The Numbers are almost meaningless... Corona Virus

Pekelo · Mar 30, 2020

wildchild said:
Its called perspective and the media never seems to do it.
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Interestingly, somehow the whole world seems to disagree with you. Just like on global warming, I assume.

CaptainObvious · Mar 30, 2020

El OchoCinco said:
We were really slow doing social distancing (for various non-political reasons) and several hospitals are overrun and people are dying on those hospitals are alarmingly high rates (don't look at the national %, look at the hospital itself and how it has to park refrigerated trucks outside since the morgue is overflowing).

Imagine if we did nothing?

This contagion and infection rate is far worse and faster due to how interconnected the world has become even in 5 years time. We are getting slammed and we are doing not that much until 2 weeks ago. Imagine if we did nothing?

C'mon...you still think this is the media's fault. I challenge you to pick up a phone and call a health professional in NYC and New Orleans and ask them what they think? I had the luxury of doing both and they are panicked out their ass becuase people are dying faster than they can treat them (look at the Queen's hospital and in New Orleans and Baton Rouge).

Stop blaming the media, and Trump should stop acting like his job is a ratings winner and people should take this seriously for ~6 weeks and then we can stop it and move to the strategy you suggest of going back out and just keeping the sick and elderly under closer watch.
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There is no denying the media has played a role and continues to be a major player in fanning the flames of panic. There is also no denying that the democrats are being politically opportunistic. There is also no denying that Trump would be better off letting others speak. Now we're too far down the rabbit hole to back out. This will go where it goes, and what I'm saying is that what we're seeing is only the tip of the iceberg of all the crap we have coming at us. Millions upon millions are going to lose everything, every single thing they have. You think there's no consequence to that? The shitstorm that's coming will have us all wishing cooler heads should have prevailed. Civil disobedience, and that's too kind of a term, will be at extreme levels this summer and fall, beyond that most likely.

El OchoCinco · Mar 30, 2020

CaptainObvious said:
There is no denying the media has played a role and continues to be a major player in fanning the flames of panic. There is also no denying that the democrats are being politically opportunistic. There is also no denying that Trump would be better off letting others speak. Now we're too far down the rabbit hole to back out. This will go where it goes, and what I'm saying is that what we're seeing is only the tip of the iceberg of all the crap we have coming at us. Millions upon millions are going to lose everything, every single thing they have. You think there's no consequence to that? The shitstorm that's coming will have us all wishing cooler heads should have prevailed. Civil disobedience, and that's too kind of a term, will be at extreme levels this summer and fall, beyond that most likely.
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People will lose a lot versus people dying in large numbers. there is no right answer here but you have to go with the social distancing/shutdowns versus letting it run rampant and people still go to bars and restaurants and keep spreading it. Government can step in and float loans and aid to help businesses but not much they can do when 100,000 people in a city have died.

CaptainObvious · Mar 30, 2020

El OchoCinco said:
People will lose a lot versus people dying in large numbers. there is no right answer here but you have to go with the social distancing/shutdowns versus letting it run rampant and people still go to bars and restaurants and keep spreading it. Government can step in and float loans and aid to help businesses but not much they can do when 100,000 people in a city have died.
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You are right, there is no easy answer. I don't disagree with some of the measures taken, but we may have gone a bridge to far with it. We cannot just dismiss all on the known and some yet to be revealed consequences of these decisions. Finding the balance does require some emotional detachment from those who will suffer the most. BTW I am not saying that you are ignoring all of these many concerns. If anything your posts have been very straightforward.

El OchoCinco · Mar 30, 2020

CaptainObvious said:
You are right, there is no easy answer. I don't disagree with some of the measures taken, but we may have gone a bridge to far with it. We cannot just dismiss all on the known and some yet to be revealed consequences of these decisions. Finding the balance does require some emotional detachment from those who will suffer the most. BTW I am not saying that you are ignoring all of these many concerns. If anything your posts have been very straightforward.
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Reactions always overreach so that is true. It is a Kobiyashimaru scenerio

Frederick Foresight · Mar 30, 2020

Amun Ra said:
Because remember folks, other people have to wear condoms if YOU don't want kids.
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We all just want you to ovulate with peace of mind.

Frederick Foresight · Mar 30, 2020

CaptainObvious said:
Finding the balance does require some emotional detachment from those who will suffer the most.
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Well, you've got the right president in place for emotional detachment about the well-being of others.

Frederick Foresight · Mar 30, 2020

CaptainObvious said:
Yes. Had the left and their media minions not whipped up panic and fear, all as part of a political campaign strategy, we would be doing business as usual all along. Take Trump and the upcoming election out of the equation and this would have been reported as an unusually bad flu season with suggestions to stay home if sick, check on the elderly who are always at risk, practice good hygine and drink plenty of fluids. It wouldn't have been a 5 minutes segment on the daily news. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it.
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Really? So the whole world is trying to take down Trump? All the countries ordering people to stay home just want Trump out of office?

Please get real.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Frederick Foresight · Mar 30, 2020

jem said:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/confirmed-coronavirus-cases-almost-meaningless-123550415.html
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It doesn’t matter that the United States surpassed China this week in reported Covid-19 cases because those numbers (83,507 and 81,782 respectively as of March 26) don’t tell us how many people actually became infected in either country. Nor do they tell us how fast the disease is spreading, since only a tiny portion of the population in the United States has been tested.

“The numbers are almost meaningless,” says Steve Goodman, a professor of epidemiology at Stanford University. There’s a huge reservoir of people who have mild cases, and would not likely seek testing, he says. The rate of increase in positive results reflect a mixed-up combination of increased testing rates and spread of the virus.

We will need more complete data, smarter data and more coordinated data to communicate something meaningful about the extent of Covid-19 in the United States, how many people are likely to die, which hospitals are likely to be swamped and whether drastic changes in the way Americans live will start to slow down the spread of the virus.

With a population of 1.5 billion people, China’s some 80,000 cases look like a rounding error, says Nigam Shah, an assistant professor of biomedical statistics at Stanford. And India’s claim of some 754 cases probably reflects a severe lack of tests — not that the disease there is still so rare. The positive tests say little about how many people are dying or will die, since most cases are mild.

What should we be watching instead? One possibility is hospitalizations. That idea was put forward by statisticians Jacob Steinhardt, an assistant professor from UC Berkeley, and Steve Yadlowsky, a graduate student at Stanford who specializes in analyzing health care data. They argue that rate of increase in hospitalizations could reflect the growth of the disease without being distorted by changes in the testing rate.

Measuring death rates can eventually track the speed with which Covid-19 is spreading — as deaths represent a fraction of cases. But there’s a lag of some three weeks between infection and death. Hospitalizations give an intermediate point, as Steinhardt and Yadlowsky explain: They estimate that it takes between 11 and 14 days for someone to get sick enough to show up at the hospital. Rates of increase in Covid-19 patients admitted to the ICU can provide additional useful data.

These numbers might not accurately reflect the growth of the disease, however, if the hospitals or their ICUs become overwhelmed, start turning people away or raise the threshold for how sick you have to be to be admitted.

But collecting this kind of data can help prevent that from happening, said Stanford’s Shah.

If we all behave responsibly, he says, then we can turn what would have been a hospital capacity problem into a logistics problem. Once you have a handle on the rate of new Covid-19 patients admitted to hospitals and ICUs, you can start to forecast how many more will arrive in coming days.

Stanford’s Goodman said that he’s confident scientists will eventually collect the data we need to understand this pandemic and how it’s playing out in the United States. “Right now we are floundering in a sea of ignorance about who is infected and the fate of people who are infected,” he says.

Though death rate figures of around 1% have been tossed around, Goodman says he’s skeptical that anyone knows the death rate of this disease since we don’t know the true rates of infection.

And we can’t identify the most vulnerable groups. “There’s this delusion being disseminated that it’s all about age,” he says. He thinks that since 95% of deaths to date in New York City were of people who had pre-existing conditions, this is the bigger risk factor. But since age is a risk factor for many of those conditions, the two are correlated.

He could figure it out if he could get data on pre-existing conditions broken down by age, but says the New York health department won’t release that data. It matters a lot, he says, since we’re shaping policies around who is most vulnerable. We should find out who they are. They should know who they are.

Some other useful data could easily be collected at testing sites. As doctors Farzad Mostashari and Ezekiel Emanuel pointed out last week in STATnews, health departments should tally not just positives but total tests, and record demographic and symptom information on all the test takers. Much of that isn’t collected or coordinated.
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It is your posts that are almost meaningless. And by "almost" I mean always.

constitutionman · Mar 30, 2020

CaptainObvious said:
Yes. Had the left and their media minions not whipped up panic and fear, all as part of a political campaign strategy, we would be doing business as usual all along. Take Trump and the upcoming election out of the equation and this would have been reported as an unusually bad flu season with suggestions to stay home if sick, check on the elderly who are always at risk, practice good hygine and drink plenty of fluids. It wouldn't have been a 5 minutes segment on the daily news. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it.
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you are right. CNN made Italy shut down and caused all the folks in Europe to die. It's MSNBC's fault that doctors and nurses are overworked and overwhelmed in NYC. you should get out and hug a fellow conservative. "Touch, lick, fuck!" instead of "laugh, live, love!"