New SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 Thread

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The_Impeacher wrote:

It's all right here, denier: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/indonesia/

I've sent an email to them requesting a 'new recoveries' column. Comparing that with new deaths would make it easier to see where flattening the curve is making a difference.

I'm pointing this out again in hopes that people reading this post understand that this interpretation is completely false... My multiquote post above might be "TLDR'D." :)

The numbers being drawn from here to get absurdly high mortality rates are being completely misunderstood.

This is the number of deaths for "resolved" cases. That means cases where creation and closing are "known." That means that these numbers do not include people for whom no official tracking measures were ever done.

Dead bodies generate paperwork.

People who don't go to the hospital don't get recorded as a "case."

People who get tested and the result is positive and then who never report back, even if they don't have a serious bought of illness, never get their case officially "closed" so its results can be tallied. (That's why there are a buttload of unclosed cases. You didn't think they just vanished, right? :))

The numbers in that chart are likely "true." It's the way you and others are interpreting them that is completely false.

Example: If fifty-eleven bajillion people get the virus and ten of them go to hospital for care and five of them die with the others being released healthy, then that number of deaths for "Resolved Cases" would be fifty percent "dead." All the rest of the fifty-eleven bajillion people stay at home, get well, and practice making babies.

Measure what you intend to measure.

Understand exactly what it is that numbers are indicating.

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The_Impeacher wrote:

It's all right here, denier: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/indonesia/

I've sent an email to them requesting a 'new recoveries' column. Comparing that with new deaths would make it easier to see where flattening the curve is making a difference.

The database isn't what's bullshit here, your method of calculating the mortality rate is. You aren't seeing official statistics use death rates like that because it's wrong (see the comment above for why). There's no point asking anyone to acknowledge the situation if you're going to deliberately misrepresent it just cos you aren't satisfied with how grave things look and so decide to use a different formula to make it look even worse. You want more than a 1-7% mortality rate? Go harp on about a different disease.

And if you want to start tossing around labels, allow me to come up with one for you - marketer of doom. Has a nice ring to it, methinks. And like any marketer, the claims are all about the spin.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Austria are trying to do it I think? Either way it doesn't matter, if a cure is found everybody will hear about it. Till then, try drinking hot water cause it kills it or at the very list forces it into your stomach where your acid kills it.

Hot water does nothing - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51735367

You aren't doing yourself any favors criticizing the deniers and then turning around to spread some misinformation yourself. Misinformation isn't somehow okay based on which side is indulging in it.

Oh thanks, I didn't know. The biggest point here is that drinking hot water doesn't hurt you so you might as well do it if you want to give yourself a placebo. Looking for news about vaccine does the same thing - giving yourself false hope when the vaccine will come next year anyway.

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Morkonan wrote:

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Household debt is high. Govt. debt is even higher (and now will be through the roof). And even most corporate debt is excessively overleveraged, and unlike govt. debt most of it is rated as junk.

I "believe" the last part is false. (junk) Though, there will be some <ahem> "re-evaluation" to be done soon. Even so, I don't think most would qualify as "junk."

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And all this was before the crisis. You're just asking for a creaky ship to be righted so people are comforted as it awaits another shock it won't be prepared for.

It's not as precarious a market as you make it out to be IMO. There are some overvalued picks to be sure. But, it's not a 2008 situation. There aren't any bits of worthless paper being mistaken for Golden Calves here.

To be clear, about half of it (so yes not 'most', but a sizable portion of it) is classified as BBB, the grade just above junk, and about a fifth of that is junk - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-29/once-hated-now-loved-bbb-corporate-debt-is-back-in-vogue

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/us-corporate-debt-10-trillion-record-percentage-economy-expert-warnings-2019-12-1028731031

So yeah I exaggerated on that bit, but the point is things aren't running responsibly. Debt that isn't supposed to be popular is now increasingly so. You don't build an economy around irresponsiblity. The countries that'll come out best from this will be places like Singapore and Norway, places that understand the importance of preparation and sound financial planning.

My other point was more fundamental, not an reference to 2008 at all. It was about the fact that the structure of our economic system is designed to maximize efficiency and profitability above all else - including resilience, redundancy and even at a basic level, savings. Everything is highly interconnected and interdependent - which is great for efficiency AND vulnerability. Reserves are anathema and the concept of diversity extends only so far as one's investment portfolio.

For an example of the latter and the danger it poses, consider monoculture farming. Just like with this virus, a major crop disease outbreak would decimate our food supply because we often use just one variety of a crop worldwide - the one that's "best" i.e. produces the greatest yield at minimal cost. That doesn't normally happen in nature, because the genetic diversity of a plant species works to counter total extinction. Or consider the analogy of the ship - a long time ago people realized that splitting it into chunks with walls between them ensured that if there was ever a puncture of the hull, it'd only fill up that section and so not sink the whole ship. In our current economic model though, such things would be classified as 'frictions' or needless barriers to smooth trade and so ironed out wherever possible. With the result being that if ever something goes badly wrong somewhere, the whole world system is at risk of collapse. We've prioritize maximizing efficiency to the point of also maximizing vulnerability. We have little diversity, minimal walls and very little in the way of fallbacks. Hence the precariousness of our situation.

This basically echoes the kinds of sentiments you hear of in books like The Black Swan and Anti-Fragile. Our current system is incredibly fragile, always dancing on the edge of a precipice just a zephyr away from disaster. Listen to any talk by the people who work in the global catastrophic risk assessment field and you'll hear the same. Our economy is highly vulnerable. Our electrical grid is highly vulnerable. And yesm our health system is highly vulnerable too (hospitals in normal times operate at close to max capacity, cos beds lying idle is lost money, which is WHY we've so limited immediate capacity for dealing with a major disease outbreak like this).

Some people like to claim that the world has been getting better overall for decades now, and have the data to prove it (less poverty, longer lifespans, etc. - all of which is true). But those same people would've been right even back during the Bronze Age flowering, right up until they weren't. They would've had centuries of data to draw on for that one - then the Bronze Age Collapse occurred and everything fell apart. Our society isn't built for shocks - it's built for keeping the treadmill running. And for all the danger it poses, Covid-19 is actually a pretty small shock. And yet we're still struggling with managing just this. God help us if the worst predictions of climate change come to pass. Or another world war. Or a Carrington level solar storm comes our way again. Or just an even worse pandemic. We're just not in a position to deal with things getting majorly messed up, ever.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Oh thanks, I didn't know. The biggest point here is that drinking hot water doesn't hurt you so you might as well do it if you want to give yourself a placebo. Looking for news about vaccine does the same thing - giving yourself false hope when the vaccine will come next year anyway.

I'd argue the vaccine obsession is harmful. Browsing the news is fine, but likely the most worried folks take it considerably further. Constantly questioning and discussing medicine that they just self-taught themselves, they're placing an additional burden of pressure on the people who're involved in making it. As if there wasn't enough pressure in this situation as it is. And some are likely stretching the truth as they play Chinese Whispers with stuff they've heard, spreading rumors and expectations whether they meant to or not.

Besides, the vaccine is likely irrelevant. It wasn't a vaccine that put an end to SARS - the disease had faded by the time we had one. A vaccine didn't stop the infamous Spanish Flu either. This vaccine is like a year away. Indications are that this disease - with whatever death toll it's gonna leave us with - would have wound down its cycle by then too. Unless it manages to become endemic somewhere.

And much like the flu, it's likely that vaccinating against this version of it won't protect us against whatever new coronavirus decides to emerge in years hence either (just as the SARS vaccine won't protect us from this virus, despite that both are coronaviruses).

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Exile009 wrote:

Our current system is incredibly fragile, always dancing on the edge of a precipice just a zephyr away from disaster. Listen to any talk by the people who work in the global catastrophic risk assessment field and you'll hear the same. Our economy is highly vulnerable. Our electrical grid is highly vulnerable. And yesm our health system is highly vulnerable too (hospitals in normal times operate at close to max capacity, cos beds lying idle is lost money, which is WHY we've so limited immediate capacity for dealing with a major disease outbreak like this).

yeah, u hear this over here, people from the nhs getting interviewed in the news talking about the health service running at 95% capacity etc. Theres no give, u can say oh u got X amount of hospitals with X amount of beds... ok sure but when shit gets busy just with regular stuff that happens all the time theres bed shortages, waiting lists, people getting treated on stretchers in corridors etc because theres nowhere to put them. this is just western 1st world healthcare systems operating with normal expected fluctuations in demand that happen all the time.



this is basically how business systems work atm. i noticed it when i left college and got a job at a supermarket for 6 months just to tied me over and earn some beer money whatever, 20+ years ago at this point? went there expecting it to be a business, its professional, biggest chain in the uk, surely everything works properly right? fresh out of education, naive. no, nothing works properly, ever.

to increase profits they cut all slack out of the system, you run on the bare minimum it takes to get 100% of 'things done' in the workplace day to day. then you look again, how much profit do we lose when we go below 100%? if we go down to 80% of stuff gets done do we go down to 80% of the profits? no, we go down to like 95%... ok thats value. So now the place runs at the ability to only get 80% of stuff done that theyre trying to get done. So lets look at it again, say we cut out another 5-10%, and then promote a culture of people feeling put upon by their bosses to get the impossible done, what happens? they work in a really unhealthy way, coming close to mental breaking point at times, and they get just enough done by going way beyond their pay grade to keep us running at like 95% of the profits while its only costing us 70% of what it really costs to make this store run in what u would think is a normal fashion.

this culture is everywhere, its not only that there isnt slack in systems, theyre constantly running as dangerously below the line as its possible to run without literally falling apart.



this is how sick the situation is with business is in this regard. look at advertising, look how hard advertising pushes 'stuff'. We buy what we need, and then we buy what we want, but thats not enough. what we need + what we want isnt enough demand to employ everyone, not even remotely close. We have to have a giant industry trying to create artificial desire and addiction to 'things' using everything we know about manipulating human psychology. Thats how absurdly vast our manpower and resources is as a society, it outstrips our need to produce what we need and naturally realistically want by an epic margin.

and yet almost everything is run with below 0 slack, on the edge of falling apart. critical things to our survival are maintained at an inch above breaking point. things that we should really be dealing with as societies that play on any moral persons mind are left to charities to try and solve, usually via putting a brandaid on it which is the most they can hope to achieve.


its utter madness.



i dont think we should stray into why this is the case because that goes from discussing the way the world of business runs into the world of politics when u really get down to it and this is obviously not a forum where thats allowed. but regardless of why, this is how business is run in most cases and as you say, it leaves things very fragile. how many businesses are talking about being on the brink of complete collapse when you simply take 1 monthly cycle of money coming in away? even just reducing expected profit for a single month is catastrophic for them, and despite us having so much 'stuff' it outstrips what we need and realistically want by such a stupid amount our means of distributing peoples allocation to get this stuff is completely reliant on these businesses to keep society functioning. its a perverse situation we have got ourselves in.

approx cases March
23 25 28
33000 66000 132000
3day double 3day double

As of right now there are 2200 deaths in the USA
This number will grow some before the day ends.

This is what makes testing so important and we are lacking it big time.
That leads us to be unable to know just how deadly this is.

There is a hidden element to this. A team of experts were polled. I
have not found much else on this part. But they as a group have a range
that the hidden part could be.

On March 23 they as a group said this hidden part could be as low as
83k and as high as 1.8million. That is a massive range. 33000 is the known.

If we just do some math for the numbers we have now.
Assume we have 80% to get this and it keeps doubling every 3-4days.
80% is the possible herd immunity. 330,000,000 X .8 = 264,000,000

132,000 264,000 528,000 1million(approx) 2m 4m 8m 16m 32m 64m 128m 256m
256million is close enough to possible herd immunity and is 11 doublings away.
11 doublings every 3days 33days .... (4)44days .... (5)55days ... (6)66days
Known numbers.
132000 and 2200 deaths. 264,000,000/132,000 = 2000
2000 X 2200 = 4.4million deaths

If we assume the low end of the experts guess of 83000 we would start with
332,000 instead of 132,000 and 2200 deaths.

332,000 664,000 1,328,000 2,656,000 5,312,000 10m 20m 40m 80m 160m 320m
About 9.5doublings away
28-57days away
332,000 and 2200 deaths 264,000,000/332,000 = 795
795 X 2200 = 1.75million

If we go the very high end of 1.8mil hidden we would start with 7.2million
instead of 33000
7.2m 14.4m 28.8m 57.6m 115.2m 230.4m 460m
5.2 or so doublings only
15days 20days 25days 30days
264,000,000/7,200,000 = 36
36X2200 = 81k deaths

This is why testing is so vital. It allows us to know alot more about the
hidden side of it. And much more about just how deadly it is.
TESTING IS KEY. And we have failed this miserably in the USA.

81k deaths on the low end or 4.4million on the higher end. And if you try
to extropolate from Italy right now like 20million.

This range is why testing is so important. We are stuck. Hardstuck.
Hardstuck because on one side is big death numbers. And on the otherside
is economy. And fear runs both sides.

The article I used for this range was one I found on 538.com.
It was the only one I have found where experts try to model what isnt
possible without testing.

Testing would have already told us if we could go back to work or not.
Testing would allow us to bend the curve alot easier.
Knowing is more than half the battle in this.
But we know nothing still.

And if we dont flatten the curve the deaths will be higher due to many
who need ventilators or other medical assistance to survive wont get it.

The good news is that if the hidden side closer to the 1.8million estimate
we had on march 23 instead of the 33000 known we will see the deaths keep spiking
for another 15-21days and then should drop off hard as herd immunity is reached.
81k will be dead or so.

If it is closer to the 83k this drop off wont happen for 45ish days? Not sure.
Guesses are just that and why testing is so important. And 1.75million dead.

My guess of the USA doubling every 3days is based on the last 6days. We are very close to doubling every 3-3.5days.

A lot of numbers up there Hampster. Let me know when more die of it than flu each year and I'll start to worry.

So far 2000 vs 30,000+..tempest in a teapot.

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Exile009 wrote:

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Oh thanks, I didn't know. The biggest point here is that drinking hot water doesn't hurt you so you might as well do it if you want to give yourself a placebo. Looking for news about vaccine does the same thing - giving yourself false hope when the vaccine will come next year anyway.

I'd argue the vaccine obsession is harmful. Browsing the news is fine, but likely the most worried folks take it considerably further. Constantly questioning and discussing medicine that they just self-taught themselves, they're placing an additional burden of pressure on the people who're involved in making it. As if there wasn't enough pressure in this situation as it is. And some are likely stretching the truth as they play Chinese Whispers with stuff they've heard, spreading rumors and expectations whether they meant to or not.

Besides, the vaccine is likely irrelevant. It wasn't a vaccine that put an end to SARS - the disease had faded by the time we had one. A vaccine didn't stop the infamous Spanish Flu either. This vaccine is like a year away. Indications are that this disease - with whatever death toll it's gonna leave us with - would have wound down its cycle by then too. Unless it manages to become endemic somewhere.

And much like the flu, it's likely that vaccinating against this version of it won't protect us against whatever new coronavirus decides to emerge in years hence either (just as the SARS vaccine won't protect us from this virus, despite that both are coronaviruses).

I agree we still have not found AIDS vaccine in 40 years.