magnet
3815
No, they are arguing that trying to flatten the curve may be insufficient. Now, I recognize that some people may find this discouraging. But data is what it is.
If you want to present a deceptively encouraging picture to prevent a feeling of futility among people who don’t “fully understand” yet, then you aren’t presenting data. You are making propaganda.
Insufficient to do WHAT? Any flattening if the curve, regardless of how insufficient, is still better than none. And who the hell said anything about being deceptively encouraging? I just got through saying that the curve that have been published should not show the entire curve below capacity for exactly that reason.
Terrifying.
People see the initial low numbers and think “lottery ticket”, but they simply don’t understand exponential growth.
I wonder how many are smokers. Read that 27% of their adult population smokes.
Guap
3821
Yeah, but it was his tone. He followed that up with “there will be plenty of time for that later.”. He was impressive, didn’t come across partisan to me.
Mexico needs to close the borders to the USA to wake the people up.
1% death rate at 50% infection is 40,000 people. Distribute that over a year and it’s 109 deaths a day. In New York’s worst day it was 10 murders a day.
Payback’s a bitch, yo.
If he’s lucky he might be able to sell for it for 150% of the normal price and recoup the cost of his gas or whatever, but his time is out the window. As it should be, for being a dick.
Denial isn’t a river in Egypt
The Chinese approach was mitigation for that city, and containment for the rest of the country. Most democratic countries will not be able to lock down say Seattle and the rest of the state (or more? How far has community spread gone? Oh you can’t say so we can’t lock down an area.)
We’ve failed at contact tracing which is pivotal to containment.
Orlando theme parks: no cases, so far as we know
Mar-a-Lago: cesspit of festering disease
Sure, but I would say that it’s at least partly because of the restrictions that have been in place on who could be test. If there is a patient zero in a given area that has traveled to Wuhan, then if that person was missed (maybe they didn’t get particularly sick), and you were unable to test others that started getting sick because they didn’t have known contact with someone that had tested positive…
It’s like the old commercial where the guru asks, “how to get a job without experience, and how to get experience without a job?” If we couldn’t test, it makes it tough to identify positives, and if there aren’t positives, it’s hard to test.
Contact tracing at a manageable stage wasn’t going to happen because the White House wanted testing to be as limited as possible. We never had a chance.
I was going to comment on that medium article, but I see the discussion has already gone way past. I’m not even sure what that argument is about now. Reading it, it seems like he’s trying to argue against the US/UK’s approach to fighting Covid-19, but doing so in an incredibly weird way (and making lots of wrong assumptions along the way).
Suffice to say that everyone should understand that people will die - lots of people. The only question is whether we can keep the number of deaths down so that this will feel more like a really bad flu season, or we get into a situation where we hit Italian-like conditions.
The reason I am so extremely negative about what is happening in the UK (and also in the US), is that - as both Italy and China have shown - containing and controlling the virus is extremely difficult. Some countries have already taken extreme measures to do so, and there is absolutely no guarantee that they will succeed. One day +/- can make all the difference between controlling the situation and the breakdown of health services, and I just think it is unconscionable hubris to think that you can determine the exact right day in the absence of accurate tracking of the number of infected.
It doesn’t really matter why we failed at this point (though there are some people at the CDC who need to be questioned as to why they refused to use the proven WHO test and needed to design their own faulty assay.) We need to deal with the current realities of the situation, and not try to argue for things that are impossible - that’s not going to make anything better, and may make things worse.
