4742

From everything I can tell, here in the US testing through private labs/hospitals/healthcare services and even university medical schools has probably overtaken official CDC reported testing, and by the end of the week these private entities may be conducting well over 10,000 tests in the US per day.

With the next concern being that there’s no standardized way for these tests/outcomes to be reported for data collection. That’s something they kind of all need to get sorted out pretty quickly.

4743

Less cryptic version:

Someone in the tower tested positive and they need to shut down to clean the whole thing.

4744

Yes, 2 tech ops guys got it. One is in ICU. Temp ground stop for cleaning. (Edit: per NAS backend, GS was lifted some time ago. Very brief.)

4745

Health care being overwhelmed, yes . Bodies being piling and rotting in people’s homes, that’s extreme hyperbole 7,700 people die in the U.S. each day about 1,800 in Italy. Like the victims of Covid19, these are primarily elder. Even today, when 345 folks died in Italy, that’s still only 20% of all deaths in Italy.

I think your definition of slight economic hardships is way different than most everyone else’s. We’ve seen trillions of dollars in lost wealth (which doesn’t bother that much) and tens of billions dollars worth of lost economic output, much of which gone forever. Lowering the US GDP from a 2% growth to -2% recession for one quarter alone is $100 billion.

How much is a life worth is a question that governments and society grapple with, but it is an important one.EPA and some other government agencies say one life is worth about $10 million. Kenneth Fineberg in administrating the 9/11 fund and the B.P. settlement ended up with $1-$3 million/lost life and wrongful deaths (after being reduced) also end up in the range.

So that says if have a government policies costs a billion in lost economic activities that needs to save at least 100 lives. Which means it needs to prevent 10,000 cases at a 1% mortality rate. It would also save us the expense of treating about 2,000 serious cases of COVID 19

But those are really on the high-end values for human life. The opportunity cost for other public health measure are much lower. For instance, ten billion dollars would provide, food, shelter, and a good chunk of the medical care for all of the 500K homeless folks in the country, or methadone treatment for all two million folks who are addicts. It seems almost certain that either one of those actions is going to save way more than 1,000 lives/year The Gates foundation has saved millions of lives by spending 30 billion in 3rd world countries.

Professor Ioannidis is making argument #1 that we have shitty data, which no one disputes.

Is his second argument is this.

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.
.

Right now, I’m onboard the better safe than sorry. He is an outlier among experts studying this stuff, But we need to be constantly questioning our assumptions, and not letting our fear overtake the facts.

4746

Look at this post apocalyptic scene at Clearwater Beach, FL.

Just kidding. It’s filled with thousands of idiots.

4747

I’d like to note here that my institution is contributing to both testing and development of new testing resources. Specifically, we’re going to be able to contribute > 1000 tests a day for starting now, and we’re going to scale that up further. That will be available though hospitals that we’re affiliated to, like Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. We’ve also got project going on to develop a paper strip test, which will allow testing to take about 1 hour to test extracted RNA, and doesn’t require any special equipment to read the test results (think something like a pregnancy test to read the result off.)

4748

There are two groups, I would think. The people that thought it was a trendy thing to do. But get on the bandwagon. And the ones who are too stupid to think for themselves. And some of them will have family and children that die.

4749

For sure. Like Shivax pointed out, you can twist off the cap any time you want when your being careful, but once the genie is out of the bottle there is no going back.

4750

In another bit of Canadiana, i was playing world of warships today and a ship was hit bad and was foundering, and i shouted out a tell “OMG, THE NEW ORLEANS IS SINKING!” (it was, actually, the USS Cruiser New Orleans(CA/CL-32) that was sinking).

Unfortunately, i don’t think anyone got it and I was sad.

Your regularly scheduled apocalypse messages will continue in 3…2…1…

4751

I’m with Clay. I’m all for sacrificing him to the corona virus in the name of the economy.

4752

We can commemorate him with a plaque outside the NYSE.

4753

God help me, I read that dumb article. The writer A) realizes that if medical systems are overwhelmed the death rate will be way higher, and says as much near the end, and B) at the front of the article he pretends that the death rate will be at most 1%, based off a cruise ship where everyone had ideal medical care. His argument falls flat on its face and isn’t even internally consistent.

The only reason the article is getting any traction at all is because some people want an excuse, no matter how paper-thin, to consign millions of people to death in order to try and keep stock values up.

4754

I have seen the cruise ship used as a data point on numerous occasions. I have seen people saying it’s a very bad example that does in no way simulate real world conditions. I have seen others say its controlled nature is good for data collection. Based on the arguments I have seen, I fall on the side of it being a terrible data point to extrapolate to the real world, but I’m open to other thoughts on the matter.

4755

Does he have any explanation for why the virus would stop at 1% and not say 50%? Also why 0.3% for a fatality rate?

4756

I can’t see a quarantined ship being extrapolatable. It doesn’t resemble the general populace in any way other than there are humans involved in both.

4757

I think that if we lived side by side in a giant arcology it would be good science. Otherwise… meh.

4758

They had almost the opposite of ideal medical care, which is why the whole damn ship got infected. It was an absolute travesty by Japan, second only to still not postponing the Olympics! Abe is completely delusional on this point.

4759

lol

4760

Buffalert sounds sorta cool.

4761

Bodies piling up in Iran is not hyperbole, but documented fact. The bodies rotting in people’s homes part presumably refers to things like the Italian man whose sister died at home and it took the coroner 36 hours to arrive. (And which we know about since he was tweeting the fiasco, which went viral.)

I am quite puzzled at the article. Ioannidis obviously has the credentials, and is one of the most famous scientists alive. But the article does not really say anything. Sure, the data is imperfect (though I think a factor of 300 underreporting seems hard to justify). But why would inaction be by default a better option than action when there’s uncertainty?