You are at a loss? You randomly chose two bad off countries and two better off ones as examples that prove unspecified measures worked. Like I should just pretend you’re dumb enough to not realize a small, mostly rural, less traveled island country like New Zealand might have some advantages that Italy might not. And pretend you don’t realize South Korea implemented some policies that would be basically impossible in Spain.
I do not know what the origin of your hostility is but in thread after thread in this forum I’ve witnessed you aggressively confronting people over trivial offenses and supposed insults that are of strictly your own imagination.
You asked for real world evidence in the difference between measures to limit contagion and the lack thereof, and these are real world examples that demonstrate a qualitative difference in outcomes based upon policies. If what you are looking for is controlled randomized studies delineating the differences between implementing a specific policy versus the null hypothesis to a statistical degree of confidence, these do not exist because that would be a controlled experiment that no one is capable of running for reasons which I and others have explicated.
The public policy recommendations of limiting travel, closing businesses, et cetera, are derived from a combination of epidemic modeling, recommendations based upon past experience, and “common sense” evaluations of what is feasible to do, e.g. no one has recommended closing grocery stores because the vast majority of residents do not have a several month stockpile of supplies or the ability to grow their food. The scientifically specified absolute parameters that you and the o.p. are looking for do not exist because real life is not a controlled experiment and we cannot run a Monte Carlo simulation of societal response to pandemic that gives precise estimates of mortality.
Stranger
If you want to look for patterns in the data relative to restrictions, one useful pairing is Google’s movement data
And one of the more useful graphical representation sites:
However there are caveats. It is not a good idea to compare countries directly. Google note that their categorisations of movements have intrinsic differences between countries, and different countries have different patterns of movement ordinarily. Movement data is useful within a country. But what is useful is you can see when movement restrictions began, and how long they took to take hold. But the raw percentage of change can’t be compared between countries.
Case rate comparison between countries is also very hard to compare. Japan appears to still only test people on admission to hospital. Deaths are perhaps more consistent, but there remain significant variabilities in how deaths are counted. None the less, for most countries, lining up infection and death data, and comparing that with movement restriction data shows a pretty clear correlation, and produces some reasonably consistent numbers for the lag effects.
What is interesting, is that irrespective of the government restrictions, most country’s populations started to noticeably restrict movement on about March 15th.
Google’s movement data works for people who own Android phones. So application to poor countries isn’t possible.
I find it very strange that no country (that I have heard about) has said, “We believe that the current measures have saved x number/% of people at a cost of a, and continuing them for an additional y months will save z number/% of people at a cost of b.”
Ranges would be fine. Anything! If they were to say, “We’ve saved between 50,000 and 500,000 people so far,” that would be a start.
Not to even take a stab at it while, for example, decrying the protesters as bad/stupid/etc. is pretty much unconscionable.
At the very very least, if as Stranger seems to be saying they can say close to nothing, then they need to discuss that fact and why the measures are still a good idea.
The exact quote from Rumsfeld:
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
It’s interesting you mentioned because I was talking to a relative the other day about Corona and brought up the quote. There a lot of “unknown unknowns” involved here. A lot of it is guesswork that this will progress similarly to the way influenza and other coronavirus outbreak in the past and extrapolating from there. Unfortunately that isn’t perfect because:
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This Corona virus could behave differently than other viruses have in the past–throwing off past models.
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People themselves could behave and react differently than they have in the past—throwing off past models. (This is big factor in using the 1917 flu epidemic as a model because travel is a lot more easier and faster today than it was then.)
Would it be more “unconscionable” to make up figures? Because that is essentially what you are asking for. The reason that no one can say “ current measures have saved x number/% of people at a cost of a, and continuing them for an additional y months will save z number/% of people at a cost of b,” is because you would need a model based on empirical evidence to demonstrate this, and this pandemic is unprecedented in the modern era. There have been some qualitative comparisons made to the 1918 “Spanish” Flu pandemic to show that cities that maintained isolation and quarantine measures recovered economically more quickly, and such claims have been handily dismissed by opponents of such measures as not being pertinent to the modern economy. We lack more recent and applicable metrics because we have not experienced a pandemic of this extent in over a century, and we lack good data on even the absolute infectiousness and infection fatality rate to make more than wantonly speculative estimates of how many people might die with versus without. Many have ridiculed the validity of “high end” estimates that the United States could have an ultimate mortality of over a million people even though an IFR of 0.5% and uncontrolled contagion could easily double that number.
You seem to be expecting that the poindexters can punch the numbers into the mainframe and a punchcard will shoot out with a precise range of mortality estimates. This isn’t how predictive modeling works unless you have a prior basis to ground such predictions, and even then statistical variance (e.g. the proverbial “black swan” event) can result in an outcome well outside of statistically expected range.
Stranger
If what you say is true, then they need to say what you just said and explain that.
Look, if there is no theoretical cost/benefit analysis at work, then the protestors are equally correct: this is costly the economy too much for not enough benefit.
If that reasoning is clearly incorrect, then that needs to be explained.
If it comes down to, “We need to take more or less maximum measures until we’re sure this won’t kill millions,” then that needs to be advanced.
In a word, the explanations being offered are unacceptable. I mean, do you think they have been good and enough?
I’m sure there are spreadsheets out there, and my guess is that there are some good ones. My further guess is that these are not being shared for a number of not-so-good reasons:
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The spreadsheets would need to presented in layman’s terms, and no one is taking the time to do it. And/or they don’t think it would be good politically to do so.
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The policy makers don’t really understand them and can’t be assed to do so and thus are sticking with, “We’re saving, um, a bunch of people–doing otherwise would be mean!”
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Hi Opal. Sorry you’re dead but glad you don’t have to see this mess we’re in.
You think these are done with Excel spreadsheets?
Not all the number crunching–no doubt there is specialized software.
I’m an MBA. If I have a business problem, I open up Excel and start playing with the numbers. There are people I’m sure doing something similar and have an idea of what measures are accomplishing what.
…I challenge you to listen to the briefingswe’ve had in New Zealand and tell me that they haven’t been good enough. Clear, concise daily updates, under the scrutiny of the press, with the support of 90% of New Zealanders. Yet we are locked down tighter than almost anywhere else in the world, and the lockdown (at Level 4) has just been extended another week despite only 6 new cases, 3 of those from overseas and 3 related to existing clusters. No sign of community transmission. We’ve been locked down for two full transmission cycles and we will be locked down for an additional cycle at Level 3 before we start to open the economy up (to most things except overseas travel)
It all depends on who you are listening too. Obviously the US Federal government are failing in their mission. But each individual state have presented a different case for lockdown, so if you think that “the explanations are unacceptable” perhaps that’s a reflection of the place that you happen to live and the people that you are listening to more than anything else.
Yet another example of the superiority of the Master of Business Administration over all fields of knowledge, because what is really needed to solve this problem is anther Pareto chart.
Stranger
There are no answers to many of the things people are complaining about. It isn’t like 6 feet=100,000 people die, and the economy takes a massive hit; 5 feet=110,000 people die, and the economy is fine. Many of these things are educated guesses based on imperfect data, but done because a decision needed to be made. It wasn’t a matter of “do something,” but a question of “what can be done to slow this thing down?” The answer was social distancing, closures, and lock downs.
Would things have been fine with a bit less? Maybe, we had no way to know, in part because a month or more of testing was missed.
If we did nothing would we have been all right? Almost definitely not. Covid-19 would have spread all over and the medical system would have quickly saturated, leading to a much higher casualty rate. The economy would have still ground to a halt as people stayed home on their own. Businesses would have closed anyway, either because they didn’t have enough customers to stay open, management wanted to protect their employees, or there were just too many people sick to run the business.
If we did too little, then it might be much the same as doing nothing. The medical system would still be saturated, and the economy still takes a big hit.
So, we do a lot. It might still not be enough. At this point, it appears that closing just about everything has worked to slow the spread and flatten the curve. In at least some places. It hurts because the economic hit seems like an own goal, but the economic hit was coming no matter what.
We have no way to know what exactly is too little, and what exactly is too much. We have no way to know if the economy is better off letting SARS-2 run its course and kill a bunch of people, or to lock down. Except that we do know which of those options results in fewer deaths (if we do it right, which we’re also make our best guess about).
History from the 1918 pandemic suggests that there is no trade-off between public health and the economy. Cities that implemented social distancing sooner seemed to also have greater economic recovery than cities that implemented social distancing later. Getting hit hard by the pandemic seemed to have lasting economic impacts which were worse than the impacts of social distancing. (A working paper from some economists.)
The option people seem to want is that the whole thing just didn’t happen, or that it was actually a hoax, and the 45,000 people who’ve died so far in the US were all going to die soon anyway, so they don’t really count as Covid-19 deaths. People seem to be looking for a gotcha in the shutdowns. “Aha, if they’d just let the restaurants and bars stay open, unemployment would have been cut in half, but deaths would only have gone up by six old men, who probably were jerks anyway.”
What a snarky lad you are!
You have kind of made yourself the Jesus of this topic on this board. I think you’ve said lots of informative things, and I appreciate that, but I’m not sure where you get off with the superior attitude. Just sayin’.
Could be. Is there any particular clip or written paragraph where someone gives a summary of the kind of numbers I say I think are needed?
So can’t that reasoning be stated in some sort of numerical way?
I basically buy that reasoning. But here’s the thing: that reasoning could equally apply 6 months from now when the economy isn’t just wrecked but truly wrecked and the cure is worse than the disease. At some point, we will reach that point. The only way to avoid such a trajectory is to express things numerically in terms of cost/benefit.
It’s not just a matter of justifying the initial response. The measures require continuous justification in real time, or at least reasonable increments of time. I don’t buy the argument (I’m hearing in various implicit and explicit forms here) that since we can’t do that perfectly, we can’t do it at all.
…you could always try watching one of the briefings and come to a judgement for yourself.
The kind of numbers that **you **thought were needed **weren’t actually needed **to convince a country to lockdown. So perhaps what you actually need to do is to rethink your assumptions.
But you’re now saying they don’t contain the kind of numbers I think are needed? Feel free to provide a YouTube link to one you think is particularly good.
How do you know that? You don’t think there was any cost/benefit discussion among the leaders using concrete numbers? They just went by “gut”?
…I’m saying **exactly what I said. ** That the briefings in New Zealand have been good enough. That was the question you asked, was it not? If you don’t think they are good enough, even if they are missing the information you are wanting, can you explain why not?
They are all good. I’ve linked to them all. But the announcement of moving to Level 4 was a particularly memorable one.
I’ve already provided a cite to tell you how I know this. 90% of people back the NZ strategy. They extended Level 4 by a week and almost everybody went “okay then.”
Not by “gut.” Everything has been explained concisely and explicitly, the science behind the lockdown isn’t very hard to understand. What is it do you think is missing from the NZ briefings?
I will indeed give them a look. But it’s a dodge with respect to my original point. I said a certain kind of justification was required. You haven’t said that NZ has provided that; you’ve just said that what they’ve provided is “good enough.” And now I’m obligated to wade through the briefings to see whether a) they include or don’t include the kind of thing I think is needed, and b) whether they are “good enough”? My original point stands: someone needs to provide a succinct summary of costs/benefits, both rear view mirror and going forward. That would seem to be a very basic requirement of planning policy–at least at this point when more information is in.