COVID-19: Chapter 4 - OPEN FOR BUSINESS

This post being right above a bunch of Mitch Daniels navel gazing is pretty great

My daughter gets sick like every other week at school.

On my Facebook feed, there was a “suggested” post for one of the local news stations. It was a story about how Six Flags Over Georgia is going to require guests to wear masks once it opens. 1K comments. Every single one I saw was crying about it.

There was a good one, though, from someone who I think assumed that Six Flags Whitewater (water park) was going to the same thing. He said wearing a mask on a fast water slide would be like getting water boarded.

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It may not always be that simple, but I think it is in this particular case.

Most people are idiots. Some hide it better than others. That’s likely what happened here.

People hate to be wrong about their impressions of others, so to avoid that, they often will come up with explanations like yours. I’m not saying that your hypothesis is never true, but it most cases it is not.

Also to be clear, I don’t think Riverman explicitly said that this guy was smart, but it seemed implied and I assumed it. My assessment is that he isn’t. He still could be empathic and a good dad. I’m not doubting Riverman’s read on those aspects.

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This is a tricky one. Obviously the right answer is to not fuck up as bad as we have, but that ship sailed. Then it’s to do a proper shutdown now and expand testing and tracing and convince people to use masks. That’s never going to happen.

So ultimately we have to open up schools, unless we shut down the economy. We should open them up and take as many precautions as we can. Surgical masks for students, make N95s available for staff. Create isolation pods within the school, keep separate grades/classes from co-mingling.

Ultimately that probably won’t stop the spread, but it’s what we’ve got. All the choices are bad, this is the type of decision that usually gets kicked up to the top executive because there’s no good answer and nobody wants to make the call.

Trump is gonna be like “LOL what? Of course open them up, hand me my 9 iron. Masks? What the hell is wrong with you?”

This many people, plus another 453.

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I mean, come on, man.

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Please keep sharing these, especially once he adds the fall third wave on top of the Memorial Day second wave. Eyeballing it, that’s at least 600K deaths before the end of the year.

Governor of Nevada and his team can’t figure out how to manage a live stream, but I’m sure they’ve done some great contingency planning and really thought through all of the pros and cons of Phase 2!

https://twitter.com/GovSisolak/status/1265477090691842048?s=19

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Yeah, this is why I voted reopen. All research I’ve seen shows that kids missing time from school is an absolutely enormous issue. It’s really hard, if not impossible, to make up the missed learning, let alone the food issue, the social interactions, etc.

In wealthier school districts, this may not be as much of an issue since parents are (a) more likely to either be home already or with a teleworking job or with additional help and (b) more educated and likely better at teaching their kids without teachers, if necessary. But in poorer districts, kids not going to school is an abject disaster and, although difficult to quantify, is imo likely worse than the additional damage caused by spreading the virus.

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Well if there’s one thing I know it’s that Riverman’s reads are never wrong.

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He knows that covid19 is killing off his largest viewer demographic

I don’t understand why he predicts a flat curve under full mitigation. Even under the best conditions there will still be people dying.

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Just a quick look but if we assume that pneumonia deaths that do not also list covid are the missing deaths I think the excess deaths are pretty close.

Somewhere around 57k total?

Barely awake. Will try to remember to look later.

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If we kept up full mitigation (which they aren’t doing either) we would eventually decline to almost zero cases/deaths. We have seen a 75% reduction in cases/deaths just in the last month in places like NY. Even one more month of full mitigation in NY assuming the same decay rate gets us to what 300 cases/30 deaths a day?

That also explains why locking down for a month and a half and then releasing everyone near the peak is super dumb. Lockdowns were working and had R < 1. Increasing to any R > 1 with the current levels of active Covid will be catastrophic.

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Even if full mitigation starts mid-june the death curve won’t be flat after 3 weeks. It might be enough to reach the peak for active cases but there will still be a lot of new infections and people will keep dying. South Korea and Germany have quadrupled its death totals after reaching their peak, Italy increased their total by ~50% and Spain by 25% and at least the latter two are far from done yet.
Is there a single country in the world that had a flat curve after just 3 weeks of mitigation?

There were periodic closings for influenza throughout the 20s and 30s.

We need studies on what off the shelf ventilation technology can do (think residential air purifiers.

Both classrooms and busses.

We also need to understand masks and how effective they are in a school setting.

Interesting that UMich with a microbiologist/immunologist has a different take. He says no sports unless students are back on campus. No decision has been made yet for fall.

When you see the bigger numbers like 500k and up, that means we opened schools without many if any mitigating strategies. Just letting Mother Nature throw a straight right into our glass jaw. But yeah, we are stupid enough.

That’s true. My guess is the assumption he makes is that we will still continue to see a decline in the number of new cases over the next couple of weeks. Which means there is no way we have full mitigation by mid-June.

My personal take is that the numbers the next few weeks will be very interesting. Places like NY/NJ/Michigan/Connecticut have dramatically lowered their cases/deaths. As has been noted this has helped to offset the slow rise elsewhere. At some point there isn’t any room for the March hotspots to continue to go down and then what will be driving the national number trend will be the early reopening states.

Today’s bump should also be interesting after a 3 day weekend with reported deaths in the 600-700 range every day. I’d be very surprised to see us not head back to 25,000 new cases/1300 new deaths today.

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I feel exactly the same way. Completely separate out the Calculations and being “right” and the horror of the actual numbers.

FWIW looks like this guy is suing the same math as me. Minor nit with his full mitigation curve being slightly down? I’m assuming that is just a smoothing function error or my eyes are bad.

When my giant fermentation was going bad from a bacterial virus I was both proud that my math worked and royally effing pissed off that the new management did what I expressly said not to do. It did help my credibility with them.

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