Facebook Follies of Friends and Families

[alfred russel]

Incidentally, I also believed that IFR was below 1% back then, but now I think I was wrong.  Back then we had to do a whole bunch of back-of-the-envelope estimates, because testing was so limited so the denominator was inconsistently unreliable.  However, the latest figures still appear to point to 2.0%-2.5% case fatality rate, and I just don't think it's plausible to assume that we're still only catching at most 40% of the cases.  It does appear to be the case that the real IFR is somewhere between 1.0% and 2.0%, not below 1.0%.

You are probably missing something near all of the asymptomatic cases and a healthy percentage of the mildly symptomatic ones.

Most of the literature is going off of demographic estimates based on age.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7721859/

Using table 3 of this article, and the US population profile by age on wikipedia:

Age / IFR / % of population
0-34 / 0.004% / 47.2%
35-44 / 0.068% / 13.3%
45-54 / 0.23% / 14.6%
55-64 / 0.75% / 11.8%
65-74 / 2.5% / 7.0%
75-84 / 8.5% / 4.3%
85+ / 28.3% / 1.8%

Which if covid was evenly distributed through the population by age would imply an IFR of 1.18%. But I think that is really unlikely--on a per capita basis under 65's have a lot more positive tests than older groups, and since that is also where most of the asymptomatic and mild cases are concentrated the actual incidence is probably quite a bit less. I think it is really unlikely we are over 1%.

The CDC estimated back in February that we had 83.1 million total infections. The implication is that the overall IFR in the US would be around 0.6-0.7%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html

[Barrister]

The fatality rate of Covid is going to be debated for a long, long time.

The thing is it's hard to divide up into "infected" vs "not infected".  Take my wife*.  She tested positive for Covid.  She had no symptoms, did not pass it to me or our kids.  My understanding is the PCR tests are quite accurate - that it did detect the Covid virus from her sample.  But it could be that she had such a low viral load that she wasn't meaningfully infected.

One of the reasons the fatality rate appears to be diminishing is that as we all more-or-less wear masks and practice social distancing the virus is still spreading, but the amount of viral load being transmitted is greatly decreased and thus the strength of the resulting infection is lessened.




*Insert Henny Youngman joke here.

[Valmy]

The fatality rate of Covid is going to be debated for a long, long time.

Well we are going to have it around for a very long time, so I am sure we will have many opportunities to gather data on the subject.

[Admiral Yi]

My perspective is that there are different motivations of behavior modification:

-compliance with government restrictions,
-private initiatives and personal decisions to reduce risk.

In the case of Texas, whatever compliance with state government restrictions existed prior to March 2021 does not appear to have been significant in controlling covid-19. This is obvious from what happened regarding disease spread after they were entirely lifted.

My perspective is that meaningful compliance has dropped to zero. Meaningful compliance being confined to compliance with restrictions because the restrictions exist (and not because you think the most safe option is to comply, or because of peer pressure in a community that thinks safety demands certain actions).

This is the fourth time running you have failed to understand the difference between restrictions causing noncompliance and the impact of noncompliance on deaths and infections, or willfully ignored it.

Peace out homie.

[alfred russel]

Yi, I'm seriously not willfully ignore anything.

If we define compliance as following government rules and regulations, I think in a world that could have been we could have had effective rules and regulations from government authorities that were complied with, and ultimately reduced deaths and infections.

Somewhere along the way, from what I've experienced at least, people began to do what they felt was appropriate (or followed their community herd in doing so), and ultimately the rules and regulations became somewhat meaningless. The loss of meaning in the rules and regulations is unfortunate as a tool is lost to control deaths and regulations. But compliance is a relatively meaningless concept -- I really have no idea what the rules and regulations are.

My perspective is that the rules and regulations could have had a better chance to keep meaning if they had a lighter touch at the start. Plus, for people that are ignoring almost everything, there could have been a better chance to keep them in the covid-concerned camp if governments didn't have mandates that were at times transparently stupid.

[alfred russel]

Yi, to be absolutely clear, I'm not solely attributing rural regions have become covid unconcerned to that one time I saw a cop blocking a hiking trail in the middle of no where.

Their great leader going on TV every day to tell people he wasn't going to wear a mask and to take anti malarials and possibly chlorox definitely didn't help, as did a zillion other factors such as less education and probably a more survivalist mentality.

But blocking random hiking trails certainly doesn't help.

[The Larch]

Guys, if you have not been able to convince Dorsey in one year, perhaps it is time to give up?

Some people just don't have the neural connections required for empathy developed in them. It happens. Don't waste your time on this.

Give up? Sir, we once fought the battle of Hortlund.

And that was fucking pointless.

[The Larch]

And this thread was meant for us to facepalm at Syt's family's postings, not debating a brick wall.

[PDH]

Guys, if you have not been able to convince Dorsey in one year, perhaps it is time to give up?

Some people just don't have the neural connections required for empathy developed in them. It happens. Don't waste your time on this.

Give up? Sir, we once fought the battle of Hortlund.

And that was fucking pointless.

So was the 3rd Battle of the Isonzo, but did that stop the Italians?  Well, not from fighting the rest of the battles, but it did kinda stop them.  What was my point again?

[The Minsky Moment]

Krugman said deaths.
Last 7 day chart for deaths is here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_deathsper100klast7days
Texas is #2 after California.
Even adjusted for population they are #6.

LOL. MM, that is a fundamentally dishonest analysis. Death is a lagging indicator, the Texas non policy went into effect at the beginning of the month, and when cases were quite high.

What is dishonest is saying Krugman is wrong based on a metric he didn't use.
Case counts can vary for lots of reasons, deaths are deaths.  He made the statement at the beginning of the month, and Texas is leading in deaths late in the month.  Thems the facts.
The bigger point is the the policy is stupid and done for political gamesmanship.  Yes just like the Southern strategy was stupid and did cost lives there.

I did err on the side of what I thought was pessimism a year ago out of the cautionary principle and still managed to underestimate the deaths this disease has caused in America.  Sad but fitting that crappy political leadership continues to do all it can to keep COVID in the game as the vaccine coverage kicks in.

[Syt]

[Josquius]

Another own goal there. Showing examples of marketing and big money interests that were defeated by science. Are they saying the marketers were right and the scientists wrong?

[Syt]

Another own goal there. Showing examples of marketing and big money interests that were defeated by science. Are they saying the marketers were right and the scientists wrong?

The literally next post on my middle sister's timeline is:

History All Day

This is known as one of medicine's most incredible moments. In 1922, at the University of Toronto, scientists went to a hospital ward with children who were comatose and dying from diabetic keto-acidosis. Imagine a room full of parents sitting at the bedside waiting for the inevitable death of their child. The scientists went from bed to bed and injected the children with the new purified extract - insulin. As they began to inject the last comatose child, the first child injected began to awaken. One by one, all of the children awoke from their diabetic comas. A room of death and gloom, became a place of joy and hope. Thank You Dr. Banting and Dr. Best!

[alfred russel]

What is dishonest is saying Krugman is wrong based on a metric he didn't use.
Case counts can vary for lots of reasons, deaths are deaths.  He made the statement at the beginning of the month, and Texas is leading in deaths late in the month.  Thems the facts.
The bigger point is the the policy is stupid and done for political gamesmanship.  Yes just like the Southern strategy was stupid and did cost lives there.

Your position on Krugman is untenable. The full op ed is linked:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/opinion/coronavirus-masks.html

To summarize his arguments:

-Masks reduce the spread of covid-19.
-There is no reason not to wear a mask. There is no economic argument to going around maskless.
-Texas removed the mask mandate for purely political reasons -- to appeal to voters by signaling that the governor rejects "liberal values like civic responsibility and belief in science"
-People are going to die because of the removal of the mask mandate.

If my personal perspective here matters, I agree with bullets 1 through 3. I think requiring a mask in indoor public places makes sense!

But Texas was way more covid-y at the start of March than it is at the end. That clearly undercuts his argument that getting rid of the mask mandate (and every other state level restriction) would cause people to die.

I don't see the relevance of of people dying of covid in a period where the mask mandate was still in place, or caught covid in Texas most mask mandate while transmission in Texas was falling.

[The Minsky Moment]

AR the question posed is whether *ceteris paribas* fewer people would have died in Texas wearing masks than without since early March.  Looking at last week's case counts is useless to answering that question, both because of the unreliability of case counts generally and because you are comparing it against history as opposed to measuring what the counts would have been last week had more people worn masks.  Case counts could be going down for lots of reasons, most notably increasing vaccine coverage.  So your proposed analysis has no control and therefore undercuts nothing.

The argument that less mask wearing has zero effect is a pretty extraordinary claim given what we know about efficacy of masks in helping control spreads.  Before calling out Krugman as a liar you should have sufficiently compelling evidence to prove that.  Raw weekly  case counts doesn't cut it.