What is going on? I don’t understand the hysteria that is going on. What am I missing?
Let’s get some numbers out there. According to the CDC, from September of last year until the end of February this year, 180 days, 18,000 Americans died of the seasonal flu. Starting with March, we have been on high alert, we have been exercising greater hygiene, and, for the last week, we have been quarantining ourselves and spacing ourselves out (a new meaning to the words “being spaced out”). Yet, the CDC just released new numbers, and, over the last roughly 20 days, 4,000 Americans died of the seasonal flu, while only 140 Americans died of the corona virus. That’s a 30 to 1 ratio, roughly. Now, if “spacing out” helps, then why did the average death rate from the seasonal flu rise from 100/day to 200/day? Anyone have an answer?
Also, if the corona virus is so virulent and contagious, then why were there only 6,300 new cases of corona virus, while, using the yardstick of 0.1% mortality rate, 4 million new cases of the seasonal flu developed?
How about some more numbers?
The P&I (pneumonia and influenza-like-illness) mortality of the average flu is 0.1%. In 2009, the H1N1 “swine flu” was declared a “pandemic,” and a national medical emergency was called here in the U.S. What was the final P&I for the “swine flu”? 0.02% That is, 5 times LESS deadly than the seasonal flu. How many died of the “swine flu” in 2009? 12,469+_. How many died of the seasonal flu in the 2017-2018 flu season? 68,000!! Was there a national emergency? No. Did we “space out”? No. Were our hospitals overrun? No. Did we run out of toilet paper? No.
When is a disease an epidemic? When the CFR (case fatality ratio) is above 7.3% (1 in 14). What is the CFR, worldwide, for the corona virus? Well, roughly, there are 219,000 cases around the presently around the globe, with about 9,000 deaths in total so far. The CFR? 1 in 24. 4.1% So, why is it a pandemic?
Here in the United States, over the last three weeks, 4,000 people have died of the flu virus, while over the last two months, world-wide, only 9,000 have died. What’s going on? What is the CDC thinking? What are our government leaders thinking? How long will the current Draconian measures going to continue?
The CDC botched the “swine flu” contagion back in 2009. But nothing is ever learned. I remember following the numbers back then and thinking there was an overreaction to its virulence; and, there was an overreaction. Final statistics for the “swine flu”: 0.02% P&I!
Some numbers to end with. Yes, Italy’s and Iran’s numbers are at about the 10% P&I level. But, guess what, they have older populations and, as we know so well, the elderly are the most vulnerable. In fact, today I looked at a couple of abstracts on the flu and on epidemics. One abstract concluded that whether a virus is at the epidemic level or whether it is below that level, those over 65, and who have underlying health issues, die at the same percentage levels. That is, even if Italy and Iran are at 10% P&I–above the epidemic percentage (while the rest of the world is below the 7.3% epidemic criteria), this only tells us that we’re dealing with older populations; not that we are dealing with an epidemic or pandemic.
And, so, the final numbers.
During the 2017-2018 flu season, for 16 consecutive weeks, from the week ending on December 23, 2017 until April 7, 2018, the P&I of the seasonal flu was ABOVE epidemic levels! Now, listen to this. Nationally, for 4 consecutive weeks, the P&I of the seasonal flu exceeded 10.0%?, peaking during the week ending January 20, 2018 at a P&I of 10.8%.
Three weeks: 4,000 dead from the flu; 140 dead from the corona virus. And we’re talking trillion dollar stimuli.
Who’s running the country? So much for scientists being scientific.
Here’s the bottom line: If the corona virus was going to be so deadly, we would know by now. Instead, with more and more testing and reportin, the number of cases will skyrocket, while the number of deaths will increase linearly–in line with the number of test being conducted, and then fall.
My prediction: I suspect, from inspecting these numbers, that the CDC will once again end up with egg on its face, with a P&I at, or below, the seasonal flu, a la, the “Swine flu” fiasco. And what suffering in the meantime–psychological and and otherwise.
Please, someone, tell me where I’m going wrong. Or else, pass me a Corona, because I’m old enough to have to stay off the streets.
My god…
The reasons there are only 6,300 reported cases of covid-19 is that the US is not testing well and…. I hardly believe I have to say this, the start of an outbreak has fewer cases than the peak.
We know from Wuhan and Italy precisely how dangerous covid-19 is, pretending this is just like the flu is a mistake.
@Mimus, according to CDC’s own figures, the death rate of the common flu based on confirmed cases is over 10%. The death rate of the Corona virus based on confirmed cases is 2% in the US and 4% globally. It’s obvious this virus is being manipulated for political and other reasons by powerful entities that no one voted for.
Besides, there is an effective treatment that is known to cure 95% of COVID-19 patients. It’s an anti-malarial drug called hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil). It’s cheap and it gets rif of the virus within 6 days. The CDC could end this epidemic within a month or two by ordering that the elderly and those at risk be given hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure. They won’t do it because the CDC is run by Obama appointees and other evil globalists.
New Study: Taking Chloroquine Fights Off COVID-19 in 6 Days
https://youtu.be/VAV7QkABExw
Tell that to Italy that is making decisions on who gets a ventilator based on age. Italy has more hospital beds per capita than the US and they are swamped.
56 million induced abortions per year. Encouraged and applauded. That is mass-killing. COVID-19 is nothing compared to those numbers.
@ Ed George
Italy is currently governed by a globalist open-border regime. I take everything globalists said with a grain of salt.
Having seen a few videos from China back in February, I am a believer. …If this somehow ends up being a hoax, it sure is the best made hoax ever.
…Not knowing who/what is behind this outbreak, how many different strands of the virus there are, and if their respective moralities are different, it is close to impossible to make sense of the regional differences in the number of serious cases. …I would definitely expect there to be a lot more bad cases in the US by now, unless the virus is truly race-selective, but then there’s Italy…
Nobody is saying COVID-19 is a hoax. It’s probable that it was engineered by the Chinese communist party. We know they got no honor. It’s just being made into a much bigger problem than it is for political reasons. The Chinese sure solved their Hong Kong problem instantly by getting everyone off the streets. And everybody knows they’ve been in bed with the globalist mafia for decades.
Mimus:
Did you read what I wrote closely? Did you read where I said that they did a study showing that you can’t tell the difference between a viral epidemic and the yearly flu when it comes to those 65+ years old with underlying conditions? Italy has this kind of population.
Have you looked at the latest statistics for China? Look here for the numbers. Look at the daily count for new cases and deaths. Over the last week, they’ve almost bottomed out. Yes, you’re going to tell me that we can’t trust their numbers. OK. Let’s throw out China altogether. That leaves Italy with an aging population. It’s at about a 10% P&I. The flu season will end very soon. The seasonal flu from 2017-2018 was running at a P&I of 10% for four consecutive weeks. Are you saying this corona virus is as bad as the seasonal flu? I’ll concede that it might be.
You say that it is obvious that as a contagion spreads the numbers go up. So? Isn’t it also true that the accurate number of cases of someone having the virus also goes up as more testing takes place. So, as we begin to do more testing, more cases will emerge–without having any impact on deaths. Again, this brings the CFR down, and deaths will always be higher at first than testing. Why? Because you don’t know you have a problem until the contagion start spreading and killing people. Again, the swine flu in 2009 was declared a national medical emergency and a pandemic by the WHO. Don’t you think this was because the P&I was high at first? I hope you do, because nothing else makes sense. But they kept testing. And when it was all over, this “pandemic” turned out to be 5 times less deadly than your ordinary seasonal flu. We’re headed for this.
I’m afraid I still need a Corona. So, pass the Corona!
I’m not saying this corona virus is a hoax. What I’m questioning are the Draconian measures we’ve taken at the behest of the really smart people at CDC–who got it all wrong 11 years ago, and who never talked about an epidemic two years ago when the seasonal was at epidemic levels for 16 straight weeks. That means the case to death (fatality) ratio was above 7.3% for 16 weeks in a row. It’s now about 2%. And yet we’re in the midst of destroying our economy and putting untold thousands of families in turmoil. Why?
I’m saying the people running the show are not so smart. They haven’t paid attention to the mistakes they’ve made. This is the problem with socialism: the smart people are really dumb. If you want to be successful, your IQ should be around 130-140. Any higher and you have little common sense; any lower, and you’ll be taken advantage of. But when it comes to socialism, it’s the Mensa group that wants to take over. Not always good.
But, no, not a hoax; just a very ordinary corona virus (like the seasona flu) that is, like other flus, deadly to an acceptable level. 2017-2018: 68,000 dead. Five or six weeks of this corona virus: 155 dead. Off by a factor of 400.
Ed George:
How has Italy been testing their patients? Do we really know if they have this corona virus? Or, is it a combination of this virus and the seasonal cold virus?
Two years ago, when the seasonal flu was at the level it is in Italy for four straight weeks, did we run out of hospitals and respirators? And do respirators really help? The data suggest maybe they don’t.
Here’s an article about how it started, mostly undetected, in Italy. This is the point I’ve been making. Testing for the virus always has to catch up with the virus itself, which has, in the meantime, spead and killed. That means that as people become more careful, and as testing increases and spreads, the number of ‘cases’ of the virus increase while the number of ‘fatalities’ peaks, and then declines. Is that what we’re going to see here? It should be interesting. And I bet we’ll all learn more than the wizards at the CDC.
Look at this website for Italy. Look at the number of deaths per day. It is growing linearly!! Linearly; not geometrically! Do you want to tell me that the virus is also spreading linearly and not geometrically? Put the pieces together.
In the article I linked to above, they say this:
Maybe this is the reason they’ve run out of beds and respirators: it’s socialized medicine–you know, the kind that all the Democratic candidates are pushing for. Let’s talk to some Canadian citizens about how much they love their system there. Or maybe to the English, who at least have a side-by-side private system to help them. But there have been hardly anything but terror stories coming out of England about their national healthcare system. These are precautionary tales. Will we be like the wizards of the CDC and ignore it when things go wrong? (P.S. the “underfunding” of the healthcare system is otherwise known as “rationing”)
So, for the time being, pass me a Corona!
P.P.S. For those not from Mexico or the States, Corona is a favorite Mexican beer here in the U.S.
Here’s a topical article.
The message: calm down.
I read your post, it’s garbage. A pandemic is not defined by its cfr, you don’t seem to understand what the P&I statistic your quote means (it’s NOT a CFR), obviously prople dying with the flu this week where infected some time ago (so are not reflective of current social distancing policies), Wuhan’s numbers are the result of a massive containment program.
The list could go on… but I really just want to say you are dangerously wrong on this and the site admins might want to reflect on what value this post, and the conspiracy theories in the comments hold.
Pav – Thanks for the reasoned and calculated approach to this panic, Being honest I am not sure how serious this might get but to crash the world`s economy which will cause the death of millions seems like a terrible idea. If the media were to report any situation were people die in the same manner they have reported this the world would be paralysed EG 1 million people die every year in traffic accidents should we ban driving , in Ireland tens of thousands die from alcohol related diseases we are not banning alcohol any time soon , as a matter of fact Covid 19 probably saved lives in Ireland as only 2 people have died so far , and due to the calling off the St Patricks day parade and closing the pubs no one got killed in the usual alcohol fuelled fights we normally see and no one drank themselves and their livers into oblivion and shortened their life span because of this.So calm , and reason is required before we make the cure worse than the disease.
It’s exponential growth, innit? This is epidemiology 101. If there are N_t cases on day t and the daily growth rate is r, then on day t+1 there will be r N_t cases. So, for example if r is 2 and N_0 =100, N_1 will be 200 (an increase of 100), and N_2 will be 400 (an increase of 200).
Because it’s an epidemic – those numbers are increasing (in the US at the moment by about 1.2 to 1.35 times per day, although some of this may be increased testing. Death rates are going up by about 1.1 to 1.3 times per day). So things are going to get worse.
Also, the flu cases are spread over the whole flu season rather than in the space of a couple of weeks.
“And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
Donald Trump, 2/26/20
If Trump wants to say the virus is a hoax, and he’s not going to cancel rallies with his elderly supporters, I’m fine with that.
@mimus the US cases are around 10,000 now, but that’s just the confirmed cases, because the idiot administration refused tests from the world health organization. We’re going to find out how bad the pandemic is when you have idiots in charge. I follow vacation rentals in Florida, and that market is crashing. Kind of like the Dow Jones.
Influenza (flu) stats by CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
Thanks for the numbers PAV, And while it does strike me as quite an overreaction, people will do what they believe they need to do in order to alleviate death.
And as I stated in the other post this morning, I just wish that the atheists here on UD were not so hypocritical in their desire to alleviate death.
It seems obvious that when there are some cheap political points to be scored, as exemplified by Jim Thibodeau’s comment at 17, then Darwinian atheists here on UD are all too happy to champion life, but when it comes to actually preventing their own death and the death of others by forsaking atheism and abortion, then all of the sudden their desire to champion life evaporates and they become ‘pro-choice’ champions of the grim reaper himself.
And as also pointed out in another thread,
Millions and millions of elderly people die prematurely every year due to poor diet, lack of exercise and too much alcohol, so we should close down every alcohol producer, every junk food producer and everyone should be made to exercise , whether they want to or not.
We know Corona virus is serious , but just how serious , and is it serious enough to crash the worlds economy and cause millions to starve and more to die as monies to prevent future sickness and disease will be in short supply.
So just how long should this lock down go on for, if there is no fix in sight should we be locked down permanently.
If you guys want to say that the novel Coronavirus strain is fine because other people die of other stuff, then sure, you’re ethical monsters, but as far as voting populations go we’ll see some improvement.
What is ironic is that these virulent critics of “Darwinism” to a man will defend an economic system that is “survival of the fittest” to the core. They will condemn the “holocaust” of abortion but say and do nothing about the upwards of 45 million of “my fellow Americans” who dare not seek medical treatment, except in extreme emergency, because they can’t afford it. When the Republicans controlled the White House, House of Representatives and Senate we were promised a healthcare system that would be cheaper and better than Obamacare. What did we get? Another empty promise. Zilch! Nada! Nothing!
There was a piece on MPR by one of their correspondents who had visited a poor Latino community in southern Texas. They were terrified by COVID-19 because they could’t afford to go to a doctor or pharmacist. They couldn’t afford the insurance.
I don’t need God to tell me that it’s wrong for people to be left to suffer in this way. It just takes a little empathy. Something that all these MAGA-hat-wearing Christians – who are happy to ignore the lesson of the parable of the Good Samaritan – seem to lack.
And exactly how am I an ‘ethical monster’ for wanting you to forsake your atheism so that you, and other atheists, might live significantly longer?
Again, Christians live significantly longer than atheists do.
Marfin @ 22 –
No, you take an evidence-based approach to look for effective interventions. Sugar and alcohol taxes are one approach that work, for example.
Bornagain77@ 25
No. Try reading the research. It says “religiously-affiliated people”. Not just Christians, You’d probably find the same advantages from belonging to any group that provides strong social support.
Seversky, I did read the details. i.e. “religiously-affiliated people” includes Christians. Forgive me for mentioning Christianity, the world’s largest religion, at the top of the group of “religiously-affiliated people”.
Moreover, digging into the details of “belonging to any group that provides strong social support” we find that, as I referenced, “the effect of volunteering and participation accounted for 20% or 1 year of the impact, while religious affiliation accounted for the remaining four years or 80%.”
Digging even deeper we find that,
It just so happens visiting people who are socially isolated is exactly what Jesus, the Great physician, prescribed.
Verse:
Moreover the positive effect of a caring/loving attitude is found to work both ways, in that not only does the person receiving loving care from another person heal more quickly, but it is also found that people of a genuinely loving nature also receive the tangible benefits of a longer and healthier life in return:
Of course, from a Theistic-Christian perspective, this tangible effect of loving one another is to be expected, whereas from a Darwinian perspective of survival of the fittest, i.e. dog eat dog, it is, to put it mildly, very counter intuitive:
Verse, music and Near Death quote:
Mimus: Are you trying to censor me? How responsible of you.
The current P&I is 7.1 %, below the 7.3% for an epidemic. It was over 10% for four consecutive weeks two years ago. Did we do any of the things we are now doing? This is the whole point, isn’t it?
By the way, new deaths today in the U.S.–it will likely change as the day goes on, is 5. 100 people will die today from the seasonal flu. 100 people will die today because of car accidents. A little perspective, please.
Man. Where do I start? I don’t have the time to pull up the articles or embed links, but….
1. No, Italy doesn’t have more beds than US. US is number 1 per capita, Germany 2nd, and Italy is a distant 3rd. Italy, especially the first and most affected area, is home to a disproportionately elderly Chinese expat population.
2. No, the US didn’t refuse WHO assistance. Fake news. Most who falsely reported this have since begrudgingly printed retractions.
3. Sev’s use of the Good Samartian parable to justify Marxism is as ancient as Marx himself and probably older. US conservative evangelicals donate their time and money more than any other demographic in the world. The Mormon cult comes in 2nd. The Roman cult, 3rd. Voluntarily donating one’s own money is a far, far cry from stealing other people’s money in the name of some logically self-refuting athiest altruism. Government-run healthcare, education, research and development, all have dismal records. This current authoritarian overreach combined with statist inefficiencies will, I predict, prove to be the larger problem. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is still theft, not Samaritan charity. And, Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham were the thieves in Robin Hood, not the Merry Men. Robin was pro 2A and anti government usurpation of the lifeblood of the small business owner and the average charitable churchgoer.
As has been pointed out by better writers than me, almost all of the Virtuous American “green” authoritarian power grabs have exacerbated and possibly even caused this pandemic: unchecked open borders, mass migrations from failed Marxist autocracies to somewhat freer nation states, mass transit, urban sardine housing, long wait times and death panels easily documented in the “universal health care” poster countries, banning of single-use cups, straws, bags, tolerance of vagrancy and open drug use and defacation…..could go on, surely. And, where are these outbreaks in the US right now? See the above list and which political party monopolizes government.
Bob o H . Sugar and alcohol tax has not worked in the slightness in Ireland tax on alcohol is over 50% and has not stopped excessive drinking , same with sugar intake people are getting fatter and drunker.
Jim Thib ,- no one said Covid 19 was fine , its just a judgement call on the cure being worse that the disease , so if a world wide lockdown takes several trillion dollars or more from the world economy
what effect will this have on poorer countries from a food and medicine stand point, and also what effect will it have on western countries as to availability of funds to develop new medicines and medical tech.I believe hundreds of thousands might die , but sure they are from the third world so who cares about them.
@ Jim Thibodeau,
Man, you’re demon-possessed monster. What’s wrong with you? The anti-Christianity crowd is a veritable Satanic cult. God help us.
Are you guys into QAnon lunacy or something? I mean, creationism is bad enough.
@27 Bornagain77
Evolutive ‘reasoning’.
Bornagain77, you clearly are NOT into darwinian apologetics. According to this religion, you help people by telling them that;
– life is pointless
– human life equates faecal bacterial life
– nothing matters: try drugs and sex day in and day out. Pregnancy? Abortion rulez, you are just killing a little ‘bag of chemicals’/ parasite
– beauty is a ‘trick’
– love is a ‘trick’
– morals are ‘illusory’
– everything is defective/ sub-par (and specially human bodies)
– we are specs in an unproved, imagined multi-verse that does not care about anything
– free will does not exist
Darwinism. Best. Religion. Ever.
@31 Marfin
Most people did not care at all about the chinese people when they were suffering due to the COVID-19. It is now that the little fella is here that they care about their ‘precious’ lives. (The same ones they despise and say are ‘pointless’).
@32 Four Faces
Yes. They hate God. Consequently, they hate life, beauty and everything that is good. They hate their bodies. They hate the world. They hate the Universe. They hate order and reason. They hate purpose.
They are a death-cult.
Marfin – Do you have any evidence for that? These guys reviewed the literature and concluded that such taxes do work to reduce consumption of sugar and alcohol.
@ 28Bornagain77
No, no, no. Bornagain77, you are being ‘deluded’. Probably due to some evolutive ‘trick’ that is helping you to ‘achieve’ nothing 😉
These words are far more powerful:
Pray Darwin. And COVID-19 is a loser, it has no DNA (it’s a ssRNA virus), so according to dawkins, it has no ‘purpose’. All for nothing, COVID. Sorry.
Seversky, for once you’ve got it right. If we cannot love those we can see, those we pass in the street, begging, sufficiently to pay taxes to see them in at least minimal comfort, how can we hope to love those we cannot see in the womb, and are killed, torn limb from limb, effectively by their own parents, but indirectly, in some measure, by you loony-toons who obsess about Commies. You’ll get Commies all right at the Pearly Gates.
It is the worst of Church scandals – well, vying with the clerical, sexual abuses and cover-ups, that the Church has not provided its own socialist politicians in what is left of christendom. As St Ambrose declaimed, God provided his bounty for all of us, not just the rich, those ‘with sharp elbows’, as scripture puts it, elsewhere.
The Bible, virtually from cover to cover, identifies the rich man with wickedness, oppression, violence, fraudulence, deceipt, etc ; and the poor man, with the virtuous man, the honest man, the True Israel ; perhaps nowhere more dramatically than n Our Lady’s Magnificat, but most beautifully, in The Beatitudes, a quality they reflect that is said to be acknowledged throughout the world.
However, for sheer numbers of such references to rich and poor, one must look at the Psalms and the Prophets. Indeed, many exhortations to rescue the poor man from his aggressors, to go to the aid of the stranger, the orphan and the widow, i.e. the poor. That really struck me as countervailing against the commanment, understandably appropariate for its time, to honour the emperor in terms of civil obedience, etc – even the likes of Nero ; as well as leaving the tares in the field until the harvest when they will be thrown on the fire. It is after all, CHRIST we seek to rescue from homeless destitution, immiseration – in Jesus’ own words in Mat 25. In the RC church at least, the throne-room clericalism mindset has been emphasised excessively, to the detriment of his human nature.
An addendum to my comment 36 (aside from the mistake of not closing the blockquote tag correctly) – I think the data might be cumulative deaths, not deaths on that day. So probably best to ignore my comment. Sorry for any confusion.
I don’t mean to be unappreciative of the untiring championing of the unborn by some of you, but let’s focus also on those outside the womb. Most are poor because, at a praeternatural level, their heart is not so much focused on the idols of this world. Where our treasure is, there also will be our heart.
TF
Yet, on this thread, it is the theists who are suggesting that we are doing too much to protect the vulnerable and the non-theists who are arguing that we are not doing enough. So much for your “death cult” nonsense.
@ Ed George,
You, too, are a demon-possessed monster for accusing theists of suggesting that we are doing too much to protect the vulnerable. What we’re saying is that destroying the world’s economy will cause worst problems than the Corona virus. Millions may die as a result. The H1N1 epidemic under Obama was much worst. It killed 12,000 in the US alone. It took Obama 5 months to act. There was no hysteria in the Satanic mainstream media then. Where the hell were you? Close to 20,000 people died of the flu in the US since the outbreak began in China. 40,000 die every year in traffic accidents. Where is the hysteria over that?
You people see this epidemic as a way to gain more power and get rid of Trump and other populists who are opposing your evil plans. We will fight you every step of the way. Christians are amassing weapons and ammo like never before and we know who the enemy is. Be cool.
FF
I thought we were discussing the response to COVID-19. It was BA77 and TF who decided to make it a theist vs atheist rant.
@Four Faces
He thinks killing babies is ok. But it makes sense, because according to atheism we are beasts with no free will, so we can not resist the appeal of fuc**ng. Evolution is queen.
Today New York state, the hotbed for the corona virus, reports 1,114 new cases. How many new deaths? 1.
That’s less than 0.1% It’sno worse than the seasonal flu, maybe less–which more testing will reveal.
Does anyone want to justify the extreme to which our country has gone? Shouldn’t epidemiologists know better than this?
E.G. accuses me starting a ‘theist vs atheist rant’.
I can assure you the ‘rant’ has been going on far longer than this thread, even far longer than UD has been around. But anyways, I response to JT at 17
I responded thusly,
In 23, JT went on to call me and others ‘ethical monsters’
To which I responded in 25 thusly,
Again, it is not a ‘rant’ against atheism, it is simply, as for me myself, me coolly and calmly pointing out to atheists that you guys are, once again, being completely inconsistent in your logic and morality.
If you were as truly as concerned with life as you want to appear to be with this current virus, then why are you not also concerned about abortions, not to mention your very own lives? It is simply hypocrisy on a grand scale for you to pretend to be concerned with life on the one hand and then be completely oblivious to life when it concerns yourself.
of note: the word ‘rant’ implies making irrational, bombastic, arguments, and that is exactly the type of arguments that atheists constantly make here on UD:
@ PAV,
I forgot to thank you for writing this excellent article. Thank you for your well argued opinion.
The hysteria was obviously manufactured by the globalist mainstream media. At first they accused Trump of being racist for stopping flights from China. Then they realized they could use the epidemic for their own evil purposes. We, Christians, know who controls mainstream media. What they’re doing is evil. We’re keeping a watchful eye on them.
Another article where, contrary to the WHO’s 3.4% mortality rate, a much lower rate has been calculated.
From the Phys.Org PR:
“The novel coronavirus proved deadly in 1.4 percent of all people infected in the Chinese outbreak city of Wuhan, far lower than global estimates of the killer pandemic, researchers said Thursday.”
Will this 1.4% figure continue to drop? We’ll see.
From the Phys.Org PR: “On Wednesday China reported just one new domestic case, compared to over 1,000 per day at the epidemic’s peak.”
Total deaths in China from CoVid-19? 3,245. How many Americans died from the seasonal flu over the last three weeks? 4,000.
Is this, or is this not, reason to question the present Draconian measures the government has taken?
Bob o H . re 38 All that happened was that people in Ireland which is where I live just happen to go to the pub a little later but offset this by buying cheap beer and spirits in the supermarket and drink at home before they go to the pub. Believe me alcohol consumption is out of control in Ireland tax will not stop it.
Actually the funniest or saddest sight you would witness was when the pubs had to remain closed on Good Friday , on thursday evening the surpermarkets used to be jam packed with people with supermarket trolleys packed to the brim with booze for fear they would miss out on one days drinking, believe you wont break cultural habbits with tax , as culture eats strategy for breakfast
PaV – New York saw their first case 9 days ago. So in less than 2 weeks they’ve gone up to over 1000 cases per day. That suggests it’s going to get worse.
You really should invest some time in reading up about epidemics and how their numbers change.
Ed @4
The USA has far more ICU beds than Italy. 34.7/100K vs 12.5/100K
An interesting observation regarding the Diamond Princess Wuhan/Corona virus:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/16/diamond-princess-mysteries/
This is an important blogpost to read.
And, further down:
So, in Italy, are there a lot of “false positives”? Is there a confusion of a virulent seasonal flu with the CoVid-19? At this point, I don’t think we can say.
Those meat-robots with no free will.
PaV
-If what we are seeing is ‘natural’ selection in action:
HOW is it possible that we, who are the result of evolution, are fighting against that same evolutive process?
Makes 0 sense.
Mike
I was talking about total hospital beds per capita, not just the ICU beds. Even with more beds per capital than the US, they are taxed beyond the breaking point.
It’s extraordinary that I should have to say this, but people die from a disease quite a long time after they catch. It.
The measures being taken are not about the deaths happening today, but about what will happen if in 2 or 4 or 6 weeks time if the epidemic is left to burn.
Seversky, Mimus, Ed George, Bob O’H, Jim Thibodeau, MatSpirit, JVL…
Any answer to my post @58?
-If what we are seeing is ‘natural’ selection in action:
HOW is it possible that we, who are the result of evolution, are fighting against that same evolutive process?
Makes 0 sense.
FYI: Point of correction re allegations that Mr Trump termed Covid-19 a hoax https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/02/is-coronavirus-a-hoax.php KF
PS: I do not like tone in this thread, in general. I simply give a correction for record.
“Survival of the fittest” ring a bell?
FYI:
Per Capita Death Rates In One Chart
How did Italy become the new ground zero of Coronavirus?
What is HydroxyCholoroquine?
Pav
Inherent in every single laboratory test that is performed is its uncertainty. In fact, a result without an understanding of its uncertainty is meaningless. If we were told that we had a 95% chance of winning a million dollars by spending ten, very few of us would pass on it. Yet PaV is questioning the accuracy of the tests because they are 95% accurate?
This from the administration that initially balked at testing? And where did she get the 50% from?
No. qPCR tests have very low false positive rates, testing in most countries is limited to those with symptoms (so the positive predictive value will also be high) and, again it’s amazing someone has to tell you this, something like 20% of of all deaths in Italy right not are due to coronavirus. That’s for the whole country, despite disease being focused especially in one region (which must therefore be suffering an even higher rate).
The P&I statistic that you failed to understand is the proportion of all deaths attributable to pneumonia and/or influenza in a given time period. It is an imperfect measure of flu prevalence (because large numbers of people die of pneumonia year round, but not all deaths due to flu are labeled that way), but it’s a useful tracker of how bad a season’s flu is. The study you found said the peak of the worst seasonal flu had 10% of deaths due to P&I for a short window. In Italy as a whole, 20% of deaths are due specifically to this disease (that’s more than twice as bad, as the excess deaths contribute both the denominator and the numerator of this statistic).
Why you should be concerned:
On Feb. 27, when the United States had 15 confirmed cases of COVID-19, President Trump was tamping down fears and suggesting the virus could be seasonal.
“It’s going to disappear. One day, It’s like a miracle. It will disappear,” the president said then, before adding, “it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens.”
On that same day, Rep. Burr attended a luncheon held at a social club called the Capitol Hill Club. And he delivered a much more alarming message.
“There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” he said, according to a secret recording of the remarks obtained by NPR. “It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”
“Italy has more hospital beds per capita than the US and they are swamped.”
This is just blatantly false. I don’t understand what compels people to share absolutely false information. The US has 3 times the beds that Italy does:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-countries-with-the-most-critical-care-beds-per-capita-infographic/
“In Italy as a whole, 20% of deaths are due specifically to this disease (that’s more than twice as bad, as the excess deaths contribute both the denominator and the numerator of this statistic).”
Maybe, but not *exclusively* this disease. Italy admits 99.2% of deaths were of people who had 1 or more serious health problems. Fully HALF of those had 3 or more serious health problems! This is hardly an average group of people (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says)
In addition, Italy has particularly bad flu seasons every year, and already sits at 85-95% hospital capacity each season (https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30328-5/abstract). Combine this with having the second oldest population in the world, a population that is 5x denser than the US, a population where younger people and older people tend to live together more, etc, and you end up with an incredible situation. Almost a “worst-case” situation.
“Inherent in every single laboratory test that is performed is its uncertainty. In fact, a result without an understanding of its uncertainty is meaningless. If we were told that we had a 95% chance of winning a million dollars by spending ten, very few of us would pass on it. Yet PaV is questioning the accuracy of the tests because they are 95% accurate?”
Yes, because Bayes theorem applies. See https://wmbriggs.com/post/29761/
RHampton7:
This is nothing like the 1918 pandemic. It’s not even close to being as bad as the seasonal flu in 2017-2018. This CoVid-19 was on a cruise ship–the worst situation for containing the virus. 80% didn’t get the virus. Of th 700 who did get the virus, only 7 died–and this is in a population that would be higher than average in the elderly, who are most susceptible. That’s a mortality rate of 1%. The Spanish flu had a mortality rate of somewhere between 3% and 5%.
Again, a cruise ship is not the proper set of circumstance from which to generalize about its mortality.
Millions of people died in the Spanish flu. It’s less than 10,000 so far with the Chinese flu.
Mimus:
Both of us are on the record.
Here’s another take on the Diamond Princess cruise ship data.
Ed George:
Why don’t you read the links that I’ve provided? Then maybe you’ll see that it is experts who are making this case; I’m reporting their concerns.
Look at figure 1 in this blogpost:
On the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the percentage of those 70-79 and 80 and above is about thee times as high as for the general public. The CFR was 1%. Now we should expect the CFR not to exceed 0.33%. Now that’s three times greater than the seasonal flu–on average. So, it’s not acceptable. But we have a long ways to go, with a lot of testing and rechecking of results waiting to be done. We’ll just see how that moves the numbers around. But I would put my money on the CFR falling “below” the average seasonal flu. My meck is on the line. No problem: just pass me a Corona!
@ Seversky
Yes, it rings a bell. And it makes no sense, because:
1. Viruses are not considered to be ‘alive’, so survival is of no value.
2. The common descent idea does not work with viruses.
(Thank you Martin_r!)
Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ does not apply here, because his theory can not explain viruses.
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/a-darwinian-skeptic-confesses/
3. The ‘fittest’ for what?
Don’t know whether PAV is right or wrong but like the existence of God we will find out or not.
Obviously I don’t have a lot of confidence in data coming out of China but my contact in China is telling me that indeed the worst is over. They have reportedly closed 4 hospitals because they no longer need them. Another interesting stat I have heard is that in the area around Wuhan the survival rate of those infected was 96% but here was the good news ,outside of that area it was 99%.
Personally S Korea is the country I am looking at for stats.
Vivid
PaV, maybe reflect on the fact you’ve got everything wrong (definition of a pandemic, the meaning of P&I statistics, CFR of flu etc etc) so far. It might just be possible that your desire to underplay the risks of covid-19 come from somewhere other than the data, and you are now hunting out snippets that you think might support the conclusion you’d like to draw.
“Survival of the fittest” ring a bell?”
I thought the term “survival of the fittest” was verboten.
Vivid
Anybody want to give estimates for the 2020 US death toll from the virus?
I’ll go first: The total number of deaths in the United States from the flu for all of last year is 34,200. So I’ll wager it’ll be at least twice that, 68,400.
Jim
More than the flu. I think at least 1% of those who get it based on current medical treatments, that’s a large number I think the % for flu is much lower.
Vivid
@ Jim Thibodeau
This is not a festival. We’re talking about human lives. (Now I remember you consider them ‘pointless’).
Sev @ 24,
>What is ironic is that these virulent critics of “Darwinism” to a man will defend an economic system that is “survival of the fittest” to the core.
It is unfortunate that this happens, but the alternative is even worse: subsidized buggy whip makers in 2020. Once a company starts making something, gets entrenched, and then something better comes along, _something_ has to give. The only practical solution there is for people to not get set in their ways, job-wise, and be willing to retrain throughout life.
@TF There was nothing in my post about morality, and I wouldn’t get my reality from somebody who acts like you anyway. Why don’t you throw up some numbers and commit yourself to the decision.
I really hope Uncommon Descent does not close though, because I wake up every day and I check it with a smile, and joy cometh in the morning.
Let me just add this now: I didn’t realize how low the CFR was for the Spanish FLu. It helps put the experts concern into perspective. But the Diamond Princess numbers strongly suggest we’re not dealing with the Spanish Flu–lucky for us all.
My estimate is based on “current medical treatments” I think this is the wildcard and holds potential to significantly reduce the lethality. We have a terrific scientific community.
Vivid
JD@76, sadly, I think we will have to be very lucky to keep the death toll below 100,000.
@Jim Thibodeau
Of course not. Thanks to darwin, the lunatic that married his first cousin, now we know that ‘morals are an illusion’.
Morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.
https://chrisblattman.com/2015/11/03/morality-is-a-collective-illusion-foisted-upon-us-by-our-genes/
Darwinism. The.doctrine.of.lunacy.
@EdGeorge i was assured by Trump that it was a hoax, and by Conway that it was “contained”. Pro-science people learned a looooooong time ago not to believe republicans. Only fools do that.
Pro-science people learned a looooooong time ago not to believe *darwinism*. Only fools do that.
No numbers, huh.
JT
TF
From the ‘I know you are but what am I’ debate tactic that most of us grew out of when we reached puberty.
Darwinism, since it has no rigid falsification criteria, is not science,
Although I have little faith in The NY Times but many do, they are reporting that the % of deaths in Wuhan Is running at 1.4% not the 4% I posted before.
Vivid
Darwinism is the doctrine of the mentally challenged. A religious view with no basis in reality.
VB@91, mortality rates for diseases like this and the flu are, at best, an educated guess. The times that you have had the flu, how often have you seen a doctor? And if you did, did they actually do swabs or blood tests to confirm, or did they diagnose it based on symptoms? None of these are reported.
For any new disease with low mortality rates, the early estimates of mortality rates are always higher than they really are simply because they only include people admitted to hospital.
EG
Good points
Vivid
PS, even if the mortality rate of COVID-19 is only 0.1%, if it infects 25% of the population (not out of the realm of possibility) we get over 80,000 dead.
Wasn’t Trump under fire for cutting off flights to Europe and the rest of the world? That he acted too quickly?
In a time of crisis, small minds point fingers.
Chloroquine looks promising in helping patients recover from the devastating stages of covid-19. It looks like it stops/ blocks our immune response from over-reacting, cutting back inflammation, thereby aiding in the recovery from pneumonia.
Everything could be back to normal in a few weeks.
“Everything could be back to normal in a few weeks.”
If so then mark my words Trump will be excoriated for over reacting.
Vivid
For the next time around perhaps we should focus on the root cause of why these viruses so often originate in China or Far East. Whatever it is we should have them fix it.
Buffalo
The Spanish flu, the deadliest virus in over a century, is thought to have originated in the US.
TF @ 61 –
Nope. I think your final sentence summed up the rest of the comment pretty well.
Ed George: “The Spanish flu, the deadliest virus in over a century, is thought to have originated in the US.”
Cite your source, please.
I can find no reputable source which claims the Spanish flu originated in the U.S. Every source lists its origins as unknown.
The fact that you felt the need to lie in order to defend China is alarming. I’d ask how much they’re paying you, but it’s clear you’re a proud useful idiot willing to shill free of charge.
As for Buffalo’s comment . . . he’s exactly right. China’s carelessness has become arguably the biggest threat to civilized society. It’s time to ostracize them from Western society.
BTW, looks like Spanish Flu was swine flu, which returned in 2009. That tends to point to China. In any case, recent pandemics or potential pandemics have tended to come from two sources: China and Central Africa. Both have patterns of eating exotic meats and in China, there are regions where people live in close company with farm animals in the same dwelling. The next factor then becomes, global mass travel that can carry an infection to any point on the globe except utterly remote islands, in 24 – 48 hours. KF
PS: I gather, the Pacific islands are the holdout zone on this current epidemic.
PPS: In my thread put up yesterday, I brought up a potential breakthrough covid-19 treatment, Chloroquine, e.g. https://uncommondescent.com/mathematics/sir-simple-basics-of-epidemics/#comment-695496
Why, when the 2009 pandemic probably came from Mexico?
JT, 86:
I see you are persisting in the fake news talk-point that Mr Trump claimed that Covid 19 was a hoax, despite repeated corrections in the thread above. In 62 I linked a definitive corrective, complete with screen shots:
Your continued use of a false media narrative in the teeth of readily accessible correction rather makes the point on how fake news and message dominance can distort understanding and needlessly polarise discussion.
Meanwhile, there is a potential breakthrough on the table, Chloroquine, that was brought up by “Orange man bad” yesterday and conspicuously failed to show up in the media reports from the usual suspects across yesterday. Telling.
It turns out, as I discussed in my parallel thread, that a hot news peer reviewed study has been released and there is a 15 year old peer reviewed article on how it works with Corona Viruses, specifically SARS.
Let me clip Delingpole’s summary and pointed question:
Now, let’s see if you can rise above repeating long since refuted false agit prop media narratives and address something vital for the whole world.
KF
BO’H, There are speculations all over the map on the Spanish Flu. Kindly note, I spoke to the 1918 epidemic, not 2009, and I highlighted a pattern of emergence of diseases. BTW, this is not new, the black death may well have had the same original locus. And, since the Spanish Flu was a pandemic, that a new variant could come out of Mexico is quite consistent with China as source c 1918. BTW, in WW1, China sent a considerable labour force to the Western Front, in France, discussed as a second possible point of origin. KF
I love how it’s coming out that Republican senators were telling the public everything is fine while secretly selling stock. I’m positive their clueless supporters will make excuses.
The day that Trump said it was a hoax, as a directly quoted him above, there were about 15 cases in the US. It’s now 15,000. A month from now it’s going to be a quarter million.
Trump thought the virus was such a hoax he shut down flights from China all while China, WHO, the left, and Europe were busy the race card. The end result? Europe is in a state of disaster, while America remains relatively strong.
United States
• 14,000+ Infected (500+ New)
• 217 Deaths
• 1.5% Death Rate
Europe
• 112,000+ Infected (1,200+ New)
• 5,000+ Deaths
• 4.5% Death Rate
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between having real leadership, and having globalist trash playing make-believe leadership.
How Fox News has shifted its coronavirus rhetoric.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=ifKbwDf51bA
Kellyanne Conway and Larry Kudlow both said the virus is “contained”…ten thousand cases ago.
JT, you have shown irresponsibility by doubling down. You obviously refused to read the linked devastating corrective, one of many out there. You further managed to show how agit prop poisons discussion, by trying to use distractive cross complaints on typical scapegoat targets. Meanwhile, you are absent from serious discussion here at UD, despite your claimed track record as a researcher. FAIL. KF
PS: Again, kindly note the link with the PowerLine corrective: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/02/is-coronavirus-a-hoax.php (And if you don’t know what PowerLine is, you should.)
@ Ed George
A long time ago in your case. We know you are an over-sharer and an old lech.
It was my understanding H1N1 when it returned was because a sample from 1918 was kept and somehow leaked out. Can anyone substantiate this?
Bu**ho**-researcher. And Ed George loves that part of the human anatomy as well. Probably an evolutive ‘strategy’.
Buffalo at 112, I believe this will help
A Fox news host is calling on Burr to resign, but they should call on the other two Republicans to resign too.
“coronavirus fear-mongering by the deep state will go down in history as one of the biggest frauds to manipulate economies, suppress dissent, and push mandated medicines.”
-Sean Hannity, late Feb.
@Bob O’H
Do you understand what I was asking?
TF – I believe so, but it’s possible that I’ve mis-understood what you were trying to say.
Someone else thinks we’re overreacting: Here.
Yesterday, the CFR was 0.01498. Today it is 0.01387. It’s been trending downward. It is already below Spanish Flu CFR’s (3-5%). Again, the Diamond Princess cruise ship numbers suggest the final CFR will be no higher than about 0.2%, as I see things. Meantime, the West is destroying itself. Are the hospitals in Italy overburdened? Send them help. Why destroy everything else.
PaV – do you understand that CFR isn’t what’s primarily what’s concerning people? It’s the actual real number of people who could get sick enough to need hospitalisation, and who could die, all in a short span of time? The reason why everyone is acting now is because this is an epidemic – it’s going to get worse. That’s what epidemics do. There may not be many deaths now, but the predictions are for many more – one UK study estimated that, without mitigation, over 2m Americans would die directly from COVID-19. The didn’t include the secondary effects on other patients in over-whelmed hospitals.
So, why destroy everything else? Because if we don’t, the destruction will be even worse.
“A Fox news host is calling on Burr to resign, but they should call on the other two Republicans to resign too.”
Yes and so should Feinstein if she did the same.
Vivid
James Joyner, associate professor of security studies at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College at Marine Corps University, writes “Republican Senators Commit Insider Trading after Coronavirus Brief
Richard Burr, Jim Inhofe, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler should go to jail.”
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/republican-senators-commit-insider-trading-after-coronavirus-brief/
To tell if it’s a genetically engineered bio weapon, why can’t intelligent design scientists just get the virus’s sequence and then calculate the CSI?
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Bob O’H:
But the CFR should concern people, because it’s a way of telling us how many people will die from this virus. It’s a ratio; a ratio comparing the number of cases of people being infected and the number that die from that infection. How could that not be important?
We need to compare the CFR for the CoVid-19 to that of the Spanish Flu–because this is the “fear” the powers that be say they’re concerned about. The CFR for the Spanish Flu was somewhere between 3% and 5%. The latest projections for the entire US is 1.39%, and FALLING. The Diamond Princess cruise ship data tell us the eventual CFR will be about that of the seasonal flu. Meantime, we destory the economy and people’s lives.
Prudence is needed. Good luck finding any.
No, I’ afraid you’re wrong. Here in the United States, it is NOT an epidemic. For it to be an epidemic, the P&I would have to exceed 7.3%. The data the CDC issued just yesterday, or the day before, says the P&I is 7.1%. Do you understand this?
Now, two years ago, when we were no paying attention to any “medical emergency,” no hoopla, no shutdowns, the P&I was at 10% for four consecutive weeks, peaking at 10.8%. That was an epidemic. But the CDC didn’t seem to be concerned. So, why now? Who’s running the show? Do they know what they’re doing? Can bureaucrats truly be trusted to make solid decisions? Most of the time, no.
Why do you state the obvious? I’ve posted numbers and what those numbers seem to be telling me. If you want to do something productive, then point out, using the numbers that are out there, and show me why we need Draconian measures to be in effect.
For example, explain to me why a falling CFR is not good news, or why it isn’t telling us anything.
Jim
Curious why you don’t mention that Diane Feinstein and her husband is reported to have sold 6 million worth of stock?
Vivid
If you go to Worldometers.com,, you’ll see that there are but a few hot spots throughout the world. Right now, China has only 3 new deaths for today. The other hotspots are places where Chinese nationals were coming and going. The US is not really a hotspot. Is it because Trump banned Chinese incoming flights early on? I suspect so.
Look at Italy, they have imposed incredible constraints on their citizens and yet the new deaths are rising. The most sensible explanation is that we’re looking at people who were infected, didn’t show symptoms right away–which seems to be a M.O. of this viral agent, and then struggled against the virus before dying. Most are elderly. Most are males. Why? Is it because Italian men smoke like chiminies?
Are we about to see in Italy what we have seen in China? The number of infections falls and the number of deaths fall, and rather precipitously. This makes some sense because if the virus were being spread, we would say that the new deaths are a by-product of new infections; but, because of the very severe measures imposed upon all of Italy, and for quite some time now, there is likely a falling off of infections. So, I suspect Italy might be heading for a sudden drop off of both “new cases” and “new deaths.” I don’t think we have more than a week, or so, to wait before these numbers appear.
Jim Thibodeau:
Give us the Darwinian explanation for how this virus arose–in detail, please.
As to trading, if you have a lot of money in the market, almost assuredly you have stop-losses in place that are triggered as the market falls, With the great volatility of the market over the last two weeks, these could easily have been triggered. Let’s not jump the gun.
Louisiana governor warns state could exceed capacity to treat patients within one week
There are 347 confirmed cases in Louisiana, but Bel Edwards noted that his state is one of the hardest hit by the coronavirus on a per capita basis. He asked the Trump administration to allow the state to send patients to a Veterans Affairs hospital in New Orleans.
Medical supply shortages
Hospitals all over the US are restricting visitors in an effort to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The guidance was perhaps the most strict in South Carolina, where Gov. Henry McMaster on Thursday asked all hospitals and overnight medical facilities to only allow visits from patients, with the exception of end-of-life care.
But those were not just aimed at stopping the spread of the virus — they were also meant to preserve vital medical supplies as communities across the country face shortages.
Update: CFR 0.0135: still falling, even as we speak.
Unlike the flu, which has a hospitalization rate of about 1% based on figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 requires about more than 20% of all cases to be treated in the hospital, meaning a large-scale outbreak in a community dramatically increases the burden on local hospitals.
There are now 12,612 confirmed cases in France, and 450 deaths. Of the deaths, 87% were aged over 70 years old. There are 5,226 people in hospital, 35% of them over 65 years old: 1,297 of these are in intensive care, 50% under 60 years old. 1,587 have been released from hospital.
Governors across 28 states have mobilized components of the Army and Air National Guard to assist in their state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than 3,300 guardsmen have been called up to state active-duty status, with more states expected to activate additional Guard resources as the novel coronavirus continues to spread.
All 50 states have issued emergency declarations, a critical step before mobilizing National Guard resources.
RHampton7:
“But those were not just aimed at stopping the spread of the virus — they were also meant to preserve vital medical supplies as communities across the country face shortages.”
They face shortages because 225 people have died of CoVid-19 over all of the US? Think about that for a second.
Not deaths, but hospitalizations . . .
A LONDON hospital has declared a “critical incident” with its intensive care unit 100% full amid the coronavirus crisis. It comes as the death toll rises to 177 and the UK cases are at 3,983.
The senior doctor added: “The thing people aren’t really talking about yet is that we are going to have to quickly agree some clinical thresholds for admissions to intensive care.
“This is what the Italians have had to do, and whether it’s set at 60 or whatever, we are going to have to do something similar. There’s no way we’re going to be able to scale up to the level we need otherwise.”
Blood donations to U.S. blood banks are down severely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and physicians and blood donation centers are asking the public to step up.
More than 2,700 blood drives in the U.S. have been canceled due to the COVID-19 crisis, according to the American Red Cross, and individual donations are down by 150,000.
“America’s blood supply is dangerously low,” said Jeff Kirby, chief of UAB Hospital’s trauma service, in a video on UAB News. “The need for blood is urgent and donation is still safe.”
@121 Bob O’H
As of today, March 20, 2020:
Could you please explain, according to darwinian evolution, what is happening?
– for example, is COVID-19 ‘winning’ (being favored by NSelection)?
WTOC spoke with Georgia Congressman Buddy Carter about the global pandemic. Who knows how long it’s going to last. All we know is we’ve got to flatten that curve. We’ve all got to do our part. I’m very disturbed to hear that some of the beaches are full of young people. Folks, we really, this is serious. And as a pharmacist, I can tell you this is really serious, and even for young people it can have life-long effects.
The New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, who said on Friday on MSNBC that there were now 4,000 cases across the five boroughs, comprising 30% of US coronavirus cases, begged Donald Trump to deploy federal military assistance.
Within two to three weeks, De Blasio has warned, the largest US city will soon run out of many medical supplies – and needs 3m N95 masks, 50m surgical masks, 15,000 ventilators, and 25m each of surgical gowns, coveralls, gloves and face masks.
RHampton7:
I just looked at the statistics for the UK. It says that there are 20 serious cases. And their health system can’t handle that? I would think those with serious cases would be in the ICU.
Now the CFR for the US stands at 0.0128. Going down as testing is going up. Does this surprise anyone?
You can thank Trump that the number of deaths and known cases isn’t any higher.
PaV 130
“Let’s not jump the gun.”
Im no fan of political parties , I am a registered independent,I see them more as two mafia families fighting for turf. No doubt there are decent people in both parties but unfortunately politics has always been somewhat a dirty business. Politics is war without blood. However we do need more facts.
The stock market is something I can address as an expert and there are many reasons one might sell, perhaps they follow charts which would have signaled major trouble by breaking their 50 MAs, that first 1000 point down day, perhaps they are in a blind trust. I am more than willing to wait for the facts for the members of BOTH parties that seem to be involved.
Vivid
JT,
I notice, further side-stepping, in a context that goes to your want of basic credibility . . . and at a time where for several years we have been seeing guilt by accusation tactics.
Okay, let me clip part of the repeatedly linked PL article:
KF
“ I just looked at the statistics for the UK. It says that there are 20 serious cases”
What statistics claim 20 serious cases? Link please
These numbers are for South London – not even the entire city
Unpublished NHS figures obtained by the Guardian show that the number of people confirmed or suspected to have Covid-19 being treated in an intensive care unit (ICU) in hospitals in south London rose from seven on Friday 6 March to 93 on Tuesday 17 March – a fifteenfold increase in 12 days. . . Doctors are worried that 86 of the 93 cases last Tuesday were on a ventilator, suggesting that Covid-19 was leaving many needing life-or-death care.
Doctors involved at a number of hospitals have given the Guardian vivid accounts of the pressures they and colleagues are facing.
Coronavirus: the week explained – sign up for our email newsletter
Read more
“I had to turn my operating theatre into a four-bed ICU and we are intubating two or three patients every eight hours or so,” said a doctor at one London hospital. An intensive care unit consultant at another hospital said: “The place is in panic stations trying to cope safely with the numbers of patients coming out of our ears.”
A third, at a different hospital, said: “All of our high dependency units [for patients less seriously ill than those needing intensive care] are being used for intensive care. We have patients spilling over into the recovery areas.
@Jim Thibodeau (et al )
Since you love ‘hoaxes’ so much, look at this: according to this darwinian nutty, the ‘reality’ we perceive is ‘not real’, it is a ‘hallucination’. COVID-19 is just an evolutionary ‘hoax’. That evolution bitch that loves playing games with our brains. 🙂
https://mindmatters.ai/t/steven-novella/
Feel better now?
PaV, I can only hope you don’t let your contraianism effect your behaviour and endanger others.
FWIW, the crude CFR (and it’s trend over time) is a pretty useless measure during an epidemic (yes, your misunderstanding of CDC reports not withstanding, this is an epidemic). Partly because cases are underestimated (pushing CFR up) and partly because (amazingly you still haven’t got this) people die quite a while after they catch the disease. In the US, the people that are dying now caught the disease 10-20 days ago. The right denominator for the CFR is obviously not the number of cases known today as the virus has spread a lot since those people caught the disease.
there appears to be an effect of hydroxychloroquine, and a notably stronger effect (down to zero virus as measured by nasal swab) of the hydroxychloroquine – azithromycin combination. That’s the result that’s getting the attention, and justifiably so.
– Graph
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/03/HCQ-768×410.png
Coronavirus: Some Clinical Trial Data
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/19/coronavirus-some-clinical-trial-data
@ Mimus
As of today, March 20, 2020:
Could you please explain, according to darwinian evolution, what is happening?
– for example, is COVID-19 ‘winning’ (being favored by NSelection)?
Thank you.
In a greatly simplified way, an epidemic can be visualized over time as two normal curves. The one on the left (the number infected) will be larger than the one on the right (the number that die). If you take the ratio at any point in time it will give a biased estimate of lethality. If you take it at the left part of the curve, it does not appear to be that bad. If you take it at the right part of the curve, it appears to be very bad. We are still at the very left end of the curve. The only accurate estimates of lethality are those made after the epidemic has passed. The ratio of the area under the curves.
A new coronavirus lineage was formed, possibly due to mutation out recombition between existing viruses. This virus has very high fitness in humans, in part because no humans have immunity to it. Left alone, the virus will continue to spread until a large proportion of the population has acquired immunity at which point it may circulate at a low level.
There’s no game to win or lose, but clearly the mutations that caused this outbreak have been “favoured by selection”in your words.
@ Ed George
As of today, March 20, 2020:
Could you please explain, according to darwinian evolution, what is happening?
– for example, is COVID-19 ‘winning’ (being favored by NSelection)?
Thank you.
You know, if a person wants to learn basic biology, they should get some textbooks, or take a class at a nearby college, instead of asking strangers on the Internet to explain everything to them.
Most universities will allow community members to take individual classes in a type of lifelong education program. I know my three alma maters allowed it.
TF
Sorry TF, if I want to play childish games I will go visit my two year old granddaughter. Perhaps if you stopped acting like an immature child, people might interact with you. Bye.
At one of my alma matters, there was this crazy street preacher who would yell at women for wearing pants and shout all kinds of ignorant nonsense. He said that women who wore pants were harlots. He would shout at the black students that they need to stop having so many babies.
Some people belong on the inside of the classroom, and some angry and shouting people belong on the outside.
They aren’t there to learn, they’re there to try to cram their ignorant viewpoints down everybody’s throat.
I can’t tell you How many times from 2000-2006 I saw Gary, for instance. Here’s Gary:
https://www.wral.com/news/local/story/1229617/
JT
You must be smarter than me. I only have two alma maters. 🙂
Do you think that TF honestly believes that he can catch anyone up in his childish attempts at those ‘gotcha’ questions? Surely he can’t be that stupid.
RHampton7:
Worldometer.com
Mimus:
200 people dead from a virus an epidemic does not make. If you’re saying there’s all kinds of people out there who have it and don’t know it, I would say, “No doubt.” You say CFR is useless. But, of course, that’s what epidemologists use.
From this study of high mortality rates in Italy over the last seven flu seasons:
Deaths due to the CoVid-19 virus this year, so far: 4,032. Compare this to 54,000 “excess deaths” in 2014-2015. Let’s assume this was over 250 days. That’s, on average, 208 deaths/day. Let’s say there was a peak in deaths over a four month period (120 days); then, on average, this 450 deaths/day.
We need perspective.
Gary used to wear this leather holster dealie that would support his big protest sign. It usually said something like REPENT OR BURN IN HELL. I wonder how many atheist liberals Gary was responsible for creating.
One day I was walking around campus with the guy who taught my Calc 2 class, and we came across Gary, and the professor said to me, “you know what scares me about people like this? He is absolutely certain.”
Jim Thibodeau:
The Antifa crowd is also “absolutely certain.” Have liberal politicians denounced them? No.
@Ed oh no, I’m sure you’ve got me beat. My degrees are not terribly impressive. I did work with some amazing people, like Laura Mersini-Houghton, and Eva Andrei.
Drug Success https://videos.files.wordpress.com/ZGnxuWby/dr-william-grace-says-chloroquine-is-already-being-used-in-us_dvd.mp4?fbclid=IwAR2C_-eBA0IjeDfE4tr7mpjQR6G3t493BAwxpsVILuK7LNRnMotAFr2b1pQ
I have encountered people before who have no understanding of how science works, who think that they can win at science by playing word games and making arguments about definitions. That’s not how science works, and it never accomplishes anything, but people still do it for some reason. I think it’s because apologetics contains a lot of word games and a certain type of person thinks that’s smart.
“ We need perspective.”
Had you been reading any of my posts? You desperately need perspective.
It’s not deaths, but hospitalizations (flu 1%, COVID 20%), that’s the critical factor in this pandemic. Once ICUs are full, ORs, ERs, and other areas of the hospital are pressed into service, any other medical emergency (heart attacks, strokes, etc aren’t going to stop) have to fight over dwindling supplies and space. Soon enough a triage system goes into effect to use what remains on those under a certain age with the best chance of surviving, the others have only God’s mercy.
It happened in China, is happening in Italy, starting in the UK, and NYC looks like it could be next. Smaller places will be hit just as hard too, like parishes in Louisiana and small towns n Kentucky and Tennessee.
Gov. Andy Beshear announced 16 new cases of novel coronavirus in Kentucky on Friday, bringing the statewide total up to at least 64.
Eight of the new positive cases, including a 17-year-old female, are Jefferson County, bringing that area’s total to 25.
The governor reiterated the state’s “shortage” of personal protective equipment for health care providers, such as masks, gowns and gloves.
“Anybody out there who has this equipment, we will absolutely take it,” Beshear said.
State health officials are reporting 537 cases of COVID-19 in Louisiana, up from 392 Thursday. Of those cases, 326 are in the Orleans Parish. The number of Louisiana deaths increased to 14.
The first two Lafayette Parish cases were reported Wednesday night. State health officials are releasing little information about the cases, but The Advocate reported Thursday one of them is Shawn Wilson, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.
In Tennessee, 228 people were confirmed with the coronavirus.
“We don’t have enough tests; we don’t have enough tests apparatus,” he said. “The swabs you put in your nose. The country is struggling on that.”
The city confirmed a Memphis Police Department employee tested positive for coronavirus
PaV, just. stop.
Mortality rate is scaled to be per year. So, the total death rate in Italy from all sources was 10.7 per 1000 per year (about 3 per 100 000 per day) in a particularly bad winter. Yesterday, they reported 627 deaths from coronavirus alone, with a population of 61 millions that’s a bit more than 1 per 100 000.
In a very bad flu season total mortality is 3 per 100 000 per day. Yesterday, coronavirus killed 1 per 100 000. Countries that are complacent will experience very similar tragedies.
So maybe, just stop.
Intensive care beds at Los Angeles County’s emergency-room hospitals are already at or near capacity, even as those facilities have doubled the number available for COVID-19 patients in recent days, according to newly released data obtained by The Times.
Fewer than 200 ICU beds were available Wednesday, with most ICU beds occupied by non-coronavirus patients, according to the data which covers the roughly 70 public and private hospitals in Los Angeles County that receive emergency patients.
@155 Mimus
Thank you for your reply.
Regarding this:
So we are:
– trying to develope a vaccine
– studying chloroquine efficacy
– using face masks and gloves
– harming the economy
– and enforcing exhausting quarantines for nothing? No ‘win’?
Is this not an unmistakable H. sapiens against COVID-19 ‘war’?
You can use whatever metaphor you want, I guess. Do you have a point?
@159 Ed George
If you are trying to be hurtful, please stop. It is within the evolutive paradigm that you love so much that neither adults nor children can reason. Both are equally stupid.
Look, you are SO BAD at logic it hurts. Children are immature by definition.
You have interacted with me. Again, you are SO BAD at logic it hurts.
Are we fighting a war against COVID-19 or not?
@175 Mimus
Well, something is happening. I think we both agree on it. How would you define it?
Yes. But first I would like to hear your answer 🙂
@167 Jim Thibodeau
How does ‘science’ work?
Funnily, I don’t much feel like playing silly word games about a pandemic that threatens to kill millions. If you have a point make it, otherwise kindly shut up.
@179 Mimus
Both you and I have to use words to communicate. It is inherently human. Even silly is a word that expresses something.
@179 Mimus
And? Atheistic evolutionism/ materialism has killed hundreds of millions of people. People who have have been taught they are ‘useless bags of chemicals, with no purpose whatsoever’. People who have slowly killed themselves doing drugs, drinking themselves into oblivion. People who have committed suicide and killed their ‘useless’ children in the womb.
Do YOU HATE ATHEISTIC EVOLUTION, MIMUS?
Ok, well, please don’t hesitate to fuck off and stop wasting everyone’s time.
@181 Mimus
The point is:
<b Evolution is false.
According to evolution, there is no purpose to anything. But people are fighting and being buried to save other human beings. H. sapiens has a purpose. LIFE IS VALUABLE.
-Evolutionary theory is wrong.
When the killer darwinian doctrine dies.
@182
Yes, your ‘useless’ time. Darwinism is cancer and needs chemotherapy. ASAP.
I will fuck a lot. For NO reason whatsoever according to this pathetic darwinian cult. I will even enjoy killing my unborn children.
Darwinism is WORST THAN COVID-19.
Mimus@182, there is no point trying to interact with TF. He has no interest in an honest discussion. He is just obsessed with insulting and deriding anyone who doesn’t believe in the things that he does. I can’t even bring myself to be mad at him because the only emotion that he stirs in me is pity. I can’t imagine going through life with such ignorance and hatred.
TF, how science should work, is by logic [including logic of structure and quantity, i. e. math], careful observation, warrant on reliability of explanatory constructs and being open minded. Too often, we have seen ideological captivity to imposed evolutionary materialism and general polarised politics. KF
PS: It isn’t evolution per se but ideological evolutionary materialistic scientism that imposes that all that is is in the end material, thus purposeless. And, it would be responsible to address that worldviews challenge, but then , ion flows and mV potentials are not bound by duty or logic, only by blind mechanical forces and chance.
PaV @ 127 –
It’s only of indirect importance, because most people are asymptomatic. What’s important is the total number who get sick, need care and die. They are the people who will need attention, and who will have to be hospitalised. If too many have to go to hospital at the same time, they will overload the healthcare system. Then doctors will have to make choices about who to save and who to let die.
CFR is only of secondary interest, in that it says something about the number of people who have the disease. But, again, the primary statistic of interest is the number of people who are infectious, especially if they are asymptomatic.
Where did you get this definition from? It is utterly utterly wrong. Here’s what the CDC says about what epidemics are. You might want to educate yourself.
@187 Kairosfocus
Yes, the problem is the illegitimate ideology (evolutionary materialistic scientism), not the real science (change over time).
Materialism only leads to absurdities, such as ‘there is no purpose’, while it is patently clear that H. sapiens is right now fighting a war against COVID-19.
An immunological one (only physical) + an intellectuall one (intelligence leading to vaccines, masks, gloves, disinfectants, statistical data interpretation…). The intellectuall one includes morals/ solidarity.
Acartia Eddie @ 185:
Neither do you. 😛
Jim Thibodeau:
And you are one of those people who have no understanding of how science works.
@188 Bob O’H
Choices that are based on morals, morals that are based on logic, logic that is based in reality. Logic can not just be the physical brain (it leads to absurdities, people are then only mechanical devices with no reason).
Reality shows that materialism is false.
A good article on why we are not overreacting. Well worth a read.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/3/20/21179040/coronavirus-us-italy-not-overreacting?fbclid=IwAR3pfoVHgzH7vvr0biN2WMpK9Fo7DJRWQ7F2BkxMHSsts96V2dKq7RCWKlg
Neither author is a medical doctor. Neither doctor has worked with infectious diseases. So read the article knowing that.
In New York City, coronavirus patients were dying at a rate of more than one an hour, with that rate expected to rise, the city’s health commissioner said Friday, according to The New York Post.
Spain has recorded almost 5,000 new cases of coronavirus in 24 hours as it became the third most infected country in the world.
Health authorities said on Saturday that virus infections have reached 24,926, up from 19,980 the day before.
Total deaths are at 1,326, up from 1,002 on Friday.
More than 1,600 patients are in intensive care units that authorities admit are at their limits.
Dougherty County leaders placed this Southwest Georgia community of 90,000 on lockdown Friday night after the county coroner confirmed two more deaths due to COVID-19. Now with six deaths and 42 cases identified in the Albany area, County Commission Chairman Chris Cohilas asked all residents to shelter-in-place, starting Saturday morning.
@Rhampton7
Hundreds of thousands of feminists spreading COVID-19 on 8-March manifestations, lots of them already with symptoms.
Maybe feminism is an ‘evolutive strategy’ to spread COVID-19?
Who knows, who knows…
Ed George, is this behavior moral or amoral? You were very worried about churches and the ‘oldies’. People are dying thanks to the 8-M festivity.
RH7, the Spain numbers sound more likely to be moves in testing and emergence of symptoms than in actual infections, which tend to be silent up to a fortnight. KF
The availability of testing obviously has an impact on the numbers of identified cases. And I don’t know how you would tweak the truth out of the data. Even the death numbers aren’t completely independent of the test availability. Only testing people who already show symptoms, which is the case in many jurisdictions, will have little impact on the number of deaths because they will already have exposed others. But testing those who show no symptoms could identify individuals who may soon become contagious and isolate them. This type of approach appears to be working in Singapore, but it is too early to say for certain.
Just-so story:
COVID-19 uses the feminists to propagate itself. Hundreds of thousands of those feminists gathering together for no-reason, knowing there was an outbreak, to defend their spandrelic and illusory rights.
Makes sense?
It does not matter, materialism makes no sense 🙂
I miss Silver Asiatic.
The Atlantic reported in January that there was a worldwide shortage of PPE.
Nothing was done.
I have heard the atheist god- Darwin (or the Guru) accepts child sacrifice (a.k.a. abortion).
What do the scriptural darwinian texts say about that?
JT, I have read that they are seriously looking at MacGyvering ventilators so that they can be used on four patients at a time.
I’ve heard right here on Uncommon Descent that the Coronavirus was designed, presumably by a loving God. I heard that from Michael Behe and News agreed. You can read it your self and see.
Maybe religion is how Covid propagates itself?
Let’s test that theory. Everybody who believes in God should show their belief by attending church tomorrow! Crowd together and shake hands with everybody. Don’t worry about breathing on each other and if somebody coughs on you, give them a friendly Christian cough right back. Let the athiests worry about the Covid-19 virus.
A good ID believing, God loving Christian knows that God made all viruses to HELP us. (Behe was a little vague on exactly how they help us, but it’s enought to know that God did it because he loves us!)
Let the athiests stay home Sunday morning while the Christians show their faith by partaking of the Coronavirus! I wonder if there’s a way to put it in the Communion wine?
Ed George Here’s Hackaday on multiuse ventilators:
https://hackaday.com/2020/03/19/saving-4-patients-with-just-1-ventilator/
Mississippi now has at least 140 confirmed cases of COVID-19, up from 80 reported a day earlier, health officials said Saturday.
Of those cases, 24% are being treated in hospitals, the Mississippi Department of Health reported. In addition, the agency said its laboratory had tested more than 770 people. Positive cases have been reported in 45 of the state’s 84 counties..
“The real horrifying thing about COVID-19 is that people thought it was going to really only affect the elderly, and instead this is anything but,” said Dr. Stavros Christoudias, who chairs the New Jersey Doctor-Patient Alliance.
“I’m at four different hospitals, and I’d say that less than half of the people that are critical with the coronavirus are over the age of 50. This is alarming.’’
Christoudias’ statement is further supported by a federal study released earlier this week that reports nearly 20% of the people hospitalized with coronavirus in the United States are young adults between the ages of 20 and 44.
https://medium.com/six-four-six-nine/evidence-over-hysteria-covid-19-1b767def5894
Thought this might be of interest but not a light read. Not an endorsement
Vivid
@Rhampton6
Yes. Old people and chinese people, so lots of folks, being good darwinian devotees, did not care at all. Survival of the luckiest. For nothing really.
Reality is multi-layered and complex.
Bob O’H:
Help me understand, Bob: 22,000 Americans have died from the seasonal flu, but it’s NOT an epidemic. 288 Americans have died from the Corona Virus, and it IS an epidemic. I’m now scratching my head.
By the way, the figures I got were from the CDC site.
CFR right now, which will change over the next few hours (and likely tick up), is 0.0119, or about 1.2%. It was 1.5% a few days ago, and 1.3% yesterday. It’s falling. Very positive. Maybe I can get back to a normal life out here in California.
BTW, I watched FoxNews last night, and they used the same numbers for CFR that I’ve been using.
Somebody else has my take on things: Here.
PaV @ 212 – what reference are you using to say that seasonal flu isn’t defined as an epidemic?
This video might put things in perspective.
https://youtu.be/n4no04822NQ
FFS, covid takes about 20 days to kill someone, and was first known to spread in the community in the US about a month ago. Deaths today are an indication of how wide spread the disease was in the past. Because this is spreading rapidly (and many more people will catch it than flu, as no immunity exists) the small number of deaths now are an indication of very bad things to com now the virus is so much more prevalent.
Why this is so hard for you to comprehend I don’t know.
Perspective relates to context. And Acartia Eddie has already admitted that it doesn’t understand why context is required for anything.
Today, on the radio, I heard someone from the Los Angeles Health Department saying how over wrought their hospital system was in L.A. They were appealing for money (everyone likes money). I looked at today’s numbers for California: 1 person died. One! And maybe it was up in San Francisco.
There are places in the US, according to the Washington Post, if I’m not mistaken, that say we’re “past” testing. We have to deal with the pandemic. For weeks they were saying, “We need to know the denominator,” which is the number of cases–used to calculate the CFR, so you know where you are. They make this huge push, and 125 Americans die, and they say, basically, “It’s too late.”
Now, what will the effect be of stopping the testing for CoVid-19? It will drive up the CFR!!! Something stinks badly here. What is going on? This is not rational, nor normal.
CFR for today, 1.28%, slightly down from yesterday. But, if we stop testing, this will continue to rise. Who’s behind this?
We are clearly fighting a war against COVID-19. Our immune systems are being amplified using our intellects (i.e. vaccines).
According to materialism, our intellect is a component of the immune system. I mean, a physical one. Like the tonsils i. e. (those important ones that used to be labelled as ‘junk’ and removed for silly reasons).
PaV
The only part of the hospital that is stressed by the number of dead is the morgue. When they talk about the hospitals being over wrought, they are talking about the living.
So, again, materialism leads to absurdity.
Components of the immune system:
-white blood cells.
-antibodies.
-complement system.
-lymphatic system.
-spleen.
-bone marrow.
-thymus.
And the brain 🙂 It uses its ‘powers’ to understand abstract concepts (i. e. immunity, vacune, maths, then creates the mentioned vaccine, then it applies itamplifying the immune response.
Remember kids, the brain is part of the I. S.
Reality is real, materialism. Forget your: we are ‘hallucinating’ non-sense. Because according to your absurd religion, this pandemic is ‘merely resembling reality due to some evolutive-related-just-so-story-trick but not really real’. Go tell the victims.
Ed George:
Such blithe answers. According to Worldometer, there are, in the entire United States, 23,468 cases. Of those 23,468 cases, there are only 64 “serious” cases, a little more than one per state.
In fact, when you divide 64 by 23,468, you get .0027, or, .27%, which, when rounded, is ZERO percent–the actual number I see on their webpage. All the rest are “mild.” Do you end up in the hospital with “mild” cases of a virus?
Would you like to correct your comment?
PaV, are you even readign replies or you hard of thinking?
The number of deaths today is the result of the small number of infections that started about three weeks ago. So it’s quite possible for CA to experience one death while the strain on the medical system from admitted patiens grows (from cases caught more recently as the epidemic has got so much more prevalent). If it typically takes 5 days from symptom onset to hospitalisation and 10 days from hosptlisation to death and the number of cases is growing exponentially then it stands to reason the strain on the hospital will come before the death rate accelerated. I don’t think this should be too hard to comprehend.
The reason to test early in a epidemic is to seek out cases, follow trains of transmission and stamp out the spread of this disease. When a disease becomes very prevelant these techniques are no longer feasible, so better testing doesn’t change clinical or public health outcomes. The CFR of disease only becomes finally known after we can test for antibodies in the general public.
Your conspiracy there’s and contrarian nonsense are really dangerous at the moment, and I hop you take some time to really understand what is going on.
Mimus:
Can you read my comments? What load is there exactly in our hospitals when ZERO percent of the current cases are “severe”? Well, it’s not exactly zero–there are 64 such ‘severe’ cases. But that’s throughout the whole of the US. I’m looking at the numbers and trying to figure out what they’re saying.
Should I add that someone went up the the ER room of our small, local hospital. There was hardly anyone in the ER. The nurses and staff weren’t wearing anything. They acted as if they thought this whole epidemic thing was a joke. This is anecdotal, but it jives with the numbers.
I looked in an Italian newspaper today, and almost all of the cases are from the Lombard region at the foot of the Italian and Swiss Alps. They said that the average age of those dying was 80.
Should we use Italy as a barometer for the US? The Diamond Princess, those who died were all in their seventies and eighties. This is typical for the seasonal flu. That is the part of our population that suffers the most and is the most prone to die from the flu. So, what are we to make of 301 deaths over a three week period when, according to the CDC, over 1,000 people per week have died of this years seasonal flu? Do you think those numbers impact our hospitals more than the 64 “severe” cases?
If you want to kowtow to the “experts,” go ahead. But, if I were to kowtow to experts, then I’d be a Darwinist; but, I’m not.
Mimus: you’re susceptible to Jedi mind tricks; I’m not. Make rational arguments; don’t just tell me: “Oh, you don’t know how really bad it is. Don’t make it worse.”
There are almost 40 million people living in California, and today, one person died of this virus. Please explain to me why I should be worried about this? The seasonal flu probably caused 4 deaths today. Shouldn’t I be afraid of that?
@PaV
🙂
Darwinism is a dangerous cult.
The Middle Tennessee Mayors Caucus, a group made up of more than 600 Middle Tennessee physicians, has sent Bill Lee a letter voicing its support for statewide shelter to be implemented in place during the coronavirus pandemic.
“… The replication rate (R0) of COVID19 is the primary area upon which we can impact this deadly virus. Compared to the annual influenza, COVID19 is anywhere from 60 to 100% more “efficient” at replicating itself. For instance, on average 10 patients with the influenza will infect 13 individuals. With COVID19, (R0 of 2.0 to 2.5), those same 10 will infect 20 to 25 individuals if we do nothing.
“ …According to very conservative estimates 20% of our state’s population will become infected. Based on hospital bed availability in Tennessee, we would surge above hospital and ICU bed capacity by 132% and 298%, respectively. Other estimates predict 4060% infectivity. This would prove disastrous.
“ …The mortality rate of COVID19 is at minimum 10x, and possibly up to 34x deadlier than seasonal influenza. The incubation time of COVID19 is up to 14 days, versus only 1 to 4 days with influenza, therefore apparently well individuals already infected will infect numerous people without knowing it.
“… We request that effective midnight Sunday, March 22nd that Tennessee declare a shelter in place for 14 days with only essential personnel being deployed during this emergency. We also request a selfquarantine of 14 days for all individuals returning from international and domestic travel.
PaV, are you going to church tomorrow?
Just passing along info
I have a family full of medical people, the ones that work at large public hospitals texting me that they are practically empty.
Also saw this Hope it’s accurate
https://www.breitbart.com/border/2020/03/21/rapid-coronavirus-test-approved-by-fda-results-in-45-minutes/
Vivid
Vivid, I looked at that medium.com link you gave in 210. It looked fishy, but when I went back a couple of hours later to give it a good look, I got this:
410
This post is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.
Vivid: “I have a family full of medical people, the ones that work at large public hospitals texting me that they are practically empty.”
Strange. I live a few hundred miles from Bornagain77 and our biggest local hospital is asking patients to postpone all elective surgeries and procedures.
MS
That is why I said “this is not an endorsement”
As to the hospitals I can give a first hand report that indeed the hospitals my family members worked in were so empty that one of them was sent home and the other texted “can someone bring cards we are bored to death” I honestly dont know what that means or doesn’t mean. Maybe something maybe irrelevant. Personally it was surprising to me.
Vivid
Here’s a video to look at: https://youtu.be/gku7mdTS8cc
Note especially that we are never more than three months from world infection.
That means that if we manage to completely suppress the virus, there will always be a few viruses left over to start reinfecting the population again. The only way to stop the virus for good is to develop a vaccine – and that will take a minimum of a year or a year and a half.
So picture the world economy shutting down over and over every couple of months until we get that vaccine.
If I owned any stocks, I’d make like a Congressman and sell them now while they’re still worth something.
P.S. If you’re an American and you think our government is as dumb as a box of rocks, pity the poor UK. They’ve just elected Boris Johnson, who is telling his citizens to avoid groups larger than ten – but he’s leaving the schools open!
According to the materialist religion, numbers are part of our physical brains. So where exactly are they? This thing evolution gave rise to brains that create mathematics 🙂 For no reason whatsoever of course.
Those same mathematicas that are so helpful to i.e. model epidemics and save lives.
But no, no goal orientedness and no purpose here, fellas.
There is NOT a patently obvious war here featuring H. sapiens vs COVID-19.
There is ‘nothing to win’ according to them. Just genes randomly copying themselves for no reason.
And remember, stay calm, it is known that we are in the Matrix 🙂 That is scientific.
Pray Darwin (and Neo).
Once you start to list the absurdities materialism + (evolution) lead to, you realize the list is almost endless.
Johns Hopkins says of the 1470 cases in California, 27 have died. And LA County says they’re not testing most patients for coronavirus because they have way more suspected cases then test kits. And it’s still increasing exponentially.
Thank you ‘materialistic’ science for those planes that have helped to spread COVID-19 like wildfires. Thanks for the ships, and the trains and the cars too.
Amen.
If there is no intelligence in ‘nature’: why do we need intelligent and trained people to fight against a tiny viral particle?
If everything is dumb and mindless, scientists are then dumb and mindless too.
But according to materialistic scientism, scientists are all knowledgeable gods.
It makes 0 sense.
If panpsychism is true, maybe COVID-19 is consciously choosing to spread itself (for no reason). Does COVID-19 understand darwinian evolution?
Mimus:
You’re banned from this post. Your attitude and language are reprehensible.
MatSpirit:
Of what interest is that to you? How the the Left lacks civility.
Mimus has been shown the door. When your “argument” is “fuck off,” you can expect to be instantly banned from this site.
Trying to estimate the depth of your sincerity. You’ve been telling us how we’re being manipulated into believing a simple flu like Covid-19 won’t really hurt us any more than a seasonal flu we already have and Behe and News have both told you that God made that virus.
If I was a sincere Christian, I would have gone to a church this morning and tried to accept this gift from God.
Mimus was right and he has exactly the right attitude. Follow his advice and you might live longer. Or, trust God and go to church. Be sure to shake hands with everybody.
PaV
That is your right as the thread owner. And in this case I don’t disagree. But if you are going to be consistent, might I suggest that you also ban TruthFreedom. He has done nothing but Repeatedly mock and deride rather than contribute to the discussion. A discussion on a subject, I think we would all agree, is very important.
Hi Barry. How’s Denver doing with the new virus God has designed for us?
NO! Keep Truthfreedom posting! He’s our only source of humor in these tumultuous times.
Matspirit
I am not suggesting they ban him from UD, just this thread. I am completely in favour of UD continuing to allow people to comment who make ID look like a joke. I hope they never ban ET or TruthFreedom.
Here is an article that was published by Medium, and then dropped because it didn’t meet Medium‘s Rules–whatever that means. It is now accessible through Zero Hedge.
It’s by Tyler Durden, a data analyst for a Silicon Valley company, and titled: COVID-19 – Evidence Over Hysteria.
More than a few times, doctors are talking about CoVid-19 as acting like a seasonal flu–my argument here. And his take on all of this is, given all that data that is out there and how it is being analyzed, what the governments are doing is an overreaction that could cause great, but avoidable, harm.
An important point is that the CoVid-19 virus is not as contagious as we were led to believe: it doesn’t persist as long as initially thought, nor is its infection rate as high as initially thought, etc.
As to a comparison to what Dr. Fauci said in 2009 versus today, here is an interesting look.
“If you’re thinking about sharing that viral Medium article, read this first.”
-Dr. Tara Smith, epidemiologist.
What she links to:
https://tinyurl.com/vmsf9vm
Tyler Durden was Brad Pitt’s character in Fight Club. The Covid article seems to have been written by a guy named Aaron Ginn. Possibly.
From the above linked article on CoVid-19:
Notice his source: Worldometer.info. It’s the same source I’ve used, but I’ve incorrectly displayed it as a .com, and not a .info. So, there’s where you can go for more info.
Today’s calculation: 1.28% (349 of 27,151)
For the last three days, the rate is 0.33%–seasonal flu like numbers. Alas.
Now New York City and Los Angeles says they want to stop testing. Why? Again, this will cause the CFR to rise. Why would anyone want that?
For very obvious reasons—they’re being overwhelmed.
Back in the day (my early to mid 20’s) I was a Lab tech in hospitals and reference laboratories in three different states. Running tests is time consuming and expensive. They used to have to pay me, on the weekends, to come in and run CK and LD tests for potential heart attack cases. Them Abbot reagents ain’t cheap either. And PCR can be pricey.
I am completely in favor of UD continuing to allow people to comment who make themselves look like a joke. Ed George, is a prime example. Jim Thibodeau is right behind Ed in proving they are clueless dolts.
MatSpirit
It is difficult to know whether this comment is more stupid (it betrays an appalling ignorance about both the claims of ID and Christian doctrine) or more vicious (did no one ever tell you that mocking someone’s faith in a time of crisis and heartache is just plain mean)?
Mat, you make me sad (for you I mean).
PaV, where did you hear that NYC and LA want to stop testing? Why do they want to stop?
At 251, Jim Thibodeau invites readers to consider Carl Bergstrom’s series of tweets in which he attempts to rebut Aaron Ginn’s article that PaV has linked in 250. I have read both, and from the get-go Bergstrom’s tweets gave off a foul odor. For example, Bergstrom bashes Ginn for using a “bell curve” model. Huh?? EVERYONE is using a bell curve model. We are told over and over again that we must endure draconian distancing rules. Why? Because we need to “flatten the curve.” What curve? The bell curve of course.
Then out of the blue, Bergstrom takes a swipe at Charles Murray’s book “The Bell Curve.” First, the swipe is gratuitous, because the book has nothing to do with Ginn’s thesis. It is as if Bergstrom is saying “There is this wholly unrelated book about bell curves that I don’t like; therefore all articles that mention bell curves are bunk.” Bergstrom has surely beclowned himself. This is even more the case because Bergstrom implies (without actually saying) that Murray’s book has been debunked. This is not true. As recently as 2018, award winning Harvard geneticist David Reich was saying things very similar to what Murray said. Bergstrom’s comment reveals far more about his politics (obviously far left) than anything else.
Barry, are you calling Michael Behe AND News liars? Behe says all viruses are designed. I read it on this blog! He says there must be a good reason for this, although he doesn’t seem to know what that reason is and I sure can’t tell him. Do you have some other designer in mind besides God?
People who put us all in mortal danger because of their ignorance and obstinance make me sad. (I’m talking about Trump.)
This article says that according to the WHO and the CDC, up to 650,000 respiratory deaths occur world-wide each year due to the seasonal flu.
Total world-wide deaths for CoVid-19: 13,694. And there is only about a month or two left of the flu season. Likely, the death rate will begin falling within a week or two. Let’s estimate the total number of deaths given what we’ve seen in China, S.Korea and the U.S. I think a fair estimate would be double of the current deaths, which is 27,400 roughly. How does this compare to “up to 650,000 deaths” due to the seasonal flu?
Based on this statistic, I suspect that the numbers coming out of Italy, and possibly Spain, have conflated seasonal flu deaths with CoVid-19 deaths; i.e., their test protocols might be off. I suspect that in two months, they will correct their figures, once this all sorts itself out.
The world, each year, doesn’t bat an eye at 650,000 deaths, but goes into padnemonium over 27,000. Who thinks this makes sense?
MatSpirit
Maybe you should actually read the thread in which you are participating. Your buddy Jim has quoted the article at 254.
Over a week ago I asked people to give me an estimate of how many deaths there would be from this, and I don’t remember anybody answering. So PaV, you think globally there will be 27k deaths from this.
You will be proven very, very wrong.
Matt spirit and I aren’t buddies, and I have no idea who he is, but Matt spirit you seem to be a very smart guy, so if you want to be buddies in the future please email me at
thibodeaujim@yahoo.com
MatSpirit suggests that ID and Christian doctrine posit that God specifically designed the COVID 19 “for us.”
Barry points out that this comment is appallingly ignorant and vicious.
MatSpirit doubles down by claiming that Behe and UD News back his claim that God specifically designs every new virus strain for us.
Of course, neither Behe nor UD News has ever said any such thing.
Adding lies on top of your mean spirited comments only makes things worse Mat. Please stop.
MatSpirit
Testing serves two purposes, for epidemiological reasons and to inform on the preferred course of treatment. Testing requires resources and for the flu or COVID-19 it does little to inform treatment decisions. Since most viruses are treated symptomatically, And assuming that hospitals are using appropriate elevated isolation techniques, there is little value from the treatment perspective. This would change if chloroquine proves effective. But it is critical from an epidemiological perspective. For public health officials to make the best decisions, they need current and accurate information.
Perhaps MatSprit had this article in mind when he said that Behe says God designed the COVID 19 virus “for us.” Behe on COVID 19
If so, he does not understand Behe’s point. Yes, in a general sense viruses are designed. All life is designed.* But Behe did not say that each virus strain is designed “for us” by God. Nor does Christian doctrine posit that God specifically designs each virus “for us.” MatSpirit is either not capable of grasping these distinctions or (more likely) he does understand the distinctions and is using the occasion of tens of thousands of deaths and incalculable suffering to make cheap rhetorical points in support of his “village atheist” level of atheism.
__________
*I understand that whether a virus qualifies as “life” is debatable. The distinction is not relevant to the point I am making.
PaV, I’ve reprinted your numbers from message 253. I’ve added another column on the right showing the daily increase in deaths:
4.06% March 8 (22 deaths of 541 cases)
4
3.69% March 9 (26 of 704)
4
3.01% March 10 (30 of 994)
8
2.95% March 11 (38 of 1,295)
4
2.52% March 12 (42 of 1,695)
7
2.27% March 13 (49 of 2,247)
8
1.93% March 14 (57 of 2,954)
11
1.84% March 15 (68 of 3,680)
18
1.90% March 16 (86 of 4,503)
23
1.76% March 17 (109 of 6,196)
41
1.66% March 18 (150 of 9,003)
58
1.51% March 19th (208 of 13,789)
48
1.32% March 20th (256 of 19,383)
Do you find it worrying that in two weeks the daily deaths have increased by 1200 percent? If you don’t, you may not fully understand the problem.
Barry Arrington
Maybe you should actually read the thread in which you are participating. Your buddy Jim has quoted the article at 254.
Yes, he posted it while I was writing. Thanks Jim.
Welcome!
MatSpirit
The chart shows there were a few deaths at the very beginning and now that we are weeks into the event there are several times more deaths. This was to be expected, and that “1200 percent” figure is just the sort of scare-mongering tactic that makes your side so unbelievable. You might just as well said that on day 1 there was one death. A few days later when there were 20 deaths that day, a “2000 percent” rate increase in mere days! But still only 19 more deaths. Or in the same vein you might have said in hour 1 there was one death and two hours later there were another two deaths, a 200% rate increase in mere hours! But still only one more death.
Your comment is a classic example of the “damn liars” school of statistics.
Barry, would you like to make an estimate of how many deaths it’ll be? PaV thinks 27,00 globally, i say the number will be waaay larger.
Jim,
I do not know how many deaths there will be. But I have seen people on your side of this argument make estimates of up to three million here in the United States alone. That is insanity level scare-mongering. I will venture this estimate. When this is over and the numbers are counted, the deaths from COVID 19 will be a fraction of the deaths attributed last year to the seasonal flu.
Barry, this is from the message you pointed to:
Behe: “So, do I think viruses were designed? Yes, I most certainly do! The viruses of which we are aware — including the coronaviruses, Ebola, and HIV — are exquisitely, purposively arranged, which is the clear signature of intelligent design. Well, then does that mean the designer is evil and wants people to suffer? No, not necessarily. I’m a biochemist, not a philosopher. Nonetheless, I see no reason why a designer even of such things as viruses should be classified as bad on that basis alone.”
So “coronaviruses, Ebola, and HIV” are “exquisitely, purposively arranged”, but “does that mean the designer is evil and wants people to suffer?” Apparently, Behe thinks not, but he’s not sure because he’s “a biochemist, not a philosopher.” But “Nonetheless, I see no reason why a designer even of such things as viruses should be classified as bad on that basis alone.”
So if you design and release huge numbers of invisible deadly weapons upon the world so that large numbers of people inevitably run into them and die horrible deaths, you’re not NECESSARILY bad.
You’re a lawyer. How’d you like to make THAT argument in court?
I haven’t seen a 3 million estimate. The early estimates I saw were 700,000 to 2.4 million. The most recent estimate I saw was 200,000–1.4 million US by the end of the year with millions needing hospitalization. That was CDC. They’re smart, I’ll go with them.
So for the record, the guesses are:
PaV 27,000 globally
Barry: a fraction of 60,000 in the US
Me: 200k+ US
Barry: “When this is over and the numbers are counted, the deaths from COVID 19 will be a fraction of the deaths attributed last year to the seasonal flu.”
I’ll take that as an estimate. I’m assuming you mean US deaths from COVID and seasonal flue.
PaV, what’s your estimate.
Barry @ 258 –
*sigh*
The time series of epidemics tend to be positively skewed, so they look (to me) more like a Gamma distribution. If you read the thread, you’ll see that Bergstrom points to a paper that used a normal curve to predict the course of AIDS, and concluded it would infect about 200 000 people.
The substance of Bergstrom’s argument is that most countries are still in the exponentially increasing phase of the epidemic, and from this it’s difficult to extrapolate to find out where the peak will be, just using statistical methods. I’m a statistician and I endorse this message.
Mat @ 273
From an ID perspective, I would argue that ID has never posited that the designer specifically intends every strain of virus. As Behe has shown in his books, evolution by natural selection continues to play a role. Like so many, you seem to believe that ID and natural selection are mutually exclusive. No prominent ID thinker has ever argued that. Mat, you come here day after day claiming to (1) understand the claims of ID; and (2) debunk them. That you have obviously not read Behe’s books (if you had, you would not be making the argument you are making), demonstrates that (1) is not true. You are appallingly ignorant about the very basics of ID. It follows from the fact that (1) is false, (2) is also false, because it is obvious that you cannot debunk that which you do not understand.
As for Christian doctrine, there is an answer. Indeed, an entire branch of philosophy dealing with the theodicy has developed in response to the questions you raise. I will not go into the answer other than to say that, again, that suffering exists in the world is not contrary to Christian doctrine. It is a demonstration of it (see, e.g., Romans chapter 8). The answer will not be satisfactory to people like you. That’s OK. But your suggestion that Christians have nothing to say in response to suffering in the world is patently false.
@Bob Some of the graphs I’ve seen have wrongly used Gaussians, but most of the ones I’ve seen have correctly used gamma distributions. To lay reader this might not be obvious.
To others, this is a gamma distribution:
https://www.wiscontext.org/urgent-battle-flatten-wisconsins-covid-19-curve
Bob at 276:
Well, I suppose everyone could believe you, or they could believe the scientists. Here are a few links. Go look at them:
Live Science
Health.com
New York Times (that infamous right wing rag)
Wired
*sigh*
Bob, what do all of those curves modeling this outbreak (comparing what we can expect without preventive measures to what we can expect with preventive measures) have in common? If you guessed “they are bell-shaped Barry” then you get a cookie.
Why do you write such easily debunked crap. It took me 10 seconds to find these links and I could have added dozens more.
BTW, I am not suggesting that I necessarily agree with those models. I am suggesting that Bergstrom’s swipe at Ginn for suggesting a bell shaped model is appropriate is staggeringly stupid.
If there is not intelligence in ‘nature’, how can you explain that we need the most prepared people and technology to fight this battle ?
Size is not important, a tiny particle is consuming a lot of our brain power, needed to end the pandemic.
We are reverse-engineering.
And you insisting that mindless matter runs the show is non-sensical.
Unless you want to try the route ‘there is no intelligence involving viruses’, but then it leads to the conclusion that scientists are stupid.
And even worse, it leads to all the pathetic and absurd, eliminativist non-sense (consciousness is an ‘Illusion’, we are ‘hallucinating’, ‘no-goals’ in nature, etc).
Jim at 274,
That is a fair summary of our respective positions.
The people at CDC are scare mongering. They are government bureaucrats; that is what they do. Being smart and being inclined to scare monger are not mutually exclusive. You should write that down.
I am glad that you now admit that your allies were scare-mongering by overstating the threat by a factor of 10.
Barry take a closer look at that NY times graph.
Marry anybody who knows how epidemics work knows that the numbers can be wildly inaccurate at the beginning, and the real number is only known after it’s over. That’s not scaremongering, that’s a basic knowledge of how this kind of science works. And take a look at that New York Times graph again.
Materialism is false. With such a premise, only absurdity can follow.
Reality is out there to stay. Materialism is a mental trap.
Barry – the graphics are not, I think, being used in the actual models. Bergstrom was criticising the use of a Gaussian curve to extrapolate the course of the epidemic: he was saying that you need to have a mechanistic model if you want to do that. In your 10 seconds of googling, did you find any counter to that argument?
And take a closer look at that health.com graph.
oops. My voice recognition turned Barry into Marry.
Half your examples of bell curves are actually gammas.
Jim
OK. I did. Definitely bell shaped.
Jim Thibodeau, could you explain the evolutive origin/ development of mathematics? You are using them for your science/ modelling. Without them, you could not understand the epidemic. Those numbers are telling you something.
Jim
I am glad that you admit that folks in your camp did not hesitate to throw out “wildly inaccurate” numbers. Why you should engage in an apologetic for their indefensible scaremongering is a mystery.
Evolution invented mathematics. 🙂
That is materialism in a nutshell. Non-sense.
Jim,
A gamma is a special case of a bell shaped curve. “Bell shaped curve” and “normal distribution” are not synonyms, as you appear to believe. See here (“A gamma distribution with a large value for «alpha» is also useful when you wish to use a bell-shaped curve for a positive-only quantity.”).
Jim, where in our brain are mathematics? Nucleus accumbens maybe 🙂
I see no further need to comment.
I will comment one final thing. Putting words in people’s mouth’s, numerous times in the conversation, is rude.
Bob
Bob, I defy you to demonstrate where Bergstrom uses the word “Gaussian.”
Jim Thibodeau
Mathematics are ‘material’ according to materialism.
And they are in our brains.
Where? 🙂
Jim:
I will take that as an admission that you have nothing to say. OK. Thanks for your candor.
Bob:
Wow. Just wow, Bob.
To what graphics are you referring Bob? Why, the graphics that model the virus in a graphic form. Your statement is equivalent to “the models are not, I think, being used in the actual models.” Do you have no shame?
Barry, do you think one day materialism will find where mathematics is hidden? 🙂
If numbers are ‘material’, then 10000 weights more than 1.
If I think 9999999, will my head explode?
So much weight 🙂
Barry, it’s not that I don’t understand the various claims of ID, it’s that I don’t believe them.
Do you want to argue this case in court? “Your honor, the defendant did invent the virus and he did indeed know that it would mutate into trillions of diabolic mass murderers who kill more people than all the wars in history, BUT!!! Those viruses also do something so wonderful for us that it more than makes up for the death and suffering they cause but we can’t tell you exactly what. I rest my case.
Christianity has indeed developed an entire branch of apologetics they call theodicy, but they’ve never answered that question.
Jim: I see no further need to comment.
Barry: I will take that as an admission that you have nothing to say. OK. Thanks for your candor.
I think he’s just given up on you. You can lead a horse to water …
Materialism will never solve the problem of suffering.
Mat
No, that is definitely untrue. If you think that Behe believes some designer specifically designed CONID 19 “for us,” that alone demonstrates appalling ignorance of the claims of ID’s leading thinkers.
Now, I admit that, like many materialists, you probably believe you understand some caricature of ID you have created in your own mind. Well, how could you not? It is your own caricature after all.
Do I want to argue ID and Christian doctrine (I don’t know why you would add “in court” as if that makes some difference as to the truth of the matter or the content of the arguments)? Why my dear Mat, I have been doing that very thing for decades. Some are convinced by my arguments. Some are not. I am not sure what point you are trying to make.
@Mat It’s very clear at this point that Bob said they look like gamma distributions, Barry said no they are bell shaped, and then he took a look at the graphs and realized he screwed up and now he’s trying to play word games. I’m not continuing the discussion with Barry because everybody can clearly see what happened. I honestly thought he was going to delete the thread.
Jim
If by “playing word games,” you mean pointing out that you do not seem to fully grasp the meaning of a word you used, then I suppose you are right.
Barry: “Do I want to argue ID and Christian doctrine (I don’t know why you would add “in court” as if that makes some difference as to the truth of the matter or the content of the arguments)?”
Because no judge I’ve ever heard of would accept the claim that there’s a wonderful justification for my client that the greatest thinkers in the church have been developing for the last 3,000 years, but I can’t tell you what it is.
Jim
“Over a week ago I asked people to give me an estimate of how many deaths there would be from this, and I don’t remember anybody answering. “
I did see 80
FYI all one of my family that works at a major hospital texted me that they have 24 potential positive positive cases at her hospital
Vivid
Jim, that’s the way most arguments end here. The IDists dig their heels in, and things just dribble to a stop.
Evolution created our brains, with God and mathematics.
God is ‘false’.
Mathematics is ‘true’.
Wow. Evolution is awesome. What a tricky lady.
Mathematics has then a physical substrate. But materialism can not say where in the brain is that substrate located. 🙂
For those still on the fence about Bob’s and Jim’s bullshit attempt to suggest that a bell shaped curve should not be used to model COVID 19, here is a paper from Stanford that predates COVID 19.
Yes, the “real world” curve is always going to be somewhat messy. In other words, it is never going to be perfectly symmetrical. No one ever said it would be. But the classic epidemic curve is definitely bell shaped. The paper shows a bell shaped curve on page 8 and then on page 9 it states: “This is the classic epidemic curve. The epidemic curve is “bell-shaped”, but not completely symmetric.”
This is just common sense. The epidemic starts off slow; spikes; and tapers off. That is a bell shaped distribution. It is a mystery why Bob and Jim think they can change that by saying crap like “I am a statistician and I am here to tell you that the curve for this epidemic will not be bell shaped.”
JT
Not that I want to turn this into some kind of twisted “deadpool”, but I had said that we would be lucky to be under 100,000 US
MatSpirit:
You don’t understand the various claims of ID.
Ed, I just put a note in my calendar for January 2021 to come back to this.
I hereby make the following commitment: If Jim is correct (i.e., COVID 19 deaths in the US exceed 200,000), I will sincerely apologize to the entire world on this site for understating the threat by a magnitude of more than three.
I wonder if Jim is willing to make a similar commitment. If I am correct (i.e., COVID 19 deaths in the US are fewer than 60,000), will he sincerely apologize to the entire world on this site for overstating the threat by a magnitude of more than three? I doubt he will make the commitment.
[For those doing the math, this leaves a range of 60,000 to 200,000, where neither of us would apologize under this commitment.]
God is bad because of viruses that kill people.
Let’s promote abortion.
Makes sense.
1st step: dehumanize babies. Now they are not babies, just foetuses. And even better, parasites.
The less human, the better.
Easier to kill.
But viruses are bad.
Duh.
After this is all over we can only know one thing for certain, that our actions weren’t sufficient. We will never know if we over-reacted.
More than half the counties in America have no intensive care beds, posing a particular danger for more than 7 million people who are age 60 and up ? older patients who face the highest risk of serious illness or death from the rapid spread of COVID-19, a Kaiser Health News data analysis shows.
Intensive care units have?sophisticated equipment, such as bedside machines to monitor a patient’s heart rate and ventilators to help them breathe. Even in communities with ICU beds, the numbers vary wildly ? with?some having just one bed available for thousands of senior residents, according to the analysis based on a review of data hospitals report each year to the federal government.
Didn’t the global warming alarmists all want a decrease in population? And now they are the people whining about covid 19 and not enough ventilators.
@321 ET:
Yep. But they only accept ‘natural’ selection done by humans (pills, abortions, etc).
‘Natural’ selection via viruses is ‘bad’.
Dr. kills baby = good.
Now back to the topic of the thread, coronavirus, I want the estimates of the knowledgeable people to be wrong, I have an elderly mother who is not in great health, and my friend Stephanie has an ailing mother with lung issues who is not in good health. I very much want Barry’s or even better PaV’s numbers to be correct, but I’m afraid they will be very, very wrong.
If viruses killing H. sapiens is ‘natural’ selection?
What is a H. sapiens (i. e. a dr.) saving another H. sapiens then? Genetic drift? Does the dr want to increase the number of certain genes in the population?
Oh, evolution is useless. We already knew it.
Ed
Huh? Just when I thought our opponents on this site had hit bottom, they plumb new depths. Of course there is such a thing as an over-reaction. And of course we can give reasoned arguments that what we did was such an over-reaction. Ed’s formulation is just a preemptive attempt to justify (and avoid accountability for) scaremongering.
Sort of surprised why no one has brought up “Farrs Law” My understanding , could be wrong, is that it should apply in these types of situations. Maybe someone has already and I missed it.
Vivid
Jim Thibodeau,
Glad to see you are back. What is your response to my challenge to you at 316?
Vivid, it is in the article PaV linked.
Mat Spirit:
Do you not understand that this is precisely why the CFR is calculated? It avoids the mistake of looking simply at a ‘delta’ in deaths, but, instead, correlates the ‘delta’ in cases to the ‘delta’ in deaths. The CFR is dropping. This means that as more cases are diagnosed, the number of cases is growing faster than the number of deaths. This means the virus should be viewed as less deadly.
Let me add, what is going on in New York City is, at this point of some concern. Their numbers are jumping way too fast. Is it their mass transit system. People suspect that and I would think that’s likely.
Nevertheless, here’s the numbers for today: 5,429 new cases; 58 new deaths. The CFR is 1.07% The national CFR, for comparison purposes is: CFR (nation) 1.28%. So everyone will scream about these new numbers, but they effectively are below the national average. The CFR continues to go down—-slowly. In a week’s time, we’ll know more. I’m betting (hoping) we’re reaching an inflection point. But only time will tell.
So, MatSpirit, we have a new number for March 22nd–if the numbers hold, and it’s 1.28%, down from 1.32% two days ago. It’s falling. That’s what scientists in the know are looking at. It’s a good sign. Let’s get back to work–but do something about the mass transit systems.
Another article, this time from US News & World Report.
From Feb. 21, 2020–one month ago. Not very long ago, eh?
So, what about all those people who said I didn’t know what I was talking about when I said that an epidemic is defined as a P&I is above 7.3%? Would you like to apologize?
Now, look at the 41.9 cases of hospitalization per 100,000 people. Let’s round to 42/100,000. In the great state of California (excuse me while I tend to my nausea), we have close to 40 million people. So, because of the seasonal flu, we’ve seen 16,800 hospitializations just in our state.
Excluding New Yor City, because it is a complete outlier, there have been 16,555 total cases of CoVid-19. Assume 30% of them are “serious” (though the actual number might be as low as 10%) cases, that means that in all of the United States there have been around 5,000 hospitalizations. The exercise is done simply to try and provide all of us some perspective.
Some good news (of a sort) from Italy. The Telegraph reports that the deaths reported as due to COVID 19 may be vastly overstated:
We’re not going to have to wait until January. I’ll take that bet. And “I don’t trust the numbers” will not be an acceptable excuse for the loser.
Jim,
Of course we will have to wait until January to know how many people died of COVID 19 in 2020. But if you want to test the challenge at some earlier point, I am happy to oblige you. When do you propose?
But when you’re wrong, I don’t want a sincere apology. I want you to understand that you only believed what you did because of politics, and you fell into motivated reasoning.
And if I’m wrong I’ll admit I’m a Libtard and just hate Trump, and my atheist materialism etc. etc. whatever nonsense you want.
Barry Arrington @ 330
I’m sure we all hope this is good news.
But…
… if those patients with pre-morbid conditions had lived with them for some time, only succumbing when they contracted COVID-19, then isn’t it reasonable to attribute cause of death to the coronavirus?
Oh no, the bet is for the year, but I think the bet is going to be clearly over before the year is up. Just a subjective, ungrounded feeling.
Ed
I am still wondering at this gobsmacker. Let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose our reaction is to declare martial law and confine everyone to their house except for the soldiers enforcing martial law. Suppose this causes economic activity to drop to zero resulting in the deaths of tens of millions from starvation and lack of other basic necessities. I suspect even Ed would agree that after it was over we could know for absolute certain this was an over-reaction.
Sev
Given your assumption, your conclusion follows. But the point of what the doctor is saying is that it is not at all clear that the assumption is warranted in every case. It appears that in 88% of the cases that assumption was made, and no one has been attempting to justify it. And if that is in fact the case (which appears likely; otherwise the doctor’s statement is pointless), the numbers have been skewed way up.
BA
We only know if something is an overreaction if we can compare it to a similar situation where lesser actions were taken. Which country do you suggest we use as a control?
PaV, we have no idea of the actual infection rate because has an acute shortage of test kits. We do have good figures on deaths because we’ve been diagnosing death for tens of thousands of years. Those figures are the leading edge of an exponential rise and they will get much bigger very fast.
Some countries have gotten on top of the plague. They have tested, quarantined, closed schools, cut transportation, ordered people to stay home and other measures and they have stopped the virus from spreading. Their infections are not spreading. But the virus is ready to spring back just as bad as ever if they let up on their efforts and it’s going to be like that until we get a vaccine – in a year or two.
But we’re in for a much worse time. We have a national leader that fired the the epidemic control team that Obama put in place, took a billion and a half dollars out of the CDC’s budget and then did nothing but minimize the situation for two and a half months. We’re in for it now. It may be a year or more before you get to go to church again. If one of God’s viruses doesn’t get you first.
Oh, and the world economy is going to go into a world wide depression. They don’t work when nobody can get to work.
I’ve got supplies to lay in and this thread is going nowhere. Several people who know a whole lot more than I do have led you to water, but we can’t make you drink.
BA
How is that any different than PaV’s numbers for the flu? Most deaths attributed to the flu are due to preexisting problems that are exacerbated by the flu.
MatSpirit is lying. Trump did NOT fire any epidemic control team.
In medicine, if there is a proximate cause and a distal cause, Cause of Death is usually the proximate cause. If your myopia causes you to fall into a poured foundation and drown, Cause of Death is drowning, not myopia.
My grandfather, a heavy smoker, got into a bad car crash at the age of 73. His health went downhill for the next three months and one day he fell down on the sidewalk of a massive heart attack. My mom is angry that the cause of death is listed as a heart attack, not the car crash. But that’s the rules.
Barry @ 294 –
Not it isn’t, and if anything it’s precisely the opposite. You can read up about it here.
Barry @ 298 –
My apologies. The normal distribution is also called the Gaussian distribution. I had slipped into stats-speak. You can read up about it here.
barry @ 301 –
.
The graphics visualise the epidemic, but what is the model underlying them? Do you know? OK, because they show the effects of flattening the curve, but I don’t know that that means they are accurate representations, because I don’t know what the underlying model actually is (SIR? SEIR? Something else?).
FWIW, only one looks to have a normal curve – the others look too platykutric: they have too much mass in the middle, and not enough in the tails.
Barry @ 313 –
Let’s run the tape. This is what they say:
So not a normal distribution (which is symmetric). But also note that that’s an SI epidemic, i.e. everyone who is infected remains infected and doesn’t recover (or die). They then go on to analyse an SIR epidemic (which is closer to how corona is acting). You can see their results on slide 15. The green curve is the relevant line (i.e. the number of infecteds. For those who are red/green colourblind, it’s the curve that goes up and then down). This curve is definitely not bell-shaped, and even more definitely not a normal curve. So I think if anything that backs my point: they have an unrealistic model that gives something that’s close to bell-shaped, and the realistic model is different.
Two thing to note:
(1) at the start of the epidemic (i.e. before it gets to tapering off) a lot of curves will look similar. This underlay Bergstrom’s point: you can’t just fit a convenient curve to the data and expect it to extrapolate correctly.
(2) Bell-shaped curves are symmetric, but epidemics are typically positively skewed. The tapering off happens more slowly than the explosive exponential growth at the start of the epidemic. This means that fitting a symmetric function will underestimate the number of people who become infected.
From: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ the evening of March 22, 2020:
US: Closed cases
Cases which had an outcome: 592
of which 178 recovered/discharged (30%) and 414 deaths (70%).
For the World as a whole:
Cases which had an outcome: 112,247
of which 87% recovered and 13% died.
So, a question is: how many of the active cases will fall into the cases which had an outcome category and where do the others go?
Also this page: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/
has a discussion of how some of the calculations are made and any of the current estimates puts the CFR for COVID-19 way, way above the CFR for seasonal flu (0.1%).
If we take the CFR for COVID-19 to be 2% . . . it’s a low estimate . . . in order to exceed Barry‘s limit of 200,000 deaths in the US there would have to be over 10 million cases in the US. Wikipedia says the 2019 estimated population of the US is about 328 million so that means about 3% of the population would have to be diagnosed.
It’s impossible to say, now, of course, but I’d be inclined to think that it’s fairly likely that 3% of the US population will get infected. We’ll see . . . .
Here’s what I wrote @260 just this morning:
Thanks, Barry, for confirming my suspiscions.
By the way, the numbers have held: today’s CFR is 1.29%. The number keeps falling. Good sign.
Right now in China, their numbers look like Korea’s numbers: both relatively good.
In China, 81,054 cases and 3,261 deaths, but the additional deaths has gone down from 14 a day, a week ago, to about 6-7 now. In Korea, the daily deaths have averaged around 4 a day (just eyeballing the graph) for the last three weeks. Korea does not require their residents to “shelter in place.” So, why are the numbers so good? Think of how close they are to the disease’s epicenter. Did the CIA lie to the president and our nation about the numbers? I wonder. They said China was lying, and that their numbers were wrong and that this virus was much worse than they were saying. Yet, the numbers we’re looking at don’t paint a picture of a world-wide calamity. So, who’s lying? And why? I have my own ideas about this.
@JVL if i hadto estimate the CFR, i’d say with medical attention including ventilators available, it’s probably around 1%. But when hospitals run out of ventilators, it goes way up.
And when the new drug protocol starts saving lives and moving people off of ventilators, it goes way down.
“JVL if i hadto estimate the CFR, i’d say with medical attention including ventilators available, it’s probably around 1%. But when hospitals run out of ventilators, it goes way up.”
After Pearl Harbor it took only 30 days for Ford and GM to convert to a wartime footing producing tanks and airplanes, maybe we don’t have 30 days but if the shift is made we will have more ventilators than we need. Being hopeful here.
Jim my best for your parents, we all our in this together regardless of our disputes on this site.
Vivid
Thanks Vivid.
JVL:
JVL says “it’s fairly likely that” around 3% of the US population of 328,000,000 will contract COVID 19, resulting in 10,000,000 cases. (The exact number is 3.0488%.) He also says that of those 10 million cases, the fatality rate (CFR) is likely to be at least 2%, resulting in over 200,000 deaths.
This is insane scaremongering on a grand scale. And it is easy to demonstrate that it is. Right now, as I write this, China (population 1.386 BILLION) has had a total of 81,054 cases. See here. 72,440 of those have recovered. There are 5,353 active cases. 1,845 of those are “serious.” There have been 3,261 deaths.
Deaths per day in China peaked at 150 on February 23. On March 21, there were 6 deaths.
New cases peaked at 14,108 on February 12. On March 21 there were 46.
Significantly, there have been ZERO new cases reported in Wuhan for the 4th day in a row.
Inescapable conclusion. The epidemic has nearly run its course in China.
Let’s do a little simple math. Total deaths in a country with a population of 1.386 BILLION will almost certainly be under 10,000.
Why in the world would anyone believe that total deaths in a county with a population of 328,000 will approach 200,000? For that to happen, there would have to be over 20 times the deaths in a population that is one-fourth the size.
I found Osterholm to be very credible. Hope the links work it’s a few weeks old
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZFhjMQrVts
Vivid
Bob,
The epidemic is slowing way down in China and seems to have nearly run its course. For the fourth day in a row there were ZERO new cases reported in Wuhan. Now, on this site, take a look at the graph entitled “Active Cases in China,” which graphs the actual Chinese data.
That is a bell shaped curve Bob. You can apologize any time. Of course, I won’t be holding my breath.
Barry: You can apologize any time Bob.
Bob: [crickets]
Some of you are completely unaware of the scale of what has happened elsewhere and will soon happen in the US.
Do you not understand that this is precisely why the CFR is calculated? It avoids the mistake of looking simply at a ‘delta’ in deaths, but, instead, correlates the ‘delta’ in cases to the ‘delta’ in deaths.
Astonishing. In an epdemic the number of deaths of are a function of the number of cases at the time those dieing caught the disease. Obvously, during an upswing the number of cases now is much greater than at the time those dieing now caught this disease. The rate of increase in deaths is a much more important indicator than the crude CFR.
Just to make this clear. Imagine early in a outbreak there 1000 patients. With a true CFR of 1%, 10 of these patitents will die, but they will do so, on average, 18 days later. How many cases will there be in 18 days? Given a growth rate of 15% (about what we see in the data) it will be (1000 x 1.15^18) = ~ 12 000 cases. If we just divide 10 deaths by the new case total we’ll obviously horrifically underestimate the CFR.
Some of you are completely unaware of the scale of what has happened elsewhere and will soon happen in the US.
Do you not understand that this is precisely why the CFR is calculated? It avoids the mistake of looking simply at a ‘delta’ in deaths, but, instead, correlates the ‘delta’ in cases to the ‘delta’ in deaths.
Astonishing. In an epdemic the number of deaths of are a function of the number of cases at the time those dieing caught the disease. Obvously, during an upswing the number of cases now is much greater than at the time those dieing now caught this disease. The rate of increase in deaths is a much more important indicator than the crude CFR.
Just to make this clear. Imagine early in a outbreak there 1000 patients. With a true CFR of 1%, 10 of these patitents will die, but they will do so, on average, 18 days later. How many cases will there be in 18 days? Given a growth rate of 15% (about what we see in the data) it will be (1000 x 1.15^18) = ~ 12 000 cases. If we just divide 10 deaths by the new case total we’ll obviously horrifically underestimate the CFR.
Some of you are completely unaware of the scale of what has happened elsewhere and will soon happen in the US.
Do you not understand that this is precisely why the CFR is calculated? It avoids the mistake of looking simply at a ‘delta’ in deaths, but, instead, correlates the ‘delta’ in cases to the ‘delta’ in deaths.
Astonishing. In an epdemic the number of deaths of are a function of the number of cases at the time those dieing caught the disease. Obvously, during an upswing the number of cases now is much greater than at the time those dieing now caught this disease. The rate of increase in deaths is a much more important indicator than the crude CFR.
Just to make this clear. Imagine early in a outbreak there 1000 patients. With a true CFR of 1%, 10 of these patitents will die, but they will do so, on average, 18 days later. How many cases will there be in 18 days? Given a growth rate of 15% (about what we see in the data) it will be (1000 x 1.15^18) = ~ 12 000 cases. If we just divide 10 deaths by the new case total we’ll obviously horrifically underestimate the CFR.
China has been lying about the numbers, which is the norm for the CCP. We will never know how many contract COVID-19, nor will we know how many develop severe symptoms. Of those who develop severe symptoms, we will never know how many actually die. The WHO is using China’s numbers as fact and refusing to discount anything the CCP tells them, which is what they did with COVID-2. The WHO still holds to the claim that COVID-2 is ten times more deadly than the flu, which is exactly what they are claiming with COVID-19.
Italy has the oldest population in Europe, with Germany a close 2nd. The average age of death in Italy from COVID-19 is 81. Any country with an aging population will have high numbers due to having an aging population. Italy is pointed to for no other reason than it suits the media and politicians who use scare tactics to get people in line.
South Korea has an average age of 40, which is pretty close to being between the United States and Italy. They have done mass testing and are discovering that 99% of people who test positive show mild to moderate symptoms. This is not the Spanish Flu, this is a mild virus and there’s no justification for shutting a single business down.
Barry –
Sorry, Barry. I don’t usually check in on UD at 3am in the morning.
China implemented stringent measures, which is how they brought the epidemic under control. IOW they changed the shape of the curve during the epidemic.
FWIW, as they’re relaxing the conditions in Wuhan, they might see a distinctly non-normal second upsurge. Hopefully not, and it probably depends on whether movements back into Wuhan are allowed.
Bob O’H, the Chinese government lies about everything. It’s standard procedure for the CCP. There’s no independent source to tell us they are being honest. Wuhan is the 7th largest city in China, with a population of 11,000,000. COVID is highly contagious, but not particularly deadly, which is why we’re seeing the results we are in South Korea. Millions in Wuhan alone are infected, but the vast majority of people who have the virus will never suffer severe symptoms. Wuhan has an international airport with flights to other major Chinese cities, which means it spread beyond Wuhan.
Apologies for the multiple posts above, not sure how that happened. I did want to address some of these other points…
I would encourage you to read that a bit more closely. The bell-shaped curve you mention is for the number of new infections per day. People that are infected stay infected for some time, so the SIR model is much more like a typical epidemic. You’ll see the SIR model in that report the “I” (infected) compartment has a very skewed distribution over time.
It’s extraordinary that you think there are “sides” to understanding a pandemic. Putting that to one side, the high rate is not simply a result of a small starting number. It’s just how exponential growth works (and will continue to if nothing is done). The original posts here was written on March 18th, the last full day of data was therefore the 17th when 23 news deaths brough the total to 109 . 4 days later on the 21st there were a total of 302 deaths (even more on the 22nd, but I’ll anti-cherry pick and hope that day proves an outlier). That corresponds to a growth rate per day of about 28%. If this continues how many deaths should we expect when this post is two weeks old?
Assuming exponential growth with daily rate of 28%, then it would (109 * 1.28^13) * .28 = 755 deaths. Much more than 1200 precent more than 23. If you proceeded only at the 15% rate seen in Italy you would get (109 * 1.15^13) * .15 ~ 100 new deaths that day.
Guessing from time series is not as good as using explicitly epidemiological models like the SIR, but these numbers should give you pause. A lot more deaths are already assured (because so many people are just now starting their infections), but the longer it takes for actions to curb the spread, the greater the damage will be.
Angraecum – that presentation Barry linked to uses an SI model (i.e. no R) to get the approximate normal distribution.
@360 Bob Ryan:
Like our darwinian friends then. Maybe chinese people are automata? Well, according to ‘evolution’, we all are. The communist automata and the darwinian automata. 🙂
Angraecum
“The bell-shaped curve you mention is for the number of new infections per day.”
No it isn’t. You should actually read things before you post about them. It is for total active cases.
OK Bob.
The actual data on tracking total infections over time is bell shaped. It is not now 3:00 AM not presumably. Ready to admit you are were wrong yet?
Barry – read my second paragraph.
And, having just looked at the data (Hubei is in yellow), I’m confident that, no, it’s not bell-shaped. It’s got some positive skew, and no tails.
Actually, I wonder if the problem is that we mean different things by “bell-shaped”. What do you mean by it? For me it means “approximately a normal (=Gaussian) curve”.
The CFR based on numbers from Worldometer.com right now:
1.18% The CFR keeps droppin. Korean ‘active cases’ has started to dip down. Korean deaths so far: 111.
United States: Deaths today: 54 (as of 12:00 Noon EST), 43 in New York, 11 in all other 49 states!!
“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
Chart from Powerlineblog.com:
Quite a perspective, eh?
The madness may quickly come to an end. We can only hope.
Meantime, there’s a report out there saying that 6 out of 7 cases of CoVid-19 go unreported. [Here’s the actual report from Science Magazine. It’s the Mar 16, 2020 edition.]
Take the 1.18% death rate and divide by 7. It’s 0.17%. Yes, that’s right———like the seasonal flu.
For needed balance.
MatSpirit@245:
As usual, Darwinists want to argue theology. Why don’t we stick to science. Certainly God “allows” viruses to exist. Why God permits this is a theological question, not a theological one.
Job says, “We accept good things from God, why not evil ones.” Shall we now discuss the problem of evil in the world? Is that what you want? Are you a scientist, or a philosopher, or a theologian? Please let me know.
What a snarkly response. Again, those on the Left have no civility. Their arrogance won’t allow it.
As to Mimus, he’s no longer posting here for the time being. He needs a better attitude. You need a dose of civility and decency.
If it wasn’t over such an important matter, the level of hypocrisy here would be funny. Here’s how the bell-shaped graph is introduced:
“We might also want to know about the shape of the incidence of infection, that is,
the number of new cases per unit time“.
The number of new cases… If you can read the R programming language you’ll also see the quantity being plotted is the “diff” (that difference in this value from the proceeding one) of the cumulative infections. Because, as Bob points out, this is a model with no resistance or death, there is no peak in the epidemic curve for this example. It goes on until everyone is infected.
You go this pretty horribly wrong. Do you think it’s possible that people that learned their epidemiology before this week might know a bit more about the likely impacts of this disease that you?
Pav, have you read my post (sadly repeated multiple times) in #357?
We won’t know the CFR until we have reliable antibody testing to know who was infected. But tracking it the way you doesn’t tell us much at all (partly because of the lag between death and infection, partly because of under-testing in mild cases).
doesn’t the fact there are now five times as many deaths in the USAas there were when you posted this make you wonder if you are wrong?
If the disease was spreading that quickly ~3 weeks ago, how prevalent must it be now? Even if the CFR was 0.5%, a disease with no natural immunity might well infect 60% of the population before waning. Thats a million deaths. Maybe the CFR will be lower still, but the best hope for that is to prevent further spread of the disease.
If current numbers hold for Italy, it appears that the virus has peaked.
New York state: 5,085 new cases; 43 new deaths. CFR: 43/5,085= .84%
Yes, less than 1%. “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!!”
Bob
“it’s not bell-shaped”
You’re incorrigible Bob. I knew a little simple honesty would be beyond you, but I had to give you a chance. BTW, my definition of “bell shaped” is “shaped like a bell.” Yes, a Gaussian curve is an example of a bell shaped curve. Why? Because it is shaped like a bell. So you think the distribution in Wuhan “has no tails”? God help us. According to Bob the virus had no case 1 (no left tail) and since there are not yet zero cases there is no right tail. Plus, real world data is so so messy. It is not an exactly precise distribution, so according to Bob, it can’t possibly be bell shaped. You are a disgrace Bob. You should hang your head in shame, but you won’t because you have no shame.
Angrecom:
Why would it? Do I think this virus is not virulent as a consequence of its not spreading like normal viruses? No. The question is simply this: how deadly will this virus turn out to be? It doesn’t appear that deadly. Italy seems to be peaking. Iran appears to be peaking. S. Korea has peaked. Our numbers now are running at 1.18% and falling.
As you say, there are lots of people out there who are infected and we don’t know about it. But that only lowers the CFR. You can be in a state of ignorance when it comes to infection; there is NO such state of ignorance when it comes to death. You’re either dead, or alive.
The “textbook” sample for this virus, and what it can do, has already been provided. It is the data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Only 20% became infected, even though it is a virus “with no natural immunity right now.” So, why use 60%. Only 1% of the passengers died–all were elderly, sitting ducks for ANY KIND of flu, even the common cold. Adjusting for the age groups on the ship, we’re looking at no more than .3%. 72 million Americans become infected–using these statistics, and 240,000 die. That’s the worst case scenario. We’re not anywhere close to this. This disease spreads like the flu and flu season ends soon. Temperature and humidity changes will stop the spread.
Barry – you must have some very odd bells in Colorado, if they don’t even have to be symmetrical. They apparently don’t flare out at the edges either.
No, Barry, if it had “no case 1” then the density would have a mass at -infinity, so there would have to be a tail, unless the maximum was also there. I’d suggest before you make stuff up, ask whether it’s accurate.
Well, 20% became infected by the time testing was carried out, the majority appear to have acquired the virus before quarantine measures were put in place. So 20% in a few weeks with quarantine doesn’t seem so far away from 60% over the course of a year (albeit in a larger and sparser environment).
The question I’d really like you and Barry to consiedr is “why would the virus peak”? Flu peaks because it’s highly seasonal, many of us have immunity to circulating strains and many of us take the vaccine. So there are just not that many susceptable hosts, and warmer drier weather lowers its transmisability. We have no evidence that covid-19 is strongly seasonal (outbreaks in Australia suggest any effect is not so strong as to limit transmision entirely) and no one has immunity. So what will make it peak (other than measure to break transmission?)
Bary, while you are up their on your high horse, do you want to read comment #371? Given your indignance about whatever you previeve to be wrong in Bob’s posts, it might be time to withdraw an apologise for some of your own mistakes.
I’d also reiterate the question I ask above: what makes you think the virus will peak without strong interventions to prevent its transmission. PaV points to Italy and the cruise ship, but those are both examples of measures to counter the spread.
(btw, even if covid-19 did peak in this spring… what do you think would happen to the millions of susceptible Americans in the following winter?)
@PaV:
Never understimate the lunacy of darwinism, PaV. These are people who say the self is ‘illusory’.
I am in a quandary. There are two people arguing over what a normal distribution looks like. Should I listen to the person who makes a living as a statistician, or should I listen to a lawyer? How will I ever decide?
Should I believe evoT*RDs that say that our perception of reality is ‘not’ real?
BA, BO’H, JT, EG et al,
I think the issue is to understand sigmoid, logistic-like cumulative growth curves.
Simply plotting sigmoids will show that a sigmoid is first near flat then rises in a quasi-exponential, concave up phase. Then, as saturation effects come in, it passes a point of inflexion and slope dies away towards zero.
The slope curve — the driving impulse — will then necessarily be roughly bell-shaped [without committing on particular model, a beta distribution type curve or the like can do that flexibly]. I am aware that bell curve is often used for a Gaussian curve but this is not required, given the general pattern here. Gaussian impulse curves are of course often useful as a familiar case.
We can go on to look at lagged effect impulses etc.
Such growth curves are relevant to growth of organisms, or to growth of populations or to growth of markets or to growth of movements, and of course to epidemics.
In this case, the spike is about new cases, the total cases is its cumulative effect. In turn that will partition into recovered vs death outcomes in some ratio that we may estimate while the curve is rising but will only have a good view on post epidemic, providing that we have good estimators for mild cases.
KF
PS: Wiki on the logistic curve:
I note that in a complex real world the rising and falling skirts need not be symmetric and cumulative curves can reflect superpositions, etc. This curve is a key to analysing strategic marketing, investment and long term economic growth — Kondratiev.
PPS: JB as usual has a good discussion on growth or trend models https://mindmatters.ai/2019/10/dont-leave-home-without-these-three-curves/
EG, you should listen to the canny investor or the strategic change planner who studies long term cumulative effect, historically based processes, turning points — kairous — and their driving dynamics. KF
Thank you KF for 383.
1. Apparently Bob thinks that all bell shaped curves must necessarily be Gaussian, and if they are not Gaussian, they are not bell shaped. As you point out, this is not the case.
2. Bob also appears to believe that for a curve to be bell shaped it must be perfectly symmetrical. This is also false.
As Ed points out, Bob makes his living as a statistician. There is little doubt that he knows 1 and 2. I will leave readers to do the math about what that means for Bob’s integrity. The fact is, he erred. Instead of admitting his error, he doubled down. In other words, typical materialist behavior.
BA, I suspect he is not familiar with how canny, trend-spotting investors, strategic marketing planners and other strategic change operators approach such matters. The same seems to obtain from the critic of the analyses that were taken down but reposted by UNZ. Over on my Chloroquine thread, I used the log-lin plot to do a graphical, exploratory, dynamical analysis that may help all concerned. KF
PS: try y = Ce^kt, take logs: ln y = lnC + kt. Intercept is ln C, slope is k, t is independent variable for causal-temporal processes. Notice, log on dependent variable, linear on independent variable. Start from that to understand exponential growths and the power of log-lin plots. On moving to sigmoids, see how the driving impulse will be a peaked pulse with smoothed off tails . . . which need not be symmetrical. Of course, idealised curves such as the classic logistic curve are ideal, they help us develop the insight to see how neighbouring real world curves will behave, with noise, asymmetric impulses, further growth or decay/decline impulses, etc. A key question is whether charts talk to you and what do they tell you.
@387 Barry Arrington:
What can you expect from people who say that our brains invented mathematics.
We’ze be intelligent, designing, goal-oriented agents. KF
@391 Kairosfocus:
Yes. And they know that for them is very problematic to explain the difference between ‘dumb’ (natural selection) vs intelligent (artificial selection) (since we all know we humans have intelligence).
They say the difference exists, but logically it fails.
Their solution: explain away the human mind. Absolutely pathetic. They use their human minds to deny their human minds. 🙂
The whole concept of this site is, if you wanna understand deep topics in modern biology, you absolutely shouldn’t listen to the basics that biologists have figured out, you should listen to anybody else. A Java programmer, car mechanic, Unification Church devotee, you name it. Just not experts. So obviously you don’t listen to the statistician about statistics.
Darwin was a barnacle collector, a failed theologian, a failed doctor and an inbreeder that married his first cousin.
Even his father agreed he was not very bright. 🙂
And you lick his boots.
Jiimie:
Is lying the only thing tat you have, Jimmie? Why even bother?
Biology is one thing. Evolutionism is something else. We argue against evolutionism, not biology.
JT, the exchange above and in other threads was about sigmoid curves and the impulse waves [bell curves] that drive them. Kindly, explain to me why people who study those dynamics in other contexts somehow have no insight of relevance when it comes to an epidemiological case? Your silence once the dynamics were pointed out followed by resort to attempted belittling speaks, volumes. FYI, on that, the issue with imposed evolutionary materialistic scientism is not science but ideology; ideology in a context where the relevant issue is the empirically and analytically warranted origin of functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information beyond 500 – 1,000 bits. Relevant knowledge on that comes from Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics and Engineering. That relevant knowledge substantiates a readily observed phenomenon: strangely enough, we are surrounded by trillions of cases of origin of such FSCO/I. In every actually observed case, it comes from intelligently directed configuration, which we would expect from the hopelessness of blind search to create such FSCO/I. If you happen to know of credible observation of such FSCO/I coming about by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity without design, kindly cite the observation ____ . Predictably, you will not be able to cogently fill this in. KF
PS: Moreover, DNA is a string data structure in key parts, bearing algorithmic coded information to assemble proteins. Coded, alphanumeric information is purposeful and linguistic, by the definition and substance of what algorithms and codes are. The known source of each is design. Indeed, language is a major part of complex intelligent behaviour. Kindly, tell us where else, per actual observation, such language, codes and algorithms come from ____________ Again, predictably, you will not be able to cogently fill in that blank.
PPS, the mutual inverse relationship between rates and accumulations of change is a focus of Calculus. The impulse-cumulative function curve analysis is based on that fundamental theorem of Calculus. You tell us, what is happening to the slope of a sigmoid, why and what shape of impulse gives rise to such a cumulative effect. Explain, also, why the impulse must be symmetric about its peak in time or else it cannot be relevant. Do, tell us whether or not such a pulse will generally resemble a bell, perhaps with a raised skirt, i.e. skew.
I think I figured out why Darwinists are difficult to get to with real facts. We tend to use big words, such as the first law of thermodynamics. Maybe we should make it easier for them. Energy does exist. Let me know if you need energy defined. Energy cannot be created. Are those words too big for you? Energy cannot be destroyed. If energy cannot be created or destroyed, how do we have energy?
If that’s too complicated, I’m sure you can find a child to help you understand the big words.
BR, energy in our going concern cosmos is conserved. Save with a heat engine with an absolute zero heat sink, no work producing device can be 100% efficient and we cannot get to that absolute point. This is equivalent to, concentrations of energy are steadily degraded in real work producing devices, pointing to a finite duration of the observed cosmos, absent an infinite source of concentrated energy. Further to such, the how did we get to a finite duration cosmos in which energy is conserved but concentrations are steadily degraded becomes a serious question. The observed cosmos credibly had a finitely remote beginning, pointing to adequate cause of such. The notion of an underlying sub cosmos in which sub-cosmi like ours pop up by fluctuation fall under the same strictures about beginnings. Indeed, we can point out a logic of structure and quantity challenge: no stepwise, finite stage, causally cumulative process — think, climbing a ladder or cycles of a 4-stroke engine etc — can traverse a transfinite succession of stages. The structure of the logic permits a potential infinity going forward but never exhausted, but not to have completed such a traverse already. And that can be shown on an extension of the reals to hyperreals [see here for a beginning], with naturals as unit-step mileposts. And sorry to step up the technical issues on you. KF
Ed George @ 381 – flip a coin. It’s what the pros do.
Barry (and, to some extent kf) –
(a) No, I don’ think a bell curve has to be Gaussian, but it should look like it. If you knew anything about the logistic function, you’d know that it does look very like a Gaussian. Coincidentally, I was writing about this for my students yesterday (albeit in a very different context).
The second sentence is a correct description of the first sentence. A Gaussian is symmetrical, so a bell curve should ideally be symmetrical too. In practice real data isn’t that precise, and curves that are bell curve-like are approximations, so I wouldn’t insist on perfect symmetry. But visibly obvious skew takes you outside of that bell-shaped comfort zone.
I do, and I haven’t written anything to contradict these. Rather, you have been mis-representing what I’ve been writing. I assume that this is because you haven’t fully understood it – I appreciate that we all read things in different ways, so you may have interpreted what I wrote in a slightly different way than I intended (or I explained things poorly).
BO’H, kindly see my update just now to the thread on Chloroquine, in which I show bells and sigmoids in action for the CV19 pandemic. It is fair comment, that you tried to dismiss the general description of more or less bell-shaped impulses [which can be skewed] and cumulative effects and that this also happened elsewhere. The import of such an approach was to belittle rather than to seriously engage substance, a pattern that reflects the ill advised deep polarisation that is haunting policy analysis, discussion and decision, with likely highly adverse onward outcomes. KF
PS: Just in case you have forgotten, here is 376:
That, alone, more than warrants strong correction.
PPS: Notice the leading edge tail for S Korea and the beginnings of a trailing edge tail, compare the trailing edge for China. Simply the presence of a sigmoid, per fundamental theorem of Calculus, implies that for the driving impulse.
kf @396 –
The simple answer is that any insight they have has probably already been thought of. In the case of infections, epidemiologists moved beyond what you’re writing about in the 1920s.
BO’H, you are again resorting to belittling behaviour in a context of evading what you put up in 376. I have no doubt that from 1830 – 50, the basic mathematics and relevance of the logistic curve were worked out. The problem is not whether such is accessible in the world, it is that in the exchanges here and elsewhere those insights have been conspicuously lacking and failure to understand the relevance has affected how things have been addressed. In that context, comments in threads here at UD have been relevant and corrective, including on the sort of error of distractive strawman 376 reflects. KF
Is mathematics subjected to ‘natural’ selection? Genetic drift? Recombinaction? Maybe the problem lies there. Different brains= different mathematics? 😉
TF, actually, comparable processes do apply to the growth of Math and Science bodies of knowledge. KF
According to our materialist interlocutors here at UD, evolution ‘invented’ mathematics. 🙂
That means mathematics has a physical substrate (brain).
If that substrate changes, do mathematics change too? 🙂
Maybe in some distant future 2+2=5?
Maybe in China 2+2=5?
Maybe statistical interpretations are like morals, there is not an objective basis and due to that we are facing different interpretations of the growth rate of COVID-19.
Bob O’H,
First rule of being in a hole. Stop digging. You have beclowned yourself in this thread in the context of your own specialty. This is very sad.
I, with six hours of undergrad stats under my belt, pointed out your errors in a general way, and your response was to double down. Then KF, with a far better grounding than I, really took you to the woodshed. Frankly, I am not surprised. As I noted above, your behavior is typical of the materialists who have graced these pages over the years. I suppose that whole “my truth is my truth and yours is yours” thing really isn’t conducive to basic integrity and honest discourse, as you demonstrate from time to time.
kf 403 –
Eh? You don’t actually fit the curve. FWIW, in the early stages of the epidemic, most curves will look similar, they will look approximately exponential (this is why R_0 is so useful). What happens after that depends on the epidemic. The reason simple logistic functions aren’t used by epidemiologists is because they don’t describe the full course of an epidemic very well: they have to use more mechanistic models, such as SIR models. Because these models include the actual mechanisms of spread and incubation, it becomes possible to predict the course of the epidemic from data that can be gathered early on. Simply fitting a logistic curve won’t work because (a) it doesn’t predict well later on, and (b) even if it did it would be difficult to estimate the important parameters.
BO’H: Did you actually look at what was done, especially the charts? Remember, the only curve I am interested in primarily is the sigmoid of cumulative cases [I am only looking at logistic-like curves, i.e. sigmoids, with the logistic curve only as a handy reference, could just as easily been the gaussian and its cumulative frequency curve], and the observed pattern of the driving increment of cases shows the driving impulse. Once a sigmoid then — per fundamental theorem of the calculus — an underlying driver connected to the rate curve; typically a quasi-exponential growth era (further growth depends on current mass), an inflexion and a saturation-driven flattening. There is no needed curve fitting or the like here, we are looking at the empirical observations and their relationships i/l/o the fundamental theorem of calculus applied to time domain. The relevant point is that we can see from concrete cases that the skewed bell-like driving impulse is real, the sigmoid is real, the fact that skirts can be asymmetric is real. Those are what are illustrated. KF
F/N: I am not using sigmoid as a synonym for logistic curve, but as meaning s-shaped, snake like curve in general. KF
TF, while it is happening, it is quite difficult to track the overall dynamics of an epidemic so part of the problem is that we do see different models and interpretations at work. For simple example, with the pool of susceptible people an unknown and with mild or asymptomatic cases, it is difficult to estimate the actual number of the infected. There are debates over incubation period and duration to death or recovery [which on average for serious cases takes longer than dying]. How serious cases are observed and diagnosed is not standardised, indeed tests, notoriously can give false positives and false negatives, hence the habit of doing a double test. There is much more. KF
Well, Barry, I guess just blindly declaring victory is one way to stop digging.
Bob O’H:
Mathematics leads nowhere, remember that there is no purpose in ‘nature’. 🙂
kf @ 414 – thanks for the clarification. I think you’ve rather vindicated my point @ 406, if your insight is just that epidemics tend to have S-shaped dynamics. That’s part of epidemiology 101: you also find it in more realistic models like SIR models.
Of course the problem with Bob O’Hara’s confession that he statistically ‘tortures data until it confesses’ is that data, like people, will confess to anything you want if you torture it/them long enough.
Perhaps Bob should let the evidence speak for itself instead of ‘making it confess’ to whatever conclusion he wants it to say beforehand?
But then again, if he were honest in the first place he would not be a Darwinist.
Bob O’H,
As everyone who has followed these pages knows, you deny that the Holocaust was evil in any objective sense. You don’t prefer Holocausts of course, but you deny that there is any objective standard to judge between your preference and Eichmann’s preference.
It is not at all surprising that someone whose subjectivism has led them to deny that the Holocaust was objectively evil would also cast aside standards of fair and honest discourse when it suits them. When you were caught out in your error (in your own field no less), the honest thing to have done was to admit your error and move on. Instead, subjectiviest that you are, you cast aside moral constraints and brazenly doubled down, behavior that I have seen so many times before. It is all very sad.
I’ve pointed out where you have mis-represented me, my views and what I have written (e.g. comment 402). Did you “admit your error and move on”? If not, on what basis can you lecture other people about “fair and honest discourse”.
BTW, lest there be any doubt, I utterly condemn the holocaust as an evil act.
For the atheists who whine about viruses: 🙂
Maybe 0.0000001% of viruses are ‘harmful’
Trillions of viruses circle the Earth.
Barry Arrington @ 411
So, on this basis, if I were to take six hours of legal training I would be considered competent to provide legal advice to clients or represent them in court? Or you would have no problem with having a medical problem diagnosed and treated by someone with six hours of medical training?
I think not.
BO’H: First, you still have not explained and resolved what caught my eye in the first instance, in 376:
BA pointed out that “bell” can and does refer to a general peaked shape pattern, and needs not imply symmetry. I pointed to skewness as a relevant factor, gave real life cases from China and S Korea, further drawing out the implications of a sigmoid — S-shape pattern — that the rate function driving it [inferred from slope] will be concave up, pass through an inflexion then will sink in another concave up pattern, with no requirement of symmetry between the rising arm and the falling one.
Your further strawman caricature fails, given the import of your words in 376.
While this is in the end a relatively minor point, it goes to the pattern of problems that keeps on showing itself, where there seems to be a deep polarisation to the point that nothing a design-supporting person has to observe can have any credibility. Or, on this extension to policy matters in response to an in-progress pandemic, the heretics cannot ever be acknowledged as having a point.
That goes to much wider issues and shows why there is a refusal to entertain the empirical and analytical force of the credible source of functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information.
We need a different approach.
KF
PS: I should have put, maximum there.
Sev, more strawmen and red herrings. Kindly see what BO’H said in 376, and why it was corrected for cause. KF
Bob O’Hara
Welcome to Theism Bob!
Now that you honestly admitted that evil really does exist, i.e. “I utterly condemn the holocaust as an evil act”, and therefore necessarily admit that God must exist, and to push the moral argument for God one step further, how do you reconcile the fact that you yourself are not morally perfect? i.e. That you yourself are a sinner before God’s eyes?
Are you going to, in a futile effort, vainly try to ‘work’ your way to moral perfection, or are you going to accept the free gift of Jesus work on your behalf?
Bob,
Your antics would be hilarious if they were not so pathetic. You try to deflect by condemning the Holocaust as evil. But everyone knows you are equivocating. Because when we use the word “evil” we mean evil in an objective sense, and because we use the word that way we can be absolutely certain that anyone who disagrees with us over whether the Holocaust was evil is wrong, because our understanding of evil is objectively superior to theirs in this instance.
In contrast, when you use the word “evil,” you mean “that which mindless material forces have conditioned me not to prefer.” Of course, under your worldview, those same mindless material forces conditioned Eichmann to prefer the Holocaust. And you say there is no objective standard by which to judge whether that which you are conditioned to prefer is in any way superior to that which Eichmann was conditioned to prefer.
As always, Bob, by employing the equivocation technique you doubled down on your mendacity. Because intentional equivocation is a form of lying.
Sev,
If I said something wrong about the law and with your six hours of legal training you were able to point out my error, then you would be right and I would be wrong. Same with me and Bob.
Can one extrapolate from that — as you have done — that someone with six hours of legal training is competent to provide legal advice generally. Of course not, and you know that. Which is why your comment is so vicious. It is based on a faulty premise that you know to be faulty; yet you advance it anyway to try to make cheap rhetorical points. You are quite pathetic Sev.
BTW, you need to go over to the “insane scaremongering” thread and apologize for the mendacity your hatred caused you to engage in.
428 Barry Arrington:
Materialism leads to absurdity.
More:
‘We can not perceive reality as it is’. (!?)
‘But wait, even though we can not perceive reality as it is, we are sure it is only material.
Makes sense. 🙂
Apart from bickering on not especially important details, there is a lot of misunderstanding in this thread. I happen to know a bit out the way the CDC tracks flu. So…
The “P&I” number is the proportion of all deaths that have pneumonia or flu wrtten on the death certificate. If we only counted flu, there would be few hundred at the peak, but because we know flu is often not recorded the pneumonia deaths are included.In the middle of summer, the P&I is typically about 5% (people die of bacetrial and fungal pneumonia year round), and rises to something like 7% in the middle of winter (more respirtory illness). The threshold for an epidemic flu is not fixed, but changes every week based on the expected rate for that week. The different between ‘baseline’ and ‘epidemic’ level is actually very small in percentage points (7% baseline v 7.3% epidemic), as you can see on the CDC website: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html. So it takes a relatively small increase in pneumonia deaths to tip the scale.
The top post here seems to imply that the P&I % is a case fatality rate, but that’s not the case. They also claim that flu is killing more people than corona virus. Perhaps at the time, but in the last 7 days there have been approximately 467 coronavirus deaths in the US, almost certainly more than what will be coded as flu for this week. As there are ~50,000 deaths a week at this time of year, this is already 1% of all deaths and will only rise as the epidemic continues. This is not the flu.
There is also a lot of talk about the potentially low case fatility rate. It might be the the CFR will be low if hospitals can keep up with serious cases. But this virus will infect many more people than a typical flu, as none of use are immune to it. So even a low CFR and managed medical response can translate into hundreds of thousands of deaths, if the epidemic is allowed to simply burn.
Whatever backage you might have about trusting experts and government agencies. I hope you cal look at the data and the rates on increases (there were more deaths today than in the entire time leading up to the publication of this post…) and take the actions required to stop the worst of what is already guaranteed to be a devastating outbreak for many.
Orthomyxo, thank you for bringing some sanity to this discussion.
@Orthomyxo, just a heads up: you know something about this topic, so don’t be surprised if you’re attacked.
JT, there has been a clear problem of needless polarisation and hostility reflecting wider polarisation in policy, politics, media and culture. In the US, this is currently manifesting in a walkaway and attempt to load up an emergency economic support bill with a huge load of highly controversial [and dubious] agenda items backed by the obvious threat of using ideologised media to play guilt by accusation agit prop games. That illustrates what I have pointed out as low grade 4th gen civil war. In this thread, something as simple as the point that someone may legitimately describe a skewed bell-shaped driving impulse as a bell, became occasion to attack — cf. 376 above. That is where I intervened to point out implications of the fundamental theorem of the Calculus for sigmoid shaped initially quasi-exponential growth with onward saturation processes. It is clear that the balance on merits has favoured from the beginning that an impulse can indeed look like a lopsided bell, and I illustrated from this pandemic in another thread that I own. The indications are, that there is need to back away from needless polarisation and seek positive ways forward. KF
OM,
Your perspectives are welcome.
However, unfortunately, we are dealing with a hyper-polarised ideologically driven situation. That is the root cause for why I just had to point out, there is needless polarisation reflective of urban centred “progressivist” reaction to what has become an anglosphere, cross-Atlantic peasant uprising by ballot box. One hopes, we can learn from this, that scorched earth agit prop, ideology motivated media distortions, lawfare and show trials, belittling hoi polloi and the like are dangerously counter-productive,
On the history of factionalism and collapse through the Peloponnesian war, such can become fatal to democratic polities.
That said, your comments so far have provided some useful perspective on the somewhat fuzzy nature of our health, disease and mortality statistics, which will be amplified by the international nature of the current emergency. I note, that Flu complications on serious cases are too often deadly, especially to older people and those with preconditions. This disease evidently follows that general pattern, and even if the numbers when the statistics firm up will show that on average it is less deadly than flu for serious cases, that does not mean that it cannot overwhelm facilities and staff, forcing military-style triage.
Such a possibility justifies strong intervention to reduce spreading, isolate active cases and do so for long enough to impose rapid saturation. In that process, urgent action on antivirals and interventions that break out of immune system over-reactions etc will be helpful.
At the same time, we must not forget that such a break in economic activity can trigger a down-spiral into deep recession or depression, which itself has serious potential consequences, including onward health consequences.
That said, my concern remains, that hyper-polarisation, agit-prop, slander, lawfare and the like and hostility undermine sound governance and pose the danger of spreading fatal disaffection. Let us stop playing with fire.
KF
I have some experience in dealing with people who have reasons to distrust their government (indigenous and minority groups, e.g.) so I see how one’s cultural identity can make it more or less easy to accept government advice. That being said, I hope the orginal poster, and others that have downplayed the risk or used this to re-open old battlelines can step back a bit and see the scale of this. (And, importantly, others can be gracious enough to give them the chance to do so without losing face).
How’s Trump doing? From a New York based BBC correspondent:
It’s quite a lengthy article discussing the situation.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52012049
BO’H,
I am led to further note on how foundational, seemingly simple insights are often ignored or disregarded in decision-making contexts, once there is hyper-polarisation. Back in the 70’s and 80’s, that was manifest on Economics, and that issue is having an echo in our time.
On the matter of growth trends, I am often astonished by tendencies to vastly extrapolate small-scale quasi- linearities and exponential growth, ignoring limitations of inductive logic and the issue that wider dynamics may be in play leading to snowballing growth then to saturation. A classic is of course the me-too rush into a market that is growing, leading to shakeout.
Another, is the hype on population bombs and ecosystem collapse [with questionable extrapolations on already known to be inaccurate climate simulation models playing a leading role].
So, pardon my willingness to point out nearly 200 year old basics on sigmoid curves, with the even older fundamental Calculus principle that rates and accumulations of change tie to mutually inverse mathematical operations. That’s why sigmoids can and do have lopsided bell driving impulses. And, that in this case we see a pattern of lodgement and breakout with growth rates driven by short-range contact forces so we have quasi-exponential growth on absolute number of cases is a significant sign of dynamics at work. This means, local action counts and we can break the spreading by isolation.
Further to this, the pattern where Europe and North America have a common pattern of 2 – 3 day doubling time by contrast with a cluster of Asian countries with about 10 day doubling time implies that there is no one exceptionally good or bad case relative to a flawed general trans-Atlantic approach. What we need to be discussing is what do Japan, Singapore, Malaysia et al know and do that we should be doing. And, what did South Korea do to break out of 2-3 day doubling growth into saturation. (I have doubts on China’s numbers.)
Do you have any significant suggestions?
KF
JVL, kindly, look at the log-lin growth rate charts in the Chloroquine thread. You will see — as I just noted above — that there are two clusters: the 2 – 3 day doubling time group and the about 10 day doubling time group. Europe and North America are in that group implying that we see local variations on a fundamentally flawed approach. We need to be learning from Singapore, Japan and the like, rather than playing at Trump bashing and oh the US has all of these long-standing challenges. Mind you, the resort to hyper-polarisation, agit prop and lawfare pivoting on progressivist ruthlessness and exploitation of the media being part of the progressivist factions, is going to be a challenge to moving to sounder governance. Cross-complaining, linked red herrings, strawmen and ad hominems are simply further signs of the problem, not the solution. FYI, there happens to be a global emergency that requires urgent attention and responsible thought leading to prudent action. KF
KF: Once the disputed treatments pass the appropriate efficacy and safety checks I’ll be happy to endorse them. I’m open minded but I won’t take them until they’re certified.
Part of the point of the article is that Trump engages in the kind of activity you are condemning. Even if you don’t see it that way there are a lot of people all over the world that do see him that way. Perhaps you don’t care what the rest of the world thinks but an isolated and belligerent US is not good for anyone. As the article points out Trump is the focus point of a potentially damaging movement.
F/N: lessons from Asia. KF
JVL, you are behind the curve. Chloroquine was approved by the FDA for “compassionate” exploratory use on Thursday last or thereabouts. If you follow several clips in that thread, you will see there is a considerable body of evidence on the matter. Further to this, the exponential growth challenge on breakout and high death rate from complications and for older people or those with preconditions implies business as usual cannot work. In that context, we have long needed effective antivirals, and — as I noted in my OP here — Chloroquine was published in the literature as having demonstrated broad antiviral action against both RNA and DNA viruses 15 years ago. Why were trials and certification not a done deal a decade ago or more? For that matter, as the sad incident with aquarium treatments shows, the breadth of action of this drug has long been known and its reasonable safety has been clear as well as affordability. Indeed, aquarium use extends to the early 70’s at least; never mind fatal breach of common sense. Something is wrong and it is entrenched in business as usual. As a part of sound governance, that has to be fixed. KF
PS: You haven’t got a clue as to my opinions on Mr Trump. Clue, to suggest he is a Cyrus-like or Constantine-like figure is NOT a general endorsement, whether of character or anything else. Next, it is grossly false to characterise the USA as isolated and belligerent. A sounder summary is as I have noted, radical urban progressivists and fellow travellers driven or influenced by evolutionary materialistic scientism, relativism, cultural marxism and what has been termed transgressivity have tried to use institutional dominance on the seven mountains to pull our civilisation into an imagined, secular humanist utopia, only to let loose the holocaust of mass slaughter of living posterity in the womb [the worst in history and proceeding not at a few thousand per week but about a million] , corrupting mass blood guilt as a consequence, thence warping key institutions. There has been a trans-Atlantic, peasant revolt by ballot box, threatening to become fatal disaffection. Unsurprisingly, some astute political leaders or celebrity figures capable of joining the political contest, have responded. One hopes that enough of their motivation — never mind “warts and all” — is sincere and prudent. In the US, this has reached low grade 4th gen civil war, hence BTW, stocking up on ammunition. (If owners of over 300 million firearms were fundamentally lawless and irresponsible, civil society in the US would have long since disintegrated into a war of all against all.) The resulting polarisation threatens to spin out of control and — as this thread shows — undermines ability to even get something as basic as the sigmoid curve’s dynamics straight. We need to wake up and face what we are doing to ourselves.
COVID-19 is mostly benign and fewer people will suffer severe reactions than from influenza. State governors have declared states of emergency without the emergency. They use expected infection rate, rather than expected severe development rate to justify their actions.
In order to receive federal funds under the Stafford Act, a state must show financial strain from the direct result of a natural disaster. Since most states will not reach this point, they have tanked their economies to guarantee results. By tanking the economy themselves, they no longer qualify for one dime, since the strain is man-made, not natural.
Every governor purposely tanking their state economies to receive federal money is carrying out an act of economic rebellion against the United States. No state can put an undue burden on interstate commerce without violating the Commerce Clause. Any financial assistance from the federal government, rather than legal action, is aiding the rebellion.
President Trump can do his job and have the Attorney General respond, or he can choose to send money to states in violation of the Stafford Act. One is him doing his job, the other is to commit an impeachable act and should be removed from office.
kf @ 424 – my comment about not flaring out at the edges was about that one data set.
I agree that the polarisation is a problem. I’d hope that people on both sides try to reduce this, as both sides are guilty of making things worse.
BobRyan @ 444 –
What are your figures for that?
According to the CDC there are up to 61,000 deaths per year from flu in the US. That equates to about 170 deaths per day, on average.
The latest stats on deaths from COVID-19 in the US are 149 deaths, from yesterday. So the number of deaths now is roughly the same as the upper end of deaths from flu. The expectation is that COVID-19 deaths will get much worse. I haven’t seen any up to date projections, so I don’t know whether they suggest the total deaths will be higher (the one prediction I’ve seen is of 2.2m deaths in the US if nothing was done. But as things are being done, it should be a lot less than that).
Bob
Bob, you have stretched the daily average over the entire year. But we all know flu is seasonal. If we are going to compare apples to apples, we need to estimate the daily average not over the year but over the flu season. Assuming the flu season is five months (I don’t know; just a guess), the daily average goes up 2.4X to 408.
Anyone who thinks it’s a great idea to just run out and start taking pills that you heard would work, should recall that the reason Europe had a big Thalidomide problem, and the United States had a small one, is because of the FDA insisting on studies of safety.
KF
That is about the most succinct and accurate summary of our moment I have seen. It is exactly right. There has been talk of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind (in the context of a sitting senator’s unprecedented threats directed at members of the Supreme Court while standing on the steps of the Supreme Court building). It is becoming harder and harder to be optimistic.
JVL asks how Trump is doing. Then to answer the question he quotes a screed by a radically progressive news outlet. Succumb to confirmation bias much JVL?
I could counter every point by cutting and pasting some article from Fox News. But to what end? The truth lies somewhere in the middle (it is a cliche, yes; that does not make it any less true). KF has just warned against polarizing agitprop. Plopping some polarizing agitprop into the thread is probably not the wisest response to his warning.
LoL! @ JVL- Thankfully the world is NOT waiting for your endorsement. The two treatments are being used to save lives. No one cares what you have to say about it
SARS 2, which is what COVID-19 is, will have the same impact as SARS. No virus from the same family will have a different impact on human hosts than the original had. That’s how viruses work and science should not take a back seat to science fiction. COVID cannot become the Spanish flu. All strains are known to be far from lethal. Highly contagious does not mean highly deadly.
Every governor who interferes in interstate commerce by creating a situation a natural disaster will not create on its own is guilty of violating the Constitution. They should face criminal charges for violation of basic civil rights. When people are told they cannot leave, that includes the right to peacefully assemble. When a state in committing an act of rebellion, which is what the states are doing through attacking interstate commerce, they must be held accountable.
They should be charged with multiple federal laws, including sedition. They are holding the economy the economy hostage and demanding the federal government pay them to make it go away.
Barry Arrington: JVL asks how Trump is doing. Then to answer the question he quotes a screed by a radically progressive news outlet. Succumb to confirmation bias much JVL?
You think it’s a screed, others might disagree. In most of the world the BBC is considered a reliable and very middle-of-the-road news organisation. Compared to other services in the UK and Europe it’s downright bland.
I could counter every point by cutting and pasting some article from Fox News. But to what end? The truth lies somewhere in the middle (it is a cliche, yes; that does not make it any less true). KF has just warned against polarizing agitprop. Plopping some polarizing agitprop into the thread is probably not the wisest response to his warning.
Of course you could. It is ‘your’ blog and you can pick its editorial stance. But many of your frequent commenters post things that lots and lots of other people on the other end of the political spectrum would find ‘polarising agitprop’ but when anyone counters it they get told off. This always happens here when discussing gay rights; an issue that is getting to be old news all around the world but on this site it’s akin to the end of civilisation.
If you’re going to heavily support a certain kind of stance so be it. But then you are not attempting to be objective or ‘fair’. That’s your ‘right’ and I will support that. But I (and others) may choose to stop contributing if everything we say is considered ‘wrong’ instead of just a differing opinion.
JVL,
There was a time, coming out of WW2, that BBC earned a reputation as gold standard of news. That goodwill has been recklessly squandered in recent years, and the BBC is little more than a voice of the London Progressivist chattering classes. This, is something I can demonstrate from personal experience with their complaints process, as well as their pattern of reporting and opinion. BBC has given itself over to agendas and for cause has lost its credibility. Of course, it is by no means alone in this, and many others are at least as bad.
Part of the consequence of this, is that they are at the point where they are inadvertently feeding spreading, fatal disaffection.
Next, you are trying to belittle the terms, polarising, agit prop, and by extension lawfare etc and the underlying cultural marxist agendas and strategies tracing to the Frankfurt School and coming to us through so-called critical studies. These remarks can be substantiated in detail.
The issue is, not who leans one way or the other but first, warrant. As I pointed out arguments appeal to pathos, ethos, logos. In the end, it is the quality of warrant on evident facts, reasoning and underlying framework assumptions that counts. In turn those point to the first duties of responsible reason, to truth [so, inter alia to facts], to sound logic [i.e. principles of right reason], to prudence [thus, warrant], to sound conscience, to fairness and justice, etc. In a day in which the worst, ongoing holocaust in history is mounting up at about a million victims per week, and in which many institutions are being corrupted to enable that, in a day in which we just saw star chamber court tactics being blatantly used in defiance of the self-evident first principles of the natural law in the leading republic of democratic character, such are routinely flouted.
At root of such is a corrosive, self-referentially incoherent, thus self-falsifying evolutionary materialistic scientism and its fellow travellers, leading to precisely what Plato warned against 2360 years ago:
There comes a point where it is not merely opinion or perspective but serious error or worse.
So, sorry, but the issue of warrant is on the table.
KF
@Bob Ryan
“SARS 2, which is what COVID-19 is, will have the same impact as SARS. No virus from the same family will have a different impact on human hosts than the original had.”
The original SARS infected 8,000 people and killed 800. This virus has infected 440,000 and killed 19,675. So far.
So much for your claim.
KF: The issue is, not who leans one way or the other but first, warrant. As I pointed out arguments appeal to pathos, ethos, logos. In the end, it is the quality of warrant on evident facts, reasoning and underlying framework assumptions that counts. In turn those point to the first duties of responsible reason, to truth [so, inter alia to facts], to sound logic [i.e. principles of right reason], to prudence [thus, warrant], to sound conscience, to fairness and justice, etc. In a day in which the worst, ongoing holocaust in history is mounting up at about a million victims per week, and in which many institutions are being corrupted to enable that, in a day in which we just saw star chamber court tactics being blatantly used in defiance of the self-evident first principles of the natural law in the leading republic of democratic character, such are routinely flouted.
And yet, a very large number of people disagree with you on some or all of your views. I think that’s fine that’s why, ET, I’m not trying to convince anyone of my views. I don’t expect you to see the brilliance of my arguments and change your mind; that’s just not going to happen. So I don’t feel the need to call you out on any ethical or moral or political view and belittle you. I do bring up other points of view because I think that’s what one does in a forum! That’s how I view UD, a place where differing views can be aired and examined. If that is the case then views need to be given space and be tolerated.
Like I said: this blog is under no obligation to stand for anything other than what its . . . owners (?) want it to stand for. It doesn’t have to be middle-of-the-road or centrist. I’d prefer that it was but what I think or want doesn’t matter. If offering up some contrary views is heading towards warnings of “serious error or worse” then I would like to ask this question:
What is the purpose of Uncommon Descent? Is it a forum for the fair and collegial exchange of differing views or . . . . something else. Thanks.
Jim Thibodeau et al:
Is a man-made vaccine ‘natural’ or not-‘natural’ 🙂
What a conundrum.
At Powerlineblog.com, a “Part 3” post appears on the topic of our response to the corona virus spread.
It’s written by former UnitedHealthGroup general counsel Kevin Roche, who has had problems placing an ad in the Minnesota Star Tribune paper in which the points contained in the ad are those he makes in his post. His arguments are parallel to the arguments I have made here. He is not a professional biologist, nor am I. But he has had extensive experience in the healthcare sector.
He, too, points to the Diamond Princess data as a guide for our preventative strategy. As Trump said yesterday, “The cure can’t be worse than the sickness.”
So, here is the post.
I wonder if Mimus is on the board of the Star Tribune.
@456 JVL
To demonstrate that darwinism/ materialism are false worldviews. And that they are advanced via lies and bullying.
Truthfreedom: To demonstrate that darwinism/ materialism are false worldviews. And that they are advanced via lies and bullying.
That certainly is consistent with the way you approach ‘conversations’ in the various threads.
JVL, do you notice the difference in focus between warrant for argument or claims on one hand and interpersonal disagreement on the other? Do you see that the first is about objectivity, the second subjectivity? Which do you think is more likely to foster a sound outcome, why? KF
@460 JVL
It is consistent with a doctrine that teaches people that they are animals with no reason (epiphenomenon or some other garbage).
Sow the wind… etc
Show me materialism/ darwinism are true and I will shut up.
Not holding my breath though.
Kairosfocus: JVL, do you notice the difference in focus between warrant for argument or claims on one hand and interpersonal disagreement on the other? Do you see that the first is about objectivity, the second subjectivity? Which do you think is more likely to foster a sound outcome, why?
Again, you and I are not going to agree on many issues including some views you think are objectively true. So, when I disagree with you, why does that mean I am utilising “polarising, agit prop,” ? When I point out there are other views in contrast to some of your core issues is that automatically “wrong”? Which issues can we differ on collegially and which brook no dissension?
Truthfreedom: Show me materialism/ darwinism are true and I will shut up.
I’m not trying to change your mind; I’m just participating in a discussion. I like to try and understand views, especially those that differ from my own. It helps me be more empathetic and, hopefully, more supportive when I can. I believe in compromise and consensus where possible. Everyone gets some of what they need and everyone gives up a bit.
JVL, do you notice, again, your shift from warrant to opinions? That is a sign of the problem, not the solution. Even from your arguments, it is obvious you expect us to know and respect first duties of reason. So should you, manifestly; I don’t care what your favourite colour or food or song is, but we collectively had better attend to prudence, truth, right reason, sound conscience, fairness and justice or we wreck our civilisation. To do that, we need more logos, less pathos, and ethos needs to be held to the issue of logos. KF
PS: Plato’s other warning, Ship of State — and BTW, a first disaster for Athens in the ruinous Peloponnesian war was a plague:
PPS: Wiki on the Plague of Athens:
Notice, strategic impact:
Kairosfocus: JVL, do you notice, again, your shift from warrant to opinions?
Yes . . . we do disagree and we will not come to an agreement on some things. For at least some of those issues, I choose NOT to declare one position correct and another one false because I consider them opinions.
That is a sign of the problem, not the solution.
So, it’s not sensible to disagree with you on some issues? Yes?
Even from your arguments, it is obvious you expect us to know and respect first duties of reason. So should you, manifestly;
I’m trying to do that and still respect points of view that are different from my own.
I don’t care what your favourite colour or food or song is, but we collectively had better attend to prudence, truth, right reason, sound conscience, fairness and justice or we wreck our civilisation. To do that, we need more logos, less pathos, and ethos needs to be held to the issue of logos.
I would say, on average, we ARE attending to fairness and justice which is why, over the last 200 years, more people have more rights and all first world countries are more egalitarian than ever. I understand there are certain core issues that you consider canaries in the coal mine but, again, there are other views. Generally I avoid arguing with you about those issues and I’m not interested in doing so now. But I do hope I’m allowed to present views that are different from yours without being considered offensive or irrational.
Continuing, societal breakdown:
In this light, the excerpt from The Laws, Bk X, makes a lot of sense. So does the parable of the ship of state, given death of Pericles et al.
Of course, parallels to the great de-moralisation of our civilisation in recent decades just beg to be drawn.
Looking at Worldometer, if you calculate the CFR for the world, we’re looking at 4.4% That is in the Spanish Flu range. We’re doing much better here, so is Germany. But both countries have some of the best medical systems in the world. If these rates continue, unless hotter temperatures and higher humidities slow down the spread, right now it doesn’t look good.
What we’re seeing in Spain and Italy, and what has happened in New York City, make clear the virulence of this disease. Let’s hope the measures we’ve taken in the U.S. help us, as well as what we’ve seen in China and S. Korea where a kind of lessening of the virulence set in rather relatively quickly, proves true in all parts of the globe and here at home.
Kairosfocus: Of course, parallels to the great de-moralisation of our civilisation in recent decades just beg to be drawn.
I just don’t see modern civilisation teetering on the brink of disaster. I see a lot of positive, long terms trends that bode well for the majority of the citizens of the world. There are some real problems, of course, but I have hopes that humanity will learn how to cooperate and coordinate their efforts to solve those problems. For example: the way governments across the planet are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic is generally good; sometimes a bit slow or misguided but okay for the most part.
JVL, we are seeing a playout as we speak; Covid-19 is a warning on how brittle our systems are but my concerns are far wider and reflect the sort of concerns that are on the table above and as linked therefrom. For the moment, though, MNI is going into lockdown as I type, so as soon as the ongoing news conference closes, I have to get a serious move on, personally and business wise. Later today, on returning. I think a serious discussion is needed on what ails a very sick civilisation. KF
PS: We just heard a serious warning sign. Fly-in case 1 is NOT so far showing connection to a community transmission case 2. Uh oh! Looks like the exchanges at UD are going to be pretty directly policy relevant.
Kairosfocus: take care of you and your family; that’s the most important thing. Plenty of time for discussions later. Your country is small and every case is probably someone you know. Look after everyone please.
Back from meeting, thanks for thoughts. Policy issues are on the table.
Kairosfocus:
Take care.
Does anyone know if Silver Asiatic is ok?
No, pray for his protection.
In many ways, this is the closest we have to an experiment in coronavirus transmision/disaese. But people that want to make a lot from it will need to pay attention to details.
It’s true that ~20% of the ship tested positive when. But this is after a ship-wide quantine was set in place. It seems most of those affected caught the virus after this measure. The death rate is also also biased downward, as many infected people still have the disease (two more died a few days ago) and because all cases could be traced and tracked and given appropriate care.
People that want to use the cruiseship as a model should remember this was an example of quarantine, extensive testing, trackng and and case-quarintine and effective medical response.
I appreciate you are now moderating your response to this, so I hope you’ll think on this example too.
I know we are all trying to get a handle on something that we will not know for months but here is some good news and let’s hope in continues.
In New York the governor said that original projections were hospitalizations would double every 2 days, on Monday the projections were every 3.4 days and Tuesday they are at 4.7 days. Quote “This is almost to good to be true” Let’s hope not
Vivid
Sorry, in the above comment
Should say before this measure. Though, note, there is another bias here because the test is more likely to detect older cases (since viral load builds up over time), so it’s quite possibleothers not in the 20% have since developed the disease having caught it onboard.
Follow up https://uncommondescent.com/ethics/hydrochloroquine-wars-2-a-ny-physician-speaks-of-hundreds-of-successful-patients-a-governor-bans-use-in-nevada/
___
New blood tests for antibodies could show true scale of coronavirus pandemic.
___
Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) Might Explain Why COVID-19 Is More Deadly In The Elderly
Just had a conversation with somone about the Corona virus. I did a back of the envelope calculation.
If we take the Diamond Princess cruise ship numbers and run them over the world’s population, we get something like this:
a.) 20% of the passengers were infected. World population: 7.8 billion. 20% of that: 1.56 billion persons.
b.) 1% of those infected died. 1% of 1.56 billion is 1.56 million: 15.6 million dead.
As of today: 21,200 have died. 735 times less than what we saw happen on the Diamond Princess.
Total flu cases reported to CDC the last full week: 28,000. Total flu cases reported in second week of February: 26,500 ( a combination of 7 or 8 different varieties of flu strains. The Corona virus apparently has three different strains–heard this on the radio today.)
CFR: 1.43% How many cases have unreported? Hard to know. But the more that fall into this category, the smaller the percentage will end up being. Thank God, it’s not worse.
TF
Is that known as a cytokine storm?
Vivid
KF
With respect, you have a history of declaring that your opinions have warrant and, therefore, any disagreement must be unwarranted opinion. That is no way to have a constructive discussion.
We disagree on many things. Homosexuality, same sex marriage, premarital sex, etc. In my mind, this type of disagreement and discussion is healthy, if not critical, for society. We are never going to convince each other but if we are lucky, we might temper each other’s views.
EG, there you go, shifting from warrant as focus to opinions. Lesse, warranted or not: Ari aptly categorised appeals into one or more of pathos, ethos, logos in The Rhetoric, Bk I Ch 2. Categorisation, readily checked fact. Aptness, lessee, this is the standard classic view, roughly, emotions, authority/credibility, fact and logic [thus, warrant]. You give the 4th ___ and why if you disagree ____ . Prediction, hard to fill in a way that is distinct from the categories given. Now, further claim, that even your own argument implicitly and inescapably appeals to first duties of reason, to truth, to right reason, to prudence [thus, warrant], to sound conscience, to fairness & justice etc; where if something is inescapable in reasoning then it is self-evident on pain of self-undermining. The appeals are manifest in your case just now. If you doubt, just provide an escape as true ____ (see the problem?) . What we are actually seeing is an anti-rational, radically relativist factionalism which is self referential and self-undermining, posing as a skeptical view. And BTW, notice, my response is, provide a cogent counter-argument; which directly falsifies [see the point again?] the claim that I hold that “any disagreement must be unwarranted opinion” — which last is an appeal to failed logical entailment, BTW (see the problem?) KF
PS: You again resort to obsession with sexual perversities. The manifest impact of undermining foundational identity, family, sound nurture, conscience and more is plain all around.
KF
Sorry, but you are again expressing your opinion, under the assumption that it has warrant. You ascribe sexual behaviour that you are opposed to as perversion, as if this is objectively true.
@489 Ed George
Nothing is objectively true according to the naturalist philosophy. Maybe in a near future it will be socially approved to lock your daughters in a cellar, to r*pe them and to father children with them. Joseph Fritzl is a nice example. And you can NOT condemn such a behavior, because it is just a matter of taste. Social consensus and all that. And maybe it has certain selective advantage.
Acartia Eddie:
Wrong again. We are opposed to it because it is perverse and deviant. It is perverse and deviant because it goes against the design and nature. It is objectively true that it goes against the design and nature.
Acartia Eddie:
There isn’t any “constructive discussion” with you involved. With you a “constructive discussion” is an oxymoron.
EG, notice, how you ducked the primary issues and challenge of warrant, to go off on an obsessive, distasteful tangent? We can take it to the bank, then, that you have no answer on first principles and duties of responsible reason and how they are in fact inescapably and so self evidently true. That is warrant to certaintly not mere opinion to be dismissed with oh I disagree with you. Such further means that there is inescapable moral government of creatures such as ourselves through the objective natural law that stems from these premises. Therefore there is an objective framework for morality, ethics, professionalism, reasoning, judging, deciding, government, law, courts, policing, history etc. A built-in objective law that we did not make nor can we arbitrarily change, it is part of our nature. This then gives us an equally objective framework to assess novel claims such as that the unhealthy, disease-spreading abuse of organs of elimination for sexual gratification is just as acceptable as creation-order, naturally evident conjugal marriage. But that is simply an extension of the core issues. One of the problems evolutionary materialists and fellow travellers have is that they seek to run before they are even ready to creep without falling over. There is a reason why first principles and duties are first, after all. KF
@Vividbleau:
No. They are classified as different processes*.
Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE):
Cytokine ‘Storm’
___
*The Immune System (life in general 🙂 exhibits a lot of inter-dependence. More info is needed.
This guy Joseph Fritzl says he ‘was born to r*pe’. Who are we to judge him? He found a ‘purpose’ to his life.
KF
Myself and others have addressed this on numerous occasions, supported by current and historic evidence. The fact that you don’t accept this does not mean that it has been ducked or not addressed. All you can conclude is that we disagree.
@496 Ed George
And you have failed to provide a cogent argument. Emotions and feelings can be discounted.
LoL! Acartia Eddie has ducked and avoided all responses to his addressing of the facts. That alone says it all.
@Ed George
If I have (consensual) sex with my father:
-Is that ‘good’
-Or is that ‘bad’?
TF
Maybe you should ask your father the next time you are having sex with him.
Ed George:
Your nihilism is not a warrant to reprehensible thinking. There is a limit. And you will find yourself not posting here any longer if you persist.
This is all way “off-topic.” Enough.
PaV
The modeller now admits his numbers were wrong. He’s an expert, of course.
All Hail the Experts! (Now bow.)
Neil Ferguson “dropped his prediction [for the UK] from 500,000 dead to 20,000.”
___
How Deadly Is COVID-19?
1/100 = 0.01
1/10000 = 0.0001
It’s not the same.
Darwinists take note.
We need to know the real number of infected people.
From bacteria to man is un-proved non-sense. 🙂
EG, you have repeatedly evaded how even your own arguments turn for persuasive effect on how we acknowledge first duties of reason. Your refusal to acknowledge patent, inescapable first duties of reason does not make them go away. As we can all see for ourselves. If we do not acknowledge the duties to truth, right reason, prudence [including warrant], sound conscience, fairness and justice etc, the community of serious responsible discussion collapses into a chaos of well warranted mutual suspicion. Internally, the very framework of rational, responsible thought evaporates into the same poisonous chaos. We are forced to acknowledge the first duties as first truths of responsible reason and take their import seriously, especially that we require a root of reality sufficient to bridge the is-ought gap. KF
Ferguson’s model was used by our country:
Washington Post
No, this is not correct. The widely-reported numbers from the original report are from a “do nothing” approach (what you seemed to be suggesting in the original post), while numbers talked about in that post are assuming intense physical distancing measures are maintained. The numbers weren’t wrong, it’s just that strongs measuresto break the spread of the virus is predicted to have a large impact on total deaths.
Orthomyxo:
I believe you are wrong. The article says that Ferguson changed his numbers 2 days after Boris Johnson decided to implement social distancing measures. That’s not enough time for anything to happen.
If you’re going to argue that his new numbers reflect the efficacy of what lockdowns can do, then why didn’t he issue new numbers for the United States, which had been doing the lockdown for a much longer time?
Also, if lockdown measures are so effective, then why are the numbers out of Italy sky high? They are at almost 10% deaths. Their lockdown started before the US. Any answers here?
Personally, I believe something entirely different than the SARS CoV-2 virus is going around Europe. Medical people in Italy are looking at very high numbers of P&I (pneumonia and influenza-like illnesses) deaths in the months October to December. I think the numbers we’re getting will have to revised downward for the SARS CoV-2 when they discover some other virulent flu was actually going around in Europe/Italy prior to, and along with, the SARS CoV-2 virus. We’ll have to wait and see about that.
While I’m at it, my estimates for total deaths needs to be revised upwards. What’s going on in Europe is atypical of the Corona virus we have here in the US, and that China and S. Korea had. Whatever is happening there is skewing the overall numbers. But, we’ll see. I pray the numbers remain low.
From the article:
This is the critical element:
The other interesting part of the article on the Imperial Study is this:
But, of course, the CFR for the seasonal flu–which Dr. Fauci yesterday likened the SARS CoV-2, is 0.1%, or, one in a thousand. So the SARS C0V-2, per Dr. Gupta’s research, is even less severe than a seasonal flu. My original point.
How many will die throughout the entire globe? 40,000? But 68,000 Americans died of the flu two years ago. And the cost of taking action? At this point, mimially, $2.3 Trillion. And will we get to celebrate Easter? Has the Devil prevailed?
There are no new numbers. You can hear Ferguson say very clearly himself that the 20,000 figure is from exactly the same (March 16th) report. Here’s my comment from Barry Arrington making the same mistake:
“How many will die throughout the entire globe? 40,000?”
4 days ago you estimated 27,400.
At minimum, what is being headlined for policy-makers and public is shifting downwards. Now, let us see if we can find a reasonable balance also on possible treatments and the need for agility in regulatory frameworks for approving drugs.
World-wide there were more than 537,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and 24,354 deaths from Covid-19, the pneumonialike illness caused by the virus, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Global numbers and fatalities have more than doubled in the past week, led by jumps in the U.S., Italy and Spain. More than 122,000 people have recovered from Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins. They include its estimate of 753 recoveries in the U.S.
Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, who on March 13 told a group of seniors that fears of the “beer virus” have been overblown by the media, on Thursday delivered a very different message.
“Weeks ago I did not fully grasp the severity of this crisis, but clearly, we are in the midst of an urgent public health emergency,” Young said in a video published to YouTube and distributed by his office.
“World-wide there were more than 537,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and 24,354 deaths from Covid-19”
Rhampton7,
How would you go about verifying this information?
Andrew
Per Worldometer:
Number of deaths: Italy and Spain: 14,068 /// Rest of the World: 12,300.
Very hard to know what’s going on in Spain and Italy. Today Italy records its highest death total yet: 919 (and the day isn’t over). This is three week’s after they began their social distancing/lock down measures. All of this, at this point, is inexplicable.
PaV: All of this, at this point, is inexplicable.
Unless . . . the reporting procedure is biased or periodic, i.e. it only comes through every other day or so.. It’s possible the virus is more dangerous than the general public understands and if they’re not following good preventative measures . . . Or this is just the lag between the infections and the symptoms showing up?
What do you think?
2,746 cases in Louisiana
119 deaths reported
1,170 cases in New Orleans
54 parishes with reported cases
773 patients in hospitals
There were 531 new COVID-19 cases reported in Pennsylvania, state health officials said Friday. COVID-19 in Pennsylvania: 560 new cases up state total to 1687 COVID-19 in Pennsylvania: 560 new cases up state total to 1687
That brings the state total to 2,218.
– Less than 1% are aged 0-4
– Less than 1% are aged 5-12
– Nearly 2% are aged 13-18
– 11% are aged 19-24
– 40% are aged 25-49
– Nearly 28% are aged 50-64
– 18% are aged 65 or older
The coronavirus has passed a grim milestone in Canada, killing more people in Canada than SARS did in just a fraction of the time. Back in 2003, 44 people in Canada died of SARS during a six-month timespan. As of Friday afternoon, 53 have died after testing positive for COVID-19.
Rhampton7: About 68% are between the ages of 25 and 64? So it’s not just a problem with those over the age of 70? That’s scary.
54%
Rick Wlies said yesterday that the novel coronavirus was designed by God as punishment for the Jews not accepting Jesus.
There are words for the likes of Rick Wiles that I cannot use here.
As of Friday afternoon, Illinois health officials are reporting 3,026 cases and 34 deaths. That’s an increase of nearly 500 cases and 8 deaths.
Jim Thibodeau: Rick Wlies said yesterday that the novel coronavirus was designed by God as punishment for the Jews not accepting Jesus.
Do you have a reference? That would be pretty hideous.
Darwin said that female inferiority was an inescapable consequence of ‘nature’. 🙂
https://www.google.com/amp/s/bigthink.com/patricia-fara-science-and-suffrage-in-the-first-world-war.amp.html
Sev 524
Ditto
Vivid
Truthfreedom: Darwin said that female inferiority was an inescapable consequence of ‘nature’. ????
From the article you linked to:
Are you sure you want to pursue this argument? Really?
@jvl
https://www.newsweek.com/conservative-pastor-says-coronavirus-spreading-synagogues-gods-punishment-jews-opposing-1494578
Jim Thibodeau That’s really awful. Thank goodness no one here supports such views.
So Darwin was:
– A barnacle collector
– A failed theologian
– A failed doctor
– Not very intelligent (even his father acknowledged that)
– An inbreeder that married his first cousin
– A fairytaler
– A male supremacist
Wow. What a nice ‘god’ atheists have. 😉
Truthfreedom: Wow. What a nice ‘god’ atheists have. ????
I prefer to judge someone on the quality of their ideas and actions. And NO ONE gives Darwin a free pass, he is not a ‘god’ in any sense of the term.
He did try really hard to answer his critics, how are you doing on that criterium?
I keep forgetting which religion Jesus followed and was part of. Could it be that “false religion” the Reverend Wiles mentions?
You can’t make these people up. You just can’t.
ET: Reverend Wiles is pretty awful.
Who takes this guy seriously?
As I said- you can’t make these people up. And he’s very naïve if he thinks that transgendering anyone is even on a list of bad stuff humans should be punished for. The list is long. So if someone wanted to claim that this is punishment for our actions- as a people- I wouldn’t argue against that.
ET: So if someone wanted to claim that this is punishment for our actions- as a people- I wouldn’t argue against that.
Umm . . . is that what you meant to say? I think you should clarify your view. I don’t want to criticise if it’s not warranted.
After watching Tiger King, which destroyed my faith in humanity LOL, Wiles would fit right in. Actually Wiles makes the people on Tiger King seem sane and that’s extremely hard to do.
Vivid
Jim,
“Rick Wlies said yesterday . . .”
You lost me at “Rick Wlies.” Who cares what he says? I wonder if progressives will ever tire of quoting fringe goofballs and pretending they speak for anyone but other fringe goofballs. I suppose it is only to be expected. Conservatives quote idiotic things that progressive goofballs say all the time for the same reason. Just the other day a conservative quoted AOC going on about how we need to spend $78 trillion on some hair brained Utopian scheme. Hey wait. I guess that is not a good example, since AOC is ensconced firmly in the mainstream of the Democratic party. I mean her boy Bernie came within a deuce of capturing the nomination. Never mind.
@vivid longtime Florida resident here. I watched the first episode of that two days ago. I’d like to say that anything in it shocked me, but it didn’t. If I met that guy, it would have just seemed like a normal day.
Have you ever talked to the cops with a gram of meth in your pocket? Have you ever chatted with a drug counselor who didn’t know you were on LSD? Did your last HS girlfriend want to drink your blood, in an affectionate way? Have you ever tried to push the windshield out of an upside-down car? Do you routinely go swimming in Ocean Pond, with alligators sunning on the banks?
I don’t do that sort of thing anymore. I survived to middle agedness. WINNING! 😀
Jim
Then you need to watch the latest season of the sinner LOL. Stay safe and still positive thoughts and wishes for your parents.
Vivid
JVL- You want clarity? We deserve what we get. It is said that you can judge a people by the way they treat their most vulnerable. We kill them and think its OK. We are a pathetic race.
JVL:
It is almost impossible to know how S. Korea and China kept their deaths down. Was it their method ofquarantining? Something to look into when this is over. But what we’re seeing in Spain and Italy is just mind-numbing.
This virus, as seen in a thread by an ER doctor, seems very lethal–it sort of wears you down, and then, boom, the lungs seize up. So, my mind makes me wonder–as your last post suggests, if we’re looking at some kind of a biological weapon. Maybe countries know this, but don’t want the general population to know it.
While the numbers are still low–as far as normal flu deaths, this doesn’t seem to be your ordinary flu.
Let’s pray that the flu season ends quite soon–that is, let’s pray for warm, humid weather.
Someone who dies of covid-19 today caught the virus (at median) 18 days ago. Given the dymaics of the outbreak (the number infected three weeks ago, and the move from a local epidemic in the North to a more nation-wide) it’s not surprising the number of deaths has not yet stopped accelerating. Deaths are really the most-lagging indicator, so not how to estimate the effects of the lock down.
@542 ET:
You are wrong, ET. Killing the most vulnerable is the way to go. We should celebrate our social advancements.
I was just looking at the stats for California. The total number of cases is only about 5,500. We have almost 40 million people in our state. Obviously many more people are being tested than that small number, which brings up the question of how many people have tested negative for CoVid-19. It seems to me that the numbers used for CFR give us no idea of how this virus affects our population as a whole.
So I quickly looked around and found this article about what’s going on in Wisconsin.
It turns out that 94% of those tested in Wisconsin have had their test results come back negative. And this is for only those who have been tested. So that percentage of negative results is a larger number than actual. But, if we do the numbers, we find that 6% of 365 million Americans is 21.9 million. And, right now the CFR is 1.67%. Multiplying these two numbers together, that estimates that around 365,000 Americans might die.
But, again, both the CFR and the percentage of those infected are on the high side. Some have said that the actual number of people with cases so mild that they never get tested is perhaps five times the actual number of confirmed cases. Yes, this might affect the actual number of people in the 94% negative category, but 5 times the present actual cases is only a million people. So, to try and balance that out, let’s say there are 21.8 + 1 = 22.8 million people affected by the CoVid-19 virus. But the CFR would be 1/5th of the 1.67%. So the new number is: 22.8 x 1/5 x 1.67% = 76,152 people. But this would be over the course of an entire year or more. So, as we enter the tail end of this year’s flu season, I suspect we might not reach a third of this number, or around 22,000 Americans.
Again, by comparison, the flu season of 2018-2019 caused affected 61 million Americans with over 60,000 dying. The revised Imperial College study says 20,000 Brits will die, and they have a much smaller population than we do. So, will, perhaps, only 80,000 Americans die? As of now, only 2,000 Americans have died from the SARS-COV2 virus. Will we end up with a number in the 20,000 range? Again, the actual numbers can only be assessed when this virus has run its course and in the short run–this tail end of the flu season, won’t give us the ultimate total number of cases and deaths. We’ll have to wait until next year for that.
Each year, 37,000 Americans die because of car accidents. Has our government done the right thing by collapsing our economy and threatening many people with a complete loss of livelihood?
This CoVid-19 seems like a much terrible infection than your average flu. And it is wise, then, to take measures to prevent painful deaths; but, again, where does prudence lie in all of this? But my concern is this: will these kinds of questions be asked and evaluated once the worst is past us? My fear is that they won’t.
PaV, you touch on the multiplicity of issues that have to be balanced. No easy answer exists. KF
I can’t say I follow that calculation PaV, but I don’t think it’s likely covd-19 will stop when the weather gets warmer. It may well be a little less transmissible, but with so may naive hosts, such high infectivity and outbreaks in warm southern hemisphere countries, it seems unlikely the epidemic will be halted by the weather.
Re this
There is no revision, Ferguson himself has been very specific about this (https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928). He expects 20,000 deaths with the lockdown in effect, up to 500,000 with a “do nothing” approach.
Orthomyxo:
Thank you for disagreeing in such an agreeable manner! We don’t get much of that here.
As to Ferguson, he has now backtracked again, saying that deaths in UK should not be higher than 5,700, or so. He’s now off from his original scenario by almost two degrees of freedom. That’s some kind of backtracking. And all of this because England only recently started social distancing?
I’ve looked at Gupta’s study. (See Figure 3, and the discussion surrounding it)
It shows that the best match they can make with data available from the UK and Italy, is that but 01% of the population is at risk of infection, the rest of society having already encountered the virus and not been affected, building up anti-bodies to the virus instead (“herd immunity”). The next phase of the study is to begin sampling persons at random to see what percentage have anti-bodies to the virus.
[Since Dr. Fauci is on the scene in the United States, let’s mention something here: Those who “test” for HIV do not test for the virus itself. That is, if you look at their blood, you will not see any virus particles in the blood. What they “test” for are “anti-bodies.” Well, isn’t it clear that if a person has anti-bodies to a virus this means that they have been exposed to the disease, with their immun system having fought it back. Let this settle in. Here we are, 36 years after HIV was said to be the cause of AIDS, and still no vaccine. Why? We even have vaccines for the common cold. Why not for HIV? Dr. Peter Duesberg, whom Dr. Fauci dismissed thirty plus years ago, says HIV is a passenger virus–just one kind of virus that most people are infected by, but for which the body builds immunity. End of aside]
Dr. Gupta’s study suggests, then, that only .1% of the English population can become infected. The CFR in England right now is 6.3%. Population of UK: 66, 500,000. Using these numbers, I calculate 4,600 total deaths in the UK.!
And what is Dr. Ferguson’s new number? 5,700. How interesting.
Let’s use the US’s numbers. 327 million people; CFR of 1.78%. We assume only .1% of our population is susceptible to infection (as in Gupta’s study). I calculate 5,809 total deaths. Total deaths from the corona virus? 2,362.
Again, for perspective: since Feb 28th, there have benn 2,362 deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 virus; in that same time period, there have been 4,000+ deaths due to the seasonal flu.
The whole purpose of this thread was to ask a simple question: are the Draconian measures instituted by our government to subdue this virus justified? We now have more questions than answers. But, from the looks of things, the answer will finally be, NO!
Who’s behind this fraud on the people of this world? Effectively martial law–all because some scientist, who has now revised down his initial estimates by two degrees of magnitude, rattled the planet. Has this been orchestrated? Is there a political dimension to all of this? These questions not only deserve to be answered, they must be answered–or we’re headed for a police state.
Here’s an article by Peter Hitchens from the UK. He quotes a Dr. John Lee from the NHS:
Earlier this week, I was questioning the numbers we’re getting out of Italy. There’s a reason for that, and, perhaps, for Spain as well. However, I don’t ever remember reading an article saying that a city in Spain had to rent the local ice skating rink to serve as a temporary morgue. So, again, some things seem fairly straight forward while other things remain obscured, and in need of further investigation.
Even Dr. Fauci, the immunologist that stands beside Trump, is saying that the number of deaths in the US could exceed 100,000.
Given that we are still in logarithmic growth, it is a fair bet that the number of deaths will far exceed the 2,385 that the US currently has. If Trump loosens restrictions, as he is indicating that he will, the numbers will jump.
@Ed George the good thing is Trump doesn’t have the authority to force everybody to open everything up.
If Trump says open everything up, and McDonald’s and Belks and Apple etc just say “no”, what’s the federal government going to do?
Yes, Eddie. If we do not continue to shelter in place this virus will kill many people. More than 100,000. And Trump said he is HOPING that the country can get back to work by Easter.
What is wrong with you guys? Do you always have to twist reality in order to score imaginary internet points?
McDonalds is already open. A front-line doctor on CNN yesterday said that the way to get the virus is by not washing your hands and touching your face- ie mouth, nose, ears and eyes. He said that to get it by inhaling it you would need to be in a room with infected people breathing that air for at least 15 minutes. So the front-line people are in that group. Everyone else is in the first.
You’ll have to show me the citation, but sounds unlikely.
We’ll see what comes of the Gupta study when seroprevelance can be assessed, but those extrapolations are very hard to reconcile with the course of the disease.
There is no HIV vaccine because our immune system doesn’t mount much of a response to HIV (keeps in check by never ellimnates it), so “artificial” immunity from a vaccine can’t do much. HIV-denialism has killed (at least) thousands of people across the world and has been so thoroughly debunked I’m not even going to spend a mother second talking about it.
The epidemic has hardly started. There were 500 deaths yesterday and there will probably be more than that today. The measures already enacted haven’t hard time to effect the death rate (due to the lag between infection and death) so thousands more deaths are already guaranteed.
It’s worth looking back when you started this thread. Did you really think the epidemic would have go so much worse since then? If not, what does that tell you about your instincts for the severity of this disease?
That goddess science of yours is not very straightforward. More like a bit convoluted lady. Maybe the Guru will help you to interpret her commandments more clearly. Pray Darw.
Every single McDonald’s in my state is technically open, but the seating area is not. You’re allowed to walk in order get your food and leave. Same with Panera, same with Burger King, same with Red Ginger, same with Moe’s, same with Firehouse.
And the federal government has no ability whatsoever to change that.
33,597 deaths as of right now. And that’s going to go way up.
Just caught the tail end of Trump’s briefing. Did I miss him earlier or was Dr. Fauci not there?
@EdGeorge that’s a bad sign. A good sign though is that they’re starting to take this more seriously, and now they say they’re not going to try to re-open everything by April 15, the new date is April 30.
Fauci is speaking now . What are you talking about?
Vivid
Jim, no one said they were going to try to open anything in April. Stop lying.
Yes, because as a whole, humans are stupid.
Dr. Fauci has better things to do then be @ press conferences
ET
Fauci is at the news conference!! he just spoke
Vivid
And then there’s that…
ET
So to all the Trump haters Fauci is at the press conference, he spoke at the conference, he said that (gasps) that Trump made the decision to follow his advice and other medical pros advice to go out another 30 days.
So to all you Trump haters time to move on to something else you hate about him and quit all the incessant hand wringing about Fauci, and that Trump does not listen to his medical team.
Vivid
@569 Vividbleau
Darwinian ‘reasoning’. They are awfully bad at logic.
Maybe in their alternate ‘reality’ Dr. Fauci does not exist.
I provide links so that you can read/scan the papers. You’ll find the 5,700 number in the Hitchen’s article.
The curve for Italy has been more or less flat for the last 8 days. This is a great sign. Spain is inching towards this same kind of leveling off.
The pattern I see in both Italy and Spain is: 1.) linear rise for two weeks in both cases and deaths, then, 2.) leveling off for a week. This all starts once there’s an appreciable, but low, number of deaths recorded. For the United States, it looks like our pattern started around March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day!. That means Monday or Tuesday should be the high mark, with the leveling off for the next week.
It, of course, remains to be seen what happens after this “leveling off” in Spain and Italy. For Italy, it seems like the cases have started to fall. I’ve heard this same thing anecdotally from the press. As a ballpark figure, using this preliminary pattern, means the US should suffer about 7,950 deaths.
I’d say that a week from next Wednesday, the President could make the decision to start ramping things up, or, as a palliative, allowing Easter Sunday services to be conducted.
A vaccine is:
– ‘natural’ selection?
– or ‘artificial’ selection?
The President remains HOPEFUL and OPTIMISTIC. And for that the lefties are giving him crap. You can’t make this stuff up…
Massachusetts has a back-to-school date of May 4, 2020
ET
Yeh when he halted travel to China he was a racist and xenophobe , ditto for closing travel with Europe, now he did not close them soon enough. Everyone seems to forget what the top officials in NY, De Blasio ( two weeks ago)and the head of the health commission encouraging people to not distance themselves, let me repeat the health commissioner of N.Y. said people should not worry but heh it’s Trumps fault.
Mardi Gras is Trumps fault.
Optimism is wrong pessimism is wrong, everything is Trumps fault, whatever he does is wrong so yes we can make this stuff up!,
But not Fauci so we have to and we will move on to the next thing to hate him for.
I’m thinking his proposal to allow corporations to write off lunch and dinner expenses for their employees to support restaurants , how dare he allow those dirty rotten corporations to write off these expenses to help the restuarants. Or his announcement that the US is not going to pay for Harry and Meghans security they have to pay for it themselves, RACIST
Vivid