40westwx

I am arguing that social distancing prolongs the time in which the disease is in the population. That it needs to reach around 80% infection rates in order for it to extinguish itself. That flattening the curve will never change the number of people that contract the disease... the area under the steep curve is the same as the area under the flatten curve. And the longer it is around the higher the chance that it will impact the elderly population. We should be letting our children to spread the disease around while not letting the elderly leave their home.

2.8 % infected is terrible and only shows the fallacies of Social Distancing. This basically tells me that we have failed as a human race to apply common sense and experience to a problem we have dealt with for many years. Dragging this out will ultimately mean more deaths. I am really sad.

What I don't understand is that everyone is saying we need better (antibody) serological testing and then (always in the same sentence) they say then we can do better contact tracing.. thats unadulterated bs and makes no sense whatsoever. The more people you find that are COVID positive (or have the anitbody), the fewer degrees of separation you will have before you get to 100% contact in a population. Its like the Kevin Bacon game. If everyone has been in contact with everyone within 2-3 degrees of separation.. what the heck is point of contact tracing?

I would go.. but get fired from your job for stuff like that.

Both Fauci and Birx were on the selective quarantine side.. focus on the elderly population.. and let the young spread the disease.. I remember a few weeks ago Birx saying that we have enough "Ground Truth" to know that the models are completely inaccurate. That we more or less know that this virus will behave like any other Season Upper Respiratory illness (albeit having a more aggressive kill rate) and would natural extinguish itself once herd immunity is reached.. then.. couple of thousand people died in NYC and they knew that they needed to change their approach or they would have blood on their hands China is the perfect example of what you get when allow the natural immune process to take its course. You could probably overlay USA graph and see almost a perfect fit to this: Where China = Without Protective Measure USA - With Protective Measures

Without Protective Measures is by far the more palatable approach if you can accurately predict what is going to happen (and you have the balls to go that way). The problem IMHO was lack of sound leadership and experience in the scientific communities. I am fairly certain that #flattenthecurve was propagated by young inexperienced pHD types that didnt have the practical experience. Its like when the Euro shows a mega HECs 10 days from now and @usedtobe comes in tells us why it isnt gonna happen that way.

According to the official model of every single scientist and policy maker in the world, Sweden will absolutely and definitely decline in deaths and cases faster than the US.

If they "open" but they don't have the NFL season or let night clubs open.. then they might as well stay closed. Good night.

What do you guys think? "We do not allow misinformation to circulate on Facebook which can lead to real-world harm," Clegg said in an interview with All Things Considered on Wednesday. "So if people say drinking bleach is going to help you vaccinate yourself against coronavirus — that is dangerous. We will not allow that to happen. We won't even allow folk to say social distancing makes no difference in dealing with this pandemic."

I think they are gonna do something for the Seniors.. I think thats something we owe to them.. even if it is a reunion like ceremony next summer after freshman year.

I beg to differ. Everyone talks about the denominator.. gotta keep the denominator low because that will keep the overall deaths low.. thats not necessarily true. Deaths dont lie.. meaning that you can get a relatively reliable count on how many people are actually dying of the disease (most of the time) but trying to estimate how many total cases there are is really a crap shoot. One thing what we do know is that for every person that shows symptoms there are other people that either are completely asymptomatic or simply dont show up at the doctor's office or ER writing it off as something that they will be able to manage. All of these uncounted cases increases the denominator.. but death... as it is hard to miss.. stays relatively steady or slowly increase... thus decreasing the overall perceived lethality of the virus.. The other benefit of increasing the denominator is that you get the benefit of herd-immunity (which is slowly but surely becoming a bad word in many circles)

I am thinking about opening one on the black market.. we have a great dane and an assortment of other animals.. let me know if you need to get a break for a couple hours.

thats a low blow.. they literally are pulling out all the stops here folks.. I dont know what is worse.. the propped/ posed body bags from yesterday or this..

Can I ask you a question.. what if we get a good antibody test and it shows ~60% immunity in the population (I personally think that is a conservative number.. but what do I know?)... what does that mean for the the current policy? Does that mean that we need to selectively let people out of quarantine if they have immunity? Or would that mean something bigger? Perhaps that we have had the hospital capacity all along and we should simply cancel the quarantine?

It might be less than that.. I have heard reports that it goes from 0-60 really fast for the vulnerable population. but yeah.. we are definitely seeing a lag.. hopefully we are over the hump and we are in the peak for deaths.. fingers crossed.

Well recently I moved to a health care company and we develop software for Health Record interoperability.. I really though I was gonna be doing stuff that was gonna have a direct impact on helping people.. but it is pretty far removed from helping people.. so I guess I will take what I can take and be grateful for having a job!

haha.. I am part of the 20% so that means I have deliverables too.. but I still cant find purpose in what I do

Has this lockdown made anyone else think about how just non-essential most of us really are.. everyday I sit on conference calls from like 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM and the only thing that ever happens is people talk.. these conference calls are really only sound boards for people who have absolutely no use to the organizations that they work for. Everyday, I wonder how is it that my employer actually justifies paying me for what I do. It really is insane.

@PhineasC you are using way too much logic in your thought process here... we have plenty of data that shows that this virus spreads much like any other seasonal respiratory virus. The faster it spreads, the faster you achieve immunity in a target population and the disease naturally extinguishes itself. This is just how things work.. the "flatten the curve" approach actually scares me because we are effectively f-ing with nature.. we are attempting to interfere in areas where we really have no business interfering.

I just figured it out.. CDC guidelines are instructing doctors to use COVID-19 as the presumptive cause of death when no positive analysis is available/ no test is performed, if you have reason to believe COVID was the cause of death. That is really interesting because this time of year, you typically get between 4000 - 7000 pneumonia/ flu deaths per week. If we are using COVID-19 as presumptive cause of death.. then how do we differentiate the normal deaths and the COVID deaths.. seems to me that this is a really large discrepancy in the numbers.. I guess this would be okay.. accept for the fact that people are making policy decisions on the mortality rate.

Seeing that the COVID PCR test takes 2 weeks to get results... does anyone have any idea if the deaths that they are reporting as COVID deaths are after they get Laboratory results?

We should let Elizabeth Holmes fire up the old Edison for mass in-home antibody testing.

higher population density = higher number of cases?

Respiratory illness generally eradicate themselves after 80% of the population has reached immunity. This a the "breaking point" where the virus can no longer find a susceptible host and spread faster than the rate in which people either recover or die. China had the benefit sufficiently spreading the virus before policy makers panicked in to lock down.. Thinking that something different happened in china is sorta like buying in to conspiracy theory and denying science. We have no reason to believe that this virus will act different from other corona viruses. The only apparent difference, and we are seeing it play out now, is that there will be a higher fatality rate because the elderly and at risk population have zero immunity. Birx and Fauci tried to tell everyone this back in March.. then sh$t load of people started dying in NYC and they had no other choice but to go the policy route.

That is a really good point. Johns Hopkins has a github of there raw data.. a bunch of csv files.. maybe the answer to what date is being reported is in that data..