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COVID-19 Talk


mappy
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Roughly 600 people per day on average have died in NYC from March 11th through today.  That's about a 400% increase from the typical ~150 daily average.  Apparenty now we are being told that the "fear of COVID" is causing more deaths than COVID itself.  This conversation has really jumped the shark.

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4 minutes ago, DCTeacherman said:

So let’s make the assumption that those who are poor, elderly, and have preexisting conditions are the least able to absorb the downstream economic consequences of this and remain healthy.  That’s a similar demographic dying disproportionately from covid.  Why do you care less about the Covid victims and more about these downstream victims?

I think it’s a matter of doing the cost benefit analysis (which is not a fun analysis to do when dealing with life and death) to determine which scenario causes more hardship and death.  If i have a model that shows An additional 100k deaths from Covid if we don’t have a full shutdown for 3 more months and there is no other considerations i think most people would be on board.  But if we then contrast that to a model that shows 60 million lost jobs and several hundred thousand Premature deaths due to the economic and societal disruption of the shutdown, then what do you do? And the other murky thing is these are just models.  They may or may not be close to reality.  We had a model that showed 2.2 million deaths in America a month ago that was considered serious at the time.  Economic models can have flaws too.  Another consideration is the death and hardship from the shutdowns will not just come for the sick and elderly.  A ton of factors to consider.  It’s a complex problem and we need to try to find the optimal solution.  And it’s likely the optimal solution will still include a lot of death sadly.

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13 minutes ago, Inverted_Trough said:

Roughly 600 people per day on average have died in NYC from March 11th through today.  That's about a 400% increase from the typical ~150 daily average.  Apparenty now we are being told that the "fear of COVID" is causing more deaths than COVID itself.  This conversation has really jumped the shark.

What if we took the flu season and just compressed it into a couple of months? That change your analysis at all?

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2 minutes ago, SnowGolfBro said:

I think it’s a matter of doing the cost benefit analysis (which is not a fun analysis to do when dealing with life and death) to determine which scenario causes more hardship and death.  If i have a model that shows An additional 100k deaths from Covid if we don’t have a full shutdown for 3 more months and there is no other considerations i think most people would be on board.  But if we then contrast that to a model that shows 60 million lost jobs and several hundred thousand Premature deaths due to the economic and societal disruption of the shutdown, then what do you do? And the other murky thing is these are just models.  They may or may not be close to reality.  We had a model that showed 2.2 million deaths in America a month ago that was considered serious at the time.  Economic models can have flaws too.  Another consideration is the death and hardship from the shutdowns will not just come for the sick and elderly.  A ton of factors to consider.  It’s a complex problem and we need to try to find the optimal solution.  And it’s likely the optimal solution will still include a lot of death sadly.

It's a political calculation too.  An overwhelming majority of people supported restricting the economy to save lives (even if those lives are largely very old people).  Having a virus wipe out 30% of your elderly population isn't a good look for politicians.

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46 minutes ago, DCTeacherman said:

So let’s make the assumption that those who are poor, elderly, and have preexisting conditions are the least able to absorb the downstream economic consequences of this and remain healthy.  That’s a similar demographic dying disproportionately from covid.  Why do you care less about the Covid victims and more about these downstream victims?

I think there will be way more of them, and more than half of COVID deaths (far more in some places) are very old, very sick people who would likely die within six months. The economic impact deaths will be much stronger amongst young people here, and especially in the developing world.

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1 minute ago, Inverted_Trough said:

Not at all.  That's what a novel virus does.  Except that the death counts will be also much higher because nobody has immunity.

So has it occurred to you that the "daily excess deaths" figures you just noted may not mean much as a snapshot today? Smooth them over the year like we do with flu deaths.

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14 minutes ago, SnowGolfBro said:

I have a forum wide poll question.  If we tested every American today for Covid 19 (or if they have the antibody) how many people do you suppose would test positive?

I will start.   I think the number would be at least 10 million.  

It's probably about 3% of the population.  Could be up to 15% in certain places like NYC.

Some people on this forum actually thought 30% of the population is already infected, which it complete bunk.

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3 minutes ago, DCTeacherman said:

So if you go to a country where covid isn’t prevalent and run a couple hundred thousand tests you’ll find the same number of + cases? 

Depends on the country, but in places in Africa and Latin America you'd find a ton of cases, yes. Climate may be holding the virus back a bit there.

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Just now, PhineasC said:

So has it occurred to you that the "daily excess deaths" figures you just noted may not mean much as a snapshot today? Smooth them over the year like we do with flu deaths.

It's not clear what your point is.  The annualized death count will be much higher than the flu because the entire population is vulnerable.  It doesn't matter if you smooth it over a year.

There's a flu vaccine, and we also have some partial immunity to the flu, so the vulnerable population is much smaller.

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3 minutes ago, DCTeacherman said:

lol what?

Sorry if you don't understand. If we go up the curve in 30 days and back down in 30 days, how can you compare day to day numbers to a disease that kills at a fairly even rate for 6-7 months of the year (in some places)? You need to look at the impact across the year to make it apples to apples.

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Just now, Inverted_Trough said:

It's not clear what your point is.  The annualized death count will be much higher than the flu because the entire population is vulnerable.  It doesn't matter if you smooth it over a year.

There's a flu vaccine, and we also have some partial immunity to the flu, so the vulnerable population is much smaller.

It may not end up much worse globally than a really bad flu year with social distancing measures in place. Depends on what happens in the fall.

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2 minutes ago, PhineasC said:

Sorry if you don't understand. If we go up the curve in 30 days and back down in 30 days, how can you compare day to day numbers to a disease that kills at a fairly even rate for 6-7 months of the year (in some places)? You need to look at the impact across the year to make it apples to apples.

I really don’t know what your point is sorry. 

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6 minutes ago, PhineasC said:

Depends on the country, but in places in Africa and Latin America you'd find a ton of cases, yes. Climate may be holding the virus back a bit there.

Our testing volume has plateaued recently.  If we keep finding the same number of cases on approx the same number of tests that shows the prevalence might not be dropping very much.  The current volume of cases is causing thousands of deaths a day.  I’m not sure what’s complicated about that for you. 

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Just now, PhineasC said:

Where are you getting those numbers?

I based the 3% on the various small studies I've seen thus far (including the Santa Clara one from yesterday)

I base the 15% on some crude mathematics:  There are 135,000 confirmed cases in NYC.  The general rule of thumb in epidemiology is to assume that there are 5 to 10 times as many people in the population that have been infected but are unconfirmed.  So if we assume a worst case of 10x, we would have 1.3 million New Yorkers that have/are infected.  1.3 million / 8.6 million (total population) = 15%

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