COVID Near Term Future is Bleak at Best...

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 18:59:57 +0100, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 29/11/2020 18:09, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 17:38:05 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 29/11/2020 17:06, John Larkin wrote:

Maybe there are some other effects than masking.


There are lots of factors that affect things.


What surprises me, this late in the epidemic, is how little other
effects (ie, non-social-behavior effects) have been studied and appear
in the press, even as simple correlations. All we hear is masks,
masks, masks.

San Francisco is usually windy. It would be interesting to correlate
wind velocity to infection rate.


Possibly.

The challenge here is that there are a huge number of potential factors,
and it is extremely difficult to separate out effects. Correlations are
/not/ helpful - most are going to give completely wrong ideas. You
could, to pick a somewhat silly example, try to correlate starch foods
(rice, potatoes, pasta, etc.) with Covid deaths. Then you\'d find that
if you eat lots of boiled potatoes you have a higher chance of dying of
Covid. Is that in any way useful - or is it just that old-folks\' homes
serve more boiled potatoes and pasta or rice?

Most of the published work on Covid has concentrated on things where we
can reasonably expect an effect - such as distancing.

That\'s crazy, to only investigate things that you can \"reasonably\"
expect to matter. Some people just don\'t need to learn anything that
they don\'t know already.

Correlation is a good indicator that causality should be investigated.

But good studies
are hard to do. How do you do controlled studies of social distancing?
How do you do placebo tests and double-blind studies with masks?

Right. Best to just assume that expert opinions are all correct. Then,
just pick the expert that you prefer.

There certainly /are/ other studies going on. Scientists are careful
about publishing, however - there is too much of a tendency for media to
blow things out of proportion. In science, when someone does a study
that seems to indicate that - say - eating lots of garlic lowers your
risk of getting Covid, then they would /like/ to publish their
preliminary findings. The aim is that other scientists would try to
replicate or disprove the results with bigger samples, and in the end
we\'d hopefully know one way or the other. But you can be sure that some
media would grab it, misunderstand it, and publish it as a scoop.

Or supress it.

Then
some idiot wannabe-dictator would recommend it as an alternative to
fish-tank cleaner. And by the time the real value of garlic is
understood, half of the USA are eating a dozen bulbs a day, and the
other half think its all a conspiracy started by communist and/or KKK
garlic farmers.

(Personally, I think eating lots of garlic is a good idea. It helps
enforce social distancing.)

Well, raw garlic. It actually tastes best, and is less anti-social, if
you put lots of it in the food before it\'s fully cooked. 5, 10 minutes
of simmering is about right. Takes the edge off.




--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc trk

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
\"Bunter\", he said, \"I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason\"

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 29/11/20 17:09, John Larkin wrote:

What surprises me, this late in the epidemic, is how little other
effects (ie, non-social-behavior effects) have been studied and appear
in the press, even as simple correlations. All we hear is masks,
masks, masks.

You need to broaden your news sources

Over here the slogan is \"hands, face, space\", i.e.
\"wash your hands, cover your face & make space\".

The origin of that isn\'t clear, but the earlier Catalan
government’s slogan was: “Distància, mans, mascareta”, or
“Distance, hands, mask”

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 29/11/20 18:30, John Larkin wrote:

On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 18:59:57 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 29/11/2020 18:09, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 17:38:05 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 29/11/2020 17:06, John Larkin wrote:

Maybe there are some other effects than masking.


There are lots of factors that affect things.


What surprises me, this late in the epidemic, is how little other
effects (ie, non-social-behavior effects) have been studied and appear
in the press, even as simple correlations. All we hear is masks,
masks, masks.

San Francisco is usually windy. It would be interesting to correlate
wind velocity to infection rate.


Possibly.

The challenge here is that there are a huge number of potential factors,
and it is extremely difficult to separate out effects. Correlations are
/not/ helpful - most are going to give completely wrong ideas. You
could, to pick a somewhat silly example, try to correlate starch foods
(rice, potatoes, pasta, etc.) with Covid deaths. Then you\'d find that
if you eat lots of boiled potatoes you have a higher chance of dying of
Covid. Is that in any way useful - or is it just that old-folks\' homes
serve more boiled potatoes and pasta or rice?

Most of the published work on Covid has concentrated on things where we
can reasonably expect an effect - such as distancing.

That\'s crazy, to only investigate things that you can \"reasonably\"
expect to matter. Some people just don\'t need to learn anything that
they don\'t know already.

Where time is available and resources aren\'t a limitation,
there is something to be said for that.

Do I have to point out that neither are available?


> Correlation is a good indicator that causality should be investigated.

Ever heard of \"Post hoc ergo propter hoc\"?

When are you going to spend your time and money investigating
which shoe sizes should be given to kids in order to increase
their arithmetic ability and spelling ability?

There is, of course, a strong correlation between increased
shoe sizes and better arithmetic/spelling!

There /is/ an /important/ distinction between \"evidence lead\"
and \"science lead\" strategies.

But good studies
are hard to do. How do you do controlled studies of social distancing?
How do you do placebo tests and double-blind studies with masks?

Right. Best to just assume that expert opinions are all correct. Then,
just pick the expert that you prefer.

Don\'t be silly; you know that\'s a strawman proposition.

(Personally, I think eating lots of garlic is a good idea. It helps
enforce social distancing.)

Personally I think fencing is the ideal sport:
- you wear masks
- you wear gloves
- if anybody comes closer than 2m, you stab them

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, November 29, 2020 at 6:32:11 AM UTC-5, Tom Gardner wrote:

On 29/11/20 11:16, TTman wrote:


Predictions... The denialists will
- deny their denial
- find (more or less spurious) reasons why their opinion wasn\'t wrong


Hpefully they will all dies from self infection and not pass it on to too many
people.
I hope they won\'t infect innocent bystanders.

I wouldn\'t wish that horrible slow death (or worse, long covid)
on anybody.

The \"Typhoid Mary\" experience may be a lesson we have to relearn.

I saw a video the other day of a heavily PPE attired doctor working on a COVID patient from the patient\'s pov. The subtext was what the patient saw his last few hours on earth.

At least one of the idiots here makes a big deal of not being afraid of the disease, as if not fearing an ugly, horrific death was a goal to achieve.

--

Rick C.

-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, November 29, 2020 at 7:55:31 AM UTC-5, Brent Locher wrote:

On Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 8:59:21 PM UTC-5, gnuarm.del...@gmail.com wrote:
I recall how 9 months ago many were in pretty much complete denial of the seriousness of this disease. Predictions included forecasts of a quarter million US deaths by the end of this year and we managed to pull that off well ahead of schedule. The number of people maimed by this disease is much higher than that and ever growing at increasing rates.

So how many still deny that this is a very serious disease and needs to be addressed as such? I get that many in the world and in particular in the US are not bright enough to understand the numbers and often believe those with ulterior motives. But in this group it is hard to say people can\'t understand the nature of exponential growth and how rapidly the disease gets out of hand when we stop taking protective measures.

So is this group still populated by so many denialists? Or have people learned from others\' mistakes?

--
It is not \"denialists\" but rather people that ask whether there should be a public discussion about the tradeoffs between liberty and safety. Whether the government should be allowed to make mandates that destroy businesses that would otherwise be able to survive if people could make their own decisions about going out in public or not.


The grand irony is that there has been a complete shift in attitude within the left......

I remember two of the lefts great battle cries were:
1. keep the government out of my bedroom
2. Its my body.

Logic would dictate that those who chanted those things in the past would be the ones saying
1. I will invite over to my house whoever I want
2. Its my body and I will wear I mask if I feel like it.

But alas, we live in a world where everything is twisted.

Not sure how you connect those different lines of thought, but I notice you don\'t say anything about those who have the exact opposite ideas which by your reasoning are equally at odds with logic.


> As I understand, in Finland the government cannot mandate the wearing of masks by anyone , even in stores and on public transportation. The Finns have recognized that there are certain lines that , if crossed, will lead to a tryranny that is just too great.

That\'s pretty funny, the idea that mandating a medical response to a medical situation is \"a tyranny too great\" is a real hoot. \"Give me liberty to infect others or give me death\". Maybe we should take you up on the idea. What did your country do during the 1918 pandemic? I suppose your country is a bit far north to have dealt with mosquito born illnesses that ravaged the southern climes until they were largely controlled by *mandating* removal of breeding areas of mosquitoes.

Medical issues are one of the areas where governments typically have carte blanche to take whatever measures are required.

How would Typhoid Mary be handled in your country?

--

Rick C.

-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, November 29, 2020 at 10:01:56 AM UTC-5, Brent Locher wrote:

On Sunday, November 29, 2020 at 8:43:40 AM UTC-5, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 29/11/20 12:55, Brent Locher wrote:
It is not \"denialists\" but rather people that ask whether there should be a public discussion about the tradeoffs between liberty and safety.
I am very happy to tradeoff my liberty for your safety.
Are you happy with that tradeoff?
In other words, you are willing to restrict your own liberty at your own discretion and are OK with others restricting their liberty at their own discretion? I think we are on the same page. By all means, if you are living in sheer terror over catching Corona -virus then stay home.....I will not compel you to go out whether it is because you fear catching it or if your fear spreading it.....by all mean stay home!

You seem to not understand the issues go beyond trying to protect yourself. There is no way to do that absolutely unless you have a couple of years food supply and everything else you need to not go out at all. The reason for the masks and the distance is to minimize the spread of the disease and prevent it from becoming the massive pandemic it has. But there are so many who disregard the warnings and now we are all paying the price of not having access to many things we could have if we had simply responded to the disease as we should have.

A person has to have a very limited view of the disease to think giving everyone a choice of risking not only their lives, but the lives of others is an essential act of liberty.

I suppose your country has no laws about speeding or driving drunk either? Where are your liberties on those issues? It\'s precisely the same deal, less freedom for everyone to prevent a few deaths.

--

Rick C.

+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, November 29, 2020 at 12:10:11 PM UTC-5, John Larkin wrote:

What surprises me, this late in the epidemic, is how little other
effects (ie, non-social-behavior effects) have been studied and appear
in the press, even as simple correlations. All we hear is masks,
masks, masks.

San Francisco is usually windy. It would be interesting to correlate
wind velocity to infection rate.

No, not interesting at all since it would provide virtually no useful information. What we have tons of control over our actions. But it\'s not of much use when people think it\'s more important to measure the velocity of the wind.

You don\'t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

--

Rick C.

++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Monday, November 30, 2020 at 4:10:11 AM UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:

On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 17:38:05 +0100, David Brown
david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 29/11/2020 17:06, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 04:55:25 -0800 (PST), Brent Locher
blo...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:

On Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 8:59:21 PM UTC-5, gnuarm.del...@gmail.com wrote:


As I understand, in Finland the government cannot mandate the wearing of masks by anyone , even in stores and on public transportation. The Finns have recognized that there are certain lines that , if crossed, will lead to a tryranny that is just too great.




Finland is #107 on the list of per-capita deaths, at 71 PPM. Belguim
is #1, at 1418. Do people wear masks in Belguim?


It\'s worth noting that the country of Belgium is almost entirely
high-density urban area, so they\'ll spread it faster as people are close
together. They are a highly international country with huge amounts of
travel and connection to other countries. And they also count Covid
deaths differently from most countries - any death that could possibly
be influenced by Covid is counted as a Covid death, even if the person
never even had a test for it. (Don\'t ask me why.) That said, they are
still doing a rotten job at dealing with it.

Sweden is #24, 660, masking voluntary.

Sweden has been using a completely hopeless strategy, and are only now
beginning to turn around and start doing something sensible. They have
suffered massively more than Norway, both in terms of people who have
died or been sick, and in terms of social and economic costs. (Norway
and Finland would have been almost Covid-free if we didn\'t have Sweden
in the middle.)

San Francisco is a very dense city with an anamolously low (for the
USA) covid death rate, about 180 PPM. Maybe a third of people walking
outdoors don\'t mask.


Masks aren\'t necessary if you can keep your distance. (Not that I know
much about San Francisco - it was a general statement.)

The dynamics of this infection may not be much affected by masking.

The details are hard to tell - there is no good way of determining them
in an ethical way and without long-term studies, which take time. And
the effect of masks varies according to the behaviour of the people
wearing them - such as if they wear them correctly, or how they would
act if they were not wearing them.

But the big psychological effect of wearing masks is that it keeps the
epidemic in people\'s minds. If seeing people wearing masks reminds you
to keep your distance, then they are indirectly a big help regardless of
how much they limit droplets.

Most european countries are just getting over a gigantic second
infection pulse, which have generally been shorter in time and less
deadly that the first one. Belguim\'s second case rate peaked at over
14x the first one, and it\'s likely that mask wearing was more common
during the second peak.

Maybe there are some other effects than masking.

There are lots of factors that affect things.

What surprises me, this late in the epidemic, is how little other
effects (ie, non-social-behavior effects) have been studied and appear
in the press, even as simple correlations.

Going from scientific results to popular journalism is difficult. English language journalists rarely know enough about the science to do it well. There are studies going on - I picked up one from PNAS and posted it here a day or so ago - but they don\'t translate easily into stuff that would get the average newspaper reader\'s attention.

John Larkin is rather below average when it come to attending to information that he doesn\'t like.

> All we hear is masks, masks, masks.

It\'s a simple enough message to be worth pushing at people like you.

San Francisco is usually windy. It would be interesting to correlate
wind velocity to infection rate.

Tricky though. You have to know where people got infected, and when, and the local wind speed at the time.

Most infections seem to reflect relatively prolonged contact - the local contact tracing rules suggest that if you have spent more than 15 minutes in the near vicinity of an infected person in-doors you ought to self-isolate for 14 days from the time of contract. Out-doors you\'d have to have been in fairly intimate contact to get enough of the virus to be likely to get infected.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, November 29, 2020 at 9:17:20 PM UTC-5, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Monday, November 30, 2020 at 2:07:36 AM UTC+11, Brent Locher wrote:

If the death rate goes up to 10% then sure, I would rethink the tradeoff. But at this point the death rate is not high enough to warrant the loss of liberty that we are suffering.
The death rate is always individual people dying. Being casual about anybody dying because you\'ve decided that some trivial issue is a matter of principle is disgusting.

If people think it is noble to die by not wearing a mask and contracting a disease that is ravaging the world, perhaps it is time to help them along to being noble. Let them not wear a mask and they can be allowed to give action to their opinion by working in the CV ward... without PPE. But even that would not be fair to those who would be treating the newly infected... so they get no treatment when they come down with the disease.

Of course this is an absurd idea, but it does illustrate the absurdity of trying to defend the idea that we have perfect liberties and no responsibilities. Just as we are not allowed to play with explosives or drive way above speed limits and many other laws that we must follow, protecting yourself against this pandemic is required because it also protects the rest of us..

I really don\'t care if he wants to drive off a cliff, as long as he doesn\'t hurt anyone else on the way down. If he could become infected while being sure to not infect anyone else, I would say go for it. The problem is there\'s no way to protect everyone else from idiots like this. I guess when someone is observed not practicing protective measures and they become sick, we could just shoot them as the \"kind\" thing to do for them as well as the rest of us. That\'s what we do with rabid dogs to protect the rest of us.

--

Rick C.

--- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 30/11/20 02:17, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Monday, November 30, 2020 at 2:07:36 AM UTC+11, Brent Locher wrote:
If the death rate goes up to 10% then sure, I would rethink the tradeoff.
But at this point the death rate is not high enough to warrant the loss of
liberty that we are suffering.

The death rate is always individual people dying. Being casual about anybody
dying because you\'ve decided that some trivial issue is a matter of principle
is disgusting.

Yes, that is pretty vile.

What he does with his own body is his own business; I don\'t care.
What he does with strangers\' or family members\' bodies is
everybodys\' affair, and I do care.

Why is it the right wing \"give me emphysema or give me death\"
nutters are perfectly happy to shit over other people?

 

[Martin Brown]

On 29/11/2020 16:06, John Larkin wrote:

Finland is #107 on the list of per-capita deaths, at 71 PPM. Belguim
is #1, at 1418. Do people wear masks in Belguim?

They didn\'t in the past. Rule breaking is a national sport in Belgium
though. What is much harder to explain is why Switzerland also went
through the roof at about the same time (and Spain slightly earlier).

Switzerland should be in the German class of healthcare and operational
efficiency so I am not sure why they went so far off the rails.

Best guess seems to be a more infective strain that originated in Spain
and returned to the rest of Europe with holiday makers. I do wonder if
the shorter daylight hours plays any part in this. The exponential rise
began at approximately the equinox in all cases apart from Spain.

Sweden is #24, 660, masking voluntary.

San Francisco is a very dense city with an anamolously low (for the
USA) covid death rate, about 180 PPM. Maybe a third of people walking
outdoors don\'t mask.

Only about 30% of people outdoors in the UK wear masks and that is
probably because they can\'t be bothered taking them off and putting them
on again each time they go into a shop.

> The dynamics of this infection may not be much affected by masking.

The experience in the Far East strongly suggests that it makes quite a
big difference (that and that the people *trust* their governments and
do exactly what is asked of them). Japan Sumo has audiences again -
socially distanced and a fraction of capacity but it is a start.

Their curve on this metric (which I agree is the right one is almost at
baseline).

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=GBR~DEU~BEL~CHE~ITA~ESP~JPN&region=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc

Most european countries are just getting over a gigantic second
infection pulse, which have generally been shorter in time and less
deadly that the first one. Belguim\'s second case rate peaked at over
14x the first one, and it\'s likely that mask wearing was more common
during the second peak.

That just means that the peak could have been even higher. Belgium had a
very bad result on the first wave too and with a pretty extreme
lockdown. By comparison neighbouring Netherlands had more relaxed rules
and still did better overall. It isn\'t at all obvious why.

It is true that the second peak hasn\'t been as fatal but that is largely
because at least in the UK many of the people being infected right now
are teenagers and twenty somethings at universities. They have a much
much lower case fatality percentage. Sending the universities back is
responsible for the very steep UK rise 3rd-11th October. Great idea to
have people from the hotspots criss cross the country and have freshers
parties at their new location NOT!

The UK blip peaking at 17th Nov was almost certainly caused by last
chance pre-lockdown partying the week prior to lockdown coming into
force. If you have a sub group determined to do stupid things then
control is virtually impossible. There are £10k fines for some Covid
offences now but it makes almost no difference to people\'s behaviour.

> Maybe there are some other effects than masking.

The extent to which individuals think it is OK for *them* to break the
rules would be my first guess as a explanation.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 29/11/2020 18:40, Tom Gardner wrote:

On 29/11/20 17:09, John Larkin wrote:
What surprises me, this late in the epidemic, is how little other
effects (ie, non-social-behavior effects) have been studied and appear
in the press, even as simple correlations. All we hear is masks,
masks, masks.

You need to broaden your news sources

Over here the slogan is \"hands, face, space\", i.e.
\"wash your hands, cover your face & make space\".

Though this latest health slogan does sound more like a malfunctioning
Buzz Lightyear than a sensible health policy against Covid.

If you had to rank them in order of importance the they would be in the
opposite order. Maintaining your distance is the biggest single factor,
followed by not touching your face - especially eyes and nose.

The origin of that isn\'t clear, but the earlier Catalan
government’s slogan was: “Distància, mans, mascareta”, or
“Distance, hands, mask”

The latest UK initiative is to try and persuade people that it is *NOT*
OK to struggle into work with cold/flu/Covid symptoms (as was the norm).
Unfortunately it is the urban poor who bear most of the brunt of this
pandemic since they quite literally cannot afford to be off sick.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/peculiar-britons-should-stop-going-to-work-when-sick-says-hancock/ar-BB1bjsrw?c=8328353264962146257&mkt=en-gb

Strangely this was also the norm in Japan too but they *always* wore a
mask when they were streaming with cold or flu. We had one guy pass out
at his desk once! - he was sent home. I suspect that masks do mostly
work on the basis of this previous experience with other respiratory
diseases (at least to stop the wearer giving it to someone else).

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 30/11/20 09:50, Martin Brown wrote:

On 29/11/2020 18:40, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 29/11/20 17:09, John Larkin wrote:
What surprises me, this late in the epidemic, is how little other
effects (ie, non-social-behavior effects) have been studied and appear
in the press, even as simple correlations. All we hear is masks,
masks, masks.

You need to broaden your news sources

Over here the slogan is \"hands, face, space\", i.e.
\"wash your hands, cover your face & make space\".

Though this latest health slogan does sound more like a malfunctioning Buzz
Lightyear than a sensible health policy against Covid.

If you had to rank them in order of importance the they would be in the opposite
order. Maintaining your distance is the biggest single factor, followed by not
touching your face - especially eyes and nose.

The origin of that isn\'t clear, but the earlier Catalan
government’s slogan was: “Distància, mans, mascareta”, or
“Distance, hands, mask”

The latest UK initiative is to try and persuade people that it is *NOT* OK to
struggle into work with cold/flu/Covid symptoms (as was the norm).
Unfortunately it is the urban poor who bear most of the brunt of this pandemic
since they quite literally cannot afford to be off sick.

Yup.

Add living in high-rise buildings with limited lifts, and
you reportedly get 35 minute waits to get out of the building.
Unless, of course, you continue the usual practice of cramming
into lifts.

My daughter has, like millions of others, received big fat
zero compensation from the government over the last year.
She\'s fallen into the \"newly self-employed\" hole, having
started her own business in Aug \'19.

 

[amdx]

On 11/29/2020 10:28 AM, John Larkin wrote:

On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 07:01:50 -0800 (PST), Brent Locher
blocher@columbus.rr.com> wrote:

On Sunday, November 29, 2020 at 8:43:40 AM UTC-5, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 29/11/20 12:55, Brent Locher wrote:
It is not \"denialists\" but rather people that ask whether there should be a public discussion about the tradeoffs between liberty and safety.
I am very happy to tradeoff my liberty for your safety.
Are you happy with that tradeoff?
In other words, you are willing to restrict your own liberty at your own discretion and are OK with others restricting their liberty at their own discretion? I think we are on the same page. By all means, if you are living in sheer terror over catching Corona -virus then stay home.....I will not compel you to go out whether it is because you fear catching it or if your fear spreading it.....by all mean stay home!
There is a lot of sheer terror going around. It\'s contageous.

Rational assessment of risk, not so much.

In the US, 4% of the population have got Covid, of that 4% that got
Covid, 2% have died.

That means the chance of dying from Covid at 0.08%. But it is  a little
less than that because

those numbers include those that died before we learned how to treat the
symptoms to preserve life.

 Even with the great odds, it is still wise to protect yourself.

                                           Mikek



--
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

 

[bitrex]

On 11/30/2020 3:06 AM, Tom Gardner wrote:

On 30/11/20 02:17, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, November 30, 2020 at 2:07:36 AM UTC+11, Brent Locher wrote:
If the death rate goes up to 10% then sure, I would rethink the
tradeoff.
But at this point the death rate is not high enough to warrant the
loss of
liberty that we are suffering.

The death rate is always individual people dying. Being casual about
anybody
dying because you\'ve decided that some trivial issue is a matter of
principle
is disgusting.

Yes, that is pretty vile.

What he does with his own body is his own business; I don\'t care.
What he does with strangers\' or family members\' bodies is
everybodys\' affair, and I do care.

Why is it the right wing \"give me emphysema or give me death\"
nutters are perfectly happy to shit over other people?

I find myself becoming more conservative myself actually, hey what
should we do about the exploding case rate in \"red states\"? How about
don\'t do anything? Tired of sending my tax money to states full of
people like Brent above who hate us and always have.

Let them do as they please and stack the corpses in the street like the
Black Death. If they then try to flee into more sensible population
centers put a bullet in them.

 

[bitrex]

On 11/29/2020 7:55 AM, Brent Locher wrote:

On Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 8:59:21 PM UTC-5, gnuarm.del...@gmail.com wrote:
I recall how 9 months ago many were in pretty much complete denial of the seriousness of this disease. Predictions included forecasts of a quarter million US deaths by the end of this year and we managed to pull that off well ahead of schedule. The number of people maimed by this disease is much higher than that and ever growing at increasing rates.

So how many still deny that this is a very serious disease and needs to be addressed as such? I get that many in the world and in particular in the US are not bright enough to understand the numbers and often believe those with ulterior motives. But in this group it is hard to say people can\'t understand the nature of exponential growth and how rapidly the disease gets out of hand when we stop taking protective measures.

So is this group still populated by so many denialists? Or have people learned from others\' mistakes?

--
It is not \"denialists\" but rather people that ask whether there should be a public discussion about the tradeoffs between liberty and safety. Whether the government should be allowed to make mandates that destroy businesses that would otherwise be able to survive if people could make their own decisions about going out in public or not.


The grand irony is that there has been a complete shift in attitude within the left......

Brent has his axe to grind. No amount of death or misery will deter him
from his primary obsession.

<snip>

 

[bitrex]

On 11/29/2020 5:07 PM, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, November 29, 2020 at 7:55:31 AM UTC-5, Brent Locher wrote:
On Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 8:59:21 PM UTC-5, gnuarm.del...@gmail.com wrote:
I recall how 9 months ago many were in pretty much complete denial of the seriousness of this disease. Predictions included forecasts of a quarter million US deaths by the end of this year and we managed to pull that off well ahead of schedule. The number of people maimed by this disease is much higher than that and ever growing at increasing rates.

So how many still deny that this is a very serious disease and needs to be addressed as such? I get that many in the world and in particular in the US are not bright enough to understand the numbers and often believe those with ulterior motives. But in this group it is hard to say people can\'t understand the nature of exponential growth and how rapidly the disease gets out of hand when we stop taking protective measures.

So is this group still populated by so many denialists? Or have people learned from others\' mistakes?

--
It is not \"denialists\" but rather people that ask whether there should be a public discussion about the tradeoffs between liberty and safety. Whether the government should be allowed to make mandates that destroy businesses that would otherwise be able to survive if people could make their own decisions about going out in public or not.


The grand irony is that there has been a complete shift in attitude within the left......

I remember two of the lefts great battle cries were:
1. keep the government out of my bedroom
2. Its my body.

Logic would dictate that those who chanted those things in the past would be the ones saying
1. I will invite over to my house whoever I want
2. Its my body and I will wear I mask if I feel like it.

But alas, we live in a world where everything is twisted.

Not sure how you connect those different lines of thought, but I notice you don\'t say anything about those who have the exact opposite ideas which by your reasoning are equally at odds with logic.


As I understand, in Finland the government cannot mandate the wearing of masks by anyone , even in stores and on public transportation. The Finns have recognized that there are certain lines that , if crossed, will lead to a tryranny that is just too great.

That\'s pretty funny, the idea that mandating a medical response to a medical situation is \"a tyranny too great\" is a real hoot. \"Give me liberty to infect others or give me death\". Maybe we should take you up on the idea. What did your country do during the 1918 pandemic? I suppose your country is a bit far north to have dealt with mosquito born illnesses that ravaged the southern climes until they were largely controlled by *mandating* removal of breeding areas of mosquitoes.

Medical issues are one of the areas where governments typically have carte blanche to take whatever measures are required.

How would Typhoid Mary be handled in your country?

Brent has his axe to grind, he can\'t successfully state his point of
view on any of these topics without also making a point that whatever he
chooses to do today it\'s the opposite of whatever he believes \"the left\"
is doing today.

These guys are just jokers and attention-seekers, wannabe tyrants
wearing a freedom-dress hoping it fools someone. Alas, we live in a
world where people sometimes take them seriously.

 

[Rick C]

On Monday, November 30, 2020 at 8:11:21 AM UTC-5, amdx wrote:

On 11/29/2020 10:28 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 07:01:50 -0800 (PST), Brent Locher
blo...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:

On Sunday, November 29, 2020 at 8:43:40 AM UTC-5, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 29/11/20 12:55, Brent Locher wrote:
It is not \"denialists\" but rather people that ask whether there should be a public discussion about the tradeoffs between liberty and safety.
I am very happy to tradeoff my liberty for your safety.
Are you happy with that tradeoff?
In other words, you are willing to restrict your own liberty at your own discretion and are OK with others restricting their liberty at their own discretion? I think we are on the same page. By all means, if you are living in sheer terror over catching Corona -virus then stay home.....I will not compel you to go out whether it is because you fear catching it or if your fear spreading it.....by all mean stay home!
There is a lot of sheer terror going around. It\'s contageous.

Rational assessment of risk, not so much.

In the US, 4% of the population have got Covid, of that 4% that got
Covid, 2% have died.

That means the chance of dying from Covid at 0.08%. But it is a little
less than that because

those numbers include those that died before we learned how to treat the
symptoms to preserve life.

Even with the great odds, it is still wise to protect yourself.

Why do you conflate those two numbers to get a perceived risk? Then you talk about this number being excessively high because it includes a time of hospitals being overwhelmed and advances in the car of this disease. You completely ignore the fact that the number you come up with will forever increase as the disease spreads through the population.

More important would be the ratio of resolved cases to deaths, which in the US is closer to 3%. That number includes deaths from the early time, but the large number of deaths over the intervening time has swamped that out. Applying the 4% number to this death rate is not useful. That represents your risk since the disease started. If you wait long enough the infection rate could be quite high indeed. If 99% of the population has already been infected does that increase your chance of dying or reduce it???

--

Rick C.

--+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:38:28 +0000, Martin Brown
<\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 29/11/2020 16:06, John Larkin wrote:

Finland is #107 on the list of per-capita deaths, at 71 PPM. Belguim
is #1, at 1418. Do people wear masks in Belguim?

They didn\'t in the past. Rule breaking is a national sport in Belgium
though. What is much harder to explain is why Switzerland also went
through the roof at about the same time (and Spain slightly earlier).

The big, sharp second spikes are hard to explain. Could there be
anything going on here but masks, masks, or masks?

Switzerland should be in the German class of healthcare and operational
efficiency so I am not sure why they went so far off the rails.

Best guess seems to be a more infective strain that originated in Spain
and returned to the rest of Europe with holiday makers. I do wonder if
the shorter daylight hours plays any part in this. The exponential rise
began at approximately the equinox in all cases apart from Spain.

Sweden is #24, 660, masking voluntary.

San Francisco is a very dense city with an anamolously low (for the
USA) covid death rate, about 180 PPM. Maybe a third of people walking
outdoors don\'t mask.

Only about 30% of people outdoors in the UK wear masks and that is
probably because they can\'t be bothered taking them off and putting them
on again each time they go into a shop.

The dynamics of this infection may not be much affected by masking.

The experience in the Far East strongly suggests that it makes quite a
big difference (that and that the people *trust* their governments and
do exactly what is asked of them). Japan Sumo has audiences again -
socially distanced and a fraction of capacity but it is a start.

Their curve on this metric (which I agree is the right one is almost at
baseline).

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=GBR~DEU~BEL~CHE~ITA~ESP~JPN&region=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc

Most european countries are just getting over a gigantic second
infection pulse, which have generally been shorter in time and less
deadly that the first one. Belguim\'s second case rate peaked at over
14x the first one, and it\'s likely that mask wearing was more common
during the second peak.

That just means that the peak could have been even higher. Belgium had a
very bad result on the first wave too and with a pretty extreme
lockdown. By comparison neighbouring Netherlands had more relaxed rules
and still did better overall. It isn\'t at all obvious why.

It is true that the second peak hasn\'t been as fatal but that is largely
because at least in the UK many of the people being infected right now
are teenagers and twenty somethings at universities. They have a much
much lower case fatality percentage. Sending the universities back is
responsible for the very steep UK rise 3rd-11th October. Great idea to
have people from the hotspots criss cross the country and have freshers
parties at their new location NOT!

The UK blip peaking at 17th Nov was almost certainly caused by last
chance pre-lockdown partying the week prior to lockdown coming into
force. If you have a sub group determined to do stupid things then
control is virtually impossible. There are £10k fines for some Covid
offences now but it makes almost no difference to people\'s behaviour.

Maybe there are some other effects than masking.

The extent to which individuals think it is OK for *them* to break the
rules would be my first guess as a explanation.

Again, all the explanations are about social behavior. Moralism, not
biology. Sinners are being punished.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc trk

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
\"Bunter\", he said, \"I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason\"

 

[Martin Brown]

On 30/11/2020 16:22, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:38:28 +0000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 29/11/2020 16:06, John Larkin wrote:

Finland is #107 on the list of per-capita deaths, at 71 PPM. Belguim
is #1, at 1418. Do people wear masks in Belguim?

They didn\'t in the past. Rule breaking is a national sport in Belgium
though. What is much harder to explain is why Switzerland also went
through the roof at about the same time (and Spain slightly earlier).

The big, sharp second spikes are hard to explain. Could there be
anything going on here but masks, masks, or masks?

The UK\'s second wave was nothing like as sharp. It would have been
almost as good as Germany here if they hadn\'t conned the university
students into returning to campus from a very limited number of Covid
hotspots. That had the effect of spreading the infection country wide.
When they got there they found all university teaching was online.

Try telling freshers on their first time away from home not to party!

UK mask wearing is pretty much ubiquitous in shops and has been since
they decided to ask people to do it. It is now mandatory. I think I have
only seen two people not wearing a mask so far and one of them looked
likely to have a medical exemption.

There is something odd going on in Belgium and Switzerland to generate
such incredibly sharply rising spikes. In Belgium I suspect it is the
very high population density and in certain places slum housing but I am
completely mystified by why Switzerland has gone haywire too.

Maybe there are some other effects than masking.

The extent to which individuals think it is OK for *them* to break the
rules would be my first guess as a explanation.

Again, all the explanations are about social behavior. Moralism, not
biology. Sinners are being punished.

Pretty much how a virus works. If you get exposed then you may well fall
ill. The minimum infective dose is still not known with any precision
but is thought to be in the range of a few hundred to low thousands of
virus particles for a 50% chance of catching it. Those numbers are
broadly in line with the rather wide range of estimates for R0.

It is pretty clear over here that freshers parties at university halls
of residence made for super spreading events par excellence. That was
what fuelled the steep rise at the start of October. Not surprisingly
hardly any of them got seriously ill with being young and fit.

Even the most recent national lockdown was preceded by drunken party
night that fuelled a blob of faster growth on top of the trendline.
Closing the pubs at 10pm just created big not socially distanced queues
of drunks in the supermarkets and off licenses (predictable really).

--
Regards,
Martin Brown