Help the Fight Against COVID-19

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Hundreds of thousands is a lot less than tens of millions. All evidence points to fatalities of tens, if not hundreds, of millions. People are massively underestimating the lethality of this disease. It's a SARS coronavirus. Those types of viruses are nothing to sneeze at, pardon the pun. They attack your lungs and kill you with astounding efficiency.
The Princes Diamond... I would baseline your calculations from the statistics available from the PD.. it's the most stable model available...
 
This has been reported in the Italian press in the past couple of days, but it turns out to not be true. Yes, the numbers this week look encouraging compared to the numbers from last week, but no, the number of new infections has not gone down 4 days in a row. From worldometers.info:
You're right, this is the correct graph for new cases, still looks encouraging compared to the previous growth.. we'll see if this trend will be at least maintained in the next days.

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Be aware of selection bias. The press will only show you the worst. Tragedy sells subscriptions.

A New York newspaper reporting on the situation in New York is not selection bias. It is responsible journalism about the region of interest to their readers. Showing a quiet hospital somewhere in the country where the situation isn't very hot might feed some people's belief this is all a hoax, but that would be irresponsible.
 
It's about time. We need to be live streaming video from ERs onto concert screen jumbo-trons anywhere people are trying to mass like sea lions onto an ice patch. We need YouTube to cram the first half page of ANY search query with videos like that and the one below. Same with the rest of social media - they've totally dropped the ball.

Unlike the USA, where a desperate doctor has to become a rebel to get footage, Bergamo Italy asked the media to come in, to see the fight for life on the front lines and broadcast it to the world - to tell the world ASAP get your shit together or this will happen to you.

It's already happening in New York. It's very scary and the "hoax" and "fear" as some call it is just getting started. It's called reality.
 
Some interesting comments I recently heard on NPR from a guest host... about viruses in history.
During the Spanish Flu... older people were at less risk and it was the younger who had the greatest mortality rate. Because at some point, the elderly had been exposed to the virus earlier in life... some form of it.

They are trying to learn why some people get sick and others do not. If there is a earlier lineage.
 
A New York newspaper reporting on the situation in New York is not selection bias. It is responsible journalism about the region of interest to their readers. Showing a quiet hospital somewhere in the country where the situation isn't very hot might feed some people's belief this is all a hoax, but that would be irresponsible.
New York newspaper finding the worst affected hospital in New York and making you believe that's how it is across the board is selection bias, however. That's not to say the situation is easy there. That is to say that if they had a choice between showing a hospital which is doing OK and one that's completely fucked, you know exactly what would get printed. That's selection bias. If they were concerned with presenting the truth, they'd show another hospital where, perhaps, things aren't so bad. But they don't really give a shit. Panic sells subscriptions.
 
Be aware of selection bias. The press will only show you the worst. Tragedy sells subscriptions.

I spoke to one of the leading immunologists in the country today. He works in a hospital in NYC. He was retained by my company to give us as accurate a picture as possible of where things were and where things were going. His outlook was bleak. He described the situation as “dire,” cases were “exploding“, hospitals overloaded, “getting worse by the minute,” etc etc etc. Going to get much worse. It was absolutely grim. I asked him if there was any good news. He said “nothing at all.” But you know better I guess. Edit: he also said “it’s even worse than we expected.”
 
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New York newspaper finding the worst affected hospital in New York and making you believe that's how it is across the board is selection bias, however. That's not to say the situation is easy there. That is to say that if they had a choice between showing a hospital which is doing OK and one that's completely fucked, you know exactly what would get printed. That's selection bias. If they were concerned with presenting the truth, they'd show another hospital where, perhaps, things aren't so bad. But they don't really give a shit. Panic sells subscriptions.

That is one way to characterize this. Another is that they're showing you how a well staffed hospital that's used to seeing plenty of patients is on the verge of being overwhelmed. In fact, if they were not able to move certain patients to other facilities they would already be overwhelmed.

Don't kid yourself, it's not like this is the only hospital in NY or anywhere else that's in a bad way. There's plenty more in New York and around the nation. And given that we have mental midgets running states like Mississippi, there's still plenty more of this to come.

Besides, what good would it do to show that a hospital in an area with limited cases is not overwhelmed? Isn't that sort of freakin' obvious?
 
New York newspaper finding the worst affected hospital in New York and making you believe that's how it is across the board is selection bias, however. That's not to say the situation is easy there. That is to say that if they had a choice between showing a hospital which is doing OK and one that's completely fucked, you know exactly what would get printed. That's selection bias. If they were concerned with presenting the truth, they'd show another hospital where, perhaps, things aren't so bad. But they don't really give a shit. Panic sells subscriptions.

The journalists who worked on this story are not “making you believe” anything. They are busting their asses in dangerous situations to report the facts. If a war breaks out in the Middle East, would you have them ignore that and instead report on a peaceful region of the world for fear of giving the impression there is war everywhere? They can be accused of many things, but “not giving a shit” is not one of them.
 
New York newspaper finding the worst affected hospital in New York and making you believe that's how it is across the board is selection bias, however. That's not to say the situation is easy there. That is to say that if they had a choice between showing a hospital which is doing OK and one that's completely fucked, you know exactly what would get printed. That's selection bias. If they were concerned with presenting the truth, they'd show another hospital where, perhaps, things aren't so bad. But they don't really give a shit. Panic sells subscriptions.

Really...? Feel free to stop by Bellvue and visit the new massive makeshift morgue.

This is not a conspiracy to sell new papers... This not about one hospital.
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Updated 2 hours ago
"NEW YORK CITY (WABC) -- A New York City nurse is among the 280 deaths from coronavirus in the city as the number of positive cases passed 20,000.

There were at least 3,750 people hospitalized. Of those individuals, at least 840 were in the ICU.

Currently, there are at least 6,420 cases in Queens, 3,616 in Manhattan, 5,232 in Brooklyn, 3,542 in the Bronx and 1,166 in Staten Island.

The mayor expects coronavirus to be worse in April than it has been in March. The city is seeking 15,000 ventilators. Currently, the city has about a sixth of that total secured."


I have a brother, relatives and other friends that are RN's and on the frontlines of New York City and state healthcare. Yes, it is dire and it is real across the board.

They don't even have the equipment they need to protect themselves while caring for others. My bother has a 1 respirator mask "per week" allowance. Meanwhile, they are wearing garbages at Mount Siani because there are no more gowns.

What's worse than a conspiracy about a newspaper trying to sell a story? Someone from far and away, trying to tell me what's going on in my own backyard.
 
New York newspaper finding the worst affected hospital in New York and making you believe that's how it is across the board is selection bias, however. That's not to say the situation is easy there. That is to say that if they had a choice between showing a hospital which is doing OK and one that's completely fucked, you know exactly what would get printed. That's selection bias. If they were concerned with presenting the truth, they'd show another hospital where, perhaps, things aren't so bad. But they don't really give a shit. Panic sells subscriptions.
What, news is on the news? Say it ain't so.

And the # of cases in US is over 63k and still in exponential growth, so there's that baseless prediction proven wrong.
 
Hundreds of thousands is a lot less than tens of millions. All evidence points to fatalities of tens, if not hundreds, of millions. People are massively underestimating the lethality of this disease. It's a SARS coronavirus. Those types of viruses are nothing to sneeze at, pardon the pun. They attack your lungs and kill you with astounding efficiency.
Respectfully, the only estimates I gave were (a.) rough, intended only to casually indicate order-of-magnitude; and (b.) limited to the U.S. alone.

(Not, of course, because the rest of the world isn't important! People are people, everywhere...but my post addressed the U.S. because I'm ignorant of nearly all the relevant factors in every other country apart from the U.S. and thus have nothing to say, and also because I was making a point about local- and state-level decision-making in the U.S., and how we should expect it to look.)

Are you replying in kind? That is, are you predicting fatalities of "tens, if not hundreds, of millions" in the U.S. alone?

"Tens...of millions?" That's "tens," plural? In the U.S.?

That would be 20 million dead, minimum. Are you offering a prediction that this virus, this year, will kill 6% of the U.S. population? That seems wildly pessimistic given the publicly-available information.

You even raise the possibility of "hundreds," plural. If I take you literally, that'd be 200 million, in a country with a population of 350 million. Are you predicting this virus, this year, will kill 43% of the U.S. population?

You also say, "all the evidence points...." You must have evidence nobody else has. What's your source?

To make what you're saying more reasonable, I have to conclude you're talking worldwide.

In that broader scope, 20 million would be more reasonable (if that's the word to use, for something so horrific). But even at the worldwide scope, your "hundreds of millions" would seem unduly dark, given the progress that's being made. (That'd be 3%-ish of the world population, I think?)

Respectfully, please clarify your usage, and if you can offer a few bullet-points to highlight "all the evidence" that points to these outcomes, I'd sure like to see them.
 
@Dr. Dipwad have you seen Margin Call? The speech by Jeremy Irons at the end is so chilling.
Mostly because everything he says is true!
As a matter of fact I discovered Margin Call and The Big Short only in the last few days, via YouTube clips, including the one you posted. I'm not ashamed to say: I've been binging a bit.

Irons is absolute genius, playing CEO John Tuld...though he also had amazingly well-crafted writing to work with.

My favorite little tidbit is this one:


"Speak, as you might, to a young child. Or...a golden retriever. It wasn't brains that got me here, I can assure you of that."

Look at the expression on Irons' face as he says, "I can assure you of that." Notice how he flicks the cover on the report-binder.

The smile on the face -- the unblinking focus, the slight tilt of the head -- is the look of a man who is in charge, and entirely capable of eating everyone else in the room for lunch if required. That bit of self-deprecation ("young child...golden retriever") isn't really particularly disarming, is it, when coming from a man with that expression on his face?

Later, about 4 minutes in, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) tells him that "...that loss would be greater than the current market capitalization of this entire company." Look how Irons sweeps the table with a fingertip, and says, "So." Perfection.

Actually Quinto does an amazing job here, too. See that small hint of a grin he gives, when responding to Irons' character's "biggest bag of...odorous excrement" analogy? I doubt they did this scene all in one take. With dialogue like that, there'd have been plenty of read-throughs, plenty of edits. So Quinto has heard this joke, over and over. But his reaction comes across as so genuine. That's exactly how a smart, pretty confident, but undeniably junior man (unmarried) would be reacting to that comment, and those rhetorical flourishes from the CEO's outsized personality.

Genius, all of it.
 
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