I don’t think the people with the higher numbers are doing it “on purpose”… I think they are doing the projections with the numbers they have, which are uncertain and constantly changing. Having a worst case scenario is actually helpful, because it maybe pushes people to take common sense precautions that CAN save lives. The people putting out the very low-ball numbers are doing so, in part, out of partisan politics. They want to “get the economy going” so that they can get the president re-elected.
We most certainly should listen to people in the relevant fields, even when they have to constantly change their numbers due to changing circumstances… the assholes wringing their hands over the economy, advocating for letting people die to improve the economy need to shut up and let people who know what they are talking about do their jobs, so we CAN save lives…
I don’t know why this is the least bit controversial, other than the fact that so many Americans seem entirely adverse to listening to people who know what they are doing…
despite his inaction, his misstatements and lies, his attempt to curry favor by misdirecting necessary medical supplies, the bidding war he’s started between the states, his illegal refusal of oversight ( and firing of inspectors general* ) for spending two trillion dollars, his promoting of a nonsense drug, the further destruction of american international cooperation, the lifting of epa restrictions and food regulation, his likely profiting off the pandemic?
to the extent that this disease is being controlled… it’s despite the administration not because of it. that’s no win. that’s an incredible failure.
*) the only thing he’s done well is to give me the excuse to pluralize “inspector general” and that’s definitely not worth the deaths of 60,000 people
I think you forgot his active disregard for the work of previous administrations that had dealt with infection disease events and had created an action plan and a presentation for the incoming officials to be caught up and prepared for the next one?
I am not trying to overly simplify things, the article is. The fact that we have a gross number of deaths is not relevant, we have a massively higher population.
New York and New Jersey account for over half our deaths and nearly half our cases and NYC itself has a population density 30%+ higher than Milan. Leaving the NYC Metro area out of the equation, we are doing far better than Italy. Something on the order of @ tenth of the deaths per million.
Yes Italy is more dense as a whole and they should have a higher relative mortality, but my whole point is one has to compare apples to apples and the US being 5x as populous makes comparing total US deaths to total Italian deaths an apples to oranges comparison.
I wish they allowed to revisit past models and the estimates. Note - even with this model, the shaded area is the range of deaths, which could be much higher than 60K.
So I am not so certain they have the motivation to make the estimates artificially low due to politics or re-starting the economy (though pundits may indeed push these numbers to further that cause.)
IMO, saying 60k will die and it ends up being much higher than that will be seen as a leadership failure in a lot of peoples’ eyes. (True Believers™ not included.)
I think it’s because (eta - people think) everything is a big fucking political game. They have been conditioned that EVERYTHING on one side is a lie or exaggeration and any concern or issue they have is only for them to further their agenda. The Republican stance has morphed over the last couple decades is to just be anti-Democrat. There is little logic or reason - you just can’t side with the enemy. And in this case, the enemy is a third party both should be against.
To be clear, I agree there is a huge list of things he could have and should have done better. We had a free head start on this issue and chose to ignore it.
But yes, DESPITE him fucking it up, if we managed to still only have 60K, then I think “we” won. Despite all his wrong actions, there are some right actions that held it to ~60k.
This, IMO, is a big “if”. I am personally hoping for this if, because as much as I want to see Trump fail, I don’t want that to come at the expense of peoples’ lives. This is optimistic, hope. But honestly I don’t think we will manage to keep it that low.
they are not being used in a non-partisan way… there are people here in this thread, who thinks we shouldn’t care because the numbers aren’t up to 100,000…
It’s not. I’ve got family in essential jobs, some in high risk categories… I’m sick of rich assholes playing games with our lives. We should all be. This is the outcome of decades of dismantling the liberal consensus type government that understood that good governance and strong institutions that keep the worst aspects of capitalism in check.
No, it’s actively anti-human in favor of profits. This is who they are. They are showing that to us now and they need to be roundly condemned for that.
WE did not, some politicians did not. The white house DID. They decided to fuck us all over, because the president believes in conspiracy theories and is immune to education. But some percentage of our citizens believe that makes a good leader… These people fucked us over and themselves, because they wanted to stick it to the libs. Well, they have. I hope they can live with the consequences of those choices… I hope people in my family don’t suffer or die because they wanted to stick it to the libs…
You are cherry-picking which complicating factor is more important. Total population is one factor in total disease cases, along with population density, age, and rates of risk factors like smoking, hypertension, cardiac disease, and air pollution, to name just a few. By ignoring all those other factors, you are playing armchair epidemiologist.
If you want to compare apples to apples, you need to consider all the factors, or you might be comparing crabapples to Hanners Jumbos.
he’s already failed. if as you say we “win” it’s because of the “we” not the him.
he gets no credit for the work of state governments, the media agencies tracking deaths and relaying the models, the hospitals and health care workers, not even for us staying home because he was against it before he was temporarily for it.
what our successes show - and it gives me some hope - is that despite his every effort to usurp our democracy, we appear to have some resilience after all
that’s a win for us, and i hope we can pull it off. because this administration is actively working against us, not for us
I agree - stats are always abused. And people are going to use them to push this way or that.
But like you gave the benefit of the doubt when the estimates were higher, I too am giving the benefit of the doubt with these new lower estimates. That these are based on new data or new ways the models were set up, and not for partisan reasons.
Sorry, I left some words out and edited it. People who are stirring up controversy are doing so because they think everything is a big political game. They see these are over To be clear I don’t think it’s a game. Other than to get food once a week or a 1 hr date at a cemetery once a week, I haven’t even left the house for anything, including taking out the trash etc. I can wait next food run.
Right, the government as a whole. Including most state and local ones. Of course there are exceptions. Of course many in the health orgs were sounding the alarm sooner. I guess I should have been more specific who “we” was.
Look, this is NOT a general thing. People are literally dying who did not have to die because of how the administration ignore knowledgeable people.
I’m aware. You and I aren’t in charge of shit, though.
Many, MANY, took it seriously, including some GOP governors. More state and local officials did good work in the face of the criminal behavior of those in the white house. What the current administration has done is so far beyond the pale as to be unbelievable.
The website I provided uses a 1-, 3-, or 7- day exponential average. 1-day is downright dangerous to provide. 3 is much too noisy in my opinion, but that’s the most optimistic for the day I presented, and works in the best favor for the narrative you seem to prefer. I was attempting to remove any accusation of bias by providing a chart that best supported your position. Trust me, I could make the projections look much more grim (as I suspect they will).
Heck, we’re not at the half-way mark for the optimistic 60k deaths… so that slowing signal on the logistic curve would be way too early to assume it’s in the slowing phase of infections. That alone leads to an interpretation that we’re in a preliminary lull. Not to mention the 3-day and 7-day averages used still show net-increasing caseloads (again, pointing to being on the left of a logistic chart). We are not at the inflection point, even assuming there’s no second wave.
Gentleperson’s bet: I’ll donate $300 to a non-political non-profit charity of your choice if that “curve” you like continues for the next 3 weeks; Are you willing to do the same if we see a sudden rise as the rural parts of America suffer from the effects of Easter?
Source: I’m a Sr. Data & Applied Scientist with over 25 years experience in understanding the nuances of data. I completely agree the title is hogwash and needs normalization. I don’t primarily work on epidemiology, so I wouldn’t trust me over the experts… but I do know enough that I’m willing to put money where my mouth is.
Those aren’t trends on the other countries, those are actuals that those countries experiencing N days since they hit 1 death per million citizens. The only trendline is the (non-linear, but looks like it on a log graph) dashed line for United States.
No, this model does not predict the takeover of the United Nations by Trump, resulting in the disbandment of the World Health Organization. I don’t even know how you would model the impact, even if they somehow experienced reduced funding [maybe that’s what you meant?] by the United States. Presumably, countries with minimal resources would grow faster in their caseload (similar to how our models have shifted with the lack of adherence to our own plans).
We are still growing exponentially, which is why our line is above a 45-degree slope, and some of the others are not.
The chart you copy&paste is three weeks old. More recent results normalized by population show US, UK, ES, IT, FR on roughly the same trajectory, with DE doing a tiny bit better. There’s considerably more evidence of curve flattening, but we’re not at the inflection yet.
The nations that are showing sustained drops in active cases are China, South Korea, and possibly Iran and Iraq. Australia may be almost there.
It’s virtually impossible to predict when a logistic curve will inflect. The fit is unstable with respect to any noise in the data, and there is a lot of noise in these data.
The nightmare scenario is the very real possibility that COVID-19 infection fails to confer lasting immunity. That would mean that a vaccine would not work. It would also mean that people who have recovered can catch it, again and again, until it finally carries them off. If so, it’s a slower version of the collapse of the 14th century. (Arguably, the labor shortage that followed the death of half of Europe is what triggered the Renaissance, but that is NOT the way we want to advance the human species!)
To be fair, that chart is only 3 days old at this point. All countries in this particular chart are normalized on the X-axis by the date they surpassed 1 death / million people (so today marks day 23 of that starting point for the USA).
I agree the nightmare scenario is very scary. 20% of the common colds are caused by human coronovirus (the rest being Rhinovirus, RSV and Infuenza, and ‘unknown’ virus). So far, COVID-19 hasn’t been showing strong mutation, but that could change.
Uncharted waters. A shame we couldn’t lock this down. We are entering a new societal era.
Oops, missed that it was the chart of deaths! That’s of course a lagging indicator, behind the curve by at least 2-3 weeks.
The chart of active cases (which I thought was what I was looking at - that’s how closely it follows, with a time offset) shows that we are seeing an effect of social distancing:
and the chart of new cases suggests either that the curve is indeed flattening, or that cases for the last month or so are being systematically under-reported.
I don’t think, though, that an under-report of a couple of orders of magnitude would be widely believed even among the Trumpeters. The uninterrupted exponential trend line shows that one in ten of us would have fallen ill by now (half of those in the last three days!), and we’re nowhere near that.
But what we have is scary. Even with the measures that the US has in place, the number of new cases is not falling, it’s holding steady, and we’ve had them in place for longer than the incubation period. Which means that even more Draconian isolation is 100% necessary. To get this back to anything near a manageable level means closing ALL businesses including grocery stores and forbidding ALL civilians to leave their houses - at the level of ‘violators are shot on sight.’ The National Guard can be pressed into service to deliver groceries. The measures we have right now are NOT working well enough.
These people fucked us over and themselves, because they wanted to stick it to the libs. Well, they have. I hope they can live with the consequences of those choices… I hope people in my family don’t suffer or die because they wanted to stick it to the libs…
