Cases with an outcome is a subset of all cases. It includes people who are still symptomatic and still in treatment (not “recovered” or “dead”). So the mortality rate should be much higher than the case mortality rate, especially during a spike in cases.
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I doubt there’s more to this than, “I’m going to lose my business.”, but also, too, that is a thing. As was pointed out long ago, Reopening Fever would either result in catastrophic loss of life (racing there now) or require another shutdown, and economically speaking a second shutdown would be far more damaging than staying shut down in the first place.
And of course, half baked half measures worse yet.
Tom Hatten, Mountainside Fitness CEO, said during a press conference Monday that the governor’s move is “arbitrary” and lacks clarity.
True as far as it goes.
Hatten told reporters that he does not intend to close at 8 p.m. Monday night when the order goes into effect. ABC15 was outside of a Mountainside location after they reopened early Tuesday morning for business as usual.
But you still need to shut down.
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Here’s a good reminder of the Reopening Fever crimes:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/these-optimistic-covid-19-reopening-takes-didnt-age-well
And TPM is good about consistently and directly attacking nonsense media narratives:
The current spike, experts argue, isn’t really a “second wave”: Many states never had high numbers of infections in the spring, but do now.
But it’s not just bad luck: The current spread of COVID-19 follows a different kind of wave — a wave of happy talk from right-wing pundits and politicians whose takes have aged poorly.
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My experience too. Even people I care about and respect were struggling sometimes with contradictory messages even discounting the president himself. He sucks but the mishandling of this crisis is deeper than him for sure. Some people will naturally grasp at any sliver of optimism and that is that. It’s not even inherently a bad trait. But it means people need very clear and unambiguous messages.
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This, exactly. Hence a “dicey stat.” There is absolutely an artifact of “testing the sick” which will inflate the mortality rate. On the other hand (not a statistician, obviously) since it is a compilation of the cases that have “resolved,” and that number is fairly substantial at this point, it is concerning to me that it is so much higher than the 1-1.5% so frequently cited as estimated mortality for Covid-19 overall. Anybody with a better grounding in statistical analysis than me (which could be just about anybody, really) who can give an explanation of that difference, I am all ears.
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ummm, that is kinda the definition of “expert,” you ass. Should we apply that to eye care and ophthalmology? I suspect you would have a different answer.
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Let me rephrase that -
“We shouldn’t presume that a group of (experts) senators(?) somehow knows what’s best for everyone” - @RandPaul says during Senate hearing on COVID-19.
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That’s different, see… that’s HIS field… 
He really needs to fuck off… When is he up for re-election (Moscow Mitch is up this year)…
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New cases in Illinois, where reopening has been slow and careful:
I still worry that we’re going to see a spike, as more stuff reopens. That little blip at the end of the month is telling.
New cases in Arizona:
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A reminder that things don’t get magically fixed in January, whatever happens:
Eschaton
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
The Obummer Plague
It was a bit hard to get the MAGA anti-lockdown protests to catch on too much, but imagine what March-May could have been like if Obama had been president. Picture a full rebellion against tyranny from the Kenyan president if the Feds tried to encourage any sort of responsible state action.
There were always mixed messages from the Feds generally and even Trump himself about whether lockdown was necessary. Sure he kept trying to blame liberal governors and pushed to OPEN FASTER, but it was hardly straightforward. Without a clear “villain” to rebel against, the response, while hyped by our media, was pretty muted.
But try to imagine Tsar Obama instituting or just encouraging a nationwide lockdown. Republican governors would have rejected anything the Feds pushed, including fully paid for testing. Large protests in any state with a Dem governor trying to do the right thing. Front page stories in that fucking newspaper dominated by the question of whether OBAMA HAD GONE TOO FAR with whatever meek encouragement they would have used to stop the country from infecting itself to death.
However “good” the Obama administration’s response would have been, in theory, the backlash would have been immense.
I do believe that Joe Biden would receive different treatment from his “good friends” and the media than Obama, for reasons he can’t quite seem to express, but not that much better. I hope someone in his team is ready for that…and willing to fight.
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Another thing that’s pretty dicey is that recoveries tend not to be reported, since the patients drop out of the system. I’d bet at this point that if people are recovering, most of them are listed as ‘still ill’ because nobody got around to closing the cases. (‘Discharged from hospital’ is possibly a surrogate for those who were hospitalized to begin with, not for those who were ill at home.)
So divide the cases into, ‘tested or presumed positive, admitted to hospital, subsequently discharged’, 'tested or presumed positive, admitted to hospital, still hospitalized, ‘tested or presumed postive, admitted to hospital, died’, ‘tested or presumed postive, not admitted, died,’ and ‘tested or presumed positive, not admitted, and we don’t know what happened because our outpatient tracking sucks’. I’m betting that the last category is the largest. The effect will be to overweight ‘resolved’ with the sickest patients.
And that’s why this thing has been so damned difficult to model - everything depends on assumed base rates, and we don’t have good grounds on which to base the assumptions.
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When I suggest that in making decisions on an issue, we should perhaps ask people who have spent their lives studying the issue, people on both sides of the political spectrum deride me as a ‘technocrat.’ The belief that ‘my ignorance is as good as your knowledge’ runs deep, and in our time gets augmented with ‘everyone’s entitled to their own opinions AND their own facts.’
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see, here’s the part i don’t understand.
we know the country as a whole is doing poorly. so how does re-opening fast or slow make any sense at all?
it’s my opinion that you just literally cannot open bars and indoor eating anywhere. you cannot have large gatherings. life shouldn’t be returning to normal.
unless a business has established verifiable safety measures, it shouldn’t re-open. period. people shouldn’t be forced back into the office. factory workers shouldn’t be put on the line. restaurant workers shouldn’t be forced into close quarters with staff and customers.
to me, it doesn’t matter it if cases are going down or up locally because we don’t have a vaccine and we’re all connected geographically to one another. all that matters is the safety measures. masks, and the ability to distance at work.
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i dont think that matters. all you need to do is compare the number of cases found, the number of deaths that have occurred, and the positivity ratio.
the front edges are all that matter to estimate mortality. ( and similarly severity. ) whether or not they’ve “recovered” doesn’t matter for the estimate. it’s found by subtraction.
total cases found - total deaths that have occurred = found cases where people didn’t die.
so, no. we don’t actually have to track the closed cases to see the results.
the harder part is making guesses about how many cases and deaths we haven’t seen ( noting they are always going to be worse than what we see. ) that’s where people can use the positivity ratio, and comparative analysis between regions – but again, it’s always going to be worse than what we know.
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Not exactly, unless you are dealing with historical data. In a fast moving pandemic, where there are a whole lot of folks in the first 2-4 weeks of infection, who are not yet dead, but some will be, the math is not that simple. If you go back a month or so you might be able to do this, but the death data will always lag the case data. By how much is debatable, but 2-4 weeks is a good range.
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Well, if Africa is a country, why not Europe, too?
Oh, by the way: on all my regular news sources (without additional effort of searching, that is) ZERO news from all but one African country in regard to Covid-19.
Only RSA featured recently.
I had a discussion with a friend of a sibling who has family and a business in Togo. He said the crops are to be dead in the fields, because his family can’t leave the house due to the lockdown.
I am afraid for my friends, former colleagues, former employees. I am so afraid that I do not even search for some news on Burkina, Niger, Mali, Tanzania, Madagascar, and the other places I visited.
Remember the locust crisis in East Africa?
I do. And every time I do, I’m upwelling.
Fuck. And around here, people complain because they can’t have their fucking holidays like they want to.
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totally.
@kennykb seems to be trying to say it’s not as bad as we think by some hand waving about categorizing recovered cases.
ie.
but that’s simply not true. the math is not that hard. it’s subtraction on the front edge numbers not what happens to each case later.
the “window size” between those two front edge numbers is, as you say, debatable. and tracking cases can help tune that window, but tracking successful recoveries isn’t - to be blunt - going to make less dead people.
yeah, exactly. we’re half a year into this and we’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find it’s just another flu. there’s already a half a million people who’ve died of it.
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