All the plans to reopen the economy are terrible in different ways

The Quarantine Zone
81

From the Romer website you linked to:
“This is not the type of model one can use to capture the actual course of the disease.” I don’t think you can conclude 22 million tests/day is sufficient to snuff out the virus since his own disclaimer is that it can’t be used to capture the course of the disease.

1.6 million is better than what we have now, but it isn’t insignificant. And we need to deal with the ramifications of those false positives. Kids missing two weeks of school and the parents then missing work to stay home with them, for example.

82

I am getting fed up with a certain “hey, we’re staying locked up til we figure this all out” attitude. I’m fine with some caution but the current situation simply will not stand. Guage your future pronouncements accordingly, government folks. “This is the new normal until whenever” isn’t acceptable, I’m afraid.

83

NYC reports twice as many deaths (all causes) as usual (cite) so ~2X excess deaths. The latest annual stats I find from the CDC are for 2018 and count 2.8+ million deaths. WAG a 2020 excess death rate of ~1.35X and around a million excess deaths in 2020 are quite possible from COVID, with COVID, and collateral damage. I still fear it’ll be much higher.

84

A million excess deaths is ludicrous. We are at approximately 25 thousand right confirmed C-19 deaths right now. You are predicting 100 000 deaths a month for the rest of the year. How can you defend such ridiculous shit? And you fear much higher?

Look, it was wise to be cautious early on but this disease is clearly not as dangerous as we thought three months ago.

85

Since all dead aren’t tested for COVID, and all deaths aren’t reported immediately, we can’t depend on “confirmed C-19 deaths” and I didn’t specify that criterion. To see the virus impact, count excess deaths. That heart attack patient dying on a gurney in the corridor because the hospital was overloaded may (or not) have been COVID positive but that’s irrelevant - “collateral damage” still means “dead”.

86

What the fuck ever, dude. You are predicting a million deaths caused by covid. And you are tying to act like everyone who stayed at home for a heart attack can be blamed on covid rather than sharing that blame with stay at home orders.

87

Which ‘stay at home order’ even suggested that symptoms of a heart attack were not grounds to leave your house and seek emergency medical treatment?

CMC fnord!

88

The ones that say “no unnecessary leaving the house” when someone wants a good excuse to pretend they aren’t have a heart attack. A big percentage of people do that, which you’d know if you had a clue. People almost always downplay serious symptoms and this lockdown is giving people a big fat excuse to do that.

89

COVID-19: Are Acute Stroke Patients Avoiding Emergency Care?

Anyway, sorry. Just getting a little sick of your “I’m smarter than everyone” one liners that don’t demonstrate the implied extra smartness.

90

I did not predict “deaths caused by covid” but EXCESS deaths in 2020, whether on not a corpse tests positive. We cannot know how many deaths are due to COVID infection because inadequate testing but we can count how many more died than last year. Yes, deaths due to COVID-overloaded medical facilities count. Yes, people dying at home because they can’t get to care count.

Parallel: Xena is high-walking a tightrope. Yolo fires a pistol in Xena’s general direction and kills Zed. Xena is not hit but, startled, falls on Walt, fatal for both. Zed is “dead by gunshot”. Xena and Walt are collateral damage. How many did Yolo kill?

91

So, you’re gonna blame the order and not the people using the existence of the order to make bad, and unsupported by the order, choices? Fascinating!

CMC fnord!

92

Yeah, fascinating that I make connections between things. Bizarre even.

93

Let me do a mea culpa. At the beginning of this, I scoffed at the costs of people being told to stay home. That seemed ridiculous in the face of millions of dead. Millions of dead doesn’t seem a reasonable concern anymore.

94

Yeah, I’m that guy: cite please.

NO ONE yet knows how close or far various areas are from levels that might result in herd immunity … or even how many have been infected and resolved. NO ONE knows how long a specific germ will take to result in herd immunity until they minimally know what the true number in the functionally resolved bucket is. There is no freakin’ “average” that has ANY meaning to this specific circumstance. We at best have some hints that allow for some discussions about educated guesses.

IF the true infection rate is close to the reported confirmed test number rates then herd immunity is a long long way away. I don’t anyone who knows anything who believes that the true infection rate is close to the reported confirmed test number rates however, or even close to the true significantly symptomatic rate. Hell even if every significantly symptomatic person was tested (and likely that is off by at least an order of magnitude) the result would likely underestimate the true number by 30% just based on the test’s false negative rate under fairly ideal circumstances. Then add in the apparent at least 5 asymptomatic infections to every symptomatic ones.

Not to get too jargony here, but the result of those if true is a shitload of infections out there already, herd immunity already a factor in some locations, and almost assuredly going to be a factor long before a vaccine is available almost everywhere.

Is that if true? No where close? I don’t know, YOU DON’T KNOW, none of the models YET KNOW. Conclusive data is still lacking but likely won’t be for too much longer, from several different sorts of inputs. So playing with what if approaches based on what the data MIGHT show is good planning. Have the various contingencies thought about. But wait until the actual data is in hand before declaring with confidence what THE RIGHT approach is or is not, don’t just shit on stuff you don’t know Jack Shit about. The Jack Shitlessness by the way not being a ding on you, because those who know the best know the magnitude of our shared collective Jack Shitlessness, even as they choose one assumption or another. You wanna make your GUESS go ahead, but for the love of whatever can people here stop declaring bullshit statements as fact?

I for one will be not at all surprised if the rate of presumptive immunity by antibody testing to SARS-CoV-2 is 30 to 40% or higher among adults in NYC, Spain, and Italy. If so then those areas can likely re-open in a controlled but somewhat expedient manner. If not then reopening has to be much more cautiously gradual. We will at least have some sense of which of those is closer to true within a few weeks and by then also be able see how different models of re-opening are working out, in Spain, Denmark, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and more.

How about we get the key data and THEN decide what the best approaches might be?
As to the other inane discussion ongoing here. Years from now many papers will be published analyzing how many deaths in the following year to years were caused by our interventions compared to how many were prevented by them. Maybe it will end up being a slam dunk one way, or the other, or maybe analysis with the luxury of knowing what we cannot now know will show the numbers to be close or unable to be figured out with any confidence even then. But clearly what we DO causes deaths as assuredly as what we do NOT do. We don’t have the luxury of that future information yet and the possibilities on the what we do not do side range to so big that given such uncertainty the prudent decision of DO while trying to get more information seems clear for now. But trying to pretend that the DO choice causes no deaths is very specious. It may be, seems to be, the right choice given what we do and do not currently know, but it is one that is causing and will cause many deaths also. Even if those deaths are less in the news when they occur.

You want to go with silly analogies? Okay. The analogy that holds better is not the high wire act, but that SARS-CoV-2 is a terrorist holding 30 people hostage and has killed one person already. You decide to storm the building. Storming the building you end up shooting 5 of the hostages while aiming for the terrorists in the fog of battle. It may have been the right choice, maybe more would have died if you did not act, you had been convinced (maybe correctly, maybe not) that the terrorist was otherwise going to kill them all, but you still are the one who killed the five, not the terrorist, and their deaths are still a weight upon the choice you made, even if it was the right one.

95

I think it’s fairly self-evident that a lot of “should I go to the ER or just wait this out?” questions are judgment calls. There are obviously severe cases where the answer is obviously “yes, and call an ambulance immediately” or trivial symptoms where the answer is fairly obviously “no”. But there are many borderline cases where you have to try to make an educated decision, and the above-cited paper suggests that the pandemic may be influencing those decisions.

When I had mild but persistent chest pains several years ago I was uncertain for days whether I should go to the ER, mainly because of the hassle of it all. Finally, pretty much on a whim, like a coin toss, I decided to go. In the present pandemic situation I definitely would not have gone until and unless it turned much worse. It turned out that my blood pressure was through the roof and I was unknowingly having a mild heart attack which had already done some cardiac damage, though not seriously. The arbitrary decision to go to the ER may well have saved my life or at least prevented serious complications. The greater inclination now for hospital avoidance is likely to have some impact, but I think it’s impossible to guess how much.

96

I’d argue that if we could even test one or two percent of the population per day, it would probably be good enough to spot flare-ups, and then you could target those areas with something much closer to a 100% testing sweep. Whether we can even test that many, I don’t know.

97

Here in Oz, we have received our latest roadmap our from our political masters. Much of this depends upon our current reasonably good numbers. So:

Not much will change for four weeks. After that, careful and managed opening up in consort with three pillars.
[ol]
[li]Lots of community testing. We are only just opening up testing to anyone who thinks they need a test. Previously you needed clear symptoms. :)[/li][li]Tracking. This means a smart-phone app. There is talk of needing at least 40% uptake in the community to make it work. (I have no idea why 40%). Uptake will be interesting. A friend of mine in the medical community (ex ICU nurse) point blank said there was no chance she would be downloading it. I’m OK with it (and I’m the computer geek with some security background.) :dubious:[/li][li]Ability for targeted shut-downs of areas. Up to and including calling out the military to close down an area. :eek:[/li][/ol]

I can see a some of these measures getting nowhere in other countries. So YMMV.

There remains some talk of achieving actual elimination of the virus, but mostly as a far off hope. OTOH, there is some talk of opening boarders with New Zealand. Making a little Pacific bubble of virus free freedom.

How well we will go remains an open question. But that is where we are today.

98

My god, you think people are all just assholes, don’t you?

But to address your specific point, since I doubt there will be an ‘at-home’ test available any time soon, the payments would require a lab-certified positive result.

99

It depends on your assumptions. We have been under lockdown for about 5 weeks now, and are seeing deaths around 2,000-2,500 per day. That rate is over 60k dead per month. Not too far off of your 100k per month.

What would that rate be if we had open schools, St. Patrick’s day parades, and March Madness, and Baseball Opening Day, and SRO Easter Services?

We’ve thrown a lot of resources at containing this thing and people are dying pretty damn quick anyway. If we open up the economy I don’t see a million deaths as ludicrous, because I don’t think we’ve stopped COVID from being dangerous, we’ve just slowed down how fast it kills.

100

60k is quite a bit less than 100k.