COVID topic vol 2

[chenda]

The development of vaccines in less than a year must surely rank as one of the greatest public health achievements in history. Well as long as they work as well as we hope.

[J_]

@Jacob I agree so much what you said above. It is a very realistic observation.

To me it feels so sad that we cannot really help other people who eat/live so blatantly wrong and who are destructing their, in origin healthy body, every day further. My guess is that at least 60 percent of western humans are helping themselves to illnesses and/or destruct their immune system.

I know and have read long enough the reactions in this forum to know that it is like fighting a losing battle, to think we can overcome this lack of knowledge and the lack of flexibility in human behaviour to change this (western) world wide problem of human tragedy.

Nevertheless, we are such a bunch of very informed/educated/creative humans here. Would it not be possiible to find a way to overcome this and to reach out to other humans? That they also can get back their health if they have lost it?

[Loner]

I wrote about it elsewhere, but I think it's perhaps doing a disservice to everyone to blame it on individuals for making those bad choices. Choices are also a function of the context and environment, and the US is just horrible in this matter. I recall, as a kid, going to Florida, and being both amused and horrified at the fact that people drank Pepsi from small buckets. What the hell? When you see this everyday, and your friends and family drink only soda, etc., it's difficult to do otherwise but become really, really fat. The Dutch don't suffer from an obesity epidemics, but they have an amazing cycling infrastructure. In the US, you have to be some kind of urban Indiana Jones who is not only daring in the face of death, because of the bad infrastructure, but also stoic in the face of ridicule and social shaming associated with transporting yourself with a child's toy. To do the right choice would require the will of a Zeno, who committed suicide through sheer will by holding his breath.

The Dutch don't really owe it to themselves, individually, for taking their bikes and remaining thin anymore than Americans should blame it on themselves for being fat for driving across the street and putting on the pounds. The reality is such that many people do all those things all the while knowing how bad it is. We've just built an environment that makes it too hard to stop making bad choices. I'm not sure what's the solution. For sure there ain't no overarching fix, but modifying the environment (building bike lanes, changing views towards cycling, etc.) would be a good start. It's one of the things I like about ERE, it kind of gives you the optionality to remove yourself from the unhealthy environments.

[chenda]

For sure there ain't no overarching fix, but modifying the environment (building bike lanes, changing views towards cycling, etc.) would be a good start. It's one of the things I like about ERE, it kind of gives you the optionality to remove yourself from the unhealthy environments.

Yup, although the Dutch had it easy as its a small ,flat, very densely populated nation with no oil and an urbanised long before cars were ever thought of. The US was the complete opposite and could kick the health can down the road for decades. Another good thing about ERE is that you can become part of the solution to this. As was mentioned on the food thread, moving somewhere where you can live car free not only helps your own health and finances but helps set a good example for others. The more people do it, more bike lanes get built.

[Jean]

People make thé culture. Thé worst one Can Do, is bringing along a culture, while fleeing its effect.

[tonyedgecombe]

Yup, although the Dutch had it easy as its a small ,flat, very densely populated nation with no oil and an urbanised long before cars were ever thought of.

The Dutch had a car culture in the seventies. What changed that was a lot of political campaigning because so many children were dying on the roads.

[chenda]

The Dutch had a car culture in the seventies. What changed that was a lot of political campaigning because so many children were dying on the roads.

Interesting I didn't know that. Apparently half a million Britons died on the roads in the 20th century, comparable to the death toll of ww2. Probably we all know of people who have died in car accidents. We just sort of accept it as normal.

[George the original one]

@GTOO
The original numbers coming out of Wuhan were in the range of 20% hospitalization rates and 3-4% mortality. I don't have those numbers handy anymore, but if you dispute this I'm sure I could find them. Obviously, the now well known reality is much, much lower.

And again for the gazillionth time, I do not consider COVID a minor problem, nor do I think it's not a tragedy. I was on the front lines when it started. It is VERY bad for a minority of the population. I think everyone should live their lives assuming anyone they come into contact with could be one of those people and should take is seriously.

Also, I don't consider Trump an authority on COVID, or most anything (maybe marketing?), but maybe you do? I 've never given anything he has to say about COVID consideration in my statements.

Going into March, as the NYC outbreak began, I agree the collective wisdom was definitely 20% hospitalization, but I recall 1% mortality.

My Trump comment was in regard to his public statements when he had his health experts in front of him in mid-March. It was the one time his statements were in line with health experts and then he began backtracking.

[Ego]

Insofar "stupid" is defined as a behavior that "hurts oneself and hurts others", it is clear that an infectious disease is highly compatible with "stupid" behavior. I really shouldn't need to say this but stupid has little to do with education or IQ. It is at best correlated, but it's a trait of its own.

A [stupid] person can know all the disease theory and pass the test on paper but still proceed to constantly fiddle with the outside nose part of their mask...

It may feel good to call those you disagree with stupid. Consider an alternative.

Might it be possible for someone to believe the scientists, agree that Covid is dangerous to a small percentage of the population and still believe that the 'solutions' have been far worse than the disease would have been?

Virologist know virology. They should certainly weigh in on the viral implications of opening schools or closing down retail. They are NOT experts in the long-term harm lockdowns cause to society nor to stilted development of young people as a result, and should have zero input in that side of the cost/benefit analysis.

We cannot change the past but we can learn from it. Doubling down on the failed policies that have turned out exactly how many if us predicted, the worst possible solution, is indeed your definition of stupid. Harming oneself while harming others.

It is possible to believe in the science of Covid but disagree with the solution.

[plow_2]

It is possible to believe in the science of Covid but disagree with the solution.

Yes, thank you.

From my observations, the biggest problem is that the virus hit during an election year. Anything done by either party by necessity had to be denigrated by the other. If a decision was made, and after more research was found to be incorrect, then the opposing side would say that it was intentional and the decision likely doubled down upon to try to prove that it wasn't wrong. The political theater resulted in any statement/observation/new information being met with suspicion. Protestors and rioters were excused from mask wearing for awhile thus reinforcing some peoples suspicions that it was BS.
Then add the inconsistencies of politicians of both sides not practicing their own mandates (Gavin Newsom comes to mind) and it's no wonder that there is a large segment of the population that believes that something is fishy.

[J_]

@ Loner

Choices are also a function of the context and environment, and the US is just horrible in this matter. I recall, as a kid, going to Florida, and being both amused and horrified at the fact that people drank Pepsi from small buckets. What the hell? When you see this everyday, and your friends and family drink only soda, etc., it's difficult to do otherwise but become really, really fat.

I agree, it is always in a context that you decide to change. To become financial independent early in life I, like most of us, had to go against common customs and diminish spending.

The very same applies to get and or to keep a robust health. First you have to study, to get knowledge about food and how it works out on your body. Than you have to imply that knowledge and go (mostly) against the common grain. You have to stop your bad habits, and to learn to cook for yourself.
You have to overcome massive manipulation by advertisment and by internet posts, you have to do it in an other way than most of you circle.

The most valuble skill you can have is the skill to stay healthy. It is more important than any financial skill.

[7Wannabe5]

@ZAFCorrection:

It just seems to me that many people behave as though there is more information to be found in 10 books in perfect order on a shelf than 100 books in messy stacks.

Also, putting some skin in the game reveals true belief. It’s one thing to argue in broad strokes that the hit to the economy by the “cure” will be long term worse than the direct effects of the disease. It’s another thing to be willing to place a structured bet on the matter. If you can’t even create a structured bet, as I offered on previous thread regarding Covid numbers, then I would argue that your thoughts on the matter are at least a quantum level more hazy than those arguing against you.

[7Wannabe5]

@J:

Yes, but age and male sex are still greater risk factors for death by Covid than obesity. In fact, voluntary castration is more likely to extend lifespan due to protection from number of maladies than any other possible health choice available for a man.

[ZAFCorrection]

@7w5

You may have been replying generally, but I want to point out that I have never strongly suggested the cure is worse than the disease, just that the mantle of scienciness which has been adopted by the technocrats and other "numerates" is unjustified. To repeat again, if you don't bother with other factors in the equation - indeed, you low key pretend they don't exist - your error bounds are going to be, shall we say, very large. The way that error propagates, your answer is likely to be only trivially more accurate than that of the rando on the street.

That's coming off of publishing engineering papers that estimate error. I'm happy to have someone explain how in other fields you can YOLO it on factors/terms and still get a reasonable error.

[jacob]

That's coming off of publishing engineering papers that estimate error. I'm happy to have someone explain how in other fields you can YOLO it on factors/terms and still get a reasonable error.

"Reasonable" depends on the tolerance of the system you're trying to design/control/understand. Random is essentially p=0.5 but various fields have very different tolerances for what they will accept. Social sciences are maybe p=0.66. Medicine is p=0.9. Physics is 0.99+. Engineering presumably depends on what you're building. A trading algorithm in financial engineering might use p=0.51 as a signal insofar it can hedge away the residual "noise". In particular, you can design a strategy to be highly tolerant of the known lack precision. Compare e.g. the AK47 to the M16. The "precautionary principle" is also such a strategy for what to do when the system is not well known.

The bigger problem in one-off novel model construction is that the precision of the input variables and model parameters is not known rendering error propagation null and void. The other issue is that the model might be structurally wrong. In this case, the error calculation could give a misleading characterization of the accuracy, e.g. "the answer is 9.43+/-1.26" whereas a more accurate model structurally closer to reality might have it at 6ish.

Not all science is precision engineering. Often you do what you can with what you have. The problem then becomes having to rely on an expert to interpret the result based on their confidence is the structural completeness, inputs, unknowns, ... For example, if you look at the IPCC reports for climate change, you'll see they put in a huge effort to express the level "confidence" in various claims. Sometimes this confidence is calculated statistically by comparing multiple different simulations. Other times, it's essentially polling a bunch of experts to gauge their general agreement/confidence.

PS: IIRC---it's been 25 years since I had to do it---the equations for error propagation are derived based on the assumption of independent Gaussian variables(?) IRL that is not necessarily the case.

[classical_Liberal]

...

[jacob]

Sometimes the [shape of the] distribution is not even known because you only have a couple of results/data points. IIRC, it wasn't until AR4 (2007) that CC confidence intervals became standardized. To do so requires lots of data, results, ... and people whose primary job is to "gather and compare" for the meta-studies. Scientifically, this V&V effort is not sexy---a career dead end compared to making new discoveries, so having it available for frontier science is the exception(*) rather than the rule. CC now has a dozen different models and standardized model runs (so comparison becomes possible).

(*) You basically need to secure long term funding to "lure" someone into it. Just before I decided to retire from physics, this was the position I was being groomed for, but I just couldn't see myself maintaining such a database...

Conversely, before COVID epidemiology and public health was not high on funding and thus not high on the number of researchers. Research groups were actively being shut down on budget cuts. The prevailing attitude was one of "since it hasn't happened here in decades, it can't happen here" so why bother spending millions researching epidemics "over there" when it has no "practical" value. Perhaps this will change now. Either way, it will probably take at least a couple of "phd-cycles" to ramp up the field. However, with more epidemics coming in future years and about a handful of different strategies being tried by different countries for COVID, at least they'll have something to test their models on, so precision will increase.

Should also note that the Economy-CC models ala DICE are rather simplistic as well. The structural uncertainty and simplifications in the damage model makes it difficult to assign any kind of precision. For example, the resulting carbon tax range two orders of magnitude. Better than nothing, but still ...

[chenda]

However, with more epidemics coming in future years and about a handful of different strategies being tried by different countries for COVID, at least they'll have something to test their models on, so precision will increase.

Do you see an increase in epi/pandemic frequency Jacob, through climate change, urban encroachment into wilderness etc ?

[7Wannabe5]

@classical_Liberal:

First obvious note in reference to article you linked would be no attempt to discriminate between secondary effects of epidemic itself vs. effects of the lockdown policy. For instance, I have avoided some routine medical check-ups, but this is because of the epidemic NOT the lock-down. In fact, if there were no state mandates in place, I would be even more likely to avoid routine medical care.

Also, because I am semi-addicted to reading NYT level economics books, I easily recognized many of the trends listed in that article as being relatively new, but well established before Covid or lockdowns; for instance, the percentage of adult children living at home.

Finally, the article does not touch on any of the positive economic effects of the lockdown such as reduced traffic and CO2 emissions and resurgence of some forms of wildlife.

[7Wannabe5]

@ZAFCorrection:

Yes, I see your point, yet my prediction on other thread was correct.