The coronavirus spread updated in real time

[_EAllusion]

The whole point of restricting certain businesses is / was to buy time to have a testing, tracing, and isolation system in place to keep the spread to a minimum while also building up medical supplies and not overwhelming the medical system with an unmanageable surge of seriously ill patients. This is something that is manageable to obtain well before "3-4 years" which is your pessimistic take on vaccine availability generally estimated to be 18 or so months out.

You should be livid with the Trump admin because while society has been trying to buy time to put these measures in place like *other countries have*, our federal government has been badly bungling it to the point that we've just been treading water and still don't appear anywhere close.

This also continues to be delusional about how certain businesses, say sports bars, are going to function while a sizeable % of their customer base avoids them because they recognize that it isn't safe to be there. Businesses running on low margins are going to be sensitive to sizeable drops in consumer demand.

You've repeatedly indicated you are OK with mass death if it means that managers at a Lids can get back to their work, and for you, I'm not sure that's so much about you misunderstanding the scale of harm as not caring if lots of people die. There's a pretty consistent theme in your posting history, including at one point supporting genocide, that you don't care if people live or die as long as you get yours. Then you brag about how your religion gives you moral purpose that unbelievers lack.

[_Res Ipsa]

So Birx has become a shill for Trump? Fauci just said yesterday the numbers are most certainly an undercount.

Will you allow people to go back to work if we elect a Democrat president? I guess under the left's reasoning, the economy is functioning at 75%. We can keep the shutdown for the next 3 to 4 years or until a vaccine/cure is found. Better yet, let's not go back to work until death is cured.

Ajax, why do you continually make stuff up about the “left’s” who are promoting lockdown for 3-4 years.

[_Res Ipsa]

Here's a study indicating that social distancing policy has a very sizeable effect on the transmission rate of coronavirus in the United States:

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/ ... urtemanche

And here's a video Donald Trump is promoting on his Twitter:

https://Twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/12 ... 9089101830

Interesting that it found no effect for school closures and cancellation of large events.

[_EAllusion]

The school closures is interesting, though with the caveat that their methods can only detect large effects. For the cancellation of large events, I wonder if that's just a matter of pro-social behavior making government mandates redundant. It isn't, after all, looking at the density of large events occurring.

[_EAllusion]

[quote]Ajax, why do you continually make stuff up about the “left’s” who are promoting lockdown for 3-4 years.[/quote]

This strawman is very common in the right-wing media Ajax relies on. A binary is presented between indefinite lockdown and "re-opening" meaning something like a return to pre-COVID activity. Then the left is ascribed the former position. The 3-4 years seems to come from the idea that while everyone is optimistic that a vaccine can be on board within a year and a half, it's plausible that it could take longer, even several years.

Ajax's brain simply cannot handle the idea that everyone wants to "re-open" or that re-opening isn't a binary but rather is a gradient involving tradeoffs between risks and safety measures. And it really can't handle the idea that restrictions would be less needed if our government could manage the sophistication of Ethiopia when it came to public health policy.

[_Res Ipsa]

The school closures is interesting, though with the caveat that their methods can only detect large effects. For the cancellation of large events, I wonder if that's just a matter of pro-social behavior making government mandates redundant. It isn't, after all, looking at the density of large events occurring.

Yeah, I think that’s likely. I don’t know about other states, but folks here we’re doing lots of social distancing, telecommuting, etc. before schools were closed, so it may be the same thing.

[_Res Ipsa]

Ajax, why do you continually make stuff up about the “left’s” who are promoting lockdown for 3-4 years.

This strawman is very common in the right-wing media Ajax relies on. A binary is presented between indefinite lockdown and "re-opening" meaning something like a return to pre-COVID activity. Then the left is ascribed the former position. The 3-4 years seems to come from the idea that while everyone is optimistic that a vaccine can be on board within a year and a half, it's plausible that it could take longer, even several years.

Ajax's brain simply cannot handle the idea that everyone wants to "re-open" or that re-opening isn't a binary but rather is a gradient involving tradeoffs between risks and safety measures. And it really can't handle the idea that restrictions would be less needed if our government could manage the sophistication of Ethiopia when it came to public health policy.

I think that’s some of it. I also think the right wing media caricatures the left more than the traditional media does with right. Ajax’s knowledge about what people left of center think is spoon fed to him by Brietbart and he’s too incurious to fact check what they tell him.

[_Jersey Girl]

Cool tracking map from Nat Geo
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... 4E3A4DE500

[_Gunnar]

Thanks for that link, Jersey Girl!

[Guest]

https://mobile.Twitter.com/rafalab

Nicholas Kristof
@NickKristof
·
May 13
So what's the undercount on #covid19 in the US? I worked with
@Harvard
statistician
@rafalab
to calculate the excess deaths, and it seems that in the US more than 100,000 Americans have ALREADY died from the coronavirus. Here's our count:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/opin ... 2SZsojoiwc

tl;dr - Ajax is wrong again. He's gleefully buried in conspiratard Conservative totally-not-fake-news sources because they all read like the Enquirer.

- Doc