By the way, I still have not heard of a single serosurvey being run in South Korea. Why is that?
It's almost like people just don't want to know the CFR of this thing... Why wouldn't you want to know the CFR, in exquisite detail, down to groups refined by as many distinguishing details as you can possibly measure? But, surprise! You simply cannot know the CFR of Covid-19 without statistically valid immunity studies of the general population. Which nobody is doing! Just ... crazy.
Its stunningly clear that outcomes for this disease are wildly variable. For some, its extremely risky, for other groups, its not even a passing thought!
And yet, here we are -- global, carte-blanche "quarantining", to "flatten the curve" -- that big, ill-defined "curve" that means sudden death to our civilization if we get near it!
And yet, here I sit in a community with virtually empty hospitals, but almost no progress toward herd immunity. But, with an undercurrent of well-distributed carriers -- because nobody is interested in testing the general population (for either infection or immunity). And, we're starting to "open up". Heaven help the elderly and immune-compromised -- they are just toast.
In 2-3 weeks, a brutal "second wave" is just ... guaranteed. And, it'll be presented as a "surprise"! Who could have possibly predicted it! By golly, we'll have to really put the hammer down, this time!
I pray that this bungled, too-terrible-to-be-an-accident response to Covid-19 comes home to roost on those who should have known better. But, the truth won't be coming out from the criminally complicit "media". If only we had any "Journalists" to expose this thing! But, big-media is on the gravy-train of the politicians (here in Canada, at least), so there's no hope of that.
Independent journalists need to step up, somehow run the gauntlet of our controlled Internet media outlets (say something contrary to WHO -- ban-hammer!), and expose this thing!
Fortunately, evidence-based reality cannot be suppressed forever!
I don’t think this will happen in the northern hemisphere, thankfully. There is reason to believe both that effective R drops off a cliff in the summer months, and that we’re much closer to herd immunity (or whatever is possible with this kind of virus) than most people think. If you want references I can dig them up, but I guess we’ll see either way in a few weeks.
Certainly for SF/LA, which is basically an extension of China because of the daily flights to SFO and LAX.
The SF tests show 3.6% of 78,000 exposed to corona, but nobody knows how accurate those tests are. The hospital dashboard has been flat.
I just checked, and the numbers have been flat (no growth) for over a month, with only 62 deaths to date and 38 in ICU now:
https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#ho...
All sources I've seen before say something different about those two things (i.e. supposedly effective R will maybe go a bit down in summer but in all likelihood not by much; and herd immunity is in most (or all) places still very far away), but I'm not following the science very close so I might very well be wrong. I'd be very grateful if you could dig up those references!
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.26.115832v1
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.18.100545v1
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30610-3
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.20061440v...
https://hal-pasteur.archives-ouvertes.fr/pasteur-02569149
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108308v1
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.02.20120477v...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v...
There isn't much completed research about the seasonality of COVID-19 itself (understandably), the "cliff" is mostly an educated guess based on the strong seasonal pattern we see with every other respiratory virus. Here are a couple papers:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.12.20034728v...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.22.20025791v...
If you show him a straight line with R²>0,99 (e.g. Germany using 7 day averages) - they will tell you that it all means nothing and that the curve in fact is bending - because the 'policies' must have worked.
If you tell them that working policies should have left visible marks in the curve and that the curve is converging: They will just block you.
Science is dead - at least in the field of epidemiology.
You are deeply into "Not even wrong" territory.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Did you forget HCQ already? Lots of "positive reports" and yet controlled studies shows that it kills more Covid patients than leaving them untreated.
We have data and hypotheses showing that it's mostly continuous exposure that matters (which means that nongroup workers are better off than we expected and casual interactions to buy groceries and such are safer than expected), and yet everybody wants to get back into groups--which is known wrong. Two Mother's Day gatherings account for more than 50% of the Covid cases in Santa Cruz county.
Data by itself is meaningless. Data leads to a "falsifiable hypothesis" which can then be tested. AFTER the test passes or fails, you modify your Bayesian priors and your working tasks. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Remember how the scientific method works: if you make a hypothesis, it's the most fragile thing in the universe -- a single falsification is all it takes to send you packing.
So, every time someone trots out "the plural of anecdote is not data" when presented with a refutation, this tells us something important... Like it or not, that's just how it works.
A group's CFR is almost the only thing that matters to that specific group. If the CFR is low, it literally does not matter at all how, or how fast you got infected -- the statistical outcomes are now known! The "continuous exposure" vs. "casual interactions" thing? That R-0; interesting, but almost irrelevant vs. CFR. In fact, once low group-CFR has been ascertained, the "normal behavior case" R-0 defines the societal infection/immunity rate required to achieve their group's contribution to societal herd immunity, but otherwise is of little interest: the average group participant just wants to gain immunity, as quickly as possible, to provide protection for the high-risk groups.
So, the fact that multiple independent instances of (accidentally measured, statistically significant) high rates of group infection without demise, leading to a low group CFR are extremely surprising, and that should have led to a "stop work, tools down" moment for those engineering our societal response. But, it did not.
That is disappointing.
I think the most disappointing thing, to me, is how many in our society are more than ready and willing to throw the innocent, high-risk elderly and those with co-morbidities "under the bus", just to avoid their own (very low) CFR.
Take it like a man/woman.
Except that you don't know what defines a group.
We know what makes someone at risk. That does NOT imply the reverse--that we know what makes someone NOT at risk.
Sure, maybe 18-30 year olds by and large don't drop dead. That doesn't mean they don't wind up with stroke risk or a damaged lifespan. And, maybe some 2-3% subgroup of them drops dead because they have a particular receptor--oops, sucks to be you but we can't undo it now that we let the pandemic loose.
You don't just shove a disease through a population when you don't know what the effects are. That is unethical and immoral at the level of eugenics. Good God, man.
We actually did this sort of thing with chicken pox and now those children get the joy of shingles possibly blinding them in their adult life. Oops.
And, by the way, you know what disease we achieved herd immunity to before vaccines? Oh, yeah, NONE. This one will be no different.
Nobody is "shoving a disease"; the disease is naturally progressing, that's what diseases do. Most moral systems distinguish between actively causing harm and not doing something that could prevent harm.
Not only that, but while we may not know exactly what the effects of the disease are, we know exactly what the effects of the lockdown are, and it's causing immense misery to many many people. So it's a case of weighing up something of unknown badness (the disease passing through the population) against something with known, definite badness (the lockdowns). So we need to be reasonably sure that the unknown badness of the disease is sufficiently bad to outweigh the known badness of the lockdown.
You've now left the realm of science and entered the realm of politics.
The "badness of the lockdowns", however, is not a given and varies depending upon the competence of your government and the idiocy of the people.
Yes, everybody locked WAY down at the beginning. However, governments that had universal healthcare and actually paid unemployment benefits to their people had far less "lockdown badness". People in those conditions weren't forced back to work in order to get food or healthcare.
In addition, those who actually locked down (R0 < 0.8) had cases that dropped substantially and can now reopen with contact tracing and efforts that aren't quite so invasive.
This is opposed to those who really just "sorta" locked down , whine about wearing a mask, etc. (R0 about 1.0)--see: Santa Cruz county being able to trace more than half of their cases to two Mother's Day gatherings.
"Lockdown badness" is something that is the result of poor government policy and actually has solutions--it is not immutable scientific fact.
Whether political leaders will implement those solutions is a different question.
All badness is the realm of morality and politics, not science. Science can predict how many people will die, it can't weigh this up against other consequences. Science can't make moral judgements, only inform them.
>"Lockdown badness" is something that is the result of poor government policy and actually has solutions--it is not immutable scientific fact.
A big part of the lockdown badness is the economic damage. This is an immutable economic fact: stopping most people working will mean fewer things are produced, and more of the existing things and infrastructure will be consumed. This translates into worse standard of living and quality of life for people. Weighing this against the health damage from the virus is a matter of politics/ethics, not of science.
What we can see clearly is countries with no widespread forced closure of businesses, like Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Sweden, are having much better economic outcomes compared to countries with strong lockdowns like the US, France and Italy (expected yearly GDP growth of ~0%, vs ~-5% for the lockdown countries).
As did Taiwan after Wuhan. Taiwan also rationed emergency supplies. Here's what Taiwan did: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/taiwan-covid-19-lessons-1.5...
See any of those dividers in the US? Yeah, no, you can't even get people to put masks on.
Japan seems to be cooking the books because of the Olympics even though that's simply not going to happen.
Sweden is about to pass the US in cases and deaths per capita and is right about the same economics as the other European countries (which are all benefiting from their social safety net). Not sure that's counts as better than the rest of the EU--we'll see if it continues.
Your economic claims are dubious.
The primary difference is how fast a country reacted, not how hard. The problem is that if a country didn't react fast enough, it is then required that you react harder and longer.
>As did Taiwan after Wuhan. Taiwan also rationed emergency supplies. Here's what Taiwan did: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/taiwan-covid-19-lessons-1.5....
But they didn't mass-close businesses. That's what causes the economic damage.
>the same economics as the other European countries (which are all benefiting from their social safety net
You sure about that? https://www.dw.com/en/as-coronavirus-lockdown-eases-italians... , https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/23/unrest-hunger-and-hardsh... .
> The problem is that if a country didn't react fast enough, it is then required that you react harder and longer.
Required by what? Sweden hasn't "reacted" harder and the spread of the virus is already slowing there: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?location=Brazil&location=Ca...
There are no words for the level of incompetence displayed in the handling of these HCQ studies.
But, it wasn't; because these "falsifying" signals were ignored (or worse yet, stridently denied), and were certainly not actually tested -- we have yet to see even a single case of a country aggressively testing a random sampling of their entire population for immunity!
This one example is an astonishing repudiation of the global response to Coronavirus. Its insane! Wholesale self-destruction of the global supply-chain and division of labor, because the political, medical and scientific elites just don't want to be shown to be wrong.