Can anyone explain how the virus is twice as infectious as we thought, but we're consistently lowering our death projections everyday?
Dig into state by state numbers and most states are after that with lower peaks. See https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america and then https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/new-... to verify.
This is for NYC specifically (last few days of data are incomplete): https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
I wouldn't be surprised if NY continued surging in the coming days.
When we end social distancing, all bets are off. See http://www.healthdata.org/covid/faqs#length%20of%20the%20epi... to see that they are painfully aware of this and are explicitly not trying to model that.
It might be the case, but that assumes that effective measures to control the epidemic will keep being applied everywhere.
We didn’t discover a bunch of dead people that were infected. So the denominator increased relative to the numerator.
Not stating this as fact.
The authors of this study are almost certainly not the only ones who "knew" it was twice as infectious based only on the data available back in early February, before anyone outside of China was testing at all.
Really? Because all I’ve been hearing for weeks is nonstop complaining about how the US started social distancing measures way too late, how no one is taking it seriously, etc.
This article is talking about R0-- a measure of contagion without considering interventions like increasing mask wearing, quarantines, or physical distancing.
The higher the R0 the harder we have to work to push the effective R below 1, as is required to stop the spread... and the wider and faster the spread will be if we don't mitigate it.
'The first casualty if war is the Truth'.
Whatever the government tells you during a time of crisis is a form of propaganda, 'for your own good' so to speak.
Even if individuals are intelligent, crowds are not.
Whatever they say is very calculated and controlled, as if to achieve a specific outcome. So imagine a very cynical view of political messaging in normal times, but now tilt that towards a more truly civic situation wherein maybe it doesn't seem quite so cynical because, well, there is actually a crisis.
The 'numbers' projected a few weeks ago will have been constrained by a) what people could handle without panicking, b) what kind of numbers might get them to actually behave properly, c) what will save every political leaders skin (i.e. give bad news then everything after that seems like good news), d) how much we can bend reality without hurting their own credibility by being perceived as lying.
It's extremely hard and politically risky to 'shut down a country' and get millions of individual actors to 'buy-in' to behave as we want especially if it means annoyance or personal hardship. Political leaders are used to acting in a very populist way, and basically right now they are doing the extreme opposite. Every day, politicians have to act against their best populist instincts. It's hard to overstate what a sensitive time this is, it could go sour very quickly.
So take everything with a grain of salt, knowing that whatever is being said is calculated and 'all projections' are filtered somewhat. Ostensibly 'for our own good'.
I think there are often more qualified numbers published out there, but you have to go right to the source, if available.
Edit: the 'masks' PR and policy is probably the best example of that. In reality, there's not much harm, and likely a little bit of good that can come from masks. But the strategy was to get PPE to the front-line health workers who have a greater need and were in a real crisis, so, the public messaging was 'no masks'. But the 'truth' of masks started to creep to the fore, more were asking questions, moreover, the PPE situation started to stabilize a little bit and 'poof' all of a sudden 'masks are good'. Now they are telling us? The Canadian Chief Medical Officer literally did a 180 on that, sounding a lot like Donald Trump in his total about turns. The communications strategy early on was fairly clear and it made sense, but it's a little uncomfortable to see your so-called leaders only make decisions 'after everyone else' so as to avoid taking and risky or blame (Canada wouldn't budget on it until most other countries did first). If you read the fairly confident communications about masks from several weeks ago and compare them to the messaging now - you see a problem that very only makes sense in the context of "purposeful misdirection for the 'public good' ". Masks did not 'get safer' and nor did our understanding of them change. What changed was who ostensibly needed them the most.
Stimulus helps, but a clear exit strategy for reopening segments of the economy is going to have to be presented.
Given the reality of '2cnd wave' and also the gov. is going to run out of money to print and special programs, the next few months of 'undoing the ratchet carefully' is going to be the public/PR exercise of a lifetime. We'll be studying it literally for generations.
It has always assumed that lockdowns would be everywhere and would be observed.
Every new revision in the last 20 days has been a revision downward in death rate.
10 days ago, the 95% confidence interval was 100k-240k deaths with lockdowns observed.
2 days ago it was 45k-145k, with prediction of 81k.
Today is is 37k-137k, with prediction of 60k.
IHME has no incentive to downplay the severity, yet every time the update the model, they have to adjust it downward because reality had failed to keep up with the model.
Meanwhile, reporting of fatalities has actually gotten looser, with all deaths of tested-positive or presumed-positive individuals reported as covid deaths, regardless of cause or comorbidities (that became universal yesterday, and is why yesterday saw a big increase in deaths despite a huge dropoff in hospitalization over the last 6 days)
In the OP people are talking about 'the models'? Well, who's models exactly? What is the official one? And which ones are going to get widely communicated and have authority in the eyes of the public.
I am not indicating that some group of University researchers, somewhere in America are 'in cahoots' with Donald Trump's political team, for example.
IHME, for example, surely will just publish whatever they think, but this is not 'communication' and not at a national level. The plebes are not reading their data.
What information the government collects directly, the information they chose to highlight in press briefings, the information they want to be communicated in their talking points, how it is presented ... this is controlled and filtered.
I tend to read a lot of left-leaning and right-leaning social media, and IHME's model is the only one that I routinely find both camps talking about and linking to.
Admittedly, on the right, most of the pointing has been to mock or demean it, showing the apparent continual need to revise downward as some sort of evidence of malfeasance or bias -- but even so, the model's predictions are being reviewed regularly on both sides of the spectrum.
On the left, I've also seen people remark on this particular model -- usually holding it up as proof that covid is a serious, scary problem that the Trump Administration is being too casual about.
Each group seeing the model differently, and drawing different conclusions from it -- but people are, in fact, looking at this model and it's predictions regularly.
You can call people you don't like "the plebes", and dismiss them as rubes -- but doing so tells me more about you than it does about them.
It actually is likely that the decrease in cases is more dramatic than the numbers show -- now that the acute pressure on the healthcare system in New York has abated, they're probably detecting a higher percentage of their cases.
(And on top of that, testing has begun increasing again -- we tested 127,000 people today, up from 107,000/day just 6 days ago.)
As I said above, we tested 127,000 people yesterday.
We're at 142,000 today already.