“It'll all be over by Christmas” (Part 2)

This means that from the time someone is infected until they die, a month and a half can have gone through.

By the time you take new isolation measures, you have to wait roughly two weeks to see if daily infection rates start to vary. But the lethality at this point, assuming no change in healthcare system overload, can be more or less statically predicted for weeks after the fact.

Those are called "lagging indicators"; the main thing you try to prevent are deaths, which you can lower by reducing the overload on the healthcare systems, which you can lower by controlling infection rates and keeping them low.

Due to the duration of the disease's evolution, you get to see if your policies really worked more than a month and a half after enacting them, which is extremely slow for a disease that propagates at exponential rates. So people look for proxies like infection rates that are still lagging, but far less so.

Do note that the one good metric you want in the end is going to be "excess deaths", which counts the impact of not just the diseases, but of all other side issues that the disease may have caused. This can usually take months up to years to properly account and analyze.

The situation is far different now, with a good chunk of people actively rejecting even basic distancing measures. If you look beyond positive test numbers at the % positive you can see the rates are rising even faster beyond our testing capabilities. And the idea that only 20-30 year olds are getting the disease is wishful thinking - the highest risk situation is from household transmission, at over 80% likely.

Combine high infections with a general disregard of safety and those older populations are bound to be infected as young spreaders interact with their families, at offices, supermarkets, etc. I think this is why the death spike lags a fair bit further than expected.

In the early days patients essentially had to be far along in the progress of the disease to be tested, we simply had very little testing capacity.

Now we are doing many times more tests against a much wider set of subjects. So it is inevitable that we are getting more of the milder cases and cases earlier in their development. This also accounts for the so-called “shift” toward many more young patients.

The disease hasn’t changed. Current testing is sampling a different distribution of patients than previous months had been.

Is seems like your position is that:

--COVID response strategy based on invalid "post-modern science",

--the conclusion that the disease death rate is order of one percent is incorrect

--and therefore, the policy response is grossly disproportionate and harmful.

It seems like you are arguing about facts not values, and you think the disease death rate is not really order of %1. Is this what you mean?

I'm also asking because I have heard many heated statements about "post-modern" science around here as of late that wherein the speaker seems to treat that concept as common knowledge, and then walks off without explaining themselves, but I don't really understand what they are on about.

(I have (unfortunately) already won a few bets like that, but it's always a chance that I am wrong this time, of course).

In fact, there is already a failed prediction in your essay: "but we will fail to see the 'second wave' that was predicted". The second wave happened. Exactly in the way we, "postmodernist scientists", have predicted. I will be the first one to tell you that indeed, there are many problems in modern science. But this is not one of them.

“In the tallies shown on this page, The Times is now including cases that have been identified by public health officials as probable coronavirus patients.”

The daily case count and daily death count initially look like two of the same curve simply shifted — as you might expect.

Since approximately mid-April that has no longer the case and they are fundamentally different curves.

You can see it here if you scroll down to where the daily charts are one above the other;

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...

Something big changed (or several smaller somethings) mid-April to cause this divergence.

If the case count measurement is no longer measuring actual positive cases, that could be a big part of the problem.

Labour and Tory mapped well enough to US politics.

If you were sitting through that process feeling like you knew which way it was going to go one way or the other based upon political tweets then you'd describe it as "snake oil" as the author did, when in fact it was just the normal, albeit accelerated, clinical research process with a lot of noise from the bleachers. My own assessment is any scenarios where preliminary data was less than ideal (eg due to non-randomization) was published in the interest of sharing information due to the urgency of the crisis to help guide further controlled trial development. And look, it worked, most of the drugs who had early papers published with clinical patient data pointing in a positive direction did in fact get into trials. Unfortunately so far there have been no home runs but some solid base hits.

The reality is that most of these kinds of things like using the term "snake oil" to describe HCQ are an obvious "tell" on the part of people who consider themselves immune to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias to be anything but.

> “Our dosing also differed from other studies not showing a benefit of the drug. And other studies are either not peer reviewed, have limited numbers of patients, different patient populations or other differences from our patients.”

I’ve informally been following testing and it seems like every paper published against hydroxychloroquine is either not peer reviewed, the data is suspect and unavailable, or are promoted by groups with financial interest in another solution.

Assuming that hydroxychloroquine in fact has no benefit, there also seems to be limited evidence that it causes complications and has been widely used without issue until this pandemic. If me or my family were hospitalized with COVID, I would push hard for immediate hydroxychloroquine treatment along with whatever schedule was prescribed assuming no known contraindications.

If tomorrow a new treatment emerged and had consistently repeatable results described in peer reviewed journals, I’d gladly change my strategy. Screw media and political fear mongering. Show me repeatable statistics.

Cases != fatalities.

A lot of places are doing a lot more testing. That causes case count to rise. That doesn't mean the disease is spreading beyond control. If it were, the fatality rate would also be increasing, which it's not.

Sorry, but you're going to have to find some other reason to justify your partisan hate boner.

There have been ≈3.5M cases in the US. That sounds awful! That’s out of 35M people tested. At its peak the infection rate for people tested in the US was around 12%. The current infection rate is 9%. The rate is falling, not rising. As more people are tested the numerator increases - it’s a tautology. It’s meaningless without understanding the context.

Media outlets Are going to drown out any rational discussion (and search results) with their hyperbole.

To me personally, the tone comes across as way beyond partisan. It is smug, disgusting bullying.