Why You Must Act Now

Computer models are wonderful. Just tweak a few parameters and get something to publish.

reposting, with apologies . .

The Lancet published a recalculation of the case fatality rate, taking the delay between 'diagnosed' and death into account, as of March 1st. This looked to have stabilized at about 6%, vs the 1-2% being generally spouted before March 15. It's now 3.5%.

The CFR of SARS rose from 3% to 10%, as all the data came in, without similar delays being considered in the mean time.

By age, in China, up to Feb 11:

With underlying health conditions:

Seasonal flu fatality rates are generally an order of magnitude lower.

RL

In the US that wouldn't be difficult!

In the UK we are scaling back testing of people with cough or fever in the community, reserving testing for those in hospital.

I think the general presumption is that it will become endemic, as did Spanish flu.

That's alarmist, and depends on what "lockdown" actually consists of. "Lockdown" isn't binary; it is shades of grey.

Well, it does sell newspapers and adverts, so of course the good capitalists will jump on board.

But that indicates /nothing/ about the seriousness of the situation.

Exactly. There were no confirmed cases until the test kits became available. The first kits became available in mid-January. The test kit supply certainly distorts the exponential growth data.

There's some validity to that, but: - all models are wrong - but they can still be *useful* - you use LTSpice to model a circuit :)

e-

are oblivious to the danger and go on about life as usual, and that's cert ainly NOT the case. The virus has been circulating in the U.S. since at lea st October, and any deaths have been attributed to influenza. Suddenly, whe n the test kit becomes available, people are dying of corona left and right .

And the tests were only administered to people exhibiting symptoms AND havi ng a reasonably *high* risk of exposure. That's a very skewed sample. Bunch es of people have already been infected and recovered, we'll never know. If the average mortality is 1%, then the recovery rate is 99%. Younger health y people have only very mild symptoms they barely notice. Most of urban China does in fact have diseased and/or weak lungs from a lif etime of breathing heavily polluted air, and that does not bode well for su rviving a serious respiratory infection in any case. The mortality data fro m China may not be applicable to first world western countries.

on"

e-

are oblivious to the danger and go on about life as usual, and that's cert ainly NOT the case. The virus has been circulating in the U.S. since at lea st October, and any deaths have been attributed to influenza. Suddenly, whe n the test kit becomes available, people are dying of corona left and right .

Getting back to the air pollution theme, a recently published study has qua ntified this effect:

Study: Coronavirus Lockdown Likely Saved 77,000 Lives In China Just By Redu cing Pollution

So many interfering factors here, only a fool takes the numbers at face val ue.

on"

The Chinese smoke a lot too, 52% among men.

That doesn't explain the events happening in China unless you think the medical system in China can no longer detect even 50 new cases per day. The infection rate there has dropped to such low levels they barely rank in the top 20 countries.

The issue of testing capacity is more a factor early on as the more primitive countries struggle to ramp up their testing capabilities. Countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Qatar and the USA.

On 3/16/2020 10:23 AM, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...

Do you believe that the situation in Italy is just hyperbole? If you accept that it's real, do you have any reason to think that the US will be any different?

die-

ubei Province.

"Social distancing" in Hubei??? I don't think that is the right term for i t and that is the problem. China seems to be the only country that has its infection rate under anything like control. They did it by draconian meas ures that are far beyond "social distancing".

My concern is that other than buying mass quantities of toilet paper, most people don't seem to be much aware of the issues involved. Yesterday in th e supermarket people were just doing their thing. A meetup group I am in i s still having events. We seem to be waiting for the numbers to grow to th e point of causing a huge problem before we react at a personal level.

Yes, in a pandemic situation where many people will die, what you want to focus on is the press. Yup, makes perfect sense. Kinda like worrying about the hand cleaner dispenser at Walmart.

One thing we have working for us in this pandemic, the Darwin effect. Unfortunately while this disease has the ability to remove people from the population, most of them have already reproduced.

And that is part of the problem. People don't universally end up in the ho spital with this disease. They live their lives and infect others. Withou t widespread testing many don't know they are infected and the problem appe ars better than it really is.

You are talking to someone who is calling anyone concerned about this disea se "alarmist". Do you really think they are going to pay any attention to what you say as opposed to what they hear?

This thread was started with a link to an excellent web site. Of course th e denialists are going to say the author is an alarmist even though he is c lear in his reasoning and math. But then JL will acknowledge that math is not his strong suit. So instead he focuses on a sentence or two in the who le article trying to prove it all wrong.

This is a serious disease and the US is ill prepared to deal with it. I ho pe I am proven wrong, but so far not many here are acting like they underst and the severity. Yes, drop interest rates. That will deal with the real problem!

The UK and US median age is quite a bit lower than in Italy 45.5). ISTR only Japan, Germany and Monaco rank higher than Italy on that.

UK median age 40.5 is ranked 50th USA median age 38.1 is ranked 61.

Since serious complications are much more common in the over 70's it is reasonable to suppose that countries with a mostly younger population will fare a little better in this respect. However, handled badly it could easily go pear shaped if intensive care capability saturates. (you need not only the kit but the staff and the PPE for them to use)

Of course we will be different. We're the US of A!

I seem to recall S Korea has some single event early on that spurred the in fection widely. I don't know what happened in Italy to promote the infecti on rate quickly. But what is clear is that it will continue to grow at acc elerating rates until a lock down is imposed. We aren't prepared to do tha t in most western countries until it is clearly required... meaning even pe ople like Larkin see the writing on the wall.

So we will report on the toilet paper runs and the shortage of short bread. Meanwhile we aren't able to test enough people to really know the extent of the infection here which feeds into the problem of people believing in t he need for drastic measures.

We were supposed to have millions of test kits available by today. Where a re they?

The US failure to produce effective test kits in volume is a disgrace. CDC budget cuts occurred at roughly the same time as those to EPA etc. New heads appointed at roughly the same time.

Space Force !

RL

e-

are oblivious to the danger and go on about life as usual, and that's cert ainly NOT the case. The virus has been circulating in the U.S. since at lea st October, and any deaths have been attributed to influenza. Suddenly, whe n the test kit becomes available, people are dying of corona left and right . Speaking of tests, someone needs to get on the ball and develop an ELISA for this virus. This testing methodology is about 10-25 % the cost of a PCR , the type they're now using, and it doesn't require a sophisticated lab to process the results. Sampling is a pin prick and they can really go to tow n assaying the entire population of the world if they want to. Singapore is about 90% of the way there but haven't developed anything scalable to comm ercial yet.

MAHA, Make America Healthy Again!

Agreed.

The counter-point would be that there's no point in testing for something if the answer won't change subsequent actions. Better to concentrate limited efforts where the effort might change subsequent actions.

I don't like that, but it is rational.

The irony had not escaped me. That's why I used "alarmist" :)

Agreed.

You used that term. I didn't.