COVID-19

[Riggerjack]

I'm not sure if it was necessary, or not. It happened.

My point is that it did happen, and the effects of the lockdown are baked in at this point.

To use augustus' term, there are two bowls of shit. My point is the economic one is already large, and the lockdown is adding to it. If that is all one is concerned about, it seems like a bad situation, and stopping the adding seems like the obvious right thing to do.

But below that bowl, is a dumpster, and while the bowl seems bad, and the steady addition of more shit to it is very unappealing, it's nothing on the scale of the possibilities.

If this virus gets out of hand, we will look back fondly on those two nice simple, small bowls. If only...

..........

In every disaster movie, as the volcanoes are erupting, and the meteors are falling from the sky, as people are dying everywhere, somebody starts looking for her cat, or tries using a landline phone with the cord dangling. It's a form of comic relief as someone is anchored back to a time before the action started.

Worrying about when my favorite barista can get back to life as normal has that same disconnected feel, to me.

But I tend to focus on how bad things can get, and how to prevent that. It limits my upside, but also limits my downside. I greatly admire your ability to shrug off adversity, I don't mean to dismiss it. I just don't think you have taken a real look at what the possibilities are, here.

What does half the population with GGOs look like, economically in 2022? What does 10% of the population needing medical attention, while half the medical staff are sick, look like, regardless of CFR? What do the problems in Ecuador look like, in Kansas City? Is anyone worried about how their barista us going to pay her rent in those scenarios?

I hope you are right. I hope I am wrong. But I expect that I am right, and that there are a lot of people waiting in line at the phone booth, for their turn to use a phone that doesn't work, and won't, for quite some time... all complaining to each other that this was all so unnecessary. And seriously, when is someone going to fix all these big cracks opening in the streets?!?

[Mister Imperceptible]

I said this in the investment trade log, but I will say it here too.

If the world is insolvent and the powers that be were running out of ways to maintain business as usual, you start this thing with a bang and say “See, we were living in a golden age, and that virus ruined everything, what a shame. Wall Street needs a helicopter drop.” Notice the Main Street bailouts are meeting with much difficulty while the Wall Street bailouts are instantaneous.

Say it enough times and long enough, and enough people will believe the fiction to be true.

Crises are a great time to try things that would be unpalatable during business as usual. Now we can infringe on a bunch of civil liberties because, hey, now is no time to be petty, right?

You are fired, go home. Now you are dependent on us for UBI.

For their purposes this was entirely necessary.

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

[theanimal]

LA mayor announced today they are allowing any and all individuals to be tested (symptoms or not) free of charge effective immediately. First major US city to do so.

[7Wannabe5]

Three ways by which a civilization collapses; the runaway train, the dinosaur, the house of cards. Which one best describes the set of contingencies leading to the epidemic? Which best describes the state of the economy/finance prior to the epidemic? Which best describes current socio-political takes(s) on the situation?

The government in London in 1665 literally locked up/in households in which any member was infected with the plague. Since “family” in those days included any servants, if your scullery maid became ill because she was the one who was running to the market, the whole household would be boarded up and the city hired unemployed men to guard the boarded up houses, so nobody could escape. Just a year after the plague, there was the great fire of London, but then the economy picked up again, because the basic energy sources hadn’t been affected. IOW, there was still enough coal and topsoil to fire the Industrial Revolution.

[TheWanderingScholar]

Three ways by which a civilization collapses; the runaway train, the dinosaur, the house of cards. Which one best describes the set of contingencies leading to the epidemic? Which best describes the state of the economy/finance prior to the epidemic? Which best describes current socio-political takes(s) on the situation?

Which one best describes the set of contingencies leading to the epidemic?
Dinosaur. Outdated security measures, ill-funding, and complacency from national governments has made situation and crisis much worse than it had to be. Not even considering, when FEMA is intercepting supplies from state governments and setting on it. I can't believe I am saying this, but I honestly agree with Riggerjack when it comes to more states rights question of governance.

Which best describes the state of the economy/finance prior to the epidemic?
House of Cards. Stock market and economy built on cheap debt, with businesses being taxed via import tariffs means expanding markets with low margins. The epidemic was the wrecking ball that tore down this house of cards.

Which best describes current socio-political takes(s) on the situation?
House of Cards if watch the news. Which is kind of correct.

My take? Eh, all of the above in a strange way. I would go into more detail, but I have others things to do such as writing a piece to send to the Dark Mountain website, working on short story submission for another fiction magazine, and working on html skills.If you want me to, I can got into detail into my take, just will take a little bit of time to write up.

[Ego]

In every disaster movie, as the volcanoes are erupting, and the meteors are falling from the sky, as people are dying everywhere, somebody starts looking for her cat......

But I tend to focus on how bad things can get, and how to prevent that.....

As a society we do not make decisions that affect everyone based on the catalog of catastrophized fears of the most risk averse among us. I get that some are absolutely terrified by this. It is indeed scary for a minority. I've said for months that those at legitimate risk should self-isolate and let the rest of us get it out of the way.

--------

Reports are surfacing that hospital staff are now being pressured to code patients as Covid even after they tested negative for Covid.

[Ego]

[7Wannabe5]

@TheWanderingScholar:

I was roughly quoting “A Short History of Progress” by Wright. My initial take was we were heading on runaway train to pandemic due to minimization of degrees of separation between stressed wilderness and international travel. The economy/finance would be obvious candidate for house of cards. Sociopolitical discourse / decision making would be dinosaur, because given how much worse the plague was, it seems to me that 1665 decision making was actually better on many levels and people had the same inborn tendency towards letting sentiment or momentary personal druthers influence risk taking. However, I agree that decent argument could be made for applying each to any.

[George the original one]

I finally know what bothers me about this graph: it does not show the timescale for how rapidly the deaths are piling up. It only shows susceptibility.

[Riggerjack]

Ego,

I find myself to actually be more calm and relaxed since I started working from home. My actions are aligned with my beliefs. Prior to that, I was feeling a lot of anxiety.

This seemed to be caused by knowing what the right thing to do was, and not doing it, in a potentially hazardous situation.

Now, I am working from my ten acres in the woods, with no need to resupply for about 6 months, or considerably more, if I stretch it. I am working, my wife is working, most of the people I know are working.

It sounds really petty, but my life has improved since this started. I don't anticipate going back to work in an office before I retire.

So lockdown, no lockdown, pandemic burning thru or not, my life is pretty good, and not likely to be affected except in very indirect ways. My friends and family are similarly situated, though not to my extreme.

I'm not arguing with you out of fear. Partially it's that I like you, and want good things for you, and I see you not considering a bigger picture in a situation that could be threatening. Let me give an example of what I am trying to do.

My mom is in her seventies, diabetic, very overweight, former smoker, current cannibis consumer. Her take on her risk was that if she gets sick, she dies, and that's ok, she's lived a full life and she's happy. So she wasn't going to make any changes to the life she had already set up for herself.

This is reasonable, but even with her stats, odds are still very good that she would live through the virus. What does that look like? What are the long term effects, because that is the more relevant question to ask, even with her risk factors.

The truth is, we don't know. We're figuring it out, but more time is needed. Even among the asymptomatic, there is still 54% who had GGOs in their lungs. What does that mean, long term? We don't know. There have been cases with brain damage among survivors, seems uncommon, but how uncommon? We don't know. Brain damage can be hard to detect. What is the best treatment? And the best alternative treatments? What are the side effects of each? We don't know.

There are far more risks then merely death, here. You seem to have simplified the issue to risk of death, and damage caused by lockdown. While ignoring the risks of survival, and damage prevented by lockdown.

As you pointed out, the lockdown has risks if it's own. There has never been a risk free path.

I don't know if lockdown was justified or not. It hasn't made my life any different. I was personally locked down prior. I was in cash, prior. The only economic effects I have felt were difficulty in selling off some physical assets. In a harsh and selfish way, the more damage done, the better the prices of my future investment options. I'm arguing against my economic interests, because they are not my main interests.

So when people talk about a hazard, I notice the things they aren't talking about, and point them out. Not for me (though with Agreeability of zero, one could say I am very comfortable pointing out differences in opinions, perhaps too comfortable... ) but to give you another set of eyes on the problem you are facing. In the end, we all have to choose our actions for ourselves. I am happy for you to make whichever choice you feel best suits your needs.

I don't know if the lockdown was necessary. Life is good here. Maybe this is a question better asked of @ seppia, or @ campitor. They are closer to the problems than I am.

I don't know if we should continue the lockdown. I know that the economic damage is not constant, but should be happening at a decreasing rate. This means that costs are mainly paid. While the potential losses of pandemic still loom over us. But maybe, again, I am focusing on the potential negatives...

I never expected this to happen at this stage. I thought lockdowns would be local and too late to do any good. More like locking up households/apartments as 7w5 described, or China did.

How are our PPE supplies? In my adventures to the mainland, it seems like those who would wear masks, are wearing masks. So maybe that's good enough reason to lift the lockdown. I don't know.

But it seems we are about to find out. Lockdowns seem to be getting lifted to one degree or another soon. Monday, locally, unless something changes.

I guess we will see.

[jacob]

Germany started opening up on 4/20 (one of the first EU countries to do so) and have subsequently seen R0 increase from 0.7 to 0.96. Here comes the dance.

[jennypenny]

Unemployment just hit 31% in my metro area, going pretty well here too.

Just to repeat myself...again... peak unemployment in the great depression was 24.9%. It must have been going pretty well then too

Isn't there a bit of apples to oranges when comparing unemployment rates from a century ago and today though? I would bet that most people who lost their job during the great depression were the sole bread winner in the family. That's not true today since most women work. A partner might lose their job while the other retains theirs ... still a terrible situation but not immediate poverty for the family. Also, unemployment is highest in the youngest age groups, who generally have the fewest dependents, especially when compared to the 1930s when the birth rate was almost 3x higher and people married younger.

Again, I'm not saying that this situation isn't bad; I know there are a lot of people are getting slammed by the lockdown. Still, families tend to have more than one income these days, and there are social welfare programs in place -- social security, unemployment, snap -- to pick up some of the slack (inadequate, but a big improvement over the era of the great depression). For that reason, I think it's inaccurate to make a straight-up comparison of the two situations.

[Riggerjack]

Unemployment during lockdown should be much, much higher than immediately after the lockdown. My concern is what unemployment looks like a month or two after lockdown is lifted.

We simply don't know what that will be. But I think it will have more to do with the dance, than the hammer.

[Freedom_2018]

This might be a dumb question, but how is R0 calculated? I am assuming it is a backwards looking imputed number....as in "Since X more infections were detected since Germany reopened, holding other parameters constant (or not), the new calculated R0 value is 0.96 or whatever"...somewhat like solving an algebra equation?

If so, does more testing which would result in more "reported cases" not increase the R0 ( whether people are locked down or not). Also is more testing done when states/countries are open vs locked down?

[jacob]

It's fitted to a model, so yes, it's imputed. Here's a simple/textbook-level example of how it could be done: viewtopic.php?p=213772#p213772

(For a modeller, it would be trivial to scale the data input to increased testing intensity. E.g. if it's knowing that the test-rate has gone up by 20%, it's easy to divide the results by 1.2 to normalize them.)

[Freedom_2018]

Okay...I found this right after asking my question, do we need to be worried about how this epidemic R0 is calculated?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804098/

Some of this is going over my head/paygrade but reading the text I am starting to wonder.

The above paper is from 2007

[jacob]

Nice paper. It shows the three different ways of calculating (estimating!) R0, namely, the (low numbers) ghetto-way (contact tracing, which is irrelevant now), SIR-type (ODEs), and agent-based modelling (their ILM model). Note that by introducing more categories they allow for more "resolution" in the behavior. For example, SIR does not capture the fact that some people remain infectious for longer times than others. To some degree, what the authors of the papers discoverd w/o realizing it is the central limit theorem. It's obvious that the three models will converge as N gets larger.

I think the post I linked to describe the issue in a simpler manner(?)

What's important is whether R0 is calculated accurately, not precisely. I suppose we should be worried if the public/politicians misunderstand what R0 is in the same way that there was so much confusion about morbidity vs case fatality rates initially ... with this "confusion" subsequently transferring to not understanding the difference between sensitivity and specificity for the serological tests. This can easily lead to the wrong or rather inaccurate conclusions. In terms of accuracy, it would be better to give the result as "under control but rising and getting close to starting a second wave".

[7Wannabe5]

Also, if non-mitigated RO is higher than initially assumed, that means mitigation efforts were more, rather than less, critical in reducing effective RO. Therefore, lifting of restrictions should produce dance more like jitterbug than waltz.

[Freedom_2018]

(I wrote a longer post...but somehow got vaporised as I was trying to post...has happened to me before too...so not gonna write again, especially on phone screen typing)

Short version: Are governments using an 'average' R0 number to punish all the people (economically and otherwise) whereas there is a range of people/behaviors that result in an average R0 ?

In other words, instead of lockdown on everybody, should the focus be on the high spread folks/activities so that others can carry on with life?

[jacob]

In other words, instead of lockdown on everybody, should the focus be on the high spread folks/activities so that others can carry on with life?

Very early on, three strategies were proposed: The "expensive" (lockdown), the "deadly" (no lockdown), and the "impossible" (selective lockdown). Very few countries chose to [deliberately] pursue the third option for two reasons. First, in most countries it is hard to really isolate people over 60 because not all of them live alone. In Italy, many live with family, for example. Second, humanity as a species have sufficient numbers of individuals who are incapable of following directions to selectively drive R0 under 1. IOW, the number of "stupid" (defined as those who through their actions damage themselves as well as others) people is high enough to ensure that R0 could never go below 1(*).

So as a practical and also political matter, it's a lot easier to give out simple directions that apply to all people than complex directions that apply to specific people. This, of course, also depends on the level of trust in the government and the average willingness of the people to abide such edicts. For example, such a strategy would work better in Singapore than the US.

(*) A similar problem exists in vaccinations. Say, you need 90% vaccination rates to develop herd immunity (because R0=10), but the vaccine is only 95% effective and 10% refuse the vaccination. Then in effectively, herd immunity is at 85.5% which is not enough. The choice of the 10% thus endangers themselves but also the 5% of the 90% who got vaccinated but where the vaccine didn't take. Moral relativism quickly ensues in a never-ending omission/commission discussion between the freedom to not get sick and the freedom to not get vaccinated.