COVID-19: Chapter 4 - OPEN FOR BUSINESS

Depending on the age of the kids, it would be somewhere between extraordinarily difficult and beyond impossible to get meaningful compliance.

this is fine.

https://www.alreporter.com/2020/05/26/were-surging-alabama-reports-largest-covid-19-increases-to-date/?fbclid=IwAR3hhd3ek9jY7xLf7dZW5XyL8SJe2MoVNq-HUf01OV_qW8jnh454KDmViFo

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It amazes me that so many people in my neck of the woods talk about how it isnā€™t that bad here as if somehow we have some magic protecting force keeping Covid at bay. Meanwhile the opposite has to be true. Places without many Covid cases previously are the most likely to have outbreaks going forward.

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I assume the students/faculty/staff will actually make the decisions as to whether they have classes in the fall or not. If cases continue to rise and thereā€™s more and more deaths, then Iā€™d imagine a bunch of people simply arenā€™t going to show up and places like Purdue are going to end up wasting bunches of money trying to get ready for a semester that just doesnā€™t happen. I definitely feel for all the students who are in precarious positions that depended on them being in school for the next couple of years.

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Agreed. Now is when Iā€™m expecting a second wave to beginā€“to date, I donā€™t think any places have had the pattern of (wave) (reduction in cases) (wave). Alabama etc are just now getting their first wave because the nation was in pretty strict containment mode before the virus ever got to them in great numbers.

I took a trip to Alabama in late April (for work, from Georgia) and they were laughably more lax than Atlanta was. People just didnā€™t get the social distancing thing, and I was often the solitary person wearing a mask. So it stands to reason Alabama would be getting a surge now. But now Georgia is vastly more lax than it was; there are open restaurants full of people. Weā€™re probably more lenient than Alabama was a month ago.

My take on the virus is this:

  1. About six weeks of unfettered growth (from late Jan to early March) got us 100,000 deaths.
  2. The virus is (a) vastly more widespread now than it was in late Jan, but (b) major social distancing, albeit uneven, is in place across the country.
  3. The net effect of 2a and 2b on virus reproduction is incalculableā€“this is the major open question. Anyone who claims to know with a high degree of certainty is lying to you.
  4. Based on 3, scenarios for the summer range wildly: from the virus generally receding over the summer to becoming unfathomably catastrophic. Imagine six weeks of the kind of reproduction we had in February, except seeded with thousands of times more cases than we had then.
  5. The optimist in me thinks that the bad scenarios in 4 would be starting to blow open with some second wave right now. Thereā€™s very limited evidence of this in places that were hit hard the first time around. However, those places tended to lock down harder and better, and all the irresponsible activity weā€™re seeing right now is cumulative and exponential and on a significant time lag, so thereā€™s still LOTS of reason for concern.
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So it turns out this is probably nonsense. Apparently that correlation is based on smoothed data rather than the actual datapoints. You can get super-high correlations between two best-fit lines even if those best-fit lines are terribly noisy estimates of the underlying data.

https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1265411882283917315

AL is still lax for sure, i went to get groceries a few days ago and masks were about 50% i estimated, which honestly surprised me, i was expecting less.

I donā€™t see a connect to the raw data, so hard to say what impact their smoothing has. Certainly the R^2 is improved artificially but is it from a .85 or a .6 without the smoothing.

Anyone putting something like this out should publish the raw data so the fitting is transparent.

https://mobile.twitter.com/julieverhage/status/1265589322104930304

:point_up_2:

Longer clipā€¦

https://mobile.twitter.com/caseywagner/status/1265612644100292610

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The level of sheer delusion and denial out there is really insane. Whoever the fuck this Joe guy is rattles off this list of stuff that people were rightfully freaking out about (like PPE, testing, ventilators, etc.) as proof that it was all overblown. Tough to get dumber than that.

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I think his ā€œpointā€ is that all those things did not drive the market lower and that the right move was to hold you STONKS.

What says your brother? I assume something like ā€œThose numbers are probably not accurate and we shall seeā€

havenā€™t asked but yea iā€™m sure it would be more of ā€œnumbers canā€™t be trustedā€

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This has certainly been a strange evolution over the last 4-6 weeks. They really do believe some sort of magic or pixie dust in the air has kept them safe instead of random dumb luck.

Sure population density and other factors play a role, but as you said if your area has not had it bad yet and you are reopening everything based on that, you are in significant danger.

Areas where people practice better social distancing, mask usage, government oversight and general awareness can keep ahead of it. However there is no magic out there.

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The only potential positive in that dark cloud is maybe it will make some yutes realize they donā€™t need that particular lifetime slavery shackle and they end up taking another path to pursue their goals. I think most here would agree a significant portion of people In college should probably not be there, especially because of the value versus the accrued debt.

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The map of cases is practically a map of population density. The northeast is hit the hardest, then Chicago, LA, Detroit, then some parts of Texas and Florida. Itā€™s still more than half the cases and deaths in the vicinity of NYC.

The restrictions necessary to have R<1 in NYC are obviously quite different than the restrictions necessary to have R<1 anywhere else, let alone places that are actually sparcely populated.

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Someone linked to a SC poll in the Senate races thread. In looking at the crosstabs, I saw this:

% of people who say they know someone who has died of coronavirus.

Democrats 25%
Republicans 5%
Blacks 26%
Whites 5%

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yea in places like AL i think its legit just thinking like ā€œguess theres something we do better than new york that made it hit us lessā€ lul. Also I have a ex coworker, who trained me when i first moved into the office 10 years ago, she just quit back when we went all remote a couple months ago, shes at that age to retire and has some health issues so decided it was for the best i think. Well found out today that her and her husband are both in the hospital for covid, husband has been for like a week apparently and she just went today. Apparently they are in good shape at least right now, heard that they had the husband using some sort of bipap but not a ventilator.

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35 active duty military service members have died from Covid-19. I am surprised we hear basically nothing about that. Presumably they would have to be at least somewhat young.

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New guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that in areas where the prevalence of COVID-19 is low, ā€œless than half of those testing positive will truly have antibodies.ā€ The CDC also says that antibodies are not accurate enough to use to make important policy decisions.