Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19) and Tinnitus

[Jack V]

You're rewriting history. You were trying to draw a clumsy parallel using Space Shuttle missions and commercial airline flights that actually contradicted your position.

When I pointed out the deficiencies of your reasoning you started arguing in circles rather than acknowledge your mistake and then played the victim when you were called out on your passive aggressive behavior.

I have no idea what you're talking about so I'll channel what someone else said earlier in the thread – your facts are wrong, but not worth pursuing since you wear people out.

I will, however, leave you with three thoughts:

First, in our entire lives, I have interacted with you only once (in this thread), and you started flinging insults at me as if we were married for 30 years. "Passive aggressive?" "Playing the victim?" "Rewriting history?" That honestly makes no sense. I'm just an internet stranger in the middle of a thread who happened to disagree with you.

Second, at the risk of making a "clumsy metaphor" even clumsier, some additional background: A few years ago I did a project for NASA and remember reading the report on the Columbia disaster. The report was shocking, blaming NASA culture as much as any technical failure for the explosion. Even though every Space Shuttle was essentially a prototype (and depending on how you count them, around 1/3 of them exploded), NASA had begun treating them as routine, more like aircraft than spacecraft. The report skewered NASA for losing sight of how novel and risky spaceflight truly is -- in the first 50 years of aviation, over 1 million aircraft were built and used multiple times, while in the first 50 years of spaceflight, humans launched only around 4,500 rockets into orbit, almost all used only once.

Similarly, there are those, and you seemed like one of them, who were misperceiving the introduction of an utterly new and risky virus into humanity as routine, as "just another flu." Yet absent mitigation, and with no herd immunity, no vaccine, and no treatment, Covid19 is a killing machine for the elderly and infirm. My point was that just as misperceiving the new for the routine lead to complacency and disaster at NASA, it could lead to complacency and disaster in dealing with a virulent new virus. It still might.

Third, I'm here for the same reason we're all here, because we share a common misfortune, and help each other with information and camaraderie we can't get anywhere else. Right now my ears are ringing. I can tell you that and you know what I mean, while almost everyone around me irl does not.

I honestly don't want to "internet fight" with you or anyone else here. There are forums all over the internet for that, where you can internet-pound your enemies, internet-win your arguments, internet-show how smart you are, and internet-indulge in condescending psycho-babbling insults.

Happy to engage in civil banter with any and all, but I prefer to avoid the spiderwebs of people out to "win" internet arguments. I'm not your adversary, just a stranger who added my .02 to a thread when I read someone confusing the new for the routine in comparing the mortality rate of an entire flu season with early numbers from an emerging virus that had only just developed a taste for human flesh (see clumsy metaphor above).

 

[Bill Bauer]

The projections have been criminal.

 

[Bill Bauer]

Time will tell of course... but some experts are starting to weigh in: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidn...virus-strategy-has-failed-as-deaths-top-1000/

I know that looking at the new number of dead instead of the normalized number of dead is crude, but still...

 

[Bill Bauer]

Dr. Deborah Birx Predicts Up To 200,000 Deaths 'If We Do Things Almost Perfectly'
Begins at 2:53

Two weeks later, and the death toll is 25,000 and stabilizing. Would the decision makers have chosen the lockdown if they were to know the true risks involved?

Half of the deaths are in old folks' homes, and those could have been locked down at a low cost. If people over 60 were to go into self-isolation, we would have probably taken care of most of the remaining cases.

 

[linearb]

If we're going to start criticizing pieces of American culture as vapid, Lady Gaga seems like a really weird starting point to me. Very.... middle of the list?

It's notable that an immunsuppressive drug is showing possible efficiency; that fits in with the general observation that younger people fare better and produce fewer antibodies, cytokine storm hypothesis, etc. So, a virus that programs the immune system to go completely nuts and destroy its host, based on the intensity of the immune response.

@Lane that's one anecdote about a person who was given multiple therapies, and the article itself is trying to give credit more to Actermra than anything else. I read the phrasing as the author being open to the idea that other parts of the polytherapy had some effect, but trying to bring that article into the vit C debate seems sorta disingenuous to me.

So far the controlled and/or n > 25 studies have failed to produce spectacular results, which is why this is something being wheeled out as an adjudicative therapy in complex cases that have already failed conventional treatment, and not used as a front line defense. Vit-C has to be much cheaper than any of the front line stuff and have a better side effects profile than at least some of it; it's too bad it hasn't shown more obvious benefit because there is desperate need.

As bad as things are getting here, I can't imagine what's going on in the parts of the developing world that are sort of either in media blackout mode, or just generating clouds of really dark things on Twitter

 

[FGG]

Dr. Deborah Birx Predicts Up To 200,000 Deaths 'If We Do Things Almost Perfectly'

Two weeks later, and the death toll is 25,000 and stabilizing. Would the decision makers have chosen the lockdown if they were to know the true risks involved?

Half of the deaths are in old folks' homes, and those could have been locked down at a low cost. If people over 60 were to go into self-isolation, we would have probably taken care of most of the remaining cases.

Keep in mind, that a second surge and a seasonality is also predicted. The lockdown is first and foremost to prevent a saturation of the healthcare system.

 

[Bill Bauer]

This is what people do when they are bored out of their mind, right?
In any case, they are heroes:

Imagine a loved one being taken away to a local hospital, getting a call that they died, and then seeing a video of the doctors there doing a funky dance:




I hadn't realized it, but the daily 8 pm clapping ritual in the UK has been going on strong all of this time. The British would have loved living in the Soviet Union.

 

[Bndsmheowqhe]

I have no idea what you're talking about so I'll channel what someone else said earlier in the thread – your facts are wrong, but not worth pursuing since you wear people out.

Disagreeing with unsubstantiated claims and pointing out the specific flaws in your arguments hardly qualifies as "wearing someone down."

First, in our entire lives, I have interacted with you only once (in this thread), and you started flinging insults at me as if we were married for 30 years. "Passive aggressive?" "Playing the victim?" "Rewriting history?" That honestly makes no sense. I'm just an internet stranger in the middle of a thread who happened to disagree with you.

Your comments are plain to see for anyone that wants to go back and look for themselves. It was textbook passive aggressive behavior and as is typical for someone engaging in that type of conduct you're now attempting to gaslight me by feigning ignorance about it.

Second, at the risk of making a "clumsy metaphor" even clumsier, some additional background: A few years ago I did a project for NASA and remember reading the report on the Columbia disaster. The report was shocking, blaming NASA culture as much as any technical failure for the explosion. Even though every Space Shuttle was essentially a prototype (and depending on how you count them, around 1/3 of them exploded), NASA had begun treating them as routine, more like aircraft than spacecraft. The report skewered NASA for losing sight of how novel and risky spaceflight truly is -- in the first 50 years of aviation, over 1 million aircraft were built and used multiple times, while in the first 50 years of spaceflight, humans launched only around 4,500 rockets into orbit, almost all used only once.

"As to why the foam dropped off. As it turned out, to be environmentally friendly, NASA had eliminated the use of Freon in foam production, Mr. Katnik reported. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., later concluded that the absence of Freon led to the detachment of the foam."

"A videotape made by a team of NASA scientists at the Jan. 16 liftoff appeared to show a bushel-basket-sized chunk of debris breaking away from the external fuel tank and striking the fragile protective tiles on the underside of the left wing. A NASA analysis suggested the impact could have damaged a swath of tile as large as 7 inches wide and 32 inches long, according to an agency memorandum made public yesterday."

The non-problematic foam was unnecessarily replaced with 'environmentally friendly' foam which broke off during liftoff damaging the tiles that eventually led to the destruction of the spacecraft upon reentry. The vague talk of "NASA culture" contributing to the accident is a convenient way of sidestepping the real issue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/...report-warned-of-damage-to-tiles-by-foam.html

Five complete Space Shuttle orbiter vehicles were built and flown on a total of 135 missions.

133 successful missions. 2 failed missions. That means that close to 99% of all shuttle missions were completed without incident.

That being said...

It's still an intellectually sloppy comparison. A passenger on a Space Shuttle mission was 11,200x more likely to die during their flight than a passenger on a commercial airliner. Based on the latest projections the average US citizen is about as likely to die from the Coronavirus as they were from the 2017-2018 Flu season.

Similarly, there are those, and you seemed like one of them, who were misperceiving the introduction of an utterly new and risky virus into humanity as routine, as "just another flu." Yet absent mitigation, and with no herd immunity, no vaccine, and no treatment, Covid19 is a killing machine for the elderly and infirm. My point was that just as misperceiving the new for the routine lead to complacency and disaster at NASA, it could lead to complacency and disaster in dealing with a virulent new virus. It still might.

That's a straw-man argument if ever there was one. I never said that we had a complete understanding of the virus or that we could know with absolute certainty that it wouldn't become a more serious problem. I simply pointed out that based on the facts we had available to us at the time the response was disproportionate to the actual threat when objectively compared to the handling of similar public health crises. That wasn't an unreasonable assessment of the situation given that the doomsday scenarios involving millions of deaths in the US alone have been downgraded to less than that of a bad flu season.

 

[linearb]

Imagine a loved one being taken away to a local hospital, getting a call that they died, and then seeing a video of the doctors there doing a funky dance:

Imagine dealing with watching other people die or suffer unimaginably, day after day, week after week.

I don't know how many MDs, EMTs, etc you know, but basically every ambulance rider I've ever known has had a really dark sense of humor, by necessity.

As for "imagine" -- well, once very recently I was dealing with my own kid having a seizure, on the floor of our house, and as I was running up and downstairs getting stuff ready to go to the ER, I heard the EMTs who were attending my child on the floor joking about something and laughing. Was I offended? Not even slightly, they did a stellar job and were passing time in an incredibly tense situation. I do remember thinking at the time that there are people who would have been extremely upset by this, and that I am just not someone who is because I can see it from the EMTs perspective too easily.

So, I think all kinds of different people would have all kinds of different reactions to both my situation, and to these videos, but if I'd had a relative die in a hospital which produced one of these videos, I would not think it had adversely impacted their care; in fact, I would assume that hospitals which allow things that keep morale up among doctors, might have reliably better outcomes.

The like to dislike ratio on that video is overwhelmingly positive, so it seems very few people take offense to this sort of thing. I'll ask my wife (who has a relative who passed of Corona) how she'd feel if this came from that facility but I will be surprised if she views it differently.

@Bill Bauer I realize I came on strong here and I wanted to make it real clear I am not saying you're wrong; in both the hospital video and the situation with the EMTs joking in my house, I can see rational people responding differently; I just don't have any negative emotional response to this, it seems like acceptable coping behavior to me.

The Last Dinner photo, especially, as anyone working on the front lines of this knows there is a significantly nonzero chance of lifethreatening infection if their PPE gets messed up even slightly.

...less than that of a bad flu season...

Maybe, but if so, only with declared emergencies in all fifty states and stay-at-home orders. Literally no one is suggesting that those measures haven't been effective in slowing the spread of the virus and preventing the kind of resource starvation which was at the heart of the really extreme projections.

Were those projections too aggressive, and would a "do nothing" response not actually have been as catastrophic as projected? Entirely possible; we're not likely to know, barring everyone just totally going back to life as normal instantly and getting an extreme coast-to-coast second wave. However, beyond obvious differences in viral structure (with implications towards vaccines and immunity), the reason the "flu" comparisons are so silly to me is that we've never had a flu that we shut the country down for, and if we did, we probably would have had a flu year where we had ~75% less flu deaths.

It is like comparing the effects of two car crashes, one at 20mph and one at 70mph and saying "well, gee, in both cases the drivers sustained minor injuries", but the 20mph car had no seatbelts or airbags. It's a fundamentally different situation with a different set of statistics and probabilities around it.

 

[Bill Bauer]

Imagine dealing with watching other people die or suffer unimaginably, day after day, week after week.

I don't know how many MDs, EMTs, etc you know, but basically every ambulance rider I've ever known has had a really dark sense of humor, by necessity.

I have a dark sense of humor. Watching people suffer wouldn't motivate me to do a funky dance. Also, I wouldn't upload a video of my dance or one of the dark jokes I come up with to the net.

I think all kinds of different people would have all kinds of different reactions to both my situation

The difference is that you happened to Overhear a joke that wasn't meant for you to hear. To make the analogy more complete, the ENT would have to make a joke with you there in the room.

@Bill Bauer I realize I came on strong

That's good. I wouldn't have it any other way.

The Last Dinner photo, especially, as anyone working on the front lines of this knows there is a significantly nonzero chance of lifethreatening infection if their PPE gets messed up even slightly.

Before the pandemic, I remember noticing medical staff walking around town in their scrubs. It has always seemed very wrong to me.

would a "do nothing" response not actually have been as catastrophic as projected?

There is a middle ground - isolating people over 60, workplaces providing masks or face shields and gloves to their employees, asking people to not have parties and businesses to not hold any meetings. It seems to me that the cost to the economy would have been a fraction of the cost now, whereas we would be able to get most of the benefits that we are getting now.

It's a fundamentally different situation with a different set of statistics and probabilities around it.

What about comparing the conditional probabilities "given someone infected with the flu, probability of dying is 0.1%" with "given someone is infected with COVID-19, probability of dying is X".

 

[Bill Bauer]

Not sure what to make of
https://townhall.com/columnists/mar...or-shows-virus-follows-fixed-pattern-n2566915

His graphs show that all countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week and rapidly subsiding by the eighth week.
...
"There is a decline in the number of infections even [in countries] without closures, and it is similar to the countries with closures," he wrote in his paper.
...
But what about Italy and their staggering 12% mortality rate? "The health system in Italy has its own problems. It has nothing to do with coronavirus. In 2017 it also collapsed because of the flu," Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel told the news agency. Indeed, Italy's exceptionally high coronavirus mortality rate is eerily reminiscent of their unusually high flu mortality rates. Supportive of this theory, Germany, has low flu infection and mortality rates and similarly low coronavirus rates.
...
President Trump urged a strong coronavirus response after consulting with Dr. Fauci and his team, who relied on a British model predicting 2.2 million deaths in the United States and 500,000 deaths in the U.K. But that model was developed by Professor Neil Ferguson, who had a history of wildly overestimating death rates through his prediction models. Professor Ferguson was not known for his reliability, and his 2001 disease model was criticized as "not fit for purpose" after it predicted that up to 150,000 people could die in the U.K. from mad cow disease (177 deaths to date). Ferguson's U.K. coronavirus deaths prediction is now down to 20,000 people, 4% of the original prediction.

And what about
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com...ate-lower-than-anticipated-close-to-flus-0-1/

In explaining their conclusions, the Economist said:

COVID-19 takes 20-25 days to kill victims. The [Silverman and Washburne] paper reckons that 7 m Americans were infected from March 8 to 14th, and official data show 7,000 deaths three weeks later. The resulting fatality rate is 0.1%, similar to that of flu. That is amazingly low, just a tenth of some other estimates. Perhaps it is just wrong, possibly because the death toll has been under-reported. Perhaps, though, New York's hospitals are overflowing because the virus is so contagious that it has crammed the equivalent of a year's worth of flu cases into one week.

It seems to me that the reason New York was so hard hit is because of their reliance on public transportation (where exposure is similar to that in churches or at sporting events, where infection rates are known to be high). Was there a good reason for the people using a car to commute to work to stay home?

 

[linearb]

There is a middle ground - isolating people over 60, workplaces providing masks or face shields and gloves to their employees, asking people to not have parties and businesses to not hold any meetings. It seems to me that the cost to the economy would have been a fraction of the cost now, whereas we would be able to get most of the benefits that we are getting now.

Without disagreeing that there may have been a workable US response short of what we saw, I don't like your idea because you can't really effectively isolate all high risk people, and also some stats for the 40-49 age range are still putting the death numbers at ~1:250 - 1:500, which is a couple orders of magnitude higher than flu for that age. (These numbers may eventually be revised down, or up; I acknowledge all the data we have now is early and questionable).

We yanked our kid from childcare earlier than most people here (though only 11 days before the state closed them all), because we know other parents in that group have hospital and travel exposure. If the RO of this thing is really >5, it's going to become endemic and it's going to spread to all the high risk groups eventually, it's going to kill a bunch of people, and the calculus is just slowing the burn to where people don't needlessly die of other things because of resource starvation.

What about comparing the conditional probabilities "given someone infected with the flu, probability of dying is 0.1%" with "given someone is infected with COVID-19, probability of dying is X".

This is fine, I think, for purposes of looking at immediate impact and the cost of doing something vs nothing. It still gets dubious when we look towards 2021 and 2022.

We have moderately to reasonably effective flu vaccines. Everyone seems to be operating under the assumption that we're going to have a SARS-COV-2 vaccine in 18 months, because of the amount of money being dumped into it. A software term I'm sure you're familiar with, as its made its way into general economic vocab, is "vaporware": a product that a client, a vertical, or even an entire market is depending on, which has specs and has a roadmap but doesn't actually exist.

Vaccines are vaporware right now, so, we can look at the burn rate of the disease, and that's about it. I think that's why a lot of the models show phases of increasing and decreasing distancing. "Citizens of Manhattan, cases are projected to exceed ICU capacity in 2 weeks; please resume distancing protocols for 28 days".

I am not a conspiracy theorist, but if I were, I could hardly invent a better scenario for instilling a basic willingness for whole new kinds of social control on the global population. Because I am not a conspiracy theorist, I do not think this was something that happened by the design of a table of people in cowls sitting under a solid gold Eye of Providence statue. However, any time an event allows or requires partisan groups or entire governments to institute new kinds of social controls or assume power, they never give it up willingly afterwards. I am going with "requires" as much as "allows" in this case; I am still convinced that a complete non-response would have had even more catastrophic effects.

So, two final thoughts, on my long winded ramble of a reply:

#1 - the first country to respond to this, China, is a place that can just snap its fingers and institute authoritarian social control in any given urban area, relatively quickly and with little resistance. They also had SARS (2005) experience on which to build such protocols. So, they instituted stuff that seemed real extreme to the West. How much of that was useful containment, and how much of it was an authoritarian regime flexing? I think it's a mix of both.

The world has, in one way or another, been informed by that response. In the US we have seen some flexing, but also general public fear of disease and compliance without too much complaint. I have read about some protests where people are doing "park outs", occupying the parking lot of a state capitol... but in cars, so, adhering to the protocol they are protesting. I sort of assume if they had no fear of disease, they would be engaging in the actual civil disobedience of a march.

#2 - I'm in general agreement with you, I believe, that we do need to find effective ways to put metrics on these things, which necessarily involves putting dollar values on human life. This is something people often have a problem with; it's also the basis of most of our tort system, and, in fact, if it were not possible in general to agree that this is an okay concept, then there would really be no mechanism in the current system to hold bad actors accountable for noncriminal but none the less injurious and immoral actions.

It's such a weird, and personal calculus, though. To me, my life is completely disposable if required to protect the life of my child. To someone looking at our family through the lens of the US GDP at large, well, I produce value for the economy right now and my kid is a value sink and will be for a long time even in the best case scenario.

We're not going to stay locked down until we have a vaccine, though. I believe we need to find a way to talk about #2 openly, in public, with no sense of shame or taboo. There will be massive disagreements, and we need to work through that, because we do need to get on top of this shit.

I really wish we had a competent federal response; on the other hand, we're getting this weird balkanization now that might ultimately be beneficial to me personally, but if so it's changing things about America.

 

[Bill Bauer]

you can't really effectively isolate all high risk people

Why are we able to do it now?

We yanked our kid from childcare earlier than most people here (though only 11 days before the state closed them all),

Of course every precaution that has a reasonably low cost has got to be done. Shutting down the economy has an enormous cost.

is just slowing the burn to where people don't needlessly die of other things because of resource starvation.

It is likely that most of those gains could have been achieved at a much lower cost.

Everyone seems to be operating under the assumption that we're going to have a SARS-COV-2 vaccine in 18 months, because of the amount of money being dumped into it.

One expert mentioned the development period lasting 4-5 years...

I do not think this was something that happened by the design

The right people might have noticed an opening/opportunity...

I have read about some protests where people are doing "park outs", occupying the parking lot of a state capitol... but in cars, so, adhering to the protocol they are protesting. I sort of assume if they had no fear of disease, they would be engaging in the actual civil disobedience of a march.

I think their message is that it's ok to go to work, provided that employers provide some personal protection like masks.

US GDP at large, well, I produce value for the economy right now and my kid is a value sink and will be for a long time even in the best case scenario.

You have fewer years left in your career.

 

[Bndsmheowqhe]

Maybe,

25,239 coronavirus deaths in the US as of 04/14/20.

60,000 projected deaths in the US from Coronavirus (reduced from initial projection of 2.2 million deaths).

61,000 Flu-Associated Deaths in 2017-2018 U.S. Flu Season.

but if so, only with declared emergencies in all fifty states and stay-at-home orders.

Correlation doesn't imply causation especially when you consider that most people aren't really effectively self-isolating. Anyone that's been to a crowded big-box store in the past month for food or supplies knows what a complete joke "social distancing" is in that context.

We're supposed to believe that this is what reduced our projected death toll by a factor of 40?

Literally no one is suggesting that those measures haven't been effective

https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-...porter-challenges-the-dire-coronavirus-models

preventing the kind of resource starvation which was at the heart of the really extreme projections.

"Aside from New York, nationally there's been no health system crisis. In fact, to be truly correct, there has been a health system crisis, but the crisis is that the hospitals are empty,"

https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-...porter-challenges-the-dire-coronavirus-models

the reason the "flu" comparisons are so silly to me is that we've never had a flu that we shut the country down for,

You're effectively saying: "The overreaction was justified by virtue of the fact that we overreacted in the first place."

That would be an example circular reasoning.

It is like comparing the effects of two car crashes, one at 20mph and one at 70mph

A more appropriate analogy would be comparing the anticipated effects of two car crashes where both were traveling at 20mph but one of the vehicles was incorrectly (and irrationally) believed to be traveling at a speed of 800mph (40x greater than it actually was) because it was painted a different color.

 

[linearb]

Why are we able to do it now?

Because we're isolating everyone, in places. But this is unsustainable, for reasons we agree on.

I don't know if it was the correct call or not; my gut read is that the current administration is fairly incompetent, and so did not react at all until the cow was outside of the burning barn. It seems entirely possible to me that less drastic measures enacted much faster with surgical precision could have had a better overall outcome, but here we are.

 

[Luman]

Had Hillary Clinton won the presidency, would she have done a better job at handling this and, more importantly, would there have been fewer cases, and less deaths? I voted for her, but I doubt that it would have been better, all things considered, if she were in charge. If we're very lucky, and careful, the toll may turn out to be 100,000 or less.

 

[Bill Bauer]

the current administration is fairly incompetent

The current US administration banned flights from China back in January. It is my understanding that the current Canadian administration has been allowing flights from everywhere to land and for people to go anywhere they wanted (after clicking "no" on the touch screen in response to a question "have you been to Wuhan or Italy in the past 2 weeks") All of this time, even after the lockdown had began.

Because we're isolating everyone, in places.

If we are able to tell people to stay home, and as a result fraction X of the people over 60 are currently staying home, why wouldn't telling the older people to stay home not result in a fraction close to X staying home?

Had Hillary Clinton won the presidency, would she have done a better job at handling this and, more importantly, would there have been fewer cases, and less deaths?

It all depends on the answer to the question of whether she would have banned those flights earlier than January 30.

 

[Bill Bauer]

25,239 coronavirus deaths in the US as of 04/14/20.

60,000 projected deaths in the US from Coronavirus (reduced from initial projection of 2.2 million deaths).

61,000 Flu-Associated Deaths in 2017-2018 U.S. Flu Season.

Correlation doesn't imply causation especially when you consider that most people aren't really effectively self-isolating. Anyone that's been to a crowded big-box store in the past month for food or supplies knows what a complete joke "social distancing" is in that context.

View attachment 38189

We're supposed to believe that this is what reduced our projected death toll by a factor of 40?

https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-...porter-challenges-the-dire-coronavirus-models

"Aside from New York, nationally there's been no health system crisis. In fact, to be truly correct, there has been a health system crisis, but the crisis is that the hospitals are empty,"

https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-...porter-challenges-the-dire-coronavirus-models

You're effectively saying: "The overreaction was justified by virtue of the fact that we overreacted in the first place."

That would be an example circular reasoning.

A more appropriate analogy would be comparing the anticipated effects of two car crashes where both were traveling at 20mph but one of the vehicles was incorrectly (and irrationally) believed to be traveling at a speed of 800mph (40x greater than it actually was) because it was painted a different color.

I used to argue with you about this, but these days I began to come around. I am still not completely sure what to think of this disaster. It looks like a month from now things will become a little more clear.

 

[Luman]

.....It all depends on the answer to the question of whether she would have banned those flights earlier than January 30.

NYC got hits of coronavirus, from individuals coming here Europe, possibly Israel, etc., that were carrying it. Although all of it is believed to have originated in China, it's hard to track it after that, in a city like New York simply because of the huge population of people who come and go from everywhere.

 

[Bill Bauer]

NYC got hits of coronavirus, from individuals coming here Europe, possibly Israel, etc., that were carrying it. Although all of it is believed to have originated in China, it's hard to track it after that, in a city like New York simply because of the huge population of people who come and go from everywhere.

Yes, it would have been wise to not allow any flights from the countries that hadn't banned flights from China. At least in the US they suspended flights from Europe on March 12.

It seems to me that New York has so many infections as a result of people's reliance on public transportation...

 

[Jack V]

Disagreeing with unsubstantiated claims and pointing out the specific flaws in your arguments hardly qualifies as "wearing someone down."

I was referring to @lcj's earlier response, because it so perfectly reflected my own.

Your comments are plain to see for anyone that wants to go back and look for themselves. It was textbook passive aggressive behavior and as is typical for someone engaging in that type of conduct you're now attempting to gaslight me by feigning ignorance about it.

We have literally only interacted once - in this thread - and your reactions are wildly disproportionate (speaking of disproportionate reactions).

"As to why the foam dropped off. As it turned out, to be environmentally friendly, NASA had eliminated the use of Freon in foam production, Mr. Katnik reported. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., later concluded that the absence of Freon led to the detachment of the foam."

"A videotape made by a team of NASA scientists at the Jan. 16 liftoff appeared to show a bushel-basket-sized chunk of debris breaking away from the external fuel tank and striking the fragile protective tiles on the underside of the left wing. A NASA analysis suggested the impact could have damaged a swath of tile as large as 7 inches wide and 32 inches long, according to an agency memorandum made public yesterday."

The non-problematic foam was unnecessarily replaced with 'environmentally friendly' foam which broke off during liftoff damaging the tiles that eventually led to the destruction of the spacecraft upon reentry. The vague talk of "NASA culture" contributing to the accident is a convenient way of sidestepping the real issue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/...report-warned-of-damage-to-tiles-by-foam.html

Five complete Space Shuttle orbiter vehicles were built and flown on a total of 135 missions.

133 successful missions. 2 failed missions. That means that close to 99% of all shuttle missions were completed without incident.

So you googled an article, great.

If you're genuinely interested, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued a comprehensive report that provides extraordinarily specific information regarding the technical as well as organizational causes. I wouldn't recommend going through it just to understand the metaphor, but if you've got time on your hands, it's a pretty good read.

That being said...

It's still an intellectually sloppy comparison. A passenger on a Space Shuttle mission was 11,200x more likely to die during their flight than a passenger on a commercial airliner. Based on the latest projections the average US citizen is about as likely to die from the Coronavirus as they were from the 2017-2018 Flu season.

That's a straw-man argument if ever there was one. I never said that we had a complete understanding of the virus or that we could know with absolute certainty that it wouldn't become a more serious problem. I simply pointed out that based on the facts we had available to us at the time the response was disproportionate to the actual threat when objectively compared to the handling of similar public health crises. That wasn't an unreasonable assessment of the situation given that the doomsday scenarios involving millions of deaths in the US alone have been downgraded to less than that of a bad flu season.

You're ignoring important variables such as mitigation. The whole world essentially screeched to a stop, exactly to avoid doomsday scenarios. And even so, hospitals are renting refrigerator trucks to store corpses. When was the last time that happened?

And what is a "similar public health crisis?" The 1918 Spanish Flu?

 

[Luman]

Yes, it would have been wise to not allow any flights from the countries that hadn't banned flights from China. At least in the US they suspended flights from Europe on March 12.

It seems to me that New York has so many infections as a result of people's reliance on public transportation...

Yes, you're right. And we have to rely on elevators, apartment buildings, etc. I think my wife caught it in February at a gym that she goes to, and I probably caught it from her, although neither of us were tested.

I remember when, some time ago, a couple of years maybe, you mentioned something about being very careful, regarding germs from other people. I thought at the time, that you were perhaps taking it a bit too far. Not any more, Prof., not any more, lol.

 

[Bill Bauer]

You're ignoring important variables such as mitigation. The whole world essentially screeched to a stop, exactly to avoid doomsday scenarios.

No, the exaggerated estimates were also made about the case where the world screeched to a stop.

 

[Bndsmheowqhe]

I was referring to @lcj's earlier response, because it so perfectly reflected my own

You're like two peas in a pod.

We have literally only interacted once

The good news is that Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder as a standalone condition and as defined in the DSM IV was removed in the updated DSM V. The bad news is that it's still considered dysfunctional behavior and is frequently associated with other Cluster B personality disorders.

So you googled an article, great.

I simply advanced the generally accepted explanation for the Columbia disaster. It actually serves to make the overall comparison you're trying to draw incrementally less asinine by lowering the rate of death to a mere 5602x more likely on a per flight basis than commercial air-travel.

You're ignoring important variables such as mitigation.

That's an awfully fancy way of saying that you were wrong.

The whole world essentially screeched to a stop, exactly to avoid doomsday scenarios.

Translation: "We needlessly collapsed the economy in order to avoid a doomsday scenario that was never going to happen."

And what is a "similar public health crisis

The 2017-2018 Influenza season.

https://cnsnews.com/article/interna...ate-45-million-flu-cases-61000-flu-associated

"an estimated 61,000 flu-associated deaths."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...irus-deaths-may-be-60-000-halving-projections

"Fauci lowers U.S. coronavirus death forecast to 60,000."

 

[linearb]

No, the exaggerated estimates were also made about the case where the world screeched to a stop.

Which estimate(s), specifically?

 

[Bill Bauer]

Which estimate(s), specifically?

100,000 - 200,000 (see above) and even larger estimates before that.

 

[Bill Bauer]

Thought-provoking...
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

 

[Bill Bauer]

hospitals are renting refrigerator trucks to store corpses

The reason for it is explained beginning at 7:11 in the following informative video:



Basically there are regulations in New York (and four other states) that require crematoriums to be owned by cemeteries. This limits the number of crematoriums that can open there. COVID-19 bodies can't be buried (as embalming might endanger the people at the funeral home), and the nonsensical regulations resulted in an unreasonably small number of crematories to exist there. It would appear that this part of the crisis had been artificially made. I am not sure how one could trust any media source that hasn't clarified this when they reported on crematoriums being overwhelmed.

 

[linearb]

I guess I am sliding towards the center on this issue, because I do not think the current level of lockdown is sustainable. Additionally, interstate travel being what it is, the effect of regional lockdowns will become more limited once there's thoroughfare traffic, especially in urban places.

The leftward take on this I see, repudiates market-based analysis entirely: "you can't put a price on human lives!". That's hopelessly naive, of course you can, it's foundation to the tort system. There is a grisly calculus to that but it's a conversation we need to have rationally.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/04/us-coronavirus-outbreak-out-control-test-positivity-rate/610132/

The U.S. did almost 25 times as many tests on April 15 as on March 15, yet both the daily positive rate and the overall positive rate went up in that month. If the U.S. were a jar of 330 million jelly beans, then over the course of the outbreak, the health-care system has reached in with a bigger and bigger scoop. But every day, 20 percent of the beans it pulls out are positive for COVID-19. If the outbreak were indeed under control, then we would expect more testing—that is, a larger scoop—to yield a smaller and smaller proportion of positives. So far, that hasn't happened.
...
The prevalence of COVID-19 might be higher in the New York area than anywhere else in the country, but high test-positivity rates are not confined to the mid-Atlantic. Five other states have a positive rate above 20 percent: Michigan, Georgia, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Colorado. They are spread across the country, and they all have obviously serious outbreaks. Each of the eight states with positive rates over 20 percent has, individually, reported more COVID-19 deaths than South Korea.
...
But there is another way to interpret the decline in new cases: The growth in the number of new tests completed per day has also plateaued. Since April 1, the country has tested roughly 145,000 people every day with no steady upward trajectory. The growth in the number of new cases per day, and the growth in the number of new tests per day, are very tightly correlated.

This tight correlation suggests that if the United States were testing more people, we would probably still be seeing an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases. And combined with the high test-positivity rate, it suggests that the reservoir of unknown, uncounted cases of COVID-19 across the country is still very large.

 

[linearb]

The next week, seems to be where we'll see models collide, break down, or not.

3 weeks ago, we were at ~5k dead in the US; 2 weeks ago, 10k. A week ago, 20k. We're set to crest 40K tonight (38,664 now, though the trend we've seen the last 3 weeks is lower numbers over the weekend and then a catch-up Monday).

The models showing 60K through august -- that means that the total death count, between now and then (73 daus), is not higher than the total number from the last 7 days.

Remember that the original basis of some of this model was the Wuhan numbers -- which were revised upwards by 25% in the last week.

I'm not trying to prognosticate doom; I don't think anyone knows what the fuck is going on, so people are just making their best guess and their willingness to socially distance or shelter in place without protesting about it is closely tied to their ability to continue to eat and pay for a roof over their heads while doing so.

edit: actually that model seems to show 60,000 through 6/1, and then no more than 100 total after that. This seems... optimistic?