The World-O-Meter Thread

[Jokodo]

Something I just noticed: A lot more young(-ish) people seem to be getting hospitalized and dying in the USA/New York than e.g. in Italy: According to NY's Covid-19 tracker 17,4% of the state's dead are younger than 60, even 7% younger than 50. In Italy, only 5% are younger than 60. Any idea on what might cause this stark contrast? Other than maybe undercounting elderly victims presumed to have died of old age, but that would be exptected to be a factor in Italy at least as much as in New York?

Race could play a role.
Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States

That doesn't really explain it - someone in Italy has to be doing the jobs blacks are doing in the US too. From your link it seems the most likely explanation for the disparity is sociological, with race as a proxy for class:

The data emerging in some places, researchers said, is partly explained by factors that could make black Americans more vulnerable in any outbreak: They are less likely to be insured, more likely to have existing health conditions and, as a result of implicit racial bias, more likely to be denied testing and treatment. And then, the researchers said, there is the highly infectious nature of the coronavirus in a society where black Americans disproportionately hold jobs that do not allow them to stay at home.

“If you walk outside and see who is actually still working,” said Elaine Nsoesie, an infectious disease modeler at Boston University’s School of Public Health, “the data don’t seem surprising.”​

 

[Elixir]

Who knew other countries would be more authoritarian with their lockdowns than Trump has been

I'm sure you'd be upset if some "authoritarian" pushed you out of the way of a train that you were too deaf to hear coming...
Funny thing is, when you have a REAL leader, people will unite and do the right thing. When you have a despot who is only interested in his own image and money, you get deaths. Lots and lots of deaths.

TODAY, SO FAR:
* 1875 Americans died to keep PINO from looking like an authoritarian
* Zero New Zealanders died, because they willingly followed the directives of a leader acting in their interest and in whom they had confidence.
PINO can claim neither. Hurts worse that "she's a girl" and ten times the leader Trump ever dreamt of being.

New Zealand isn’t just flattening the curve. It’s squashing it.

 

[Elixir]

The US started dismantling its entire pandemic response apparatus as soon as Donald Trump took office.

???

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

From insufficient testing to a lack of coordination, Trump’s Covid-19 response has been a disaster years in the making.

His overt effort to destroy the country's readiness began in early 2018, but his intent was clear from the outset of his crime-spree masquerading as an administration: undo everything the black guy did ESPECIALLY if the lib'ruls liked him for it.

 

[laughing dog]

???

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.

Yep, Trump never fired any pandemic team. It's leftist myth:

https://www.politifact.com/factchec...ities-are-sharing-misleading-post-about-trum/

Snopes disputes that claim (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/):

Legum outlined a series of cost-cutting decisions made by the Trump administration in preceding years that had gutted the nation’s infectious disease defense infrastructure. The “pandemic response team” firing claim referred to news accounts from Spring 2018 reporting that White House officials tasked with directing a national response to a pandemic had been ousted.

Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer abruptly departed from his post leading the global health security team on the National Security Council in May 2018 amid a reorganization of the council by then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Ziemer’s team was disbanded. Tom Bossert, whom the Washington Post reported “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks,” had been fired one month prior.

It’s thus true that the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it, eliminating Ziemer’s position and reassigning others, although Bolton was the executive at the top of the National Security Council chain of command at the time.

It is also a fact that the Trump administration budgets contained cuts to the CDC but Congress increased the CDC's funding.

 

[Jokodo]

Today is the day NYC's official death toll surpassed Wuhan's. The two cities have roughly the same number of inhabitants.

 

[Elixir]

04-07

New cases back over 30k and new record day for US deaths as well, up almost 50% in a day.
Maybe the "peak" that the markets were celebrating yesterday wasn't a peak but a reporting anomaly?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And your excuse about population size is irrelevant, b/c it has no direct impact on growth rate. It only directly impacts how many total cases there could eventually be, which is the maximum height the line eventually reaches, but not how quickly it gets there.
If you take a line of 10,000 dominoes vs a line of 100,000 and keep other variables constant, then you push both starting dominoes over, after 5 seconds the number of dominoes knocked over will be the same. The longer line (bigger pop) simply has more possible dominoes that could be knocked over eventually if the process isn't stopped.

More directly relevant to growth rate of a disease is population density, and the US is lower in pop density than all countries in those graphs but Canada and New Zealand, and 6 times lower than Italy.

Nitpick: The total population size is relevant in that it controls the point where the curve will infect due to not finding as many susceptible people. That's only a factor in the hardest hit areas, though.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

???

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.

Yep, Trump never fired any pandemic team. It's leftist myth:

https://www.politifact.com/factchec...ities-are-sharing-misleading-post-about-trum/

No wonder Trump always says, "Fake news" and he's right. Media slanders him non-stop.

Read your source more carefully!

1) His Flatulence tried to fire the team, Congress stopped it.

2) The team left in 2018, whether they were fired is unclear.

That makes it reasonably clear he wanted to get rid of them and by some means succeeded.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's probably better if people go crazy and the economy is fucked, than if people die like flies and the economy is fucked.

Nobody wants people to die like flies. That's why it would be stupid to open things too soon. The active case numbers need to peak and then decay to some low level before we can ease restrictions. Then we need more testing.

The sacrifice granny crowd wants it over as fast as possible, never mind the megadeaths.

 

[Derec]

Yesterday was a bad day - almost 2,000 dead. New cases were flat though. I hope the death spike is an outlier.

 

[Derec]

The sacrifice granny crowd wants it over as fast as possible, never mind the megadeaths.

But there needs to be some middle ground between "sacrifice granny" crowd, which wants to open everything up as soon as possible, and "we have to remain on lockdown until Christmas".

 

[bilby]

The sacrifice granny crowd wants it over as fast as possible, never mind the megadeaths.

But there needs to be some middle ground between "sacrifice granny" crowd, which wants to open everything up as soon as possible, and "we have to remain on lockdown until Christmas".

Your desire for it to be so doesn't make it so.

Whether there can be any such middle ground is entirely dependent on the way the virus spreads through the population, and what measures are effective in limiting that spread to a sufficient extent as to keep deaths and permanent disabilities to an acceptable level.

Of course, we don't yet know any of the variables with certainty, so there's a wide range of possibilities; But at this stage, it seems more likely than not that any attempt to reduce the severity of the lockdown, before either an effective treatment or an effective vaccine (or both) are widely and cheaply available, would be disastrous - and it's very unlikely indeed that either will be available as soon as Christmas 2020, much less June.

Wishes, hopes, and desires count for nothing. Reality is real, and doesn't give two shits about the economy.

This is not a negotiation; We either do what is necessary, or lots of people die. No middle ground, no compromises, no appeals to the dire impact on the economy, or on people's preferences and wants.

We don't have to like it, and we can't make a deal with it, so we have to cope with it.

 

[Elixir]

Yesterday was a bad day - almost 2,000 dead. New cases were flat though. I hope the death spike is an outlier.

It's time to pay more attention to the new cases. The deaths were new cases days or weeks ago. That figure is going to lag...

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The sacrifice granny crowd wants it over as fast as possible, never mind the megadeaths.

But there needs to be some middle ground between "sacrifice granny" crowd, which wants to open everything up as soon as possible, and "we have to remain on lockdown until Christmas".

We would love to have "some middle ground" between the two options. The trouble is, 40% of the nation was effectively closed 3 weeks ago, and the virus is STILL spreading! The rate of spread is slowing down, however, some people seem to be not getting what the apex is and how we aren't even at the Apex yet! One fifth of US states had over 1,000 new confirmations on the virus. That is becoming a small and smaller percentage, but ultimately, percentages only matter for a chart. If 100 people had the virus anywhere, and we open back up, we'll be right back here.

It took, what just a few people, and potentially an inept Executive Branch to spread it across the US territories (not continental, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, Alaska)?

I sure the heck don't want to be stuck inside for several more months, and I can only imagine how much worse it is for people who don't have yards or live in the middle of urban areas. But the reality is, how do you prevent the spread of a disease that is failrly communicable (doesn't survive like measles can, but leaves a lot of people very asymptomatic) while allowing people to be around one another? Our nation lacks the PPE to pull that off. Every person who went outside would need disposable PPE until a vaccine could be developed (and of course, you'd get the asshole narcissists who would refuse vaccination).

 

[funinspace]

Yesterday was a bad day - almost 2,000 dead. New cases were flat though. I hope the death spike is an outlier.

It's time to pay more attention to the new cases. The deaths were new cases days or weeks ago. That figure is going to lag...

Yup! Unfortunately, yesterday's deaths (and worse) will with us for probably 2 weeks, based on projections to 80-90k dead by August. Though it is still too early to say, it is possible that new case growth is flattening...which would be some fresh positive news. The new case trend will be more obvious in the next 2-3 days. Unfortunately, there are half wits who have no clue about statistical data and when to not make farcical concrete declarations of trends...

 

[blastula]

To open up, we need more testing and with contact tracing. We also need reliably accurate antibody testing, which is being developed now. That will show who has had it and so can safely be in public.

 

[Jokodo]

Yesterday was a bad day - almost 2,000 dead. New cases were flat though. I hope the death spike is an outlier.

It's time to pay more attention to the new cases. The deaths were new cases days or weeks ago. That figure is going to lag...

Yup! Unfortunately, yesterday's deaths (and worse) will with us for probably 2 weeks, based on projections to 80-90k dead by August. Though it is still too early to say, it is possible that new case growth is flattening...which would be some fresh positive news. The new case trend will be more obvious in the next 2-3 days. Unfortunately, there are half wits who have no clue about statistical data and when to not make farcical concrete declarations of trends...

With a Big caveat: the new case growth is only as indicative as testing is consistent across time, or even across different parts of the country when the outbreak subsides in one part but gains steam in another.

 

[Elixir]

I find it heartening that there are people here who do know what to make of raw stats. Seems to be a vanishing skill.
Thanks, everyone.

 

[TV and credit cards]

The sacrifice granny crowd wants it over as fast as possible, never mind the megadeaths.

But there needs to be some middle ground between "sacrifice granny" crowd, which wants to open everything up as soon as possible, and "we have to remain on lockdown until Christmas".

There will be. Unlike China who could shut down one province, the rest of the world could not/did not do that. Come the time people's economic situation becomes so dire, when countries reach the point of civil unrest, some middle ground will have to be met. Trump's stopped clock comment about the cure being worse than the problem will be right eventually. Some may be fitted with the proper PPE and told to go back to work.

 

[marc]