Lokasenna
Posts: 9297
Joined: 3/3/2012
From: Iowan in MD/DC
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
He was referring to cases in general, not mortality.
Ah - a mid-April peak on number of new cases roughly tracks with everything else I've seen.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
Looking at this again, the irrationality of the numbers we're getting from the media and the experts seems apparent.
Most of them are estimating infection rates of 50% to 70% in the US. That means about 170,000,000 to 238,000,000 should be infected. Using the "standard" (nearly universally accepted) mortality rate of 1% yields and expected death toll of 1,750,000 to 2,380,000.
Since those totals are 10x or more what the experts are now floating, there's something wrong. Either the 50% to 70% is way off or the mortality rate is way off. If it's the latter, and if Dr. Fauci is right at 100k to 200k mortality, that means the mortality rate is something like 0.1% or less, which is the same or less than seasonal flu.
So if it isn't the mortality rate that's off, its the infection rate. Instead of 50% or 70% of the nation being infected it would be more like 5%! (5% of 340,000,000 x 1% yields 170k, a figure within Dr. Fauci's range).
Or it could be that both numbers are off considerably.
Not matter what, the numbers don't add up. They never add up. The media and the experts are so focused on working with numbers that they torture them and don't realize the outcomes contradict each other. Either we're going to have a lot less infected than they're predicting or the mortality rate is going to be much less than 1%....or both. My bet is the latter.
I think part of this is that the mortality rate is only among symptomatic cases. I don't think the 50% to 70% exposure/infection rate when this is all over (months/years from now) is at all unlikely or unreasonable if the R0 (number of people it spreads to for each infected person) on this is in the 2.5 - 3.1 range (the flu is usually around 1.3 or so). Right now, social distancing and quarantine measures will depress that R0, but unless we're able to quarantine and eradicate every instance of the virus, it's going to spread among the general population eventually.
Given that there are widespread reports of asymptomatic cases (which may not be contagious) as well as cases with very mild symptoms that would be indistinguishable from a common cold, it's easy to see how the eventual overall infection rate could be half or more of the population.
For all I know, I could have it right now but be asymptomatic and I would never know. And if my partner were also to be asymptomatic, nobody would ever know. Unless/until we got tested for antibodies.
FWIW, it looks like Italy is going to reach their death rate peak in about a week.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
Last year, I re-read Stephen King's The Stand. It's a terrific novel about a bio-weapon escape that kills most of humanity. The few survivors begin having dreams.
Last week, there were reports in the news of people having dreams! Zoiks, thinks I!
Anyhow, The Stand is a great read but might be too rattling right now.
THere was also a miniseries starring Molly Ringwald and Gary Sinese. I don't know if it is any good, as I've never seen it. But it's apparently available on YouTube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e64sPHWnsY
I might watch it, but I definitely won't encourage my wife to.
One of my favorites. Although I did not care for the miniseries all that much. Flagg was great, and Sinise was alright, but I didn't feel like it really captured the energy of the novel all that well.
When this first started happening about a month or two ago, I jokingly told my board that everybody should read it while they were isolating themselves.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Chickenboy
quote:
ORIGINAL: Lokasenna
It's doubtful that I'll have time tomorrow during work hours (and after that I'm going outside), but if we can agree on a source to use (Johns Hopkins?), I can put these into Excel for daily visualization.
This source, as well as these below, have been my daily stalwarts:
covidtracking.com/data/ (which has the state by state data in 'data as a spreadsheet') and
worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries (for the global picture)
Cool - the state by state one wasn't one that I was aware of yet. The CDC has a page but I haven't had time to fully explore its functionality.
I'll try to start on a spreadsheet today.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
If your dreams involve "Mother Abigail" sitting on the front porch of an old ramshackle house set in a Nebraska cornfield, you're one of the good guys. If, on the other hand, the subject is "The Walking Dude" aka Randall Flagg, go to church immediately with sincerity and purity of heart and stop dreaming about naked Buddy Hacketts.
P.S. I dream a lot. Usually nightmares that I'm still a lawyer (seriously). But my dreams are no more or less frequent.
A reasonable fear.
Same. After my bout with insomnia in 2007ish, my body seems to have altered the way I sleep. I now basically only have REM sleep and am able to get right back into it if I'm awakened, as long as I haven't been awake for too long (more than 15 minutes or so). It's great for continuing whatever dream I was having. Additional bonus is that I seem to only require ~6.75 hours of sleep this way as my REM cycles appear to be about 3 hours each. I started keeping a daily sleep log 627 days ago.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Chickenboy
Back to the topic at hand:
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-mortality-risk
Really good discussion of issues impacting CFR. Many of these have been bandied about here, but this is a well-written and concise article. Highly recommended to check out the 'slider' on the lower right corner of the page that compares different regional / national CFRs over time.
ETA: The graph at the bottom right of the page with the slider is actually reflective of the "Infection Fatality Rate" rather than the Case Fatality Rate so misused in the media. I'm more interested in the IFR as it reflects what most people are interested in: "If I get this, what are the odds that it will make me sick enough to die?" The Case Fatality Rate includes nebulous factors such as willingness to go to hospital, quality of medical care locally, what one's definition of a 'case' is and so forth.
I think a salient point the authors made was that as the number of positive tests increase exponentially, if deaths only increase linearly then that drops the CFR. In other words, more testing = more 'ground truth' for what this virus really means for a given population. Since the bodies are harder to hide (except in China apparently), if you want to drop the CFR, find more positive people in your burgeoning testing program. Those that only preferentially test the sickest hospital admissions cases will artificially elevate their CFR.
ETA: The article also does a very nice job in distinguishing between the "Case Fatality Rate" and the "Infection Fatality Rate". Very often (and the author cites a particularly craptastic piece of journalism by the New York Times) the media misstates what they're looking for and misapplies the terms.
+10 for this succinct and helpful clarification of what we're talking about.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
You're right, John: Today, the Guadalcanal campaign is memorable for two reasons. First, it was the closest the U.S. came to losing the war in the Pacific, but second, its victory put America on the offensive against Japan for the rest of the war. It was, as Winston Churchill said, “not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/08/battle-guadalcanal-end-beginning/
I've always thought the quote specifically applied to Guadalcanal, though the source/quote above doesn't make that absolutely clear.
Churchill is good for a good quote, but IMO he's incorrect here. The end of the beginning was June 4-5, 1942. Guadalcanal was the beginning of something else - not the end, but the middle act of the war for sure. Without going too much off topic, I'd place the beginning of the end at the Tarawa/Makin invasion with the first "combat trial" of the combined arms amphibious tactics that would be used for the rest of the war.
I think Ian Toll's book, Pacific Crucible, would be a fairly good read for anyone who's curious about why the end of the beginning would properly be placed at the Battle of Midway.
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