...overnight the IHME — the official group Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx have been promoting cut their numbers by more than half!The Experts do not apologize, they do not explain.
Here is what the IHME NOW HAS for April 5th:
– All beds needed: Was 179,267 … Now is 90,353
– ICU beds needed: Was 33,176 … Now is 17,589
– Invasive ventilators: Was 26,544 … Now is 14,951...
Don't bother to ask.
You just don't pay attention very well. There are two separate processes: getting infected and infected people dying. Most of the evidence suggests that, outside of perhaps Wuhan and northern Italy, most people haven't been infected yet. Time of death Td for each victim of the epidemic is the time of infection Ti plus ∆(x) where x is the severity of the pre-existing health condition: Td=Ti+∆(x). Let assume that this disease takes less time to kill less healthy people, so ∆(x) for them is smaller than for healthier people: ∆(x1)>∆(x2) means that x1 is healthier than x2. Time of infection Ti is independent of x.
ReplyDeleteThe virus does not know the health of people it infects. Let assume that the histogram of Ti is a symmetric bell curve. Then for each group with the same x (x-group) the histogram of time of death Td is the same symmetric bell curve but shifted by ∆(x). The sum of all those histograms will not be symmetric, it will be skewed. Its skewness however can be either negative or positive depending on mortality rates for different x-groups and the proportion of x-groups sizes in the population. The same disease in two different populations may have opposite skewness meaning that the ‘front-end loading’ whatever it supposed to mean can’t be detected from the data.
It's just that there are competing voices that all sound equally knowledgeable, and the average American citizen is not going to be able to sift through models and projections, but is instead going to rely on word of mouth over the backyard fence or whatever news outlet they use.
ReplyDeleteIt's really hard to sort out these variables and since even the scientists are not at all in agreement, what chance have we? It's pretty much like climate change, both smart sounding parties but nobody agrees.
We should all pray the projections were wrong! It would be wonderful if the prognosticators overshot the projections and over-estimated deaths and infections. I won't criticize them one iota if they are wrong by half. Even THEY don't know all the variables and they admit that. This is the most historic, unprecedented situation any of us alive have seen, where we all probably assumed many of us would be dead next week. We still may be, God forbid, but if it turns out not to be so, thank you Lord!
Personally I think the fact that so many lives have been lost, elderly lives, middle-agers, young people, even some children, is already of course a tragedy, and while not all may be due to Covid, many are. Who would debate a novel virus took off and circled the world, taking out lots of people by basically suffocating them? People were fine in the morning and almost dead by nightfall. That's not nothing that's something. Something bad.
I'm skeptical of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx because they are aligned with Bill Gates and Clinton or Obama, and that's enough for me, but they seem to have actually done a great job with this situation, so I'm grateful at this point. The economy is one thing but lives are another. I think many lives were saved by quarantine. I don't think people realize how bad it feels to even have asthma or any disorder that clogs your lungs even a bit. To suffocate in your own lungs is torment, to need a ventilator is awful, and you only have a 50% chance of surviving that, and you might have permanent lung damage, as in, forever.
Most of the evidence suggests that, outside of perhaps Wuhan and northern Italy, most people haven't been infected yet.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you are the only person in the USA who knows the denominator? Please call Dr Fauci immediately!!
Now, then. How MUCH of the population has not yet been infected? 40%? 60%? 80%? Hmmmmm. Further: how MUCH of the population in Italy has been infected? Denominators matter.
Finally: your dissection of the calculations is fine and very understandable. If you're trying to explain why The Experts were horribly wrong, that's fine. But The Experts scared the shit out of US citizens with their wild prognostications--which turned out to be SWAG's. IOW, your demonstration of stats-smarts is irrelevant to the real issue.
Will The Experts now proceed to repair the economy?..........Yah, I didn't think so.
Kathleen--"I'm skeptical of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx because they are aligned with Bill Gates and Clinton or Obama, and that's enough for me..."
ReplyDeleteThat shouldn't matter in the least.
"but they seem to have actually done a great job with this situation, so I'm grateful at this point."
Right, because they're qualified regardless of what administration is in charge.
Dad29--Leave it to the trained medical personnel. It's clearly not in your wheelhouse. Again, the reason why we are experiencing fewer people with Covid-19 is because of the policies put in place. It's not wild prognostications; the statistics are germane to the real issue--a global pandemic.
As far as repairing the economy, you have Trump in charge. What can possibly go wrong? LOL.
Common sense is not in your wheelhouse, dingbat.
ReplyDeleteYou cannot prove that The Great Imprisonment has reduced incidence of this disease--which is why you love to run with it. It's what's called a "non-falsifiable" claim.
Fine. I have one of those, too: the Trump Presidency saved 10,000,000 lives from Chinese Lung-Rot.
Prove me wrong.
"Fine. I have one of those, too: the Trump Presidency saved 10,000,000 lives from Chinese Lung-Rot."
ReplyDeleteThat would be lie, not a "non-falsifiable" claim.
Lombardy with 16% population of Italy accounts for 56% of death cases. If Covid was allowed to spread to other provinces and reach the same saturation as it reached in Lombardy, Italy by now would have had over 50,000 deaths. Furthermore the collapse of the medical system in the whole country would be much more severe as the resources could not be reallocated from less affected regions to more affected regions as it is being done now which helps to reduce mortality in hot spots like Lombardy. But you are saying that this would not have happened.
That your son’s grades improved after you hired tutors is also unfalsifiable yet you spent money on tutors. Your personal economy would be in a better shape if you stuck to your firm belief that money should not be spent on preventive or proactive actions that are linked to outcomes that are unfalsifiable. While we cannot prove that a particular smoker got cancer because of smoking we can infer it form statistics and disease etiology that has been thoroughly studied. We are not cavemen anymore. We know a lot how the world works. There are causes and there are effects and natura non facit saltus. And yet you construct a silly argument and then invoke unfalsifiability while in many other situations that suit you you would never do it.
Bad faith. Put an extra sawbuck in the till on Sunday.
Since you specialize in Bloviating Bullshit and perhaps even have a B.S. degree in that discipline, I'm done responding to your irrelevant but inventively wordy crap.
ReplyDeleteBye!
Take your ball and go home. Exactly what I thought. That's what you get when you bring a butterknife to an intellectual gun fight, heh.
ReplyDeleteI had the "intellectual" part, that's true.
ReplyDeleteYou remain a bloviating and irrelevant bullshitter. There's a job for you in college teaching someplace.
Excuse me. Not "college"; grade school. You'll be able to slide your crap past those kids.
ReplyDeleteSo you weren't done after all. Figures.
ReplyDelete