Thrag
4561
The capacity chart was an abstraction meant to demonstrate a point, not meant as empirical evidence. Any healthcare capacity line would be arbitrary, but regardless of where it might actually fall on the plot for a given locality the point remains the same. I’m not sure why people are hung up on this. Do you get similarly upset whenever you see a Venn diagram because that’s an abstraction and the overlapping areas do not relate to actual data values?
Diddums
4562
If I’m supposed to draw a conclusion from the Venn diagram, sure. Yes, I would be upset at a Venn diagram of “Serial Killers” and “Americans” and “Clowns” in which the three circles were similarly sized. It’s a bad chart.
Ok, and I don’t mean this to sound as rude as it does, but why should I care what you suspect? You’ve not made any argument for why pop size is a limiting factor in the spread of infection at infection rates in the <1% range, and I can’t personally come up with any argument to that effect. You’re just saying you feel it must be so, and that’s wildly less compelling than the argument you’re attacking here.
Possible good news. Cuomo in a live presser, he asked for FEMA, Trump said OK. He says Trump said he wants to help and asked what he needed. He says he believes Trump. (24 hours ago they were bitchin at each other over twitter)
Other things, points out the large shortage of ventilators. can’t get them because china, italy, germany, washington bought them all out. We have roughly 4k, under the 10k we need. Hospital beds also going to be short
Question to Cuomo: “Would you consider domestic travel ban?”
Cuomo says “look we have the highest number of cases in the country. I don’t think people are going to be coming over anyway chuckle” hahah!
Thrag
4565
I see the misunderstanding. You are assuming all charts are meant to be definitive proof of something. The health care capacity chart is meant not to prove anything, but to illustrate a concept.
The Lodi/Bergamo comparison is proffered as potential corroborating evidence that social distancing works, not meant to be the end all be all of proof. It alone does not prove social distancing works, but it contributes to a growing body of evidence that is being studied to more definitively answer the question. If you want to try and show it’s not really evidence of the assumed conclusion you do need to demonstrate why and not just arbitrarily pick another way to plot it without any explanation of why that is more meaningful or correct.
Not only that, but it’s flagged as a stylized example.
I think one of the new circles of hell needs to be devoted to looking at figures while ignoring the legend. I’ve been trying to stay out of this particular argument, because it makes my eyeballs twitch so hard one might fall out, and I may not be able to receive medical care.
The first part of the legend: (There’s a legend? There’s a paper? There’s context? Why not make all those up from whole cloth and come up with your own “answers” and spin up some shady context the authors were trying to “push”?)
This stylized example may serve, once more, to show why while population age structure is
crucial for understanding the populations at the highest risk of mortality both across and within
countries, it is also important for understanding how much social distancing measures are
required in each population to reduce the number of most critical cases and overload on the
health system—aka “flattening the curve.”
6
At this time of severe crisis, policy makers are called to define containment measures which are often difficult to sustain in the long run and which have immense repercussions in terms of socio-economic sustainability. For these measures to be effective, a special attention should be devoted to those population groups that are more at risk and to the strength of the connections across generations.
pyrhic
4567
Well, first off, all clowns are serial killers…
Thrag
4568
Then you misunderstand the meaning and purpose of the chart. A Venn diagram shows the logical relations between sets and does not speak to the size of those sets (other than that subsets are by nature of a smaller quantity than the enclosing set). While the creator of a diagram is free to try to proportionally size circles, it’s not exactly required and not doing so does not affect the meaning of the diagram in any way.
Enidigm
4569
Somehow this has made my father flip out furious. He was on the phone with me last night all but screaming about the *f#%^ing media and how f#%^ing irresponsible it was to post things like these breakdowns between Republicans and Democrats and wtf he’ll never vote for a Democrat in his life.
I’m not sure what’s going on with that, but it has something to do with fear + partisanship. Just fyi. I don’t think conservatives are going to roll over and accept they’ve been wrong, like i’ve warned. They want this dealt with no mention to political affiliation.
Diddums
4570
It isn’t. Figure 53 (the chart) is referred to a full two paragraphs before your quote. The intermediate paragraph describes a stylized example which is the one referred to in your quote.
I think both are true. During the Ebola outbreak, no one random republican in the US was actually asked to modify their daily routine. It was easy to scream at Obama from your recliner that he was not taking it seriously enough (and by that, they mostly meant 'keep people from coming from Africa to the US" - hmmm)
Now maybe corona attitudes are just tribalism with a lag - maybe they will soon line up behind Trump’s shifting attitude. But I suspect there will remain a large group that continue to think “this is all an overblown media plot” - at least up until they or their friends or relatives get really sick.
Matt_W
4572
Something I haven’t seen discussed much anywhere: my kids split time between their mother’s house and mine. Continue that during lockdown? I essentially live with my partner and her daughter when I’m not with my kids, but in my own apartment when I have them. Continue that? All the guidance basically assumes nuclear families with at least one non-working parent. And since no one really knows what the right answers are, advice is conflicting, contradictory, or non-existent.
Thrag
4573
That’s a really good question. How does one even get answers for this? Assuming both parents in such a situation aren’t on good enough terms to agree among themselves on what to do, would each case need to go to a family court for resolution? Would a blanket order cancelling regular visitation and transfer of custody in a lockdown even be possible legally?
Personal experiences starting to crop up for me in Colorado.
Guy I share an office with is positive that he has it. He went to Israel on Feb 28, and got back on Friday. Last night developed a dry cough and fever. Asked his doc to get tested and they said he can’t because there are no tests available… so they are just assuming he has it because of the symptoms and he is quarantining until he is better. He isn’t a rule follower, so I’m worried he will go back out when he is feeling better but still contagious. His wife also works in hospitals, so not great transmission vectors there.
Then minutes after hearing that news, but boss lets the team know that his 6 y/o daughter came down with a fever and a cough this morning. My boss has been isolating himself from the office for about 2 weeks already, but his kid was at school last week. Again, can’t get tested so no way to know if she has it or not, but they are operating under the assumption that she has it.
The testing situation in this country is just shameful.
Very much this. The implication of the criticism is that total population is a limit on the pace of spread even at very low rates of infection, and I’m still waiting for an explanation of why that would be the case.
Diddums
4576
From Twitter and the folks who had the same criticism. Piacenza, which has roughly the same population as Lodi, but was shutdown on the same day as Bergamo.
Of course this is all from the morning. By this afternoon Trump will be tweeting that Cuomo is a liar, that New York is a shithole country, and that his brother’s name is Fredo.
As I understand the numbers now, it’s significantly more likely to be a regular flu than corona. It sounds like kids are mostly asymptomatic as well, so there’s a very good chance that the daughter is the flu.
We had a “presumptive covid-19” case in the building where I work last week, but apparently he tested positive for the flu, so that’s one less vector to worry about, I guess. It isn’t clear to me if he also took the covid test.
If I get it, I assume it will be from my asymptomatic children, since we’re near the New Rochelle hot spot and they were in school until Friday. It’s all work from home and school closures now, though. They even have big scary apocalypse “closed” signs on the playgrounds.
Could be, for sure - but the testing was so FUBARed in the US that there is no way to know
Reemul
4580
Aren’t they saying asymptomatic is around 7%, if so I don’t see how that’s mostly?
