[hrothgar]

cherdano, on 2020-August-04, 17:12, said:

Genuine Q: Is there any country, let's say out of Asia, with
- pubs and restaurants open,
- schools open, and
- R<=1 for a sustainable period (let's say at least 3 weeks)?

New Zealand

[cherdano]

hrothgar, on 2020-August-04, 17:14, said:

New Zealand

That's R = undefined.

Edit: I am not just trying to score a cheap point with this. A number of countries are having a non-trivial number of infections per day (not US-level bad, but not zero either), have reopened pubs/restaurants/bars, and are hoping to soon reopen schools after the summer break without infection levels rising again. I am very doubtful this can work, and New Zealand is no counter-example...

[hrothgar]

cherdano, on 2020-August-04, 17:59, said:

That's R = undefined.

Edit: I am not just trying to score a cheap point with this. A number of countries are having a non-trivial number of infections per day (not US-level bad, but not zero either), have reopened pubs/restaurants/bars, and are hoping to soon reopen schools after the summer break without infection levels rising again. I am very doubtful this can work, and New Zealand is no counter-example...

I agree with your core point.
I was just being snarky

[hrothgar]

Quote

Even Asymptomatic People Carry the Coronavirus in High Amounts

Researchers in South Korea found that roughly 30 percent of those infected never develop symptoms yet probably spread the virus.

https://www.nytimes....ansmission.html

[cherdano]

A modest proposal. If you claim expertise on issues related to covid-19 (say because you are a medical expert, or because you have studied "the math of epidemiology"), and you post something here about covid-19 that turns out to be evidently wrong, it would be appropriate to correct your mistake.

If you don't, it's a little hard for the rest of us to consider your contributions here to be in good faith.

[pilowsky]

If you want to see how Trump and his cavalcade of crooked criminal cronies have comprehensively corruscated a country,Click the arrow at the bottom left to start. You can change the scale from log to linear at the top left.
It looks more impressive linear.
https://tinyurl.com/y3hvkves

Watch how the USA comprehensively stuffs it up with a combination of incompetence,
and generally poor governance and a worthless health insurance system along with an obesity and diabetes epidemic.
This is what a 3rd world country truly looks like.<br style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">

[Zelandakh]

pilowsky, on 2020-August-10, 02:00, said:

If you want to see how Trump and his cavalcade of crooked criminal cronies have comprehensively corruscated a country,Click the arrow at the bottom left to start.

This link is better. You get most of the key stats one one graph by changing the selections across the top.

It should also be noted that the American stats are significantly under-recorded. By comparing with the previous year death figures Arend provided I would estimate at least 40% extra needs to be added - and that value has almost certainly increased since the WH changed the way that the US figures should be collected and reported. In any case, it does not take long perusing these graphs to see that the US has not succeeded in plotting an optimal course through this.

What is notable is the way that the USA has been unable to bring the pandemic under control, in a way that is generally absent outside of Central and South America. Given the level of resources available, that is an absolutely clear indicator of mismanagement and poor leadership. It is well worth comparing the responses of Dodgy Donald and Angela Merkel to see the difference a competent leader can make, and that despite the fact that Germany had to face it earlier with almost no preparation time and much less information available.

[pilowsky]

It's the same source. "Our World in Data" - I constructed the original link to show how badly the USA performed vis a vis a collection of other comparable and not comparable countries.
It's a great resource.
You can tailor-make all kinds of graphics. I really recommend exploring it.
Your illustration is also excellent - there are many ways of showing how uselessly corrupt this administration is.
The availability of great data in the modern era compared with previous disasters is astonishing. Appalling advice and behaviour has occurred for decades but without the current ability to see it so easily.
To me, the remarkable thing is that he may yet get away with murder.

[Zelandakh]

pilowsky, on 2020-August-10, 05:16, said:

It's the same source. "Our World in Data"

It is the same site but a different chart. You are linking to the specific chart for the stat you want to emphasise. The chart I am suggesting has access to most of the data by selecting different options built in to it. You can access the specific charts for all of the various statistics from either.

[pilowsky]

That's exactly what I said. Good job.

[awm]

Apparently our Covid testing in Switzerland is very different from the US. We've only done about 100k tests per million people (half the rate of the US). But our tests are available to everyone with no wait and no charge, and results are available within 24 hours. If people do test positive, they are immediately quarantined and contact traced (in fact about 25% of the population has downloaded our contact tracing app which can immediately warn them to get tested if they had recent contact with someone who tested positive).

It seems like the US is doing a lot tests, but they take so long to get processed that the results are not really useful.

Oh well, at least Putin has a vaccine.

[Cyberyeti]

cherdano, on 2020-July-30, 16:00, said:

I don't know where Cybyeryeti got the factor 15-20 from, but it's definitely wrong. Maybe confusing percentage of symptomatic cases among all cases with percentage of "positive cases found without population screening among estimated no. of total cases in the population"?

I got it because most of the rest barely had symptoms and would not have thought they had it without the test - that was indeed the way the testing was structured, they specifically excluded people with any serious symptoms from that part of the test.

The summary of that that I read suggested they didn't have symptoms, rather than had no serious symptoms.

[johnu]

awm, on 2020-August-11, 13:31, said:

Oh well, at least Putin has a vaccine.

If you didn't have to do Phase III trials, there might be several dozen vaccines available right now. I don't think it is against the odds to predict that Typhoid Donald will do an October Surprise by signing an executive order suspending Phase III trials in the US and announcing that vaccines currently in trial are immediately available for distribution. To hell with the CDC and NIH and any concerns about the safety, effectiveness and correct dosages of the vaccines.

[pilowsky]

johnu, on 2020-August-11, 14:31, said:

If you didn't have to do Phase III trials, there might be several dozen vaccines available right now. I don't think it is against the odds to predict that Typhoid Donald will do an October Surprise by signing an executive order suspending Phase III trials in the US and announcing that vaccines currently in trial are immediately available for distribution. To hell with the CDC and NIH and any concerns about the safety, effectiveness and correct dosages of the vaccines.

He won't need to do that.
By October it will have completely disappeared and all of America will be fit, healthy, six feet tall, blonde, and ready to vote in person. Carrying an exposed handgun. No problem.
The corn will be as high as an elephants eye.
Just in time for COVID20.

[y66]

Andy Slavitt said:

SalivaDirect received approval this morning from the @US_FDA.

This could be one the first major game changers in fighting the pandemic. Rarely am I this enthusiastic. Here’s why.

https://twitter.com/...654256763609090

[johnu]

Quote

SalivaDirect received approval this morning from the @US_FDA.

This could be one the first major game changers in fighting the pandemic. Rarely am I this enthusiastic. Here’s why.

https://twitter.com/...654256763609090

Won't work in the USA if Typhoid Donald succeeds in destroying the US Postal Service. You have to mail in your samples but the Manchurian President's plan is to delay mail deliveries (i.e. vote by mail ballots) until after the election and he has won. If he loses, he will destroy every part of government that he can in a fit of rage and who knows when USPS will be back to normal.

[cherdano]

Quote

SalivaDirect received approval this morning from the @US_FDA.

This could be one the first major game changers in fighting the pandemic. Rarely am I this enthusiastic. Here’s why.

https://twitter.com/...654256763609090

This is really great news, but only if governments move to take advantage of it on a huge scale. Instead of closing pubs and restaurants, and banning indoor gatherings in Aberdeen for two weeks, you could just have tested the entire population of Aberdeen at a cost of 1 million $. To put it differently, if every inhabitant of Aberdeen had contributed $, they wouldn't have had to go back into lockdown for two weeks (and counting). Seems a pretty good trade-off?

Which will be the first country to use this systematically? The UK has been running a pilot in Southampton since late June, but I haven't seen any news on its results.

[y66]

Paul Romer said:

Anne Wyllie (Yale, @awyllie13) and her team validated saliva tests back in April.

So no problem with US research/technology.

But then of course, we had to wait while the FDA slowed things down. Took months and $100k’s to get the FDA out of the way.

https://medicine.yal...-article/24224/

[Winstonm]

hrothgar, on 2020-July-25, 16:43, said:

You mean the report with the big section titled

SARS-CoV-2 infected persons without symptoms can also infect others



No. Your specific quote was



What you are doing now is lying about your original claims.

The fancy word for what you are doing is a motte-and-bailey argument

https://heterodoxaca...rategy-to-know/

But, it really boils down to you're lying about your original claim

Richard,
Thanks for the link. I had been unfamiliar with motte-and-bailey argument so it was quite helpful.

[y66]

For Quick Coronavirus Testing, Israel Turns to a Clever Algorithm by David Halbfinger at NYT

Quote

Inspired by a mother’s question, the new method will be introduced across Israel this fall, just in time for flu season, and could be coming soon to the U.S.

Quote

Most pooling efforts elsewhere are relying on a simplistic approach developed to test World War II draftees for syphilis. That so-called Dorfman method, named for the economist who dreamed it up, calls for testing pools of samples from several people at once. If the pool tests negative, then all individuals are considered negative. If the pool tests positive, then additional samples from each individual must be retested to see which are positive.

The Israeli method, by contrast, is designed to only require one round of testing — a crucial savings in time, laboratory work flow and supplies.

It accomplishes that by building on a combinatorial algorithm that one of the three scientists, Noam Shental of the Open University of Israel, in Raanana, developed a decade ago to speed the detection of rare genetic mutations. It works much like error-detecting codes that filter out noise in telecommunications and computer science.

In one typical iteration, the Israeli team took samples of 384 people and divided them into 48 pools, so that each person’s sample wound up in a unique set of six pools.

Each of the 48 pools was then tested. If one person was positive for the virus, then each of the six pools containing that sample should test positive — resulting in a unique combination of positive pools revealing the identity of the person (or people) carrying the virus.

The algorithm optimizes the design of its pools according to the expected prevalence of the virus, making it possible to pinpoint all of the positive individuals in a batch, as long as the total number of positives does not sharply exceed the expected number.

Like all types of pooled testing, the usefulness of this method drops as a community’s “positivity rate” — the proportion of tests that come back positive — climbs.