I can tell you about a thing called Time. Interesting concept, Time. Sometimes there is plenty of it and sometimes there is not enough
I take your point, but it has now been six months since the end of April. How much time would we need? There seems to be almost zero inclination to even progress in that direction, from what I can see. Apart from, I suppose, a few court cases that have begun to weigh in.
Well it looks to me that the Trump gamble of opening up to pretend things are ‘getting back to normal’ and ‘we are just around the corner’ in time for the vote is now starting to show up the price that the US must pay.
Please bear in mind that things are going to get very much worse after the election sonce deaths trail infections by several weeks - these are currently rising but really only relate to infections that happened in early October, since that time the infections per day has more than doubled - by the time these feed into mortality statistics all the election business will be well over.
This was a cynical calculation to open up - pure and simple, the question posed was ‘How early can we open up so that we can claim the pandemic is under control before the mortalities kick in and our lies are exposed?’
I made this claim upthread a while ago, and I’ve been surprised that no-one seemed to comment on it - well here we are, infections rising, states opened up, election staring us down and deaths to follow - and it gets ignored - makes me feel like Cassandra.
This was not a difficult prediction to make - I think that campaigners for Democrats should have made more of it, there is still time.
Well, how do you feel that Florida is doing? Or New York?
The flu doesn’t kill millions of people. COVID, with wholesale shutdowns, has killed 4x to 20x the people (so far) that the flu kills, without shutdowns. That is OUR point.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
I predict we’ll see 1400+ deaths per day by Thanksgiving, based on the current number of cases per day.
To add to that, I still don’t think it makes any sense to compare covid to the flu until we have a covid vaccine. Or, at the very least, when drawing a comparison between the flu and covid (regardless of if they’re saying it’s worse/the same/not as bad as the flu), it should be mentioned that approximately half the population (at least in the US) gets the flu vaccine each year.
Whatever the numbers are, I’m assuming they’re going to spike a week or two after Thanksgiving and an even bigger spike after Christmas/New Years.
By that I meant charts like this one for the US (if you scroll down):
And this one for Europe:
The one for Europe shows the excess deaths from the spring to all but disappeared. The one for the US shows it now trending down the threshold, with a smaller second wave before that than the initial surge in the spring.
This was to address the question of what at a data level, if anything, it takes to call something an epidemic or pandemic – or, when to say it’s over.
I don’t think think this is true. Deaths follow a rise in infectious rates of people vulnerable to the disease. It matters what demographic is getting infected. Most people aren’t affected by it in a serious way. If the rise in infections is in young people and they’re separated from the vulnerable there won’t be a substantial rise in deaths. The reverse is also true. If it hits a nursing home the count goes up.
As for politics it’s the lead story of every news cast. If you believe the narrative helps then it’s a tremendous amount of free campaigning.
I think that this is exactly where we’ll be UFN. Enough people worldwide, either due to poverty, incompetent government, or sheer personal stupidity / selfishness / cussedness will ensure that humanity never gets rid of COVID. It’ll be here to rise up and smite an unacceptable fraction of the population in any country that doesn’t work hard to keep the lid on. Forever.
Some countries will do that through internal and/or external border controls, aggressive masking, mandatory vaccinations once available, prevention / prohibition of spreader events, etc., and powerful contract tracing to catch and quarantine the inevitable leakers who get exposed or infected despite the precautions.
Other countries will declare that approach “too hard” or “too expensive” or “too socialist” and instead will play their response half-assed. With the result that they will remain sickly, both physically and economically, for however many decades it takes until they wise up.
Any plausible vaccine is like a mask, a capacity restriction in a restaurant, or a prohibition against large indoor gatherings. It’s just a partially effective filter that will reduce some fraction of the transmission that will naturally happen. The more filters we can install and maintain, the better the outcome. But a filter with a big hole in it due to non-participation by the public, is no better than a mask not covering a nose. The disease runs rampant through the wide-open nostrils.
Late add.
My bottom line:
The thing that makes COVID unique among human diseases is the lengthy infectious-but-asymptomatic period. Which may run the entirety of many people’s infection. Lucky for them not to get symptoms. Unlucky for anyone else they breath on or near for about 3 weeks. It’s the perfect storm for a society of short-sighted individualists.
(It didn’t let me embed the link in the quote.)
Did you read the figure notes? “Data are incomplete because of the lag in time between when the death occurred and when the death certificate is completed”
Let me give you an example with hard numbers. The current data ends on week-ending Oct 17. The predicted (weighted) number of deaths for week ending Aug 29 is 60,053.
Deaths for week-ending Aug 29 using data from week ending:
Oct 17 - 60,053
Oct 10 - 59,782
Oct 03 - 59,511
Sep 26 - (no data)
Sep 19 - 58,601
Sep 12 - 57,574
So, as you can see, they backfill the numbers as more data becomes available. What looks like a drop in excess deaths recently is just incomplete data. I know all the numbers because I’ve been downloading the files for over a month from that link you gave.
This is link to the file week-ending Oct 17: https://data.cdc.gov/api/views/xkkf-xrst/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD&bom=true&format=true%20target=
I accept all that, of course. I wasn’t trying to claim that excess deaths are now zero, or anything along those lines. I meant only that they appear to have reduced considerably in the case of the US and near completely in the case of Europe, as two large examples. Do you know if there is any kind of consensus threshold for a definition of pandemic (if such a thing even has any intrinsic value)? Since you’ve been following this so closely, what insights have you gleaned that might predict where things are heading, if any?
What I’ve been seeing more and more is that the infectious period is thought to be considerably shorter than three weeks. Like, around one third that span. Not sure it changes anything, to your points. Except, I suppose, that people probably wouldn’t need to self-quarantine for 21 days.
Again with the denialism - deaths will rise just as infections have risen - they may rise at a different rate, precentage or whatever metric you choose, they will rise as night follows day.
You view is partly an obstacle to doing something effective and contributes to the overall idea that it’s just ‘them’ that get it and die and not ‘us’ and this feeds directly into the mentality of doing less rather than more - which in turn drives behaviours and results in an increasing infection rate.
This artificial divide between the ‘vulnerable’ and all the rest of us is so very dangerous - many folk will not even realise they are vulnerable, many folk will deny they are vulnerable - I have seen plenty of what I would imagine are very vulnerable people behaving pretty stupidly - you perhaps would say they are being fatalistic - cold comfort to relatives, or other people who they might infect.
Ultimate Fight Night?
Unbalanced Feistel Network?
Until Further Notice?
User Friendly Naming?
None of the above?
I may have missed where you spelled this out earlier??
Unfortunately (I think).
That’s how I read it.
Cool. That’s a fun puzzle and you win!
Only, it shouldn’t be a puzzle, IMHO, and should be spelled out by the author. I wouldn’t harp on it except we are seeing so much of it on the SDMB and it’s Facebook-level laziness.
Plus it stands out because it’s not really like LSLGuy to do that sort of thing.
Shutdown was not meant to be eternal. It was meant as a stopgap intervention to give time to implement other controls. 1. Stop the initial spike. 2. Prevent overwhelming medical services. 3. Implement widespread testing to identify not just patients, but trends, who is more susceptible, which communities need more help, etc. 4. Add workplace controls like masks, barriers, better air flow, filtration, etc. 5. Get the infection levels low enough to allow contact tracing to be effective. 6. Implement and enforce self isolation and quarantining. 7. Develop better medical responses as we learn about the disease, such as that intubation is not as successful as with other respiratory diseases, and therapeutics that work. 8. Eventually develop safe vaccines that effectively prevent infection as well as reduce the severity of infection for those who do get it.
Some of those have been performed better than others. We can argue about how better understanding of the disease is having a good effect on the death rate of the disease, and vaccines are in work at a rapid pace, and some therapeutics have been developed.
But compliance with restrictions is too low, fed by paranoia about government supressing freedoms as a means of controlling the people, individualists who think they know better than the experts, and foreign involvement through social media to sew chaos.
And the federal administration has hindered the very steps that allow a safer reopening. They refused to coordinate PPE and ventilator supplies, then commandeered the supplies the states acquired themselves. They delayed and minimized any use of the Defense Authorization Act. They did not roll out existing testing, choosing instead to develop their own, which caused delays by a a faulty test, and then inadequate access to tests and supplies to hit the levels necessary to provide control. And the President has undercut the value of testing by arguing our high case count statistics are due to more testing, and our numbers would be lower if we did less testing. Which is true that we would have lower case counts with fewer asymptomatic cases found, but wouldn’t affect hospitalizations or deaths, or of it did it would be negatively.
A stronger, faster, more consistent response and better compliance from the citizenry would allow more reopening while keeping spread lower.
So why are you discussing the flu in a thread about covid? The whole point of mentioning the flu is to contrast the response between the seasonal flu and covid. You are arguing that since we do not shut down for the flu, we shouldn’t have to shut down for covid. Thus the need to stress that the diseases are different, so different responses are warranted