Coronavirus

[Rico1304]

Turns out it’s a pandemic that turns me into a socialist and the big lefties into...well, not socialists. 

[Gnasher]

37 minutes ago, Alex_K said:

"We learn more, we buy time, we adapt"? How utterly vague. What more do you hope to learn? How much further can we adapt? As I've written before, the notion that we can burrow underground and feast on a winter of pick n mix, beer & Netflix boxes is a quite gorgeous philosophy. In the real world, the Job Support Scheme unveiled today was I think quite diabolical and appears to be a sure fire way to send millions of people to the unemployment line at the end of October. Whatever illusion people have in their minds as to what a second lockdown would look like, you can be quite confidently assured it will not be the summer-in-the-sun of a quarter of the workforce being on holiday at 80% pay.

True dat

[Gnasher]

17 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

Turns out it’s a pandemic that turns me into a socialist and the big lefties into...well, not socialists. 

realists 

[Gnasher]

31 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Not to mention the 1% who died

He's wrong on the first point, it wont be better than 99% of peopke who have lived, you are wrong on the second point when you say the 1% who died, it's a fraction of that and the virus would unfortunately kill a certain amount of peopoe whichever course we took.

[Rico1304]

6 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

realists 

Fucking hell, I’m getting that on a t-shirt. 

[Rico1304]

Just now, Gnasher said:

He's wrong on the first point, it wont be better than 99% of peopke who have lived, you are wrong on the second point when you say the 1% who died, it's a fraction of that and the virus would unfortunately kill a certain amount of peopoe whichever course we took.

Read it again. Slowly. 

[Gnasher]

28 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

Won't some of these younger people who contract the virus but don't die go on to lose their jobs anyway when their lungs are fucked, or they've got to learn how to walk again properly, or they get "long covid" or when it starts to fuck up their brain, as has been outlined in recent studies? 

 

 

Very very few it seems.

[Gnasher]

28 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

So your worry is people being turned out into the street and starving.  But at the same time acknowledging that the government has intervened perhaps more than any other. Which is it? 
 

Its not black and white.  What is your acceptable  % of deaths? 

It's a how long is a piece of string question. No death should be viewed asc acceptable but unfortunately the virus attacks people with underlying health problems more than the fit and healthy so people argue to shut down the country for a year is taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. No easy right or wrong answer Rico but where does this lockdown policy end? What if the virus keeps mutating? 

[Rico1304]

8 hours ago, Gnasher said:

It's a how long is a piece of string question. No death should be viewed asc acceptable but unfortunately the virus attacks people with underlying health problems more than the fit and healthy so people argue to shut down the country for a year is taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. No easy right or wrong answer Rico but where does this lockdown policy end? What if the virus keeps mutating? 

Oh well, at least parking at the hospitals should be easier when all the sick people are dead.  Sad all the cardiologists, gerontologists, etc will be out of work, but never mind. 

[lifetime fan]

Just now, Rico1304 said:

Oh well, at least parking at the hospitals should be easier when all the sick people are dead.  Sad all the cardiologists, gerontologists, etc will be out of work, but never mind. 

Wont need all those foreign doctors or nurses though. Brexit sorted. 

[A Red]

9 hours ago, Alex_K said:

 Now they are being asked to forego liberty alongside that for an illness that barely arouses sniffles in the vast, vast majority of them. I am amazed there are not more protests and riots from the set. 

They cant stay in the pub after 10pm

[suzy]

On 23/09/2020 at 13:10, Spy Bee said:

At PMQ's Johnson has confirmed that the strategy is to suppress the virus until a vaccine is available. A vaccine might never be available.

 

Are you guys really happy with that?

 

 

I’m not. I hate the ‘lock old people up’ thing. At first it seemed ok, just for a few weeks then it would all be better. But it will be getting on for a year once this 6 months  Boris is on about is over.

My parents are 83 & 81, my dad is pretty fit for his age but my mum has Parkinson’s and I’ve definitely seen her deteriorate from this. She hates staying in, and she says her legs are getting weaker. They came to my house the other day and bless my Dad he couldn’t stop talking, probably cos he can’t get much of a response from my mum as her speech isn’t good.

I don’t see much of my grandson now (he’s nearly 2) as his mum is still working from home and I really miss him. I used  to have him one day a week. Lots of my friends cuddle their grandchildren but my son is really strict and although we’ve seen him he doesn’t let him get too close. It breaks my heart.

Sorry to ramble on but it’s a bloody mess and I can’t see an end to it. Mental health is going to explode soon. Not to mention all the heart and cancer deaths which will rocket. I work in an admin role for NHS (from home) and my patients are lovely on the whole but some are (understandably) getting rather impatient.

 

 

[suzy]

10 hours ago, Gnasher said:

No one is suggesting throwing the at risk into a lake full of covid infected crocodiles.Some may argue the old and vulnerable should be shielded and the at risk paid to stay home until the worst of the virus passes. 

I’m 55 and was send home when this all started as I had a stent fitted 2 years ago- didn’t have a heart attack, thankfully  caught before that. They called me back 2 weeks later saying they’d done a risk assessment. I went back for a day and it was a disaster, hardly any social distancing in place and I couldn’t get on the system all day. That evening I was phoned up by my boss and told to say off. A week later I got all my stuff sorted and have worked from home since. 
When I went back in the office I was shocked how few people were in, it’s not just the over 50’s or over 60’s. Many who weren’t in were in their 20’s and 30’s! Turns out they had diabetes or asthma.  It’s not very black and white.

[Rico1304]

A guy on the Twitter has just calculated that the total weight of all the COVID virus in the world is about 1kg.  Amazing. 

[Section_31]

North Korea taking no chances.

 

 

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea expressed regret on Friday over the death of a missing South Korean, saying it shot him as part of measures to battle the coronavirus, the South’s national security adviser said.

North Korea’s United Front Department, in charge of cross-border ties, sent a letter to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s office a day after Seoul officials said North Korean soldiers killed a South Korean before dousing his body in oil and setting it on fire.

[Spy Bee]

26 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

North Korea taking no chances.

 

 

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea expressed regret on Friday over the death of a missing South Korean, saying it shot him as part of measures to battle the coronavirus, the South’s national security adviser said.

North Korea’s United Front Department, in charge of cross-border ties, sent a letter to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s office a day after Seoul officials said North Korean soldiers killed a South Korean before dousing his body in oil and setting it on fire.

That does seem to be a proportionate action.

[Spy Bee]

https://reason.com/2020/05/24/the-cdcs-new-best-estimate-implies-a-covid-19-infection-fatality-rate-below-0-3/

The CDC's New 'Best Estimate' Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%
That rate is much lower than the numbers used in the horrifying projections that shaped the government response to the epidemic.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the current "best estimate" for the fatality rate among Americans with COVID-19 symptoms is 0.4 percent. The CDC also estimates that 35 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus never develop symptoms. Those numbers imply that the virus kills less than 0.3 percent of people infected by it—far lower than the infection fatality rates (IFRs) assumed by the alarming projections that drove the initial government response to the epidemic, including broad business closure and stay-at-home orders.

The CDC offers the new estimates in its "COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios," which are meant to guide hospital administrators in "assessing resource needs" and help policy makers "evaluate the potential effects of different community mitigation strategies." It says "the planning scenarios are being used by mathematical modelers throughout the Federal government."

The CDC's five scenarios include one based on "a current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." That scenario assumes a "basic reproduction number" of 2.5, meaning the average carrier can be expected to infect that number of people in a population with no immunity. It assumes an overall symptomatic case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.4 percent, roughly four times the estimated CFR for the seasonal flu. The CDC estimates that the CFR for COVID-19 falls to 0.05 percent among people younger than 50 and rises to 1.3 percent among people 65 and older. For people in the middle (ages 50–64), the estimated CFR is 0.2 percent.

That "best estimate" scenario also assumes that 35 percent of infections are asymptomatic, meaning the total number of infections is more than 50 percent larger than the number of symptomatic cases. It therefore implies that the IFR is between 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent. By contrast, the projections that the CDC made in March, which predicted that as many as 1.7 million Americans could die from COVID-19 without intervention, assumed an IFR of 0.8 percent. Around the same time, researchers at Imperial College produced a worst-case scenario in which 2.2 million Americans died, based on an IFR of 0.9 percent.

Such projections had a profound impact on policy makers in the United States and around the world. At the end of March, President Donald Trump, who has alternated between minimizing and exaggerating the threat posed by COVID-19, warned that the United States could see "up to 2.2 million deaths and maybe even beyond that" without aggressive control measures, including lockdowns.

One glaring problem with those worst-case scenarios was the counterfactual assumption that people would carry on as usual in the face of the pandemic—that they would not take voluntary precautions such as avoiding crowds, minimizing social contact, working from home, wearing masks, and paying extra attention to hygiene. The Imperial College projection was based on "the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour." Similarly, the projection of as many as 2.2 million deaths in the United States cited by the White House was based on "no intervention"—not just no lockdowns, but no response of any kind.

Another problem with those projections, assuming that the CDC's current "best estimate" is in the right ballpark, was that the IFRs they assumed were far too high. The difference between an IFR of 0.8 to 0.9 percent and an IFR of 0.2 to 0.3 percent, even in the completely unrealistic worst-case scenarios, is the difference between millions and hundreds of thousands of deaths—still a grim outcome, but not nearly as bad as the horrifying projections cited by politicians to justify the sweeping restrictions they imposed.

"The parameter values in each scenario will be updated and augmented over time, as we learn more about the epidemiology of COVID-19," the CDC cautions. "New data on COVID-19 is available daily; information about its biological and epidemiological characteristics remain limited, and uncertainty remains around nearly all parameter values." But the CDC's current best estimates are surely better grounded than the numbers it was using two months ago.

A recent review of 13 studies that calculated IFRs in various countries found a wide range of estimates, from 0.05 percent in Iceland to 1.3 percent in Northern Italy and among the passengers and crew of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. This month Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis, who has long been skeptical of high IFR estimates for COVID-19, looked specifically at published studies that sought to estimate the prevalence of infection by testing people for antibodies to the virus that causes the disease. He found that the IFRs implied by 12 studies ranged from 0.02 percent to 0.4 percent. My colleague Ron Bailey last week noted several recent antibody studies that implied considerably higher IFRs, ranging from 0.6 percent in Norway to more than 1 percent in Spain.

Methodological issues, including sample bias and the accuracy of the antibody tests, probably explain some of this variation. But it is also likely that actual IFRs vary from one place to another, both internationally and within countries. "It should be appreciated that IFR is not a fixed physical constant," Ioannidis writes, "and it can vary substantially across locations, depending on the population structure, the case-mix of infected and deceased individuals and other, local factors."

One important factor is the percentage of infections among people with serious preexisting medical conditions, who are especially likely to die from COVID-19. "The majority of deaths in most of the hard hit European countries have happened in nursing homes, and a large proportion of deaths in the US also seem to follow
this pattern," Ioannidis notes. "Locations with high burdens of nursing home deaths may have high IFR estimates, but the IFR would still be very low among non-elderly, non-debilitated people."

 
That factor is one plausible explanation for the big difference between New York and Florida in both crude case fatality rates (reported deaths as a share of confirmed cases) and estimated IFRs. The current crude CFR for New York is nearly 8 percent, compared to 4.4 percent in Florida. Antibody tests suggest the IFR in New York is something like 0.6 percent, compared to 0.2 percent in the Miami area.

Given Florida's high percentage of retirees, it was reasonable to expect that the state would see relatively high COVID-19 fatality rates. But Florida's policy of separating elderly people with COVID-19 from other vulnerable people they might otherwise have infected seems to have saved many lives. New York, by contrast, had a policy of returning COVID-19 patients to nursing homes.

"Massive deaths of elderly individuals in nursing homes, nosocomial infections [contracted in hospitals], and overwhelmed hospitals may…explain the very high fatality seen in specific locations in Northern Italy and in New York and New Jersey," Ioannidis says. "A very unfortunate decision of the governors in New York and New Jersey was to have COVID-19 patients sent to nursing homes. Moreover,
some hospitals in New York City hotspots reached maximum capacity and perhaps could not offer optimal care. With large proportions of medical and paramedical personnel infected, it is possible that nosocomial infections increased the death toll."

Ioannidis also notes that "New York City has an extremely busy, congested public transport system that may have exposed large segments of the population to high infectious load in close contact transmission and, thus, perhaps more severe disease." More speculatively, he notes the possibility that New York happened to be hit by a "more aggressive" variety of the virus, a hypothesis that "needs further verification."

If you focus on hard-hit areas such as New York and New Jersey, an IFR between 0.2 and 0.3 percent, as suggested by the CDC's current best estimate, seems improbably low. "While most of these numbers are reasonable, the mortality rates shade far too low," University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom told CNN. "Estimates of the numbers infected in places like NYC are way out of line with these estimates."

 
But the CDC's estimate looks more reasonable when compared to the results of antibody studies in Miami-Dade County, Santa Clara County, Los Angeles County, and Boise, Idaho—places that so far have had markedly different experiences with COVID-19. We need to consider the likelihood that these divergent results reflect not just methodological issues but actual differences in the epidemic's impact—differences that can help inform the policies for dealing with it.

 

 

At >0.3% this makes Covid marginally worse than a bad flu season. That's a fact.

[Bjornebye]

Red Phoenix appears to have mutated into about 5 different posters 

[Rico1304]

4 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

https://reason.com/2020/05/24/the-cdcs-new-best-estimate-implies-a-covid-19-infection-fatality-rate-below-0-3/

The CDC's New 'Best Estimate' Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%
That rate is much lower than the numbers used in the horrifying projections that shaped the government response to the epidemic.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the current "best estimate" for the fatality rate among Americans with COVID-19 symptoms is 0.4 percent. The CDC also estimates that 35 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus never develop symptoms. Those numbers imply that the virus kills less than 0.3 percent of people infected by it—far lower than the infection fatality rates (IFRs) assumed by the alarming projections that drove the initial government response to the epidemic, including broad business closure and stay-at-home orders.

The CDC offers the new estimates in its "COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios," which are meant to guide hospital administrators in "assessing resource needs" and help policy makers "evaluate the potential effects of different community mitigation strategies." It says "the planning scenarios are being used by mathematical modelers throughout the Federal government."

The CDC's five scenarios include one based on "a current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." That scenario assumes a "basic reproduction number" of 2.5, meaning the average carrier can be expected to infect that number of people in a population with no immunity. It assumes an overall symptomatic case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.4 percent, roughly four times the estimated CFR for the seasonal flu. The CDC estimates that the CFR for COVID-19 falls to 0.05 percent among people younger than 50 and rises to 1.3 percent among people 65 and older. For people in the middle (ages 50–64), the estimated CFR is 0.2 percent.

That "best estimate" scenario also assumes that 35 percent of infections are asymptomatic, meaning the total number of infections is more than 50 percent larger than the number of symptomatic cases. It therefore implies that the IFR is between 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent. By contrast, the projections that the CDC made in March, which predicted that as many as 1.7 million Americans could die from COVID-19 without intervention, assumed an IFR of 0.8 percent. Around the same time, researchers at Imperial College produced a worst-case scenario in which 2.2 million Americans died, based on an IFR of 0.9 percent.

Such projections had a profound impact on policy makers in the United States and around the world. At the end of March, President Donald Trump, who has alternated between minimizing and exaggerating the threat posed by COVID-19, warned that the United States could see "up to 2.2 million deaths and maybe even beyond that" without aggressive control measures, including lockdowns.

One glaring problem with those worst-case scenarios was the counterfactual assumption that people would carry on as usual in the face of the pandemic—that they would not take voluntary precautions such as avoiding crowds, minimizing social contact, working from home, wearing masks, and paying extra attention to hygiene. The Imperial College projection was based on "the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour." Similarly, the projection of as many as 2.2 million deaths in the United States cited by the White House was based on "no intervention"—not just no lockdowns, but no response of any kind.

Another problem with those projections, assuming that the CDC's current "best estimate" is in the right ballpark, was that the IFRs they assumed were far too high. The difference between an IFR of 0.8 to 0.9 percent and an IFR of 0.2 to 0.3 percent, even in the completely unrealistic worst-case scenarios, is the difference between millions and hundreds of thousands of deaths—still a grim outcome, but not nearly as bad as the horrifying projections cited by politicians to justify the sweeping restrictions they imposed.

"The parameter values in each scenario will be updated and augmented over time, as we learn more about the epidemiology of COVID-19," the CDC cautions. "New data on COVID-19 is available daily; information about its biological and epidemiological characteristics remain limited, and uncertainty remains around nearly all parameter values." But the CDC's current best estimates are surely better grounded than the numbers it was using two months ago.

A recent review of 13 studies that calculated IFRs in various countries found a wide range of estimates, from 0.05 percent in Iceland to 1.3 percent in Northern Italy and among the passengers and crew of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. This month Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis, who has long been skeptical of high IFR estimates for COVID-19, looked specifically at published studies that sought to estimate the prevalence of infection by testing people for antibodies to the virus that causes the disease. He found that the IFRs implied by 12 studies ranged from 0.02 percent to 0.4 percent. My colleague Ron Bailey last week noted several recent antibody studies that implied considerably higher IFRs, ranging from 0.6 percent in Norway to more than 1 percent in Spain.

Methodological issues, including sample bias and the accuracy of the antibody tests, probably explain some of this variation. But it is also likely that actual IFRs vary from one place to another, both internationally and within countries. "It should be appreciated that IFR is not a fixed physical constant," Ioannidis writes, "and it can vary substantially across locations, depending on the population structure, the case-mix of infected and deceased individuals and other, local factors."

One important factor is the percentage of infections among people with serious preexisting medical conditions, who are especially likely to die from COVID-19. "The majority of deaths in most of the hard hit European countries have happened in nursing homes, and a large proportion of deaths in the US also seem to follow
this pattern," Ioannidis notes. "Locations with high burdens of nursing home deaths may have high IFR estimates, but the IFR would still be very low among non-elderly, non-debilitated people."

 
That factor is one plausible explanation for the big difference between New York and Florida in both crude case fatality rates (reported deaths as a share of confirmed cases) and estimated IFRs. The current crude CFR for New York is nearly 8 percent, compared to 4.4 percent in Florida. Antibody tests suggest the IFR in New York is something like 0.6 percent, compared to 0.2 percent in the Miami area.

Given Florida's high percentage of retirees, it was reasonable to expect that the state would see relatively high COVID-19 fatality rates. But Florida's policy of separating elderly people with COVID-19 from other vulnerable people they might otherwise have infected seems to have saved many lives. New York, by contrast, had a policy of returning COVID-19 patients to nursing homes.

"Massive deaths of elderly individuals in nursing homes, nosocomial infections [contracted in hospitals], and overwhelmed hospitals may…explain the very high fatality seen in specific locations in Northern Italy and in New York and New Jersey," Ioannidis says. "A very unfortunate decision of the governors in New York and New Jersey was to have COVID-19 patients sent to nursing homes. Moreover,
some hospitals in New York City hotspots reached maximum capacity and perhaps could not offer optimal care. With large proportions of medical and paramedical personnel infected, it is possible that nosocomial infections increased the death toll."

Ioannidis also notes that "New York City has an extremely busy, congested public transport system that may have exposed large segments of the population to high infectious load in close contact transmission and, thus, perhaps more severe disease." More speculatively, he notes the possibility that New York happened to be hit by a "more aggressive" variety of the virus, a hypothesis that "needs further verification."

If you focus on hard-hit areas such as New York and New Jersey, an IFR between 0.2 and 0.3 percent, as suggested by the CDC's current best estimate, seems improbably low. "While most of these numbers are reasonable, the mortality rates shade far too low," University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom told CNN. "Estimates of the numbers infected in places like NYC are way out of line with these estimates."

 
But the CDC's estimate looks more reasonable when compared to the results of antibody studies in Miami-Dade County, Santa Clara County, Los Angeles County, and Boise, Idaho—places that so far have had markedly different experiences with COVID-19. We need to consider the likelihood that these divergent results reflect not just methodological issues but actual differences in the epidemic's impact—differences that can help inform the policies for dealing with it.

 

 

At >0.3% this makes Covid marginally worse than a bad flu season. That's a fact.

Is the last sentence yours, or in the article? 

[Spy Bee]

7 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

Is the last sentence yours, or in the article? 

What do you think, Brains?

[cloggypop]

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Reason_(magazine)

 

Funded by Koch.

 

Milton Friedman has written for them. 

[Spy Bee]

3 minutes ago, cloggypop said:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Reason_(magazine)

Tiresome. Try playing the ball. The maths works out. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/22/health/cdc-coronavirus-estimates-symptoms-deaths/index.html

[cloggypop]

Tiresome is not actually checking the bias of the source that fits your preconceived ideas. 

[Spy Bee]

6 minutes ago, cloggypop said:

Tiresome is not actually checking the bias of the source that fits your preconceived ideas. 

If what they are stating is correct, why does that matter?

[Rico1304]

18 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

What do you think, Brains?

Hold on, I thought we were playing the ball.