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  1. #1
    Needs more flowers Moderator drone's Avatar
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    Default Re: Coronavirus / COVID-19

    With the egregious state of testing in the US, the death count is really the only number you can sort of trust, and with the hospitals full that will no longer be as accurate (statisticians can extrapolate). Positive tests and hospitalizations are meaningless. We only test the obviously sick or the privileged, and will never know the infected rate unless we do an antibody census to count the asymptomatic cases.

    With the various state lockdowns, we should be screening at the choke points (grocery stores, essential workplaces, etc) with temperature checks followed by swab tests. Most of the country has no clue how good or bad it is.
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  2. #2
    Darkside Medic Senior Member rory_20_uk's Avatar
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    Default Re: Coronavirus / COVID-19

    Quote Originally Posted by drone View Post
    With the egregious state of testing in the US, the death count is really the only number you can sort of trust, and with the hospitals full that will no longer be as accurate (statisticians can extrapolate). Positive tests and hospitalizations are meaningless. We only test the obviously sick or the privileged, and will never know the infected rate unless we do an antibody census to count the asymptomatic cases.

    With the various state lockdowns, we should be screening at the choke points (grocery stores, essential workplaces, etc) with temperature checks followed by swab tests. Most of the country has no clue how good or bad it is.
    I would have thought for tests to be worth it they'd need to be 99%+ accurate (sensitive and specific) and so far it seems a lot of them are way short of this metric.

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  3. #3
    Mr Self Important Senior Member Beskar's Avatar
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    Default Re: Coronavirus / COVID-19

    Quote Originally Posted by rory_20_uk View Post
    I would have thought for tests to be worth it they'd need to be 99%+ accurate (sensitive and specific) and so far it seems a lot of them are way short of this metric.
    People are being tested at least 3 times before it is 'confirmed', with test 1 and 2 being negative, despite a clear presentation.
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  4. #4

    Default Re: Coronavirus / COVID-19

    I wanted to do some original research toward a crude little validation of my hypothesis about testing masking incidence. What's a country with a putatively flat curve with a well-documented testing regime? South Korea is arguably the best representative available.

    Here's an official South Korean resource compiling various vital (!) statistics, including testing.

    Without taking the step of registering a prediction, here is what I found.

    DATE TESTS ADDED POSITIVES ADDED TESTS TO-DATE POSITIVES TO-DATE
    4/9 8708 39 494711 10423
    4/8 8699 53
    4/7 10500 47
    4/6 5571 47
    Week ending 4/5 67092 654 461233 10237
    4/5 6201 81
    4/4 11759 94
    4/3 11530 86
    4/2 10196 89
    4/1 10983 101
    3/31 15370 125
    3/30 1053 78
    Week ending 3/29 62361 686 394141 9583
    Week ending 3/22 63568 735 331780 8897
    Week ending 3/15 79694 1028 268212 8162
    Week ending 3/8 89597 3398 188518 7134
    Week ending 3/1 74352 2970 98921 3736


    According to my hypothesis, a testing ceiling could potentially falsely give rise to the impression of a ceiling in case growth. For example, if you test 10000 a day and identify 1000 positives among them consistently over time, it will appear as though the disease reproduction number (R0) has been suppressed to 1 or lower, which is to say that exponential growth in caseload has been decisively contained. But this testing ceiling could be misleading as these indicators alone would not allow an observer to discern between a contained outbreak and one that is growing at an increasing rate with hundreds of thousands or millions of unconfirmed true cases. In such a situation, it might be expected that growth in the testing rate (e.g. 10K > 11K > 12K daily) would produce a corresponding case growth as more true cases are uncovered.

    [Caveat: I am not doing any proper statistical analysis here, only eyeballing]

    In the South Korean figures above, from the beginning of March to now, we see the following overall trends:

    1. A gradual decline in testing.
    2. A gradual decline in new positives.

    Could South Korea be falling afoul of the trap? Breaking down the trends should offer insight.

    The number of tests being administered daily has dropped a lot since early March, as has the number of new positives added, which would be predicted under my hypothesis. However, the decrease in new positives has been proportionally greater than the decrease in tests performed. We can see that in the week ending March 1, there were 74352 tests conducted for 2970 positives, while there was even more testing in the week ending March 15 at 79694, yet there were only 1028 new positives - not even half as many. Comparing the week ending March 22 to the week ending March 29, testing each week was about the same at ~63K give or take; in the second week there were 98% as many tests as the first, but only 90% as many new positives. In the week ending April 5, more testing was done than in either of the two aforementioned weeks, yet fewer new positives.

    In the daily figures I included for the past 11 days, testing frequency has varied dramatically. On March 30 there were 1053 tests and 78 positives, compared to 15370 tests and 125 positives on March 31. On April 6 and 7 the same amount of new positives - 47 - was added each day. This was despite there being 5571 tests reported on April 6 against 10500, nearly double, on April 7. Over the past two days, April 8-9, there has been the same amount of testing - ~8700 - with 53 and 39 new positives, respectively. That there could be so much variation in testing frequency that still produces positives clustered so closely together in magnitude, yet also following the overall downward trend, is evidence that the outbreak is resolving within the observed time period and that testing captures a representative sampling.

    In the US the ratio of tests to positives has been (using Covidtracking.com and the John Hopkins map) 2,360,512 : 462,135 or 5.1. In South Korea it has been 47.5 per the latest cumulative figures (see top of table). At the beginning of March (see again table) it was 26.5. In the last day it has been 223.3. South Korea could be very bad at selecting testing subjects, or it could be identifying most of the true positives. With the latter scenario the skyrocketing ratio of tests to positives could reflect a genuine decrease in the rate of new infections.

    Unless South Korea is astoundingly bad at picking people to test, and only getting worse with time, then the combination of low absolute case growth and steadily negative rate of growth we see above really does seem consistent with a contained outbreak rather than a masked one. The testing frequency, though inconsistent and by some intuition low, would therefore prove to be well above the ceiling at which true cases begin to slip under the cracks. This conclusion would also be consistent with most news reports on South Korea's relative success, and their trends can thus serve as a point of reference (or contrast) to American ones.


    Addendum: Another avenue of validating the hypothesis for a country, one way or another, would be a view from the ground, i.e. hospital utilization, excess death rates, etc. I have not looked at South Korea's indicators for this exercise, but given the above I would expect them to comport with a contained outbreak.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 04-10-2020 at 03:40.
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  5. #5

    Default Re: Coronavirus / COVID-19

    Denver Post on the federal government confiscating purchased supplies.

    Trump had only days before prevented Colorado Gov. Jared Polis from securing 500 ventilators from a private company, instead, taking the ventilators for the federal government. Polis sent a formal letter pleading for medical equipment, but the president took the time to make clear he was responding to a request from Gardner. We are left to believe that if Colorado didn’t have a Republican senator in office, our state would not be getting these 100 ventilators. How many ventilators would we be getting if we had a Republican governor and a second Republican senator? Would that indicate we had more Republican lives in our state worth saving for Trump and resources would start flowing? Should Utah be concerned that Sen. Mitt Romney voted to remove the president from office?

    This behavior comes, of course, weeks after Trump informed states they would have to compete against one another in the procurement of medical supplies at a time of global shortages due to the coronavirus pandemic.
    If the federal government turns out to be running a double-dip scam, outbidding states or outright stealing medical equipment to resell to connected private contractors who then turn around and front to the states and hospitals, that alone would be a transgression worthy of life imprisonment.


    Toward the intersection of the pandemic and the electoral:

    https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1247658663617138691
    https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/...31484532928514

    Quote Originally Posted by Trump
    Absentee Ballots are a great way to vote for the many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on Election Day. These ballots are very different from 100% Mail-In Voting, which is “RIPE for FRAUD,” and shouldn’t be allowed!
    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...ppression.html

    “Mail-in voting is horrible. It’s corrupt,” declared President Trump earlier this week. When a reporter asked how he could reconcile that position with the fact that he had personally voted by mail in the last election, Trump replied, “Because I’m allowed to.” This perfectly circular logic — if more voters were permitted to vote by mail, they would also be “allowed to” — seemed not to satisfy him. Trump has refined his view, explaining that casting a ballot by mail is fine for members of the military and senior citizens, but is “ripe for fraud” when used by others:

    Trump is not even attempting to formulate a facially neutral principle. He is simply asserting that members of the military and senior citizens — constituencies that lean Republican — can be trusted not to commit voter fraud, but that constituencies that might vote Democratic cannot. He is willing to support accommodations to allow Republican-leaning voters to vote without risking their health, but refuses to support any such accommodations for Democrats. (Trump campaign officials already confirmed this to Politico — they will allow mail voting for senior citizens, but not others.) The travesty that was Tuesday’s election in Wisconsin is his plan to win in November.

    It’s not clear if Democrats have fully grasped the gravity of what Trump and his party are attempting to do. The coronavirus poses a threat to elections in general, but a special threat to urban voters, who tend to face more crowded polling stations. Republicans are very willing to take active measures — like strict voter ID, or the poll tax Florida Republicans have tried to impose — but the virus makes active measures unnecessary. Republicans have calculated that the public-health threat of the virus will suppress the urban vote for them. All they have to do is block any changes to the election system and allow nature to run its course.
    That Trump has never offered any nominal commitment to neutral application of government is a kind of defense if being sardonic. We're -this- close to banana republic status.

    (Grimly, Trump mentioned "when they grab thousands of mail-in ballots, and they dump it" in disparaging broadened mail-in voting. I say grim because North Carolina Republicans were discovered to have perpetrated this exact form of electoral fraud in the 2018 midterms, so egregiously that the courts vacated the election result. It's like a kiddy diddler pulling a minor into their van with the admonition that 'there are a lot of creeps out there.' criminal scum.)



    These last years have convinced me that we need to amend the Constitution to reintroduce attainder.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 04-10-2020 at 04:34.
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  6. #6
    Praefectus Fabrum Senior Member Anime BlackJack Champion, Flash Poker Champion, Word Up Champion, Shape Game Champion, Snake Shooter Champion, Fishwater Challenge Champion, Rocket Racer MX Champion, Jukebox Hero Champion, My House Is Bigger Than Your House Champion, Funky Pong Champion, Cutie Quake Champion, Fling The Cow Champion, Tiger Punch Champion, Virus Champion, Solitaire Champion, Worm Race Champion, Rope Walker Champion, Penguin Pass Champion, Skate Park Champion, Watch Out Champion, Lawn Pac Champion, Weapons Of Mass Destruction Champion, Skate Boarder Champion, Lane Bowling Champion, Bugz Champion, Makai Grand Prix 2 Champion, White Van Man Champion, Parachute Panic Champion, BlackJack Champion, Stans Ski Jumping Champion, Smaugs Treasure Champion, Sofa Longjump Champion Seamus Fermanagh's Avatar
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    Default Re: Coronavirus / COVID-19

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    ...These last years have convinced me that we need to amend the Constitution to reintroduce attainder.
    I wonder sometimes, just how much of your sociopolitical outlook revolves around the belief that any wealth is an inherent evil. Many (Most?) of the rest of your positions seem to flow from that.

    "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is poetic, but seldom materializes in practice and then not for long. Nor can it be effectively enforced by authority.

    As I am condemned to never see government minimized and localized because of the practicalities of the economy of scale, I suspect that you are condemned to never getting the governance you think we all need -- even if you get every law or change enacted that you seek. Neither of us can remake humanity in a different image.
    "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman

    "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken

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  7. #7

    Default Re: Coronavirus / COVID-19

    Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
    I wonder sometimes, just how much of your sociopolitical outlook revolves around the belief that any wealth is an inherent evil. Many (Most?) of the rest of your positions seem to flow from that.

    "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is poetic, but seldom materializes in practice and then not for long. Nor can it be effectively enforced by authority.

    As I am condemned to never see government minimized and localized because of the practicalities of the economy of scale, I suspect that you are condemned to never getting the governance you think we all need -- even if you get every law or change enacted that you seek. Neither of us can remake humanity in a different image.
    Wealth? WEALTH??!??!

    Your comment conveys the impression that the possession of massive wealth can excuse or diminish world-historical crimes to the violation of millions. What's the relevance of someone's wealth in these circumstances, other than a reminder of the depth of their depravity - there isn't even any meaningful material standard to gain for themselves - and the stark truth that wealth translates directly to the power to avoid accountability. But most of these goons aren't even particularly wealthy, which itself is irrespective of the fact that they're not sitting around at home meticulously folding banknotes in peace.

    I remind you that the Nuremberg Trials did not have any independent framework embedded in or legitimized by some system of "rule of law." Sometimes to deliver justice a bespoke mechanism suited to extraordinary circumstances is necessary. And it's abstract deontology anyway, we all know few of the principals will ever see the inside of a court, let alone a stamp of attainder.


    I'm still stunned that my writing about points of political malfeasance could prompt your post, as though I were the one reducing everything to wealth inequality or class dynamics. As though someone would fundamentally need to have a different notion of just distribution of resources than you to condemn plunder and terror, rather than even the most casual shared adherence to ideals of sound government.

    What an example of barking up the wrong tree. I hope by now you understand my sheer befuddlement at your post.

    As for the subject of wealth per se, read these, which is ethically a little more radical than I would subscribe to but well-put in principle.




    Speaking of constitutional turmoil...

    Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’

    California this week declared its independence from the federal government’s feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more. The consequences for the fight against the pandemic are almost certainly positive. The implications for the brewing civil war between Trumpism and America’s budding 21st-century majority, embodied by California’s multiracial liberal electorate, are less clear.

    Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California “as a nation-state” to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide. If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even “export some of those supplies to states in need.”

    “Nation-state.” “Export.”

    Newsom is accomplishing a few things here, with what can only be a deliberate lack of subtlety. First and foremost, he is trying to relieve the shortage of personal protective equipment — a crisis the White House has proved incapable of remedying. Details are a little fuzzy, but Newsom, according to news reports, has organized multiple suppliers to deliver roughly 200 million masks monthly.

    Second, Newsom is kicking sand in the face of President Donald Trump after Newsom’s previous flattery — the coin of the White House realm — failed to produce results. If Trump can’t manage to deliver supplies, there’s no point in Newsom continuing the charade.

    Third, and this may be the most enduring effect, Newsom is sending a powerful message to both political parties. So far, the Republican Party’s war on democratic values, institutions and laws has been a largely one-sided affair, with the GOP assaulting and the Democratic Party defending. The lethal ruling this week by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican bloc, which required Wisconsin residents to vote in person during a pandemic that shut down polling stations, is a preview of the fall campaign. The GOP intends to restrict vote-by-mail and other legitimate enfranchisement to suppress turnout amid fear, uncertainty and disease.

    At some point this civil war by other means, with the goal of enshrining GOP minority rule, will provoke a Democratic counteroffensive. Newsom, leader of the nation’s largest state, is perhaps accelerating that response, shaking Democrats out of denial and putting Republicans on notice. California, an economic behemoth whose taxpayers account for 15% of individual contributions to the U.S. Treasury, is now toning up at muscle beach.
    My compliments to California and the West Coast for their recent kind gesture.

    California is loaning 500 ventilators to states like New York where the coronavirus is exacting a deeper toll, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday.

    The act of generosity completes a bi-coastal aid package after both Washington and Oregon lent medical supplies to New York, which is battling the nation's worst outbreak. Ventilators from California will flow into the Strategic National Stockpile. Oregon announced Saturday it was sending 140 ventilators to New York, while Washington said Sunday it was returning more than 400 of the machines.
    Imagine if all the states got together and coordinated their response, forming some type of super-organization to share supplies, personnel, and information. I wonder what they could accomplish then...
    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


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  8. #8

    Default Re: Coronavirus / COVID-19

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    South Korea is arguably the best representative available.
    I'd also check out Taiwan.

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    In the South Korean figures above, from the beginning of March to now, we see the following overall trends:

    1. A gradual decline in testing.
    2. A gradual decline in new positives.

    Could South Korea be falling afoul of the trap? Breaking down the trends should offer insight.
    Interesting...
    Wooooo!!!

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