You’re right; it will be closer to 60k

Which you can then safely multiply by 10, maybe even 100.

London mayor Sadiq Khan calls for 'compulsory' face masks

Countdown to when we can watch the mostly Labour-supporting British posters, who've been in the avant garde of mask denialism ITT, pivoting most elegantly.

5, 4, 3, 2, ...

Is that unsayable?

To me there are three variables

a) bad decision making
b) poverty
c) bad health

Obviously people on the right are going to say that a) causes b) and c), whereas people on the left are going to say that b) causes a) and c). I'd say probably all three impact on all the others.

Presumably if you're a scientist (rather than just a blogger with a title) then you've done research into how all fits together though? Would be interested in reading more.


If you think "only" 500K-1M then how many people do you think will eventually get infected?

I get to not much different numbers but my likely IFR probably is only a tenth of the one you have been posting ITT. Something like 60% infected with 0.25% dead means something like 0.15% of a given society die. So in the case of the USA that's about 500K. To get the same number you presumably think the infection can be stopped then? I suppose for this purpose stopping the infection would include finding far more effective treatment. Are you expecting legal/social measures to work mostly or medical improvements?

BTW you mentioned an eventual fatality rate for Diamond Princess at 2.87% if all in intensive care die. That's true but to extrapolate it to a usable figure for a normal society you need to remember that their median age of infection is in the high 60s.

https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_ro...3addab65b.html

The Church with all the big gatherings are having people get sick? I am shocked!

That's a revised number for wuhan. But yes their numbers are an obvious scam nonetheless

Okay, but:

1) That paper itself (the one showing 5.7 R) says that their result would be the same regardless of undetected cases, so if that's not correct, then it would seem that their method was not correct?

2) We have plenty of actual testing data showing what the asymptomatic rate is. If complex models making lots of educated guesses about important parameters are predicting different levels of asymptomatic cases, then they're probably just wrong.

LOl wat?

Where are you getting this from, this is even more absurd than the UK putting its economy on ice for theatre post. One of the dumbest things ever posted on the internet.

I have attacked mask fundamentalism, that is not the same as thinking people should not wear masks, LDO they should, I have been wearing one each time I go out for over a month.

Being lax about masks, is one of the many obvious fails of the Conservative UK response. A near total fail of good governance and administration.

Which points to the true idiocy of your post (surprised anyone?). Making it a Labour thing, wat? Given its been a conservative administration that has been masks whatevs any Labour political motivation for a position on masks would have been pro masks. However even that is dumb because its just not a party political issue, Labour supporters are not going to have some monolith position on it loooool, just lol. You are top of the comedy gold poster list.

Freakonomics podcast about how we decide who will get ventilators if they need to be rationed. Should healthcare workers get priority or points? I ldo say yes, but i'm biased.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/covid-19-ventilators/

Yes, but the fatality rate doesn't shoot up to really high numbers until you get to the 80+ age range. The last time I searched for Diamond Princess data I only found a bar graph where I had to eyeball it and estimate the numbers for each category, but what I recall is that around 20% of the cases were young/middle age, a lot were generally around retirement age or a touch higher, and a relatively small percentage were elderly. The fatality rate of that group would be higher than the general population, but not to an apocalyptic degree.

Also, you have to keep in mind that the sample sizes you're working with are not enough to give precision down to a fraction of a percent. (iirc you were the one who was posting the other day about using Iceland's data to draw conclusions, and they have just 8 deaths.) The reason that South Korea's data is useful is not just because of their heavy testing levels but also because they have a large sample size of deaths. If you're arguing that the true fatality rate is 0.25% then that means that South Korea has only found about 10% of the cases in their country -- or they've had extraordinarily bad luck -- and that's not plausible.

Then why on earth do you think that you are one of the people I'm talking about?

Yes, mask-denialism is UK-wide regardless of political party. Currently debating this on FB with a Lib Dem for example.

It's not a Labour thing at all, it's just that now Khan has spoken I'm expecting Labour supporters to start posting things ITT about how they've in fact been wearing masks for weeks now and didn't mention it before in their previous scores of posts because the thread is "what are you doing to save yourself" and masks primarily protect other people.

I don't think we have any Conservatives ITT but if we do, they'll not change anything based on what Khan says. Their own pivot will come after Johnson or Gove says everyone should wear masks. Not sure who or what would cause a lot of Lib Dems to pivot. Obviously they won't get points for pivoting later than Labour.

I find that pretty plausible actually (though admittedly on the higher side). They've only done 50 tests per confirmed case so they're hardly going to get everyone who a given case is going to have infected. Antibody testing would obviously give us a better idea.

About small sample size I agree. 0.25% is my central guess but in whole numbers it's somewhere around 0-1%.

The trouble is that pretty much all the good data (i.e. where the numerator and denominator represent at least something relevant) is small sample size.

No one is going to "pivot" over masks though because its just not part of the debate in the UK.

Adopting a new position is not pivoting btw which is the most that will happen because Khan said something, not something that is a huge deal to labour supporters or voters anyway. No one is going from Masks = dumb to masks = smart over this announcement.

You might be getting into one over masks with one individual on FB, dont read anything into that in regards the more general situation.

I see Belgium has flown by Spain and taken over the lead in deaths per capita. Why have i not heard anything about Belgium?

Actually googling tells me that Belgium's health minister wants to just artificially lower the number that they're reporting. These Euro countries love them some stat juking.

If they were only detecting 10% of cases then they'd be experiencing exponential spread. That would barely make a dent. Instead the number of cases keeps going down.

And it's well established that most transmission is in clusters, so all that work they are doing to trace every last fleeting contact is just to find the fluke transmissions. Most of the transmission is between family and close friends and coworkers, etc. They won't be missing many of those.

whatever man, keep eating trash and taking meds then, delusion at its best

Citation needed. I have seen zero consistency in this metric, with estimates ranging from 15% to 80% of infections being asymptomatic. Given that the closest thing we have to widespread testing is Iceland, and it's percentage tested is still rather low and is not from a representative sample, I don't think that we're going to see a consensus on this percentage for some time to come.

+1

Seems odd to me that one could be both furloughed and claim unemployed at the same time, where furloughed means basically "Still employed but being paid ~80% while not actually having to do work" here in the UK.

Maybe it means something else in USA?

We actually very much don’t have sufficient data to understand the asymptomatic infection rate. (Source) Information is accumulating that is pointing higher, but it is far from clear or settled. Twitter discussion thread

My understanding of the model output isn’t that they are predicting asymptomatic cases. That is an input to the models derived from field research and experience with previous Coronavirus outbreaks.


Typically, in the US, furlough means you don’t have work and you don’t get paid, but the company expects to bring you back to work in the future.

Chim,

The sooner you accept that pretty much everyone is really stupid and that the human brain, while impressive, generally can't adequately decipher complex issues because it craves simple answers and patterns, the better off you'll be.

You could have a one week broadcast to the entire world where you laid out all the evidence and it wouldn't matter.

You’re right, of course. Yet, for some reason I’ve chosen a life in academia. I’ll drop this line of discussion, though. I’ve said my piece.

Study design is really depressing. They excluded those patients they expected to die.

yeah but that's the genius

Rather than having prove it's safe and effective at our normal standards (hard), they can just put out some rigged trash and have political outcry demand that it get approved (easy). Whether it's actually helpful might not be known for years and they won't have to give the money back or anything.

The beauty of the design is you can draw any conclusion you want!

Only 2 out of 113 patients with *severe* COVID died? Miracle intervention, let's do it!

Then again, 0 died with *severe* COVID in China, so 2 out of 113 must mean it's killing people, ban it!

-

Science is hard for a reason, this is such garbage. Severe is poorly defined, and different than critical - no control group - bad exclusions. You can easily draw either conclusion from this.

Furlough - Still employed, not working, not paid, still get benefits, return to work once the company needs you.