Posted on 03/17/2020 4:55:05 PM PDT by GOPmember
The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.
At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact.
Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the pandemic dissipates — either on its own or because of these measures — short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable. How long, though, should measures like these be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?
Vaccines or affordable treatments take many months (or even years) to develop and test properly. Given such timelines, the consequences of long-term lockdowns are entirely unknown.
The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.
(Excerpt) Read more at statnews.com ...
The reliable data is coming from our CNN and others.
Sky Dancer
LOL
I’ve been saying similar things.
Improved data over time will tell if we over- or under-reacted.
You mean rando dude on Twitter or nutcase in the comments of a YouTube video doesnt count as “data”?
We can’t just do nothing because information is lacking.
Social distancing and self quarantine of the elderly are a reasonable measure until the picture becomes clearer.
This damn bug manifests itself with a cough and a temperature. That's all the super clues we have right now.
As Dr. Fauci has explained, in any pandemic you are always basing tomorrow’s decisions on yesterday’s data.
Also, “fog of war”.
Well doesn’t this make my heart proud...I posted this earlier today...
The problem with data is the PhDs who flaunt it make the ignorant assumption that the data is good. Usually, it is not. Data crunchers, scientists, analysts, usually have no street smarts, no understanding of how a paycheck is derived, where money actually comes from, how customer behaviors are studied, normal life stuff. No, instead, they take their data prima facie, and move on...multivariate analysis (as an e.g.), etc. That’s not the real world. Taking into account count the Chinese migrant workers in the northern Italy leather industry would have been a wee bit important. Single payor healthcare system in Italy. Deaths in Italy, avg age 81. I’ll take my 21 yr old budding chemical engineer son’s street smart understanding of the world over 99.9% of PhDs’ anytime. My 18 year old even challenges him in that category. My to also don’t have a hidden agenda.
Please think about those words.
It became known somewhere in the January/February time slot and OUR President hopped right ON it and the rest of the world at least considered it.
Within a week or two the alarm went out ... "WASH YER FRIKKIN' HANDS" ... and assuming most people already did and the others started to, either the advice/alarm/RX was incorrect, or the panic had to be escalated.
Because if washing is what all it takes, and old/vulnerable people have been identified ( and I can tell you, that at 72, my kids are calling me and a bunch of et cetera's ) ....
So ..... how can this be "As It Takes Hold" ?
It should be, .. "As it's winding down"
A MUCH BETTER solution would have been to order the elderly to shelter in place and to restrict visitation since they are the most vulnerable.
The rest of us should have been made aware, but we go on with our lives. Instead we have destruction of the economy and people’s lives. Regular citizens who want to go out and about could be jailed. It’s sickening.
Say it isn’t so!!
We have clearly over-reacted. Even if this is 10x deadlier than annual flu, we have eliminated public worship of God, public assembly, freedom of movement, destroyed businesses, condemned millions of people to unemployment, and caused an economic Depression. We’ve isolated and stressed a people who were already tending to mental illness, and we’ve created a government with totalitarian powers and no checks or balances. There are even rumors we will bog down our soldiers in unlawful deployments at home, and that our weakness will tempt our adversaries to wage war.
And for what? Some statistical number or correlation? Do we shut the roads to prevent accidents?
Meanwhile we keep abortion clinics open, which have killed and will kill more people than this virus ever will.
How to calculate the mortality rate during an outbreak
At present, it is tempting to estimate the case fatality rate by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of confirmed cases. The resulting number, however, does not represent the true case fatality rate and might be off by orders of magnitude [...]
A precise estimate of the case fatality rate is therefore impossible at present.
2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV): estimating the case fatality rate – a word of caution - Battegay Manue et al., Swiss Med Wkly, February 7, 2020
The case fatality rate (CFR) represents the proportion of cases who eventually die from a disease.
Once an epidemic has ended, it is calculated with the formula: deaths / cases.
But while an epidemic is still ongoing, as it is the case with the current novel coronavirus outbreak, this formula is, at the very least, "naïve" and can be "misleading if, at the time of analysis, the outcome is unknown for a non negligible proportion of patients." [8]
(Methods for Estimating the Case Fatality Ratio for a Novel, Emerging Infectious Disease - Ghani et al, American Journal of Epidemiology)
In other words, current deaths belong to a total case figure of the past, not to the current case figure in which the outcome (recovery or death) of a proportion (the most recent cases) hasn't yet been determined.
Just sayin'...
I’m going with 2 million. We overreacted.
We have enough data to make semi-educated decisions on how to proceed. China’s numbers, are well, ChiCom BS. Italy? Let’s hope that’s not us.
South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are not applicable models for us to use, as we still have a slight amount of privacy left. Those places have cultures that value security over privacy.
Germany has tested widely, and has few deaths.
Social distancing will help stop some spread of this, but it is an aerosol. This explains why there are limits on how many people can gather in one place, for now. Social distancing now can hopefully prevent full scale quarantine later.
I think as our testing widens, we will not only have more quality data, but we will also see how ludicrous China has been.
We are in the prologue to this book.
Great post!
I spent 25 years watching PHD physicists base experiments on data that agreed with their preconceptions.
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