L.A. Mayor: Public Should Wear Masks, But Not N95s (Right Now)
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A sensible suggestion from Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles:
Early data suggests many who are infected are not symptomatic, which is why we are recommending you use cloth face coverings plus physical distancing for essential activities.
Do not use surgical and N95 masks, which are reserved for first responders and medical workers.
— Mayor Karen Bass (@MayorOfLA) April 2, 2020
iSteve commenter Buzz Mohawk offers a refinement:
What the stupid mayor of LA should have said is “Do not BUY N95 masks. Those are needed by professionals now. Some of you have them, and that’s fine, but don’t buy more.” But no, he said “Don’t wear them.” Fucking idiot created a stigma.
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This should have been the policy from the beginning.
I bought about 30 N95 masks as soon as the first reports started coming out of China. I already ripped the bag intentionally so they’re already “contaminated” and no one can take them from me. I’m not catching this thing and I’m protecting myself, mayors be damned. I bet you anything he has access to N95s.
https://production-web-cpo.demandware.net/on/demandware.static/-/Sites-cpo-master-catalog/default/product_media/thm/thmn7162/images/xlarge/thmn7162.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f8/59/12/f859128ce90f063c714ac5750876c546.jpg
Yes, this move makes sense. It’s also finally honest, in that it implicitly recognizes the efficacy of masking, and admits there aren’t enough good ones to go around, and that the stocks are being reserved for medical staff.
It’s unfortunate that not even surgical masks are available, but cloth masks to hold the viruses in are indeed better than nothing.
Hopefully this will be the first step in LA and other places starting to restore some of the elements of normal day-to-day life.
Yes, wear cheap Chinese masks, not N95s, because LA is cheap. And some nurse’s life is more important than your’s!
That is the position of LA County. What say you?
I bought 10 n95 last year for the fires.
I’ve been using them since day 1. Alternating, h202 spritzing them and leaving them in the sun
But this is damn well about time. Now, get the hydroxhloroquinol in production and let’s start testing for antibodies.
Would it make practical sense to set a used paper face mask aside in sunlight for, say, a week, and then reuse it?Replies: @Chrisnonymous
N95 masks are the only kind I have. I bought a large stock during the Obama Flu of 2009, so I am not a part of the hoarding problem during the Kung Flu of 2020. Shouldn’t I be free to use them? Do I have a moral obligation to turn them over to a local hospital? Or do I honor my concentric circles of loyalty, and save them for myself and my nearest and dearest?
Now that good-people are going to start praising and judging about masks, which we're, of course totally useless until 12 hours ago but will now become the most important virtue signal, i wonder how long before people wearing masks with exhaust valves start being shamed.
But seriously, n95s without them are pretty terrible (and i don't have any). I'm going to try to add a strip of paper towel patch on the outside somehow.
(bounty style) Paper towel inside is easy and works, at least for droplets, but almost totally defeats the benefit of the valve.Replies: @res
I removed three barriers today, allowing at least a dozen citizens to enjoy their park.
I kicked down and tore down several signs today, making our park less threatening and more welcoming to everyone.
Fuck you, CoronaHoax.
Fuck you, Democratic Party.
Fuck you, boomers.
I bet a lot of our hospitals look like this. Take a hard look at the patients:
https://twitter.com/Ageofdeception1/status/1245802097045573632
Areas of the US with high percentages of black residents are beginning show a higher-than-average death rate. Democrats have realized this, and they’re desperate to hide it. They don’t want blacks to make the connection between their own climbing death rates and the Democrats’ open borders policy. Blacks are already suspicous that they’re losing jobs to foreigners. If blacks realize that foreigners are giving them a high death rate too, blacks may revolt against the Democrats. First their jobs are taken away from them, and then their very lives. This is why the Democrats have suddenly escalated their war on Trump. They’re frantic to hide their own policy failures, because they realize they’re screwed once blacks figure out what’s going on. Blacks may bolt the Democrats in large numbers over this.
1. They are packed with sick people, and
2. Many of them are relatively young.
In contradistinction to the lies of the deniers.Replies: @tbmcc
The best you could hope for is that they stay home. (They're not now, if you've noticed.) That might happen if any Republican addressed them directly and explicitly about the matter. But even Trump hasn't done this.
Well, I’ve been glancing over these comment-threads and noticing some of the same people spouting off like they’ve always been doing. That brought to mind a comment of mine from March 25th, a little over a week ago, just after Trump declared he was going to urge everyone back to work by Easter:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/so-uh-what-just-happened/#comment-3793485
Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened and Trump “pivoted” on his decision five days later.
At the time of the comment, deaths were running around 50/day in New York, and I was predicting that they might reach 500/day, perhaps even 1,000/day by Easter, April 12th. Naturally, all the sorts of idiots who hang around here ridiculed and denounced me. I think half of them were still claiming “It’s Just the Flu!!!” Some of them still are.
As it happens, daily deaths in New York broke 500 on April 1st, far more rapidly than I had even considered plausible. (They dropped down to 432 on April 2nd). The whole thing sure looks exponential to me.
And perhaps those who on March 26th argued that seeing 500/day by April 12th was ridiculous should consider the implications of actually getting 500/day by April 1st.
Also, Cuomo now warns that the NY health care system may collapse under the weight of hospitalizations within another 6 days. When/if that happens, the death rate will immediately quadruple or more.
Maybe that French miracle drug will work and save the day. But otherwise, I just can’t see how the exponential curve will suddenly change…
What I do notice is that I and several other commenters were insisting that we need solid numbers on those who are asymptomatic so that we can "know the denominator." I think that is now the conventional wisdom, but it wasn't then.
Also, I and others were insisting that we need to try to balance the health risks and the economic risks: again now the conventional wisdom, but not then.
OT, but Tucker's interview with the guy from Florida this evening on the recent behavior of 3M -- rejecting US orders for masks but filling those from abroad -- was devastating. One should never assume villainy where mere incompetence is possible. But, in either case, if I were a big stockholder in 3M, I would be insisting the CEO resign.Replies: @AnotherDad
why is it that you won't accept even the slightest possibility that this matter has been pushed far beyond any reasonable consideration - in other words that we are living through a mass hysteria - directed or otherwise?
Permit me to try and add a little perspective:
As of now (10:09 GMT) there have been 6,095 reported deaths for the entire USA, counting from 22.01.20; i.e. for about 10 weeks or on average of 610 deaths per week. Now let's have a look at what the CDC has to say about the common flu for the period 1.10.2019 to 21.03.2020 (25.5 weeks):
- illnesses 36 - 54MM
- medical visits 18 - 26MM
- hospitalizations 400 - 730K
- deaths 24 - 62K
So even if we accept the low figure of 24,000 as the real number of deaths for the common flu (obvioulsy, the CDC gives only preliminary estimates at this time), that still amounts to about 940 deaths per week.
Where is the pandemic?Replies: @FPD72, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @Hail, @utu, @Mike1
Meanwhile here on the Left Coast, kung flu body counts stubbornly refuse to skyrocket exponentially. Cali's batting a buck fifty, Washington steadily rose from a dozen up to a couple hundred over five weeks, and Oregon adds between zero and two deaths per day for a grand whopping total of 21.
And for this, our Democratic governors have shut down their commerce.
Hoax.Replies: @Old Prude
Would hospitals accept 11 year old N95s?
Most but not all expiration dates are BS ways to force buyers to waste money. There are all metal medical devices that have expiration dates. It's complicated but paper and plastic products, powders and pills will still be usable if kept away from heat light and moisture. Products in liquid solution and pill capsules that are liquid will go bad be unusable much sooner. Latex rubber gloves eventually become dry and brittle after years on the shelf. Nitrile rubber being a synthetic is more durable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdOwGHpekd4
This is stupid and offensive.
Many of us already have N95 masks from the hardware store, because they are common tools for many kinds of dirty work! I have used mine for everything from cutting concrete to moving leaves on the compost pile. If politicians are trying to make our rightfully-owned protective gear a stigma, they can go fuck themselves.
— Gladder than ever I don’t live anywhere near LA, hoping this Confederacy of Dunces doesn’t eventually include the morons on my side of what used to be a free country.
Sure enough, that's exactly what happened and Trump "pivoted" on his decision five days later.
At the time of the comment, deaths were running around 50/day in New York, and I was predicting that they might reach 500/day, perhaps even 1,000/day by Easter, April 12th. Naturally, all the sorts of idiots who hang around here ridiculed and denounced me. I think half of them were still claiming "It's Just the Flu!!!" Some of them still are.
As it happens, daily deaths in New York broke 500 on April 1st, far more rapidly than I had even considered plausible. (They dropped down to 432 on April 2nd). The whole thing sure looks exponential to me.
And perhaps those who on March 26th argued that seeing 500/day by April 12th was ridiculous should consider the implications of actually getting 500/day by April 1st.
Also, Cuomo now warns that the NY health care system may collapse under the weight of hospitalizations within another 6 days. When/if that happens, the death rate will immediately quadruple or more.
Maybe that French miracle drug will work and save the day. But otherwise, I just can't see how the exponential curve will suddenly change...Replies: @anon, @PhysicistDave, @Hypnotoad666, @mh505, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Inquiring Mind
just after Trump declared he was going to urge everyone back to work by Easter:
Trump did not say that. There is no quote of him saying it that I have found via search.
Trump said he wanted the country re-opened by Easter. That is easy to find in any search.
Words mean things. Please be more careful, Mr. Unz.
And perhaps those who on March 26th argued that seeing 500/day by April 12th was ridiculous should consider the implications of actually getting 500/day by April 1st.
This.
A lot of people do not understand what “exponential” really means, that has become painfully obvious.
It's becoming painfully obvious that you and many others here are proud that you mastered and remember your eighth-grade maffs class. Good doggy!
Meanwhile, kung flu body counts remain painfully linear all across the US.Replies: @HA
Keep them and use them as you see fit.
I have only been inside buildings with the public two times in the past two weeks. (My wife hasn’t been at all.) Those are the two times so far I have worn one of my N95 masks. Now, I am not very worried about an illness that very likely would not kill me, but the mask is easy and prevents me from passing along the virus if I have it.
We should all wear masks now, so I will continue to wear one of mine when appropriate. You and I don’t need idiot politicians making public statements that are worded the wrong way. What the stupid mayor of LA should have said is “Do not BUY N95 masks. Those are needed by professionals now. Some of you have them, and that’s fine, but don’t buy more.” But no, he said “Don’t wear them.” Fucking idiot created a stigma.
In fact, why don’t our wise leaders just forbid stores from selling N95s to the public, and divert them wholesale to hospitals and other places where they are more needed? Huh?
It probably won’t amount to anything, but I wish even our beloved Steve wouldn’t have worded his subtitle, “A sensible suggestion…”
Sure enough, that's exactly what happened and Trump "pivoted" on his decision five days later.
At the time of the comment, deaths were running around 50/day in New York, and I was predicting that they might reach 500/day, perhaps even 1,000/day by Easter, April 12th. Naturally, all the sorts of idiots who hang around here ridiculed and denounced me. I think half of them were still claiming "It's Just the Flu!!!" Some of them still are.
As it happens, daily deaths in New York broke 500 on April 1st, far more rapidly than I had even considered plausible. (They dropped down to 432 on April 2nd). The whole thing sure looks exponential to me.
And perhaps those who on March 26th argued that seeing 500/day by April 12th was ridiculous should consider the implications of actually getting 500/day by April 1st.
Also, Cuomo now warns that the NY health care system may collapse under the weight of hospitalizations within another 6 days. When/if that happens, the death rate will immediately quadruple or more.
Maybe that French miracle drug will work and save the day. But otherwise, I just can't see how the exponential curve will suddenly change...Replies: @anon, @PhysicistDave, @Hypnotoad666, @mh505, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Inquiring Mind
Ron Unz wrote:
Well… I just glanced back at all my comments for more than a month (cool feature, Ron — thanks!) and was relieved to see I did not say that. Nor did I denounce you.
What I do notice is that I and several other commenters were insisting that we need solid numbers on those who are asymptomatic so that we can “know the denominator.” I think that is now the conventional wisdom, but it wasn’t then.
Also, I and others were insisting that we need to try to balance the health risks and the economic risks: again now the conventional wisdom, but not then.
OT, but Tucker’s interview with the guy from Florida this evening on the recent behavior of 3M — rejecting US orders for masks but filling those from abroad — was devastating. One should never assume villainy where mere incompetence is possible. But, in either case, if I were a big stockholder in 3M, I would be insisting the CEO resign.
-- People who don't understand the distortion of selection effects.Replies: @anonymous, @Mr. Anon, @UK, @PhysicistDave
https://twitter.com/Ageofdeception1/status/1245802097045573632
Areas of the US with high percentages of black residents are beginning show a higher-than-average death rate. Democrats have realized this, and they're desperate to hide it. They don't want blacks to make the connection between their own climbing death rates and the Democrats' open borders policy. Blacks are already suspicous that they're losing jobs to foreigners. If blacks realize that foreigners are giving them a high death rate too, blacks may revolt against the Democrats. First their jobs are taken away from them, and then their very lives. This is why the Democrats have suddenly escalated their war on Trump. They're frantic to hide their own policy failures, because they realize they're screwed once blacks figure out what's going on. Blacks may bolt the Democrats in large numbers over this.Replies: @obwandiyag, @Mr McKenna, @Reg Cæsar, @PSR, @J.Ross
More importantly, if one watches the video, one sees:
1. They are packed with sick people, and
2. Many of them are relatively young.
In contradistinction to the lies of the deniers.
Reserved? this is getting more Soviet every day.
In any case, the whole mask shortage for the medical system thing has lost all credibility with me.
a) This morning Gov. Newsom said the state has already distributed 39 million masks (from context it appears to be n95 ones) . (1)
b) a week ago he said he’s aiming for 500 million!
(https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/24/governor-newsom-richard-branson-latest-billionaire-stepping-up-in-states-covid-19-response/)
—
There’re are only 40 million people in the state. only 1500 hospitalized with covid. they need to peace themselves a bit.
IF there’s anything NEAR a shortage with those numbers it’s because the system isn’t making the slightest effort to conserve. Or maybe the doctors are using them for very uncomfortable toilet paper or something, though even then i don’t see how they’d go through that many.
1)
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/california-governor-gavin-newsom-covid-19-briefing-transcript-april-2
I have a small stash of masks, and they’re all N95. If I’m going to wear a mask, that’s what I’ll wear. That’s what the store had.
I have no idea of what the total death rate will be when this all burns out, but, one, I can safely predict the total will be higher than if we did nothing, two, the vast majority will be people who were going to have been dead relatively soon anyway, and three, if the harvest doesn’t include some of America’s most poisonous geriatric leftists I will be disappointed.
My guess is that a fair number of younger Dems are hoping for a codger cleanout as well so they can move up. Senile Joe is unelectable, and they know it: they want to unhorse him and put The Rod or Pocahontas in there, and if he goes early it’ll be easier to do it. I suspect they have nothing to fear from the right but a lot to fear from their own side.
"The Rod"? I'm drawing a blank.
What about those of us who are symptomatic but not infected?
https://twitter.com/Ageofdeception1/status/1245802097045573632
Areas of the US with high percentages of black residents are beginning show a higher-than-average death rate. Democrats have realized this, and they're desperate to hide it. They don't want blacks to make the connection between their own climbing death rates and the Democrats' open borders policy. Blacks are already suspicous that they're losing jobs to foreigners. If blacks realize that foreigners are giving them a high death rate too, blacks may revolt against the Democrats. First their jobs are taken away from them, and then their very lives. This is why the Democrats have suddenly escalated their war on Trump. They're frantic to hide their own policy failures, because they realize they're screwed once blacks figure out what's going on. Blacks may bolt the Democrats in large numbers over this.Replies: @obwandiyag, @Mr McKenna, @Reg Cæsar, @PSR, @J.Ross
Sorry, but nothing of the kind is going to happen. The Dems with their compliant media is already twisting everything but the wind itself into a ‘Blame Trump’ action, including and especially anything to do with Covid. Trump’s supposed racism and hatred of poor ‘black and brown’ people are the reason these hospitals are starved for facilities and expertise. He has blood on his hands!
Do I believe any of that? Of course not. But if you read in the mass media, you’ll see it everywhere. And blacks are notoriously gullible.
Of course you can use them and as Steve mentioned the hospitals wouldn’t take old ones anyway.
Now that good-people are going to start praising and judging about masks, which we’re, of course totally useless until 12 hours ago but will now become the most important virtue signal, i wonder how long before people wearing masks with exhaust valves start being shamed.
But seriously, n95s without them are pretty terrible (and i don’t have any). I’m going to try to add a strip of paper towel patch on the outside somehow.
(bounty style) Paper towel inside is easy and works, at least for droplets, but almost totally defeats the benefit of the valve.
https://www.sierra12.com/s12-home/n95-respirator-masks-what-you-should-knowReplies: @Lockean Proviso, @vhrm
The funny bit is that he will be paid “fair market value” for the masks. Wonder how much over what he bought them for, current market value is? Seems the feds did the sales & distribution work for him.
At a grocery store the workers all had N95 on. The good ones with the square vent in front like a pig snout.
The square valve you call a snout is a check valve, which is a one way valve for those of you that don’t do plumbing. The masks have a check valve there because the masks are for the trades and laborers. Physical exertion makes workers breath hard which can cause the mask to slightly pop off your face when forcefully exhaling, This messes with the proper fit of the mask which is critical to its effectiveness. Masks without valves also get really hot and damp and uncomfortable if you wear them for four hours straight.
I have them for dusty jobs. They protect the wearer but they are not ideal for pandemics because they only do half the job.
Another problem with wearing masks is that they need to be properly fitted and worn. There are instructions and videos available (see 3M ) and any industrial firm has to train employees as a matter of course as part of their safety program to meet workplace HAZMAT and OSHA requirements. The problem is a fraction of the population is virtually untrainable, so they need frequent simple instruction and regular enforcement to get proper compliance.Replies: @Clyde
I’m in charge of getting masks to hospitals says Jared Kushner
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8182517/Jared-Kushner-talks-role-getting-masks-NYC-hospitals-Trump-demand.html
3M Partners With Ford to Sextuple Respirators, Aims to Double N95 Mask Production From Previous Target
https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/04/01/3m-partners-with-ford-to-sextuple-respirators-aims.aspx
“50 million masks per month in the U.S., starting June 2020”
Taiwan soon to reach 13 million masks daily, N95 respirators in works
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3903194
Sure enough, that's exactly what happened and Trump "pivoted" on his decision five days later.
At the time of the comment, deaths were running around 50/day in New York, and I was predicting that they might reach 500/day, perhaps even 1,000/day by Easter, April 12th. Naturally, all the sorts of idiots who hang around here ridiculed and denounced me. I think half of them were still claiming "It's Just the Flu!!!" Some of them still are.
As it happens, daily deaths in New York broke 500 on April 1st, far more rapidly than I had even considered plausible. (They dropped down to 432 on April 2nd). The whole thing sure looks exponential to me.
And perhaps those who on March 26th argued that seeing 500/day by April 12th was ridiculous should consider the implications of actually getting 500/day by April 1st.
Also, Cuomo now warns that the NY health care system may collapse under the weight of hospitalizations within another 6 days. When/if that happens, the death rate will immediately quadruple or more.
Maybe that French miracle drug will work and save the day. But otherwise, I just can't see how the exponential curve will suddenly change...Replies: @anon, @PhysicistDave, @Hypnotoad666, @mh505, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Inquiring Mind
If the infection rate was at that extent on March 25, and expanding exponentially, then NYC should achieve herd immunity within a couple months. (Four and a half doublings ought to do it). That’s the silver lining at least.
It also implies we should seal off NYC but also shift necessary medical resources there to prevent people from dying due to an “overwhelmed” medical system.
Going one hotspot at a time, with the sequence of infection/treatment/herd immunity wouldn’t be the worst strategy. It would prevent the national system from getting overwhelmed all at once while we buy time until a vaccine or treatment is in place.
The Coronavirus task force understood the numbers, they knew 80,000 New Yorkers had been infected by March 1st because 80 New Yorkers died by March 21st....since the fatality rate is 1% and it takes 3 weeks to succumb to CV, the task force knew that 80,000 New Yorkers were infected by March First and 160,000 were infected by March 6 and 320,000 were infected by March 11 and 640,000 were infected by March 16 and 1.2 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when Cuomo order New Yorkers to stay at home.
over 1 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 , if the number of infected doubled every 5 days. If the spread was slower , doubling every 6 days , then 800,000 New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when the Stay at Home order was given.
If 600,000 New Yorkers were infected two weeks ago , we should expect 6,000 New Yorkers will succumb to CV over the next 5 days, an average of 1,200 per day...best guess will be 700 Friday , 900 Saturday , 1200 Sunday , 1,400 Monday, 1,600 Tuesday bringing the total NY deaths to 8,000 by Tuesday April 7.
1Replies: @Ron Unz, @anonymous, @res, @prime noticer
It’s getting to be that practically all major US politicians are contrarian indicators.
Early on (three weeks ago?) a presidential exec order said that all expiration dates are to be ignored, not just for masks but for drugs. This was an early sign that shit just got real because pre- COVID-19 having expired items in a medical setting was cause for censure, fines, loss of licenses and certifications.
Most but not all expiration dates are BS ways to force buyers to waste money. There are all metal medical devices that have expiration dates. It’s complicated but paper and plastic products, powders and pills will still be usable if kept away from heat light and moisture. Products in liquid solution and pill capsules that are liquid will go bad be unusable much sooner. Latex rubber gloves eventually become dry and brittle after years on the shelf. Nitrile rubber being a synthetic is more durable.
I’ve been using them since day 1. Alternating, h202 spritzing them and leaving them in the sun
But this is damn well about time. Now, get the hydroxhloroquinol in production and let’s start testing for antibodies.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @prime noticer
If I recall correctly, studies indicate that respiratory viruses of various kinds have a much shorter half-life on organic, porous, textured materials, such as tissue, cloth or wood than on smooth, non-organic surfaces such as polished stainless steel. Something about the surface geometry of materials like paper tends to tear up the molecular structure of the viruses, given some time.
Would it make practical sense to set a used paper face mask aside in sunlight for, say, a week, and then reuse it?
It's likely though unproven that baking at between, say, 175 degrees and 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes will also deactivate any virus. Baking and then leaving in the sun for a few days should certainly do the trick.
I don't remember if hydrogen-peroxide harms masks, but alcohol and bleach reduce N95 masks' filtration ability. So does UV light, though only slightly.
Also, making a vaseline seal between the mask and your face may increase the mask's effectiveness.Replies: @Soviet of Washington, @Kylie, @Clyde
That is the position of LA County. What say you?Replies: @Redneck farmer
Well, a nurse can save lives, unlike your typical LAer.
Trump had the opportunity to quarantine New York , but he backed down when Governor Cuomo complained. This was a big mistake by Trump, to ignore the experts.
The Coronavirus task force understood the numbers, they knew 80,000 New Yorkers had been infected by March 1st because 80 New Yorkers died by March 21st….since the fatality rate is 1% and it takes 3 weeks to succumb to CV, the task force knew that 80,000 New Yorkers were infected by March First and 160,000 were infected by March 6 and 320,000 were infected by March 11 and 640,000 were infected by March 16 and 1.2 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when Cuomo order New Yorkers to stay at home.
over 1 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 , if the number of infected doubled every 5 days. If the spread was slower , doubling every 6 days , then 800,000 New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when the Stay at Home order was given.
If 600,000 New Yorkers were infected two weeks ago , we should expect 6,000 New Yorkers will succumb to CV over the next 5 days, an average of 1,200 per day…best guess will be 700 Friday , 900 Saturday , 1200 Sunday , 1,400 Monday, 1,600 Tuesday bringing the total NY deaths to 8,000 by Tuesday April 7.
1
But I do find it interesting if it only took a little more than a week for the debate on these comment-threads to shift from "Don't Worry---It's Just the Flu!!!" to whether Trump should have imposed a strict quarantine on America's largest city and surrounding region. Shouldn't that give nitwits a nice flavor of what "exponential" really means?Actually, those figures seem somewhat high to me. I'd guess that once New Yorkers became fully aware of their peril in early March, they began taking precautionary steps that substantially extended the doubling-time. Also, I've seen claims floating around the Internet that desperate New Yorkers are now widely using that special drug, and it seems to be having some positive effects.
On the other side, anything like the rates of serious infections that you're suggesting would pretty quickly crash the NY health system, producing a major spike in deaths, just like in Lombardy.
Anyway, we'll know one way or the other soon enough. As I've been emphasizing all along, this isn't Global Warming. Instead of waiting 30 years, we'll just need a week or two in order to find out who's right.Replies: @Travis, @utu
P.S. And Ron, you did not notice that?! After your "math!" grandstanding?!Replies: @Ron Unz, @utu, @Ron Unz
all the experts told him to NOT quarantine NYC. as usual, the experts were wrong. trump should have gone with his instinct.
most intelligent people don't care about how many people in NYC die. what matters is that they're allowed to escape and infect the rest of the country. that's the issue. not thousands of asshole NYC democrats dying. almost everybody in NYC is literally our enemy.
the reason the Navy vessel Comfort is not very full is because it's there for overflow, but there is no overflow, because the total lockdown is sheer idiotic lunacy. since all humans are now required to live in a cave and not come out, deaths from all sources are way down nationwide. hospitals are WAY BELOW their usual activity levels, not way above. hospitals are now LAYING OFF people, because nothing is happening. they are NOT desperate for lots more staff. thousands of medical personnel across the nation are being cut.
N95 masks are being presented by media morons as a magical anti-Corona talisman but actually provide relativity poor protective qualities compared to better respirators. The number 95 in the name indicated that it will filter 95% of 0.3 micron particles, N means not oil resistant. There are N100 and R100 filters which filter 99.97% of such particles are available for half face and full face respirators, These are far more effective than the disposable N95 respirator that are intended to be used once and discarded. 3M’s own literature states that a properly fitted full face respirator is 50X more effective than a half face respirator.
Pooty poot wore a full face respirator (likely a 3M 6800) and Tyvek jumpsuit on his much ballyhoed visit to a Corona ward
The 3M 6800(M)/6900(L) full face respirator is extremely effective against airborne particules and chemical vapors with the appropriate filter cartridge. Also heavy and cumbersome
Recent news photos show NYC EMTs wearing 3M half face mask with 3M 7000 N100 particulate filters and cheap plastic goggles.
There is an even better/more effective respirator that provides a fan to draw the air through the filter easing the physical stress of breathing through a restrictive filter.
The 3M PAPR (powered air purifying respirator) for example, sells for over $1000 compared to $100-150 for the fullface 6800 (pre-crisis prices)
https://www.3m.com/wps/wcm/connect/6cb62966-16c8-4b5f-9454-24278455e8a9/PAPR+Page+270×270.jpg?MOD=AJPERES&CACHEID=ROOTWORKSPACE-6cb62966-16c8-4b5f-9454-24278455e8a9-m9eXQl5
“They’re specifically saying, ‘Listen, we are sorry your order got pushed down, but … there are foreign countries who do business differently and they’re showing up with cash.’”
https://www.foxnews.com/media/florida-emergency-official-3m-selling-masks-overseas
Mossad imports 8 million protective face masks, dozens of respirators to Israel
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/1585645366-mossad-imports-8-million-protective-face-masks-dozens-of-respirators-to-israel
Good question. They were made by 3M and sealed in plastic. I stored them at 55 F in a basement with a dehumidifier. I could try blowing cigarette smoke through one. Otherwise, I haven’t a clue if they work.
Two weeks ago I saw two masked East Asian men standing on a street corner in an otherwise deserted quarter of a college town. One of them had pulled his mask off his face down to his neck to have a smoke.Replies: @JimB
Would it make practical sense to set a used paper face mask aside in sunlight for, say, a week, and then reuse it?Replies: @Chrisnonymous
Yes, a week in the sun should be fine.
It’s likely though unproven that baking at between, say, 175 degrees and 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes will also deactivate any virus. Baking and then leaving in the sun for a few days should certainly do the trick.
I don’t remember if hydrogen-peroxide harms masks, but alcohol and bleach reduce N95 masks’ filtration ability. So does UV light, though only slightly.
Also, making a vaseline seal between the mask and your face may increase the mask’s effectiveness.
Use your car to bake them.
Sure enough, that's exactly what happened and Trump "pivoted" on his decision five days later.
At the time of the comment, deaths were running around 50/day in New York, and I was predicting that they might reach 500/day, perhaps even 1,000/day by Easter, April 12th. Naturally, all the sorts of idiots who hang around here ridiculed and denounced me. I think half of them were still claiming "It's Just the Flu!!!" Some of them still are.
As it happens, daily deaths in New York broke 500 on April 1st, far more rapidly than I had even considered plausible. (They dropped down to 432 on April 2nd). The whole thing sure looks exponential to me.
And perhaps those who on March 26th argued that seeing 500/day by April 12th was ridiculous should consider the implications of actually getting 500/day by April 1st.
Also, Cuomo now warns that the NY health care system may collapse under the weight of hospitalizations within another 6 days. When/if that happens, the death rate will immediately quadruple or more.
Maybe that French miracle drug will work and save the day. But otherwise, I just can't see how the exponential curve will suddenly change...Replies: @anon, @PhysicistDave, @Hypnotoad666, @mh505, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Inquiring Mind
Dear Mr Unz,
why is it that you won’t accept even the slightest possibility that this matter has been pushed far beyond any reasonable consideration – in other words that we are living through a mass hysteria – directed or otherwise?
Permit me to try and add a little perspective:
As of now (10:09 GMT) there have been 6,095 reported deaths for the entire USA, counting from 22.01.20; i.e. for about 10 weeks or on average of 610 deaths per week. Now let’s have a look at what the CDC has to say about the common flu for the period 1.10.2019 to 21.03.2020 (25.5 weeks):
– illnesses 36 – 54MM
– medical visits 18 – 26MM
– hospitalizations 400 – 730K
– deaths 24 – 62K
So even if we accept the low figure of 24,000 as the real number of deaths for the common flu (obvioulsy, the CDC gives only preliminary estimates at this time), that still amounts to about 940 deaths per week.
Where is the pandemic?
Still not sure if this justifies the shutdown of the economy, since 80% of the deaths will be people over the age of 65 and very people under the age of 45 will die. The 1918 pandemic was worse because most of the victims were under the age of 45.
We should have kept the economy going and told all hospitals to stop accepting any patients over the age of 75 so we could save the lives of most workers and thus encouraged Americans to continue working and avoid this Great Depression. Instead of forcing Firms to make costly , ineffective ventilators we should have forced firms to make masks and gloves for all American workers , not just hospital workers.
If NYC hospitals had stopped putting 80 year-olds on ventilators we would not be running out of ventilators. Stop the madness , No ventilators for the obese or cancer patients ....ICU beds only for those Americans under the age of 65. Then young healthy people would not fear getting sick , knowing they will have ICU beds available and access to potential treatments like the malaria drugs. Only patients under the age of 65 should be granted the scarce malaria drugs , as these drugs will soon be unavailable...
My only hope at this point is that people like you are dumb enough to live your beliefs.
The Coronavirus task force understood the numbers, they knew 80,000 New Yorkers had been infected by March 1st because 80 New Yorkers died by March 21st....since the fatality rate is 1% and it takes 3 weeks to succumb to CV, the task force knew that 80,000 New Yorkers were infected by March First and 160,000 were infected by March 6 and 320,000 were infected by March 11 and 640,000 were infected by March 16 and 1.2 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when Cuomo order New Yorkers to stay at home.
over 1 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 , if the number of infected doubled every 5 days. If the spread was slower , doubling every 6 days , then 800,000 New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when the Stay at Home order was given.
If 600,000 New Yorkers were infected two weeks ago , we should expect 6,000 New Yorkers will succumb to CV over the next 5 days, an average of 1,200 per day...best guess will be 700 Friday , 900 Saturday , 1200 Sunday , 1,400 Monday, 1,600 Tuesday bringing the total NY deaths to 8,000 by Tuesday April 7.
1Replies: @Ron Unz, @anonymous, @res, @prime noticer
Well, that’s hard to say since I’m not sure a federal quarantine could have been effectively conducted on a city of 11M. Plus since Greater New York, including NJ and CT, are “hotspots” maybe we’re talking about a substantial region of something like 20-25M people.
But I do find it interesting if it only took a little more than a week for the debate on these comment-threads to shift from “Don’t Worry—It’s Just the Flu!!!” to whether Trump should have imposed a strict quarantine on America’s largest city and surrounding region. Shouldn’t that give nitwits a nice flavor of what “exponential” really means?
Actually, those figures seem somewhat high to me. I’d guess that once New Yorkers became fully aware of their peril in early March, they began taking precautionary steps that substantially extended the doubling-time. Also, I’ve seen claims floating around the Internet that desperate New Yorkers are now widely using that special drug, and it seems to be having some positive effects.
On the other side, anything like the rates of serious infections that you’re suggesting would pretty quickly crash the NY health system, producing a major spike in deaths, just like in Lombardy.
Anyway, we’ll know one way or the other soon enough. As I’ve been emphasizing all along, this isn’t Global Warming. Instead of waiting 30 years, we’ll just need a week or two in order to find out who’s right.
The Malaria drug cure may well be effective , but few New Yorkers will have access to these drugs when they get sick. Most who get sick will try and recover at home , and avoid being exposed to increased viral loads at the hospital. Even if they get a prescription from their doctors for the drugs, the shelves are bare of these drugs in NY and NJ pharmacies.
Most of the people rushing to get treated at the hospitals are very sick , having trouble breathing and likely too sick to benefit from the drug cocktails. Need to get treatment quickly to obtain the benefits, before the patient has double pneumonia....but few sick people will risk going to the hospital with a sore throat , knowing the virus has permeated the air of all local hospitals with most of the nurses already infected. Would need to be very sick to venture into any NY or NJ hospital today. Better to take once chances at home drinking green tea and taking zinc.
Just wear a Hello Kitty bandana over your N95.
The Med. The masks are available, but not at stores. I was gifted a box of 10 plus 2 from a local contractor who also gave me a gallon of 99% isopropyl alcohol. Every collision shop, commercial painting contractor, lead or asbestos abatement contractor and pretty much any company that handles toxic products has them. OSHA comes down so hard on everybody that is better to have the N-95s than risk their fines and sanctions.
I kicked down and tore down several signs today, making our park less threatening and more welcoming to everyone.
Fuck you, CoronaHoax.
Fuck you, Democratic Party.
Fuck you, boomers.Replies: @Buffalo Joe, @Old Prude
Je, the outdoor, all weather track at our HS is padlocked, as are the tennis courts. Signage states: “Closed due to state of emergency.” Nice safe place to walk or jog on a measured surface. However, every dog in my neighborhood is being walked to the point of exhaustion, some being dragged on their sides after they collapse. I never knew there were this many dog on the circle.
why is it that you won't accept even the slightest possibility that this matter has been pushed far beyond any reasonable consideration - in other words that we are living through a mass hysteria - directed or otherwise?
Permit me to try and add a little perspective:
As of now (10:09 GMT) there have been 6,095 reported deaths for the entire USA, counting from 22.01.20; i.e. for about 10 weeks or on average of 610 deaths per week. Now let's have a look at what the CDC has to say about the common flu for the period 1.10.2019 to 21.03.2020 (25.5 weeks):
- illnesses 36 - 54MM
- medical visits 18 - 26MM
- hospitalizations 400 - 730K
- deaths 24 - 62K
So even if we accept the low figure of 24,000 as the real number of deaths for the common flu (obvioulsy, the CDC gives only preliminary estimates at this time), that still amounts to about 940 deaths per week.
Where is the pandemic?Replies: @FPD72, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @Hail, @utu, @Mike1
Do the terms “trend line,” “exponential growth,” or “accelerating rate” have any meaning to you? Taking the average number of deaths per week over the past ten weeks (the incipient phase of virus spread) and using that number for determining the future impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in comparison to past death totals from the flu is not a sound analytical method.
(https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/24/governor-newsom-richard-branson-latest-billionaire-stepping-up-in-states-covid-19-response/)--
There're are only 40 million people in the state. only 1500 hospitalized with covid. they need to peace themselves a bit.
IF there's anything NEAR a shortage with those numbers it's because the system isn't making the slightest effort to conserve. Or maybe the doctors are using them for very uncomfortable toilet paper or something, though even then i don't see how they'd go through that many.
1)https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/california-governor-gavin-newsom-covid-19-briefing-transcript-april-2Replies: @Jack D
It really is. We always thought that this type of thinking was some kind of Communist thing, but it’s really human nature to revert to this under conditions of threat and shortage. People who try to establish market prices are “hoarders” or “gougers”. Private businesses and goods are ordered to work for the state or confiscated for the benefit of the people. People who are doing vital work for the benefit of the state are given special access to scarce goods. It’s all straight from Soviet history (and Cuban history, etc. – anywhere that a Communist system has been tried).
I used to think that this was all driven by Communist ideology but I see now that it’s really driven by the perceived imperatives of the situation – the only thing Communist ideology does is create the crisis and then all else follows naturally. When you interfere with markets, things get worse and then the worsening situation itself becomes the pretext for further destructive decrees and the spiral downward becomes even more rapid. It’s like one of those situations where the pilot manipulates the controls incorrectly and instead of pulling out of the dive he only makes it worse.
Supermarket shelves are empty. Unemployment is massive. I used to think it would take years and years of Leftist mismanagement for the US to reach Venezuela levels but we’ve accomplished this in only a few weeks. If our government had done absolutely nothing in the face of this epidemic, it really would have been better than what we have now. The same # of people are going to die either way, but now we get to destroy our economy on top of that.
i posted as much several times over the last 3 months. the United States is some kind of really atypical historical aberration. socialism or some form of communism is actually the human default. 'It can't happen here' is totally wrong. America will absolutely become some kind of socialist quasi communist nation if enough of the people are replaced and certain events come along that the Democrats can exploit.
you can see this already in who is resisting the Democrat governors (not that many people, and all of them on the right) versus who is obeying without question (almost all the other citizens).
when Democrats are in monopoly control of America, the great majority of the population will accept this transition without objection. they will be fine with the bill of rights going away.
https://msbeckleysblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/shylock-1.jpg
Already being done. No need to forbid stores from selling masks, because stores don’t have masks, and probably won’t for months.
The same will be true of masks, I’m sure. They’ll reappear on the shelves in a few weeks, at a higher price. People will wait for the price to come back down and then not buy them. Until a volcano erupts or another SARS virus erupts. Then they’ll tell me I should send mine to the local hospital, which A. Didn’t buy enough and, B. Let the ones they did buy walk out the back door.
It’s human nature.
One interesting thing to me is the pushback from rural locals to the big city types taking refuge in the countryside. I’d think there are quite a few folks reevaluating the old bug-out cabin plan. That’s writ especially large for the ultra rich and their compounds in New Zealand. Even Geffen has to dock his mega yacht eventually. Hell, the USN can’t keep a carrier at sea. I wonder who’s keeping the riff-raff off the beaches in Malibu at the moment?
What I do notice is that I and several other commenters were insisting that we need solid numbers on those who are asymptomatic so that we can "know the denominator." I think that is now the conventional wisdom, but it wasn't then.
Also, I and others were insisting that we need to try to balance the health risks and the economic risks: again now the conventional wisdom, but not then.
OT, but Tucker's interview with the guy from Florida this evening on the recent behavior of 3M -- rejecting US orders for masks but filling those from abroad -- was devastating. One should never assume villainy where mere incompetence is possible. But, in either case, if I were a big stockholder in 3M, I would be insisting the CEO resign.Replies: @AnotherDad
Thanks PhysDave.
I’ve been pointing out–tediously–since day one that the Diamond Princess is the only situation where population wide testing was done and ergo “we know the denominator”.
The Diamond Princess situation shows that this was real, not “just the flu”. But it also showed that this is basically an old people/sick people killer, not smallpox or the Spanish Flu or something. Which is to me–and any real “conservative”–a bit reassuring because it’s the young people that are the future of our nation/civilization. (I care about my kids far, far more than i care about me.)
And it also showed there are huge numbers of asymptomatic people–maybe as high as a half. And huge numbers of not very sick people. Ergo any “case” counts–relying on people who are pretty sick saying “test me” and a test actually being available–are going to be very low. And ergo “case fatality” rates different from real “infection fatality rates” which are what actually matter to people.
Basically the “death rate” numbers are slop. With the exponential growth skewing it one way–in a reasonably well known fashion–but the all the asymptomatic cases, mild cases, and testing bottlenecks skewing it the other way–in an unknown, and likely much larger, fashion.
And it is just ridiculous that our “public health authorities”–i.e. timeserving bozos–continue to not do the sort of sampling that will get us the data.
~~~
People’s emotional reactions will vary depending on their personality types and on what they value, but from the beginning this has exposed two different kinds of innumeracy.
— People who don’t understand the power of exponential growth.
— People who don’t understand the distortion of selection effects.
The knowledge base of boomer's is far more valuable. What challenges have your crappy kids been through. What wisdom do they have to share? How to beat level 27 of Doom?
Let your kids go. They were lucky to be here in the first place. It just might not be their time, that's all. You gave it a try, it didn't work. No need to make a big deal of it. When all the carnage has subsided, the boomer's will hopefully be here to pick up the pieces. Post apocalypse, I'd much rather have one as a neighbor to help me rebuild than your bratty, aimless kids. And so would you, if you were honest.
It's funny how so many people (and I'm not talking about you, AD) point fingers at Corona-skeptics and deride their opinions as "it's just the flu, bro", while discounting the massive economic dislocation that's going on with what amounts to "it's just a depression, bro".
1. The age distribution of the Diamond Princess, which skewed very old, resulting in exaggerated lethality.
2. The massive bias towards false negatives and not false positives, due to factors like technician incompetence and the sensitivity of the test.
3. Recovered patients showing negative, and long-term assymptomatic infected who had only recently been infected also showing negative.
4. The cultural and even economic biases towards declaring people who die with the Coronavirus to be dead of it. Cruise ships are full of old and overweight people. I recently snuck into a cruises hip only bar area in a cruise ship only marina. The drinks cost 8 times what they did 200m walk on a holiday island away and the drinks 200m away were much nicer. It was a perfectly safe place. Nonetheless, the charmless American chain bar was full. Walking did not seem to be an option for many of the late stage Wall E crowd. They were actually lovely people though. Anyway, some of them, statistically, would die during the cruise and just after.Replies: @Steve Sailer
I think it is time for everyone to start considering the possibility that a relatively voluntarist approach might have worked: I have two neighbors in their '90s -- they did not need government orders to self-isolate. I'm reasonably healthy and in my '60s -- I started wearing a mask a week ago when grocery shopping, before the feds kindly admitted it might help. My wife and I have enough sense not to go to a basketball game given the pandemic.
Was sending the kids home from school a good idea? Hard to say -- they might have helped with herd immunity had they stayed in school, but they might have infected and killed grandma and grandpa. Anyway, the state runs most of the schools, so on that I will defer to the state.
If they allow people to pick up takeout food from McDonald's et al., couldn't they have allowed us to pick up books from the library? No, of course not! Big Macs are essential, but books... Well, everyone knows that a population is more docile if they are not encouraged to do subversive things like read books!
No doubt mistakes were inevitable, but the mistakes seem to be overwhelmingly on the side of denying personal liberty and enhancing the power of the state -- not to mention wrecking the economy, which will of course be "rebuilt" by the feds.
This is starting to remind me of some dead guys a long time ago who wrote:I'm starting to feel that our current rulers have rather less concern for our future security than for enhancing their own power.
My impression is that Trump made his back-to-work-by-Easter statement as a way to give encouragement to Wall Street, which was taking a historic nosedive about that time.
Here’s what Trump said on March 22:
“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”
and on Fox:
“I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,”
Maybe he also said something more definitive, but the first statement sounds pretty open ended. The second sounds less like policy and more like hopefulness to me. Presidents have a long history of making inaccurate statements during times of crisis.
One example is, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
There might’ve been some truth in that statement at the macro level with regards to volatile markets, but on the micro level, individuals had a lot more to fear than fear itself in 1932. Regardless, it was FDR’s intent to encourage people, not give them an accurate assessment of – and remedy for – the threat.
It's likely though unproven that baking at between, say, 175 degrees and 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes will also deactivate any virus. Baking and then leaving in the sun for a few days should certainly do the trick.
I don't remember if hydrogen-peroxide harms masks, but alcohol and bleach reduce N95 masks' filtration ability. So does UV light, though only slightly.
Also, making a vaseline seal between the mask and your face may increase the mask's effectiveness.Replies: @Soviet of Washington, @Kylie, @Clyde
No, it’s been studied. Chris Martenson linked to one study earlier this week. 170 deg F for 30 min is sufficient. He suggests putting them in a paper bag first to contain any contamination.
why is it that you won't accept even the slightest possibility that this matter has been pushed far beyond any reasonable consideration - in other words that we are living through a mass hysteria - directed or otherwise?
Permit me to try and add a little perspective:
As of now (10:09 GMT) there have been 6,095 reported deaths for the entire USA, counting from 22.01.20; i.e. for about 10 weeks or on average of 610 deaths per week. Now let's have a look at what the CDC has to say about the common flu for the period 1.10.2019 to 21.03.2020 (25.5 weeks):
- illnesses 36 - 54MM
- medical visits 18 - 26MM
- hospitalizations 400 - 730K
- deaths 24 - 62K
So even if we accept the low figure of 24,000 as the real number of deaths for the common flu (obvioulsy, the CDC gives only preliminary estimates at this time), that still amounts to about 940 deaths per week.
Where is the pandemic?Replies: @FPD72, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @Hail, @utu, @Mike1
In April alone 24,000 New Yorkers will die from CV. With the current death rates and growth we should expect about 60,000 Americans to die from CV this month.
Still not sure if this justifies the shutdown of the economy, since 80% of the deaths will be people over the age of 65 and very people under the age of 45 will die. The 1918 pandemic was worse because most of the victims were under the age of 45.
We should have kept the economy going and told all hospitals to stop accepting any patients over the age of 75 so we could save the lives of most workers and thus encouraged Americans to continue working and avoid this Great Depression. Instead of forcing Firms to make costly , ineffective ventilators we should have forced firms to make masks and gloves for all American workers , not just hospital workers.
If NYC hospitals had stopped putting 80 year-olds on ventilators we would not be running out of ventilators. Stop the madness , No ventilators for the obese or cancer patients ….ICU beds only for those Americans under the age of 65. Then young healthy people would not fear getting sick , knowing they will have ICU beds available and access to potential treatments like the malaria drugs. Only patients under the age of 65 should be granted the scarce malaria drugs , as these drugs will soon be unavailable…
Malibu is on top of things– six feet, or 600, isn’t enough:
Officials: Paddleboarder arrested at Malibu Pier for flouting state stay at home order
From Ellie Bufkin in the Federalist Society’s daily BRIGHT newsletter:
She’s talking about bladesmanship, but Jackson-vs-Arthur seems a most apt analogy for a Trump- Biden race.
What's really hilarious is this quote from the article:
"Kim Prather, who works at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told the Los Angeles Times that the beach could be one of the most dangerous places in California amid the outbreak. She said she fears the virus is being washed into the ocean and transferred back into the air along the coast.
“I wouldn’t go in the water if you paid me $1 million right now,” she told the newspaper.
Apparently, she's never heard of the fact that UV light from the sun destroys viruses. The beach and water are pretty safe. She's too stupid to know which end is up.
Here's her bio:
"Kimberly Prather is an American scientist who is an Atmospheric Chemist, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry, and a Distinguished Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego. Her work focuses on how humans are influencing the atmosphere and climate."
She's a climate wackjob. I'll bet she's the local media's contact at Scripps that they call up whenever they want an 'informed source,' for crazy liberal talking points.Replies: @Jack D
https://twitter.com/Ageofdeception1/status/1245802097045573632
Areas of the US with high percentages of black residents are beginning show a higher-than-average death rate. Democrats have realized this, and they're desperate to hide it. They don't want blacks to make the connection between their own climbing death rates and the Democrats' open borders policy. Blacks are already suspicous that they're losing jobs to foreigners. If blacks realize that foreigners are giving them a high death rate too, blacks may revolt against the Democrats. First their jobs are taken away from them, and then their very lives. This is why the Democrats have suddenly escalated their war on Trump. They're frantic to hide their own policy failures, because they realize they're screwed once blacks figure out what's going on. Blacks may bolt the Democrats in large numbers over this.Replies: @obwandiyag, @Mr McKenna, @Reg Cæsar, @PSR, @J.Ross
Now this is delusional. You must be young.
The best you could hope for is that they stay home. (They’re not now, if you’ve noticed.) That might happen if any Republican addressed them directly and explicitly about the matter. But even Trump hasn’t done this.
Those are 3M 8511 respirators. They are good at keeping contaminants and dust out, but they do not keep the stuff you breath out from exiting the mask, thus they can’t protect those around you from any illness you might have.
The square valve you call a snout is a check valve, which is a one way valve for those of you that don’t do plumbing. The masks have a check valve there because the masks are for the trades and laborers. Physical exertion makes workers breath hard which can cause the mask to slightly pop off your face when forcefully exhaling, This messes with the proper fit of the mask which is critical to its effectiveness. Masks without valves also get really hot and damp and uncomfortable if you wear them for four hours straight.
I have them for dusty jobs. They protect the wearer but they are not ideal for pandemics because they only do half the job.
Another problem with wearing masks is that they need to be properly fitted and worn. There are instructions and videos available (see 3M ) and any industrial firm has to train employees as a matter of course as part of their safety program to meet workplace HAZMAT and OSHA requirements. The problem is a fraction of the population is virtually untrainable, so they need frequent simple instruction and regular enforcement to get proper compliance.
The Coronavirus task force understood the numbers, they knew 80,000 New Yorkers had been infected by March 1st because 80 New Yorkers died by March 21st....since the fatality rate is 1% and it takes 3 weeks to succumb to CV, the task force knew that 80,000 New Yorkers were infected by March First and 160,000 were infected by March 6 and 320,000 were infected by March 11 and 640,000 were infected by March 16 and 1.2 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when Cuomo order New Yorkers to stay at home.
over 1 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 , if the number of infected doubled every 5 days. If the spread was slower , doubling every 6 days , then 800,000 New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when the Stay at Home order was given.
If 600,000 New Yorkers were infected two weeks ago , we should expect 6,000 New Yorkers will succumb to CV over the next 5 days, an average of 1,200 per day...best guess will be 700 Friday , 900 Saturday , 1200 Sunday , 1,400 Monday, 1,600 Tuesday bringing the total NY deaths to 8,000 by Tuesday April 7.
1Replies: @Ron Unz, @anonymous, @res, @prime noticer
Hey, there. The President is not intended to be your “Big Daddy,” who lays his giant bitch hand across the plantation at his discretion. You have local and state legislators who YOU voted for, currently showing YOU what they’re capable of. Attack your local leaders, and leave President Trump alone. He’s got other shit to legitimately worry about along with this. He doesn’t have a giant head full of the geolocations of all the surgery mask stock that was stuck in some forgotten back warehouse in New Jersey in 1998. That’s up to YOUR people. Get off YOUR ass, and hassle your local mayor, senator, congressman, and governor, before you think of coughing up stupid shit about Trump.
I’m in Los Angeles, and I have to deal with a Mayor who is more confused than a blind faggot at a weenie roast! Always has been, always will be. He’s a fucking waste of space. But that’s what I have to work with, that’ll do me any good at all.
I complain about him, send emails to his office, send emails to city councilmen, etc. After that, I try to figure out things for myself. Ain’t no President gonna help save your personal ass. That’s up to you, and the people who you choose to surround yourself with, and the local dumb shits YOU chose to vote for!
Alla yuz, cryin’ about Trump. He’s not your “Big Daddy.” He’s not even your house negro! Try to eject that mentality out of your pumpkin head! Just count your blessings. Right now, it could have been Hillary running the show. Yeah, that’s right. Count your blessings we don’t have a crazy cross-eyed toad bitch at the national helm! THEN you’d have something to cry about!
You’re welcome!
But this, of course, is why the Democrats are wrapped around the axle. They fervently desire that "states" be reduced to mere administrative zones within a highly centralized nation, but when it comes to the event this guarantees that their governors and other officials are unprepared, as well as psychologically indisposed, to act as effective administrators exercising authority, informed by knowledge of the issues and potential solutions to problems. They are by nature political hacks, okay for distributing patronage, and rubbing the bellies of their favored identity groups, but otherwise inadequate to challenges, limited to wailing until Mommy swoops in to kiss it and make it ALL better.
When forced to it, some of them wake up and realize that, under the federal republic, they not only have the power and authority, but also the responsibility to grasp the rod. Job one for most all of them is instead perpetuating the "Orange Man Bad" line, thus you see putzes like Michigan Governor Granholm declaring that doctors subject to their state medical boards' authority are not permitted to use the hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin therapeutic regime upon penalty of disciplinary action, only to four days later ask for help in acquiring these very same drugs for their own citizens' potential benefit after their calculus of potential political gain versus potential unnecessary deaths is seen for what it truly is; i.e., despicably sociopathic.
Well, that ain't no new thang, as the last several years' succession of bullshit, spiteful, and unhinged attacks on the lawfully elected President reveal. Instead of these acts, the Democrat party could have fought it out over policies, but no, their impulse is to try to undermine the Constitutional order and usurp the vote of the Electoral College (see, there's that contempt for the federal republic again).
It's likely though unproven that baking at between, say, 175 degrees and 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes will also deactivate any virus. Baking and then leaving in the sun for a few days should certainly do the trick.
I don't remember if hydrogen-peroxide harms masks, but alcohol and bleach reduce N95 masks' filtration ability. So does UV light, though only slightly.
Also, making a vaseline seal between the mask and your face may increase the mask's effectiveness.Replies: @Soviet of Washington, @Kylie, @Clyde
Thank you. Your posts have been very informative. Much appreciated.
Officials: Paddleboarder arrested at Malibu Pier for flouting state stay at home order
From Ellie Bufkin in the Federalist Society's daily BRIGHT newsletter:She's talking about bladesmanship, but Jackson-vs-Arthur seems a most apt analogy for a Trump- Biden race.Replies: @Anon
Paddleboarder, off in the water well away from other people, was arrested for not obeying social distancing rules. Poor guy.
What’s really hilarious is this quote from the article:
“Kim Prather, who works at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told the Los Angeles Times that the beach could be one of the most dangerous places in California amid the outbreak. She said she fears the virus is being washed into the ocean and transferred back into the air along the coast.
“I wouldn’t go in the water if you paid me $1 million right now,” she told the newspaper.
Apparently, she’s never heard of the fact that UV light from the sun destroys viruses. The beach and water are pretty safe. She’s too stupid to know which end is up.
Here’s her bio:
“Kimberly Prather is an American scientist who is an Atmospheric Chemist, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry, and a Distinguished Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego. Her work focuses on how humans are influencing the atmosphere and climate.”
She’s a climate wackjob. I’ll bet she’s the local media’s contact at Scripps that they call up whenever they want an ‘informed source,’ for crazy liberal talking points.
Depends what kind of N95. The “better” ones (for normal use) have a one way exhale valve that makes it easier to breath. But this means that your outgoing breath is not filtered.
Probably the best thing to do in the current situation is to get a cloth mask to wear on top of your N95. This will do several things, all of which are good:
1. Hide the fact that you are wearing an N95 because you may get hostility from people who have accepted the government propaganda that N95s should be “reserved”
2. Help to keep your N95s clean. I would still sanitize by putting the N95 in a 160F oven for 30 minutes when you get home. Or under UV if you have it. Remove the masks by the strings and never touch the mask itself and then wash your hands. The cloth mask can go in the wash.
3. Cover up the valve so that your exhalations will be at least somewhat filtered.
4. The cloth mask can be decorative and make us all look less like we are Asian or in a bad science fiction movie. Alt.righters can decorate theirs with swastikas and if anyone complains they can tell them that they are Native American like Liz Warren and this is not a swastika, it’s a “whirling log” – a Navajo good luck symbol to keep disease away.
I decorate mine with a cross and hang garlic from it to keep vampires away. Learned that from my wife.Replies: @Chrisnonymous
-- People who don't understand the distortion of selection effects.Replies: @anonymous, @Mr. Anon, @UK, @PhysicistDave
Not to me. Your kids are expendable. We can make more. I mean, stop and think what you’re trying to save, here: Some half-brained internet-sucking, semi-literate swine-in-the-making with the concentration power of a lightning bug. Easy to make, as well as easy to let go of.
The knowledge base of boomer’s is far more valuable. What challenges have your crappy kids been through. What wisdom do they have to share? How to beat level 27 of Doom?
Let your kids go. They were lucky to be here in the first place. It just might not be their time, that’s all. You gave it a try, it didn’t work. No need to make a big deal of it. When all the carnage has subsided, the boomer’s will hopefully be here to pick up the pieces. Post apocalypse, I’d much rather have one as a neighbor to help me rebuild than your bratty, aimless kids. And so would you, if you were honest.
this sounds familiar…
“Do not use surgical and N95 masks, which are reserved for first responders and medical workers.”
oh right. i think i’ve heard this before.
‘Do not not purchase or use firearms, which are reserved for police and my personal bodyguards.’
democrats are good at this tyranny stuff. do not protect yourself, that’s only for me and my staff. surgical masks for me, not for thee. be interesting to see how far they go to stop the LA asian population from wearing masks.
I think they will have masks in a few months. The same people who were complaining about ammunition shortages to me a few years ago are complaining again. Apparently they didn’t take advantage of the glut in the ammunition market that occurred over the last couple of years.
The same will be true of masks, I’m sure. They’ll reappear on the shelves in a few weeks, at a higher price. People will wait for the price to come back down and then not buy them. Until a volcano erupts or another SARS virus erupts. Then they’ll tell me I should send mine to the local hospital, which A. Didn’t buy enough and, B. Let the ones they did buy walk out the back door.
It’s human nature.
One interesting thing to me is the pushback from rural locals to the big city types taking refuge in the countryside. I’d think there are quite a few folks reevaluating the old bug-out cabin plan. That’s writ especially large for the ultra rich and their compounds in New Zealand. Even Geffen has to dock his mega yacht eventually. Hell, the USN can’t keep a carrier at sea. I wonder who’s keeping the riff-raff off the beaches in Malibu at the moment?
https://twitter.com/Ageofdeception1/status/1245802097045573632
Areas of the US with high percentages of black residents are beginning show a higher-than-average death rate. Democrats have realized this, and they're desperate to hide it. They don't want blacks to make the connection between their own climbing death rates and the Democrats' open borders policy. Blacks are already suspicous that they're losing jobs to foreigners. If blacks realize that foreigners are giving them a high death rate too, blacks may revolt against the Democrats. First their jobs are taken away from them, and then their very lives. This is why the Democrats have suddenly escalated their war on Trump. They're frantic to hide their own policy failures, because they realize they're screwed once blacks figure out what's going on. Blacks may bolt the Democrats in large numbers over this.Replies: @obwandiyag, @Mr McKenna, @Reg Cæsar, @PSR, @J.Ross
Hardly. Dems would be thrilled if all deaths as a resut of this virus were blacks. Look what whitey has done to you now!!!
He may very well have something better.
Now that good-people are going to start praising and judging about masks, which we're, of course totally useless until 12 hours ago but will now become the most important virtue signal, i wonder how long before people wearing masks with exhaust valves start being shamed.
But seriously, n95s without them are pretty terrible (and i don't have any). I'm going to try to add a strip of paper towel patch on the outside somehow.
(bounty style) Paper towel inside is easy and works, at least for droplets, but almost totally defeats the benefit of the valve.Replies: @res
This is an excellent point. And the first time I have seen it made during the COVID-19 kerfuffle (Thanks!). Perhaps it should be obvious, but… Here is one take on that:
https://www.sierra12.com/s12-home/n95-respirator-masks-what-you-should-know
It's true the valved masks don't filter outgoing air, but they do redirect it. Some more than others.
So they'll definitely limit droplet projection by a lot even if they aren't all contained.
On outgoing aerosols... probably not much.
why is it that you won't accept even the slightest possibility that this matter has been pushed far beyond any reasonable consideration - in other words that we are living through a mass hysteria - directed or otherwise?
Permit me to try and add a little perspective:
As of now (10:09 GMT) there have been 6,095 reported deaths for the entire USA, counting from 22.01.20; i.e. for about 10 weeks or on average of 610 deaths per week. Now let's have a look at what the CDC has to say about the common flu for the period 1.10.2019 to 21.03.2020 (25.5 weeks):
- illnesses 36 - 54MM
- medical visits 18 - 26MM
- hospitalizations 400 - 730K
- deaths 24 - 62K
So even if we accept the low figure of 24,000 as the real number of deaths for the common flu (obvioulsy, the CDC gives only preliminary estimates at this time), that still amounts to about 940 deaths per week.
Where is the pandemic?Replies: @FPD72, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @Hail, @utu, @Mike1
Because of the wide spread of the novel virus (an act itself that is unremarkable; it is what all airborne viruses tend to do), the figure “coronavirus deaths” itself is also increasingly meaningless.
The media-led CoronaPanic-pushers are gleefully counting everyone who tests positive and dies. The most recent Italian data released by specialists some days ago estimates that 88% of deaths were terminal patients (“going to die anyway”), 12% were deaths were deaths that would be attributable, by a medical examiner, to the effects of the viral infection directly (and, statistically speaking, none of the latter category are prime-age, healthy persons).
Therefore, what we should be interested is Total Death Rate. How does it compare to the ‘normal’ total death rate? To a peak flu season death rate?
“Deaths of corona-positives” being magic-wand’ed into being “Deaths DUE TO the coronavirus” (all without context of what normal deaths are, etc., as you write) is a mistake, and can lead to disastrous policy outcomes. The primary guilty party is the bloodthirsty media and the people whom it induces to panic unnecessarily.
According to this article, the 2018 flu year (a bad year) was killing up to 4,000 people per week or up to 10% of all deaths in flu season:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-09/flu-caused-1-in-10-american-deaths-last-week
(you can only see the first few lines)
but for some reason this never gained traction the way Wuhan Virus did. 4,000 per week (just like Wuhan Virus, mostly older and sicker people) were dying of flu (or more accurately because flu tipped them over the edge) and everyone else went about their business as normal.Replies: @res, @Hail
- Nearly half the COVID-19 victims suffered from at least one of the following conditions: high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease
- More than 75% reported high blood pressure, while 35% had diabetes and 33% had heart disease
- The average age of the victims was 79.5
Although elsewhere this figure is surely lower, one can easily assume that 30-50% of the deaths reported had already a foot in the graveReplies: @Hail
What's really hilarious is this quote from the article:
"Kim Prather, who works at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told the Los Angeles Times that the beach could be one of the most dangerous places in California amid the outbreak. She said she fears the virus is being washed into the ocean and transferred back into the air along the coast.
“I wouldn’t go in the water if you paid me $1 million right now,” she told the newspaper.
Apparently, she's never heard of the fact that UV light from the sun destroys viruses. The beach and water are pretty safe. She's too stupid to know which end is up.
Here's her bio:
"Kimberly Prather is an American scientist who is an Atmospheric Chemist, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry, and a Distinguished Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego. Her work focuses on how humans are influencing the atmosphere and climate."
She's a climate wackjob. I'll bet she's the local media's contact at Scripps that they call up whenever they want an 'informed source,' for crazy liberal talking points.Replies: @Jack D
It’s really unbelievable that she is supposed to be a “scientist”. It really shows how far our standards have declined. This epidemic is really revealing the rot that is at the core of our system now.
Where is this virus being washed from? It’s true that people probably shed a lot of virus in their waste when they are infected, but in America we have sewage treatment plants so it gets filtered from that. Is it washing off the streets we have coughed onto when it rains? The wonderful thing about the ocean is that it is really really big so that even if any virus ended up in the ocean (assuming that sunlight doesn’t kill it first, which it does) it would be so diluted as to be meaningless. And then somehow this virus in the water would have to fly back into the air. Can Dr. Prather point me to any studies that show ANY viral disease that gets transmitted to beach goers by this mechanism? She is, after all, supposed to be a scientist and not a hysterical woman driven by fear.
Or does she know that she is lying and just wants to back up her fellow Leftist politicians? If Trump had ordered the beach closing would she be now loudly insisting that he was a fascist idiot and it’s not possible to get “Covid-19” (Wuhan Virus) from walking on the beach?
Unless the people are shitting in the streets. What happens when it dries up?
It is indeed astonishing. This is Congress critter Hank Johnson (Guam will capsize and tip over into the ocean due to overpopulation) level dumb. A true disgrace that our once great nation has fallen to such a state.
I kicked down and tore down several signs today, making our park less threatening and more welcoming to everyone.
Fuck you, CoronaHoax.
Fuck you, Democratic Party.
Fuck you, boomers.Replies: @Buffalo Joe, @Old Prude
I’ve taken to flipping the bird at the signs on the turnpike “State beaches and parks closed. Save lives. Stay home”. F. U.
The Coronavirus task force understood the numbers, they knew 80,000 New Yorkers had been infected by March 1st because 80 New Yorkers died by March 21st....since the fatality rate is 1% and it takes 3 weeks to succumb to CV, the task force knew that 80,000 New Yorkers were infected by March First and 160,000 were infected by March 6 and 320,000 were infected by March 11 and 640,000 were infected by March 16 and 1.2 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when Cuomo order New Yorkers to stay at home.
over 1 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 , if the number of infected doubled every 5 days. If the spread was slower , doubling every 6 days , then 800,000 New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when the Stay at Home order was given.
If 600,000 New Yorkers were infected two weeks ago , we should expect 6,000 New Yorkers will succumb to CV over the next 5 days, an average of 1,200 per day...best guess will be 700 Friday , 900 Saturday , 1200 Sunday , 1,400 Monday, 1,600 Tuesday bringing the total NY deaths to 8,000 by Tuesday April 7.
1Replies: @Ron Unz, @anonymous, @res, @prime noticer
You missed an order of magnitude there. 80 is 0.1% of 80,000. So divide all of your later analysis infection and death numbers by 10. (my guess would be there is a decent chance IFR is more like 0.5% which would mean only a 5x error)
P.S. And Ron, you did not notice that?! After your “math!” grandstanding?!
https://www.unz.com/runz/correctly-estimating-coronavirus-infections/
If he assumed that MortalityRate =0.5% then his multiplier would be 2,000 and this would imply 160,000 infections from 80 deaths.Replies: @res
I realize that America's lack of widespread testing makes such a calculation difficult, but I know that the massive Chinese effort supposedly showed something close to 1%. However, I'm sure some people don't trust the Chinese data or think they're lying.
But South Korea had very solid testing and they seem to think it's 1%, and actually gradually rises over a long enough period to something like 1.5-2.0%:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-cfr-in-korea/
Is there some reason not to trust the South Korean data? Or is there some sort of other technical complication?Replies: @utu, @res, @obwandiyag
But I do find it interesting if it only took a little more than a week for the debate on these comment-threads to shift from "Don't Worry---It's Just the Flu!!!" to whether Trump should have imposed a strict quarantine on America's largest city and surrounding region. Shouldn't that give nitwits a nice flavor of what "exponential" really means?Actually, those figures seem somewhat high to me. I'd guess that once New Yorkers became fully aware of their peril in early March, they began taking precautionary steps that substantially extended the doubling-time. Also, I've seen claims floating around the Internet that desperate New Yorkers are now widely using that special drug, and it seems to be having some positive effects.
On the other side, anything like the rates of serious infections that you're suggesting would pretty quickly crash the NY health system, producing a major spike in deaths, just like in Lombardy.
Anyway, we'll know one way or the other soon enough. As I've been emphasizing all along, this isn't Global Warming. Instead of waiting 30 years, we'll just need a week or two in order to find out who's right.Replies: @Travis, @utu
True enough, we will find out in a week if 8,000 New Yorkers have died by April 7.
The Malaria drug cure may well be effective , but few New Yorkers will have access to these drugs when they get sick. Most who get sick will try and recover at home , and avoid being exposed to increased viral loads at the hospital. Even if they get a prescription from their doctors for the drugs, the shelves are bare of these drugs in NY and NJ pharmacies.
Most of the people rushing to get treated at the hospitals are very sick , having trouble breathing and likely too sick to benefit from the drug cocktails. Need to get treatment quickly to obtain the benefits, before the patient has double pneumonia….but few sick people will risk going to the hospital with a sore throat , knowing the virus has permeated the air of all local hospitals with most of the nurses already infected. Would need to be very sick to venture into any NY or NJ hospital today. Better to take once chances at home drinking green tea and taking zinc.
It should also be noted that there are years when the flu season is worse than average (and in the old days, certain years used to be much worse) but up until now no one thought that all economic activity had to cease in order to stem a bad flu year. The correct comparison would not be to compare this year to last year or the average year but to the flu mortality in a bad year, which up until now was considered to be inevitable now and then and not the end of the world.
According to this article, the 2018 flu year (a bad year) was killing up to 4,000 people per week or up to 10% of all deaths in flu season:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-09/flu-caused-1-in-10-american-deaths-last-week
(you can only see the first few lines)
but for some reason this never gained traction the way Wuhan Virus did. 4,000 per week (just like Wuhan Virus, mostly older and sicker people) were dying of flu (or more accurately because flu tipped them over the edge) and everyone else went about their business as normal.
I would say three levels cover it pretty well.
- severe epidemic - 1918 - 675,000 US deaths (multiply by 3 to compare with today!) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html
- moderate epidemic - 1968 - 100,000 US deaths (note populations below, per capita that would be >150k now) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html
- also moderate - 1957-1958 116,000 US deaths https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemic.html
- typical "bad flu year" - 2018 - 61,000 US deaths
vs.
- "typical flu year" - roughly 30-40, 000 US deaths
CDC 2010-2019 flu statistics: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
To put the numbers above in better perspective, US populations by year.
1918 103 million
1958 175 million
1968 201 million
2020 330 million
I would guess without extreme countermeasures COVID-19 would have been in the range between 1918 and 1968 (about an order of magnitude range in per capita US deaths). I would further guess (hopefully we will have a better idea after the fact) it would have been closer to 1968.
IMHO a 1968 level flu would not justify the shutdowns while a 1918 level flu would (unsure about a more exact threshold, that is a large range). The uncertainty is why we have them. (note that Ron's 1 million estimate is just over half the 1918 flu per capita US deaths)
What seems clear at this point is that in the future we should strive for a more measured and timely response. In particular, some combination of the following measures.
- Travel restrictions. Either outright or post-travel ~ 2 week quarantines.
- Limitations on large group gatherings. Including symptom testing (primarily temperature) for admission.
- Isolation and self protective mask wearing for high risk individuals and those who care for them.
- Quarantine (and other protective mask wearing if they must go out) for those who are (or probably are) infectious.
- Other protective mask wearing when community prevalence is high enough to make asymptomatic carriers likely.
- I'll leave the issue of stockpiles and intentional overcapacity for another conversation.
Thoughts?
P.S. How much value might there be in large scale temperature (fever) monitoring? Say an inexpensive cell phone accessory which would support (voluntary) tracking. You wouldn't need everyone to participate, just enough to get decent statistics. Another kind of tracking might be based on things like this (BTW, my experience matched hers, except I was less unwell and recovered more quickly).
https://www.heartratemonitorsusa.com/pages/garmin-fluReplies: @Jack D, @Hail, @Chrisnonymous
_
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUpMlR_WAAE8tdb.jpg
_
The way the numbers work out, the current best-guesses by specialists and experts are that the 2019-20 season could match, or potentially even somewhat exceed, the 1981-82 flu season, or the 1976-77 flu season (see graph above, from the American Journal of Public Health), neither of which any even remembers.By the way. The 1968-69 pandemic, known as the Hong Kong Flu, makes an appearance in that graph: Note the two consecutive, slightly-high years -- after most of the '60s were mild and showed no seasonal spikes. If 1968-69 had the age profile the US does today, it would have been a somewhat higher spike. The bad-case scenario for the 2020 coronavirus pandemic is that it matches 1968-69's flu mortality.Needless to say, as far as I can tell, no one who lived through it even remembers the 1968-69 Hong Kong Flu pandemic...(We also have helpful Total Death Rate data out of Italy, agreed by all to be the worst-case-scenario. It may be matching its own flu-death profile in the 2017 wave, but if they got through 2017....) See graph: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUpfxveXYAAYu9y.pnghttps://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country_total.htmlFor Italy this reflects deaths through about March 26.Replies: @res
I’ve been using them since day 1. Alternating, h202 spritzing them and leaving them in the sun
But this is damn well about time. Now, get the hydroxhloroquinol in production and let’s start testing for antibodies.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @prime noticer
“Now, get the hydroxhloroquinol in production”
no, no, wait. you see, that can’t happen until all the Democrat governors say it’s ok. because Trump brought it up, they automatically have to be against it until the hive mind shifts. at this point if Trump said cancer was bad, Democrats would reflexively say it was good.
these old drugs may be effective in treating people and slowing the death rate, or they may not. but doomers like Unz and Anatoly Karlin don’t want to talk about anything that might help. they greatly prefer death projections and exponential growth charts. and Democrat governors absolutely don’t want anything that might help. their interests are scamming Congress into sending them more free money, then getting Trump out of office. drugs that work don’t help them accomplish those things.
“let’s start testing for antibodies.”
negative. that might offer a data based, numbers based exit strategy for national lockdown, and again, Democrat governors and unaccountable bureaucrats like Fauci don’t like that. lockdown today, lockdown tomorrow, lockdown forever. no discussion of antibody tests and certifications please. leave that to the smartest and most serious countries like Germany and South Korea. we don’t want free IDs for voter authentication, nor do we want antibody tests.
Things in New York are starting to look as bad as in Italy. Oh, that’s why:
https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-from-italy-in-report-about-nyc/
They admitted it, after they got caught.
And, that social worker in New Orleans who died of COVID-19………didn’t:
https://www.nola.com/news/coronavirus/article_98334eea-7049-11ea-8097-fbd7ba1925ae.html
Apparently she did have what may have been an underlying condition, a chronic intenstinal malady she got overseas when she was in the Peace Corps.
None-the-less, it is sad that the poor woman died. I also find it sad that she somehow felt compelled to dedicate her life to “The Other”. It wasn’t enough that she spent two years helping people in some third-world country (which might have ultimately taken her life), she worked in an AIDS clinic for homosexuals. She could have married and had children – she might well have been happier.
The Coronavirus task force understood the numbers, they knew 80,000 New Yorkers had been infected by March 1st because 80 New Yorkers died by March 21st....since the fatality rate is 1% and it takes 3 weeks to succumb to CV, the task force knew that 80,000 New Yorkers were infected by March First and 160,000 were infected by March 6 and 320,000 were infected by March 11 and 640,000 were infected by March 16 and 1.2 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when Cuomo order New Yorkers to stay at home.
over 1 million New Yorkers were infected by March 21 , if the number of infected doubled every 5 days. If the spread was slower , doubling every 6 days , then 800,000 New Yorkers were infected by March 21 when the Stay at Home order was given.
If 600,000 New Yorkers were infected two weeks ago , we should expect 6,000 New Yorkers will succumb to CV over the next 5 days, an average of 1,200 per day...best guess will be 700 Friday , 900 Saturday , 1200 Sunday , 1,400 Monday, 1,600 Tuesday bringing the total NY deaths to 8,000 by Tuesday April 7.
1Replies: @Ron Unz, @anonymous, @res, @prime noticer
“Trump had the opportunity to quarantine New York , but he backed down when Governor Cuomo complained. This was a big mistake by Trump, to ignore the experts.”
all the experts told him to NOT quarantine NYC. as usual, the experts were wrong. trump should have gone with his instinct.
most intelligent people don’t care about how many people in NYC die. what matters is that they’re allowed to escape and infect the rest of the country. that’s the issue. not thousands of asshole NYC democrats dying. almost everybody in NYC is literally our enemy.
the reason the Navy vessel Comfort is not very full is because it’s there for overflow, but there is no overflow, because the total lockdown is sheer idiotic lunacy. since all humans are now required to live in a cave and not come out, deaths from all sources are way down nationwide. hospitals are WAY BELOW their usual activity levels, not way above. hospitals are now LAYING OFF people, because nothing is happening. they are NOT desperate for lots more staff. thousands of medical personnel across the nation are being cut.
-- People who don't understand the distortion of selection effects.Replies: @anonymous, @Mr. Anon, @UK, @PhysicistDave
In some years the flu is worse than others. It may not be “just the flu”, but it is not so much worse than “just the flu”.
It’s funny how so many people (and I’m not talking about you, AD) point fingers at Corona-skeptics and deride their opinions as “it’s just the flu, bro”, while discounting the massive economic dislocation that’s going on with what amounts to “it’s just a depression, bro”.
I even saw the figure of 99% with preexisting conditions (based on a study by the Italian National Institute of Health, dated March 18th):
– Nearly half the COVID-19 victims suffered from at least one of the following conditions: high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease
– More than 75% reported high blood pressure, while 35% had diabetes and 33% had heart disease
– The average age of the victims was 79.5
Although elsewhere this figure is surely lower, one can easily assume that 30-50% of the deaths reported had already a foot in the grave
- 10% to 38%+ were seriously ill and/or aged, but otherwise would have been expected to survive;
- <2% did not have serious health problems, but were in old age;
- 0% were young or early-middle-aged people without serious health conditions.On that "so far": Because the majority of people end up coming in contact with a virus like this, the number of "corona-positive deaths" will rise and eventually come approach the number of total deaths (Dr. John Lee, a top expert in the UK, wrote about this in the Spectator). As someone quipped, "the good news is, we've cured cancer."Replies: @mh505
why is it that you won't accept even the slightest possibility that this matter has been pushed far beyond any reasonable consideration - in other words that we are living through a mass hysteria - directed or otherwise?
Permit me to try and add a little perspective:
As of now (10:09 GMT) there have been 6,095 reported deaths for the entire USA, counting from 22.01.20; i.e. for about 10 weeks or on average of 610 deaths per week. Now let's have a look at what the CDC has to say about the common flu for the period 1.10.2019 to 21.03.2020 (25.5 weeks):
- illnesses 36 - 54MM
- medical visits 18 - 26MM
- hospitalizations 400 - 730K
- deaths 24 - 62K
So even if we accept the low figure of 24,000 as the real number of deaths for the common flu (obvioulsy, the CDC gives only preliminary estimates at this time), that still amounts to about 940 deaths per week.
Where is the pandemic?Replies: @FPD72, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @Hail, @utu, @Mike1
Your 24,000 applies to more or less uniformly spread cases over the whole country while you 6,095 number is not so uniformly spread. NY contributes 40% to this number while having 6% of the US population. So when you try to apply your argument to NY alone and compare covid stats with seasonal flu stats you will get much larger different between them and no longer be able to wonder whether corvid cases might be just seasonal flu cases.
” It’s true that people probably shed a lot of virus in their waste when they are infected, but in America we have sewage treatment plants so it gets filtered from that. ”
Unless the people are shitting in the streets. What happens when it dries up?
“We always thought that this type of thinking was some kind of Communist thing, but it’s really human nature”
i posted as much several times over the last 3 months. the United States is some kind of really atypical historical aberration. socialism or some form of communism is actually the human default. ‘It can’t happen here’ is totally wrong. America will absolutely become some kind of socialist quasi communist nation if enough of the people are replaced and certain events come along that the Democrats can exploit.
you can see this already in who is resisting the Democrat governors (not that many people, and all of them on the right) versus who is obeying without question (almost all the other citizens).
when Democrats are in monopoly control of America, the great majority of the population will accept this transition without objection. they will be fine with the bill of rights going away.
According to this article, the 2018 flu year (a bad year) was killing up to 4,000 people per week or up to 10% of all deaths in flu season:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-09/flu-caused-1-in-10-american-deaths-last-week
(you can only see the first few lines)
but for some reason this never gained traction the way Wuhan Virus did. 4,000 per week (just like Wuhan Virus, mostly older and sicker people) were dying of flu (or more accurately because flu tipped them over the edge) and everyone else went about their business as normal.Replies: @res, @Hail
One difficulty with this conversation is there are many different versions of a “bad flu year.”
I would say three levels cover it pretty well.
– severe epidemic – 1918 – 675,000 US deaths (multiply by 3 to compare with today!) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html
– moderate epidemic – 1968 – 100,000 US deaths (note populations below, per capita that would be >150k now) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html
– also moderate – 1957-1958 116,000 US deaths https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemic.html
– typical “bad flu year” – 2018 – 61,000 US deaths
vs.
– “typical flu year” – roughly 30-40, 000 US deaths
CDC 2010-2019 flu statistics: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
To put the numbers above in better perspective, US populations by year.
1918 103 million
1958 175 million
1968 201 million
2020 330 million
I would guess without extreme countermeasures COVID-19 would have been in the range between 1918 and 1968 (about an order of magnitude range in per capita US deaths). I would further guess (hopefully we will have a better idea after the fact) it would have been closer to 1968.
IMHO a 1968 level flu would not justify the shutdowns while a 1918 level flu would (unsure about a more exact threshold, that is a large range). The uncertainty is why we have them. (note that Ron’s 1 million estimate is just over half the 1918 flu per capita US deaths)
What seems clear at this point is that in the future we should strive for a more measured and timely response. In particular, some combination of the following measures.
– Travel restrictions. Either outright or post-travel ~ 2 week quarantines.
– Limitations on large group gatherings. Including symptom testing (primarily temperature) for admission.
– Isolation and self protective mask wearing for high risk individuals and those who care for them.
– Quarantine (and other protective mask wearing if they must go out) for those who are (or probably are) infectious.
– Other protective mask wearing when community prevalence is high enough to make asymptomatic carriers likely.
– I’ll leave the issue of stockpiles and intentional overcapacity for another conversation.
Thoughts?
P.S. How much value might there be in large scale temperature (fever) monitoring? Say an inexpensive cell phone accessory which would support (voluntary) tracking. You wouldn’t need everyone to participate, just enough to get decent statistics. Another kind of tracking might be based on things like this (BTW, my experience matched hers, except I was less unwell and recovered more quickly).
https://www.heartratemonitorsusa.com/pages/garmin-flu
P.S. And Ron, you did not notice that?! After your "math!" grandstanding?!Replies: @Ron Unz, @utu, @Ron Unz
That’s fair. Obviously the numbers must go with the particular dates, and I merely glanced at them. It was just pretty obvious that the overall deaths were far higher than I had projected or thought plausible, so I just pointed out they were probably wrong without looking carefully for the particular error. Anyway, my guess would be that there’s getting close to 1M infected New Yorkers by now, so it’s really just a question of shifting those projections over by a week or so.
I would say three levels cover it pretty well.
- severe epidemic - 1918 - 675,000 US deaths (multiply by 3 to compare with today!) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html
- moderate epidemic - 1968 - 100,000 US deaths (note populations below, per capita that would be >150k now) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html
- also moderate - 1957-1958 116,000 US deaths https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemic.html
- typical "bad flu year" - 2018 - 61,000 US deaths
vs.
- "typical flu year" - roughly 30-40, 000 US deaths
CDC 2010-2019 flu statistics: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
To put the numbers above in better perspective, US populations by year.
1918 103 million
1958 175 million
1968 201 million
2020 330 million
I would guess without extreme countermeasures COVID-19 would have been in the range between 1918 and 1968 (about an order of magnitude range in per capita US deaths). I would further guess (hopefully we will have a better idea after the fact) it would have been closer to 1968.
IMHO a 1968 level flu would not justify the shutdowns while a 1918 level flu would (unsure about a more exact threshold, that is a large range). The uncertainty is why we have them. (note that Ron's 1 million estimate is just over half the 1918 flu per capita US deaths)
What seems clear at this point is that in the future we should strive for a more measured and timely response. In particular, some combination of the following measures.
- Travel restrictions. Either outright or post-travel ~ 2 week quarantines.
- Limitations on large group gatherings. Including symptom testing (primarily temperature) for admission.
- Isolation and self protective mask wearing for high risk individuals and those who care for them.
- Quarantine (and other protective mask wearing if they must go out) for those who are (or probably are) infectious.
- Other protective mask wearing when community prevalence is high enough to make asymptomatic carriers likely.
- I'll leave the issue of stockpiles and intentional overcapacity for another conversation.
Thoughts?
P.S. How much value might there be in large scale temperature (fever) monitoring? Say an inexpensive cell phone accessory which would support (voluntary) tracking. You wouldn't need everyone to participate, just enough to get decent statistics. Another kind of tracking might be based on things like this (BTW, my experience matched hers, except I was less unwell and recovered more quickly).
https://www.heartratemonitorsusa.com/pages/garmin-fluReplies: @Jack D, @Hail, @Chrisnonymous
Everything that you say is eminently sensible, which makes it better than 99% of the current public discourse, including that being advocated by “experts”. It goes without saying that what most Leftist reporters and politicians are pushing is as wrong as can be. When have they ever been right about anything?
On of the problems with measuring flu (and Wuhan Virus) deaths is that what counts as a “flu death” is highly subjective. On one extreme, you can count everyone who dies while infected. On the other, you can count only the deaths of people who were in good health until they caught the flu. You can come up with pretty much any number you want in between these two extremes with the upper bound being maybe 10x or more higher than the lower. Even in a “bad flu year” a lot of the excess mortality is that of people who were going to die in the next couple of years anyway.
Regarding your final sentence, I think that is objectively true (and relevant), but IMHO going there tends to add more heat than light to the conversation.
But I do find it interesting if it only took a little more than a week for the debate on these comment-threads to shift from "Don't Worry---It's Just the Flu!!!" to whether Trump should have imposed a strict quarantine on America's largest city and surrounding region. Shouldn't that give nitwits a nice flavor of what "exponential" really means?Actually, those figures seem somewhat high to me. I'd guess that once New Yorkers became fully aware of their peril in early March, they began taking precautionary steps that substantially extended the doubling-time. Also, I've seen claims floating around the Internet that desperate New Yorkers are now widely using that special drug, and it seems to be having some positive effects.
On the other side, anything like the rates of serious infections that you're suggesting would pretty quickly crash the NY health system, producing a major spike in deaths, just like in Lombardy.
Anyway, we'll know one way or the other soon enough. As I've been emphasizing all along, this isn't Global Warming. Instead of waiting 30 years, we'll just need a week or two in order to find out who's right.Replies: @Travis, @utu
Whether the quarantine was imposed early enough is one important issue but that wearing masks is still not mandatory in dense populations like NYC is the real scandal. Wearing mask should have been the first response before going to quarantine. To do so one needs to have masks in the first place. In the US 400 mil mask are manufactured per year while in Taiwan for population of 20 mil the manufacture 10 mil mask per day. So people were told by the highest medical authorities in this country that mask were not that effective. If only you are wearing a mask surrounded by coughing people who have no mask they are not effective but if everybody wears a mask they are very effective. A campaign for wearing masks and instructions how to make home made masks should have been the first response to this epidemic. Officials responsible for the communique that masks are not effective should have been arrested.
https://www.sierra12.com/s12-home/n95-respirator-masks-what-you-should-knowReplies: @Lockean Proviso, @vhrm
If we’ve been wearing a valved N95 from early on despite some negative responses by the uninformed, then we’re the ones least likely to be sick. Hell, we should be given a key to the city for being good citizens once this thing is over.
According to this article, the 2018 flu year (a bad year) was killing up to 4,000 people per week or up to 10% of all deaths in flu season:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-09/flu-caused-1-in-10-american-deaths-last-week
(you can only see the first few lines)
but for some reason this never gained traction the way Wuhan Virus did. 4,000 per week (just like Wuhan Virus, mostly older and sicker people) were dying of flu (or more accurately because flu tipped them over the edge) and everyone else went about their business as normal.Replies: @res, @Hail
Agreed with your comment.
I have been trying to make the same point, and feel emboldened to do so now that all the data is in favor of this particular Apocalypse being a gigantic washout.
_
_
The way the numbers work out, the current best-guesses by specialists and experts are that the 2019-20 season could match, or potentially even somewhat exceed, the 1981-82 flu season, or the 1976-77 flu season (see graph above, from the American Journal of Public Health), neither of which any even remembers.
By the way. The 1968-69 pandemic, known as the Hong Kong Flu, makes an appearance in that graph: Note the two consecutive, slightly-high years — after most of the ’60s were mild and showed no seasonal spikes. If 1968-69 had the age profile the US does today, it would have been a somewhat higher spike. The bad-case scenario for the 2020 coronavirus pandemic is that it matches 1968-69’s flu mortality.
Needless to say, as far as I can tell, no one who lived through it even remembers the 1968-69 Hong Kong Flu pandemic…
(We also have helpful Total Death Rate data out of Italy, agreed by all to be the worst-case-scenario. It may be matching its own flu-death profile in the 2017 wave, but if they got through 2017….) See graph:
https://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country_total.html
For Italy this reflects deaths through about March 26.
Trends in Recorded Influenza Mortality: United States, 1900–2004
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2007.119933
Their summary of results.This seems like a worthwhile clarification.Table 1 gives an interesting summary (by month) of 12 flu seasons from 1941-1976. WWII was a bad time for the flu in the US. There is a graphical version of the Table 1 data in Web Figure 1 from the online supplement.
I'll include their version of your graphic since the version starting in 1900 puts 1918 into perspective relative to the post-1930 cases. To give a little more perspective on these numbers, each 10 per 100,000 corresponds to 33,000 people in 2020 USA.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/apha/journals/content/ajph/2008/ajph.2008.98.issue-5/ajph.2007.119933/production/images/large/doshi_f2_rev3.jpegReplies: @Hail
Mine don’t have the exhaust valve, so I don’t look like a pig and I won’t blow Corona-chunks on anyone, but thanks for the advice.
I decorate mine with a cross and hang garlic from it to keep vampires away. Learned that from my wife.
I would say three levels cover it pretty well.
- severe epidemic - 1918 - 675,000 US deaths (multiply by 3 to compare with today!) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html
- moderate epidemic - 1968 - 100,000 US deaths (note populations below, per capita that would be >150k now) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html
- also moderate - 1957-1958 116,000 US deaths https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemic.html
- typical "bad flu year" - 2018 - 61,000 US deaths
vs.
- "typical flu year" - roughly 30-40, 000 US deaths
CDC 2010-2019 flu statistics: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
To put the numbers above in better perspective, US populations by year.
1918 103 million
1958 175 million
1968 201 million
2020 330 million
I would guess without extreme countermeasures COVID-19 would have been in the range between 1918 and 1968 (about an order of magnitude range in per capita US deaths). I would further guess (hopefully we will have a better idea after the fact) it would have been closer to 1968.
IMHO a 1968 level flu would not justify the shutdowns while a 1918 level flu would (unsure about a more exact threshold, that is a large range). The uncertainty is why we have them. (note that Ron's 1 million estimate is just over half the 1918 flu per capita US deaths)
What seems clear at this point is that in the future we should strive for a more measured and timely response. In particular, some combination of the following measures.
- Travel restrictions. Either outright or post-travel ~ 2 week quarantines.
- Limitations on large group gatherings. Including symptom testing (primarily temperature) for admission.
- Isolation and self protective mask wearing for high risk individuals and those who care for them.
- Quarantine (and other protective mask wearing if they must go out) for those who are (or probably are) infectious.
- Other protective mask wearing when community prevalence is high enough to make asymptomatic carriers likely.
- I'll leave the issue of stockpiles and intentional overcapacity for another conversation.
Thoughts?
P.S. How much value might there be in large scale temperature (fever) monitoring? Say an inexpensive cell phone accessory which would support (voluntary) tracking. You wouldn't need everyone to participate, just enough to get decent statistics. Another kind of tracking might be based on things like this (BTW, my experience matched hers, except I was less unwell and recovered more quickly).
https://www.heartratemonitorsusa.com/pages/garmin-fluReplies: @Jack D, @Hail, @Chrisnonymous
How does the fact that no prime-age, healthy people are dying affect your thinking? Whereas, it is said, the prime-age and healthy were a major victim group in 1918-19.
Victim age-and-condition profiles are important. This speaking in terms of decisions that will have a very long shadow, unforeseen consequences.
In other words, it is a kind of fallacy to say, “a victim is a victim is a victim,” speaking at macro level and in public-policy terms.
I believe this has been a very big mistake, the responses a tragic chain-reaction of kneejerk reactions. It has been the public-policy equivalent of a mass panic at a sporting event (say, in response to a small fire and an old man keeling over to a heart attack), with the measures taken (rushing for the exits, in analogy) leading to worse results (deaths of several young spectators in the ensuing chaos) than the original threat.
BTW, probably best to avoid absolute statements like that ("no prime-age, healthy people"). There have been examples in the media counter to that, and even if those individuals really were unhealthy in reality, it seems likely to me that there will be some poor soul who is young and healthy but manages to die of this.
Overly absolute statements just make it easy for people to assert you are wrong. And be correct when they do it.Agreed.
Some questions for you.
1. Do you think this would have been more or less severe than the 1968 flu if we had taken minimal/no countermeasures?
2. Would the 1918 flu outcome be enough to make you think the current measures were warranted?
3. If so, any thoughts on where the threshold would fall between 1918 and 1968 for requiring countermeasures?
It is easy to scream under/over reaction (witness how many people are doing just that). Much harder to offer and justify a reasonable response.Replies: @Hail
California has its priorities straight. Some examples: new state budget sets aside $98 million for illegals’ health care, $418 million for people earning as much as $150 K for their health care. And for the homeless, and housing aide for them, $ 2.4 BILLION. (Sources, Sac Bee and LATimes.) Currently, as per the LA Times, LA spends $619 million per year on the homeless, or “unhoused” if you wish. Can’t find N-95 masks, well San Fran has a medical supplier because the city gives out 4.45 MILLION hypodermic needles per year. Not an exchange program, no need to return a used needle, just toss them on the street, or playground or beach (SF Chronicle) Sacramento hoses down the area around city hall daily to wash feces and piss into the sewers (SacBee) San Fran has a “poop patrol” that picks up human feces (SF Chron), thousands of scoops per year. They will get this COVID-19 under control, just give them a few more BILLION. And you know, we toss BILLIONS at breast cancer every year and to what avail?
I would say three levels cover it pretty well.
- severe epidemic - 1918 - 675,000 US deaths (multiply by 3 to compare with today!) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html
- moderate epidemic - 1968 - 100,000 US deaths (note populations below, per capita that would be >150k now) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html
- also moderate - 1957-1958 116,000 US deaths https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemic.html
- typical "bad flu year" - 2018 - 61,000 US deaths
vs.
- "typical flu year" - roughly 30-40, 000 US deaths
CDC 2010-2019 flu statistics: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
To put the numbers above in better perspective, US populations by year.
1918 103 million
1958 175 million
1968 201 million
2020 330 million
I would guess without extreme countermeasures COVID-19 would have been in the range between 1918 and 1968 (about an order of magnitude range in per capita US deaths). I would further guess (hopefully we will have a better idea after the fact) it would have been closer to 1968.
IMHO a 1968 level flu would not justify the shutdowns while a 1918 level flu would (unsure about a more exact threshold, that is a large range). The uncertainty is why we have them. (note that Ron's 1 million estimate is just over half the 1918 flu per capita US deaths)
What seems clear at this point is that in the future we should strive for a more measured and timely response. In particular, some combination of the following measures.
- Travel restrictions. Either outright or post-travel ~ 2 week quarantines.
- Limitations on large group gatherings. Including symptom testing (primarily temperature) for admission.
- Isolation and self protective mask wearing for high risk individuals and those who care for them.
- Quarantine (and other protective mask wearing if they must go out) for those who are (or probably are) infectious.
- Other protective mask wearing when community prevalence is high enough to make asymptomatic carriers likely.
- I'll leave the issue of stockpiles and intentional overcapacity for another conversation.
Thoughts?
P.S. How much value might there be in large scale temperature (fever) monitoring? Say an inexpensive cell phone accessory which would support (voluntary) tracking. You wouldn't need everyone to participate, just enough to get decent statistics. Another kind of tracking might be based on things like this (BTW, my experience matched hers, except I was less unwell and recovered more quickly).
https://www.heartratemonitorsusa.com/pages/garmin-fluReplies: @Jack D, @Hail, @Chrisnonymous
I’ve been looking at articles in PubMed. Looks like some interventions like attention to hygiene and mask-wearing are much more effective at preventing spread when adopted early in an outbreak. Which makes sense. But it’s important to keep in mind.
In today’s press conference Trump told us he will not be wearing a mask. He can delegate that to VP Mike Pence. Make it another Pence Rule.
Thank you for being gracious about my outburst.
But then the numbers still don’t quite add up. An order of magnitude error should mean about 3 doublings. At 5 days each that is a little over two weeks to make up for the mistake.
I decorate mine with a cross and hang garlic from it to keep vampires away. Learned that from my wife.Replies: @Chrisnonymous
You mean you learned that the garlic keeps your wife away?
Another cute thing is her tradition that says the man should enter a doorway first. You see, that means he can fight off whoever is on the other side and protect her. It makes sense, but I worry what others will think when they see me do that, so I usually don't. She always tends to walk behind me everywhere anyway, though.Paul Newman once saw me do that, open a door and walk in ahead of my wife. I did it to please her. He didn't know about that, and he scowled at me and did a few other things to make it obvious that he thought I was a jerk. He was well known around town for opening doors for ladies, always. At stores, restaurants, etc. We were in a gourmet soup place that time, and he made it a point to slowly scoop out all the remaining "white bean artichoke" soup after her overheard me telling my wife I was going to get some. Right in front of me. He was my soup Nazi. Oh well. I'll never forget it. Cultural differences can lead to misunderstandings.I just wanted to tell that story. Hope it's all right. It's late in the thread, so nobody will read it anyway.
https://www.sierra12.com/s12-home/n95-respirator-masks-what-you-should-knowReplies: @Lockean Proviso, @vhrm
One thing of note:
It’s true the valved masks don’t filter outgoing air, but they do redirect it. Some more than others.
So they’ll definitely limit droplet projection by a lot even if they aren’t all contained.
On outgoing aerosols… probably not much.
I strongly agree (and emphasis mine). What makes things even worse is the death count is going to be a huge political football this time.
Regarding your final sentence, I think that is objectively true (and relevant), but IMHO going there tends to add more heat than light to the conversation.
Jack, funny thing is, in San Francisco and Sacramento they wash the feces and urine of the homeless into the storm drains. Yeah, I know the runoff is supposed to get to the treatment plants, but not all does. Thousands of homeless shitting on the streets and crickets. One paddleboarder and doom. Well maybe he peed while he was boarding. For years , I thought urine was sterile, it is not. Oh, and to pull a scab off, a lot of Canadian cities dump raw sewage into the ocean…but, but, aren’t they more special than us?
why is it that you won't accept even the slightest possibility that this matter has been pushed far beyond any reasonable consideration - in other words that we are living through a mass hysteria - directed or otherwise?
Permit me to try and add a little perspective:
As of now (10:09 GMT) there have been 6,095 reported deaths for the entire USA, counting from 22.01.20; i.e. for about 10 weeks or on average of 610 deaths per week. Now let's have a look at what the CDC has to say about the common flu for the period 1.10.2019 to 21.03.2020 (25.5 weeks):
- illnesses 36 - 54MM
- medical visits 18 - 26MM
- hospitalizations 400 - 730K
- deaths 24 - 62K
So even if we accept the low figure of 24,000 as the real number of deaths for the common flu (obvioulsy, the CDC gives only preliminary estimates at this time), that still amounts to about 940 deaths per week.
Where is the pandemic?Replies: @FPD72, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @Hail, @utu, @Mike1
It’s hard to believe people as stupid as you can type a sentence. What part of a disease with incredible infectiousness that kills a large number of the infected is hard to understand? Do we load bodies into refrigerated trucks in flu season?
My only hope at this point is that people like you are dumb enough to live your beliefs.
I make sure to laugh in the face of every young person wearing a mask. Because it’s funny.
Also, be sure to laugh extra hard at bemasked women because they are very sensitive to social pressure. But be tall and good looking when you do this: women don’t care what ugly men think.
We ❤ you CoronaHoax!
An excellent response. This is, after all, a federal republic, and if the people in charge IN YOUR STATE have been demonstrated to be inadequate to the situation (not a category 5 hurricane, not an earthquake of 8+ on the Richter scale, not a flood caused by a 500 year rain event…in those cases the federal authorities can & should help), but a public health emergency, well then hold them accountable. States are intended to not only be constituent parts of “the laboratory of democracy”, but also political entities with real agency and responsibility.
But this, of course, is why the Democrats are wrapped around the axle. They fervently desire that “states” be reduced to mere administrative zones within a highly centralized nation, but when it comes to the event this guarantees that their governors and other officials are unprepared, as well as psychologically indisposed, to act as effective administrators exercising authority, informed by knowledge of the issues and potential solutions to problems. They are by nature political hacks, okay for distributing patronage, and rubbing the bellies of their favored identity groups, but otherwise inadequate to challenges, limited to wailing until Mommy swoops in to kiss it and make it ALL better.
When forced to it, some of them wake up and realize that, under the federal republic, they not only have the power and authority, but also the responsibility to grasp the rod. Job one for most all of them is instead perpetuating the “Orange Man Bad” line, thus you see putzes like Michigan Governor Granholm declaring that doctors subject to their state medical boards’ authority are not permitted to use the hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin therapeutic regime upon penalty of disciplinary action, only to four days later ask for help in acquiring these very same drugs for their own citizens’ potential benefit after their calculus of potential political gain versus potential unnecessary deaths is seen for what it truly is; i.e., despicably sociopathic.
Well, that ain’t no new thang, as the last several years’ succession of bullshit, spiteful, and unhinged attacks on the lawfully elected President reveal. Instead of these acts, the Democrat party could have fought it out over policies, but no, their impulse is to try to undermine the Constitutional order and usurp the vote of the Electoral College (see, there’s that contempt for the federal republic again).
1. They are packed with sick people, and
2. Many of them are relatively young.
In contradistinction to the lies of the deniers.Replies: @tbmcc
That’s in “contradiction” there Dunning-Kruger.
Sure enough, that's exactly what happened and Trump "pivoted" on his decision five days later.
At the time of the comment, deaths were running around 50/day in New York, and I was predicting that they might reach 500/day, perhaps even 1,000/day by Easter, April 12th. Naturally, all the sorts of idiots who hang around here ridiculed and denounced me. I think half of them were still claiming "It's Just the Flu!!!" Some of them still are.
As it happens, daily deaths in New York broke 500 on April 1st, far more rapidly than I had even considered plausible. (They dropped down to 432 on April 2nd). The whole thing sure looks exponential to me.
And perhaps those who on March 26th argued that seeing 500/day by April 12th was ridiculous should consider the implications of actually getting 500/day by April 1st.
Also, Cuomo now warns that the NY health care system may collapse under the weight of hospitalizations within another 6 days. When/if that happens, the death rate will immediately quadruple or more.
Maybe that French miracle drug will work and save the day. But otherwise, I just can't see how the exponential curve will suddenly change...Replies: @anon, @PhysicistDave, @Hypnotoad666, @mh505, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Inquiring Mind
“As it happens, daily deaths in New York broke 500 on April 1st, far more rapidly than I had even considered plausible. (They dropped down to 432 on April 2nd). The whole thing sure looks exponential to me.”
Meanwhile here on the Left Coast, kung flu body counts stubbornly refuse to skyrocket exponentially. Cali’s batting a buck fifty, Washington steadily rose from a dozen up to a couple hundred over five weeks, and Oregon adds between zero and two deaths per day for a grand whopping total of 21.
And for this, our Democratic governors have shut down their commerce.
Hoax.
_
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUpMlR_WAAE8tdb.jpg
_
The way the numbers work out, the current best-guesses by specialists and experts are that the 2019-20 season could match, or potentially even somewhat exceed, the 1981-82 flu season, or the 1976-77 flu season (see graph above, from the American Journal of Public Health), neither of which any even remembers.By the way. The 1968-69 pandemic, known as the Hong Kong Flu, makes an appearance in that graph: Note the two consecutive, slightly-high years -- after most of the '60s were mild and showed no seasonal spikes. If 1968-69 had the age profile the US does today, it would have been a somewhat higher spike. The bad-case scenario for the 2020 coronavirus pandemic is that it matches 1968-69's flu mortality.Needless to say, as far as I can tell, no one who lived through it even remembers the 1968-69 Hong Kong Flu pandemic...(We also have helpful Total Death Rate data out of Italy, agreed by all to be the worst-case-scenario. It may be matching its own flu-death profile in the 2017 wave, but if they got through 2017....) See graph: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUpfxveXYAAYu9y.pnghttps://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country_total.htmlFor Italy this reflects deaths through about March 26.Replies: @res
Thank you for that graphic! It does an excellent job of giving historical context and led me to what I think is the original source for that data (an even better reference IMHO).
Trends in Recorded Influenza Mortality: United States, 1900–2004
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2007.119933
Their summary of results.
This seems like a worthwhile clarification.
Table 1 gives an interesting summary (by month) of 12 flu seasons from 1941-1976. WWII was a bad time for the flu in the US. There is a graphical version of the Table 1 data in Web Figure 1 from the online supplement.
I’ll include their version of your graphic since the version starting in 1900 puts 1918 into perspective relative to the post-1930 cases. To give a little more perspective on these numbers, each 10 per 100,000 corresponds to 33,000 people in 2020 USA.
Jan. 1969: 23.3 influenza deaths per 100,000 population (The Hong Kong flu strain became widespread in the US in Dec. 1968.)Adjusted for 2020 population, that would be 133,000 influenza-attributed deaths. This appears to be something like twice the average for the time but there was no real detectable rise in the total mortality rate (Figure 1b) as there was with the 1918-1919 period (Figure 1a).The other 1968-69 flu-season influenza deaths, minus December and January, amount to a little over a cumulative 10 per 100,000 (33,500 scaled to today's population), which puts the total at ~165,000 deaths in 2020 terms, with an old-and-sick age-condition profile for victims.Given the USA's higher average age in 2020 than in 1968-69, this 165,000 must be adjusted upwards to make for a true comparison with today. Not sure by how much. Total, 200,000? 250,000? 300,000?And no one remembers it. It came and went, immediately forgotten except by specialists. Life goes on.Commenters here are highly educated and very sharp on average. That is to say, well-read and well-informed. I wonder how many knew, four months ago, that there had been a 1968 flu pandemic at all? Even of the older people who even lived through it?Replies: @res
‘A lot of people do not understand what “exponential” really means, that has become painfully obvious.’
It’s becoming painfully obvious that you and many others here are proud that you mastered and remember your eighth-grade maffs class. Good doggy!
Meanwhile, kung flu body counts remain painfully linear all across the US.
P.S. And Ron, you did not notice that?! After your "math!" grandstanding?!Replies: @Ron Unz, @utu, @Ron Unz
No. Ron Unz calculates from the assumption of MortalityRate=1% which gets him the multiplier of 1000 that leads to the estimate of 80,000 infections from 80 death. See:
https://www.unz.com/runz/correctly-estimating-coronavirus-infections/
If he assumed that MortalityRate =0.5% then his multiplier would be 2,000 and this would imply 160,000 infections from 80 deaths.
Number of infected = Number of Deaths / Mortality_Rate *2^(Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period)
Where both number of deaths and number of infected are based on the current date.
The additional factor of 10 you mention comes from the
2^(Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period)
term. This is because you use today's deaths to estimate the number of infections present at the beginning of the mortality period.
Here is the relevant portion of comment 29.Travis was estimating infections at the beginning of the mortality period and still using an additional factor of 10. Then he proceeded to go on about the doublings that would have happened between then and the date of death. Put differently, he double counted the 2^(Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period) term.
Try understanding what we are modeling rather than just grinding through equations.Replies: @utu
https://mobile.twitter.com/AmichaiStein1/status/1246043872402313217?s=20
My sister is making a modified version of the one in this video, using a shop towel and two layers of J Cloth material. We already have masks but these homemade ones will help our town fake having herd immunity at least a bit.
https://twitter.com/Ageofdeception1/status/1245802097045573632
Areas of the US with high percentages of black residents are beginning show a higher-than-average death rate. Democrats have realized this, and they're desperate to hide it. They don't want blacks to make the connection between their own climbing death rates and the Democrats' open borders policy. Blacks are already suspicous that they're losing jobs to foreigners. If blacks realize that foreigners are giving them a high death rate too, blacks may revolt against the Democrats. First their jobs are taken away from them, and then their very lives. This is why the Democrats have suddenly escalated their war on Trump. They're frantic to hide their own policy failures, because they realize they're screwed once blacks figure out what's going on. Blacks may bolt the Democrats in large numbers over this.Replies: @obwandiyag, @Mr McKenna, @Reg Cæsar, @PSR, @J.Ross
McKenna’s right, an imaginary racial targeting is going to be the focus of the Schiff/Pelosi Impeachment Reunion Tour. In fact this virus is exposing the tendency of certain subgroups to not be able to follow rules, and not just blacks: in New York and Israel the troublemakers are Haredim. The Italians are infamously anarchic. Meanwhile Koreans are good at following rules and are weathering the storm reasonably well.
Yes, my first question as well.
Meanwhile here on the Left Coast, kung flu body counts stubbornly refuse to skyrocket exponentially. Cali's batting a buck fifty, Washington steadily rose from a dozen up to a couple hundred over five weeks, and Oregon adds between zero and two deaths per day for a grand whopping total of 21.
And for this, our Democratic governors have shut down their commerce.
Hoax.Replies: @Old Prude
I’m in agreement with you, Juicy Omar. Hysterical panic. I guess it’s better to trash the economy over a hoax and have a couple old folks die than have an actual pandemic with a lot of dead and a tanked economy.
It’s really unbelievable that she is supposed to be a “scientist”. It really shows how far our standards have declined. This epidemic is really revealing the rot that is at the core of our system now.
It is indeed astonishing. This is Congress critter Hank Johnson (Guam will capsize and tip over into the ocean due to overpopulation) level dumb. A true disgrace that our once great nation has fallen to such a state.
Lucky strike! Good news for smokers?
Coronavirus warning for smokers: Experts says addicts face a greater risk of complications – but Chinese studies suggest they may be LESS likely to end up in hospital in the first place
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8184751/Coronavirus-warning-smokers-Public-Health-England-says-addicts-face-greater-risk-coronavirus.html
And Big Tobacco company may end up saving us:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-vaccine-wildcard-from-big-tobacco-11585760118
“Lucky Strike owner British American Tobacco said that its U.S. biotech division is working on a potential vaccine.”
Ask Cuomo to lower the excise tax on cigarettes as a part of anti-coronavirus measures.
The Peak Prosperity video above shows a link to this site: https://www.sewcanshe.com/blog
It has the sewing pattern for something called the Olson Mask Pattern which “was designed by medical professionals to be used when other surgical and N95 masks are not available. Most agree that it is the best pattern available for homemade face masks, and I think so too!”.
I doubt many commenters here at Unz.com are into sewing but perhaps you can share the link with your wives, girlfriends, sex partners, care givers, houseboys or special lady friends.
-- People who don't understand the distortion of selection effects.Replies: @anonymous, @Mr. Anon, @UK, @PhysicistDave
The CFR of the Diamond Princess is exaggerated over the IFR by a number of factors:
1. The age distribution of the Diamond Princess, which skewed very old, resulting in exaggerated lethality.
2. The massive bias towards false negatives and not false positives, due to factors like technician incompetence and the sensitivity of the test.
3. Recovered patients showing negative, and long-term assymptomatic infected who had only recently been infected also showing negative.
4. The cultural and even economic biases towards declaring people who die with the Coronavirus to be dead of it. Cruise ships are full of old and overweight people. I recently snuck into a cruises hip only bar area in a cruise ship only marina. The drinks cost 8 times what they did 200m walk on a holiday island away and the drinks 200m away were much nicer. It was a perfectly safe place. Nonetheless, the charmless American chain bar was full. Walking did not seem to be an option for many of the late stage Wall E crowd. They were actually lovely people though. Anyway, some of them, statistically, would die during the cruise and just after.
Especially in times of dire public need, The Merchant of Venice should be a cautionary tale for the aspiring spot ‘market dominant’. Alas, autistic ‘price discovery’ merchants gonna merchant. Sometimes they discover their final costs to be rather steep indeed.
No one can claim Trump isn’t representing the vast majority of Americans when he does this.
Ontario premier slams Donald Trump’s decision to cease Canadian exports of N95 masks
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-premier-slams-donald-trump-s-decision-to-cease-canadian-exports-of-n95-masks-1.4881717
Wearing masks might be the most important measure.
German scientist casts doubt on how coronavirus is spread
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8182767/Scientist-casts-doubt-coronavirus-spread.html
‘We know it’s not a smear infection that is transmitted by touching objects, but that close dancing and exuberant celebrations have led to infections.’
P.S. And Ron, you did not notice that?! After your "math!" grandstanding?!Replies: @Ron Unz, @utu, @Ron Unz
I have a question about that. Unlike some of the people here, I’ve spent very little time looking into the technical details of the epidemic, and have just vaguely assumed the numbers that almost everyone seems to be claiming, one of which is the 1% normal fatality rate. But you seem to think it might be 0.5%.
I realize that America’s lack of widespread testing makes such a calculation difficult, but I know that the massive Chinese effort supposedly showed something close to 1%. However, I’m sure some people don’t trust the Chinese data or think they’re lying.
But South Korea had very solid testing and they seem to think it’s 1%, and actually gradually rises over a long enough period to something like 1.5-2.0%:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-cfr-in-korea/
Is there some reason not to trust the South Korean data? Or is there some sort of other technical complication?
However data from many countries indicate that the Mortality Rate estimate increases with the duration of epidemic. People still will be dying after the infections stop. See Germany (1.4% from 0.3%) and South Korea (now 1.7%). So if indeed Mortality_Rate>1% then the multiplier would be less than 1,000 according to your formula and the assumptions about other parameters . Which is a bad news because lower number of infected so far, say in NYC, implies that the 'herd immunity' and its effect on the reduction on R0 will take longer to achieve.
Keep in mind that the number of the future dead (say, after one Mortality_Period from today) when calculated from your formula is independent off the assumed Mortality_Rate. The future number of dead depends only on Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period ratio and not on the Mortality_Rate providing that Doubling_Period remains unchanged and unaffected by new social distancing measures.
- Iceland's testing indicates about 50% of the infected are asymptomatic (note that I specifically wrote IFR rather than CFR).
- I think the fatality rate is likely to decrease as the infection rate increases. Rationale being that the most susceptible are being infected most quickly.
The South Korean numbers you linked do give some food for thought.
I have been going with the 1% estimate because it is a nice round number which seems like a decent balance between tendencies I think I am seeing towards over and under estimation from different sources.
YMMV.
P.S. Does anyone have good historical examples for the typical time trends of IFR/CFR estimates? This article about 2009 H1N1 seems close, but not exactly what I am looking for.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/
You are calculating wrong numbers.
O.T.
An ot update from Norway. Our government are spending insane amounts of money, from the Government Wealth Fund, to pay stipends to businesses that’s lost business to keep them in business. It’s not looking good.
In today’s press conference Trump told us he will not be wearing a mask. Though now recommended by the CDC, but not required, so Trump’s out, not doing it: repeated three times masks are not for him. Trump says he feeling good; and it would not be a good look for him when staring down at dictators. I assume he is referring to those both foreign and domestic.
Dr. Birx says California and Washington State, are good, out of the woods; they have showed us the way, and we thank them for their efforts. (My back of the envelope daily tracking indicates this to be the correct/believable.)
I realize that America's lack of widespread testing makes such a calculation difficult, but I know that the massive Chinese effort supposedly showed something close to 1%. However, I'm sure some people don't trust the Chinese data or think they're lying.
But South Korea had very solid testing and they seem to think it's 1%, and actually gradually rises over a long enough period to something like 1.5-2.0%:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-cfr-in-korea/
Is there some reason not to trust the South Korean data? Or is there some sort of other technical complication?Replies: @utu, @res, @obwandiyag
If it is 0.5% rather than 1% then the multiplier that you calculate is 2,000 and not 1,000 meaning that the number of infected is two times higher than you have been predicting from your formula
so far.
However data from many countries indicate that the Mortality Rate estimate increases with the duration of epidemic. People still will be dying after the infections stop. See Germany (1.4% from 0.3%) and South Korea (now 1.7%). So if indeed Mortality_Rate>1% then the multiplier would be less than 1,000 according to your formula and the assumptions about other parameters . Which is a bad news because lower number of infected so far, say in NYC, implies that the ‘herd immunity’ and its effect on the reduction on R0 will take longer to achieve.
Keep in mind that the number of the future dead (say, after one Mortality_Period from today) when calculated from your formula is independent off the assumed Mortality_Rate. The future number of dead depends only on Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period ratio and not on the Mortality_Rate providing that Doubling_Period remains unchanged and unaffected by new social distancing measures.
Looks like some interventions like attention to hygiene and mask-wearing are much more effective at preventing spread when adopted early in an outbreak.
Too bad no one told the Centers for Disease Control. There needs to be a big ol’ housecleaning over there starting this year.
danand
In today’s press conference Trump told us he will not be wearing a mask.
He can delegate that to VP Mike Pence. Make it another Pence Rule.
1. The age distribution of the Diamond Princess, which skewed very old, resulting in exaggerated lethality.
2. The massive bias towards false negatives and not false positives, due to factors like technician incompetence and the sensitivity of the test.
3. Recovered patients showing negative, and long-term assymptomatic infected who had only recently been infected also showing negative.
4. The cultural and even economic biases towards declaring people who die with the Coronavirus to be dead of it. Cruise ships are full of old and overweight people. I recently snuck into a cruises hip only bar area in a cruise ship only marina. The drinks cost 8 times what they did 200m walk on a holiday island away and the drinks 200m away were much nicer. It was a perfectly safe place. Nonetheless, the charmless American chain bar was full. Walking did not seem to be an option for many of the late stage Wall E crowd. They were actually lovely people though. Anyway, some of them, statistically, would die during the cruise and just after.Replies: @Steve Sailer
But wasn’t the Diamond Princess full of Japanese, who have low COVID death rates in general?
I should stop being mean about cruise ship goers. It is pure English snobbery. The bar was Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville by the way, an impossibly exotic, if totally tacky, locale.
Anyway, I can't get a breakdown of the nationality of the passengers but of the first 7 deaths, 2 were foreigners, including a Brit.
That does seem pretty high for a cruise ship that both started and ended in Japan but I'll accept that my 4th point probably doesn't apply here.
Nonetheless, that doctors and hospitals get more support and credit in Italy if they have lots of Coronavirus deaths, while they get fined or even arrested in China might go a long way to explaining the disparity in lethality. And I doubt that the explanation involves the Chinese doctors somehow keeping people alive better because of fear or whatever.
...
A totally different but interesting data point is that very international Sweden has bars open still. Meanwhile similar but more closed off Denmark has been in total shutdown. Yet Sweden has slightly fewer cases per million people. This is clearly counter-intuitive. Is Scandinavian conscientiousness rendering social isolation statistically insignificant? Is conscientiousness even the right word, or are they just all a bit cold and alien anyway?
“Je, the outdoor, all weather track at our HS is padlocked, as are the tennis courts.”
That’s too bad. My local park’s entrance is at least one mile wide, so they can’t close it. And its trail system is so vast, you’d need a dozen goons to effectively patrol it – which, if they did, would reveal it’s all about power and control.
Even today four young, healthy people walked off the paved trails to steer clear of me. I laughed at them all as I wished them a good morning!
Your issue is with your governor and other officials, they're the ones who mandated the shutdown.
What's your beef with your fellow residents?
Also, while I'm solidly in the this-is-overreaction camp, death numbers have definitely been exponential in most places, including California.
It's easy to see on these semi-log graphs where a straight line means exponential growth. Click the "linear" button and see the familiar upward zooming lines.
http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Also, just because the shutdown was a huge overreaction, it doesn't mean that we should all be out licking door handles.
‘He has no idea what the hell he’s talking about!’ Hurricane Katrina hero general Russell Honore tears into Jared Kushner‘s claim the federal medical stockpile is NOT for states to use
Gen. Russell Honore gained fame leading Joint Task Force Katrina after the devastating hurricane
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8186185/Hurricane-Katrina-hero-Gen-Russell-Honore-tears-Jared-Kushners-claim-medical-stockpile.html
Jared Kushner‘s taskforce is like ‘a frat party’ which ‘descended from a UFO’ says official as president’s son-in-law brags publicly that he knows better than governors what is needed and says stockpile is ‘not states’ it’s ours’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8184391/Jared-Kushners-taskforce-like-frat-party-descended-UFO.html
It's becoming painfully obvious that you and many others here are proud that you mastered and remember your eighth-grade maffs class. Good doggy!
Meanwhile, kung flu body counts remain painfully linear all across the US.Replies: @HA
“Meanwhile, kung flu body counts remain painfully linear all across the US.”
It is definitely not linear:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Here is a hardcopy graph from two weeks ago:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/coronavirus-updating-charts-us-world-compare
Correct. Daily New Deaths looks exponential which implies that Total Deaths are exponential. However Daily New Cases seem to be linear which implies that Total Cases is not exponential but at most quadratic. In theory both Total Deaths and Total Cases should have the same behavior why it is not so could have many speculative explanations.
Japanese go on cruise ships? That’s one of my stereotypes blown! I thought sumo wrestlers were the only fat Japanese people.
I should stop being mean about cruise ship goers. It is pure English snobbery. The bar was Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville by the way, an impossibly exotic, if totally tacky, locale.
Anyway, I can’t get a breakdown of the nationality of the passengers but of the first 7 deaths, 2 were foreigners, including a Brit.
That does seem pretty high for a cruise ship that both started and ended in Japan but I’ll accept that my 4th point probably doesn’t apply here.
Nonetheless, that doctors and hospitals get more support and credit in Italy if they have lots of Coronavirus deaths, while they get fined or even arrested in China might go a long way to explaining the disparity in lethality. And I doubt that the explanation involves the Chinese doctors somehow keeping people alive better because of fear or whatever.
…
A totally different but interesting data point is that very international Sweden has bars open still. Meanwhile similar but more closed off Denmark has been in total shutdown. Yet Sweden has slightly fewer cases per million people. This is clearly counter-intuitive. Is Scandinavian conscientiousness rendering social isolation statistically insignificant? Is conscientiousness even the right word, or are they just all a bit cold and alien anyway?
Sure enough, that's exactly what happened and Trump "pivoted" on his decision five days later.
At the time of the comment, deaths were running around 50/day in New York, and I was predicting that they might reach 500/day, perhaps even 1,000/day by Easter, April 12th. Naturally, all the sorts of idiots who hang around here ridiculed and denounced me. I think half of them were still claiming "It's Just the Flu!!!" Some of them still are.
As it happens, daily deaths in New York broke 500 on April 1st, far more rapidly than I had even considered plausible. (They dropped down to 432 on April 2nd). The whole thing sure looks exponential to me.
And perhaps those who on March 26th argued that seeing 500/day by April 12th was ridiculous should consider the implications of actually getting 500/day by April 1st.
Also, Cuomo now warns that the NY health care system may collapse under the weight of hospitalizations within another 6 days. When/if that happens, the death rate will immediately quadruple or more.
Maybe that French miracle drug will work and save the day. But otherwise, I just can't see how the exponential curve will suddenly change...Replies: @anon, @PhysicistDave, @Hypnotoad666, @mh505, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Inquiring Mind
Governor Cuomo claims that ventilators save only 1 in 5 patients placed on them.
Mr. Unz, tell me how the death rate will quadruple when we run out of ICU beds?
Are hospitals offering any therapy that saves patients, with a high degree if probability, that cannot be administered at home, say, supplementary oxygen from a tank or a concentrator administered with a face mask or nasal canula, without the trach tube, the sedation to tolerate it and the positive-pressure delivery?
It’s your Web site and you can scold whom you want to. The iSteve corner, however, is a refuge of sanity among the multiple blogs you host. There are a lot of us on iSteve who are receptive to arguments based on numbers. For the number of a four-fold jump in deaths if the hospitals are saturated, what is the underlying premise? It doesn’t appear to be the use of ventilators.
If you're correct and Cuomo believes ventilators are mostly useless, why would he be so desperate to obtain more of them?
Anyway, the website I monitor said that New York deaths/day just reached 680. Assuming there are similar trends in serious very serious cases, we'll soon find out what happens when the rate of infection overwhelms the local health care system.
Or maybe the whole thing is just a hoax and "It's Just the Flu!!!" like quite a few commenters on these threads still seem to believe.Replies: @res
You could blow cigarette smoke to test one?
Two weeks ago I saw two masked East Asian men standing on a street corner in an otherwise deserted quarter of a college town. One of them had pulled his mask off his face down to his neck to have a smoke.
I realize that America's lack of widespread testing makes such a calculation difficult, but I know that the massive Chinese effort supposedly showed something close to 1%. However, I'm sure some people don't trust the Chinese data or think they're lying.
But South Korea had very solid testing and they seem to think it's 1%, and actually gradually rises over a long enough period to something like 1.5-2.0%:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-cfr-in-korea/
Is there some reason not to trust the South Korean data? Or is there some sort of other technical complication?Replies: @utu, @res, @obwandiyag
My 0.5% comment was very speculative. Based on two thoughts.
– Iceland’s testing indicates about 50% of the infected are asymptomatic (note that I specifically wrote IFR rather than CFR).
– I think the fatality rate is likely to decrease as the infection rate increases. Rationale being that the most susceptible are being infected most quickly.
The South Korean numbers you linked do give some food for thought.
I have been going with the 1% estimate because it is a nice round number which seems like a decent balance between tendencies I think I am seeing towards over and under estimation from different sources.
YMMV.
P.S. Does anyone have good historical examples for the typical time trends of IFR/CFR estimates? This article about 2009 H1N1 seems close, but not exactly what I am looking for.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/
“However Daily New Cases seem to be linear which implies that Total Cases is not exponential but at most quadratic.”
No, if you click on the logarithmic scale, you’ll see a fairly linear graph (if a bit noisy), which means the daily new cases are, as of today, also growing exponentially.
That's too bad. My local park's entrance is at least one mile wide, so they can't close it. And its trail system is so vast, you'd need a dozen goons to effectively patrol it - which, if they did, would reveal it's all about power and control.
Even today four young, healthy people walked off the paved trails to steer clear of me. I laughed at them all as I wished them a good morning!Replies: @vhrm
I’m not sure how serious you are about this stuff, but why are you going out of your way to be a dick to people?
Your issue is with your governor and other officials, they’re the ones who mandated the shutdown.
What’s your beef with your fellow residents?
Also, while I’m solidly in the this-is-overreaction camp, death numbers have definitely been exponential in most places, including California.
It’s easy to see on these semi-log graphs where a straight line means exponential growth. Click the “linear” button and see the familiar upward zooming lines.
http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Also, just because the shutdown was a huge overreaction, it doesn’t mean that we should all be out licking door handles.
https://www.unz.com/runz/correctly-estimating-coronavirus-infections/
If he assumed that MortalityRate =0.5% then his multiplier would be 2,000 and this would imply 160,000 infections from 80 deaths.Replies: @res
Reread comment 29 from Travis. Ron’s calculation is
Number of infected = Number of Deaths / Mortality_Rate *2^(Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period)
Where both number of deaths and number of infected are based on the current date.
The additional factor of 10 you mention comes from the
2^(Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period)
term. This is because you use today’s deaths to estimate the number of infections present at the beginning of the mortality period.
Here is the relevant portion of comment 29.
Travis was estimating infections at the beginning of the mortality period and still using an additional factor of 10. Then he proceeded to go on about the doublings that would have happened between then and the date of death. Put differently, he double counted the 2^(Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period) term.
Try understanding what we are modeling rather than just grinding through equations.
So indeed it seems that Travis ended up using an extra factor of 10 probably because he did not do proper "grinding through equations".Replies: @res
The majority of hospital admittees don’t get intubated. Presumably many of them would die if they weren’t admitted to the hospital, but they are not so badly off that they have to be given desperation care (ventilator).
No, the log curve for Total Cases is concave in 10k -100k cases range, meaning it is not exponential. It was exponential for <10k cases.
I think I answered that question in my original comment with “I would further guess (hopefully we will have a better idea after the fact) it would have been closer to 1968.” Which just happens to have been the sentence immediately following the one you quoted ; )
BTW, probably best to avoid absolute statements like that (“no prime-age, healthy people”). There have been examples in the media counter to that, and even if those individuals really were unhealthy in reality, it seems likely to me that there will be some poor soul who is young and healthy but manages to die of this.
Overly absolute statements just make it easy for people to assert you are wrong. And be correct when they do it.
Agreed.
Some questions for you.
1. Do you think this would have been more or less severe than the 1968 flu if we had taken minimal/no countermeasures?
2. Would the 1918 flu outcome be enough to make you think the current measures were warranted?
3. If so, any thoughts on where the threshold would fall between 1918 and 1968 for requiring countermeasures?
It is easy to scream under/over reaction (witness how many people are doing just that). Much harder to offer and justify a reasonable response.
Number of infected = Number of Deaths / Mortality_Rate *2^(Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period)
Where both number of deaths and number of infected are based on the current date.
The additional factor of 10 you mention comes from the
2^(Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period)
term. This is because you use today's deaths to estimate the number of infections present at the beginning of the mortality period.
Here is the relevant portion of comment 29.Travis was estimating infections at the beginning of the mortality period and still using an additional factor of 10. Then he proceeded to go on about the doublings that would have happened between then and the date of death. Put differently, he double counted the 2^(Mortality_Period/Doubling_Period) term.
Try understanding what we are modeling rather than just grinding through equations.Replies: @utu
Wrong. 8,000 was infected on March 1st if 80 died on March 21st under the assumption of 1% mortality. But 80,000 on the day when 80 died, i.e., March 21st. is correct.
So indeed it seems that Travis ended up using an extra factor of 10 probably because he did not do proper “grinding through equations”.
You were wrong because you ground through the equation without taking the time to understand comment 29.Replies: @utu
Well, I’m absolutely no medical expert, but the medical experts all seem to say that the supply of ventilators is crucial. According to them, the death rate spikes to 5% without enough ventilators and similar ICU resources.
If you’re correct and Cuomo believes ventilators are mostly useless, why would he be so desperate to obtain more of them?
Anyway, the website I monitor said that New York deaths/day just reached 680. Assuming there are similar trends in serious very serious cases, we’ll soon find out what happens when the rate of infection overwhelms the local health care system.
Or maybe the whole thing is just a hoax and “It’s Just the Flu!!!” like quite a few commenters on these threads still seem to believe.
https://qventus.com/blog/predicting-the-effects-of-the-covid-pandemic-on-us-health-system-capacity/
we see that around the peak they estimate fewer nCov patients in ICU than there are weekly deaths (and the map for week 5 shows states generally <25% over capacity). How is it possible that the death rate increases so much with maybe a sixth as many patients failing to get an ICU bed as there are daily deaths?
Even with the aggressive 1918 scenario the ICU does not seem to going more than 50% over capacity.
“No, the log curve for Total Cases is concave in 10k -100k cases range, meaning it is not exponential.”
Exponential is certainly a more apt descriptor than quadratic — doing an OLS fit of the log of the total cases since March-1 (when the number of cases was 100) gives you an r-squared > 99% assuming I didn’t fat-finger anything. That’s a really good fit. Ergo, exponential behavior.
On the other hand, doing an OLS fit of the square root instead of the log gives you a lower r-squared. So to the extent the behavior is not precisely exponential (and I’d certainly be happy if it starts to significantly level off), claiming it’s quadratic is even more off the mark.
That remains true even if you just look at just the last two, or the last 3 weeks. If you want to cherry-pick some other range, give it a shot, but it’s going to be pretty clear that that is what you’re doing.
If some other states that were lagging behind begin producing strong exponential growth of cases the curve for the whole of the US may return back to stronger exponential growth for a while.
PS: Not sure where did you get the square root function from. If you are fitting y then compare polynomial fit or power function fit vs. exponential fit and if you are fitting log(y) compare log(polynomial) fit with linear function fit.Replies: @HA
So indeed it seems that Travis ended up using an extra factor of 10 probably because he did not do proper "grinding through equations".Replies: @res
Are you really not going to own that you were wrong when you responded “No.” to me in comment 95?
You were wrong because you ground through the equation without taking the time to understand comment 29.
If you're correct and Cuomo believes ventilators are mostly useless, why would he be so desperate to obtain more of them?
Anyway, the website I monitor said that New York deaths/day just reached 680. Assuming there are similar trends in serious very serious cases, we'll soon find out what happens when the rate of infection overwhelms the local health care system.
Or maybe the whole thing is just a hoax and "It's Just the Flu!!!" like quite a few commenters on these threads still seem to believe.Replies: @res
Has anyone worked through the numbers (and made the reasoning available) showing how that 5% claim works? Looking at this site estimating bed capacity over time:
https://qventus.com/blog/predicting-the-effects-of-the-covid-pandemic-on-us-health-system-capacity/
we see that around the peak they estimate fewer nCov patients in ICU than there are weekly deaths (and the map for week 5 shows states generally <25% over capacity). How is it possible that the death rate increases so much with maybe a sixth as many patients failing to get an ICU bed as there are daily deaths?
Even with the aggressive 1918 scenario the ICU does not seem to going more than 50% over capacity.
I have no idea of what the total death rate will be when this all burns out, but, one, I can safely predict the total will be higher than if we did nothing, two, the vast majority will be people who were going to have been dead relatively soon anyway, and three, if the harvest doesn’t include some of America’s most poisonous geriatric leftists I will be disappointed.
My guess is that a fair number of younger Dems are hoping for a codger cleanout as well so they can move up. Senile Joe is unelectable, and they know it: they want to unhorse him and put The Rod or Pocahontas in there, and if he goes early it’ll be easier to do it. I suspect they have nothing to fear from the right but a lot to fear from their own side.Replies: @Harry Baldwin
they want to unhorse him and put The Rod or Pocahontas in there
“The Rod”? I’m drawing a blank.
I am guessing the reason you are getting high r-square is because you do a fit in the full range from March 1st when y=75 and obviously a power function cannot match that large dynamic range. I did not mean doing it. I did not claim that it was not an exponential growth for y<10k. But if you do the fit from March 18 when y= 9197 other than an exponential may produce a higher r-square. I said a quadratic function because dy/dx at first glance seemed to be linear after March 18. But you must agree that log(y) is concave after March 18 so the curve departed form the exponential behavior, right? Its growths gets progressively slower than an exponential function. So possibly instead of y=exp(Ax) it is y=exp(Ax^k) where k<1 after March 18 or quadratic might be good approximation. And towards the end of March log(y) gets back to be linear but its slope is significantly lower than before March 18. Anyway you look at it no single exponential function is optimal to describe the behavior in the full range. This is to be expected because the process is much more complex with all social distancing measures and the fact that different populations are lagging and different population densities have different exponent coefficients.
If some other states that were lagging behind begin producing strong exponential growth of cases the curve for the whole of the US may return back to stronger exponential growth for a while.
PS: Not sure where did you get the square root function from. If you are fitting y then compare polynomial fit or power function fit vs. exponential fit and if you are fitting log(y) compare log(polynomial) fit with linear function fit.
You were wrong because you ground through the equation without taking the time to understand comment 29.Replies: @utu
No sometimes may mean gee, ha, oh… But seriously, yes you were correct. In the moment I was responding to the same what you responding. Sorry that my No caused you some distress.
“I said a quadratic function because dy/dx at first glance seemed to be linear after March 18.”
Which is completely false. dy/dx (or dy/dt) is not linear; it is the change in the LOG of the number of cases per day is indeed roughly linear. If you’re claiming that it’s d(logY)/dt that is linear (i.e. roughly a constant), then you are correct about that, but that’s what makes the overall growth (in the number of cases) exponential. You’re arguing my very point.
Yeah, there is a slight concavity in the log of the number of cases that I very much hope gets bigger (i.e. I hope the growth in the number of cases levels off) but it’s very small and may just be noise for all anyone knows. The fact that the R-squared associated with the LINEAR fit of the log of the function is so high means it’s still very nearly exponential.
There’s mathematical ways of proving that a dataset is quadratic or exponential, and there’s more there than just arguing over some small concavity you see.
“Not sure where did you get the square root function from. “
If Y grows as a power of time, so that y ~ t^N, then the graph of y^(1/N) should be linear. In the case of N=2, i.e. quadratic growth, y^(1/N) is the square root of y. Alas, if you plot the square root of the number of cases and see how that grows with time you do NOT see linear growth. Ergo, y is not quadratic. (On the other hand, if y grows like exp(t), then the log of Y should be linear, which it roughly is — so it’s not quadratic.)
If any of what I just said confuses you, and you prefer to make vague handwaving claims about concavity instead, then we’ve got nothing to discuss.
Gen. Russell Honore gained fame leading Joint Task Force Katrina after the devastating hurricane
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8186185/Hurricane-Katrina-hero-Gen-Russell-Honore-tears-Jared-Kushners-claim-medical-stockpile.html
Jared Kushner's taskforce is like 'a frat party' which 'descended from a UFO' says official as president's son-in-law brags publicly that he knows better than governors what is needed and says stockpile is 'not states' it's ours'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8184391/Jared-Kushners-taskforce-like-frat-party-descended-UFO.htmlReplies: @Anon
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8186287/Monash-University-scientists-anti-parasite-Ivermectin-kill-COVID-19-cells-two-days.html
No it isn’t, illiterate.
New York needs 30,000 nurses. For a hoax. Check.
This is not to say that the Fuckers in Charge aren’t trying to game this plague.
But if you look at them on TV, you will see that they are scared. And they are not good actors. If they are scared, one would think hoi polloi ought to be too.
I realize that America's lack of widespread testing makes such a calculation difficult, but I know that the massive Chinese effort supposedly showed something close to 1%. However, I'm sure some people don't trust the Chinese data or think they're lying.
But South Korea had very solid testing and they seem to think it's 1%, and actually gradually rises over a long enough period to something like 1.5-2.0%:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-cfr-in-korea/
Is there some reason not to trust the South Korean data? Or is there some sort of other technical complication?Replies: @utu, @res, @obwandiyag
Garbage in garbage out.
You are calculating wrong numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin
Ivermectin is a wonderful drug that cures heartworms in dogs and river blindness in humans. It’s so effective that Merck has a policy of giving it away free in the tropical world where river blindness is a problem. The Japanese and American discoverers got the 2015 Nobel. It was discovered through Edisonian medicine where you just try a lot of random stuff and see what works instead of trying to theorize what should work from first principles.
It’s unlikely that ivermectin will also get us out of this jam, but we can hope.
Two weeks ago I saw two masked East Asian men standing on a street corner in an otherwise deserted quarter of a college town. One of them had pulled his mask off his face down to his neck to have a smoke.Replies: @JimB
Cigarette smoke particles are sub-micron size. That’s how they get deep in your lungs. If you can blow them through, then the mask may not work.
I’d like to see an actuarial cost-benefit analysis of various responses to COVID19. Look at expected remaining lifespan of victims, debilitation and reduced productivity of survivors vs. health costs of full house arrest lockdown (it seems foolish to prevent people from getting exercise, speaking of health considerations), costs of drug OD, suicides of unemployed, lost productivity of under-education due to school closures on young people, etc. Had this been done much earlier, a crash program to build ventilators and masks and to close international borders to hot zones would’ve been much cheaper than what we have now, but it would take a resolute and sober leader to have ignored present value and interest groups to do it. For that matter, can we conceive of airline and travel CEOs advocating short term preventive measures with significant pain in order to forestall months-later existential risk to their firms?
Of course, at this point the risk of very high numbers of dead puts this into the same category as terrorism, where security theater costs outweigh the likely costs of terrorism deaths but it is politically required to Do Everything We Can. I support masks, industrial repurposing, and temporary mass quarantine, but there needs to be an endpoint with some acknowledgment of countervailing costs too.
If some other states that were lagging behind begin producing strong exponential growth of cases the curve for the whole of the US may return back to stronger exponential growth for a while.
PS: Not sure where did you get the square root function from. If you are fitting y then compare polynomial fit or power function fit vs. exponential fit and if you are fitting log(y) compare log(polynomial) fit with linear function fit.Replies: @HA
PS In general, if you suspect y grows like some power of t (y ~ t^X, where X is some constant), then you typically plot log(Y) vs log(T). If the result the function is linear, then you know your assumption is correct; moreover, the slope of that resultant line gives you X.
If you do that in this case, you’ll see that the resultant function is far from linear; that being said, if you restrict the data to the last few weeks where it’s (hopefully) starting to level off, then that portion of the graph is indeed roughly linear, though the slope is more like 4.6.
In other words, y ~ t^4.6 over the last couple of weeks.
So yet again, since 4.6 is most definitely not 2, the function is not quadratic.
Did two fits: exponential and quadratic (2nd order poly) to the US data beginning with April 18.
Clearly as you can see form the log(y) vs x plot log the data are concave not a straight line, as I was saying from the beginning, so the exponential function is not the best. While the quadratic (2nd degree poly) y=ax^2+bx+c does a very nice job.
I really do not know what you have been feeding me in your last two comments.
-- People who don't understand the distortion of selection effects.Replies: @anonymous, @Mr. Anon, @UK, @PhysicistDave
AnotherDad wrote to me:
for my having written:
Yeah, you were indeed one of those “other commenters” I had in mind: you may have been the very first, but I did not want to go to the trouble to search on who was first (it wasn’t me).
I think it is time for everyone to start considering the possibility that a relatively voluntarist approach might have worked: I have two neighbors in their ’90s — they did not need government orders to self-isolate. I’m reasonably healthy and in my ’60s — I started wearing a mask a week ago when grocery shopping, before the feds kindly admitted it might help. My wife and I have enough sense not to go to a basketball game given the pandemic.
Was sending the kids home from school a good idea? Hard to say — they might have helped with herd immunity had they stayed in school, but they might have infected and killed grandma and grandpa. Anyway, the state runs most of the schools, so on that I will defer to the state.
If they allow people to pick up takeout food from McDonald’s et al., couldn’t they have allowed us to pick up books from the library? No, of course not! Big Macs are essential, but books… Well, everyone knows that a population is more docile if they are not encouraged to do subversive things like read books!
No doubt mistakes were inevitable, but the mistakes seem to be overwhelmingly on the side of denying personal liberty and enhancing the power of the state — not to mention wrecking the economy, which will of course be “rebuilt” by the feds.
This is starting to remind me of some dead guys a long time ago who wrote:
I’m starting to feel that our current rulers have rather less concern for our future security than for enhancing their own power.
Well if that works I’m all set. I have a big tube of Ivermectin horse de-wormer that I got on Amazon for my dog. You only need a tiny dose to prevent heartworm in a dog so the hardest part is measuring out a sufficiently small quantity – you make a 10 to 1 dilution and then the dog gets a few ml of the diluted solution according to its body weight. This works out to a fraction of the cost of the ridiculously overpriced name brand tablets which each contain 0.000272 grams of the drug. One tube of delicious apple flavored horse deworming paste has the same amount of ivermectin as 400 dog chews. There are also reports of humans buying this stuff for scabies – human prescription ivermectin is even more marked up but it’s all the same stuff. A 1250 lb. horse takes the whole tube all at once, partly because its body mass is so much higher and partly because the dose for deworming is much higher than the dosage for heartworm prevention.
But anyway if this is the stuff for Wuhan Virus, I’m all set. Hurry and buy yours on Amazon before word gets around. But don’t be an idiot like the guy who took fish chloroquine and take a massive overdose.
This man cured his cancer with dog de-wormer and other common items. If I had cancer I would try this. Seriously.
https://www.mycancerstory.rocks/single-post/2016/08/22/Shake-up-your-life-how-to-change-your-own-perspective
take a massive overdosegot poisoned by his wife.https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/new-revelations-about-woman-who-accidentally-poisoned-her-husband-to-death-with-fish-tank-cleaner-raises-eyebrows/Replies: @vhrm
Why can’t they just curtail the purchase of N95 by anyone who isn’t part of a medical institution and haS the ID to prove it?
- Nearly half the COVID-19 victims suffered from at least one of the following conditions: high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease
- More than 75% reported high blood pressure, while 35% had diabetes and 33% had heart disease
- The average age of the victims was 79.5
Although elsewhere this figure is surely lower, one can easily assume that 30-50% of the deaths reported had already a foot in the graveReplies: @Hail
Similar numbers are emerging elsewhere, too. There was a release yesterday by the state of New York that 98% of fatalities had a serious pre-existing condition.
Sweden, which has had very few deaths, and whose government is to be commended for its courageous stance in refusing and rejecting any kneejerk shutdowns, has now said two-thirds of its corona-positive deaths have been terminal patients about to die anyway.
(Hail to you, Sweden, anti-CoronaPanic stalwart.)
It’s looking something like this for deaths reported so far in Europe and the USA:
– 60% to 90% “would have died anyway;” (exactly what they meant by this I have not seen delineated; some were no doubt literal deathbed terminal patients; others probably were in a class statistically expected to die, as when doctors give someone with Lou Gehrig’s Disease 6-12 months left to live, etc.)
– 10% to 38%+ were seriously ill and/or aged, but otherwise would have been expected to survive;
– <2% did not have serious health problems, but were in old age;
– 0% were young or early-middle-aged people without serious health conditions.
On that “so far”: Because the majority of people end up coming in contact with a virus like this, the number of “corona-positive deaths” will rise and eventually come approach the number of total deaths (Dr. John Lee, a top expert in the UK, wrote about this in the Spectator). As someone quipped, “the good news is, we’ve cured cancer.”
BTW: the following primer "How to Create a Fake Pandemic" ( https://www.sott.net/article/431860-How-to-Create-a-Fake-Pandemic ) will be of interest to you. It is by no means meant as satire.
In any case, I think it's time to leave this discussion to the fearmongers. In 3, latest 4 weeks we shall all know the truth and then the real debate can start.
BTW, probably best to avoid absolute statements like that ("no prime-age, healthy people"). There have been examples in the media counter to that, and even if those individuals really were unhealthy in reality, it seems likely to me that there will be some poor soul who is young and healthy but manages to die of this.
Overly absolute statements just make it easy for people to assert you are wrong. And be correct when they do it.Agreed.
Some questions for you.
1. Do you think this would have been more or less severe than the 1968 flu if we had taken minimal/no countermeasures?
2. Would the 1918 flu outcome be enough to make you think the current measures were warranted?
3. If so, any thoughts on where the threshold would fall between 1918 and 1968 for requiring countermeasures?
It is easy to scream under/over reaction (witness how many people are doing just that). Much harder to offer and justify a reasonable response.Replies: @Hail
Thanks for the thoughtful replies and digging up the study in another post above.
It’s hard to compare the world of 1968-69 to the world of 2020, of course. To make such a judgment call one would also be interested in what the response from health authorities was in 1968-69. What we can say is that even 1968-69 was, in historical terms, not really a big deal. (See Figure A you posted.)
Ask around to older relatives, not prefacing it with anything, but ask what they remember about the 1968-69 pandemic. I have yet to hear anyone respond in with anything at all, and have seen others report the same. That is to say, no one who “lived through it” even remembers. If we find and read narrow histories of the period focusing on one or another specific thing unrelated to public health, it’s doubtful the pandemic even gets a single mention (whereas any decent telling of WWI would give the Spanish Flu pandemic a lot of play).
But I realize I am not directly answering your question. I of course don’t know, but the best data I’ve seen suggests 1968 is a likely worst-case here even absent “countermeasures.” What I am 100% convinced of, is that the countermeasures that have been taken in the past few weeks are a devastatingly bad idea, treating what by all indications is a passing flu pandemic not unlike the ones seen occasionally as if it were the 1918 pandemic. And not just the 1918 pandemic, the media-led reaction seems more like it’s airborne Bubonic Plague, or a nuclear war.
The problem is “countermeasures” have spillover effects, and it looks certain by this point that much, much more damage will be done by the cure than by the disease, though this calculation requires quantifying the effects of human misery and time wasted to recession and all manner of disruption, small businesses ruined, and so on. I still have also seen few mention the inevitable decline in the fertility rate, which means potentially millions of babies won’t be born who otherwise would have, absent the CoronaPanic.
We need good data, and all the best data is now pointing to 0.01% to 0.1% as a death rate, with one recent one saying the upper-bound could be 0.2%.
Your three questions seem premised on the idea “better safe than sorry,” a compelling enough argument, I guess, for politicians when a bloodthirsty media was drumbeating for panic and attention and promoting CoronaHysteria, all thereby pressuring the politicians from one side; then a large group of citizens indulging in media-induced panic (with all kinds of opportunists on promoting their interests; the people who want to work at home as a quasi-vacation are a big one but there are others; this social aspect to CoronaPanic is a tangent but a fascinating one to me); on a third side, a few seeming experts began waving scary exponential graphs at the politicians, none with actual, reliable, robust data, all with wild projections that were suspicious all along and are now very clearly wrong.
The same argument of “better safe than sorry” can be made on almost anything. Banning cars is one. There is 100% certainty that banning all motorized transport would reduce traffic deaths to zero, right.
____________
Yes, granted there are always flukes.
Say (and I am making these numbers up but they seem roughly plausible from what I’ve seen) there are a given 100,000 “prime-age, healthy” persons exposed to the virus. In one scenario, 90,000 of them might be fine or have symptoms so mild as to be dismissed as nothing; 9,950 might come down with a flu-like illness, such as the kind people occasionally get and are knocked out of work- or school-attending ability a few days. The remaining 50 persons’ cases are more serious, with risk of death to some of them, absent some intervention. A top-notch healthcare system would be able to easily treat/save 49+ of 50 of these lives. This would give a total, final death rate of say 0.1 in 100,000 (100 deaths in 100 million).
Speaking, above, of banning cars. This 0.1 in 100,000 prime-age-healthy deaths would be a small fraction of the number of the same set of 100,000 prime-age, healthy people statistically expected to die in car crashes in 2020 (for all ages it was 11 per 100,000 in 2018, implying a lifetime rate now of 0.9%, btw.)
In any case, if millions of prime-age persons are exposed to the virus, and all indications are that this is the case, there will be some cases to point to. Statistically, it rounds to zero. The promotion of such stories in the media is clearly about agenda-setting, and more often than not those stories even turn against them (e.g., the story of the 21-year-old Spanish local soccer coach who died “of coronavirus,” but it turned out he had late-stage, undiagnosed leukemia).
My own current estimate of the IFR is 1%, with a decent chance of 0.5%. There is significant uncertainty there though. It will be interesting to see if we ever do get a decent estimate. There was still a huge range of CFR estimates for the 2009 H1N1 a year or two after the fact. See Table 1 in
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/
If you are interested, I did an age based mortality analysis here:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/san-diego-neighborhood-case-rates/#comment-3816590
The numbers are higher than you will like, but I think you could just divide by 10 to give useful estimates given your own priors.
- 10% to 38%+ were seriously ill and/or aged, but otherwise would have been expected to survive;
- <2% did not have serious health problems, but were in old age;
- 0% were young or early-middle-aged people without serious health conditions.On that "so far": Because the majority of people end up coming in contact with a virus like this, the number of "corona-positive deaths" will rise and eventually come approach the number of total deaths (Dr. John Lee, a top expert in the UK, wrote about this in the Spectator). As someone quipped, "the good news is, we've cured cancer."Replies: @mh505
I didn’t expect the figure of preexistings to be so high, but it proves our point. And yes, Sweden is the shining light in this darkness hailing back to the middle ages. Some countries too such as South Korea, Belgium etc – although having decreed a lockdown – have been intelligent enough not to enforce it. Among the best of them is Belorussia.
BTW: the following primer “How to Create a Fake Pandemic” ( https://www.sott.net/article/431860-How-to-Create-a-Fake-Pandemic ) will be of interest to you. It is by no means meant as satire.
In any case, I think it’s time to leave this discussion to the fearmongers. In 3, latest 4 weeks we shall all know the truth and then the real debate can start.
Trends in Recorded Influenza Mortality: United States, 1900–2004
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2007.119933
Their summary of results.This seems like a worthwhile clarification.Table 1 gives an interesting summary (by month) of 12 flu seasons from 1941-1976. WWII was a bad time for the flu in the US. There is a graphical version of the Table 1 data in Web Figure 1 from the online supplement.
I'll include their version of your graphic since the version starting in 1900 puts 1918 into perspective relative to the post-1930 cases. To give a little more perspective on these numbers, each 10 per 100,000 corresponds to 33,000 people in 2020 USA.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/apha/journals/content/ajph/2008/ajph.2008.98.issue-5/ajph.2007.119933/production/images/large/doshi_f2_rev3.jpegReplies: @Hail
Table 1 there shows, fwiw:
Dec. 1968: 16.4 influenza deaths per 100,000 population
Jan. 1969: 23.3 influenza deaths per 100,000 population
(The Hong Kong flu strain became widespread in the US in Dec. 1968.)
Adjusted for 2020 population, that would be 133,000 influenza-attributed deaths. This appears to be something like twice the average for the time but there was no real detectable rise in the total mortality rate (Figure 1b) as there was with the 1918-1919 period (Figure 1a).
The other 1968-69 flu-season influenza deaths, minus December and January, amount to a little over a cumulative 10 per 100,000 (33,500 scaled to today’s population), which puts the total at ~165,000 deaths in 2020 terms, with an old-and-sick age-condition profile for victims.
Given the USA’s higher average age in 2020 than in 1968-69, this 165,000 must be adjusted upwards to make for a true comparison with today. Not sure by how much. Total, 200,000? 250,000? 300,000?
And no one remembers it. It came and went, immediately forgotten except by specialists. Life goes on.
Commenters here are highly educated and very sharp on average. That is to say, well-read and well-informed. I wonder how many knew, four months ago, that there had been a 1968 flu pandemic at all? Even of the older people who even lived through it?
https://www.unz.com/isteve/l-a-mayor-public-should-wear-masks-but-not-n95s/#comment-3814212
The number I saw was 100k deaths which I scaled by 330/200 (US populations in millions) to give a little over 150k (more accurately, 165k) today.
LOL. She’s from Transylvania, and she likes those Twilight vampire movies (really does) so I can’t be too careful. She actually does hang garlic and other spices outside our doors behind the usual wreaths and seasonal decorations. To keep evil away or something. Who am I to argue? I think it’s cute.
Another cute thing is her tradition that says the man should enter a doorway first. You see, that means he can fight off whoever is on the other side and protect her. It makes sense, but I worry what others will think when they see me do that, so I usually don’t. She always tends to walk behind me everywhere anyway, though.
Paul Newman once saw me do that, open a door and walk in ahead of my wife. I did it to please her. He didn’t know about that, and he scowled at me and did a few other things to make it obvious that he thought I was a jerk. He was well known around town for opening doors for ladies, always. At stores, restaurants, etc. We were in a gourmet soup place that time, and he made it a point to slowly scoop out all the remaining “white bean artichoke” soup after her overheard me telling my wife I was going to get some. Right in front of me. He was my soup Nazi. Oh well. I’ll never forget it. Cultural differences can lead to misunderstandings.
I just wanted to tell that story. Hope it’s all right. It’s late in the thread, so nobody will read it anyway.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
Agreed about the need for good data. What references do you have for the numbers you are giving?
If you have been paying attention to my comments you might have noticed I tend to be playing devil’s advocate and arguing with people making both “hoax/nothingburger” and “doom” statements (as I see them).
My own current estimate of the IFR is 1%, with a decent chance of 0.5%. There is significant uncertainty there though. It will be interesting to see if we ever do get a decent estimate. There was still a huge range of CFR estimates for the 2009 H1N1 a year or two after the fact. See Table 1 in
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/
If you are interested, I did an age based mortality analysis here:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/san-diego-neighborhood-case-rates/#comment-3816590
The numbers are higher than you will like, but I think you could just divide by 10 to give useful estimates given your own priors.
Jan. 1969: 23.3 influenza deaths per 100,000 population (The Hong Kong flu strain became widespread in the US in Dec. 1968.)Adjusted for 2020 population, that would be 133,000 influenza-attributed deaths. This appears to be something like twice the average for the time but there was no real detectable rise in the total mortality rate (Figure 1b) as there was with the 1918-1919 period (Figure 1a).The other 1968-69 flu-season influenza deaths, minus December and January, amount to a little over a cumulative 10 per 100,000 (33,500 scaled to today's population), which puts the total at ~165,000 deaths in 2020 terms, with an old-and-sick age-condition profile for victims.Given the USA's higher average age in 2020 than in 1968-69, this 165,000 must be adjusted upwards to make for a true comparison with today. Not sure by how much. Total, 200,000? 250,000? 300,000?And no one remembers it. It came and went, immediately forgotten except by specialists. Life goes on.Commenters here are highly educated and very sharp on average. That is to say, well-read and well-informed. I wonder how many knew, four months ago, that there had been a 1968 flu pandemic at all? Even of the older people who even lived through it?Replies: @res
I expanded on the 1968 analogy in comment 73:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/l-a-mayor-public-should-wear-masks-but-not-n95s/#comment-3814212
The number I saw was 100k deaths which I scaled by 330/200 (US populations in millions) to give a little over 150k (more accurately, 165k) today.
The square valve you call a snout is a check valve, which is a one way valve for those of you that don’t do plumbing. The masks have a check valve there because the masks are for the trades and laborers. Physical exertion makes workers breath hard which can cause the mask to slightly pop off your face when forcefully exhaling, This messes with the proper fit of the mask which is critical to its effectiveness. Masks without valves also get really hot and damp and uncomfortable if you wear them for four hours straight.
I have them for dusty jobs. They protect the wearer but they are not ideal for pandemics because they only do half the job.
Another problem with wearing masks is that they need to be properly fitted and worn. There are instructions and videos available (see 3M ) and any industrial firm has to train employees as a matter of course as part of their safety program to meet workplace HAZMAT and OSHA requirements. The problem is a fraction of the population is virtually untrainable, so they need frequent simple instruction and regular enforcement to get proper compliance.Replies: @Clyde
Greatly appreciated. I knew the 3M snout masks helped with moisture build up, you explained explained why.
Best deal on eBay is $70 for one. I have had to deal with the check valve on the well for my water sprinklers.
You bought horse, but dog de-wormers are very strong too and tough on the liver, because liver is a major detox organ like the kidneys.
This man cured his cancer with dog de-wormer and other common items. If I had cancer I would try this. Seriously.
https://www.mycancerstory.rocks/single-post/2016/08/22/Shake-up-your-life-how-to-change-your-own-perspective
You’re using a 2nd order polynomial on 18 data points? No duh that those 3 parameters in general do better than the 2 from the exponential, especially when you cherry-pick an interval that suits you. A quartic or quintic fit would be even tighter — do we at least agree on that? Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself, and you’ll see the error goes down even more.
As for testing for power-law behavior using graphical methods, it’s a pretty standard technique. Again, why not just try it for yourself? For example, crunch out x^4, or x^10 on a spreadsheet, and then do a scatter plot of the log of x^4 or x^10 vs. log(t). If you don’t get a linear graph whose slope is 4 or 10, you’re doing something wrong. Then, as a final bonus, do that for the growth in the number of Covid cases and you can see for yourself that the power that best fits over that interval is betwen 4 and 5.
Still don’t believe me? Try wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#Graphical_methods_for_identification (see the section on log-log plots)
"As for testing..." - Your tutorial, which I do not need, is just an attempt to obfuscate as you do not have it in you to bring yourself to admitting that you were wrong from the very beginning. Grow up, be a man. Stop unnecessary posturing that you know what you are talking about because often you do not. Be less stubborn, more open and consider a possibility that you might be wrong which in your case as this exchange demonstrated might be very likely.
To recapitulate let me repeat my comment # 126It stands. Do not waste my time in the future.Replies: @utu, @HA
“you cherry-pick an interval that suits you” – This is the interval that we are talking about from the very beginning. Check past comments in our exchange. The interval in which the departure from the exponential growth occurred which I observed in the log(y) as it was concave. I speculated earlier that it could be a quadric function and I demonstrated here that indeed this is the case as 2nd degree poly fits if very well while an exponential function does very poorly despite of you earlier assurance of very high R-square.
“As for testing…” – Your tutorial, which I do not need, is just an attempt to obfuscate as you do not have it in you to bring yourself to admitting that you were wrong from the very beginning. Grow up, be a man. Stop unnecessary posturing that you know what you are talking about because often you do not. Be less stubborn, more open and consider a possibility that you might be wrong which in your case as this exchange demonstrated might be very likely.
To recapitulate let me repeat my comment # 126
It stands. Do not waste my time in the future.
"As for testing..." - Your tutorial, which I do not need, is just an attempt to obfuscate as you do not have it in you to bring yourself to admitting that you were wrong from the very beginning. Grow up, be a man. Stop unnecessary posturing that you know what you are talking about because often you do not. Be less stubborn, more open and consider a possibility that you might be wrong which in your case as this exchange demonstrated might be very likely.
To recapitulate let me repeat my comment # 126It stands. Do not waste my time in the future.Replies: @utu, @HA
In comment #117 up the thread I said:
What in mathematics is understood as quadratic function?
So, I made an excellent guess as the polynomial fit of the 2nd degree in comment #145 demonstrates.
But don’t be an idiot like the guy who took fish chloroquine and
take a massive overdosegot poisoned by his wife.https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/new-revelations-about-woman-who-accidentally-poisoned-her-husband-to-death-with-fish-tank-cleaner-raises-eyebrows/
"As for testing..." - Your tutorial, which I do not need, is just an attempt to obfuscate as you do not have it in you to bring yourself to admitting that you were wrong from the very beginning. Grow up, be a man. Stop unnecessary posturing that you know what you are talking about because often you do not. Be less stubborn, more open and consider a possibility that you might be wrong which in your case as this exchange demonstrated might be very likely.
To recapitulate let me repeat my comment # 126It stands. Do not waste my time in the future.Replies: @utu, @HA
“The interval in which the departure from the exponential growth occurred which I observed in the log(y) as it was concave.”
So what? I’m not denying that it’s slightly concave, nor do I deny that a 3 parameter fit will in general produce a lower error than a 2-parameter fit. But you can fit concave functions (indeed, most any well behaved function) with exponentials, too. When exponential basis functions are used then the fit is called a a Laplace transform. Are you going to make some big stink about that, too? That being the case, that concavity is not the big arbiter of exponential behavior you’re making it out to be.
Moreover, when it comes categorizing the growth or decay of a certain behavior as being either linear, exponential, or some power law (and I suspect those three choices comprise the vast majority of cases that engineers and scientists look at), and doing that in the way that engineers and scientists typically do it (as opposed to your off-the-cuff personalized decrees over what some concave region means to you and therefore must mean to everyone else), then you do it the way I’ve described. Too bad if that upsets you, but again, your ad hoc personalized definitions don’t amount to much. Given that you’re the one who seems mystified by standard math techniques, maybe you should work through your own insecurities before accusing me.
“then you do it the way I’ve described.”
Which is not so say that Q-Q plots and other techniques are not just as valid or more so. It’s just that the log-log (or linear-log, or linear-linear, etc.) scatterplot approach is generally quickest/easiest approach in my experience, given that it requires no more than a simple spreadsheet. Alas, getting worked up over what some concave region means to you is certainly not an approach I’ve ever seen, but if you’re so convinced that it is the key to understanding this, I’m sure you’ll be able to easily find some references for it — the way I have for the techniques I’ve used. Or else, to the extent you can come up with anything, maybe it’ll just be more pouting and accusations. Which is those two options is more likely, I wonder?
More obfuscations. Who do you want to impress? Yourself? The bottom line is that you were wrong. The region over the 10k cases is quadratic as I said and not exponential as you tried to convince everybody in several comments. Try saying aloud “I was wrong” and perhaps then somebody may find time to notice that you may actually know something. By saying “I know something” has an opposite effect.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I do want to clarify an earlier point. While it's true that engineers and scientists most commonly deal with linear/power/exponential behavior as I noted earlier, computer scientists actually have a much richer spectrum of behaviors to work with, and when it comes to computation complexity theory, they spend a lot of effort trying to figure out whether computation time for a given algorithm grows polynomially, exponentially, logarithmically and various prodcts thereof. So for them at least, it's more than just linear/exponential/power. But you know what they DON'T spend a lot of time with? -- pulling stuff out of thin air about some local concave bump in the growth curve and claiming that it means much of anything.)Replies: @res
“The bottom line is that you were wrong. The region over the 10k cases is quadratic as I said and not exponential as you tried to convince everybody in several comments….The region over the 10k cases is quadratic as I said and not exponential as you tried to convince everybody in several comments.”
More projection from you. According to your line of reasoning. the growth is not exponential anywhere. That is because at every region of the curve — not just the portion with the concave bump — a polynomial fit, quadratic or higher, will produce a lower error and tighter overall fit than an exponential curve (which only has 2 parameters). In fact, I can produce a polynomial fit where the error over the entire curve is absolutely zero. Do you deny that?
Try it for yourself. Depending on your fitting routine, you might not be able to make it go to zero, but you can always make it go lower than the error you see from an exponential fit. Ergo, according to your reasoning, the growth is always quadratic (or cubic, or quartic, or however high you want to go if your only criterion is only how low the error goes).
In other words, if you had the integrity to be consistent, you’d be trying to sell us on the claim that the graph isn’t exponential anywhere even though you yourself admitted it’s exponential in the lower portion. Can you not even see that your own arguments disprove what you’re claiming? Talk about not being able to admit you’re wrong. Read your last post back to yourself while looking in a mirror — most of it will do nicely. Try not to stutter too much over the part where you’re mouthing the words “I was wrong”.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I do want to clarify an earlier point. While it’s true that engineers and scientists most commonly deal with linear/power/exponential behavior as I noted earlier, computer scientists actually have a much richer spectrum of behaviors to work with, and when it comes to computation complexity theory, they spend a lot of effort trying to figure out whether computation time for a given algorithm grows polynomially, exponentially, logarithmically and various prodcts thereof. So for them at least, it’s more than just linear/exponential/power. But you know what they DON’T spend a lot of time with? — pulling stuff out of thin air about some local concave bump in the growth curve and claiming that it means much of anything.)
P.S. Yes, that is a bit of an oversimplification (the constant term and various coefficients matter in practice), but IMHO close enough conceptually.Replies: @HA
(In the interest of full disclosure, I do want to clarify an earlier point. While it's true that engineers and scientists most commonly deal with linear/power/exponential behavior as I noted earlier, computer scientists actually have a much richer spectrum of behaviors to work with, and when it comes to computation complexity theory, they spend a lot of effort trying to figure out whether computation time for a given algorithm grows polynomially, exponentially, logarithmically and various prodcts thereof. So for them at least, it's more than just linear/exponential/power. But you know what they DON'T spend a lot of time with? -- pulling stuff out of thin air about some local concave bump in the growth curve and claiming that it means much of anything.)Replies: @res
It is interesting that you bring up computation complexity theory (and helps explain your reasoning process somewhat). A key concept there is that the only thing which matters is the highest order (fastest growing) term.
P.S. Yes, that is a bit of an oversimplification (the constant term and various coefficients matter in practice), but IMHO close enough conceptually.
P.S. Yes, that is a bit of an oversimplification (the constant term and various coefficients matter in practice), but IMHO close enough conceptually.Replies: @HA
“A key concept there is that the only thing which matters is the highest order (fastest growing) term.”
Exactly — that was why I initially focused only on the x^2 term — that’s what I assumed he was getting at when he mentioned quadratic. In hindsight, I should have been more explicit about that, especially since it’s quite possible (at least hypothetically) that some of these curves might start leveling off and becoming bona fide logistic curves well before the linear and constant terms can just be ignored, the way they typically are in these kinds of analyses (because, as you note, the highest order term eventually overwhelm anything else, at which point it’s nothing but irrelevant and ignorable noise). And in this case, he’s just using the quadratic term to try and account for a little bump, so it’s presumably going to be small.
Also, my rationale for namedropping the computational computer science is to demonstrate that there is in fact a long and rich body of work focused on determining whether some process, or growth, or cascade or distribution tail obeys a power law, or is exponential, or is something else altogether. It’s not just “oh, I think it looks like this, so that’s what I’m going with”. The log-log scatterplot approach I suggested is not the only way to go, but it’s pretty common and well accepted, and a lot better than some ad hoc handwaving about concavity.
take a massive overdosegot poisoned by his wife.https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/new-revelations-about-woman-who-accidentally-poisoned-her-husband-to-death-with-fish-tank-cleaner-raises-eyebrows/Replies: @vhrm
Thanks for posting this; i hadn’t seen the follow-up. It’s a sad way to go out.
Love the sarcasm and putdowns!
It's likely though unproven that baking at between, say, 175 degrees and 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes will also deactivate any virus. Baking and then leaving in the sun for a few days should certainly do the trick.
I don't remember if hydrogen-peroxide harms masks, but alcohol and bleach reduce N95 masks' filtration ability. So does UV light, though only slightly.
Also, making a vaseline seal between the mask and your face may increase the mask's effectiveness.Replies: @Soviet of Washington, @Kylie, @Clyde
How about washing your mask best as you can. I force garden hose water through them at pressure. Then let it dry on dashboard of my car. Gets sun baked this way.
Use your car to bake them.