New SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 Thread

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.

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xMustard wrote:

...again if you want to believe you'll get sick and die by standing within 6 feet of another human being, thats your problem.
but if you want to fine me between $1000-$50,000 and upwards of 1 year in prison for trying to take my daughter to a public park? yeah you've just made it my problem

Does some other person have the right to go to the park an interact and mingle with the people there and drink from the water fountain and splash in the pool if they have Cholera?

Is that part of their civil liberty?

Is the determination of whether or not your daughter could, not necessarily will, die part of their civil liberty? Is it their choice to make choices for you?

If not, then what you're saying is that you have "liberties" that others should not also be entitled to. That's not liberty, that's tyranny. You are saying that you wish to empower yourself to subvert the will of others.

Those "others" have determined that the moral risk of exposure is much more serious a matter than whether or not you get to go to the park with your daughter.

With respect, I don't know what's controversial or not with our brethren in the Great White North. But, asserting one's liberties in the face of true oppression is not the same as blatantly demanding liberties that may subvert the liberties of someone else.

Either we are all "free" or none of us are. The objective of true liberty is that all should have true liberty, with none being subjected to tyranny.

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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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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.