Coronavirus / COVID-19

[Montmorency]

God I hate this stupid megalomaniac....

That's Dumb Criminal Bigot - sir.

How would a president nullify a lockdown? I've heard of using emergencies to declare martial law, but I'm not sure I've ever heard of - what, sending federal troops to force people out of their homes and into the workplaces and businesses? A big burly Marine looking mean on the street corner beside a flowing megaposter of Trump's face captioned with "CONSUME"?

[ReluctantSamurai]

How would a president nullify a lockdown?

He can't. 10th Amendment. And besides, he never instituted a national lock-down in the first place. The man has completely lost cabin pressure

[Montmorency]

He can't. 10th Amendment. And besides, he never instituted a national lock-down in the first place. The man has completely lost cabin pressure

Right, the states are the ones who have (inconsistently) applied various social distancing or lockdown policies. But the Constitution is a piece of paper that Trump has never much feared, so I'm asking how he would physically override the governors. The only way I can imagine is literal men with guns forcing civilians out of their homes. Almost certainly a dumb and corrosive bluff.

One can never get enough of Trump's idea of political philosophy. The president has unlimited authority to do what they want, but it's not the federal government's responsibility to provide material assistance to saving American lives. A common joke over the past years has been that, previous historiography has tended to regard ancient and medieval historical works with a grain of salt where they denounce particular kings and rulers, because often the criticisms seem so hyperbolic or outlandish to modern eyes that they have to be apocryphal exaggerations or outright fabrications - right? Now we know, yeah, Caligula for sure had a horse consul.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Almost certainly a dumb and corrosive bluff.

Actually, it's typical Fearless Leader. When he feels that the narrative is focusing on someone, or something other than himself ......(ie. the NYT article on what he knew about the outbreak):

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/u...-response.html

......he does, or says something to bring that focus back to himself and tries to take control of the narrative.

Hopefully, other news sources besides CNN and MSNBC (who cut away to commercial from the propagandist-like video reel he played at Monday's "Fearless Leader Show") start cutting short their coverage altogether

[a completely inoffensive name]

Right, the states are the ones who have (inconsistently) applied various social distancing or lockdown policies. But the Constitution is a piece of paper that Trump has never much feared, so I'm asking how he would physically override the governors. The only way I can imagine is literal men with guns forcing civilians out of their homes. Almost certainly a dumb and corrosive bluff.

If Trump were to say tomorrow that he hereby revokes all stay-at-home orders and to disobey the state governors orders, you would have a third of the country congregating and spreading the disease to the point that we would be fucked anyway. WOuldn't even matter if the rest of the country continued to follow social distancing.

[Montmorency]

New US map tab on John Hopkins COVID resource. Seems to be missing some data however.

Another examination of the federal government's failures.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/u...-response.html

Trump wants to make sure the $1200 relief checks are held back to ensure they come printed with his name.

The first tranche is supposedly out. I haven't received anything yet; we're going to need more administrative capacity. But can we have an automatic countercyclical universal income (such as Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna, and even - Tim Ryan! - propose) linked to unemployment rate and other indicators? $2000 a month for all adults (and $500 per child) would be swell in hard times. In a sane world it would be a sound compromise as a temporary stimulus.

Attention Americans: The NIH is soliciting volunteers for a pilot serological survey of coronavirus antibodies in the population.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news...irus-infection

If Trump were to say tomorrow that he hereby revokes all stay-at-home orders and to disobey the state governors orders, you would have a third of the country congregating and spreading the disease to the point that we would be fucked anyway. WOuldn't even matter if the rest of the country continued to follow social distancing.

De Santis already overruled counties that tried to institute stronger measures than those adopted by the state. I think other governors applied similar restrictions too (in keeping with the typical governing philosophy of state Republicans).

[Shaka_Khan]

Meanwhile...

[Hooahguy]

Trump wants to make sure the $1200 relief checks are held back to ensure they come printed with his name.

Got mine today. Good thing I have direct deposit set up!

De Santis already overruled counties that tried to institute stronger measures than those adopted by the state. I think other governors applied similar restrictions too (in keeping with the typical governing philosophy of state Republicans).

I mean he also declared that WWE was an essential business in Florida so common sense doesnt seem to be his strong suit.

[Montmorency]

Got mine today. Good thing I have direct deposit set up!

Yep, today here too. Sucks for the analog people.

I mean he also declared that WWE was an essential business in Florida so common sense doesnt seem to be his strong suit.

I would look into any financial connections with the McMahons.

South Dakota’s governor resisted ordering people to stay home. Now it has one of the nation’s largest coronavirus hot spots.
...
As governors across the country fell into line in recent weeks, South Dakota’s top elected leader stood firm: There would be no statewide order to stay home.

Such edicts to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, Gov. Kristi L. Noem said disparagingly, reflected a “herd mentality.” It was up to individuals — not government — to decide whether “to exercise their right to work, to worship and to play. Or to even stay at home.”

And besides, the first-term Republican told reporters at a briefing this month, “South Dakota is not New York City.”

But now South Dakota is home to one of the largest single coronavirus clusters anywhere in the United States, with more than 300 workers at a giant ­pork-processing plant falling ill. With the case numbers continuing to spike, the company was forced to announce the indefinite closure of the facility Sunday, threatening the U.S. food supply.

“A shelter-in-place order is needed now. It is needed today,” said Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, whose city is at the center of South Dakota’s outbreak and who has had to improvise with voluntary recommendations in the absence of statewide action.

But the governor continued to resist. Instead, she used a media briefing Monday to announce trials of a drug that President Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential breakthrough in the fight against the coronavirus, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

“It’s an exciting day,” she boasted, repeatedly citing her conversations with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.

At least it's a small state.


EDIT: Protestors in Ohio demanding Governor DeWine lift restrictions on business operation. Yes, it does resemble that. You know.

[Hooahguy]

That picture is terrifying for a whole bunch of reasons.

It would certainly be a tragic irony if those protests ended up being hot spots. Reminds me of that lady in Texas who said COVID-19 was a hoax and then two weeks later died from it.

[Montmorency]

I've made posts, including an in-depth one, regarding the relationship of testing volume to true incidence. It turns out Nate Silver was writing about that contemporaneously, I just missed it.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...e-meaningless/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...trump-approval

BTW, New York, if not yet the country in aggregate, has the outbreak more or less under control for the moment; we've bent our local peak under the max capacity of the healthcare system (which we also did a good job in expanding). We desperately need results for serological surveys, the sooner the better. The current US CFR is 5% (640K positives/31K dead). If the true incidence has been vastly higher than what is directly measured, then we have a best-case scenario where the disease really isn't noticeable for the vast majority of the population and we can transition to targeted policies for a low attack rate. If the true incidence is 5 or 10 times higher (e.g. ~3-6 million infected so far), then prolonged quarantines are necessary to avoid a surge of tens of millions of hospitalizations, and at least a million deaths, in a short period of time.

As I mentioned in a recent post, NIH is soliciting volunteers for serological survey. What's going on in other countries? The more data the better for everyone.

[Shaka_Khan]

[ReluctantSamurai]

BTW, New York, if not yet the country in aggregate, has the outbreak more or less under control for the moment

But I'm afraid we here in the States are headed down this road:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52305055

In the last week, Hokkaido has recorded 135 new confirmed cases of Covid-19. Unlike the first outbreak in February, there is no evidence the virus has been re-imported from outside Japan. None of the new cases are foreigners, nor have any of those infected travelled outside Japan in the last month.

Even now, more than three months after Japan recorded its first case, it is still only testing a tiny percentage of the population. "The major lesson to take from Hokkaido is that even if you are successful in the containment the first time around, it's difficult to isolate and maintain the containment for a long period. Unless you expand the testing capacity, it's difficult to identify community transmission and hospital transmission."

The big rush to restart the economy here by Fearless Leader and some of the state governors, is going to mirror the same results as Hokkaido, seeing as how we are not testing anywhere near what we should be.

And then you have ignorant governors like Kristi L. Noem bloviating about how S. Dakota "is not New York City". How do you like like it now, sweetheart??

And then you have these idiots in my home state:

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronav...ic-jam-protest

Matt Seely, a spokesman for the conservative group that organized the protest warned, "If something isn't put in place soon, you'll see in the form of a protest—businesses just opening. Because, truthfully, for the $1,000 fine, most businesses could sustain that fine because they'll at least be able to make a living."

Anyone else besides me think that India is the next powder-keg waiting to explode?:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com...w/75148094.cms

[ReluctantSamurai]

The US thinks it's ready to reopen business to some degree. With this kind of attitude, we should think again:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52311877

But according to Smithfield employees, their union representatives, and advocates for the immigrant community in Sioux Falls, the outbreak that led to the plant closure was avoidable. They allege early requests for personal protective equipment were ignored, that sick workers were incentivised to continue working, and that information regarding the spread of the virus was kept from them, even when they were at risk of exposing family and the broader public.

On the same day that Helen received her results, the issue of the Smithfield plant had turned fully political. Mayor TenHaken formally requested that Governor Noem issue a shelter-in-place order for Sioux Falls' surrounding counties as well as an isolation centre. She denied both requests. Despite the steep increase in cases, Noem also continued to decline to issue a shelter-in-place order in South Dakota, specifically saying that such an order would not have prevented the Smithfield outbreak. "That is absolutely false," she said. Instead, she approved the first state test of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that President Donald Trump has frequently cited as a possible treatment for coronavirus.

Will the stupidity ever end?

[Idaho]

I genuinely worry for you Americans. I just don't think you are culturally and economically able to manage this kind of event. You have a (quite right) mistrust of government (while being nationalistic and prone to support bombast), combined with an individualist overt culture (with a system that's designed to both reward the rich and powerful, while maintaining the pretense that it's easy to be rich and powerful).

The narrative from trump is all about externalising blame, and it seems that he will keep pushing that line. There is no soul searching, no lessons learned. No change.

[Montmorency]

But I'm afraid we here in the States are headed down this road:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52305055

I told ya Japan was in for it with their cavalier attitude to testing (or I expressed it offline).

I've seen various comments online and off, including quoted in news reports, from individuals in the US and other countries, to the effect that the subject didn't make much of the pandemic because 'if it was serious the government would be acting like it.' I think this isn't just a widespread sentiment, but a more basic psychological heuristic. The signals the authorities send to the public can be as important as any material decision. Thus the maxim to act fast and have no regrets.

And then you have these idiots in my home state:

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronav...ic-jam-protest

Several thousand cars flooded the streets around the state Capitol in Lansing, Mich., on Wednesday to protest the governor's extended stay-at-home order. Cars jammed the streets around the Capitol building, filling the air with a cacophony of honking. People draped in American and "Don't Tread on Me" flags blared "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "God Bless The USA" out of car stereos.

A very American kind of protest protest, in a bad sense.

Yeah, India is screwed. I can only hope this pandemic weakens rather than strengthens the grip on power men like Modi and Putin have.

How you know you've lost containment: Singapore edition.



This is the part where we get Dutch angles and POV-cam of monsters bounding through the hallways of a research complex as employees howl in the background. New Zealand and Taiwan still looking golden though.


Here's an article for your interest, on how South Korea plans to maintain containment in the medium-term without freezing normal life or the economy.

South Korea’s virus-containment strategy will build on an intensive contact tracing and testing campaign that experts say has been instrumental in uncovering webs of infections that might otherwise have gone undetected. Besides the testing kits and tracing techniques that have already been rolled out, South Korea plans to build out a “smart city” database and get quarantine violators to agree to use tracking bracelets. The database was designed to share information between cities on things like traffic and pollution. Health authorities plan to leverage that network to reduce the time it takes to find and isolate coronavirus cases. The database will be operated by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), giving epidemiological investigators real-time data feeds on patients, including their whereabouts, times spent at specific locations, CCTV footage, and credit card transactions.
[...]
Another key to the South Korean virus containment strategy is stepping up border controls. Around half of new cases in recent weeks have been found in people arriving from overseas, according to the KCDC. Rather than outright bans, South Korea is using widespread testing and technology-enabled tracking to allow people to travel to the country. Mandatory testing and quarantines now apply to nearly all arrivals from overseas, including citizens. South Korea installed walk-through facilities this month at Seoul’s Incheon International Airport to test anyone who arrives with symptoms. Those who don’t show symptoms will also be tested within three days. All arrivals must download a government app that tracks their location and requires users to report any symptoms. Then everyone, regardless of nationality or whether they tested negative, must self-isolate for two weeks.
[...]
Some of the long-term policies being discussed include making workplaces less crowded, and persuading Koreans that it is not a virtue to show up at work when sick, Yoon Tae-ho, director general for public health policy at the health ministry told Reuters. In a glimpse of what could become long-term practices, the KCDC last week outlined preventive measures for schools, churches and some entertainment facilities that included disinfection schedules, guidelines on how close people can be to each other and temperature checks. “Our goal is to be able to control infections in a way that our health and medical system, including personnel and sickbeds, can handle them at usual levels,” Park, the health minister, said. South Korean officials say that means keeping new cases under 50 per day, a level first reached last week. On Tuesday, South Korea reported 27 new cases. The country is also stepping up efforts to improve testing and boost resources for hospitals. Hospitals are testing all pneumonia patients, and staff at places like nursing homes and medical facilities will be regularly tested. Authorities have designated two new hospitals and are building a third to specialize in treating infectious diseases.

“We will have to step up our daily hygiene and disease prevention standards,” Yoon said. “It will be a tedious battle, but we have to do this.”

[ReluctantSamurai]

I genuinely worry for you Americans. I just don't think you are culturally and economically able to manage this kind of event. You have a (quite right) mistrust of government (while being nationalistic and prone to support bombast), combined with an individualist overt culture (with a system that's designed to both reward the rich and powerful, while maintaining the pretense that it's easy to be rich and powerful).

I agree with the cultural and economic deficits in US society in regards to this pandemic. However, in looking around the world at how other countries are dealing with it, I don't see many countries doing much better. In fact, the countries that seem to be dealing with this pandemic the best, are authoritarian regimes that use police and military to enforce local edicts, and highly invasive technology to track its' population. I'm personally willing to adhere to temporary lock-down orders, even if it's enforced. I am not willing to be subjected to personally invasive tracking technology. Yet to be seen is what will happen with Germany loosening their economy a bit, Sweden's trust in its' citizens to voluntarily adhering to social distancing, and Denmark's "deep-freeze" approach to its' economy.

Cultural rift here has been happening for a very long time. Lately that's no more evident than in our politics. Blue vs. Red, Urban vs Rural, Rich vs Poor. Picking just one issue (amongst the many), the Affordable Care Act of 2010, highlights the rift quite well.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...-fight/608797/

Before the law, people with significant health needs were either charged much higher premiums for coverage in the individual-insurance market, or denied coverage altogether because they had a preexisting condition. Those rules benefited healthier people buying individual coverage: Because those with greater needs were systematically excluded, insurers had to pay out fewer claims, allowing them to hold down premiums for everyone else. The ACA upended that arrangement. Through a long list of reforms, it required insurers to sell coverage at comparable prices to those with greater and lesser health needs—a policy known as “community rating.” It asked the young and healthy to pay more for coverage so that it would be affordable, and available, for older and sicker consumers.

The widespread lockdowns now being implemented to contain the spread of the coronavirus rest on the same underlying principle. In even the most adverse scenarios, most Americans will not be seriously sickened or killed by the disease. That means the nation is now imposing costs on many people who are less likely to die of the coronavirus, in order to reduce the risk for those who are the most vulnerable.

It’s not too surprising to see Trump and other Republicans bridle against social distancing: Their complaints fit with the right’s long-standing unease about any policy that shares risk by imposing costs broadly. The entrenched power of that belief is why Corlette is pessimistic the country will preserve widespread limits on activity while the disease remains concentrated in relatively few places. “I have zero optimism we will be able to sustain that,” she says. “It may be sustained in pockets of the country, certain states or certain cities. But it’s hard to see this nationwide for much longer. As a country, we are not great at embracing the social contract.”

That last part is what it's all about. In those places that the pandemic is lightly affecting (mainly rural America), those places want to get back to work right now, damn the torpedoes; essentially throwing more susceptible (read as the elderly and the poor) portions of our society under the bus, so-to-speak. Getting a paycheck (for the less well off) and raking in dividends (for the rich) is more important than risking infection and the possibility of death. My own personal caveat in judging the correctness of that attitude, is that my children are grown and on their own; I am a single divorcee; I own my home and truck outright; and I have no outstanding debts including credit cards. Hard to say if my attitude would be different were I 30 years younger and carrying lots of debt.

As to our economic woes....hell, that's been going on for decades, and it's only going to get worse. The next crash is going to be worse than this one, despite how catastrophic this one is because we are repeating the very same mistakes we've made in the past.

So yes, the worry is warranted.

[Idaho]

I agree with the cultural and economic deficits in US society in regards to this pandemic. However, in looking around the world at how other countries are dealing with it, I don't see many countries doing much better.

I think almost all countries are dealing with it better - you've already got the highest death rate. And we are really only starting with this. Yes we might be approaching the middle of the actual first wave covid deaths in most countries - but the us isn't. It will open up sooner and have more waves of death. And, more significantly, I don't think it will deal as well with the really critical phase - managing the impact of the economic contraction.

[a completely inoffensive name]

I think almost all countries are dealing with it better - you've already got the highest death rate. And we are really only starting with this. Yes we might be approaching the middle of the actual first wave covid deaths in most countries - but the us isn't. It will open up sooner and have more waves of death. And, more significantly, I don't think it will deal as well with the really critical phase - managing the impact of the economic contraction.

Only time will tell. We have no idea in the long run what the numbers will be from India, Brazil, or even China (unless we assume their numbers are honest).

At the end of the day, American politicians in Congress will do what they need to maintain our hegemony and keep industry knee deep in profits. Our political dysfunction is a manifestation of the lack of a real competitor.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I think almost all countries are dealing with it better - you've already got the highest death rate

I would disagree with this. The US is the most populous country outside of China to be dealing with this, and I would suspect has the most number of urban areas outside of China, as well. Stands to reason there will be more total deaths. The US currently has the 9th highest # of deaths per capita. Belgium has the highest, followed by Spain, Italy, France, and then the UK. Going by just numbers, the US has almost half the per capita deaths than the UK (and btw, less than even Sweden). Does that mean we're doing twice as good a job? Hardly. The total # of deaths, IMHO, is not a good indicator of how well a country is handling the outbreak.

And we've yet to see what's going to happen in India and Africa, as well as the Soviet Union. All three are just starting to ascend the all too familiar "curve". Then there are the unmitigated disasters of Spain and Italy, and the emerging disasters in Brazil and Ecuador. So I would say the US is doing better than some, worse than others. Now if you want to bring in the supposed level of medical treatment....that's another story.

As far as dealing with the economic depression, that's yet to be seen. I don't think it's going to be pretty anywhere on this planet.

[Viking]

Regarding countries were things are going well, here is an update to the graph I posted some time ago. Hospitalizations in Norway due to SARS-2 are legitimately plunging:




Here is the same data at the level of individual hospitals and health organisations, showing no major deviation from the general trend. The three top curves belong to entities in the greater capital region:



(source: Norwegian Directorate of Health)

The curve is not just being flattened, it is being squashed. This is achieved without curfews and with face masks hardly used by anyone in public.

I think some of the most important contributors to this result have been to cancel all major public events, get people away from public transport and out of the offices, and otherwise keeping the levels of socialisation lower than normal.

[Furunculus]

This is all true in its narrow terms, but a stamped curve speaks nothing to the total damage these nations will face over the next few years in terms of direct covid damage from deaths, and indirect damage from rolling lockdowns, lost economic potential, and labour market hysteresis.

hot takes are of little use here, come back in two years.

[ReluctantSamurai]

hot takes are of little use here, come back in two years

Holy shit, that says it all. I guess there's nothing else to say....

[Montmorency]

Republicans added a provision in the last round of relief legislation suspending a limitation on deduction of pass-through income [EDIT: losses]. This suspension is projected to result in loss of $90 billion in revenue, and 95% of benefits will go to 87000 taxpayers with 200K annual income or up. Half of those individuals having annual income of over $1 million, who will receive an average benefit of $1.7 million. This is all on top of the hundreds of billions in goosed real estate depreciation deductions included in the legislation. Who said the Republican Party is the party of billionaires? (To be fair, with all the looting Trump has done through the tax code and through dirty dealings, he's probably technically a billionaire by now.)

“For those earning $1 million annually, a tax break buried in the recent coronavirus relief legislation is so generous that its total cost is more than total new funding for all hospitals in America and more than the total provided to all state and local governments,” said Doggett.

More on Republican priorities, and probable corruption. Is this what they call the "giant sucking sound?"
https://www.thedailybeast.com/army-d...build-the-wall

On Tuesday, the Army Corps of Engineers announced it awarded BFBC, an affiliate of Barnard Construction, $569 million in contract modifications for building “17.17 miles” of the wall in two California locations, El Centro and San Diego. That works out to over $33 million per mile—steeply above the $20 million-per-mile average that the Trump administration is already doling out for the wall. Construction is supposed to be completed by the end of June 2021.

And it’s only the latest wall contract the firm has gotten. BFBC, a reliable contributor to Republican politicians, has gotten over $1 billion in taxpayer money in less than a year to build a mere 37 miles worth of wall. Scott Amey, the general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, urged federal watchdogs to investigate the new BFBC contract.

That last part is what it's all about. In those places that the pandemic is lightly affecting (mainly rural America), those places want to get back to work right now, damn the torpedoes; essentially throwing more susceptible (read as the elderly and the poor) portions of our society under the bus, so-to-speak. Getting a paycheck (for the less well off) and raking in dividends (for the rich) is more important than risking infection and the possibility of death. My own personal caveat in judging the correctness of that attitude, is that my children are grown and on their own; I am a single divorcee; I own my home and truck outright; and I have no outstanding debts including credit cards. Hard to say if my attitude would be different were I 30 years younger and carrying lots of debt.

Speaking of - as we know, the US is not a Communist dictatorship, yeah? So there's no way that the federal government - or even state governments - can "open up" the economy short of G-Men with guns throwing you out of your home and forcing you to work. The nominally voluntary nature of the private sector is such that many or most businesses, depending on location and other factors, will decline to reopen (assuming they acquired or maintained the capital to keep operating). Or even if they do resume operations and desperation/absence of government relief drives a steady labor supply to them (the UI expansion will mitigate this), many consumers will continue to avoid their unessential establishments or products out of fear-driven social distancing, or just because financial burdens restrict their discretionary spending.

To save our economy we need a steady, nationally-coordinated approach.

Which is to say, get ready for a lo-o-ong recession.

At the end of the day, American politicians in Congress will do what they need to maintain our hegemony and keep industry knee deep in profits. Our political dysfunction is a manifestation of the lack of a real competitor.

We already know Republicans won't, and they've been acting against your imputation of priorities for decades. Follow the logical consequences of Republicans being a death cult and existential threat to civilization - those consequences can rise to the loss of our hegemony! Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden is the progression of a degraded country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/o...s-economy.html

I think some of the most important contributors to this result have been to cancel all major public events, get people away from public transport and out of the offices, and otherwise keeping the levels of socialisation lower than normal.

If that's the case, then you just have to keep it up for months at a time, right? Possibly more than a year.

labour market hysteresis.

Since some (and, I believe, you included) have complained about my use of words slightly-uncommon to everyday speech, let me just adjust "hysteresis" to path-dependency.

[Furunculus]

Holy shit, that says it all. I guess there's nothing else to say....

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=...&v=bfN2JWifLCY

we might all be headed to the same place in the two years it takes to roll out a mass vaccination plan.

what matters:
you keep new cases below the threshold your health service can cope with.
you minimize the medium/long term economic damage.

those nations that do better in these two measures will eat the others lunch.

[Montmorency]

Terminological notes: Where I have been using the term "incidence" the correct term would usually have been "prevalence."

Prevalence refers to proportion of persons who have a condition at or during a particular time period, whereas incidence refers to the proportion or rate of persons who develop a condition during a particular time period. So prevalence and incidence are similar, but prevalence includes new and pre-existing cases whereas incidence includes new cases only. The key difference is in their numerators.

I grasped at a term that captured the unknowns inherently excluded in "case fatality rate" (CFR); the appropriate term is "infection fatality rate" (IFR).



Coronavirus testing and antibody testing are complementary. The former is a view into the ongoing course of the disease in the near-term, but the latter exposes the history of the outbreak. Comprehensive serological survey will also allow us to gain the measure of the virus and determine exactly what kind of testing regime is minimally necessary. If it turns out a hundred million people have already been infected, then clearly COVID is not much worse than seasonal flu and we can focus on voluntary social distancing and targeted testing and risk reduction. If only a few million have been infected on the other hand, the Non-Administered Tribal Areas of the country are in for a lot of hurt and the areas taking the pandemic seriously are essentially under siege lest they risk another surge with any loosening of the quarantine. The latter scenario is the one where we need millions of tests daily.

More on unreported deaths. Excess deaths suggest we have had at a minimum at least twice as many deaths as are officially recorded. (Indeed, NY and other states are beginning to retroactively revise their death counts upwards. Even China is!) Double the official tally, at least for the United States, seems like a reasonable estimate for now.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog...9s-hidden-toll
https://www.propublica.org/article/t...-than-reported

Since I asked what other countries are doing with antibody testing, here's some preliminary results:
Netherlands: I can find very little on this study - is this it? - but the estimate is a prevalence of 3% of the Dutch population infected so far (compared to <0.3% positive tests).
Germany: Buried in the article is a bit about the Gangelt study, which found 14% with antibodies and 2% active COVID infections in a sample of 500. However, that's a small and geographically-limited sample. [Also in the article, Germany is testing almost as many as the whole US daily!]
Speaking of Germany, apparently they're confident enough to reopen some businesses next week and schools by the beginning of May. One to watch.
Western Europe: An estimate that contagion has run its course through ~6% of the population of the countries included. I've checked none of the work.



More on testing, test-positivity rates, true prevalence, true IFR.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...2/#prevalence2

Because the number of Americans tested for COVID-19 has changed over time, the U.S. test-positivity rate can’t yet provide much detailed information about the contagiousness or fatality rate of the disease. But the statistic can still give a rough sense of how bad a particular outbreak is by distinguishing between places undergoing very different sizes of epidemics, Andrews said. A country with a 25 percent positivity rate and one with a 2 percent positivity rate are facing “vastly different epidemics,” he said, and the 2 percent country is better off. In that light, America’s 20 percent positivity rate is disquieting. The U.S. did almost 25 times as many tests on April 15 as on March 15, yet both the daily positive rate and the overall positive rate went up in that month. If the U.S. were a jar of 330 million jelly beans, then over the course of the outbreak, the health-care system has reached in with a bigger and bigger scoop. But every day, 20 percent of the beans it pulls out are positive for COVID-19. If the outbreak were indeed under control, then we would expect more testing—that is, a larger scoop—to yield a smaller and smaller proportion of positives. So far, that hasn’t happened.
[...]
The test-positivity rate, then, is a decent (if unusual) proxy for the severity of an outbreak in an area. And it shows clearly that the U.S. still lags far behind other countries in the course of fighting its outbreak. South Korea—which discovered its first coronavirus case on the same day as the U.S.—has tested more than half a million people, or about 1 percent of its population, and discovered about 10,500 cases. The U.S. has now tested 3.2 million people, which is also about 1 percent of its population, but it has found more than 630,000 cases. So while the U.S. has a 20 percent positivity rate, South Korea’s is only about 2 percent—a full order of magnitude smaller.
[Ed. That's the average. As I showed in my analysis post, the rate has been decreasing the whole time, last I checked down to less than 0.5%, or a ration of >200 tests:1 positive.

South Korea is not alone in bringing its positivity rate down: America’s figure dwarfs that of almost every other developed country. Canada, Germany and Denmark have positivity rates from 6 to 8 percent. Australia and New Zealand have 2 percent positivity rates. Even Italy—which faced one of the world’s most ravaging outbreaks—has a 15 percent rate. It has found nearly 160,000 cases and conducted more than a million tests. Virtually the only wealthy country with a larger positivity rate than the U.S. is the United Kingdom, where more than 30 percent of people tested for the virus have been positive.

At the beginning of a pandemic, both the actual number of infections and the number of tests per day shoot up, and the positivity rate is controlled by whichever happens to grow faster, he said. In this case, the faster-growing number appears to have been infections. “As things stabilize, if the testing rate declines and the positivity rate declines, you have some good signal that the epidemic is declining,” he said.

The high positivity rate also suggests that new cases in the U.S. have plateaued only because the country has hit a ceiling in its testing capacity. Looking solely at positives, the U.S. is steaming toward 650,000 confirmed cases, but the number of new cases per day appears to be plateauing or even declining.
[...]
This tight correlation suggests that if the United States were testing more people, we would probably still be seeing an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases. And combined with the high test-positivity rate, it suggests that the reservoir of unknown, uncounted cases of COVID-19 across the country is still very large.

I feel so clever for having figured this out independently. I should be up there with the president at his briefings.

Anyone think they can round up similar analyses for other countries? Looking at the John Hopkins database, most countries, but especially poorer or smaller ones, have tremendous daily variability in number of positives reported, to the point of hindering identification of broad trends. I have a strong suspicion testing capacity on any given day is a typically-limiting factor globally.

[ReluctantSamurai]

For a different perspective on how Sweden is doing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8JhC7jaiIc

[CrossLOPER]

For a different perspective on how Sweden is doing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8JhC7jaiIc

Who would have thought that pretending nothing was wrong wouldn't work out too well?

[a completely inoffensive name]

We already know Republicans won't, and they've been acting against your imputation of priorities for decades. Follow the logical consequences of Republicans being a death cult and existential threat to civilization - those consequences can rise to the loss of our hegemony! Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden is the progression of a degraded country.

The US for better or worse is still, even now the hegemonic power. Republicans will continue acting in their current manner all the way until we are not. Once they feel the threat of a foreign Chinese politburo calling the shots in world affairs, there will be somewhat of a shift internally. Even Trump's praising of China is specifically towards the structure of China's government (which GOP wishes to copy here), but never towards the actors themselves or the state as a whole.

I recall Roman Senators being openly bribed by Numidia who's leader thought of Rome as "a city for sale and doomed to quick destruction, if it should find a buyer,", it didn't turn out well for Numidia. Monty, what's the bigger driving factor among the GOP, greed or power? If you agree with me it is power.

[Montmorency]

The US for better or worse is still, even now the hegemonic power. Republicans will continue acting in their current manner all the way until we are not. Once they feel the threat of a foreign Chinese politburo calling the shots in world affairs, there will be somewhat of a shift internally. Even Trump's praising of China is specifically towards the structure of China's government (which GOP wishes to copy here), but never towards the actors themselves or the state as a whole.

I recall Roman Senators being openly bribed by Numidia who's leader thought of Rome as "a city for sale and doomed to quick destruction, if it should find a buyer,", it didn't turn out well for Numidia. Monty, what's the bigger driving factor among the GOP, greed or power? If you agree with me it is power.

Neither per se.

If they were purely venal, they would be easy to negotiate with, since they would tend to seek individual and group gain. If they were purely power-hungry, they would act in ways constructive to maximizing the power of the party, which would tend to involve more prudence and preservation of the things to be ruled.

They are ideological, which means they have a vision of the world, the ideal of which overrides even self-preservation or its own smooth implementation.

Since such people are incapable of building institutions, and do not understand them, there won't be a moment when they "come to their senses" regarding the vestigial liberal international order. My prediction is that they would emphasize belligerent militarism and brinksmanship in reaction to noxious foreign stimuli. Hopefully at least not in as haphazard a manner as Trump, because very few of them are individually quite as stupid. Don't expect a reversion to the aspirationally-liberal principles of the Bushes.