Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/16/its-only-930am-and-florida.html
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“It’s only 9:30am” implies that they’ll report more today, they won’t. Florida reports once a day, in the morning. You’re basically looking at the previous day’s numbers.
Also what is your metric for one day increases? The number yesterday was 113 so today is an increase of 43. According to worldometers, on July 13 Florida reported 35 deaths, then on July 14 there were 132, an increase of 97. But on July 11 there were 95. This is why many organizations use the rolling 7 day averages, because single days can vary widely.
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You’d think that some epidemiologist would have adapted the n-day average to the particular characteristics of covid-19, but I guess we’re not there yet.
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I’m a bit confused on this. Per this news report they reported 156 new deaths Thursday. That’s an increase of 156. Maybe the issue is with the word “increase” and my understanding of it. If 156 more people died then deaths increased by 156, at least that’s how I read it.
“The 156 new deaths reported Thursday easily surpasses the previous record of 132, which was set on Tuesday.”
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So, aside from it being an axiomatic article of faith; has anyone started looking at how much economy all this is actually producing?
Comparative reports based on situations that allow for examination of lockdown effects (eg. Sweden vs. similar or states that differed by a few weeks in one direction or the other) have generally been pretty tepid on the value of hanging an “Open for business!” sign out in absence of things like plague levels that don’t dampen consumer confidence.
I’m obviously not expecting an economic analysis to change the decision being made; “the economy” is almost certainly being invoked in the “is a cruel and fickle god that is much angered by proles receiving unemployment benefits” sense here; but it would be particularly grim, if far from particularly surprising, if this whole thing was a failure even by the standards of relatively cold blooded profit maximization.
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My mother moved back north from Florida last year, then decided she didn’t like it (really just missed her friends down there) and was talking of moving back. I think she has put that idea on permanent hold now.
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Hmm, yeah, you’re right, you can look at it as increasing the overall total. Which is probably how it was intended. I was thinking of it as “increase” vs “decrease,” and the number vs the previous day. As any deaths will make the total go up. If you said, “the biggest one-day decrease in deaths,” you wouldn’t think people were coming back to life, you would be comparing the number to a specific previous day.
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Don’t worry, as soon as HHS starts reclassifying those deaths as pneumonia deaths Covid-19 will drop.
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sorry, I can’t “like” your post as much as I agree with you…you did hit a nail on the head however.
ETA: I also have to wonder if the head of HHS was just hanging around when they heard Drumpf say “Won’t someone rid me of this troublesome CDC” and ran with it.
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I don’t think most people can understand the numbers.
On 9/11/2001, ~3k people were immediately killed. Thousands of first responders died (and are still dying) due to particulate respiratory issues. This led us into a multi-trillion dollar war to attack a country that had nothing to do with the original problem. Oh, and we’re still there.
Now we’re getting a few 9/11s every week and instead of spending trillions for each one to boost our infrastructure and safety nets we have a leader in power who is whining about how much this hurts his reputation.
Orders of magnitude. I wish people could grasp that concept.
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But the virus is out to make him look bad, dontchaknow?
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It isn’t cynical if it is true.
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Slow and non violent deaths are perceived much less than others. In 2001 in the US there have been over 42000 motor vehicle related deaths, that is, 14 times the 9/11 victims, and nobody raised a finger. Sadly that’s normal human automatic reaction, but in this case there’s another phenomenon: science has been subordinated to religious and/or political fanboyism, in other words people do what they believe their divinity or political idol would like them to do, even when their action or inaction would harm other peoples lives. To me that is fucking crazy; pretty much equals to a jump back to the Neanderthal level, and it’s damn hard to fight against. At this point I believe the only way to prevent further damages, for mental healthy people, is to stay away as much as possible from the denialists, anti-maskers and other dangerous idiots: leave them gathering together unprotected and let evolution do its job.
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Agree %100. Unfortunately they are still allowed to travel within the country sans passport. Hopefully they will see New England as a lib-lib commie state and so will stay away.
Even though we’re not. We’re just critical thinkers.
when someone is given executive power to make emergency orders to save lives and refuses to use that ability for whatever reason/belief, there should be a criminal prosecution
let them have all the lawyers they want but there needs to be a trial
it’s like if you saw someone drowning literally a foot in front of you and just stood there and said “well it’s your fault, not my problem”
that’s not acceptable, he was elected to serve
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The point of the rolling average is to filter out some noise. As such you want it tuned to the characteristics of the noise, not the signal. Seven days is a good period because the noise has a strong seven-day periodic component due the effects of weekends.
You could filter out more noise by using a larger multiple of seven, like 14 or 21 days, but that comes at a cost of making your rolling average less responsive to recent changes, effectively increasing the lag time between the reality on the ground and when that reality gets reflected in your numbers. Since that the marginal denoising probably isn’t worth the cost of more lag time, seven days looks optimal.
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But, they died free of the taint of socialism.
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DeSantis, my governator, is either heartless or stupid. I’m going with both. Killing defenseless elderly people for money is heartless. I view it as murder. Second, from an economic perspective, it is grand-mal stupid. First, his policies are wiping out customers for a major Florida industry (eldercare) [ca-ching]. Second, DeSantis is killing off people who will not be here to re-elect him as members of the so-called Greatest Generation have never voted for a Democrat in their lives. Third, by killing off Florida’s elderly, there is less reason to visit Florida so grandpa and grandma can take them to Disney and Universal theme parks [ca-ching]. Fourth, who wants to retire to a death camp? Thus, real estate, another FL industry will devalue [ca-ching]. Well, DeSantis has one thing going for him - the governor of next-door Georgia makes him look competent. [boing-boing].
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I hear you, and plenty of us see that for what it is.
Naomi Klein has some insights here, and–heads up!–it is not all doom & gloom.
I know it’s nearly 9 minutes long but as a pep talk and an explainer, I find it is useful:
I 
her rigor and her work… she’s been sounding the alarm for such a long time.
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I agree with your larger point 100%, but I would caution against the motor vehicle analogy. As a society, we do immense things to try and prevent those deaths. Cars are among the most heavily regulated, licensed, and insured things humans have ever come up with. We pour a firehouse of new safety technology into them and governments are constantly cracking down on car companies to do better. We have entire federal and state agencies dedicated to car safety, training, testing, and data analysis.
The difference is that people recognize the value of cars, and we do have to make choices as a society about what price we’re willing to pay for certain things. Nothing worth doing or having is 100% safe, so we decide with every new technology how much death that thing is worth to us as a whole.
I say all this because I used to use this analogy myself a lot, but have since learned it’s not a fair one in situations like this.
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