition to the multitudes of mass gatherings over the Memorial Day weekend. Asymptomatic infected revelers will infect massive numbers of fellow partiers during these events, and then carry the disease back to their home communities sparking new breakouts NATIONWIDE. This scenario takes us back to where we were in the curve in early late February, but with patient zeros in population centers across the country and an exhausted, depleted health service. If these conditions occur, it will lead to a second massive wave which will be noticeable in the confirmed cases numbers my mid-June, much too late to be managed by containment. At this point there will be no choice but to shut down the country again. This scenario would begin to show up in the death tolls by end of June and create a nightmarish July & August in which about 130,000 more Americans die ā more than have died to date. During those two months, we would average just over 2,000 dead each day instead of the 460/day estimated in the equilibrium model. This model has a likely 2020 death total of almost 375,000 Americans. Itās very hard to model out the 2021 scenario following such a large second wave, especially given the possibility of a new President, but some worst-case estimates place the total death toll over two years above 600,000. To be clear, anybodyās estimates after a second large wave, including this one, are probably nonsense.
FALL WAVE MODEL
This scenario starts with a continuous reduction of the mitigation efforts currently in place, leading at first to the equilibrium state as described above, and then after some time, like with the Spanish Flu in 1918, people broadly cease nearly all of these mitigation efforts resulting in a widespread reopening across the country all at once ā in this scenario, in September. Because there will be no herd immunity, we will have created a virtually identical environment to the one we found ourselves in at the end of February, only now with a depleted and exhausted health service PLUS an emerging seasonal flu. Given the current political environment, especially the upcoming election, it is possible that mitigation measures will be even slower to be adopted than they were in March and we will see an equivalent or larger spike across the country to the one weāre currently passing through. The epicenters are likely to be in urban centers outside of NY/NJ given their recent experience but Would be devastating elsewhere. The likely death toll in this scenario (assuming an identical spike to the original wave) is upwards of 333,000 in 2020. As stated before, itās very hard to have a practical death toll model for 2021, but worst-case models are just north of a half million in this model.
EQUILIBRIUM MODEL
This model is based on no significant second wave, but rather dozens of community outbreaks across the nation at any given time, with some growing as others fall. This would create a dynamic equilibrium of COVID-19 hot spots that will feel like a slow simmer. Based on the lack of national direction, states and localities are making uncoordinated decisions, and more often than not based on a political basis rather than sound economic or public health reasoning. What this is likely to mean is a relatively dynamic state of outbreak and remission until either there is a clear, centralized and enforced response to the problem or there is a vaccine. This scenario probably plays out as a lower rate of death nationally punctuated by regional spikes. Iāve run a series of models looking at this, and they tend to center around a steady state of about 460 deaths per day on average that continues more or less in perpetuity. Thatās much better than the average daily deaths over the last few weeks (~1,500 deaths/day) but with no end in sight. Playing that scenario out to its logical conclusion more than doubles the current number of dead to about 206,000 by the New Year. The death toll would grow by about 14,000 each month until a vaccine is distributed or until herd immunity emerges. In this scenario COVID-19 would be the 3rd leading cause of death in the US in 2020 behind only cancer and heart disease.
FULL MITIGATION MODEL
The first model, what Iām calling the Full Mitigation model, is the rosiest of what I believe are the most likely paths the disease could follow from here. Unfortunately, it is also by far the least likely. Nearly every state has been lifting shelter-in-place orders and lifting restrictions. [A reasonably complete list can be found here: This is where all 50 states stand on reopening In this scenario, the reopening of the country leads to new hot spots which are widespread across the US prompting a national response in which strong mitigation efforts are enacted, enforced, and broadly followed until the rate of new cases drops to nearly zero. Those efforts are maintained until a vaccine is available and distributed. Even in this best-case scenario, because of the lead time and the spike, weād still be looking at almost 30,000 more dead Americans. Thatās almost as many as died in the Korean War. The necessary mitigation efforts are well known although they arenāt being followed. They include five practical steps (not an exclusive list):
First, close or donāt reopen non-essential activities that put people in close contact until infections are largely gone in an area. It seems like this shouldnāt even require scientists to figure out.
Second, wear a damned mask. Current evidence is that masks of almost any type reduce transmission from an infected wearer to the people around them. The mask is your way of saying that you care whether OTHERS liver or die. When other people wear masks, they are protecting you. Mask wearing is a new element in the social contract of civil society in exactly the same way as all of us agreeing to drive on the right side of the road or to stop at stop signs. The mask isnāt an infringement on your rights, itās how we keep our loved ones and neighbors safe. You may not enjoy the experience, but the masks are saving lives. Largely other peopleās lives. From you.
Third, set up a national program to test large numbers of asymptomatic Americans so we can identify hot spots before they are out of control and train/deploy contact tracers across America to identify potentially infected individuals and get them quarantined before they set off a new hot spot. There are plenty of unemployed people desperate for jobs, and this would put more than 100,000 Americans back to work in much the same way that the national highway system project did.
Fourth, develop reasonable, near-term rules to get businesses back to work which are based on local outbreaks and which fine businesses that do not comply. Risk should be determined and mitigated with common sense approaches that maximize the ability to get back to work without spreading the disease. Some businesses will naturally be able to open sooner than others and some may require significant investments to be viable. We can restart the economy without putting millions of lives at risk. This is not either/or. We need to reopen the economy, but weāre shooting ourselves in the foot by doing so without the necessary measures to STAY open. At the moment we are heading down the path of Japan, Germany, and others who reopened only to have to clamp down again a few weeks later.
Fifth and finally, use the tools of government to build a national stockpile of relevant medicines, PPEs, ventilators, etc. so that they can be quickly deployed wherever they turn out to be needed. The current competition among the states has kept needed resources away from the worst hit areas and increased prices. Additionally, start building the delivery infrastructure that will be necessary to vaccinate 300+ million Americans when the vaccine comes RIGHT NOW. The vaccine is of no use if we canāt manufacture enough of it or figure out how to deliver it.
With this full mitigation model, the death toll would be about 125,000 but we would be able to largely re-open the economy after the 4th of July (great time for it too!). In this scenario, many of those that lost their jobs would be able to find new employment as contact tracers or doing fieldwork for the currently paused decennial US Census. Personally, Iād love to get a haircut without risking my life.
Whatās so painful to think about as Iām writing this, is that WE ALREADY KNOW WHAT TO DO to create the best-case scenario, and we could have been doing it for months. The effectiveness of these efforts is well known, and not factually controversial based on the available science. We just need to set aside mindless partisan differences and have the will to focus on practical solutions. If we do all of these things, the health system will not be overwhelmed, and citizens and businesses will be able to get back to work, albeit under new rules. Even if we do SOME of these, weāll be in much better shape. Iām sure there are many other great ideas out there that would help as well. As it stands, we are doing NONE of them in a systematic or rigorous way in the United States and its unforgivable. There are good reasons that our country ā with just 4.25% of the worldās population and the most advanced health care system anywhere ā is the home of about 29% of all COVID-19 fatalities globally.
So, stay home, donāt do stupid things, think about how your actions affect those around you, and try to be patient. Weāll get through this.
Itās not remotely clear to me how people, especially people in positions of public trust, are able to ignore the really obvious facts at play here. Mitigation was WORKING. The solution requires PATIENCE and SHARED SACRIFICE. WE CAN NOT REMOVE PROTECTIVE MEASURES BEFORE THE CURRENT WAVE OF THE INFECTION RUNS ITS COURSE. We are NOT going to return to our daily lives in the next few weeks, and very likely not for the next few months as things are going now. PLEASE stay home. PLEASE wear a mask. PLEASE act like you donāt want your neighbors and loved ones to contract the virus. Please, please, please.