Don’t Be Fooled by America’s Flattening Curve
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Here are some clearer graphs:
https://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/#currently_... (active cases normalised by population)
https://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/#deceased&p... (deaths, absolute numbers)
When I clicked on it, the very first thing at the top was a graph showing "the number of newly reported cases each day". Since cases cycle out of the total too as the disease runs its course one way or another, if the number of new cases per day becomes flat and/or begins declining then so too will the total number of active cases (after a lag) right? Are you seeing something different from me in the article? I have uBO and NS on but whitelist the nytimes.com and nyt.com domains.
What? After a set period of time, active cases become past cases. People recover (or die). If the number of new cases per day is flat, than the total number of active cases will also become flat (after a delay if it was growing previously). If the number of new cases per day declines, the number of active cases will also decline (all the way down to zero as you say if the number of new cases drops to zero). I am genuinely confused by what you're writing here. "Number of new cases per day" isn't the same thing as an increasing rate of new cases per day.
You are right about active cases.
It's helpful if the X axis is not simply a date but in "days since community spread started", and you're relying on the represented numbers actually mean the same thing which depends on many things.
Here's an example: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-deaths-trajec...
Here's a similar graph I like, with days since 100 cases on the x axis, and helpful doubling rate lines: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/infection-trajectory-flatte...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...
Measuring the number of cases as the testing is being massively bumped out does not measure overload - actual death rate does.
Deaths don’t track 1:1 with hospitalizations because some people die much sooner. The most at risk tend to die within 2 weeks, while others are still extremely sick and can die 6+ weeks after infection. Those people have lower rates of death per day, but may still require ventilators. Thus, a steady rate of new infections can look like a very slow decrease in deaths even as the heath system is getting more stressed.
The number of tests per 1000 people is increasing each day in the US.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...
This means that it is increasingly likely to uncover more cases, independent of how many new infections there actually are.
Where is the data on overloaded hospitals?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-covid-deaths-per-mill...
That death curve is now flat for the last two samples, implying the rate is zero. The graph should be labeled deaths/million/day, which means the acceleration is zero and the velocity is constant.
Sorry, just drives me bonkers when the media tosses about words such as “the economy grew at a rate of ....”. I suppose English is more confusing with “Billy grew 10 cm” (implied over a year), compared with “Billy is growing 10 cm/year”.
It seems impatience will get the best of us. The only way to beat this is with very strict exercising of social distancing for not less than three months, healthy habits, and extreme sanitation. It seems urban areas are not willing to wait 3 months until there is an uncontrolled outbreak.
This may be different, as people don’t take flu as seriously. But America is already loosening up. You also can’t see stuff as clearly in rural areas. The big risks are indoor gatherings at private homes, church, work, and school.
If you aren’t doing those things, you won’t see them happening. Whereas it’s easy to see people walking on an urban street as you drive by, or to watch the news going to a central urban location.
You see this with crime rates. People assume it’s a big city issue due to visibility, but crime rates tend to be higher in rural areas.
Coronavirus may well require urban density, but don’t be too quick to assume it as an axiom.
https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional/flu-hits-rural-geor...
COVID-19 lacks a vaccine, making the flu comparison problematic.
That said you’re likely correct. I found this from cdc, with rates by state. At a glance, rural states have lower rates: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1819estimates.ht...
However, this gap could also be due to health system efficacy in general. So unclear if we might expect worse covid results in places with fewer/worse hospitals.
For underlying data you may need to look at BRFSS.
In places that have opened back up, it isn’t being driven by the urban areas. Georgia and Florida aren’t opened because Atlanta and Miami forced the Governor’s hand. Do you think most of these protesters we’ve seen are from cities or outside?
When I drove to my mothers house in rural area recently there were few people in the grocery store there and most were wearing masks. A few days later I drove to Fort Hood for a military deployment and again everybody in this tiny town of Gatesville were wearing masks in the store and really taking distancing seriously in the store.
Edit: Wanted to add that the legislatures suing the Governor over his stay-at-home order are from rural parts of the state. https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20200429/gop-legislators-qu...
I don't think there is, or ever will be, sufficient testing evidence to justify similar-to-past public interaction until if or when there is a safe and effective vaccine deployed that covers all strains. The prevalence is basically unknown and will only be worse when there is no longer mindshare or patience to keep up the fight... I think nearly all of this socioeconomic pain will be for naught because of the endgame.
And it's definitely worth considering when trying to determine if a lockdown was "worth" it. If you locked down and 10k people died, the lockdown looks a lot worse when 9k of those deaths were due to suicides/"elective" procedures/missed cancer/etc. Especially if only 20k deaths were expected from the disease if there was no lockdown at all...
Exactly. There has already been legal wranglings between DeSantis and the Miami Herald over this.
So I'm going through it today, and one of the columns is total deaths. So for the purposes of this thread, Closed Cases = Deaths + Recoveries, and while there isn't a column for recoveries specifically, you can infer a couple of things from the data that is there.
First, the data sucks. Each State and in some cases, each county health department is responsible for reporting their own cases and deaths, but it seems not every place is making good efforts to track recoveries. If you drill into California and check San Francisco, and it's not limited to just San Francisco, you can see the "Active Cases" over in about the sixth column is only Cases - Deaths instead of Cases - (Deaths + Recoveries). Not all 58 Counties are like this, but you also have outliers like Humboldt where apparently 52 of 54 total cases are recoveries because there aren't any reported deaths and there's only 2 reported active cases.
It isn't limited to just individual counties in California. If you go back up a level to the USA and look at various States, you can see that New York is making some effort to track recoveries because at a glance, Active Cases does not equal Cases - Deaths, it's actually quite a bit lower than Cases - Deaths, which is good. But if you look below New York at New Jersey which has had the second highest number of cases, it would seem like every closed case has been a death, because Active Cases = Cases - Deaths, same probably with San Francisco County in California.
So when I last looked a few hours ago, the United States had about 964K Active Cases. This is probably both an overcount and an undercount. It's certainly an undercount because we obviously have no idea how many people are actively carrying it right now. But it's also an overcount because of the verified cases, recoveries are being underreported.
This bloody chart in the NYTimes is annoying. It is seemingly trying to apply some corrective measures to people's expectations about how much the curve is actually flattening in the country, that it is not equally flattened, and that reporting is fine. It's leaving out half the bloody story which is: recoveries. If the goal is to lead and not mislead with this piece, then by not attempting to address the discrepancy in reported cases and active cases, and how many closed cases are closed because of recoveries and not because of deaths, it will leave people with a sense that maybe the country is in worse straits than we think, or at least different pockets.
To be blunt, nobody knows. They don't know, the Administration doesn't know, apparently half the bloody Governors don't have a clue about a big part of the situation in their own States in addition to almost every other part of the situation, and if you assume that in terms of closed verified cases, recoveries outnumber deaths 4:1, then New Jersey should probably be subtracting somewhere around 30K Active Cases (assuming there have been 4x as many recoveries as their reported 8K deaths).
A lot of people are dying or dead, but what about the other side of this coin? How many are recovering, and why don't we know? Is it really the case that in New Jersey, not a single person has reportedly recovered and all the closed cases are actually deaths? The number that's getting trotted out by the media in terms of cases is 1.2M (implicitly, verified cases rather than actual cases). But we don't currently have 1M verified active cases, we may not even have 900K (yet) but the best available data I can find doesn't even reflect that.
Last week I appeared on a very pro-Trump podcast. The starting point for the very pro-Trump person was freedom and the economy. Numbers like in this article seemed irrelevant to him, or even signs of people trying to seize more power.
If we want to lower the spread of this pandemic, our biggest challenge is influencing people's behavior. If telling people more numbers doesn't influence people how we intend, they may be verifiable and right, but if we want to save lives, including our own, we have to figure out what works.
Elsewhere in this thread somebody wrote
> Another story with tunnel vision.
> I don't pay attention to the NY Times, but have they had any opinion pieces suggesting that maybe the destruction of the economy is also a bad thing? And, maybe, someone besides a reporter or "health expert" should make some kind of attempt to determine if it is even possible to sustain these policies?
> I really feel like I'm in a Tales from Dark Side episode.
Currently the comment is downvoted to near invisibility.
But that perspective is motivating tens of millions of people. If we want to motivate them, we have to figure out how to respond. Spewing facts, however right, if it motivates people to stop listening, or downvoting instead of addressing is a matter of life and death.
How do we respond effectively to people with such views?
"If we do this right and come out of it this summer, we're still going to have to do it again this fall"
You, a living person with a face, have to become more trusted to that individual person than the alternatives. Do not talk about the issue during this 'trust phase'. Only then can you approach that person about their erroneous ideas and thoughts. They then have to decide, freely, what to do. This can take years or weeks to accomplish. That's the summation of a lot of work on the subject.
I don't pay attention to the NY Times, but have they had any opinion pieces suggesting that maybe the destruction of the economy is also a bad thing? And, maybe, someone besides a reporter or "health expert" should make some kind of attempt to determine if it is even possible to sustain these policies?
I really feel like I'm in a Tales from Dark Side episode.
Interesting that you have changed the topic. This is indicative of a broad problem that I am observing: nobody wants to discuss economic consequences and even mentioning this will result in either very heavy down-voting or outright deplatforming[1].
My question is rather specific to how long the economy can last while held in lockdown and whether the Times has ever reported such concerns.
The economy does things like bring us food and pay for the health care that is supposed to save us from the virus. Without the economy, we don't have food and we don't have health care.
If some percentage of the population is actively blocked from having jobs while having no income, no government subsidies, and no savings, then "civil unrest" becomes reality. This is historically true.
[1] If you think that discussion of the economy is somehow a hidden message about 5G, anti-vaxx, NWO, etc., then you really need to take some time to learn economics, and I would also suggest some critical thinking, philosophy, and reading comprehension review.
Wat? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr... No shortage of threads centered around lockdown economy. Not to mention guerrilla subthreads.
Great. I can see why any comment of a person asking to discuss this should be met with so many downvotes they'll get throttled, while everybody else demonstrates their ongoing inability to discuss it, pointing at non-discussions as proof it's been discussed so extensively.
9 days ago, "71 Percent of jobless Americans did not recieve their March unemployment benefit" received 24 comments. Twentyfour! Oh well, I guess the meat is in all those "guerilla subthreads" then.
Three things:
1. What you find interesting might not interest others; if you want to force a discussion on someone, call a hotline;
2. The comment wouldn’t have been heavily downvoted if it weren’t written in this “I’m woke and you sheeple aren’t” tone. (I didn’t even downvote that one for the record.)
3. Vote swings are a thing.
Also, just for your info, “so many downvotes...” a comment can be downvoted five times before it’s dead, so any non-dead comment hasn’t attracted a lot of downvotes. “They’ll get throttled” that’s nonsense, throttling is based on thread depth and comment frequency, not votes.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
Downvoting without argument is the equivalent of calling names, so the answer is no.
> if you want to force a discussion on someone, call a hotline;
Who wants to "force a discussion"? Why do people who don't want to discuss something get to punish those who do? And how is what I quoted not blatant violation of the guidelines?
> The comment wouldn’t have been heavily downvoted if it weren’t written in this “I’m woke and you sheeple aren’t” tone.
The tone is in your reading. Also, you don't know why people downvote, you're simply claiming it. So after you say I shouldn't "break the guidelines by talking about downvotes", you then proceed to talk about downvotes, while claiming things you have no basis for, something I didn't do nor would do, because I don't need to.
* U.S. Economy Shrinks at 4.8% Pace, Signaling Start of Recession
* Coronavirus-afflicted global economy is almost certainly in recession
* Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
* Covid-19: Impact on business sectors and the economy
* Germany's Covid-19 expert: 'For many, I'm the evil guy crippling the economy'
* US factory orders plunge 14.4% as economy grinds to halt
* US GDP shrank 4.8% in Q1 as the coronavirus dragged the economy into recession
* JPMorgan-economy contracting by 40% in second quarter, unemployment reaching 20%
* Coronavirus Ravages China’s Economy–and It’s Just Getting Started
* Trump faces 'biggest decision' on re-opening economy
* Ray Dalio: What coronavirus means for the global economy
* To save the US economy, policymakers need to understand small business 101
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/business/economy/coronavi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/business/coronavirus-econ...
are two examples.
I also don't see any mention of the myriad studies published demonstrating how mortality rates increase in many different ways during periods of economic decline.
This is a false and a simple google search would have proved it (as another poster did). It sounds like you have a predetermined bias. Maybe take your own advice on some of the suggestions you have for other people?
Mentioning how the economy provides healthcare and food kind of undermines your point as those things were never shut down.
This perfectly demonstrates my point.
Those things cannot make up the entire economy because people end up starving to death. Thus, at some point there is no other option but to reopen.
It is notable how you reinterpret my comment:
> The economy does things like bring us food and pay for the health care that is supposed to save us from the virus. Without the economy, we don't have food and we don't have health care.
You also seem to ignore other parts:
> If some percentage of the population is actively blocked from having jobs while having no income, no government subsidies, and no savings, then "civil unrest" becomes reality. This is historically true.
There are essential parts of the economy and non-essential parts of the economy and they can certainly exist without each other. In fact, they did when society’s first formed. Then, they focused on a different level of the hierarchy of needs but it was still an economy. Food was produced and houses were built before cars, cell phones, and video streaming ever existed.
I skipped the last part because while it is true that those things lead to “civil unrest”, you haven’t proved that we meet your own conditionals. What is “some percentage”? What is “actively blocked”?
For example, I see government subsidies all over the place. To the tune of $2 trillion so far with almost certainly more to come.
> There are essential parts of the economy and non-essential parts of the economy and they can certainly exist without each other. In fact, they did when society’s first formed. Then, they focused on a different level of the hierarchy of needs but it was still an economy. Food was produced and houses were built before cars, cell phones, and video streaming ever existed.
> I skipped the last part because while it is true that those things lead to “civil unrest”, you haven’t proved that we meet your own conditionals. What is “some percentage”? What is “actively blocked”?
> For example, I see government subsidies all over the place. To the tune of $2 trillion so far with almost certainly more to come.
You have demonstrated a very poor understanding of economics. Chiefly, you appear to believe you understand everything in the economy since you feel some parts of the economy may be declared as essential or non-essential. This differentiation is impossible, best demonstrated in the I, Pencil[1] essay by Leonard Reed. The economy is more complex than anyone can comprehend.
As far as ancient man, you can, at this moment, give up all the luxuries of modern life and live in the mountains, but if everyone did that there would not be enough food.
The people currently forced out of work were producing things that increased our standard living and contributed to the wealth of civilization. This wealth makes its way, through various and complex ways, to nearly every corner of the economy. You will not be able to be certain there is enough food production or adequate health care without these people taking a part in the productive economy. The longer we go with parts the economy locked down, the more likely that very serious problems arise, such as empty grocery store shelves and hospital closures.
The government subsidies to retail consumers will result in increased consumer price inflation. This was last experienced in the U.S. in the 70s as a result of the "guns and butter" policies of the 60s, which the butter being what lead to the consumer price inflation. The same inflation has not arrived now because the increase in the money supply has been in financial instruments, which causes other problems but hasn't appreciably increased consumer price inflation.
Once higher rates (say, >10%) of consumer price inflation get going, it becomes extremely difficult to arrest. The usual way this is managed is either by increasing interest through Federal Reserve policies, which peaked at around 20% to take care of the inflation of the 70s, or through hyperinflation followed by the issuance of a new currency, which occurs after the value of every single asset has been completely wiped out, with examples if you want to know more being Weimar Republic Germany or Revolutionary War Continental Dollar. Note that interest rates held at less than 3% are still yielding percent of national budget in service to debt at I believe 5%, so if we have the problem of consumer price inflation hitting higher interest rates, the percentage in service to the debt is going to go up very quickly, though not instantly because the bonds have to expire.
Also of note is that a lot of people are complaining that the checks from the government are not arriving, as was popularly demonstrated in a recent clip of New York Governor Cuomo attempting to respond to a reporter asking him about what people who have not received their checks should do. New York is not the only state where there are reports of this problem.
You'll find plenty of discussion of economic issues on right of center forums, with the same sort of downvoting for concerns about opening up resulting in too many cases for healthcare systems to handle. Ditto that it may be wise to limit the total number of people who get it prior to our finding out if we can develop a vaccine for it.
I suspect that's exactly the mechanism, which someone described very well here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23081538
On the tea party side we have these crazy gun toting nuts (I own guns myself) that are yelling freedom and other crazy things regarding the lockdown. Storming government buildings with open carry and at least to me look like fools
Then on the flip side in the Bay Area we have a bunch of tech workers, working from home and being comfy yelling that we cannot open up businesses and everyone is going to die that goes out. I look at my own company internal chat and its basically this.
Unfortunately both sides and a lack of overall national leadership has detracted from the real discussion. Our news agencies on both sides are playing the extremes and nobody is talking about the real issue.
Shelter-in-place does work but its only there to reduce the impact on hospitals. Its not there to prevent people from getting sick necessarily. We don't know how long this virus is going to be around. Maybe it disappears, maybe its here for a year. The whole point of sheltering is so hospitals can continue to work without being overburdened. I think in the Bay Area the hospitals have been extremely under-utilized.
What we need are discussions on how to reopen safely. What type of rules do people need to follow when we do reopen. I don't want to argue what is legally allowed but I think things like wearing masks in public, public temperature checks, more testing and forcing quarantine of those and those that have been around them are all sensible if we want to get the economy going again.
Based on polls, most Americans are for shelter in place and are afraid of economy opening up too soon. The people who are for opening are not concentrated within groups who lost jobs, but are rather spread out over the society.
The thing about lower paid workers is that they are also the most affected by Covid, most likely to get it, more likely to die from it and more likely to know someone who dies. More affected by healthcare price too if they dont die but merely need hospital. You can see that in stats from New Yourk too - middle class people able to work from home and just not as much affected as those who work in low paid jobs.
The place where I see most pressure for opening economy is HN - Bay Area tech workers. People here dont work in meat plants nor in essential services nor in Amazon. Their employers wont have them working in close proximity with other people even when those are having symptoms. They wont get Covid and wont spread it to elderly relatives regardless of whether economy is open or not.
Your claim was that one side is "Bay Area workers telling everyone to stay home". Answering it with "no actually this is not some kind of Bay Area tech only" phenomenon is completely legitimate. There is no rule that we should accept made up divisions between groups of people just because it suits you.
> There are many countries that have sane rules and the exposure rate is pretty damn low.
Sure, lets say German or Czech republic. The sane rules still involved closing stores, limiting amount of people in stores, closed schools, mandated hands sanitation upon entering stores. Mandated masks in public places or plexiglass between shoppers and sellers. Their hospitals also instantly limited non-covid related procedures and were underutilized and still are despite countries slowly opening. Both countries also had citizens who were fairly disciplined. Their top politicians did not claimed it is all hoax by opposing party to destroy the country.
Czech Republic reacted quite fast to first few sick people and mandated masks right away. Germany ramped up testing quickly and super high. They did contact tracing before virus spread.
> We need a leader that helps focus the message on what criteria is necessary to open and how to do it safely.
Maybe start by not forcing both-sides framework on everything. Or making strawman groups of Bay Area tech workers who are definitely only ones making America close.
Had there be elevated testing regime now, opening would be closer. Had there been faster reaction by the start of it all, the New York did not had to happen and America could be where Germany or Czech Republic is. And it does not seem to me that this state of things is both sides issue nor Bay Area techies issue.
Of course without widespread and continuous testing for the virus and antibodies, who knows how to achieve that rate.
I actually am getting an antibody test through Quest tomorrow for $119. That way I’ll know if the chest cold and mild fever I had 6 weeks ago (with still lingering cough) was allergy related or the virus.
Sure, but is it possible to posit that, or to at least discuss, some nuance of at least some variance of some sort:
A. Demand is going to be decreased, and a bunch of people are going to starve to death (or, more likely, take to the streets with their pitch forks and torches).
B. Demand is going to be decreased, and recovery will be difficult.
We now know that half of all European deaths have been in care homes. The elderly in care homes are not significant contributors to the economy. (And over in resource-extraction states, most of the population is often regarded by local thinktanks as "superfluous" – Russia, for example, only needs about 10 million people to run its economy, and it makes little difference whether the virus affects the other ~135 million people!)
Of course, there is a need to flatten the curve so that the virus doesn't begin to affect, by overloading the healthcare system, those demographics that are major drivers of the economy. You also don't want people to be scared of going out and consuming. However, if the curve can still be flattened sufficiently with businesses open, then there is little mandate to call for keeping them closed just to protect that aforementioned elderly demographic.
There are hundreds of commments each day that do the exact same thing. They might get ignored, they might get an answer, and in other contexts, it's even a totally joyous occasion, AKA https://xkcd.com/1053/
> instead of making accusations that people are afraid to talk about something that they have already talked about
Maybe if people want to frame this as an unfounded accusation, they shouldn't blindly downvote a comment like that within minutes of it being posted (not just one or two downvotes either, everybody piling on while they still can).
As it is, it's demonstrated black on white. Or is there anything in my comments I "should have googled", too? What's the rationalization for them being punished? What rules do they violate?
Are downvotes “punishment”?
Was OP accused of violating rules?
How does downvoting prove the point that people are afraid to talk about opening the economy?