
Coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data - cyrksoft
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
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zw123456
Are we sure that the economic damage of the shutdown of the world economy out
weighs the heath risks of the virus. Are we in group think here? A major
recession/depression means a lot of people go hungry, lose access to medical
care etc. Does anyone know of studies or research that looks at the health
impacts of a shutdown vs. the health risk of the virus ? Just asking
questions.

I keep asking this question and I get no response from anyone. This smells
like group think. Are we not able to discuss such questions ?

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currymj
it seems like this is the response from most people everywhere about until
their region hits the knee of the exponential curve. this pattern played out
in Italy, Spain, France, and now the US.

the Imperial College paper estimates 2 million dead in the US with no response
and ~1 million dead with a limited response that doesn’t involve a full
shutdown. That paper explicitly doesn’t consider the very severe economic
impacts but it’s hard to imagine that deaths on that scale aren’t worse than
whatever they might be.

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beatgammit
~1 million is the current annual death rate in the US (~0.8% last I checked),
and the disease kills older people much more than younger people. How many of
those 2 million would have died anyway in the next couple of years? How many
would have contributed to the economy over the next few years? How many of
those who will die from a recession would have contributed to the economy?

These are tough questions, but I think they're worth answering so we know what
we're really gaining by shutting down the economy. I know we want to save as
many lives as possible, but we should also know the cost too.

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jjeaff
Another thing to note is that the virus will overwhelm emergency rooms world
wide and deprive many other patients of adequate care that will cause some
unnecessary death.

So it isn't just virus deaths you have to factor in.

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Waterluvian
Acting without reliable data reminds me of war. And that got me thinking: is
this the closest exposure to "Total War" that any living generation (except
the greatest generation) has experienced? It's not like recent wars that can
be ignored by shutting off the TV. This captivates all of us and is becoming
impossible to ignore.

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redis_mlc
No, as I wrote another day, polio, the Cold War, the meth/crack epidemic in
the USA and the vodka epidemic in Russia were/are pretty scary.

(A lot of apartment blocks in Russia became 100% female after all the men
either died in the Afghanistan war or destroyed their livers with vodka/wood
alcohol.)

SARS (Corona-1) in 2002/2003 was bad too, but mostly affected Asia, with
isolated incidents in North America.

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mntmoss
A distinctive feature of a pandemic event is that it really is a global thing.
Even the world wars could claim to have quiet fronts... and that matters as a
global society. Normally - since the modern era began - we're in a default
state of national competition and every country is under some obligation to
work itself to the bone and exploit what it can to get ahead of the others.
Hence the default response to crises has long been "keep a strong
international image, maintain business as usual". The crisis harms a select
group somewhere and everyone else ignores it. But we did periodically have
pandemics, and each one changed the character of things going forward.

And it's clear why that is the case; you can't really get ahead if you don't
take care of the disease. The as-usual response fails because it affects
everyone. Even AIDS, which was approached so, so reluctantly, eventually got
an organized response.

And this response is more likely to be humane than most crisis management
because there is so little room to evade the issue and try to fit it into the
usual powermongering circus.

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Ancalagon
This article fails to make a single mention of Italy's case-load and its
effect on Italy's healthcare system.

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mokarma
Italy seems to be an outlier. They're hit significantly harder then any other
country.

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thda
Not true. France is hit, eastern France's hospitals are at full capacity.
Doctors are starting to consider letting people over 70 die without access to
an ICU.

Also, it's kind of strange that on this forum people do not get the notion of
exponential increase. It's twice worst every 72 hours. Time runs out really
fast.

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sershe
People totally get exponential increase. I agree it's really bad given that we
have infinite population! Oh wait, we don't. The exponential increase will go
on for 3-4 weeks after which there will be no more people to infect; the time
in ICU is 2-3 week, there's overlap, so in say a month we will be done.
Recessions last years; in case of Great Depression, a decade. Remember how
Great Depression ended in Europe?

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fsh
I think that Ioannidis makes a valid point about the need for accurate data.
But isn't the (pretty decent) italian healthcare system getting completely
overwhelmed a strong argument against the possibility that the corona outbreak
could get "buried within the noise" of seasonal influenza? I also don't
understand how shutting down non-essential businesses for a few weeks is
supposed to cause large damage.

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anotheryou
At what point do randomly sampled tests make sense?

I guess now you'd test too many negative and would need too many tests to get
reliable results. (you need to have a decent sample of sick people for
statistical significance).

Than again the infections also cluster locally a lot, so you can't extrapolate
for a country well..

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neurocline
I’m sure it wasn’t the author’s intention, but the article has a lot of the
patterns and phrasing I see in denialist literature (global warming, for
example).

I agree with the author that we need more data. But he nerfed the urgency of
his plea by using wording that downplays the problem, and seems to only be
talking about the situation in the U.S. and U.K. No mention of the data points
collected at great cost by China and Italy, not to mention Iran (which seems
to be digging mass graves).

I’m confused. What does the author expect from publishing this piece?

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bsaul
about your last point : it mentions doing random sampling periodically to get
a better assessment of the spread, in order to be able to cut lockdowns when
the epidemic is already touching 99% of the population ( and not wait weeks
until we see the numbers drop in hospitals).

also, that we take south korea as an example for future policies and not
china.

