Inverted_Trough

plus, I haven't seen anyone advocating for shuttering the economy for years. It'll open back up. It'll be a risk-based, phased approach. I think the large gatherings (sports, concerts) is the most vexing challenge. Restaurants can open back up with spaced tables, capacity limits, etc.

if car accidents were contagious, would anyone drive?

Yes. That would mean it has characteristics of the flu (i.e. endemic in society but we have a vaccine, treatments and partial immunity). And stability and predictability means our hospital system can handle it. Finally you're getting the point! Yes, because of social distancing. You're getting it now!

Do car accidents increase exponentially? Do car accidents all happen at the same time? Nope. In general, car accidents follow a stable, predictable pattern, with some slight upticks on holidays. Thus our hospital system can easily handle it. You're comparing apples to bowling balls.

car accidents aren't contagious. It's like comparing apples to bowling balls.

But the rapid spread of the virus impacts our ability to work, socialize and enjoy life. The economy was tanking before the so-called shutdown. Let's say you don't shut anything down. You'll get tens of millions of people infected, which will knock out your labor force. (supply shock). Overwhelmed hospitals and bodies lying in the hospital corridors will make most people fearful of going out (demand shock) So the economy tanks. It's not as sharp of a tanking compared to an abrupt shutdown, but I wouldn't argue it's a longer, sustained destruction of our economy. Economy will never go back to normal until you contain the virus and have therapeutics (and eventually a vaccine) which give people the confidence that, even if they'll get it, they'll recover. The shutdowns weren't inevitable. Shutdowns are part of a mitigation phase. Ideally you never get to mitigation, but since we massively failed at containment, we basically went straight to mitigation.

ask not what GDP can do for you. Ask what you can do for GDP!

Same thing is happening in Italy. Thousands of people died in their homes and never got counted because they didn't get tested for COVID. The numbers will likely revised upward at a later date. France revised theirs upward by several thousand because of all the nursing home deaths. That makes validating the IMHE model challenging. I assume the model is trying to predict actual counts, but we don't really know actual counts.

The latest IME model still assumes social distancing until May 31st. Current federal guidance only extends until April 30th. I think most states will likely extend through the end of May even if the federal guidance relaxes a bit.

All state budgets will be in the red. We are all Keynesians now!

Wuhan will finally lift their lockdown today. Many of the tourist sites in China have opened back up this past weekend. It'll be an interesting to see how they do in terms of resurgence of cases. If they don't see a 'second wave', that bodes well for us too - it means a second wave won't happen here either as long as we have an aggressive containment strategy. However, our economy isn't going to be operating at 100% capacity until we have a vaccine. Maybe 90% capacity. I just don't see how the leisure, entertainment, travel & hospitality industries go back to 100% when some subset of the population is fearful of coming out even after restrictions are lifted.

Not much else for now. Once things calm down some, and the it's-just-the-flu crowd comes back with a vengeance to talk about how we over-reacted and didn't need to enact any of these measures, I'm sure I'll have to shout them down again.

Agreed. I'm pasting a snippet from the article that basically espouses what I've been saying: Are there actions that we could have taken that might’ve changed the course we’re on now? Or was what is happening now—shuttered businesses and schools, stay-at-home orders— inevitable? No, I don’t think it was inevitable. I think the fact that we are all sitting here sheltering in place is the result of a lack of preparedness and a lack of appropriate response once we saw what was happening in China. I mean we have a third of the population of China, and we had several months lead time. Yet we now have more cases than China ever had. In my mind, that’s failure. And I think one of the huge limits in our response was that we waited too long to start testing in the way that we would’ve needed to. For a very long time, until just a few weeks ago, we were only testing people who traveled from China, from Wuhan specifically. If you didn’t travel to Wuhan, but you traveled to broader China, you had to be sick enough to be hospitalized to get tested. And we maintained these criteria even after we implemented the travel restrictions, even after China itself implemented exit restrictions.

I actually agree with most of your points. But you forgot the most important one: They embarked on a very aggressive test-isolate-trace strategy as soon as the first case hit. Now, your post implies that it was easier for them to do this because of their cultural and societal characteristics. And that strategy couldn't be employed here because of fissures and differences in our society. Certainly that strategy is more challenging to implement here, but we certainly could have done it. Had we done so, I think we'd be in a much better position than we are today. At the end of the day, their country took it much more seriously than we did, and that's why they handled it much better.

You're done responding because you can't argue anything that counters your political narrative. China's role in withholding information certainly needs to be investigated. I prefer to see analysis and evidence, which as time goes on will come out. You've obviously drank the Kool-Aid and have gone into conspiracy theory mode so I think you've lost all objectivity on this issue. My focus has been on what we did or didn't do to contain this. Perhaps you can tell me how China Bungled our testing apparatus Made us complacent, believing "it's just the flu" for six weeks while the virus was spreading in the midst Responsible for our general lack of strategy, to the point where we couldn't even test-isolate-trace effectively (Public Health 101) Since you won't be able to answer, I'l do it for you: They had nothing to do with any of that.

We had an extra month. The virus was already here in January. We were too busy bungling tests and telling ourselves "it's just the flu" while the virus was spreading in the midst. The millions of dead scenario is based on no social distancing (i.e. no shutdown). Now that we're socially distancing, we're never going to approach those numbers thank goodness. The current administration finally relented and started listening to 'experts' -- about a month too late, but better late than never. The "it's just the flu" crowd and some of the MAGAs are not happy with this decision, though.

So why did South Korea contain this so much better than we did? This is the question that the "if only China would have told us sooner" crowd doesn't want to answer. Let's face it: Americans only took this seriously when the stock market became infected (pun intended). We had plenty of time to contain this.

This is the model that the government is using. It doesn't think herd immunity is going to do much to dampen a second wave. This supports what I've been saying: Better preparedness will help us contain and mitigate a second wave, not natural immunity. By the end of the first wave of the epidemic, an estimated 97% of the population of the United States will still be susceptible to the disease and thus measures to avoid a second wave of the pandemic prior to vaccine availability will be necessary. Maintaining some of the social distancing measures could be supplemented or replaced by nation-wide efforts such as mass screening, contact tracing, and selective quarantine. http://www.healthdata.org/covid/faqs?fbclid=IwAR2hG2_tdcNqbDzUvIVtnB3VqkxQ7qTQJYBMcrg-0J9PH0kBP5PqtsdTVTg

I agree that the initial evidence shows some promise, but any doctor that declaratively states "I predict this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic" based on his tiny sample size is a charlatan. They sounds like an Instagram influencer who wants to have a "hot take". I saw that segment live on Fox News during that show and I laughed. Especially when he claimed his statistician kids verified his work with statistical significance tests. (Speaking of which, statistical significance tests are often misappropriated and misunderstood, but that's a different topic)

Well I'm glad to hear this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic, and that his sons told him that the results are statistically significant, therefore this must be the magic elixir! Oh boy. What a charlatan. I prefer Dr. Fauci's assessments of these potential new treatments.

While it's true that the silent carriers aren't being counted as being infected (i.e. the denominator), it's also likely that death counts are also significantly under-counted. Here's an article about how Italy is likely under-counting mortality attributed to coronavirus: https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-is-far-higher-than-reported-11585767179 So calculating a 'death rate' will be impossible. Without ventilators, it's pretty clear the death rate of this virus is pretty high - at least 5%. If this virus would have hit us 100 years ago, the death rate would have been larger than the Spanish flu (the Spanish flu CFR was about 2%)

Might be behind a paywall, but here's a great investigative article about how we spent the month of January and February getting prepared for this thing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/03/coronavirus-cdc-test-kits-public-health-labs/?arc404=true

This is where I took your quote from about the 35 to 40 percent. Honestly I think you just conflated the percentage of tests coming back positive (which is between 35-40 percent) with the overall infection rate of the population. They are completely different things.

Certainly by the time this pandemic over - say, by the time we have a vaccine -- 25 to 40% of us will be infected by that time. Perhaps even a little more. But we are nowhere close to that right now, and we are certainly not going to reach a 40% infection rate in the next 10 days. Especially with social distancing in place. That's nonsense. What data do you have that shows NYC will have a 35-40% infection rate? Nobody knows what the infection rate is unless you randomly test a large sample from the population. But if you use the assumptions that epidemiologists typically use, and you assume social distancing will be effective, then yes this first 'wave' will infect about 10% of the NYC population. Nowhere near 35 to 40 that you're claiming.

35 - 40% of the tests are coming back positive from NY/NJ. That doesn't mean 35% of the population has the virus. For the most part, only symptomatic people are getting tested. Unless we randomly test people throughout NY/NJ, we have no idea what the true infection percentage in the population is. Generally, the rule of thumb is that there are about 5 to 10 times as many actual COVID carriers than what is confirmed by testing. So if we're looking at NYC, there are 57000+ confirmed positives. If we assume that means there are between 250k - 500k carriers in NYC, that still is only between 3% and 6% immunity. Obviously that will go higher as time progresses but hopefully social distancing will limit that to, say, 10% at most. 10% won't be enough to dampen a second wave. However I do think we will be much more prepared in terms of testing and procedures and the ventilator repository, so the impacts will be a bit less....hopefully. Unfortunately until there is a vaccine, the economy in the crapper. The economy can't grow when there's a virus in the midst.