Posted on 03/15/2020 2:11:56 PM PDT by TheConservativeBanker
Whether we will collectively move away from fears that make us subservient ....
By Philip Alcabes | March 10, 2020 Flights are canceled, airports are closed, conferences and conventions postponed, churches and mosques shuttered, soccer games played in stadiums empty of spectators. My university has called home the study-abroad students from Italy, Japan, South Korea, and China. It would be easy to look at the world in the face of the new coronavirus, COVID-19, and believe it is theater, penned by a playwright filled with xenophobia and fears of promiscuous mixing with other humans.
Every epidemic is theater, a drama written by the powerful for the sake of the unsuspecting. AIDS became a morality tale of innocence and sin. Outbreaks of Ebola became stories of strange tribal customs and feckless governments. Measles outbreaks become the fault of a delusional but highly organized anti-vaxxer movement. Whats unusual about the outbreak of COVID-19 is that the story isnt being told by the powerful. The powerful are just consumers here, responders, sometimes influencers, salespeople of a certain frightened view. But the story of COVID-19a surrealist masterpiecemasked citizens, ubiquitous squeeze bottles of Purell, conspiracy theories, bravado, insouciance, boredom, and anxietyis taking shape purely out of information.
A little epidemiology to start with. Its becoming clearer by the day that COVID-19 is a conventional virus. By this I mean that many people who are infected (perhaps most) do not get sick at all or become only mildly ill. Most of those who do get sick are older (children under age 15 are almost never reported among the seriously ill). They may have a concerning but not serious illness, including fever and cough. A few suffer badly. Some must be hospitalized, and a fraction of those who are hospitalized have and will continue to die......
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanscholar.org ...
I live in an industry town where the vast majority of people have solid-gold insurance. They go to the hospital for just about every ache and pain. You bet they'd overrun the place if they thought they had this virus.
My mistake. I misread your name on post 15. Attributed it to someone else in my mind.
It takes a man to admit a mistake.
Not if the vast majority have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.
In my nearly 70 years I have learned that admitting my mistakes is always the best course of action. Would that our political and industry leaders had learned that lesson.
I agree very much.
The author is clearly a leftist and, like all leftists, whether he is writing scientific or political opinion, he should either be ridiculed mercilessly or at best ignored.
"In the past, the Trump administration in the US, Putin in Russia, the Xi administration in China, and their many imitators had been decisive and ruthless in locking up their undesirables and in delivering policies that appeal to hypernationalist rhetoric."
I don't recall the Trump administration "locking up undesirables and in delivering policies that appeal to hypernationalist rhetoric". Putin and Xi, absolutely.
The few illegal border gate-crashers that Trump has incarcerated are minuscule by comparison.
You might evaluate the scientific information separately from the political. Almost all scientists are leftists these days. That doesn’t mean that all of their scientific analysis is bogus. Ridicule his political statements - he deserves it, but look at the science presented and judge it separately. If the science is bad and you can demonstrate it, we would all benefit from your reasoned analysis.
This writer is an idiot. Perfect example of why people reject conservative thought.
"Trump, the wall man, says his wall will stop the virus until its pointed out that there isnt a wall, and then he blames Obama."
Uh, no. I'm a scientist, and I am no leftist. The political comments are totally unnecessary to the article and serve only one purpose...to denigrate Trump. The author should have stuck to the science....he didn't. So screw him AND his information.
There is a huge mistake in that image, they pulled a fast one and changed the “confirmed cases” statistic from John Hopkins statistic (correct) and incorrectly relabled it to “#’s of infections”.
But the two are nowhere near close to each other.
I’m kind of amazed people are still making this same mistake all over the place
Phil is a nut job.
The first two sentences are fine. He should have ended it there instead of his pile of fake humanistic mush.
Yes. You see that error constantly from people who are trying to minimize the potential severity of the threat. Do they really believe that everyone who would test positive for COVID-19 has already been tested? It is ridiculous.
By the way, the U.S. number on that Johns Hopkins map page (at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html) is no longer 2,726. As I write this, it is 3,689. Both are small numbers, but let's wait for the rate of new infections to drop substantially before celebrating.
I don’t agree with your conclusions at all.
Failing to account for asymptomatic and less serious cases means two things —
1) The real death rate per infection is drastically lower than is being reported, since huge numbers of infected are never counted among the “confirmed cases”.
2) There are also drastically more infections than are being reported.
Neither point tells me whether people are underestimating or overestimating the true severity of this epidemic.
I don’t know?
But I do know people are grossly misrepresenting statistics when they imply # of deaths / # of confirmed cases is the same thing as # of deaths / # of infections.
That was not done here. The chart in #23 that you objected to says nothing about the number of deaths. You said:
...they pulled a fast one and changed the confirmed cases statistic from John Hopkins statistic (correct) and incorrectly relabled it to #s of infections.
Exactly right. Confirmed cases is not the same as the number of infections. The number of confirmed cases sets a lower limit on the number of actual infections, not an accurate count. Since lower numbers appeal to those who want to minimize the severity of the epidemic, that's what they use, even when it is obviously inappropriate. I objected to that. I thought you did too.
1) The real death rate per infection is drastically lower than is being reported, since huge numbers of infected are never counted among the confirmed cases.
I think that is almost certainly true.
2) There are also drastically more infections than are being reported.
Also almost certainly true.
Neither point tells me whether people are underestimating or overestimating the true severity of this epidemic.
The accuracy of their estimations is its own subject, irrelevant here. People who choose to PRETEND that the number of confirmed cases equals all confirmable cases appear to me to be trying to minimize the severity of the epidemic by using an inappropriate set of numbers.
I dont agree with your conclusions at all.
Exactly what do you disagree with?
Honestly, Sam. People with gold-plated insurance like a large number have around here will go to the emergency room for the sniffles.
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