I know what you wrote. And I knew that while it came across as incredibly racist, it was written poorly enough that it could have been an honest mistake. So instead of just directly calling you out on it, I gave you multiple opportunities to correct the record.
Moderator Note
Let’s not make accusations of racism in this forum. If you want to do so, take it to the Pit.
Colibri
Quarantine Zone Moderator
Moving to Great Debates.
I notice that the model on that page gives ‘predictions’ for all days from April 21, whereas it’s now actually the 24th (25th for me :)) so we can see how well they’re holding up:
21st - predicted 2465, actual 2683
22nd - predicted 2020, actual 2358
23rd - predicted 1924, actual 2340
24th - predicted 1818, currently 1858 (day not over yet, usually adds a few hundred before the switch over, very likely to be over 2200 by that point)
Data from the Worldometers page.
Also, their predictions for dropoffs in daily deaths is unbelievably steep compared to all the countries who reached their peaks earlier (have a look at the 91-divoc site and look at daily deaths for basically anywhere - Italy, Spain, SK, China). No other country has yet experienced daily deaths going down as quickly as they came up.
So yes, for both those reasons, that model is not a reliable one
I’m not reading three pages here so I don’t know how the conversation is going but to the OP I’ve been broke all my life. But I don’t need to be willing to lose my job because I work online and my boss is making bank on this virus what with the online shoppers and the various institutions switching to online classes. I’ll be fine for another few months like this. There are jobs like mine out there. It’s not a huge amount of money but I have been averaging between 10 and 16 dollars an hour for the past few weeks. . .but I never got myself in to debt so I’ll be fine. My daughter was working in a grocery store doing merchandising. She quit because she didn’t feel safe before they started laying people off so she got no unemployment. She found some online work to tide her over too. There’s stuff out there. They may not pay that great but it will keep our rent and internet paid for at least six months and we’ve only left the house a couple of times to do grocery pick-ups.
This is the beauty of never living beyond our means I guess.
And no I don’t think the restrictions should be lifted AT ALL until we stop having an uptick in cases. Sadly my state governor doesn’t feel the same way. I hate to see him gambling with people’s health and lives like this but luckily my county isn’t so quick to “fix the economy”.
The primary issue with that model is the below assumption that they have, admittedly, built into it.
The intent of their model is to help healthcare administrators and government officials make plans. Unfortunately, if those officials don’t follow the recommendations, the model falls completely apart. As a prime example, this is what their model says about the state of Georgia:
In case you missed the news where even Trump says that Kemp might be jumping the gun, the state isn’t planning on staying the course until June 22nd (they were already using fewer social distancing measures than recommended by the IHME, and they just loosened them even more today).
Oops.
Those assumptions haven’t changed since they started publishing the predictions, as far as I can tell. I’ve been following their predictions for a little over a month and I recall that always being there.
Their predictions are somewhat optimistic in that sense, so you make a good point.
On the other hand, their own predictions have been shifting greatly over time. Same assumptions, different outcomes. That points to a lessened impact as more has been learned. A lessened impact leads to the conclusion we can start opening up.
The states that opened today will be very interesting experiments, to be sure. On the news they portrayed salons as rather busy, which argues against the point that people will stay away. Of course, if there is a spike, that is going to change. I feel a very, very great deal will be known by the end of May.
The early estimate is probably low because it was made on March 30, before the majority of the lockdowns. Using your number of 15%, that’s slightly higher than Sweden’s predicted rate. You have not cited the St. Louis Fed chair prediction that I saw. When was it made?
The source you linked for the unemployment rate says that the contraction is forecast to be 5.9%, according to the IMF.
There’s this article based on a study of the lockdowns during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic where the article says that the study concludes that places that were shut down more fully and longer had the fastest economic recovery times. Places that were locked down 8 days earlier and 48 days longer recovered faster.
Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: Evidence from the 1918 Flu [study]
There’s also evidence that during recessions, the death rate falls.
Study: Great Recession Led To Fewer Deaths
You can see this happening in New York where non-Covid hospital admissions are down from a decrease in traffic accidents, stress-induced heart attacks, decreased trauma (possibly from work related injuries), decrease in crime, etc.
Recessions also don’t have that much of an effect on the suicide rate. The US has the highest suicide rate it has had in decades. A study on the last recession was inconclusive on whether suicide rates rose because of it.
None of that is to suggest that recessions are good. It’s to say that the solutions about the lockdowns should be based on scientific evidence both about the coronavirus itself and studies about the economy as well.
If your intention is to help the people who don’t have jobs by giving them money, I share that intention. But taking salaries from working people to give to non-working people is only spreading the pain around. 78% of the country live paycheck to paycheck. Taking the paycheck of the working people to give to the non-working people just flips who now doesn’t have any money to live. IMO, the solution needs to move money from people who are rich enough not to work because the wealth is concentrated in that segment of the population. [Richest 1% of Americans Close to Surpassing Wealth of Middle Class] But that wouldn’t be enough, so there needs to also be a more broad based system to get money from everyone in a graduated way.
Looks like Sweden is increasing their lockdown policies. If they’re leading the way, they’re going in the opposite direction of relaxing their lockdown.
Sweden Steps Up Coronavirus Controls as Warm Weather Adds to Risks
I’m not sure “interesting” is the correct word to use. Deadly might be more apt. The models you referred to show zero deaths by July, but again, that is based on officials delaying these changes to the current policies to the recommended dates from the IHME. I would, sadly, take a rather large bet that at least 1 person in the US will die due to this virus after the middle of July.
Numbers are so wildly variable across the map that it’s a fools errand to try to declare a specific action as THE solution to the problem. Taiwan didn’t go into lockdown and they’ve fared very well, much better than Sweden I think.
The notion that Place X went into hard lockdowns therefore that is the reason cases are low there is a fallacy, correlation does not equal causation, as everyone here should know.
Personally my belief is that the virus is much, much more widespread than what confirmed cases show and that it’s possible there are different mutations going around with very different effects on people and locales. I don’t know if there has been any study done comparing possible virus strains between places with low impacts and places with high impacts.
For example, I live in Thailand and so far the number of confirmed deaths is around 50 since the virus was first detected in middle January (to put things into perspective is the daily number of traffic deaths), there are some lockdown measures but only for the last 3 or 4 weeks.
Not hard lockdowns though, I was at the supermarket yesterday with plenty of people milling around, hardly different than during normal times.
Then there is Italy, hit brutally; what is the difference? People here were living pretty much as normal when that unfolded and the virus had been introduced weeks earlier.
I don’t know what the variables are that cause such difference, but clearly this illustrates that one can’t draw definitive conclusions on what works or doesn’t by pointing at specific strategies.
That is because besides doing social distancing, Taiwan tested a lot (really a lot) and quarantined the ones identified as carriers. They also did what has been a bit of a no-go in the USA, hard tracking of any suspected carriers (like the ones coming from abroad) by commanding their cell phones to get their details so then the authorities can confirm that they are complying with their quarantines.
:dubious:
Because the authorities in Thailand said that the lockdown helped.
And besides social distancing, seems that masks and face shields helped, one item that the USA got it wrong early on IMHO.
social distancing costs a lot of money when it involves shutting down businesses. And considering the virus spreads before symptoms manifest themselves it’s always going to be a function of transportation, public interaction, and social customs. The horse is always going to be outside the barn when the door is shut.
I agree about masks. From a cost/benefit perspective it would be easier to make 400 million masks that reduce the zone of infection. They don’t have to filter the virus in order to stop the spread, they just need to reduce the infection zone. A simple mask that can be washed daily or multiple times a day.
Doing this allows us to concentrate on the people most susceptible since the vast majority of people can get this virus without severe consequences. Those are the people who get n-95 masks and isolation.
But all this is based on knowing what we’re dealing with ahead of time.
Now we know. Now we can focus on restoring the financial devastation it has caused and create a medical treatment that works.
I left out a sentence. It’s the vulnerable who get the N-95 masks first.
The rest can start using generic masks early-on to reduce the spread and free-up N-95 masks until production can catch up.
What would I know about how the situation is and has evolved in the place I live? :dubious:
Can you Google how the lockdown looks when I went out this morning to do groceries? Or when I met with a friend in the afternoon while half the kids in the condo were playing together?
Hardly anyone keeps distance, almost everyone uses masks… incorrectly; except the kids, none had one on.
From what I have observed of people living their everyday lives here I should be seeing people keeling over in droves for months already, according to the expectations of some here.
And yet case numbers are negligible, less than 3000 thousand out of a population of over 70 million (that’s 0.000041% of the population, deaths are 0.0000007%)
Actual evidence that restrictions on work are what has kept cases low: pretty thin on the ground.
When restrictions were implemented it was two months after the first cases were detected and reported cases stood at around 100; two months with no lockdowns of businesses, 100 cases.
As a matter of fact, restrictions here were imposed and reported cases rose afterwards. I’ve seen zero evidence that keeping people out of work with lockdowns has had any significant impact, other than something that reminds me of the joke about a rock and tigers. Sure, anything can be said to help, and as long as it’s not qualified in any way it’s next to useless to asses how effective that is in the overall scheme of things.
Meanwhile, hungry people out of a job have to line up for hours on the street to get food donations, so they get none of the supposed benefits of the lockdown theory, having to bunch up to get food to survive, and all of the downsides of having no income; but that’s OK because there is the assumption that it is the right thing to do.
And of course the assumption has to be correct, otherwise tanking the economy over a bad idea is too much to contemplate. The problem is that the assumptions are built on insufficient data, for instance nobody seems to have a good idea of what percentage of the population is or has been infected, which is pretty basic and necessary information to have for taking decisions, specially decisions with very harmful, long lasting consequences.
Choosing to go by as GIGObuster you should know that using incomplete or unreliable data to effect outcomes is bad practice.
Aspidistra’s reply in post 104 said a lot of what I was going to say. I’d just add that they have the death toll dropping over 100 per day so that by May 1st, it projects just 1,000 deaths. This seems insanely optimistic. I don’t know what type of model they’re using, but it is clearly wrong.
As for the data and sources I use, I’ve just been looking at the numbers every day for the U.S., individual states, and other countries. I can’t predict what the actual number of deaths will be, but it will clearly exceed 70k.
So, who is the IHME? With a quick Google search, I found this article from April 14: US COVID-19 deaths “poorly predicted” by IHME model
:eek: This is bad.
I get your perspective except I think it’s missing some detail. When this started we didn’t know what to expect. Based on different versions of the virus it was thought that it would double every 6 days. However, when you look at the death rate it was doubling at less then 3 days.
Starting with 115 actual deaths on March 17 and doubling it every 6 days we would be at 15,000 by the end of April. But doubling every 3 days puts the number at 1.8 million.
If we knew that young healthy people tended to survive the disease we might have chosen a different path and diverted funds to the elderly and those with per-existing conditions. But we didn’t. All we knew is New York city spun out of control in a matter of weeks and we would be overwhelmed if that continued to other cities. We would have run out of medical personnel and that would have been it.
This is staggeringly illogical.
We’re talking about a virus that spreads primarily among closely-packed population groups and is extra-deadly to old folks.
In your first paragraph, you compare the death rates for some of the most closely-packed Americans to the death rates for an entire country. Sweden has a population density of 26 people per square mile. NYC, by contrast, has a population density a little above 26 THOUSAND people per square mile. And you’re gonna try to compare the death rates in these two geographic areas?
In your second paragraph, you point out that deaths are happening disproportionately in nursing homes. Uh, yeah. That’s where you have high population densities of elderly people, and where it’s really hard to engage in appropriate social distancing, since often people don’t have kitchens and meals are often served in cafeterias.
The social distancing measures we’ve engaged in so dramatically have brought death rates down dramatically. Your argument is akin to saying, “Look at those vast areas of land along the coast where there are life guards, the numbers of drowning victims are way higher there than anywhere inland, these life guards are useless.”
Not sure of the exact date. Not long ago. A quick google search should turn it up for you.
Fair enough. I’ve seen other places that said it would be much higher. It is pure speculation, so pick a number you like and find a cite for it. This could go back and forth a lot because no one really knows.
Yep, I’ve read that many times. St. Louis vs. Philadelphia, I think. I’m just not going to put a lot of trust in a study that is looking at events over 100 years old dealing with economies that were VASTLY different.
I’ll have to read this later. I read part of it. It says the death rate was among the general population, not just the unemployed. It is possible gains in one area offset losses in another, but that is a stretch.
I can equally point to studies that link deaths to unemployment. Again, we can play the game of finding cites as much as you’d like. Well, no, we can’t, because while I truly do appreciate your considered and measured responses, what is clear to me is that no matter what position one takes there studies to back it up. We’ve kind of shown that each, no? We are in uncharted waters.
I never claimed higher deaths were due to suicide rates. I suspect they are due to uninsured, which is what my original claim was about, not directly because of a recession. So there is a huge difference in what you are citing vs. what I’m claiming. Additionally, I don’t have a study to show that people are more likely to suffer stress, anxiety and fear when they are laid off. Is that not self-evident?
You are saying we can’t take the money from those that are working and there isn’t enough money from those that are rich enough to not have to work. Where is the money going to come from? MANY of the people who have been laid off were living paycheck to paycheck and now THEY have no paycheck at all. Again, my stance is that if you went to many of those people and asked if they were willing to work for benefits only for the next several months, they’d take it in a heartbeat.
Did you read that cite? It says no such thing. It says they are considering it and may adopt a stricter enforcement. It doesn’t come close to saying they are actively going into lockdown.
To address the op:
Hell no.
To forestall similar questions:
Shit no.
For the love of god, no way.
What the fuck? Of course not.
Let me think about it for a minute nope.
Possibly.
yes the social distancing brought the rates down. That’s not the argument. The argument is whether it was the most cost effective method.
If we focused on nursing homes early on we may have cut the death rate in half and at a much smaller cost.
You can smother a fire with bundles of $100 bills or you can throw .25 cents worth of water on it. The results are the same. It’s important to get the best results for the least amount of money because those efficiencies mean lives.