Board 8 > Coronavirus Topic 9

(+) Yeah! (+)

I dont necessarily think its human behavior. Its just the behavior of humans in cultures that value the individual over the collective.
---

Sounds pretty similar to the original Florida bar shutdowns which didn't actually do anything whatsoever because restaurants were allowed to serve alcohol. So bars just offered an extremely limited food menu in order to get around it. Now they stipulated that no more than 50% of sales can come from on-site alcohol consumption so there's at least some prevention but again some are still getting around it by selling beer for off-site consumption with people drinking it in the bar anyway.

Jakyl25 posted...

I dont necessarily think its human behavior. Its just the behavior of humans in cultures that value the individual over the collective.

...

Lol.

Listen. He knew residents of pa were going to Ohio and west Virgina all during the initial shutdown. He had to of been aware enough to know that by doing what he is doing that he is just spreading the virus further.

You have Levine up there saying kids have to wear masks during sporting events like she never played a sport in her life so can't understand why that's not a good idea.

You got wolf up there shutting down single counties. Like, my Facebook right now (I live in a tri county area of Washington, Westmoreland, and Fayette) is all abuzz of them naming Fayette bars to go to coming up when they close Washington and Westmoreland bars and restaurants tomorrow. Lol.

Like, a little common sense by the ones running the government would be nice.

Then you got UPMC saying yeah we got more cares but our hospitals have never really been more ready and empty due to Coronavirus and hospitalizations are down.

Like, PA is just a ckusterfuck of competing information and lack of common sense


---

Jakyl25 posted...

I dont necessarily think its human behavior. Its just the behavior of humans in cultures that value the individual over the collective.

yup.

there's probably a reason japan is doing so well, and it's not muffin's "JAPAN IS PROOF LOCKDOWNS ARE BAD" bullshit.

---

Corrik7 posted...

Listen. He knew residents of pa were going to Ohio and west Virgina all during the initial shutdown. He had to of been aware enough to know that by doing what he is doing that he is just spreading the virus further.

He probably has the naive hope that his residents aren't selfish and stupid, but, well... He should know that's clearly not the case by now.

---

StealThisSheen posted...

He probably has the naive hope that his residents aren't selfish and stupid, but, well... He should know that's clearly not the case by now.

So he lacks common sense.

---

How far would you say the average bar patron is willing to commute to go to one?
---

Jakyl25 posted...

How far would you say the average bar patron is willing to commute to go to one?

Lol... Seriously? It's a lot farther than you think and it definitely puts drunk drivers on the road.

---

Corrik7 posted...

So he lacks common sense.

I stop short of calling it common sense because it shouldn't be.

The actual residents should have the common sense that shutting bars down = drink at home, not "Just go to somewhere where they're not shut down."

It only becomes "common" sense because the populace is so full of selfish, stupid people that you now have to expect a lot of people to be, well, selfish and stupid.

---

Yes that was a serious question. I was legit curious because its a social culture thats foreign to me.
---

Corrik7 posted...

Lol... Seriously? It's a lot farther than you think and it definitely puts drunk drivers on the road.

This. For sure.

Maybe it's because the Orlando area is so spread out but travelling 15+ miles to a bar is nothing even under normal circumstances. And I have access to multiple other counties within that same distance.

What SHOULD be common sense is "don't go to a bar in the middle of a fucking pandemic"

---

StealThisSheen posted...

I stop short of calling it common sense because it shouldn't be.

The actual residents should have the common sense that shutting bars down = drink at home, not "Just go to somewhere where they're not shut down."

It only becomes "common" sense because the populace is so full of selfish, stupid people that you now have to expect a lot of people to be, well, selfish and stupid.

Nobody trusts our governor after he said restaurants can't serve you a beer with your food at a restaurant but can any other drink.

He has made so many head scratching moves that even the most liberal of people are still going "huh, this doesn't make sense".

You put orders that don't make sense with orders that compete with convenience to people and they don't go with the intended result because they no longer trust you.

I mean, I live in Fayette County that is unaffected, and I have been to a bar twice since reopening and a restaurant once. But, I do know this will push more cases into my county now because I am not a fucking idiot and know how people behave. Lol.

---

https://twitter.com/QAnonNotables/status/1280507515093094400

Curious as to how many of you would unironically support doing this here.

---

Was it no alcohol at all at restaurants or just no beer

If no alcohol at all, I assume the reasoning is because alcohol typically drives people to stay around longer, whether because you're more encouraged to sit around drinking and chatting, or sitting around to let time pass before you drive. Alcohol also loosens inhibitions and makes it harder to keep people following any rules in place.

---

If it makes you feel better, muffin, this girl on Facebook is crying because her wedding is next week and this order might axe it for her, with basically no notice.

And do you wanna know how many new daily cases her county had to cause it? Lol 30.

---

There's a decent chance I may have to postpone my wedding because of COVID. It's booked for December but because friends and family are traveling from England to attend, it's uncertain on if they will be able to come or not. So we likely have to make a decision well in advance about what we are doing.

I suspected today would be the day to indicate an upward trend in deaths nationally, and today has been the highest total in nearly a month. There's some backlog reporting from the weekend of course, but we'll see if this increases toward the end of the week. Tuesdays, and occasionally Wednesdays, have tended to be the worst of any given week.

---

From the horrible Bloomberg piece: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-07/a-lower-covid-19-death-rate-is-nothing-to-celebrate



It's like they think we can't even read. Take a second and actually look at the graphs. In the first wave, cases reached their peak on April 10. Deaths then peaked on April 17- seven days later. Not two weeks. Not four weeks. Not eight weeks. SEVEN DAYS.

The "second wave" of rising cases started on June 13. Therefore, we would expect deaths to start rising in a similar proportion seven days later, on June 20. What were deaths doing on June 20? Trending down, at their lowest level since the spike, continuing to do so for another five days before a slight blip up (something weird with the statistics must have been going on there), which quickly corrected and then the downward trend continued.

This article, warning us that "deaths lag cases" was published on July 7 - a full 24 days away from when cases started skyrocketing. Deaths are still trending down.

---

Arizona just set a record for daily death toll. As it continually has for the past week.

---

That slight blip was a backlog of suspected deaths on June 26 from New Jersey, about 1,900.

Anyway, it's usually a two to three week lag so you'd be looking at June 27-July 4 for the rise to really begin. Also note that the states that were rising in cases the most (Arizona, Florida, Texas, California, Georgia, etc.) were actually seeing their deaths trend upward by that point. Other states were seeing declining rates so the two factors combined for a period of stability in the trend on the national level.

---

SmartMuffin posted...

From the horrible Bloomberg piece: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-07/a-lower-covid-19-death-rate-is-nothing-to-celebrate



It's like they think we can't even read. Take a second and actually look at the graphs. In the first wave, cases reached their peak on April 10. Deaths then peaked on April 17- seven days later. Not two weeks. Not four weeks. Not eight weeks. SEVEN DAYS.

The "second wave" of rising cases started on June 13. Therefore, we would expect deaths to start rising in a similar proportion seven days later, on June 20. What were deaths doing on June 20? Trending down, at their lowest level since the spike, continuing to do so for another five days before a slight blip up (something weird with the statistics must have been going on there), which quickly corrected and then the downward trend continued.

This article, warning us that "deaths lag cases" was published on July 7 - a full 24 days away from when cases started skyrocketing. Deaths are still trending down.

Yes but it is declining where it should be rising based on cases

NVM I repeated u

---

Anyway, it's usually a two to three week lag

What are you basing this on?

Bloomberg's own graph shows that this is not true. In the first wave, it was a 5-10 day lag. Not 2-3 weeks. In any case, it has already been over three weeks since cases started exponential growth, while deaths are still going down in most places.

---

It's a combination of knowing how the disease progresses and what testing infrastructure was through March. Symptoms begin 2-14 days after contracting it, and then infection turns severe (if it does) at around the 7-10 day mark. Then in the hospital there's a huge variability in how long it takes for things to go downhill. Some patients who die have heart attacks within days of admission, others will be vented for up to months before dying.

The initial rise in cases in New York and elsewhere saw severely limited testing so the cases that were getting reported were already far along the path in the disease. New York City for a time had an awful policy where tests were only being conducted on those getting admitted to the hospital. Their positive test rate in late March was even worse than you saw with Arizona just recently which peaked at around 33%. Extremely high positive test rates mean there's larger proportions of undetected spread.

What you see now is testing catching a much larger proportion of people in the early days of their infections so the lag will appear a lot more of what it truly is.

---

Well first of all, thanks for responding at all. Most of the hysterics just ignore me. Secondly, I acknowledge that your claims are plausible. All of that could be happening, although it seems like pure speculation at this point. But if we agree that in Wave One, the "lag" between cases and deaths was ~1 week and that now, the "lag" between cases and deaths is ~3 weeks (or more) then I think we can do some scenario planning here. Let's make some assumptions and ask what would have to be true in order to see the lag expand by 3x.

So let's just stipulate that the time between Infection and noticeably serious symptoms is 14 days, and that once you receive serious symptoms, you are hospitalized the same day, and that once hospitalized, the average fatality occurs ~7 days after hospitalization. This takes us to a total of 21 days between infection and death, pretty much the upper limit of what could be true based on current data, and assumes deaths will have to start spiking basically today.

To see a lag in Wave 1 of only seven days, we'd have to see something like the average infection going undetected until basically the date of symptoms being so severe that immediate hospitalization is required. So, if we assume the "date of detection" (14 days after infection) and the date of hospitalization are identical, and it takes seven days to go from hospitalization to death, then we'd see a 7-day lag between cases and deaths.

So let's say that in Wave 2, because of expanded testing, we get twice as good at detecting cases "early." Let's say that instead of detecting them on Day 14, we detect them on Day 7. So detection happens on Day 7, hospitalization still happens on Day 14. Now let's also say that better treatment methods and/or more favorable case demographics have caused us to get twice as good at "delaying" death, such that the time between hospitalization and death doubles from 7 days to 14 days. We're detecting cases 7 days earlier, and we're extending total hospitalization time by 7 days. This is just enough to take us from a 7-day lag to an 21 day lag.

In order to believe that the extension of the lag (from 7 days to 21+ days) is due to earlier detection and/or longer hospitalizations, you'd have to believe that detection has improved somewhere in the range of 7+ days on average (basically meaning that we've gone from not detecting any cases until hospitalization is imminent, to detecting cases a full week ahead of symptoms getting severe enough to require hospitalization, which would suggest there's a whole lot of testing being done for people who are entirely asymptomatic) AND that we've extended the time of "hospitalization to death" by somewhere by over a week on average.

All of that being true strikes me as relatively unlikely. And that's what would be necessary just to explain where we are today. Every additional day that passes and sees deaths rise at anything less than at "exponential growth" levels makes this explanation all the more implausible.

---

Expanded testing also means that you're getting more people that are asymptomatic or with mild cases that might not require hospitalizations in addition to detecting more severe cases early. You're right that there's a lot of factors at play here though, so it's hard to say what the numbers will look like since we don't know the exact breakdown of things until they occur.

---

BlackDra90n posted...

Expanded testing also means that you're getting more people that are asymptomatic or with mild cases that might not require hospitalizations in addition to detecting more severe cases early. You're right that there's a lot of factors at play here though, so it's hard to say what the numbers will look like since we don't know the exact breakdown of things until they occur.

Well yeah, but that's an argument in favor of "rising cases is not something we actually need to worry about very much" (my position), not "OMG rising cases SHUTDOWN EVERYTHING NOW!" (the mainstream position)

The mainstream position is that the cases to deaths ratio has not significantly changed, and therefore rising cases will lead to an equivalent relative rise in deaths, and the fact that it obviously has not yet is just a factor of timing.

---

Well, that's pretty much it right? Either the cases end up being mostly harmless and the deaths don't go up or there ends up being a significant increase in deaths later. We don't know right now so it really is a matter of waiting and seeing.

Regardless, more infections (not necessarily confirmed cases) will lead to more deaths, which is where the "mainstream position" you're talking about is coming from. It's just a matter of what the fatality rate actually is.

---

Regardless, more infections (not necessarily confirmed cases) will lead to more deaths

If everything else is equal, yes.

But if some things aren't equal (like say, if all the new infections are coming from young, healthy people) then it won't.

---

SmartMuffin posted...

Well first of all, thanks for responding at all. Most of the hysterics just ignore me.

first of all, back in the days of the freedom topic you ignored like five gazillion posts i made, with the arguments for why you did so ranging from "i'm too busy to respond to everything" to "i don't respond to posts that are too stupid to respond to." you're not obligated to respond to posts, but with that attitude you kind of lose the right to complain about people ignoring your posts >_>

second of all, "ignoring" doesn't necessarily mean "disagreeing with." i'm not 100% pro-lockdown and i don't disagree with the anti-lockdown people about everything. when i made my post about greg abbott's tweet, you went on a four post long tangent as if i disagreed with everything abbott had said, which i didn't. i was only specifically replying to the "well california is spiking more than texas even though it shut down longer and harder!" part. all i was saying was that that was a stupid argument because california has a much bigger population and a much higher population density. i still stand by that.

---

David Friedman basically saying what I just did

https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2020/07/cases-vs-deaths-covid-puzzle.html

---

All of the numbers, including daily deaths, are now getting worse:

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1281009997254742021?s=21

---

@SmartMuffin

---

I mean the death numbers are going to get worse as the system gets more and more taxed

---

Whiskey_Nick posted...

I mean the death numbers are going to get worse as the system gets more and more taxed

Yes but you see it didn't happen immediately so Muffin insisted it never would.

---

Since last week, New Jersey's deaths per million increased by 23. Mass increased by 14. Texas increased by 14. FL by 16.

Not only are the evil horrible no good very bad red states still nowhere even remotely near catching the Northeast in terms of death, they're barely even gaining ground at all. At this rate, if current trends continue (i.e. FL gains about 20 deaths per capita per week), even if all deaths in the Northeast stopped today and there were no more ever, it would take Florida 74 weeks (around November of 2021) to catch up to New York.

---

lol

---

Shockingly, assuming linear growth of a quantity that fundamentally grows exponentially is not a reasonable thing to do!

---

LordoftheMorons posted...

Shockingly, assuming linear growth of a quantity that fundamentally grows exponentially is not a reasonable thing to do!

Does that look exponential to you?

---

Given the fact that those are deaths when the occurred and not when they were reported (as they explain in the caption, so a bunch of deaths are missing, particularly the most recent ones) it could be completely consistent with exponential growth with an R slightly over 1, yes.

It's not that hard to understand why you should expect growth to be roughly exponential. The mechanism is that each individual person infects R other people on average. If R was constant that gives you exponential growth. In reality R is slowly varying as people modify their behavior, new rules are put in place, etc, but growth will be obviously be proportional to the currently infected population. With linear growth that's not the case.

---

Indonesia hits new record on new cases per day today, at 2,657 (while businesses are opening up and stuff). Also there's a pretty big scandal where the Coronavirus Response Team confirmed that the official government data is faulty and manipulated to make the pandemic look not as bad.

Oh man.


---

SmartMuffin posted...

Since last week, New Jersey's deaths per million increased by 23. Mass increased by 14. Texas increased by 14. FL by 16.

Not only are the evil horrible no good very bad red states still nowhere even remotely near catching the Northeast in terms of death, they're barely even gaining ground at all. At this rate, if current trends continue (i.e. FL gains about 20 deaths per capita per week), even if all deaths in the Northeast stopped today and there were no more ever, it would take Florida 74 weeks (around November of 2021) to catch up to New York.

I think the bulk of the deaths are in the Miami area too.

Like they have made a big deal about Florida being the new hotspot and the NBA still heading there but in Orange County deaths have gone from 41 after the initial wave to 63 now. In Osceola deaths are at 30. Those are total numbers not per million although I think those 2 counties have a combined population of a little under 2 million. Those are the 2 counties Disney is in where the NBA playoffs will be.

Miami-Dade County also has one of the few mayors in the country who is willing to admit the overwhelmingly obvious - that BLM protests almost certainly contribute to the spread of COVID

https://www.newsweek.com/miami-dade-county-gop-mayor-blames-blm-protests-coronavirus-case-spike-1515682

---

SmartMuffin posted...

Miami-Dade County also has one of the few mayors in the country who is willing to admit the overwhelmingly obvious - that BLM protests almost certainly contribute to the spread of COVID

https://www.newsweek.com/miami-dade-county-gop-mayor-blames-blm-protests-coronavirus-case-spike-1515682

I dont disagree with you, but Im curious as to how you can say that theres no proof social distancing is effective and also say that this is overwhelmingly obvious?
---

My coworker got covid19 like 2 months ago but today I found out a person I was an acquaintance with in my pool league is in the ICU for it. That's the closest person I know that has it at this point. Narrowly edging out my cousin from Arizona.

---

I have a buddy who works at Home Depot and one of his co-workers got COVID-19. They have to shut the store down for 2 weeks, but apparently they gave the workers 2 weeks bonus vacation time to use in case this happened. He told me a bunch of them used it at the start of the pandemic in a panic and now they don't have the vacation time to afford working there.

Maybe just give them all paid time off, Home Depot. It's not like you've been hurting that much through this thing.

---

Jakyl25 posted...

I dont disagree with you, but Im curious as to how you can say that theres no proof social distancing is effective and also say that this is overwhelmingly obvious?

There's no evidence that government ordered lockdowns work. But voluntary social distancing measures probably help. Like, it's reasonable to assume that there are "cultural factors" that explain not only why the disease hammered Italy much more than Japan, but also why there are certain groups of people in the US who seem to be much more likely to catch and spread the disease than others...

---

SmartMuffin posted...

There's no evidence that government ordered lockdowns work. But voluntary social distancing measures probably help.

What are government ordered lockdowns if not just non-voluntary social distancing?
---

What are government ordered lockdowns if not just non-voluntary social distancing?

The problem is that the type of people who are likely to give a shit about government-ordered lockdowns are the type of people who would already be voluntarily social distancing anyway.

I mean super totalitarian no-kidding lockdown of the type we saw early in China and are seeing just now in Australia might work. But that means you have to go full "the cops will shoot you if you disobey" which doesn't seem even remotely close to happening here (and didn't happen anywhere in Europe either).

---

SmartMuffin posted...

The problem is that the type of people who are likely to give a shit about government-ordered lockdowns are the type of people who would already be voluntarily social distancing anyway.

data says this is not true.

People have been partaking across the country in whatever the hell the government decides to allow.

---