Posted on 03/17/2020 10:42:50 AM PDT by Perseverando
This is a long post addressing two underlying issues with the current response to the pandemic that leave me concerned. It’s the longest post I’ve ever written.
For those of you not taking action, or believing the pandemic to be “over hyped”, you can make fun of me as much as you want now or when this is over. You can make me the subject of memes and post it everywhere. I will pose for the picture. I am not trying to convince you, but I do feel compelled to share information that I deem critical to all of us, which is why I am posting this at all.
WHY YOU SHOULD TAKE 5 MINUTES TO READ AND CONSIDER THE INFORMATION I AM SHARING:
As of 3/15/20 at 9 am PST this post has been shared over 50k times since it was posted 2 days ago. So a lot of people find value in the post and although it's a long read, I believe you will find this information valuable too.
For those of you who don’t know me well, I am analytical and metered. I don’t freak out nor do I respond emotionally. I also don’t post a bunch of bullshit or political or controversial stuff on Facebook. I founded and am CEO of a successful software company that provides SaaS based data, analytics, and dashboards to recruiting departments at companies we all know. As you would expect, I am data driven and fact based. Before founding my company I held executive roles leading very large recruiting teams at some of the world's fastest growing companies such as Starbucks and Google. At Google I was fortunate enough to report to Sheryl Sandberg before she took the Facebook COO role. I was a Chemical Engineering major in college and have
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If those people were in the hotspots they’d be caught by the contact tracing. If they were not in the hotspots, there would be new hotspots popping up.
I think you left a “not” out of your post, by the way.
15k new cases since yesterday. (Many in places that were supposed to be safe due to climate, incidentally, but that’s a different point.)
You’re right, it’s currently not the rate of spread we’re seeing, it’s the spread of testing.
The difference between even a 2 or 4 day doubling time isn’t going to matter much if there isn’t containment. It would saturate the herd in a short time either way and take out our HCS.
The death rate from the flu is not 40 times higher. CV kills 10x or more of the people that get it, compared to the flu.
The differences between the US and Italy are pretty much that we contained most of the first wave from Wuhan, but not the second wave from Europe, putting us 2 weeks behind Italy, and that our testing is just now getting off the ground after being bungled first time around.
The big difference in the deaths is the time I mentioned above and that so far we haven’t had our HCS overwhelmed.
Hopefully we handle the strain on our HCS better than Italy did, but I am also hearing the same warnings coming out of Washington (state) that we heard from Italy before the collapse. Our system is different, and better, but is it better enough and will we heed the warnings?
Yes! Thank you. Here are some of those available numbers.
And here's some more food for thought I posted on another thread:
Deaths by age, sex, comorbidity (pre-existing conditions)
ACE Inhibitors and Coronavirus
Is it possible Rush was right and we've essentially shut down the country over a severe cold virus that becomes deadly because of a common medication the elderly are using to control hypertension/heart rate issues?
Seems to me like someone should be looking at the pharmaceutical histories of the deceased.
For your enlightenment:
How to calculate the mortality rate during an outbreak
At present, it is tempting to estimate the case fatality rate by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of confirmed cases. The resulting number, however, does not represent the true case fatality rate and might be off by orders of magnitude [...]
A precise estimate of the case fatality rate is therefore impossible at present.
2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV): estimating the case fatality rate – a word of caution - Battegay Manue et al., Swiss Med Wkly, February 7, 2020
The case fatality rate (CFR) represents the proportion of cases who eventually die from a disease.
Once an epidemic has ended, it is calculated with the formula: deaths / cases.
But while an epidemic is still ongoing, as it is the case with the current novel coronavirus outbreak, this formula is, at the very least, "naïve" and can be "misleading if, at the time of analysis, the outcome is unknown for a non negligible proportion of patients." [8]
(Methods for Estimating the Case Fatality Ratio for a Novel, Emerging Infectious Disease - Ghani et al, American Journal of Epidemiology).
In other words, current deaths belong to a total case figure of the past, not to the current case figure in which the outcome (recovery or death) of a proportion (the most recent cases) hasn't yet been determined.
To date, ~100 people have died from the Coronavirus in the US. Comparably, 35 million people have come down with influenza this season and ~20,000 have died. This season, flu will claim 30,000 lives but we're not running around with our hair on fire.
When the flu hits the US at the beginning of the flu season, within a month millions are infected and thousands have died. The Wuhan virus has been present in this country for at least two months now and we have 100 dead. And you think those facts warrant devastating our economy and putting millions of people out of work? Yeah, if you want millions of people to suddenly become dependent on the welfare state, then you should be pleased. I suppose you'd also be pleased with the fact that the commies controlling San Francisco and NY are forcing residents to "shelter in place" for three weeks.
This is nothing more than a coup being ginned up by fear and panic. And FReepers are falling for it. Pathetic.
I hope you are right, however, I think the subject matter experts and some folks in Italy seem to dispute your comments.
The average age of death from the virus in Italy is 81. Their healthcare system receives praise but it has collapsed under this outbreak. They are now using war time triage to decide who gets treated and who is left to die.
20,000 - 60,000 Americans have died from the flu every year since 2010. The elderly have taken a beating. For some reason, though, we don't shut down our economy at the beginning of every flu season to deal with this massacre.
He posted this very long and complex post and you responded just 5 minutes later. So if you saw it and responded JUST as he posted it you had five minutes to read it,analyze it, come up with opinion and post your opinion.
Considering the length and scope of the article I'm thinking that you didn't read it at all and just shot from the hip based on what you already believe.
Like I said, I hope you are right.
Hard to figure out sometimes but entirely worth the couch at times.
All the best to both of you. :)
roughly. it completely overwhelms hospital acute care capacity and the seriously ill become additional deaths.
that is test confirmations. totally different from real world infected people.
paying attention to confirmed tests is saying you want to be lied to.
if deaths are accurately attributed (a big question given some stories posted here and reddit), then the death rate becomes a lagging indicator of general doubling time, as long as the point(s) where systems are overloaded and triage begins are noted in the data. I would think a short moving average of daily death tolls provides considerable data on the state of infection 2.5-3 weeks prior, as well as doubling time.
china numbers on this are fabricated and at one point followed a very simple equation exactly daily. italy appears to make effort to report real numbers, and hopefully continues to do so even when the numbers get uglier.
daily testing is not going to hit the trendline every day - real life doesn’t work like an exact equation (except when china makes the numbers). it bounces around.
testing in particular is subject to so many crazy limitations that I find confirmed test a low-information-voter type number. it tells me if the US has managed to make a test yet or not.
I assume a lot of the math complains are people that read until they found a number to dispute.
other complaints are ad hominem attacks without even touching the math - maybe for obvious reasons.
I read the article. One can quibble over any number of variables - but I don’t see folks extrapolating answers when they insert their own, because no matter what, the results are ominous.
change asymptomatic infections from 86% to something else.
change doubling time from 3 days to something else.
do the math.
its still extremely bad not too far down the line.
I realized the contagion factor being reported on this thing by late jan/early feb was bad news and ended up expecting something like what we see (actually it is moving slower than I expected but it is happening otherwise).
china cracking their economy over this should have been a tell to anyone willing to pay attention. their actions were an end-of-the-world reaction by a country.
but I guess if we go by the FR version of Occam’s Razor, adversarial powers all shutting down their economies at great harm to their national interests over a virus is a sign that virus is.........a fraud!
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