Coronavirus
Out of context: Reply #3628
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- kingsteven2
Just reading AQUTE's post there and thought i'd play devils advocate (DISCLAIMER: anyone that actually claims this as fact is talking out their arse, but these are my suspicions about how this is going to play out...)
Right now the UK has lost .06% of it's population to covid and deaths have tapered off to around 15 per day for the last 2 months... If Covid acts like every other pandemic of recent times is likely where it will stay until it can be eliminated by vaccine or just become an annual seasonal nuisance.
The UK govt. has been focusing on increasing testing capacity for months and through track and trace and advisory measures created a culture where localised clusters of the virus get tested leading to a high proportion of positive tests.
The UKs Office of National Statistics on the other hand runs a properly constructed surveillance programme which aims to estimate how many new cases per 2000 people... their model shows no increase in positive cases and only estimates a small increase in the coming weeks due to schools returning...
But we've just gone back into some sort of household lockdown in the UK because the UK govt has no idea what it's doing and is trying to appease an axis of liberals that have spent months formulating their own reactionary bullshit ideas on the virus to combat a narrative of "kill the elderly to save the economy" present in the ruling class... In reality anti-maskers are just incredibly stupid iconoclastically minded, paranoid people that believe they are united against a common enemy.
The unfortunate truth is when Trump in the US says the increase in cases is due to the increase in testing, he's probably totally correct. The US is sitting at exactly the same toll as the UK ATM (.06% of its population dead) - but deaths continue because every estimate of deaths in the US is higher due to its size and demographics (the average American is older, fatter, darker skinned). I think the other big shock to us in the UK is how seriously the average American has taken the pandemic, again probably due to the polarisation of your society. In the UK it was clear that our lockdown measures were only to prevent the overloading of hospitals (so most of us have no clue why they're bringing them back in now.)
If you look at two of the countries with the hardest lockdowns early in the pandemic. Spain and South Korea both are experiencing second waves of deaths...
In the US i'd hazard to guess the second wave (bump?) of death is just the same failure to contain the virus (as experienced everywhere bar New Zealand) spread over a much wider area.
I posted a lot of stuff back in the early days of the pandemic about the models being used.
There was one EEID oxford paper that made the headlines that predicted no second wave however it was built on the assumption that covid sufferers would develop antibodies and that mass scale serology testing would show that a large percentage of people had already had it. That wasn't the case, but we now know that most people fight off the virus without antibodies and form immunity on a shorter term through t-cells so that idea is still totally plausible.
Another paper I posted about how the calculations used to predict herd-immunity are incorrect and used 'toy' models based on actual social activity to suggest that herd immunity could be achieved at levels as low as 20% due to super spreading. If R = 1 as it stands in the UK atm it's actually an average of some socially active people and caregivers spreading to many others, and many other folks not spreading the virus at all... once the superspreaders develop immunity society develops herd immunity.
So AQUTE, if you're falling out with their mates because they're not wearing masks and shouting "KILL THE ELDERLY TO SAVE THE ECONOMY" fuck those cunts. But if they have genuine concerns about measures effectively prolonging the spread of the disease and just think it's all a pile of bullshit but while still erring on the side of caution... the situation in the US could well be <100 deaths p/d in just a few weeks, so best not loose mates by taking sides right now - as we really still don't know shit about how this is going to play out.
- posted south korea graph twice, meant to post US deaths: https://imgur.com/uy…kingsteven
- Sounds like Sweden had it rightGnash
- I think so, more to the point I think Neil Ferguson should be jailed for enjoying the smell of his own farts.kingsteven
- i envy the energy you put into researching this stuff. I feel like there's so much junky or misinterpreted science out there. hard to keep upGnash
- @kingsteven Isn't most of the world including Sweden still practicing social distancing though? I wonder how much of the leveling off is due to thatyuekit
- as opposed to a natural burning out or herd immunity effect. In the USA at least, the second wave was definitely correlated with people thinking it was overyuekit
- and reopening businesses, restaurants and bars...many of which were then closed again and are still closed.yuekit
- Look at California for instance
https://www.latimes.…yuekit - lockdown is pointless but i'm not knocking social distancing, basic hygiene... you've got to realise all 3 are privileges not afforded to front-line workers.kingsteven
- a shop assistant gets it and passes it on to 10 people. one patient in palliative care gets it and caregivers with inadequate PPE spread it around. if you don'tkingsteven
- factor in the magnitude of social activity that exists to keep services running for the rest of us and who is dying and where you're overestimating the riskkingsteven
- what you see in the US graph is not a second wave but the first wave of states that went in to lockdown early... masks, distancing are what YOU can do to helpkingsteven
- Yeah I'm sure there's some of that. Just think you have to factor in that the current situation is not anything close to normal in terms of human interaction.yuekit
- slow the spread, flatten the curve but the deaths (past the peak/ overwhelming of hospital services) are largely inevitable. measures may just be prolongingkingsteven
- the crisis, delaying the return to normalcy.kingsteven
- Take a look here for example, cell phone data from US states showing the drop in human interactions:
https://topagency.co…yuekit - Seems like in most states degree of social contact is about half what it would be in normal times.yuekit
- I couldn't find any recent info from Sweden but according to this report, people did in fact change their behavior significantly earlier this year...yuekit
- https://arxiv.org/pd…yuekit
- yep, i know but it's catch 22. if you have the means and intelligence to distance you are probably not a super spreader. infections stem from central points...kingsteven
- supermarkets, public transport, care facilities. the people that work in these places can not distance appropriately... just 1 visit per week to a supermarketkingsteven
- per household totally undermines lockdown measures. also the eeid paper mentioned theorises that the virus spread undetected in europe for months...kingsteven
- this does not seem to be the case in most central US states. The difference between NY or Seattle and Ohio is down to catching it early/ flattening the curve...kingsteven
- by Seattle I mean King County (ie. the epicentre on the west coast)kingsteven
- deaths in most states already nearly plateaued, 3 weeks and you'll see. it'll be below 200 deaths p/d by the election.kingsteven
- Aren't there additional vectors of transmission that are being held back right now though? Such as bars, restaurants, churches, concerts, etc.yuekit
- Now that we are living this socially distanced lifestyle, I'm sure you're right that the main mode of transmission are the essential workers that people stillyuekit
- come into contact with. But if everything reopens and we go back to 2019 existence tomorrow, I don't see why there wouldn't be a big surge in additional cases.yuekit
- yeah, i think if it comes down to 'has distancing protected some venerable people' i agree 100%. but given that there's a correlation between the most venerablekingsteven
- (the elderly and infirm) and social isolation, it's incredibly rare for asymptomatic infected to pass it on, 10% of infected cause 80% of cases, where they'vekingsteven
- traced all contacts it turns out you are very unlikely to spread to anyone (4 - 20% chance of household transmission, just slightly higher for spouses). wherekingsteven
- they have traced clusters to one individual, they have been experiencing symptoms at the time of transmission. there is definitely an argument to be made thatkingsteven
- apart from isolating when you feel ill and exercising good hygine. all other measures (distancing, masks) while not ineffective are moot once deaths plateau.kingsteven
- of course thats not a reason not to wear a mask. but also, in america the mask war is political on both sides and it's prob. not worth loosing friends over...kingsteven
- OK I think I get what you're saying...society as it is normally structured is actually good at protecting vulnerable groups, whereas some of the actions takenyuekit
- by governments actually put more people at risk? That's an interesting take on it. It does seem like "the experts" are still all over the map in terms of howyuekit
- things will unfold, some predicting it will get significantly worse in fall/winter or that this will drag on for some time. Hopefully you are right though andyuekit
- we can start to get back to normal sooner.yuekit
- it seems that many people are still observing what is happening through the lens of the ICL study (what i was alluding to with my comment about neil ferguson)kingsteven
- this was the study for the UK govt. that was then adapted for the US and sent us all in to lockdown (which was a wise situation with the information we had atkingsteven
- the time) but the more I looked in to his methodology (it's actually impossible to know exactly because he wrote the program 13 years ago and couldn't rememberkingsteven
- how it worked himself) the same paper also predicts multiple waves - I took it as gospel until i read how basic the model was and how many assumptions were madekingsteven
- then reading Neil Ferguson's previous predictions for CJD, Swine Flu that were off by 13000%... (65k deaths predicted: 500 actual)kingsteven
- then in hindsight thinking about how the clustered nature and social factors that have been observed in different studies (some of which i've stated above) justkingsteven
- aren't taken in to consideration in models and herd-immunity calculations. which work well for the flu because everyone can get it and spread it...kingsteven
- so, you end up in a situation where the same people that say "its not like the flu" are using estimates that treat it like the flu. and folks that don't believekingsteven
- in herd-immunity at all because boris and trump both tried to pass it as policy (dick move) or don't believe in superspreaders because it's a victimising term!kingsteven
- just cant comprehend how a mask may not actually be that useful (other than indicating that you give a shit about your fellow man)kingsteven
- of course if you are one of the <10% infected that is a super spreader and you feel ill and you want to be in an enclosed space with other people ORkingsteven
- you have a respiratory disease that may worsen your outcome then you're exactly the 2 kinds of people that don't wear a mask in public :Dkingsteven
- What's is typical us death per day?********