stevenkesslar

Seriously? You think that study you posted proves anything about the validity of herd immunity? If I recall right, you're a doctor, right? I have a few simple biases about this whole thing: 1) Doctors, nurses, scientists, and first responders are the biggest heroes in this movie; 2) They know shit that is above my pay grade. So when you post charts about ventilator protocols, I simply assume that is above my pay grade. I have nothing but empathy for doctors like @purplekow and nurses that have to make really difficult decisions about whether somebody goes on a ventilator. Speaking as a non-professional, the simple idea that makes the most sense to me, and I think the overwhelming majority of Americans, is that the best way to treat COVID-19 is to simply not get infected by it at all. So the idea that getting sick once from COVID-19 prevents you from getting sick twice is a theory, not a fact. We just don't know. I can't imagine how we could know. The US CDC was informed about this virus on January 3, 2020, when Dr. Redfield got the call from the Chinese CDC. Him and Azar agreed immediately this was a "very big deal". We are about four and one half months from that point. So the idea that anybody knows at this point whether herd immunity works - or how long it works for - is anybody's guess. And that is not above my pay grade. We just don't know. I've read various interesting theories about it. One was posted by @bigjoey from some place up in Minnesota. They theorized that maybe COVID-19 confers immunity for six months, or maybe a year. Which is one sensible enough theory. That would put COVID-19 somewhere in the ballpark of influenza, which does not provide total or permanent immunity. It's actually very depressing to think about. I don't think anyone wants to really contemplate the idea that COVID-19 could turn into the gift that mutates and keeps giving year after year. Again, Rule Number One: scientists are the heroes in this action movie. Everybody in America (and the world) is rooting for Captain Marvel to discover the vaccine, maybe even this year. And, sorry, the Marvel action script calls for the vaccine to work permanently. Check with Steven Spielberg for the script notes on that one. The study you posted, and several other ones, probably say a lot more about test efficacy than about herd immunity. Nobody knows exactly why some people who were infected and recovered and tested negative then test positive a week or two later. One educated guess is that if you have something like 95 % test efficacy, it means that you are going to get some false positives. So if you test 100 recovered people who tested negative once, some small number of them are going to test positive if you test them again. It probably does not mean they were reinfected. Let alone that they can infect anyone else. I think we do know that antibodies to COVID-19 exist, which is why we can fortunately have antibody testing and plasma donations. I assume, or at least hope, that the antibody tests being used in places like New York are relatively accurate. Like I said above, even if you assume the testing shows that 20 % of New York City residents were infected, it still means you need 2 or 3 or 4 times as much mass death to achieve herd immunity. Does anyone hear anyone in New York City who wants double or triple or quadruple the horror show they just went through? Or anyone else who wants that shit show in their local movieplex, and intensive care center? And, again, I'm all for clicking my heels and wishing and hoping for permanent herd immunity - ideally through a vaccine. But wishing doesn't make it so. If there is any evidence anywhere that COVID-19 antibodies protect anyone for at least a year or two, please let us know. I simply don't think anyone knows anything about that yet.

And I think this seals the deal that the numbers do not look very good for herd immunity. Unless you fancy 2 million dead Americans, who are mostly senior citizens. From the article I found this chart in: So this is a "give me the facts, the facts, and only the facts" post. What I found very interesting about this particular article is that it is written by an author in a journal that has exactly the opposite view point as mine. the author argues forcefully that the data is accurate, and relevant. So the math and science question is: can we agree on certain basic facts that will keep senior citizens alive? And based on this chart, I think the answer is yes. The data comes from a country which has had a roughly equivalent number of deaths from COVID-19 as the US. (334 deaths per million in The Netherlands versus 283 deaths per million in the US.) So I agree with the author's points about data. This is the kind of information the government should be telling us. And what it says about the impact of COVID-19 on different age cohorts may be quite relevant to the US. This is also an interesting lesson in the usefulness and uselessness of statistics. Here is the author's take: As a statistical point, that's a true statement. The intent of the author is to say what a lot of people are saying: What'sthebigdeal? It'sonlyonepercent! Theseareseniors! They'regonnadieanywaysoon! Sorry, but I've now heard these sound bites enough that the words just all kind of bunch together and roll off the lips. The big deal is that based on this data, 2 million Americans are going to die. Just do the math. That's what the numbers tell us, Even though the author doesn't spell that part out. My sense from everyone I know is that 100,000 or so COVID-19 deaths has already been quite exhausting. Particularly for those who live in the relatively few hot spots, like New York City or Boston. If we turn the entire US into similarly intense or more intense hot spots, 2 million dead is probably in the ballpark of what we should expect. So, yes, this is quite useful information to know. The number of deaths in the The Netherlands is 5,715 right now. Relative to the US, that's actually a slightly higher number of deaths per million residents, as I said above. And in both The Netherlands and the US, in a few months of pandemic the total numbers of deaths from COVID-10 are already more than double the annual number of deaths from the flu. So the question now is: are we going for 5 times as many deaths as the flu? 10 times as many deaths? The sky's the limit? The experience in The Netherlands does suggest the upper limit in the US is about 2 million - which is what Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx have been saying all along. To do the math, you can see the number of total Americans by the same age cohorts here. And you can see the number of Americans that die of the flu in any of the last ten years by ago cohort here. I picked the 2016-2017 flu season for a reason. If you average the last ten years, the average number of flu deaths was about 38,000 a year. So I picked the year in the last decade that came closest to the average. There were 38,320 flu deaths in 2016-2017. Of those deaths, 32, 833 were among seniors aged over 65. So that is the nature of the beast. Respiratory diseases mostly kill seniors. That is the way it works. Right out of the gate, this herd immunity is not looking like a very good idea. We're already at 93,533 dead Americans, in a few months - compared to 38,000 US flu deaths annually. We don't know how much of the US population has been infected. But even in New York City, the high end estimate was maybe 1 in 5 people - if these antibody tests are in the ballpark of correct. So herd immunity basically means mass disease, mass illness, mass hospitalization, and mass death. Again, pretty much what the scientists have been saying all along. So if you take 5 minutes to do the math, here are the number of Americans that will die of COVID-19 based on age cohort, using the death rates by age cohort from The Netherlands: 0 -19 years: 2,459 deaths 20-29 years: 1,362 deaths 30-39 years: 3,495 deaths 40-49 years: 6,878 deaths 50-54 years: 12,104 deaths 55-59 years: 31,813 deaths 60-64 years: 58,957 deaths 65-69 years: 129,295 deaths 70-75 years: 223,530 deaths 75-79 years: 410,496 deaths 80+ years: 993,604 deaths So how is herd immunity looking to everyone so far? This all adds up to a grand total of 1,873,993 deaths. Again, this is using data of actual deaths from The Netherlands that people who think this isn't just that a big deal are saying are the kinds of numbers the government should be telling us. the data also syncs with what the smartest scientists all over the world has been saying. Dr. Fauci has been saying the actual death rate is probably about 1 % of all those infected. A very detailed study in The Lancet in March produced what now looks like a very accurate scientific best guess: the Netherlands data is actually slightly low ball compared to Fauci and The Lancet. But the range is the same. And since The Netherlands data is based on the actual experience of death, not just theory, I would tend to overweight it as what is likely in The United States. So what the numbers are telling us is that 2 million Americans will die if we embrace this approach. So we need 20 times more death than we've had so far. Would I be wrong to guess this just doesn't sound like a very good idea? Of course, part of the reason this is so much more deadly than the flu - 38,000 flu deaths in a typical year, as opposed to up to 2 million from COVID-19 - is that way more people will get infected. In 2016-2017, the CDC estimates that 30 million Americans got the flu. 2 million deaths is based on the idea that 100 % of the herd gets sick. That obviously won't happen. But the basic idea of herd immunity is that most of the herd actually does have to get sick. And as much as it is sexy and fun and exciting and incredibly orgasm-inducing to say that OF COURSE we will bubble wrap seniors and OF COURSE that will be very easy and OF COURSE not even one senior will die ................ well, it turns out that is totally bullshit. It didn't work out that way in Italy or France or Spain or New York. Or even in Sweden, where it was the specific intent of government policy. Whatever the plan may be, the reality is quite clear: letting COVID-19 run amok leads to the mass death of seniors. Every time. That is what The Netherlands learned. Again, every time. Even if you assume "herd immunity" only requires 50 % of Americans to get infected, it still means mass illness, mass hospitalization of the US work force, and most death ........... mostly of seniors. Instead of up to 2 million dead Americans, letting the virus infect half the US population cuts the number of deaths top "only" 1 million. Woo hoo! So I completely agree with the author's point. Facts are facts. And when you look at these facts, it is very hard to see why anybody would support this approach. The data and the numbers are simply awful. It has nothing to do with politics, or ideology. The virus doesn't understand politics, or have an ideology. This is just basic science, and basic math.

Another chart I stumbled on that tells the story of Sweden in a particularly clear way. Obviously whoever did that chart did it to make a point about Sweden. If you added Spain or Italy or France, it would look very different. That said, the headline on Reddit that I found that chart in said this: Sweden shows the world what "herd immunity" looks like: Hint: They're fucked I don't disagree with that sentiment. This is a global science experiment in which nobody really wants to be the control group. Note that the chart is a month old. What has happened since then actually reinforces the point. Sweden is now at 3,743 deaths - even further ahead of the pack. Of that group of nations in the chart, Poland is now in second place, at 948 deaths. Denmark is at 551 deaths. Finland is at 301. Norway has 233 deaths. The most amazing example is South Korea. They have barely moved in the last month. They have 263 deaths. What makes South Korea an even more inspiring example is that they have a population five times greater than Sweden. So adjusted for that, South Korea has 5 deaths per million citizens. Sweden has 371 deaths per millions citizens. Anders Tegnell was 100 % wrong about how Sweden was going to stop the mass death of senior citizens. The "let's try herd immunity" approach actually induced the mass death of seniors in Sweden, by allowing the virus to run amok. I suspect he is also wrong about "herd immunity". He says that Sweden will achieve it relatively soon. Except, there is no evidence that suggests even a substantial minority of Swedes has been infected. Or that prior infection confers future immunity for any known period of time. So all we know for a fact is that the plan Sweden is following clearly results in a maximization of death, especially for senior citizens. Who wants that? Meanwhile, there is no evidence that Sweden's economy fared better than others that endured harsher lock downs. That's because it makes sense that this virus is what is causing the economy to suffer. The lock downs are simply a response to it. What seems unfathomable to me is that the approach that clearly prevents the most death is not always the most popular one. The closest brush I've has with death so far is one of my brothers, who I spent a year helping care for as he died of pancreatic cancer. If there were two treatments for pancreatic cancer, and one led to a 50 % reduction in death and the other led to no reduction in death, it's an easy guess which one him and his wife would choose. Right? So the way I look at these numbers is that it is actually a pretty simple idea, even though it takes a huge amount of unity and discipline to implement it. The countries that have reduced or prevented death the most had one basic thing in common: they decided to stop death. Other countries, like Sweden, that have suffered the most deaths just have not tried. In the case of Sweden, they actually decided it was better to let things run their course. There are, of course, big exceptions: France, Italy, and Spain in particular. They got hit hard, and have death rates relative to their population that are as much as double Sweden's. That said, they have also proved the point about how this is a choice that every country will make. They initiated some of the harshest lock downs. In some cases, you had to fill out a piece of paper just to leave your home for a month or so. The message was clear, and intensely enforced. And in every case, they cut the number of cases and the number of deaths by somewhere in the ballpark of 90 percent. Who would not want 90 less death? Germany was never as bad off as its neighbors, because it was ahead of the curve. They seem to have the most aggressive testing, tracing, and treatment program of any of the large EU countries. Which is probably one of reasons why they've suffered a relatively low 98 deaths per 1 million residents, which is roughly one quarter of what Sweden has endured. The final thing is that the countries that have really excelled at testing, tracing, and treating actually have not had to endure the kind of lock downs other countries have. So you can argue that Iceland or South Korea are excellence by exception, or islands, or whatever. But the whole point of the lock down was to quickly suppress the virus, so that after the lock down it could be controlled. In the countries that moved quickly, broad lock downs were not even needed. Or they were over quicker, as the nation got some sort of system to control the virus in place. And, at least so far, those systems are mostly working. So those countries can have their economy, and their health, too. And the problem with that is .............? I'm hopeful that some version of this will work in the United States. The states that have really been off the chart in the US are New York - 1,472 deaths per million - and New Jersey - 1,192. They both had the misfortune of being the control group in the US. They got to be our herd immunity experiment, even though they obviously did not choose that experiment. I honestly think it was just bad luck. It seems like it could have been California, where we now know the first deaths from COVID-19 actually occurred. That said, it may have helped that California was also ahead of the curve on shutting the state down temporarily to suppress the virus's spread early on. The four other states that I think will be interesting to watch, with the number of deaths per million residents, are: Ohio (147 deaths per million), Florida (95 deaths per million), California (87 deaths per million), and Texas (48 deaths per million). Note that all four of those states are right in the ballpark of Germany. Meaning they have way fewer deaths than what happened in Spain or France or Italy, and fewer still than what happened in New York or New Jersey. This is good news. This is strong reason for hope. I'll save any political comments for the political forum. But the reason I even mention politics here is I think that this is fundamentally pretty apolitical. These states all have very different political cultures. But the outcomes are still roughly equivalent. Compared to New York or New Jersey, the number of deaths have been small. Relative to population, Texas has had 30 times fewer deaths than New York. Here's another interesting and relevant statistic about those four states. In all for cases, they have had no more death than than have from the season flu. Florida (2000 flu deaths a year) and Ohio (1700 flu deaths a year) have both has just about the same number of deaths from COVID-19 every year. California and Texas are still well below the number of flu deaths they experience every year. Of course, that's apples to oranges. W're only two months into the COVID-19 pandemic. And it took extraordinary lock down to avoid what happened in New York and New Jersey, which have both had about 10 times as many deaths as they suffer from the flu every year. My point is that I don't think we have to question why people approve of these lock downs. 90 % less death is always a good thing to most people. I see this as having way more to do with human nature than politics. The simple fact about human nature is that people don't want to die. Nobody likes the idea of herd immunity when they are the part of the herd most likely to end up dead. And the best theory I've read about why Florida has fared relatively well is that it is chock full of well educated and resourceful senior citizens who simply would rather not die. In each of those four states, somewhere right around 2 to 3 % of the population has been tested for COVID-19. I don't read or hear anything about resistance to testing or tracing here in California, where the state is well into building an army of contact tracers. The people I know don't particularly want to leave their home, and would be perfectly happy to be tested. Nobody I know wants to gamble on herd immunity. They'll take the vaccine as soon as possible, or a mask and social distancing for now, thank you. So the notion that what is happening in Sweden is somehow inevitable seems like: 1) nonsense, and 2) a veiled death wish which is unpopular in most places, because it is contrary to human nature. Maybe we will all learn, sadly, that the patience of people in all these other countries that seem to have beat the virus, and are going back to work, has just worn out. Maybe the virus will beat us in the long run. In the short run, it sure seems like other nations are beating the virus where ever they have actually tried. As a happy bonus, it also seems like beating the virus is actually better for the economy.

Or, it shows the idea that you can "properly protect" seniors in the middle of a massive viral wildfire just totally sucked to begin with. It's an interesting concept to say that we'll expose most of the population to a lethal and highly contagious virus, and yet somehow magically bubble wrap the most vulnerable people for a year or so. How was that ever supposed to work? Other than by magic? The author of the policy, Anders Tegnall, has admitted repeatedly that the idea of keeping seniors safe - which was at the core of the policy from Day One - simply did not work. So it was not a bug in the software. It was that the entire idea was just wrong. I lived this for close to a decade with my Mom and Dad in a nursing home. My Dad died of pneumonia a few years ago. It could easily have been COVID-19 were he still alive today. Many of the workers in the nursing home were local college students (the entry level jobs with close contact, like they put the plate of food on your table), or Moms with kids (the professional nurses, social workers, rehab therapists). They were all wonderful, caring people. And they would all make fantastic virus spreaders. So the idea that you could somehow let a virus run amok in a community but magically keep it out of nursing homes is just a stupid idea. I mean, it is just bat shit crazy stupid. Anybody who has ever cared for a loved one in a nursing home would know this immediately. Except, of course, for the Tom Friedman types. He calls this plan "harmonious balance". Let the virus hit everybody else - as if having lots of sick and hospitalized workers doesn't fuck everything up - and "harmoniously" shelter seniors. Frankly, I think of it as the mass slaughter of senior citizens, based on stupid ideas that were never going to work in practice. Not that anything that elitists like Friedman have ever thought up has actually worked in practice. Sweden had no lockdown but its economy is expected to suffer just as badly as its European neighbors And that's the really bat shit crazy part. Sweden managed to maximize the mass death of senior citizens relative to their neighbors. But its economy is no better for it. Again, call me bat shit crazy. But I am a proud and stubborn capitalist. And being a capitalist, this makes total sense to me. Capitalism works based on markets, and demand. When you have a lethal virus, it fucks up markets, and demand. It did that in 1918 and 1919. It is doing it again in 2019 and 2020. Seniors don't want to die. Workers don't want to get sick or be hospitalized. The only difference, THANK GOD, is that unlike the 1918 virus this one does not particularly prey on young adults. The scientists and the economists agree. The driver of this crisis is a lethal virus. Until we get that under control, the economy is fucked. Period. That's how capitalism works. That's why all these other countries figured out, correctly, that they had to try to use lock downs and "test, trace, treat" to first get the virus under control. Since the virus is now not running amok in Austria or Australia, and dozens of other capitalist nations, now they can gradually and somewhat safely reopen. And the risk to seniors in nursing homes is far lower - simply because the virus is not being allowed to run amok everywhere. Maybe it doesn't sound as nice as "harmonious balance". But the idea of avoiding the mass death of senior citizens still sounds pretty good to me.

There's important part of the numbers problems with reopening: workers. Some people like to say it's mostly seniors dying. That's true, which is the nature of flu-like viral disease. But that doesn't mean lots of workers who are not seniors don't get very sick. Some people also like to say most of these deaths are in and around New York or New England. That's not true. That's like saying because the last plane crash was in New York, planes can only crash in New York. Actually, planes can crash anywhere. And pandemics can and do eventually spread everywhere. Case in point: South Dakota. Which is pretty much the opposite of New York in every way. COVID-19 IN SOUTH DAKOTA I've been keeping my eye on Minnehaha County, South Dakota. That's where Smithfield Foods had to close down a meat packing plant because hundreds of their workers tested positive for COVID-19. If you want to understand how work places in every part of the US will become hospitals and morgues, that state's data is comprehensive and helpful. Absent something like "test, trace, treat", it is likely where the US is headed. South Dakota is overwhelmingly White. But only 30 % of people with COVID-19 in South Dakota are White. And about 9 in 10 of those with the disease are under the age of 65. So in South Dakota, COVID-19 isn't a nursing home disease, like it was at first in Washington state. It is a work force disease. The numbers are staggering for anyone who thinks we can just reopen and work our way through this. While most of the original cases in Minehaha County were meat packing factory workers, there are now 3,150 cases in the county. So COVID-19 did exactly what Dr. Fauci is warning it can do anywhere . It jumped the factory wall and got outside, into broad community spread. Not only did it force a factory to shut down. That whole community is now living under a cloud of disease and death. If it could happen in South Dakota, it could happen anywhere. Of the 3150 people infected in Minehaha County, 233 had to be hospitalized, and 39 died. So that's a 7.4 % hospitalization rate. And 1.2 % of those infected ended up dead. How do you run a work force when you are faced with 7 % of them needing to be hospitalized, and 1 % of them dying? This is going to be a huge numbers problem in every state in America. Which is probably why California, which alone is the 5th largest economy in the world, has business community support for the idea that we'd better have this figured out before the economy reopens. There's no way any office or church or restaurant or retail store can function when you work force is largely sick, and maybe 7 % of them are so sick they need to go to the hospital. That's not work. That's a plane crash. The good news from Minehaha County is they figured it out better late than never. As that state website shows, the number of new cases went from a peak of about 300 a day in late March to 11 yesterday. They got on on the "test, trace, treat" bandwagon. They had to. Because COVID-19 sickened and killed an unacceptable number of workers and seniors. Of the total of 44 deaths in the entire state, 39 were in that one county. Only two of the dead were under 50 years old. 24 of the 44 dead were over 80. So the pattern is clear, and a potential disaster in the making. Lots of workers get sick, all at once. The hospital and ICU fills to 100 % of capacity. It spreads out into the community, and many senior citizens die. That plan could happen anywhere. It is magical thinking to hope and wish that the virus will go away. Just like in March, magical thinking simply invites the mass death of senior citizens. And in the US, the mass daily death of seniors from COVID-19 still hasn't even stopped. States like California and Ohio, among others, will be able to demonstrate whether we can actually avoid every other county in America being like Minehaha County.

Really? So 20,000 to 30,000 new infections a day and 1,000 to 2,000 deaths due to COVID-19 EVERY DAY - mostly of people over 65 - is just the new normal? Is this now the idea? Or, to quote Dr. Fauci, "death lags." So there were very few deaths in New York from COVID-19 around the middle of March, when the virus was silently spreading. Since then, New York became a morgue. The mass death and collapse of hospitals has subsided. But the economy of New York won't reopen quickly or effectively. That's regardless of any government plan. It's simply because seniors don't wish to die. They won't go to malls, or restaurants, or plays. Funny how that works, isn't it? So the idea that we can judge the impact of a plane crash before it occurs - or simply pretend that it won't occur - is an interesting and magical idea. Under normal circumstances, we board planes everyday because everybody knows the chances of dying in a plane crash are almost zero. There is a lot of magical thinking about COVID-19 still. Most people get that the chances of dying of COVID-19 are way worse than dying in a plane crash. Especially if you are over 65. Some people still haven't grasped this idea, though. It is magic to think that a month from now, the virus won't have the same impact it did two months ago. It will. How broadly it spreads will be a matter of how the economy is reopened, and what precautions people take. That said, the US is committed to not having a simple and effective national plan: TEST, TRACE, TREAT. Some states, like California and Ohio, are aggressively ramping up test, trace, treat. Others are not. It's pretty likely that the states that ignore what has been effective everywhere else in the world are simply asking to be morgues. That's the thing about a viruses like COVID-19. They are very scientific, and mathematical. They are smart little buggers. Here's some interesting comparisons of other countries that have reopened, in terms of the numbers of deaths reported yesterday: Australia - 1 death Austria - 1 death China - 7 deaths France - 131 deaths Iceland - 0 deaths Japan - 5 deaths South Korea - 1 death Spain - 59 deaths Thailand - 0 deaths Meanwhile, the United States had 1,003 deaths yesterday. That's five times more than all those other countries combined. Which of these ones is not like the others? The more important question is: WHY is the United States not like the others? The basic answer is simple: test, trace, treat. Other countries are using it nationally, and aggressively. The US is not. They are stopping the mass death of seniors citizens. We are not. It's pretty much that simple. In past iterations of this discussion about numbers, what has been effective in reducing mass senior citizen death in every other nations has been dismissed: they are an island, or not an island; they are a big country, or a small country; they are Madagscar, or they are not Madagscar. So @Unicorn and @bigjoey will believe whatever they wish to believe. But all these countries embraced variations of the same idea: shut down, then reopen with a very aggressive program of test, trace, and treat in place. So far, it is mostly working everywhere it has been tried. Since it has not really been tried in the US yet, that would explain why we are losing 1000 people a day, mainly seniors. The scientists are all saying that that 1000 will go back up to 2000 and higher when the impact of reopening occurs weeks from now. Time will tell. Most states have not met the minimal guidelines set by Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. Those two people are among the most highly respected experts in the country. Yet one wonders why their ideas aren't as respected. especially since their ideas seem to actually be working everywhere except the US. Maybe this is part of the multivariate "American personality" model @bigjoey posited. Does this have something to do with "the American personality", @bigjoey? I guess I don't understand that part of the American personality. Please explain. I included France and Spain as two examples of countries that were hit by the mass slaughter first, and were also morgues not that long ago. They are two examples of how countries have used test, trace, treat to stop the mass death of senior citizens. Which, to me, seems like a pretty awesome goal. Why should we want 1000 or 2000 seniors to die of COVID-19 in the US every day? It makes no sense to me. None whatsoever. Spain went from a peak of 8,271 new cases in one day in late March to 469 new cases yesterday. That's a 94 % reduction. France went from a peak of 17,355 new cases in one day in early April to 358 new cases yesterday. That's a 98 % reduction. The US went from a peak of 38,958 new cases in late April to 22,630 yesterday. That's a 42 % reduction. Again, which of these countries is not like the other? And why? The blunt instrument of a national shutdown stopped the bleeding, like it was supposed to and like it did everywhere. Other countries seem to have figured out how to actually contain the virus, drive the numbers down to next to nothing, and stop the mass death of senior citizens. In the US, we haven't really tried that yet. This is as good as it gets for the US, probably. Because deaths lags. So we know that the 190 deaths that occurred in France and Spain yesterday will be lower a month from now. That's because the number of new daily cases has been dramatically cut by an effective nationwide test, trace, treat program in countries that were morgues. The same thing could probably work in the US - notwithstanding "the American personality" - if it were tried. Why aren't we trying it? I don't get it. It seems like we are saying we would prefer the plane to be able to crash. Again, time will tell. California and Ohio and some other states are ramping up small armies of contact tracers. So maybe what works in China, or Austria, or Iceland, or Australia could work here, of course. Or maybe somehow mass senior citizen death is just in the cards in the US. Like I said, time will tell.

Really, I get it. To use @bigjoey's phrase, you are committed to the idea of the American personality, and American exceptionalism. Good for you. More or less, facts from China, or New Zealand, or Australia, or Iceland, or Austria, or Hong Kong, or Japan, or Singapore, or wherever, don't matter. You didn't read The Hammer And The Dance, and you clearly won't. You are committed to the idea that there is something exceptional about the US that has nothing to do with anything else. The idea that a scientific community posited a theory about how the coronavirus numbers work, which is basically in the ballpark of Fauci/Birx, and the countries that complied with some version of that theory pretty much all had similar positive outcomes, which were the outcomes predicted, is all irrelevant. Your argument about Madagascar has nothing to do with anything, other than your point is to find some exception. This was an island, that was smaller, this was bigger, and then there's Madagascar. I don't disagree with your core point, which is that nothing is ever simple. This virus and its lethal path of destruction and death is as complicated as it can get, actually. So I'm good with the idea that we'll start by dismissing what actually worked anywhere else. And with the idea that lock downs hurt the economy, but the mass death needed to achieve herd immunity would not hurt the economy even more. @bigjoey's multivariate analysis about how the numbers work does not seem to allow for the outcome that ending the lock down will lead to greater economic destruction. His analysis actually seems to be based on an immutable principle, rather than a variable: these lock downs will lead to the worst possible outcome. Even though about 80 % or so of Americans seem to think that is not the case. If this were a real drug study, I could tell you that there were 98 % fewer deaths in one group, that received the drug, than there were in another group, which got the placebo. You could argue that some people in the medicated group died, so there was death anyway, so what's the point? Or you could argue that you checked, and people in Madagascar died, so what's the point? Or you could simply argue since that group is made up of 1000 specific people, what happened to them isn't relevant to anybody else. I know how this is working out. It will not be a controlled scientific study. But the US is choosing to be the global placebo. (As are several others, such as Brazil, at least so far.) At 67,000+ deaths, we already are the global placebo. It's actually charitable to the planet that every other country can point to us and say, "If you don't do this, we think what's happening in the US is the potential outcome." Fortunately, they won't say it to our face, so we won't have the burden of hearing it. We're now at a point where individuals in California are saying their right to not have to be kept from surfing for a month or two is more important than some 75 year old's right to not contract a virus that has a good chance of killing them. So as a numerical pattern in an epidemic, which is the point of the thread I am sticking to, the verdict is in. I agree that if we don't do what people in other countries did that worked, even if it was based on the recommendations of a lot of US scientists, then the outcome of what they did is irrelevant to the US. What is much more relevant in the US is that 15 to 20 % of the US herd is predisposed to make it easy for the virus to infect them. You know more about this stuff than I do. So I think we agree that we are headed (or, in my view, "doomed") to achieve herd immunity - the very hard way. Hopefully, @bigjoey knows more than Dr. Fauci, and he's right that the death rate is 0.087 or so. If he's also right that 70 % of Americans get infected, we're about one third of the way towards 200,000 deaths. Woo hoo! Tomas Pueyo, who predicted accurately what would happen in all those others countries - the prevention of mass death - predicted far worse for us if the US follows the course of herd immunity. His prediction - over 10 million dead - was based on zero mitigation. So we know that's wrong, thank God, because we have been practicing unprecedented forms or mitigation. So we have a range of 200,000 dead Americans to 10 million dead Americans. Time will tell.

It's not me. Fauci keeps saying 1 %. Again, no one knows. It's an estimate. I'll repeat the argument you don't want to hear. We do now have a 2020 set of numbers. We know the number of deaths in New York City and New York state. We know the implied infection rate from antiboy testing: 20 % in New York City, and 14 % in New York State. We know the death rate in New York state is 7.63 % based on the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases, which we know is a fraction of the number of actual infections. So there's four unique ways we can go at this, all of which confirm each other. 1. We can say Fauci is smarter than you or me, and we'll just go for a ballpark 1 % death rate as correct. It's the doctor knows best theory. 2. We can say that the 319,213 confirmed cases in New York are 12 % of the actual 2.7 million or so infections in the state, if that 14 % statewide infection rate is correct. In other words, every known case really 8.3 means infections, if that statewide antibody study is valid. If you scale down the 7.63 % death rate based on the fact that the actual number of infections is really 8.3 times higher, it leave you with a 0.91 % death rate. 3. You can make the same assumption, that there is a 14 % "herd immunity" in New York State and a 20 % "herd immunity" in Nerw York City. You can then divide the actual number of deaths into the presumed number of infected individuals, which is 2.7 million for the state and 2 million for the city. I did that a week ago, when the study came out. At that point, it was just under about 0.88 % for the city and about 0.6 % for the state, if I remember right. If I recalculated it today, the death rate would of course be higher, since there are more deaths. 4. I think the best scientific studies, like this one The Lancet, are actually pretty close. Granted, the difference between a 0.9 % death rate and a 1 % death rate in the US is 330,000 Americans, or about 5 times the number that have died so far. So decimal points matter. That study, which reviewed most of what we knew a month ago, said the death rate based on total infections is 0.657 %. They didn't spell out all their assumptions. But my view would be that, whatever assumptions they made, the scientists like Fauci and the ones who get published in The Lancet know more than you or me. That said, if you think it's more like 1957 or 1968, which would average out to about 200,000 total deaths, you're entitled to your view. Even more reason to think we should be rushing to herd immunity, right? For America's sake, I hope you are right. For Fauci's sake, I hope you are wrong. Brad Pitt's prediction will be right, and Fauci is gonna be fired. because what you are arguing is that the death rate from COVID-19 is actually lower than flu. Fauci's basic idea is that instead of the 0.1 % death rate with the average annual flu, this has an annual death rate of 1 %. You're actually arguing that with 200,000 dead, COVID-19 has a death rate of 0.087 % or so, right? Just so it's clear, you are saying herd immunity (or, if you prefer, "harmonious balance") is inevitable, and will be achieved when 70 % of Americans are infected. That's 230 million Americans. It's simple math. 200,000 deaths are 0.087 % of 230 million infections. Correct me if i missed something, but that's what you are saying. The reason the 0.1 % flu death rate is higher than your calculation is that in any given year the flu infects maybe 30 million Americans. That's because we have: 1) natural immunity, via antibodies to prior flu strains; and 2) induced immunity, through flu shots. COVID-19 is lethal precisely because we have none of that right now. So you might want to double check your multivariate analysis. Given that at 67,444 dead we are already at 163 % of the average flu number of deaths, it just doesn't make sense that COVID-19 is less lethal than the common flu. Good news is, if you are right, you can take Fauci's place. He's kind of around retirement age anyway. You're way better at multivariate analysis than me. So how does your multivariate analysis account for how lives get destroyed from the impact of 200,000 to 2 million Americans dying? In other words, what long term impact does 200,000 to 2 million dead have on the living over the long term? As a specific example, a lot of children were orphaned in 1918. I'm detecting that your may have a cognitive immunity to history. So as a current example, Nick Cordero, 41, is near death, He has an infant baby. So whether that baby is immunized for the measles is an important thing. That said, whether that baby has a father is arguably more important. And if we have hospitals jammed with COVID-19 patients for the next year, whether a baby can even be born in a hospital may be a question. Could you share with us how your multivariate analysis factors in these types of things, that may occur after these lock downs are ended?

First, in fairness Honestly, though, I think there's a better one The caveat to that quote is history is always open to interpretation and multivariate analysis. It's complicated. In this case, though, it's very easy. It's not a question of whether we are doomed to repeat history. We are repeating it. So you are a logical person. The conclusion that follows is simple. We are doomed. 200,000 to 2 million Americans. That's how many are going to die. It really depends on which states do what. If more states are like California and Ohio, it's closer to 200,000. If we embrace the idea that we really can't be bothered with blah blah blah, it's closer to 2 million. What happened in 1918, or China, or Austria, or Iceland, or South Korea, or Japan, or Singapore, or Australia, or Thailand, or Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or really anywhere just really doesn't fucking matter. Blah blah blah. That's fine with me. The good news now is we will get to see the consequences of "harmonious balance". So all the people saying that we really should not have lock downs will get what they want. If two million die, so be it. It was going to happen anyway. The rest of the world is just stupid. Or at least different. And I completely agree with you that this is about "the American personality". The word I used was individualism. And I'll repeat, that's value neutral. Individualism can be a great thing, or a problem. From a scientific perspective only, in a pandemic, it's a problem. What matters is a pandemic is what the herd does. Not the individual herd member. So you don't have to worry about the fact that all over the world, countries that have few deaths and have this under control will be thinking, and saying among themselves, "Well, there you have it. American individualism," I say you don't have to worry about it because, out of respect, they won't say it to you. So there's no problem. They don't have to worry about hurting your feelings. And you don't have to worry about listening to useless facts and learning useless stuff. Stated differently, no sound multivariate analysis would include data from other countries. Why even think of it, really? There's another word you should add to your multivariate analysis. American exceptionalism. It is a strong part of what you call "the American personality." So we will prove we can do it differently. We are proving we are the exception quite nicely, already. 67,444 deaths and counting. It follows from your argument that these coronavirus numbers are the unique result of the American personality, And American exceptionalism, if I may add. Therefore, we can't blame the numbers on anyone else. No one else in the world has similar numeric outcomes. And why would we blame these numbers on anyone else, anyone? We should embrace it, and be proud of it. I'm going with your argument. This is the exceptional outcome of America's personality. Woo hoo! Let's give ourselves a big hug! So the good news is we now get to test your premise. I give you credit for this. There is a fervent commitment on your part to certain principles. One could reach exactly the opposite conclusion based on the what lots of other countries just demonstrated. But you are having none of it. Your theory is clear, and - sorry to say - you keep repeating it too: We have not stopped death. We have simply delayed it. That would be news to people all over the world, who think they prevented the kinds of deaths we are seeing in America. But you are having none of it. Do you care to put a number on it? Shall we go for 2 million or bust? If you are right, we know what the numbers are in California: 28 million infections, and over 800,000 deaths. https://www.companyofmen.org/threads/coronavirus-numbers.156870/page-11#post-1904821 Your theory is that this can not be stopped. It can only be delayed. And the cost of delay is the "destruction of our economy" and "throwing trillions at the problem". I have good news and bad news. Good news is @Epigonos is on your side. He articulated early in March that closing down restaurants and other things in California was a "dip shit" strategy. And he doesn't go for the blah blah blah stuff. So you guys can pioneer how to avoid "the destruction of our economy" and expedite progress toward herd immunity free of "dip shit" decision making. I'll even spring for the beer. It might take a while. Bad news is that 85 % of California believes the opposite. They seem to think 800,000 deaths can be prevented. So the leadership policies they approve of include things like mass testing, "throwing" money at 10,000 contact tracers, and all manner of other nonsense that will likely just lead to a "bad hangover". Worse, this toxic cocktail was developed in places like China, New Zealand, and even Iceland. Call it magical thinking on my part. But I'd bet money we'll learn before too long that even Bill and Melinda Gates had a hand in it! And, no, they don't count as American. They're from Seattle. So here's my suggestion. Which beach should we meet at? Or would you prefer a bar, or a crowded restaurant? I'm Catholic, but I'd be up for a synagogue. Wherever you choose. Let's just make it some place very crowded, where we have the best chance of doing our part and pushing herd immunity along. Since it's all about delay, and delay costs trillions, we can at least do our patriotic party to help get the virus out of the way. And since 70 % means at least one and a half of the two of us, I'd say we do it together. That way we don't have to decide whether you go first, or I do. Work for you?

I think you should read The Hammer And The Dance. It doesn't sound like you have. It would address much of what you said in great detail. The chart does not describe what the US did. It was a prescriptive chart from an essay on March 19 recommending what the US should do. Which was to hammer, hammer, hammer. So the point of those others lines on the chart - doing nothing, or mitigating - is what Pueyo argued we would get if we followed that approach. Basically, he said we would not get the results we wanted. "Mitigating" is a word that means different things to different people. But Pueyo's basic idea in mid-March was that half-hearted measures that only some people abide by would not get us the results we wanted. And I think since he wrote that on March 19, it has proven to be true. All the really hard hit European countries that were much more hard core about hammer, hammer, hammer have cut the infections by a half or two thirds or more. France is a notable example. They had a high of 17,000 infections on one day, and a more normal daily high of about 5000 a day for several weeks at the peak. So now they are down to 509 three days ago, 758 two days ago, and 168 yesterday. That's a remarkable decline that took a lot of sacrifice. So if you were to ask most Americans, would you rather see 30,000 people a day get this, or 168, we obviously know how most Americans would answer. So my point is that this hammer idea seems to have achieved what people really wanted - all over the world. Less sickness, and less death. Some of these European countries were fining people, or limiting you to two people that could be outside together at once and only for certain reasons - like to get food. So the idea was to take very hard core steps for a limited period of weeks, all at once, to dramatically lower the number of cases. It worked, in terms of quickly and dramatically hammering down the number of infections per day. Back to that word "mitigating", I would argue that Pueyo pretty much called what happened in the US. What we did worked, but in a different way. The really good news is that had we done nothing, what was happening in New York would have played out all over the US to one degree or another. Probably more in California, less in South Dakota. But even in South Dakota and Iowa, even with some moderate restrictions, big outbreaks still occurred in some places. I think it's clear that if we have 65,000 deaths that are growing by 2,000 a day with the lock downs, it would have been much worse without them. So the lock downs worked. That said, arguably it was more "mitigation" than hammer, I would argue. In truth, it was very different in every state. And sometimes very different in different parts of states. So the bottom line is we didn't grow from 30,000 to 100,000 new cases a day, thank God. But we are stuck at 30,000 a day. The polls say that most Americans want to focus more on getting this high number of cases down. People are worried about their health, and especially of all these deaths. (On May 1 the US has our second highest number of new cases - 36,007 new cases.) All the other outcomes I mentioned in other countries that you are sort of rebutting had not even occurred yet. So what happens in Australia, or Austria, or China, or Hong Kong, or Iceland, or Japan, or New Zealand, or Singapore, may be irrelevant to the US. My point in bringing it up was this: they have all followed some version of the model Pueyo described, which is itself a compilation of what a lot of scientists and doctors are saying. The model is essentially the Fauci/Birx model. Although it is more aggressive, in that it advocates the use of a "hammer" in a way that maybe 20 % of Americans simply would not support, at least going off polls. Fauci and Birx have sort of baked into their cake that some percentage of Americans really do seem to feel that liberating the virus is the best scientific and economic approach. Other countries have said the best thing for the economy is to focus completely on crushing this virus. The idea was to just hammer, hammer, hammer relentlessly and uniformly for a period of weeks. The countries that did it - like China, like South Korea, like New Zealand, like Australia, and the others - all seem to have achieved the same result. I'm oversimplifying, of course. There's complexity and many different variables in each of those countries. And part of it is what you said, which is the point I made several times above. It helps a lot that most of them started with no more than 1,000 confirmed infections on their worst day. That said, the outcome is true in every case: THE HAMMER PART WORKED. The polls suggest people think we can do better than 2000 Americans dying every day. Which will likely be headed to 3000 a day as we reopen, according to at least some of the experts. The polls say 80 % of Americans feel like containing the virus is the top priority. Pueyo was speaking to that part of the nation. His message, like Fauci, is that many of the Fauci-types all over America think these ideas make sense. That's what he said in the middle of March, right after the lock downs he helped promote started. I'm a Doubting Thomas by nature, and I always prefer facts to theories. I brought up all these other countries because his theory turned out to work, in fact. So you can say in mid March, What if a country hammered this virus relentlessly for 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 weeks? Would that work? So now we can look at all these other countries and say that they tried it, and it worked. If we don't want 2000 or 3000 dead Americans every day, it is definitely food for thought. I mentioned California because you can do the same examples in the US. If we had the same rate of infection as New York did, and the same rate of actual deaths relative to our population, we'd have had 50,000 dead in California. Basically double the population of New York, double the number of deaths. And that's nothing, compared to what Newsom talked to us about in mid-March, when all this was first coming down. He said up to 20 million could get infected by May or June. And all those models, like Imperial College and the Pueyo one I posted, bore it out mathematically. Exponential growth, left unchecked, will do that. That's why we have 25,000 known dead people from COVID-19 in New York. I bold-faced that thing you said about Australia and New Zealand because that is an absolutely critical point. There is a huge difference between having 1,000 cases a day and 30,000 a day. Both Australia and New Zealand are on the leading edge of contact tracing. That is partly how they got the number of infections under control - along with the lock downs themselves, of course. When you have 30,000 new known cases every day, which probably means well over 100,000 new infections a day, it turns something that is hard work into impossible work. It's just too many people to trace. I'd strongly encourage reading Pueyo's whole thing, because it goes through a lot of these variables in a very detailed way. About how to really focus both on saving the economy, and of course save lives, too. California will be a model on how, or even whether, testing and tracing can work. Even though it is really science, not politics, I'm putting most of this stuff on a thread there called Test, Trace, Treat to leave room for discussing the partisan differences between states. California is well into the process of hiring 10,000 contact tracers. That's way more than any other state. This past week there have been between 1000 and 2500 new cases per day in California. We are on par with where Australia was before their lock down, since we have twice their population. We are continuing the lock down here for another month. I think the idea is that once we reopen, we really want to be able to stay open. Meaning people can go to work. Kids can go to school in the Fall, and maybe have the schools start early. That's the goal, at least. And I think based on everything in the world it's clear that "test, trace, treat" is our best shot at being able to keep the jobs and schools going. Of course, none of us will know until we see how bad the Fall gets. I'm posting that chart to add a touch of nuance. That's from Pueyo's first paper on March 9th. At that time, South Korea looked like the global problem child. In fairness to them, there was a mass undetected infection cluster in a church sect. Over 4000 sect members were infected. They infected others. So in early March, the snapshot of South Korea looked bad. Now everyone sees them as a model. The good news is we learned that to err is human, but to be determined is divine. They have been relentless about "test, trace, treat". So far it has worked. Only 250 deaths in South Korea. The bad news is Spain, France, the US are all those little lines at the bottom of the graph. Two months ago! That's how quickly this spreads and kills.

I think you should read The Hammer And The Dance. It doesn't sound like you have. It would address much of what you said in great detail. The chart does not describe what the US did. It was a prescriptive chart from an essay on March 19 recommending what the US should do. Which was to hammer, hammer, hammer. So the point of those others lines on the chart - doing nothing, or mitigating - is what Pueyo argued we would get if we followed that approach. Basically, he said we would not get the results we wanted. "Mitigating" is a word that means different things to different people. But Pueyo's basic idea in mid-March was that half-hearted measures that only some people abide by would not get us the results we wanted. And I think since he wrote that on March 19, it has proven to be true. All the really hard hit European countries that were much more hard core about hammer, hammer, hammer have cut the infections by a half or two thirds or more. France is a notable example. They had a high of 17,000 infections on one day, and a more normal daily high of about 5000 a day for several weeks at the peak. So now they are down to 509 three days ago, 758 two days ago, and 168 yesterday. That's a remarkable decline that took a lot of sacrifice. So if you were to ask most Americans, would you rather see 30,000 people a day get this, or 168, we obviously know how most Americans would answer. So my point is that this hammer idea seems to have achieved what people really wanted - all over the world. Less sickness, and less death. Some of these European countries were fining people, or limiting you to two people that could be outside together at once and only for certain reasons - like to get food. So the idea was to take very hard core steps for a limited period of weeks, all at once, to dramatically lower the number of cases. It worked, in terms of quickly and dramatically hammering down the number of infections per day. Back to that word "mitigating", I would argue that Pueyo pretty much called what happened in the US. What we did worked, but in a different way. The really good news is that had we done nothing, what was happening in New York would have played out all over the US to one degree or another. Probably more in California, less in South Dakota. But even in South Dakota and Iowa, even with some moderate restrictions, big outbreaks still occurred in some places. I think it's clear that if we have 65,000 deaths that are growing by 2,000 a day with the lock downs, it would have been much worse without them. So the lock downs worked. That said, arguably it was more "mitigation" than hammer, I would argue. In truth, it was very different in every state. And sometimes very different in different parts of states. So the bottom line is we didn't grow from 30,000 to 100,000 new cases a day, thank God. But we are stuck at 30,000 a day. The polls say that most Americans want to focus more on getting this high number of cases down. People are worried about their health, and especially of all these deaths. (On May 1 the US has our second highest number of new cases - 36,007 new cases.) All the other outcomes I mentioned in other countries that you are sort of rebutting had not even occurred yet. So what happens in Australia, or Austria, or China, or Hong Kong, or Iceland, or Japan, or New Zealand, or Singapore, may be irrelevant to the US. My point in bringing it up was this: they have all followed some version of the model Pueyo described, which is itself a compilation of what a lot of scientists and doctors are saying. The model is essentially the Fauci/Birx model. Although it is more aggressive, in that it advocates the use of a "hammer" in a way that maybe 20 % of Americans simply would not support, at least going off polls. Fauci and Birx have sort of baked into their cake that some percentage of Americans really do seem to feel that liberating the virus is the best scientific and economic approach. Other countries have said the best thing for the economy is to focus completely on crushing this virus. The idea was to just hammer, hammer, hammer relentlessly and uniformly for a period of weeks. The countries that did it - like China, like South Korea, like New Zealand, like Australia, and the others - all seem to have achieved the same result. I'm oversimplifying, of course. There's complexity and many different variables in each of those countries. And part of it is what you said, which is the point I made several times above. It helps a lot that most of them started with no more than 1,000 confirmed infections on their worst day. That said, the outcome is true in every case: THE HAMMER PART WORKED. The polls suggest people think we can do better than 2000 Americans dying every day. Which will likely be headed to 3000 a day as we reopen, according to at least some of the experts. The polls say 80 % of Americans feel like containing the virus is the top priority. Pueyo was speaking to that part of the nation. His message, like Fauci, is that many of the Fauci-types all over America think these ideas make sense. That's what he said in the middle of March, right after the lock downs he helped promote started. I'm a Doubting Thomas by nature, and I always prefer facts to theories. I brought up all these other countries because his theory turned out to work, in fact. So you can say in mid March, What if a country hammered this virus relentlessly for 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 weeks? Would that work? So now we can look at all these other countries and say that they tried it, and it worked. If we don't want 2000 or 3000 dead Americans every day, it is definitely food for thought. I mentioned California because you can do the same examples in the US. If we had the same rate of infection as New York did, and the same rate of actual deaths relative to our population, we'd have had 50,000 dead in California. Basically double the population of New York, double the number of deaths. And that's nothing, compared to what Newsom talked to us about in mid-March, when all this was first coming down. He said up to 20 million could get infected by May or June. And all those models, like Imperial College and the Pueyo one I posted, bore it out mathematically. Exponential growth, left unchecked, will do that. That's why we have 25,000 known dead people from COVID-19 in New York. I bold-faced that thing you said about Australia and New Zealand because that is an absolutely critical point. There is a huge difference between having 1,000 cases a day and 30,000 a day. Both Australia and New Zealand are on the leading edge of contact tracing. That is partly how they got the number of infections under control - along with the lock downs themselves, of course. When you have 30,000 new known cases every day, which probably means well over 100,000 new infections a day, it turns something that is hard work into impossible work. It's just too many people to trace. I'd strongly encourage reading Pueyo's whole thing, because it goes through a lot of these variables in a very detailed way. About how to really focus both on saving the economy, and of course save lives, too. California will be a model on how, or even whether, testing and tracing can work. Even though it is really science, not politics, I'm putting most of this stuff on a thread there called Test, Trace, Treat to leave room for discussing the partisan differences between states. California is well into the process of hiring 10,000 contact tracers. That's way more than any other state. This past week there have been between 1000 and 2500 new cases per day in California. We are on par with where Australia was before their lock down, since we have twice their population. We are continuing the lock down here for another month. I think the idea is that once we reopen, we really want to be able to stay open. Meaning people can go to work. Kids can go to school in the Fall, and maybe have the schools start early. That's the goal, at least. And I think based on everything in the world it's clear that "test, trace, treat" is our best shot at being able to keep the jobs and schools going. Of course, none of us will know until we see how bad the Fall gets. I'm posting that chart to add a touch of nuance. That's from Pueyo's first paper on March 9th. At that time, South Korea looked like the global problem child. In fairness to them, there was a mass undetected infection cluster in a church sect. Over 4000 sect members were infected. They infected others. So in early March, the snapshot of South Korea looked bad. Now everyone sees them as a model. The good news is we learned that to err is human, but to be determined is divine. They have been relentless about "test, trace, treat". So far it has worked. Only 250 deaths in South Korea. The bad news is Spain, France, the US are all those little lines at the bottom of the graph. Two months ago! That's how quickly this spreads and kills.

I read it to say pretty much nothing at all. I don't really mean that. It's a perfectly fine study. As far as I can tell, CIDRAP is affiliated with the University of Minnesota. It's not clear to me that there is anything there that's not been said repeatedly in many other studies. I think you are right. A vaccine is just factored out of their equation. More significantly, the words "test, trace, treat" or "social distancing" are factored out. So what I took the study to mean is that if we factor out anything related to human choice, and assume we are just the helpless victims of this alien virus inside us, this is what will happen. Lucky us! It's fun stuff. But it's not very multivariate, if that's what you prefer. The only variable in this study is this: what happens if we liberate the virus? That's it, basically. Liberate it and see what happens. The answer is: 70 % of people will get infected. It will take 18 to 24 months. We have no choice. The authors beg the question of a death rate. I'd be curious to know how many people they think will die, at what rate. They don't say, other than whatever happens could happen in various forms of waves. I'd also love to see someone actually model out how the economy fares if we actually had 70 % of Americans - meaning probably close to 100 % of workers - infected. How many workers are sick? Hospitalized? Dead? How many hospitals go bankrupt? How many businesses go bankrupt? How many doctors and nurses die? How many seniors die in nursing homes? Outside of Tom Freidman, who posits this vague idea of "harmonious balance", I haven't seen any specific models of anything. Sorry, but the multivariate "herd immunity" crowd is kind of slacking, I think. They also say nothing about whether 70 % of people getting this virus would actually result in herd immunity. This is what they say about herd immunity in the study: So I guess my question to these folks would be: If you think immunity could be as short as a few months, what does herd immunity mean? By definition, it can't exist. I can get sick this month, and then get sick with COVID-10 again this Winter. That's not herd immunity. The same problem exists with a vaccine, of course. The flu vaccine is never 100 % effective. So there is no reason to assume a COVID-19 vaccine will be. At the very least, a vaccine would dramatically reduce the transmission of the virus. Combined with testing and tracing and isolation, it should make it much easier to effectively eradicate the virus, like we have with SARS and MERS and Ebola. I assume if this is Plan A, it explains why almost every country outside the US said we have to get our shit together, immediately, and go for Plan B. This is very much like the Imperial College study. Except they said it would be 2.2 million dead Americans , and quicker. That's a jolting concept. What's even more jolting is the idea that, after you let 2.2 million die, you maybe only had immunity for three months. So now we have to do it all over again. That's probably why every other nations said, "Plan B and only 500 deaths, please." Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time March 19, 2020 If you want a multivariate analysis, you should love this Tomas Pueyo piece: As you can see, there's 11 variables built into that model. Pretty cool, huh? To really oversimplify a very rich and multivariate analysis, Pueyo says that really liberating the virus will more than double the death rate of all those infected, at least. Most hospitals in America would be crushed. Beyond the impact of mass infections on quality of care and death in hospitals, including sickening and killing many doctors and nurses. The even larger issue is that most people won't even die in hospitals. The data @LivingnLA posted suggests that, even with "only" 65,000 deaths, we might have up to double the number who died of COVID-19 but are not being counted. That's based on the actual, and unexpectedly high, non-COVID 19 death rate. Once you get into the millions of deaths, the models suggest it only gets worse. So that chart is Pueyo's much richer and much more specific multivariate model of what living hell looks like under herd immunity (news flash: it turns out to be the absolutely worst choice for the economy, as well as for human life). Now I'll step back and talk about the more optimistic future Pueyo has modeled. On March 10, he published this essay: Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now Politicians, Community Leaders and Business Leaders: What Should You Do and When? March 10, 2020 It is a very interesting and multivariate read. But the essay above, The Hammer and The Dance, is far more urgent reading. Because in that essay he presents the ideas of a whole bunch of people that I think are now becoming the conventional wisdom about how we prevent millions of US deaths. The reason I posted his earlier work is that I think that, along with the Imperial College model, he helped move the needle. Especially in California, where he is based, and which was one of the key states to get the lock down ball rolling. As of today, California has had 2,134 deaths. That's a little less than half the annual flu deaths in California. If we had the same actual infection rate and death rate as New York, we'd have over 50,000 deaths in California alone. Had we done absolutely nothing to prevent mass death, it would have actually been far worse. The state modeled up to 20 million infections, hundreds of thousands dead, at a minimum. Pueyo predicted what happened in New York. Mass infection far beyond the scale of what was understood in early March. He said, correctly, locking down a few days earlier could prevent thousands of deaths in states like California. He was right. What has actually happened in New York since he wrote that March 10 essay would be a picnic compared to what will happen if we just let this thing race all over America unchecked, he said. 10 million dead. Again, some of that is that a crushing wave of infections of 70 % of America would mean lots of people crush the capacity of hospitals, and millions die at home. It would be a repeat of 1918, with a much larger population. While we will hopefully never be able to fact check Pueyo on that, almost everything he predicted in the short term played out. Except it was even worse, and deadlier, than he modeled. Pueyo's hammer and dance model is complicated, and extremely multivariate of course. But conceptually it looks like this: I think the easiest way to understand this idea is that some much more complicated version of this is in the ballpark of what Australia, Austria, China, Hong Kong, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and others have done. China is the best example, because it was the fiercest hammer (or, if you prefer, a fascist hammer) and it hammered the virus into near eradication. Australia and New Zealand did more user-friendly versions, but it seems to have had about the same effect. So with the exception of China, I think every one of those countries have had fewer than 1 % of the deaths we have had in the US. There's one other significant thing about that chart. Note that it does not look like the "flatten the curve" chart. The idea is NOT that will will have the same number of deaths, but just space them out more efficiently. The idea is that we are in World War III with a virus, and like any good army our generals are going to try to keep the casualties to a minimum. The idea is to "dance" with the virus until we have a vaccine. My guess is some people here think that can't be done. Talk to China, or Australia, or Austria, or South Korea. My guess is they are not sure, either. But speaking as an American, I sure appreciate the fact that they are showing the kind of pragmatic global scientific leadership the US was once known for. The Hammer and The Dance is a very rich analysis, and a cause for optimism in human creativity and resilience.

I read it to say pretty much nothing at all. I don't really mean that. It's a perfectly fine study. As far as I can tell, CIDRAP is affiliated with the University of Minnesota. It's not clear to me that there is anything there that's not been said repeatedly in many other studies. I think you are right. A vaccine is just factored out of their equation. More significantly, the words "test, trace, treat" or "social distancing" are factored out. So what I took the study to mean is that if we factor out anything related to human choice, and assume we are just the helpless victims of this alien virus inside us, this is what will happen. Lucky us! It's fun stuff. But it's not very multivariate, if that's what you prefer. The only variable in this study is this: what happens if we liberate the virus? That's it, basically. Liberate it and see what happens. The answer is: 70 % of people will get infected. It will take 18 to 24 months. We have no choice. The authors beg the question of a death rate. I'd be curious to know how many people they think will die, at what rate. They don't say, other than whatever happens could happen in various forms of waves. I'd also love to see someone actually model out how the economy fares if we actually had 70 % of Americans - meaning probably close to 100 % of workers - infected. How many workers are sick? Hospitalized? Dead? How many hospitals go bankrupt? How many businesses go bankrupt? How many doctors and nurses die? How many seniors die in nursing homes? Outside of Tom Freidman, who posits this vague idea of "harmonious balance", I haven't seen any specific models of anything. Sorry, but the multivariate "herd immunity" crowd is kind of slacking, I think. They also say nothing about whether 70 % of people getting this virus would actually result in herd immunity. This is what they say about herd immunity in the study: So I guess my question to these folks would be: If you think immunity could be as short as a few months, what does herd immunity mean? By definition, it can't exist. I can get sick this month, and then get sick with COVID-10 again this Winter. That's not herd immunity. The same problem exists with a vaccine, of course. The flu vaccine is never 100 % effective. So there is no reason to assume a COVID-19 vaccine will be. At the very least, a vaccine would dramatically reduce the transmission of the virus. Combined with testing and tracing and isolation, it should make it much easier to effectively eradicate the virus, like we have with SARS and MERS and Ebola. I assume if this is Plan A, it explains why almost every country outside the US said we have to get our shit together, immediately, and go for Plan B. This is very much like the Imperial College study. Except they said it would be 2.2 million dead Americans , and quicker. That's a jolting concept. What's even more jolting is the idea that, after you let 2.2 million die, you maybe only had immunity for three months. So now we have to do it all over again. That's probably why every other nations said, "Plan B and only 500 deaths, please." Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time March 19, 2020 If you want a multivariate analysis, you should love this Tomas Pueyo piece: As you can see, there's 11 variables built into that model. Pretty cool, huh? To really oversimplify a very rich and multivariate analysis, Pueyo says that really liberating the virus will more than double the death rate of all those infected, at least. Most hospitals in America would be crushed. Beyond the impact of mass infections on quality of care and death in hospitals, including sickening and killing many doctors and nurses. The even larger issue is that most people won't even die in hospitals. The data @LivingnLA posted suggests that, even with "only" 65,000 deaths, we might have up to double the number who died of COVID-19 but are not being counted. That's based on the actual, and unexpectedly high, non-COVID 19 death rate. Once you get into the millions of deaths, the models suggest it only gets worse. So that chart is Pueyo's much richer and much more specific multivariate model of what living hell looks like under herd immunity (news flash: it turns out to be the absolutely worst choice for the economy, as well as for human life). Now I'll step back and talk about the more optimistic future Pueyo has modeled. On March 10, he published this essay: Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now Politicians, Community Leaders and Business Leaders: What Should You Do and When? March 10, 2020 It is a very interesting and multivariate read. But the essay above, The Hammer and The Dance, is far more urgent reading. Because in that essay he presents the ideas of a whole bunch of people that I think are now becoming the conventional wisdom about how we prevent millions of US deaths. The reason I posted his earlier work is that I think that, along with the Imperial College model, he helped move the needle. Especially in California, where he is based, and which was one of the key states to get the lock down ball rolling. As of today, California has had 2,134 deaths. That's a little less than half the annual flu deaths in California. If we had the same actual infection rate and death rate as New York, we'd have over 50,000 deaths in California alone. Had we done absolutely nothing to prevent mass death, it would have actually been far worse. The state modeled up to 20 million infections, hundreds of thousands dead, at a minimum. Pueyo predicted what happened in New York. Mass infection far beyond the scale of what was understood in early March. He said, correctly, locking down a few days earlier could prevent thousands of deaths in states like California. He was right. What has actually happened in New York since he wrote that March 10 essay would be a picnic compared to what will happen if we just let this thing race all over America unchecked, he said. 10 million dead. Again, some of that is that a crushing wave of infections of 70 % of America would mean lots of people crush the capacity of hospitals, and millions die at home. It would be a repeat of 1918, with a much larger population. While we will hopefully never be able to fact check Pueyo on that, almost everything he predicted in the short term played out. Except it was even worse, and deadlier, than he modeled. Pueyo's hammer and dance model is complicated, and extremely multivariate of course. But conceptually it looks like this: I think the easiest way to understand this idea is that some much more complicated version of this is in the ballpark of what Australia, Austria, China, Hong Kong, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and others have done. China is the best example, because it was the fiercest hammer (or, if you prefer, a fascist hammer) and it hammered the virus into near eradication. Australia and New Zealand did more user-friendly versions, but it seems to have had about the same effect. So with the exception of China, I think every one of those countries have had fewer than 1 % of the deaths we have had in the US. There's one other significant thing about that chart. Note that it does not look like the "flatten the curve" chart. The idea is NOT that will will have the same number of deaths, but just space them out more efficiently. The idea is that we are in World War III with a virus, and like any good army our generals are going to try to keep the casualties to a minimum. The idea is to "dance" with the virus until we have a vaccine. My guess is some people here think that can't be done. Talk to China, or Australia, or Austria, or South Korea. My guess is they are not sure, either. But speaking as an American, I sure appreciate the fact that they are showing the kind of pragmatic global scientific leadership the US was once known for. The Hammer and The Dance is a very rich analysis, and a cause for optimism in human creativity and resilience.

I think there are several issues. If I read that right, it's a swab test, right? Not a saliva test. Part of what @purplekow was saying is that administration of swab tests usually requires PPE. I know Gates network came up with a self-administered swab test, which would essentially serve a similar function as a saliva test. That one is FDA approved, I believe he has said. If a test is accurate, whether I put a swab in my nose or spit into something is probably irrelevant. Part of the point is that either eliminate the need for a professional to administer it using up limited PPE. The article you posted makes it sound like the Abbot test is administered from start to finish by professionals. In other words, it does require someone in PPE, I think. It does solve the other problem PK was talking about, which is mobility and quick turn around. I think this was the test that Abbot announced in the Rose Garden a month or so ago, and you and I both said it was great news. So it is good to know it is in the field, and they are trouble shooting it. The part of my quote that you cited was my own very different point. I'll restate it: I mentioned hospitals, but what I mostly was thinking of is at-home individuals, and employers. In a lot of countries I think there is a very good chance that with the tests they have, and a relatively small army of paid contact tracers, they can control the spread of the virus. If you have 10 or 100 cases a day in a country the size of South Korea or Australia, or hopefully soon France or Germany, you can do it that way. There will be outbreaks. But the good news so far is that where there have been outbreaks, they are conceptually the same as a wildfire. You send in the pros and they put it out. With COVID-19 they use testing and tracing and isolation to do it. So far, it seems to work. In the US, I think that individual testing kits could make a huge difference. Not to be cute, but it does play to what we are good at: individualism. So people will do it at home, and you can catch a lot of infection voluntarily that way. Same with employers. Think of a restaurant with 10 employees. Even if you have to buy them at $25 a pop, if it cost $250 a week to test every employee, finding one positive case and sending them home on sick pay is a better economic plan than having an outbreak and having to close your restaurant. I've read lots of think pieces on testing models. The math that is almost indisputable is that even if it costs the US government $100 billion a year for a few years to be throwing free tests around to every employer in America, it saves the US government from spending trillions. Gates can legitimately say that if we had listened to him, we could have spent $100 billion and saved the trillions we've already just spent. In fairness, hindsight is always 20/20. There were thousands of smart people like Gates around warning about thousands of possible problems, including asteroids and aliens. But it certainly makes sense to listen to Gates now. And he is pretty much saying we can't throw enough money at testing and tracing quickly enough. Globally. In the US, given that we probably have hundreds of thousands being infected a day, we either have to let it rip and have millions dead and complete economic collapse for a period of time, or we need massive testing. My point is that a self-administered saliva test for individuals and employers that did not require medical staff in PPE would make this enormously easier.

I think there are several issues. If I read that right, it's a swab test, right? Not a saliva test. Part of what @purplekow was saying is that administration of swab tests usually requires PPE. I know Gates network came up with a self-administered swab test, which would essentially serve a similar function as a saliva test. That one is FDA approved, I believe he has said. If a test is accurate, whether I put a swab in my nose or spit into something is probably irrelevant. Part of the point is that either eliminate the need for a professional to administer it using up limited PPE. The article you posted makes it sound like the Abbot test is administered from start to finish by professionals. In other words, it does require someone in PPE, I think. It does solve the other problem PK was talking about, which is mobility and quick turn around. I think this was the test that Abbot announced in the Rose Garden a month or so ago, and you and I both said it was great news. So it is good to know it is in the field, and they are trouble shooting it. The part of my quote that you cited was my own very different point. I'll restate it: I mentioned hospitals, but what I mostly was thinking of is at-home individuals, and employers. In a lot of countries I think there is a very good chance that with the tests they have, and a relatively small army of paid contact tracers, they can control the spread of the virus. If you have 10 or 100 cases a day in a country the size of South Korea or Australia, or hopefully soon France or Germany, you can do it that way. There will be outbreaks. But the good news so far is that where there have been outbreaks, they are conceptually the same as a wildfire. You send in the pros and they put it out. With COVID-19 they use testing and tracing and isolation to do it. So far, it seems to work. In the US, I think that individual testing kits could make a huge difference. Not to be cute, but it does play to what we are good at: individualism. So people will do it at home, and you can catch a lot of infection voluntarily that way. Same with employers. Think of a restaurant with 10 employees. Even if you have to buy them at $25 a pop, if it cost $250 a week to test every employee, finding one positive case and sending them home on sick pay is a better economic plan than having an outbreak and having to close your restaurant. I've read lots of think pieces on testing models. The math that is almost indisputable is that even if it costs the US government $100 billion a year for a few years to be throwing free tests around to every employer in America, it saves the US government from spending trillions. Gates can legitimately say that if we had listened to him, we could have spent $100 billion and saved the trillions we've already just spent. In fairness, hindsight is always 20/20. There were thousands of smart people like Gates around warning about thousands of possible problems, including asteroids and aliens. But it certainly makes sense to listen to Gates now. And he is pretty much saying we can't throw enough money at testing and tracing quickly enough. Globally. In the US, given that we probably have hundreds of thousands being infected a day, we either have to let it rip and have millions dead and complete economic collapse for a period of time, or we need massive testing. My point is that a self-administered saliva test for individuals and employers that did not require medical staff in PPE would make this enormously easier.

Nick Cordero's Lungs Are 'Severely Damaged' and Have Holes in Them, but His Wife 'Is Not Giving Up Hope' I have two strong reactions to this. The first is that we do need to release doctors and hospitals from liability on COVID-19. Just trying to understand this as a non-professional is beyond comprehension. I was at an escort buddy's deathbed when he died of septicemia. So I have some understanding of how everything can go wrong and be a living horror story, in real time. The death, the drive home with his partner, the days of sobbing after. It stays with me. In some ways it is a relief, perhaps, that Kloots CAN NOT be there next to him. It may help her to endure this that she knows she has a healthy young baby to focus on. But it just makes no sense to me that this could happen to a 41 year old healthy man. A Broadway star. I have not followed Cordero's tragedy that close, but my impression is that very early in the game his oxygen nosedived and they ventilated him. She dropped him off at a hospital thinking she'd be picking him up a few hours later. He called her to say they were checking him in. I don't think it was more than a day that he was on a ventilator. Some part of me thinks that him being on a ventilator didn't help. But the main way I feel about it is that I could not endure having to think about whether "a" should not have happened or "b" should have happened. That is, of course, why doctors and health professionals and scientists get paid the big bucks - to figure out what application of this drug or that way of delivering oxygen at what point makes the most sense. As a non-professional, my emotional reaction is that it is more than any human heart should be asked to bear. This is probably why it is good that doctors have to emotionally distance, and loved ones have to love, and never give up hope. They are two very different jobs. Now I will say something else that I know I shouldn't, and wouldn't if I thought that Kloots or anyone that knew him was reading this. I hope he dies. He doesn't have a leg, his lungs are ravaged, and probably every other organ in his body is severely compromised. That is what this virus does. If there were not ICU's he would be dead. If it were 1918, he might be dead at home, and nobody would be quite sure what to do with the body. It would be picked up by a horse and buggy with stacks of bodies, and buried in a mass grave. @purplekow wrote something about how a few very old patients under his care have loved ones who want the medical professionals to do whatever it takes. My siblings and I went through that not too long ago, and did the opposite, which is what my Dad wanted and my Mom had no say in, since she had severe dementia. (It obviously runs in the family. ) It makes very little sense to me that we would be spending $1 million dollars to keep someone my Mom or Dad's age alive if they had COVID-19. But that is the situation we are in. And families will do what families will do. This is part of why we can't work our way through a pandemic. Anybody who thinks that Broadway will be open during the pandemic, or even that people will choose to go to the restaurants around Broadway during a pandemic, better rethink this. Not when thousands of people are dying every day, and probably hundreds of thousands are being infected everyday. You could say let's all order the classic herd immunity, 1918 vintage, and do it all at once. But then what you actually get is hospitals at 1000 % of capacity, and people dying at home. That's not good for the economy or Broadway, either. I don't think anybody should need a multivariate equation to understand why. This is not what Australia or New Zealand, among others, are choosing to do. This is not what much of the world is choosing to do. It is unimaginable to me that somehow we are making this choice. I can not fathom why a nation or a community would do this, by choice. It is beyond human comprehension to me. Perhaps that is my dementia. Speaking of Australia, and as an offset to my negativity, have a look at this. That video is completely relevant to this particular discussion. When I stumbled on that I spent a few hours figuring out who Nick Afoa is. He's the gorgeous guy in the front row. Search his name on YouTube and you can see him more than half naked on stage. My point in this context is he would be a candidate to be the completely unexpected person who for some reason is in an ICU on a ventilator down one leg and with lungs that will pretty much never function again. He is from New Zealand. And that video was shot during the Australia tour of The Lion King. So this is directly relevant to what choices different countries are making, right now. So right now we know that that video could not be shot. If anybody is on an airplane, they are going to be wearing masks, not singing. And more likely than not, people will not be gathering to watch The Lion King for a year or two in Australia or New Zealand. But the offset in this multivariate analysis is that none of the people on that airplane will be dead. Almost nobody will be dead. And they will also have an economy that functions way better than that of the US. So everybody can construct their own multivariate analysis about the human and economic cost of Nick Afoa, or any other real human being on that plane, being a life worth saving. If the goal is saving the economy, my analysis says its better to save them all. And at the risk of being cheesy, the circle of life part applies. Part of the moral lesson that makes that story so powerful is that we are all a community. And our lives all do depend on each other. It's a great way to think about nations and the whole planet in the age of COVID-19. This is a real choice. And nobody is telling us that 2000 Americans a day have to die. Soon it will be 3000 a day, and then 5000. And I'm pretty sure Nick Cordero will be one of the dead very soon. The virus is not telling us it has to be that way. We are deciding it will be this way. Australia and New Zealand simply made very different choices. Maybe they won't work for the long term. So far, they are working great, though. Speaking of other artists I admire, in this case for his mind more than his body, it is what Marcel Ophuls would describe as a sorrow and a pity. Even in the worst of times, it is always a matter of human choice.

Nick Cordero's Lungs Are 'Severely Damaged' and Have Holes in Them, but His Wife 'Is Not Giving Up Hope' I have two strong reactions to this. The first is that we do need to release doctors and hospitals from liability on COVID-19. Just trying to understand this as a non-professional is beyond comprehension. I was at an escort buddy's deathbed when he died of septicemia. So I have some understanding of how everything can go wrong and be a living horror story, in real time. The death, the drive home with his partner, the days of sobbing after. It stays with me. In some ways it is a relief, perhaps, that Kloots CAN NOT be there next to him. It may help her to endure this that she knows she has a healthy young baby to focus on. But it just makes no sense to me that this could happen to a 41 year old healthy man. A Broadway star. I have not followed Cordero's tragedy that close, but my impression is that very early in the game his oxygen nosedived and they ventilated him. She dropped him off at a hospital thinking she'd be picking him up a few hours later. He called her to say they were checking him in. I don't think it was more than a day that he was on a ventilator. Some part of me thinks that him being on a ventilator didn't help. But the main way I feel about it is that I could not endure having to think about whether "a" should not have happened or "b" should have happened. That is, of course, why doctors and health professionals and scientists get paid the big bucks - to figure out what application of this drug or that way of delivering oxygen at what point makes the most sense. As a non-professional, my emotional reaction is that it is more than any human heart should be asked to bear. This is probably why it is good that doctors have to emotionally distance, and loved ones have to love, and never give up hope. They are two very different jobs. Now I will say something else that I know I shouldn't, and wouldn't if I thought that Kloots or anyone that knew him was reading this. I hope he dies. He doesn't have a leg, his lungs are ravaged, and probably every other organ in his body is severely compromised. That is what this virus does. If there were not ICU's he would be dead. If it were 1918, he might be dead at home, and nobody would be quite sure what to do with the body. It would be picked up by a horse and buggy with stacks of bodies, and buried in a mass grave. @purplekow wrote something about how a few very old patients under his care have loved ones who want the medical professionals to do whatever it takes. My siblings and I went through that not too long ago, and did the opposite, which is what my Dad wanted and my Mom had no say in, since she had severe dementia. (It obviously runs in the family. ) It makes very little sense to me that we would be spending $1 million dollars to keep someone my Mom or Dad's age alive if they had COVID-19. But that is the situation we are in. And families will do what families will do. This is part of why we can't work our way through a pandemic. Anybody who thinks that Broadway will be open during the pandemic, or even that people will choose to go to the restaurants around Broadway during a pandemic, better rethink this. Not when thousands of people are dying every day, and probably hundreds of thousands are being infected everyday. You could say let's all order the classic herd immunity, 1918 vintage, and do it all at once. But then what you actually get is hospitals at 1000 % of capacity, and people dying at home. That's not good for the economy or Broadway, either. I don't think anybody should need a multivariate equation to understand why. This is not what Australia or New Zealand, among others, are choosing to do. This is not what much of the world is choosing to do. It is unimaginable to me that somehow we are making this choice. I can not fathom why a nation or a community would do this, by choice. It is beyond human comprehension to me. Perhaps that is my dementia. Speaking of Australia, and as an offset to my negativity, have a look at this. That video is completely relevant to this particular discussion. When I stumbled on that I spent a few hours figuring out who Nick Afoa is. He's the gorgeous guy in the front row. Search his name on YouTube and you can see him more than half naked on stage. My point in this context is he would be a candidate to be the completely unexpected person who for some reason is in an ICU on a ventilator down one leg and with lungs that will pretty much never function again. He is from New Zealand. And that video was shot during the Australia tour of The Lion King. So this is directly relevant to what choices different countries are making, right now. So right now we know that that video could not be shot. If anybody is on an airplane, they are going to be wearing masks, not singing. And more likely than not, people will not be gathering to watch The Lion King for a year or two in Australia or New Zealand. But the offset in this multivariate analysis is that none of the people on that airplane will be dead. Almost nobody will be dead. And they will also have an economy that functions way better than that of the US. So everybody can construct their own multivariate analysis about the human and economic cost of Nick Afoa, or any other real human being on that plane, being a life worth saving. If the goal is saving the economy, my analysis says its better to save them all. And at the risk of being cheesy, the circle of life part applies. Part of the moral lesson that makes that story so powerful is that we are all a community. And our lives all do depend on each other. It's a great way to think about nations and the whole planet in the age of COVID-19. This is a real choice. And nobody is telling us that 2000 Americans a day have to die. Soon it will be 3000 a day, and then 5000. And I'm pretty sure Nick Cordero will be one of the dead very soon. The virus is not telling us it has to be that way. We are deciding it will be this way. Australia and New Zealand simply made very different choices. Maybe they won't work for the long term. So far, they are working great, though. Speaking of other artists I admire, in this case for his mind more than his body, it is what Marcel Ophuls would describe as a sorrow and a pity. Even in the worst of times, it is always a matter of human choice.

I'm not 100 % sure. But I think the answer is no. There is no 15 minute, do it yourself saliva-type test. I think they are being worked on. But I don't think they are available. First Saliva Test for COVID-19 Approved for Emergency Use by FDA This stuff is above my pay grade. So you can read that and maybe your takeaway is different. I think the main benefit of this particular test is it gets rid of swab testing that has to be administered by a trained person wearing PPE. But it still needs to be analyzed by a machine, I think. It is not a "do it yourself" pregnancy-type test. And that article says it is still administered in hospital settings. Another issue is that a lot of the tests the FDA has given their blessing to suck. I say "given their blessing" because the protocols and standards are above my pay grade. I think the antibody tests we read about in these large studies, like the ones in New York and California, are probably better tests with more reliability. The results from those studies make sense. But I don't know that we know for sure that even they are valid. A test that individuals could take on their own or that hospitals or employers could use that gives results in 15 minutes and is mostly reliable would be a huge game changer. i don't think we have it yet, unfortunately.

I'm not 100 % sure. But I think the answer is no. There is no 15 minute, do it yourself saliva-type test. I think they are being worked on. But I don't think they are available. First Saliva Test for COVID-19 Approved for Emergency Use by FDA This stuff is above my pay grade. So you can read that and maybe your takeaway is different. I think the main benefit of this particular test is it gets rid of swab testing that has to be administered by a trained person wearing PPE. But it still needs to be analyzed by a machine, I think. It is not a "do it yourself" pregnancy-type test. And that article says it is still administered in hospital settings. Another issue is that a lot of the tests the FDA has given their blessing to suck. I say "given their blessing" because the protocols and standards are above my pay grade. I think the antibody tests we read about in these large studies, like the ones in New York and California, are probably better tests with more reliability. The results from those studies make sense. But I don't know that we know for sure that even they are valid. A test that individuals could take on their own or that hospitals or employers could use that gives results in 15 minutes and is mostly reliable would be a huge game changer. i don't think we have it yet, unfortunately.

Thanks for posting that. Here's the main takeaways for me. It sounds very much like the restaurant story and chart. We can think of the bus as the same as a restaurant on wheels. Like with the restaurant, one of the key variables is air conditioning and air flow. I agree with you that the other variable is wearing the mask. I still feel this has to be an outlier. They say Patient A infected 13 others that they know of. So this is an outlier. And it's not clear from the story that they know for sure that the one person who got on the bus 30 minutes later got infected by Patient A. There is no way they could know that. One other factor is that this guy was on a long distance bus for four hours. So I don't know that is the same as being on a bus or subway for 10 or 20 minutes. Again, I agree with you 100 % that masks are seemingly a solution to this problem. All of this puts the lie to the notion that we can just work our way through a pandemic. The main problem with the ideas are the most obviosu ones. You can't have 35 % of your workforce contagious, 25 % sick, 10 % hospitalized, and 1 % dead. So issues like how people get to work are secondary. But it just doesn't make sense that during a pandemic people are going to go eat at a restaurant or ride a bus or go work in enclosed spaces close to lots of people - if they have a choice in the matter. I think this actually explains why we know, from history, that trying to keep the economy going by just working through a pandemic actually drives economic and social collapse. I doubt people in South Korea feel "safe" right now. But they do feel safe enough to go to work in offices, go out to eat, and ride subways. That has to be because only a handful of people in the country are infected every day. And at least if you happened to be near one of them, you will learn that through those apps immediately. In an environment like NYC, where every time you leave your home or apartment you are at risk of running into many infected people, the economy and the social order are much more vulnerable to collapse.

Thanks for posting that. Here's the main takeaways for me. It sounds very much like the restaurant story and chart. We can think of the bus as the same as a restaurant on wheels. Like with the restaurant, one of the key variables is air conditioning and air flow. I agree with you that the other variable is wearing the mask. I still feel this has to be an outlier. They say Patient A infected 13 others that they know of. So this is an outlier. And it's not clear from the story that they know for sure that the one person who got on the bus 30 minutes later got infected by Patient A. There is no way they could know that. One other factor is that this guy was on a long distance bus for four hours. So I don't know that is the same as being on a bus or subway for 10 or 20 minutes. Again, I agree with you 100 % that masks are seemingly a solution to this problem. All of this puts the lie to the notion that we can just work our way through a pandemic. The main problem with the ideas are the most obviosu ones. You can't have 35 % of your workforce contagious, 25 % sick, 10 % hospitalized, and 1 % dead. So issues like how people get to work are secondary. But it just doesn't make sense that during a pandemic people are going to go eat at a restaurant or ride a bus or go work in enclosed spaces close to lots of people - if they have a choice in the matter. I think this actually explains why we know, from history, that trying to keep the economy going by just working through a pandemic actually drives economic and social collapse. I doubt people in South Korea feel "safe" right now. But they do feel safe enough to go to work in offices, go out to eat, and ride subways. That has to be because only a handful of people in the country are infected every day. And at least if you happened to be near one of them, you will learn that through those apps immediately. In an environment like NYC, where every time you leave your home or apartment you are at risk of running into many infected people, the economy and the social order are much more vulnerable to collapse.

We agree. We're making a similar point, except using different language. My point boils down to a simple number: 2 million dead. That's a hell of a lot more than the 40,000 traffic deaths you cited. So one way to think about any multivariate equation with COVID-19 is this: 2 million dead is probably a hell of a lot more than "x". So, "x" could be "mass closure of small businesses". I'm essentially a small business as a landlord. So I'm sympathetic. If you play it out, I'd actually have to kill my tenants. If I can't pay mortgages or bills, I get foreclosed on, they get evicted, and they die. It sucks for everybody. That's extreme, of course. But if the idea is that closing small businesses sucks, I completely agree. A true multivariate model would factor in the impact of 2 million deaths on small business closures. So you can say it's a horrible thing that we had to close down South Dakota because of people dying in New York. But then Dr. Birx will say, "Uh, New York had zero cases in February 2020." As if to prove her point, in almost no time Sioux Falls, South Dakota has thousands of cases, a dozen deaths, and a closed meat packing plant. We don't even need to model the multivariate impact of mass death on small business closures. We already know what will happen from history. We are going to have complete economic and social collapse. And note my verb tense. This is going to happen. It is now unavoidable in the US. We are going to have complete economic and social collapse. We do not need to model it. We just need to watch what happens - assuming 99 % of us are lucky enough to survive. Why do I say that? First, we know from 1918 that there was complete economic an social collapse. To the degree that chambers of commerce pushed the idea that the economy came first, it resulted in the most devastating possible economic collapse - every single time. It's a stunningly simple idea, actually. When you are at the 1918 parade in Philadelphia, people just didn't consider the possibly that a month from now they would be dead. But they were. It's human nature, I guess. All it takes is one bullet. That's how the virus works. For whatever reason, people just seem to underestimate the devastating impact of those bullets - or viral particles. The tell to me is that all these herd immunity arguments never address any detail of how we achieve the "harmonious balance" they aspire to. There's this vague concept, like you state, that life involves choices, and we need a "multivariate analysis". The word sounds good. If a multivariate analysis gives us harmonious balance, that must be a good thing. So if 20 % of the NYPD is out sick, how does that work? If 10 % of your workforce is hospitalized, and 1 % die, how does that work? If one-third of the dead are seniors in nursing homes - even in Sweden - how does that work? Those are variables. These are all things that just happened in the real world. So take that and say that we're at "only" 60,000 deaths. So to get to 2 million, we need it to be 33 times worse than what we just went through. When I read @purplekow's posts, it makes it very understandable to me that either as individuals, or collectively, we find it very difficult to imagine that kind of living hell. But that living hell was 1918. And that is where we are now headed, by choice. We seem to be determined to do it our way. We have many perfectly good examples of countries that are doing something very different. And it is working much better than what we are doing. The difference between 30,000 infections a day and 20 is pretty dramatic. The difference between 2000 deaths a day and zero deaths is pretty dramatic. It's actually really amazing to me that so much of what I read does not even state the words "test, trace, treat". Even though that is the mantra of the two most trusted scientists in America right now, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. I have a pretty clear idea of what the problem is. I think it really does boil down to one word: individualism. There are many good things and many bad things about individualism. Where it doesn't work well is when you need something like 100 % herd conformity. That pops up with vaccines, because the idea is that if too many in the herd refuse to vaccinate, it fucks things up for the whole herd. So this is just math, and science. If 20 % of the herd won't conform to the rules that keep the herd safe - which is what the polls tell us - then 100 % of the herd is not safe. Hypothetically, if only 20 % of the herd chose to walk into the slaughterhouse, then only the 20 % of the herd that chose to be slaughtered would die. But in the real world, with a lethal and highly contagious virus, it just doesn't work that way. Of course, this is NOT how the 20 % of the herd that feel fine living with the virus is thinking. But it is the scientific fact. So what is actually working in Australia, Austria, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Thailand, and arguably some other nations can not and will not work here. The 20 % of the herd that is focused on individualism simply will not allow it. The impact on society will be devastating - economically, politically, and otherwise. But for this forum, I'll just focus on the science of it: in epidemics, 20 % can easily rule. Hell, 1 % can rule. At 1 %, the cat is already out of the bag. So we will have hundreds of thousands of seniors die this year. I think we are headed to 2 million dead. And that will mean complete social and economic collapse. So if you want a multivariate analysis, that's it. Just like in 1918, when you add all the variables together, you get complete economic and social collapse. My mother, the Spanish flu orphan I hyperlinked that article above, but I'll cite one of several reasons I posted it. The author notes, correctly I think, that there is a sort of collective amnesia about 1918. She experienced it in her own family. It cost her grandmother and grandfather their lives. It cost her mother her life, in the sense that her mother never "found herself", in the view of the author, and resorted to lifelong alcoholism. She suggests that was the result of the deep childhood trauma of losing both parents to disease. I've read enough to suggest that, other than specific histories about the 1918 pandemic, it tends to get glossed over in general histories. The specific histories about the pandemic suggest that people who lived through it and survived did not want to talk about it or think about it. Once it ended, the dead were buried and people needed to move on. So all of that smacks of deep and unbearable emotional trauma. So you need to factor that into your multivariate analysis, too. Even the living pay a huge price for mass death. There are two variables that mitigate against the inevitability of 2 million dead Americans and that complete social and economic collapse. One variable is other countries. At some point, people will notice that America has over 65,000 dead. And the worst country on the list I cited above is Austria, with 589 dead. Most of those countries have fewer than 100 dead. Human nature being what it is, at some point a critical mass of people may say, "Geez. Maybe there is some room for improvement here." But we are where we are, and Americans are fine with the horror show so far. I think that the 20 % of the herd that is focused on individualism is a fixed number. So as far as the science of it goes, 20 % is more than a majority when it comes to viral herd slaughter in an epidemic. We're just dead meat. The virus will decide which members of the herd live and die, with doctor likes @purplekow having some influence. But it mostly is the virus's decision if you and I are dead meat or not. The second variable is states. So you can argue that California is like South Korea. Or that Ohio is like Australia. So some states will basically look to Australia and South Korea and many other nations - including China - as models. They will roll out "test, trace, treat", and we will see how it works. They will have outbreaks in this factory or that office building anyway. But they will likely prevent complete economic and social collapse, just like some cities managed to in 1918. Same shit, different century. There are many holes that can be poked in my arguments. I'll cite three. First, maybe it won't be 2 million people. Second, maybe "test, trace, treat" is a false promise. Third, and I'll mention this in my next post, maybe it won't take 70 % infection. The best guess is that in 1918 it stopped at 25 % to 28 % infection of the population. That was a flu virus, but we just don't know for sure. We also don't know for sure that people that have antibodies are immune - or for how long. I'm trying to go on fact, and what we have a pretty clear picture of. Friedman and his "harmonious balance" happy talk just sounds like fantasy-based fiction to me. He can't point to one example of any "harmony" based on facts. His concepts failed completely in Sweden, and the guy who designed the policies admits it. Meanwhile, the track record of US states that locked down early, like Ohio and California, and nations focused on "test, trace, treat" is remarkably clear.

We agree. We're making a similar point, except using different language. My point boils down to a simple number: 2 million dead. That's a hell of a lot more than the 40,000 traffic deaths you cited. So one way to think about any multivariate equation with COVID-19 is this: 2 million dead is probably a hell of a lot more than "x". So, "x" could be "mass closure of small businesses". I'm essentially a small business as a landlord. So I'm sympathetic. If you play it out, I'd actually have to kill my tenants. If I can't pay mortgages or bills, I get foreclosed on, they get evicted, and they die. It sucks for everybody. That's extreme, of course. But if the idea is that closing small businesses sucks, I completely agree. A true multivariate model would factor in the impact of 2 million deaths on small business closures. So you can say it's a horrible thing that we had to close down South Dakota because of people dying in New York. But then Dr. Birx will say, "Uh, New York had zero cases in February 2020." As if to prove her point, in almost no time Sioux Falls, South Dakota has thousands of cases, a dozen deaths, and a closed meat packing plant. We don't even need to model the multivariate impact of mass death on small business closures. We already know what will happen from history. We are going to have complete economic and social collapse. And note my verb tense. This is going to happen. It is now unavoidable in the US. We are going to have complete economic and social collapse. We do not need to model it. We just need to watch what happens - assuming 99 % of us are lucky enough to survive. Why do I say that? First, we know from 1918 that there was complete economic an social collapse. To the degree that chambers of commerce pushed the idea that the economy came first, it resulted in the most devastating possible economic collapse - every single time. It's a stunningly simple idea, actually. When you are at the 1918 parade in Philadelphia, people just didn't consider the possibly that a month from now they would be dead. But they were. It's human nature, I guess. All it takes is one bullet. That's how the virus works. For whatever reason, people just seem to underestimate the devastating impact of those bullets - or viral particles. The tell to me is that all these herd immunity arguments never address any detail of how we achieve the "harmonious balance" they aspire to. There's this vague concept, like you state, that life involves choices, and we need a "multivariate analysis". The word sounds good. If a multivariate analysis gives us harmonious balance, that must be a good thing. So if 20 % of the NYPD is out sick, how does that work? If 10 % of your workforce is hospitalized, and 1 % die, how does that work? If one-third of the dead are seniors in nursing homes - even in Sweden - how does that work? Those are variables. These are all things that just happened in the real world. So take that and say that we're at "only" 60,000 deaths. So to get to 2 million, we need it to be 33 times worse than what we just went through. When I read @purplekow's posts, it makes it very understandable to me that either as individuals, or collectively, we find it very difficult to imagine that kind of living hell. But that living hell was 1918. And that is where we are now headed, by choice. We seem to be determined to do it our way. We have many perfectly good examples of countries that are doing something very different. And it is working much better than what we are doing. The difference between 30,000 infections a day and 20 is pretty dramatic. The difference between 2000 deaths a day and zero deaths is pretty dramatic. It's actually really amazing to me that so much of what I read does not even state the words "test, trace, treat". Even though that is the mantra of the two most trusted scientists in America right now, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. I have a pretty clear idea of what the problem is. I think it really does boil down to one word: individualism. There are many good things and many bad things about individualism. Where it doesn't work well is when you need something like 100 % herd conformity. That pops up with vaccines, because the idea is that if too many in the herd refuse to vaccinate, it fucks things up for the whole herd. So this is just math, and science. If 20 % of the herd won't conform to the rules that keep the herd safe - which is what the polls tell us - then 100 % of the herd is not safe. Hypothetically, if only 20 % of the herd chose to walk into the slaughterhouse, then only the 20 % of the herd that chose to be slaughtered would die. But in the real world, with a lethal and highly contagious virus, it just doesn't work that way. Of course, this is NOT how the 20 % of the herd that feel fine living with the virus is thinking. But it is the scientific fact. So what is actually working in Australia, Austria, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Thailand, and arguably some other nations can not and will not work here. The 20 % of the herd that is focused on individualism simply will not allow it. The impact on society will be devastating - economically, politically, and otherwise. But for this forum, I'll just focus on the science of it: in epidemics, 20 % can easily rule. Hell, 1 % can rule. At 1 %, the cat is already out of the bag. So we will have hundreds of thousands of seniors die this year. I think we are headed to 2 million dead. And that will mean complete social and economic collapse. So if you want a multivariate analysis, that's it. Just like in 1918, when you add all the variables together, you get complete economic and social collapse. My mother, the Spanish flu orphan I hyperlinked that article above, but I'll cite one of several reasons I posted it. The author notes, correctly I think, that there is a sort of collective amnesia about 1918. She experienced it in her own family. It cost her grandmother and grandfather their lives. It cost her mother her life, in the sense that her mother never "found herself", in the view of the author, and resorted to lifelong alcoholism. She suggests that was the result of the deep childhood trauma of losing both parents to disease. I've read enough to suggest that, other than specific histories about the 1918 pandemic, it tends to get glossed over in general histories. The specific histories about the pandemic suggest that people who lived through it and survived did not want to talk about it or think about it. Once it ended, the dead were buried and people needed to move on. So all of that smacks of deep and unbearable emotional trauma. So you need to factor that into your multivariate analysis, too. Even the living pay a huge price for mass death. There are two variables that mitigate against the inevitability of 2 million dead Americans and that complete social and economic collapse. One variable is other countries. At some point, people will notice that America has over 65,000 dead. And the worst country on the list I cited above is Austria, with 589 dead. Most of those countries have fewer than 100 dead. Human nature being what it is, at some point a critical mass of people may say, "Geez. Maybe there is some room for improvement here." But we are where we are, and Americans are fine with the horror show so far. I think that the 20 % of the herd that is focused on individualism is a fixed number. So as far as the science of it goes, 20 % is more than a majority when it comes to viral herd slaughter in an epidemic. We're just dead meat. The virus will decide which members of the herd live and die, with doctor likes @purplekow having some influence. But it mostly is the virus's decision if you and I are dead meat or not. The second variable is states. So you can argue that California is like South Korea. Or that Ohio is like Australia. So some states will basically look to Australia and South Korea and many other nations - including China - as models. They will roll out "test, trace, treat", and we will see how it works. They will have outbreaks in this factory or that office building anyway. But they will likely prevent complete economic and social collapse, just like some cities managed to in 1918. Same shit, different century. There are many holes that can be poked in my arguments. I'll cite three. First, maybe it won't be 2 million people. Second, maybe "test, trace, treat" is a false promise. Third, and I'll mention this in my next post, maybe it won't take 70 % infection. The best guess is that in 1918 it stopped at 25 % to 28 % infection of the population. That was a flu virus, but we just don't know for sure. We also don't know for sure that people that have antibodies are immune - or for how long. I'm trying to go on fact, and what we have a pretty clear picture of. Friedman and his "harmonious balance" happy talk just sounds like fantasy-based fiction to me. He can't point to one example of any "harmony" based on facts. His concepts failed completely in Sweden, and the guy who designed the policies admits it. Meanwhile, the track record of US states that locked down early, like Ohio and California, and nations focused on "test, trace, treat" is remarkably clear.

No. Thank you for being such a compassionate and dedicated professional.

No. Thank you for being such a compassionate and dedicated professional.