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Comment by glofish | Hacker News Reader

Now ask yourself - do you believe that Louisiana has a more stringent, more accepted and more enforced lockdown than say Massachusetts or Pennsylvania? Yet the epidemic seems to slow more drastically in Lousiana than most other states.

Why is that? Investigating that seems to be more fruitful avenue.

Perhaps there is more validity to the initial theory that the virus is a lot less virulent in high humidity and heat. Many more observations seem to back that. Low number of cases in India or Brazil etc.

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You're cherry-picking. Louisiana is on the low side, but Alabama, Texas, and Georgia are on the high side.

In noisy and unreliable data it's always possible to pick a single data point that supports any desired conclusion. I'd say that all we can conclude is that everybody should stay vigilant.

>In noisy and unreliable data it's always possible to pick a single data point that supports any desired conclusion.

Reminds me of the Principle of Propaganda - You can prove anything if you ignore enough facts or data.

I've been following Georgia's data for a while now, and I actually think they are closer to Louisiana than you realize. Over the last few weeks, it wasn't unusual to see counties stop growing for days at a time only to suddenly jump by 20-30%.

I think there are effects being seen from the lack of early testing rather than an indication of recent spread during the (very recent) higher temperatures.

Like from a few weeks back, the conclusion that COVID-19 will kill 10% of people who contract it, based on the testing from one town in northern Italy.

Or it's just inaccurate data. I wonder how many cases of COVID19 deaths being reported as "pneumonia" [1] (technically correct, but also untrue) as in this story?

Also keep in mind the "excess mortality" [2] - many stories of places where the total death toll has gone up by a lot YoY that the formally reported COVID19 death numbers don't account for.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/not-just-the-flu-coronavirus-...

[2] https://towardsdatascience.com/covid-19-excess-mortality-fig...

India's tests/M is 149. Brazil's 296. Compared to 8894 of USA as of today.

Positive % out of tests: USA ~20%, India: ~5%, Brazil: ~38%.

But at least here in India we test when we are like really really really really sure this person possibly has COVID-19 (if not the very symptoms then either extremely close proximity of a COVID +ve or at a cluster). So that's also there.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Louisiana closed its schools (NB: corrected my earlier contention of went into lockdown) much earlier than NY and closed essential businesses sooner.

Source: I live in New Orleans, returned from Los Angeles March 9.

Louisiana didn't close bars and restaurants until March 16th[1], which seems to be the same day that NY did as well[2]. Anecdotally, people were still gathering and going out in the french quarter right up until the ban took effect.

[1]https://nola.eater.com/2020/3/16/21182099/louisiana-closes-b... [2]https://ny.eater.com/2020/3/15/21180713/restaurant-bar-shutd...

You are right, I misremembered https://twitter.com/skooks/status/1248072346801442817, edited my post above to reflect that.

> Why is that? Investigating that seems to be more fruitful avenue.

To know you have to investigate that you first need the number that indicates that, no?

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