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Just curious, anyone have a plan, or preps for global pandemic?


Gordo

Covid-19 Vaccine Survey  

30 members have voted

  1. 1. Your Vaccine Status is:

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  3. 3. Are you OK with having your CR forum name included on a list of members who have/haven't chosen to be vaccinated?

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38 minutes ago, KHashmi316 said:

Concentrating on the second graphic (Death Toll; note COVID-19 data up to Apr 6, 2020), please list all the reasons why this presentations like this -- so common in pop sci -- may be inaccurate, irrelevant, sensationalistic, etc.

We have more than 4 times as many Covid-19 deaths now as we did on Apr. 6th...

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14 hours ago, Ron Put said:

Well, I was referring to how it affects over 90% of those who are infected, with mild to no symptoms at all.  I took it straight out of Sweden's former chief epidemiologist's mouth (see the link above).

But OK, even based on your interpretation, how do you personally define it?

The 2017-2018 flu season killed 1,200,000 people around the world, right?  This is a fact.  Yet 2017-2018 was not a major pandemic, like 1957 or 1969.  It was just a "bad flu season."

Covid-19 has killed just over 300,000 people around the world, right?  Now, since this is about four times less than the number of deaths from the 2017-2018 flu season (and it's unlikely to ever surpass it), how would you classify Covid-19?  It cannot be like a "bad flu" since the death toll is much smaller. An average flu kills about 500,000-600,000 worldwide, according to the CDC. So, if by August or so Covid-19 has killed less than half a million worldwide, then it will cause less deaths than the average flu.  Hence, "mild."

But, I'll even take "like a bad flu."  Which still does not justify the lock-downs and the crashing of the economy.  Or the nonsense about contact-tracing and the presumably mandatory isolations which would follow.
 

Well you may be right and you may be wrong. If covid CFR is around say .5% which is a reasonable possibility and it spreads rapidly by the time we reach herd immunity we could lose  850,000 people??? .05 % x 170,000,000 people or herd immunity. Don’t know if that is a reasonable calculation or not. Don’t hold me to it if it’s crazy please explain. If it is a reasonable possibility would that soften your position?  OTHO, my position has always been we are playing with fire and we don’t really know which is better policy because we are not God! If it were up to me I’d lean toward the moderate position. Open up, but hard line with gatherings, utilize internet First for meetings etc, make masks mandatory, limit travel etc. etc.

Edited by Mike41
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20 hours ago, Gordo said:

You guys have a good point, it may not be possible to protect nursing homes unless the workers self isolate (which is hard if not impossible to ask) if asymptotic transmission is a significant factor. Workers could however do 3x daily “symptom checks” (this should not be a big deal really), they could also wear PPE and spray their gloved hands in isopropyl alcohol after touching anyone. They could cut off visitors, require obsessive cleaning and hygiene, etc.  Prefer hiring staff that has already recovered and has antibodies, even better (but there may not be enough of them out there yet).

The Sweden death graph is “weird”, clearly trending down over the last month but very “spikey”:

A4E88C39-9073-423E-BA03-A6704FFED2CD.jpeg.abe565da1cfafc862000247ec0583d90.jpeg

I’m not convinced one way or the other yet, but I do think the higher end death predictions will be proven wrong, however that may just be due to therapeutics and vaccines. 
 

The psychology aspect of lockdowns is interesting to watch, I don’t endorse one side or the other, just fascinated:

CORONAVIRUS

Psychotherapist: Lockdown Zealots Are Behaving Like Cult Members

I agree with Gordo, and strongly disagree with Dean.  I'm happy that Monroe county (which includes Rochester) and all surrounding counties of NYS are slowly and cautiously opening up, following the intelligent recommendations of Governor Cuomo.  The University of Rochester, where I teach, is currently scheduled to teach courses in classrooms -- not on-line, starting this Fall (when I resume teaching).  I imagine we'll be using reduced classroom size (to enable distancing), and massive testing.

😀

  --  Saul

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U.S. Cities Seen Losing $360 Billion of Revenue From Economic Rout
What do you think will happen as cities and states go broke? What will happen in your own town? Tax increases? Will the Fed just send every local and state government a check? I still think big economic problems are brewing that are being underestimated or ignored.  Didn’t realize my state is apparently among the worst hit economically.

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My guess:  States will get Federal money to pay for COV-19 related spending -- but neither the Senate nor the President will allow federal money to pay for the unrelated deficits of other state spending.  The House bill won't be considered by the Senate.

My guess:  Even without bailing out state deficits,  the Federal govt. will spend so much (print so much money) that the value of the dollar will drop -- possibly eventually leading to inflation. 

We live in weird, but interesting, times.

  --  Saul

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49 minutes ago, Saul said:

I agree with Gordo, and strongly disagree with Dean.  I'm happy that Monroe county (which includes Rochester) and all surrounding counties of NYS are slowly and cautiously opening up, following the intelligent recommendations of Governor Cuomo.  The University of Rochester, where I teach, is currently scheduled to teach courses in classrooms -- not on-line, starting this Fall (when I resume teaching).  I imagine we'll be using reduced classroom size (to enable distancing), and massive testing.

As is almost always the case, I take it to be sign of the rationality of my position when Saul disagrees with me. :-)

But in this instance I'm genuinely curious about what you think you disagree with about my perspective. In particular, Governor Cuomo's approach to phased reopening and the plan your university has come up with to restart in-person classes (both of which you seem to support) sounds entirely reasonable to me and aligns with what I've advocated for - i.e. start opening up but have a plan for how to do it safety and for what to do if new cases are discovered.

Saul, what do you suppose I'm advocating for other than this, when I said quite explicitly just a few posts ago that the idea of "lockdown until a vaccine" is a strawman that virtually noone, including me, is advocating for? Here is more what I said in that post, for you to disagree with if you like:

Quote

...I think virtually everyone wants to be able to get past the stay-at-home "orders" that are still in place in some parts of the US ... The only question is when and how to do it to minimize total harm, including economic as well as psychological.

--Dean

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Interesting that some of the organizations that have pushed hard against losing their freedom have resume closures.  Reminds me of the old song "When will they ever learn?"

TWO SOUTHERN CHURCHES RECLOSE INDEFINITELY AFTER PASTOR DIES AND LEADERS, CHURCHGOERS CATCH CORONAVIRUS

https://www.newsweek.com/two-southern-churches-reclose-indefinitely-after-pastor-dies-leaders-churchgoers-catch-coronavirus-1505291

 

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A lot seems to hang on "testing". But how reliable are those tests? What good is the testing strategy if the tests don't have sufficient reliability and accuracy? Of course new tests can come along at any moment, but decisions about re-opening the economy have their own schedule independent of when good tests are available. 

https://www.sfgate.com/coronavirus/article/which-COVID-19-tests-are-accurate-antibody-swab-15250911.php

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48 minutes ago, Dean Pomerleau said:

As is almost always the case, I take it to be sign of the rationality of my position when Saul disagrees with me. :-)

But in this instance I'm genuinely curious about what you think you disagree with about my perspective. In particular, Governor Cuomo's approach to phased reopening and the plan your university has come up with to restart in-person classes (both of which you seem to support) sounds entirely reasonable to me and aligns with what I've advocated for - i.e. start opening up but have a plan for how to do it safety and for what to do if new cases are discovered.

Saul, what do you suppose I'm advocating for other than this, when I said quite explicitly just a few posts ago that the idea of "lockdown until a vaccine" is a strawman that virtually noone, including me, is advocating for? Here is more what I said in that post, for you to disagree with if you like:

--Dean

Hi Dean!

Everything that you said in this post I agree with (except for the part about disagreeing with me being rational 😉).  I think that your pnumbers are probably too high.

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I'm no judicial scholar, but I suspect that a case may reach the Supreme Court:  When state governors limit gatherings of people -- are the crowds being deprived of the right of assembly?

(Not that I favor such gatherings)

  --  Saul

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May 14, 2020
Assessment of Deaths From COVID-19 and From Seasonal Influenza
Jeremy Samuel Faust, MD, MS1; Carlos del Rio, MD2,3
Author Affiliations Article Information
JAMA Intern Med. Published online May 14, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.2306
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2766121?guestAccessKey=593c753a-433e-45a0-ac5e-7e7e2014bac0&utm_source=silverchair&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_alert-jamainternalmedicine&utm_term=mostread&utm_content=olf-widget_05192020
"The CDC also publishes provisional counts of COVID-19 deaths but acknowledges that its reporting lags behind other public data sources.7 For the week ending April 11, 2020, data indicate that the number of provisionally reported COVID-19 deaths was 14.4-fold greater than influenza deaths during the apparent peak week of the current season (week ending February 29, 2020), consistent with the ranges based on CDC statistics.6 As the CDC continues to revise its COVID-19 counts to account for delays in reporting, the ratio of counted COVID-19 deaths to influenza deaths is likely to increase."

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8 hours ago, mccoy said:

If we stick to science, You are citing numbers which everyone knows are not accurate at all, especially the Covid19 deaths. ...

mccoy, what are you on about, with this "stick to science?"  Please back up your claims, especially if you are challenging published figures.  The worldwide total estimated Covid-19 deaths so far are 326,000, according to John Hopkins,  and worldometers.  What are you basing your "science" on?

These numbers are close to 50% lower than what is considered an average flu season, which kills 500,000 to 600,000 worldwide, and far less than 2017-2018's 1,200,000 dead, and close to 8 times less than the 1957 flu pandemic.  What exactly is your point?

 

3 hours ago, Todd Allen said:

We have more than 4 times as many Covid-19 deaths now as we did on Apr. 6th...

Wow! And that's just about 4 times less Covid-19 deaths worldwide than the 2017-2018 flu season, and 8 times fewer worldwide deaths than during the 1957 pandemic.  

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2 hours ago, Dean Pomerleau said:

As is almost always the case, I take it to be sign of the rationality of my position when Saul disagrees with me. :-)...

Dean, your rationality on this topic has been veering into the absurd, with numerous nonsensical "models" which started with "750,000 deaths in the UK and millions of deaths in the US."  But you are still at it, with smaller, but still silly numbers.  Perhaps by this time next year your "rationality" will align with reality.

On a related note, Texas currently has 1,402 deaths from Covid-19.  In comparison, the 2017-2018 flu season killed 10,000 Texans.  But Dean and company are still yelling "Lock Them Up!"

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48 minutes ago, Ron Put said:

Dean, your rationality on this topic has been veering into the absurd, with numerous nonsensical "models" which started with "750,000 deaths in the UK and millions of deaths in the US."  But you are still at it, with smaller, but still silly numbers.  Perhaps by this time next year your "rationality" will align with reality.

On a related note, Texas currently has 1,402 deaths from Covid-19.  In comparison, the 2017-2018 flu season killed 10,000 Texans.  But Dean and company are still yelling "Lock Them Up!"

Ron it ain’t over yet! You keep citing stats from previous pandemics while we are only at the beginning of one. That does not make any sense? For all we know this one may kill many more than the ones you cite. Again it ain’t over and until it is you cannot draw these conclusions. Did you read my previous post on this very point directed at you?

Edited by Mike41
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Surveillance State:

"Colombia’s capital Bogota is using police drones to detect people with high temperatures or those violating the country’s coronavirus quarantine, Reuters reports.

If a drone detects someone with a potential fever it sends the location to a medical team that seeks out the person to determine if they have coronavirus symptoms, officials said on Wednesday. "

Edited by Sibiriak
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To the best of my knowledge, thermal imaging cameras for prevention and detection of infection are useless, simply a technological scarecrow. Even with expensive stationary cameras, the technology isn't accurate enough to accurately gauge and detect fevers. I can't imagine how inaccurate drone cameras will be, used at a distance in sun-exposed outdoor settings.

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10 hours ago, Ron Put said:

What are you basing your "science" on?

The official data are not science, rather a fruit of an inherently inaccurate counting procedure. Do you really believe official COVID19 deaths in Brasil are only the ones officially counted? But even in Italy it has been shown that COVID19 deaths have been, in some main outbreak areas, far higher than the official counts. Already posted that. 

I have told it innumerable times, I'm basing myself on excess all-cause mortality data, which are undebatable data (they follow a scientific logic of accuracy). But you  don't seem to perceive that.

Further point, rightly cited by Mike Colella: the epidemics is not over yet. 
 

Edited by mccoy
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On 5/15/2020 at 9:25 AM, mccoy said:

There is little more undisputable than an all-cause excess mortality graph. Deaths in western society are accurately recorded and statistically processed by the national actuarial agencies. The graph posted by Dean simply suggests a huge positive anomaly in the March-May period. The anomaly is overlapped onto the Covid19 outbreak. The temporal association is so strong that denying causation seems logically impossible to me. Even then, we should offer valid reasons for the large anomaly in excess deaths. flu deaths are included in the normalization to past years average, so that is automatically taken care of. Data speak for themselves, as reverend Thomas Bayes used to say. Evidence shows unarguably that this is not just another flu as seen in the latest 5 years.

Allow me to point out that there is nothing logical about deducing causation from correlation.

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Only 5% of the UK (excluding London) has had the infection so far. 

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-05-21/health-secretary-matt-hancock-government-daily-coronavirus-press-conference/

I don't know the distribution for age, but I'd imagine that since a lot of the vulnerable people have been shielded for weeks now (millions not leaving their house at all), the death rate would go up significantly if these people are exposed. And based on the fact that only 5% of the public at large outside of London has been infected, clearly we have a long way to go before going back to normal.

I'm not sure I understand Ron's point when he says it's a "mild flu" and has killed less people so far.

This thing is far from over and as i said: many of those vulnerable people (2 million + in the UK) have been advised to shield and are taking that advice. I've not been out of my house in weeks due to mother on immune system suppressants (government supplies food and delivers it every week.) 

This is nowhere near as bad as it would be if there wasn't a lock down. And it happened near the start of Spring as well... let's wait for the rest of the year as we approach winter before claiming it isn't any worse than the flu.

Edit: to clear up some stats

An estimated 2.85 million people in the UK outside of London has had the virus based on antibody testing.

Around 30,000 deaths across the UK (excluding London). About 36,000 confirmed deaths across the UK (it's suggested this is at least 10-20K below the true figure.) 

Outside of London, the mortality rate is 1.45% based on large number of antibody testing -- some could be false positive as Dean mentioned. In London it's about 0.52%. And that's without hospitals becoming overwhelmed due to the lock down.

1 in 12 people with the infection end up in the hospital.

 

 

Edited by Matt
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21 minutes ago, Matt said:

And based on the fact that only 5% of the public at large has been infected, clearly we have a long way to go before going back to normal.

I thought this result from the same researchers who did the (apparently pretty flawed) Santa Clara antibody study was pretty interesting, although probably subject to the similar criticisms. They took samples from 6200 employees of 26 major league baseball teams around the US, mostly white collar workers in the teams' back-offices.

They found only 44 of them (0.7%) had been previously been infected with the virus.  Given that the researchers reported the specificity of the test to be 99.5%,  a large fraction of those 0.7% positive results could conceivably have been false-positives, particularly since 70% of them reported being asymptomatic.

[Lead Stanford researcher Dr.] Bhattacharya said the low number of positive tests showed there is a still long way to go in the pandemic. “It’s very clear,” Bhattacharya said, “that the epidemic is still in the early stages throughout the country.”

--Dean

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9 hours ago, mccoy said:

The official data are not science, rather a fruit of an inherently inaccurate counting procedure.

My guess is most governments would prefer to under recognize the pandemic but some find it easier.  While there have been many stories and corrections of under counting in Italy, France, Spain, the UK and the US, I suspect under counting is greater in countries with few to no stories of under counting.  For example North Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, Nepal, Venezuela, Mozambique, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Angola, Uganda, Libya and Syria are not reporting much of anything.

Comparing tallies of government reported Coivd-19 deaths while the event is in progress to calculations based on worldwide mortality data for flu made years later may be misleading.  Is Coivd-19 really infinitely less dangerous than seasonal flu in North Korea or Vietnam which with nearly 100 million people has reported zero Covid-19 deaths?  Maybe we should wait for statistics generated by similar methods to compare Covid-19 to seasonal flu or the special pandemic strains.

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Speaking of being early in the epidemic, the Swedish Public Health Authority has just released the first report on the results from its ongoing, nationwide serology study. It includes data through week 18 (May 3rd). They found:

The analyzes for week 18 (a total of 1,104 analyzed samples) show, as expected, the largest proportion of positive antibody tests in Stockholm. A total of 7.3 percent of the blood samples collected from people in Stockholm were positive in the antibody study, which can be compared with a total of 4.2 percent in Skåne and 3.7 percent in Västra Götaland.

The 7.3% in Stockholm seems quite a bit lower than what the Swedish epidemiologists have been suggesting and quite far from herd immunity. 

The report rightly points out that it takes time for antibodies to build up. But it also takes a few weeks for people sick with covid-19 to die. So if we assume the two delays are approximately equal, and that the average positive antibody test rate across the country was ~5% on May 1st (averaging the biggest city Stockholm rate of 7.3% with lower rates in less dense regions) we can compute an infection fatality rate.

As of May 1st, Sweden had 2653 deaths. The total population of Sweden is 10M, so if 5% had been infected by the time those dead people got sick, that means 0.05 * 10M = 500K infections. That puts the infection fatality rate in Sweden at 2653/500K = 0.53%. That is in line with serology-based IFR estimates from other parts of the world, which have ranged from 0.5 to 1.0%.

--Dean

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