4782

Yeah. I am mentally prepping myself for telling both my mom’s family and my dad’s family that we will be canceling Easter events. It’s best now just to consider it not… happening.

I gotta feeling they’ll both fight me on it. It’s just too risky. My family trends old and not in good health.

I expect lots of crying form mom, especially when I tell her I’m sick but not that kind of sick.

4783

Yeah I think I’ll join you in taking a break from reading about this thing. It kinda overwhelms at times.

4784

I’ve gotta movie all picked out!

4785

The news and, well, every discussion everywhere is starting to make my anxiety-riddled brain make the rest of me physically ill.

Happily my therapist retired Friday and all outpatient places I can possibly get to are closed for at least a month.

4786

I’m sure their Thetans will protect them, or something.

4787

As long as it’s not Saving Private Ryan, I’m in! :D

4788

He explains it, at beginning, of the article. You have to adjust for the differences between the population of the Cruise (much older) and the population at large. In more or less ideal environment for the virus to spread only to 17% of the passenger and crew got the Covid19 and 1% died. How you get from 17% on the cruise ship to a 1% infection rate for the population, I don’t know… This article is written for a medical news site (Stat comes from the medical term “stat” for urgent, not stat as in statistic.). He doesn’t go into detail, how he arrived at either number but I’m guessing you don’t get his job by making shit up.

I think it entirely possible that we, a bunch of smart guys on the internet, who a couple of months ago were constitutional experts and now have become Public Health experts, may not actually know more than a leading expert in the field.

The economic impact of this is huge. I just got off the phone with CEO of a medium size hotel chain, with properties throughout the Pacific Rim. Hotel occupancy rates in Hawaii typically run 80-90%. He is getting more than ten cancelations for every booking through June. They are modeling 5-10% occupancy for the next 3-6 months and needless to say room prices are going to drop considerably.

A trillion dollar stimulus package is just a drop in the bucket, when you are looking at these type of economic losses. This is lot bigger impact that just asking people to sit on their couches, watching Netflix and chill.

4789

Are you, erm… young enough to know what ‘Netflix and chill’ means?

4790

Is the thought that these losses wouldn’t happen with another approach?

4791

I think it has something to do with the Cornavirus baby boom of Xmas 2020.

4792

I’m too tired look up sources, but this doesn’t seem right to me. Don’t we know patient 0 of the cruise? Even with an aggressive doubling time it wouldn’t get to 60% that fast. Exponential growth is still slow at the beginning. And is he assuming that the quarantine measures they did take on the ship were basically useless?

4793

If you look at this chart about every three years or so we have especially bad flu season. Part of the measurement of these “bad flu seasons” is less the raw statistics, and more the media saying hospitals in XYZ cities or states are near the critical point. It’s also important to note the wide range of death estimates. For all I know the situation that’s occurring in Italy or Iran, may actually have occurred in every “bad flu season” in few cities around the world. We just were just less connected and less aware many years ago.

If we are talking only an addition 10,000 or even 50,000 deaths about a normal flu season, than yes we
are almost certainly over reacted. If we are talking millions of extra deaths then we aren’t.

4794

‘Sex,’ right? When I was 12 I learned that everything actually means ‘sex.’

4795

Why are you asking me. I don’t know. I just googled how many Covid 19 case were on the Diamond Prince cruise ship and did the math.

4796

But the 1% number is in fact made up. There is no support for it at all, it’s not a prediction, it’s just a number he throws out to make his projected deaths seem small. People who know their shit and are actually making projections are saying 30-70%.

His whole scenario doesn’t fit with observed facts at all. If it’s basically a blip that would disappear in the noise of annual flu statistics, then why are hospitals so overloaded everywhere the virus has found a foothold? Why are mortuaries suddenly overflowing? Why are the obituaries 10x longer than normal in a town where the virus spread? I understand the message of the need to collect better statistics but in the meantime the threat seems pretty damn real.

This is true, but what this guy is saying is quite at odds with what a lot of other experts are saying. So someone with a lot more experience and knowledge of the topic than we have is definitely wrong.

4797

I’m looking into it. There’s a lot of PHDs on Twitter dumping on this article. He assumed 10,000 deaths if you just do nothing. That we wouldn’t even NOTICE this virus that it would be buried within the noise. I don’t want to get too personal but my sister works at a hospital things are insanely obviously easy to notice within the noise right now. There are massive shift changes and wings are being rearrange and reallocated. They’ve cancelled or reschedule basically all elective procedures and they are operating at capacity. They are actually managing the load as of today, nobody has been denied a bed or a ventilator, but it’s not like anything she has experienced before in her entire work history. And it’s taken a lot of steps to keep it good.

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.

4798

The Finest Hours. It’s on Disney+. Just want to see the results of these darn primaries before I snuggle.

4799

In morbidly amusing news, Outbreak has slowly been rising up the Netflix top 10 in the US. Was #9 a couple days back and has made it up to #7.

4800

You bet, and as I said early on his opinion is an outlier. But then so was the dead Chinese doctor, who first identified the virus, I’m sure there were plenty of smart doctors who said he was exaggerating.
I really have nothing more to add to the article, other than I hope he is right.

4801

I hope he’s right too, and I even think there’s still a (very small) chance he might be. But the cost of being wrong in any of those assumptions in absolutely huge.