Taking it to the Streets - Covid-19 #12

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

24 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

And you are ignoring my point. She's the mayor of the city. She represents the city. I don't know any city that doesn't have a city manager that runs day to day operations. Are you saying city managers in the US overrule city councils? News organizations do not interview the city manager, unless it's on some issue that has come up, they interview the mayor, because the mayor is elected by the people of the city to represent them. That's her job - she represents Las Vegas.

eta: and she won her last election with 73% of the vote. She and her husband have held the position of mayor for decades, so yes, she speaks for Las Vegas.

But that’s all.  She doesn’t have any actual power to issue an executive order to the city government.  Being mayor doesn’t mean she has any power.

If she is a figurehead why interview her at all?  The mayor of New York has power.  The mayor of Chicago has power.  It doesn’t apper that the mayor of Las Vegas has power.

 

[Fragile Bird]

Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

But that’s all.  She doesn’t have any actual power to issue an executive order to the city government.  Being mayor doesn’t mean she has any power.

If she is a figurehead why interview her at all?  The mayor of New York has power.  The mayor of Chicago has power.  It doesn’t apper that the mayor of Las Vegas has power.

 

This is getting ridiculous. I'm not responding anymore, ok?

[Zorral]

Random testing outside supermarkets in the NYC boroughs indicate that 21% of residents had? have? the infection -- this is not clear to me, whether they are sick, asymptomatic, recovered, have antibodies, what?  Upstate, the random testing reveals a startling lower rate.  I don't know what that means either, considering how many of NY state's deaths are in the upstate nursing homes.

https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-cuomo-20200423-alxgtumui5hk3odbusu2yr6kxq-story.html

Moscow Mitch says blue states and NYC are to drop dead, no federal money to them in order to be fiscally prudent -- give it to the farmers!

https://www.nationalmemo.com/mitch-mcconnell-farm-bailout

Elizabeth Warren's oldest brother died of covid 19:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/23/nation/elizabeth-warrens-oldest-brother-dies-coronavirus-oklahoma/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The floated idea that smoking tobacco is a protective habit for this is so counter-intuitive!  First of all smoking has been proved to hurt people's lungs and kill them for years and years and years.  Being a smoker has exacerbated every kind of illness we know, never has it made things better. If it warded off diseases of this nature why didn't it do the Native Americans any good when infected with the die-off respiratory diseases introduced by Europeans?

[Maltaran]

17 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

But that’s all.  She doesn’t have any actual power to issue an executive order to the city government.  Being mayor doesn’t mean she has any power.

If she is a figurehead why interview her at all?  The mayor of New York has power.  The mayor of Chicago has power.  It doesn’t apper that the mayor of Las Vegas has power.

 

Symbolism

[Kalbear]

15 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

But that’s all.  She doesn’t have any actual power to issue an executive order to the city government.

That's true (maybe)

15 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

 Being mayor doesn’t mean she has any power.

That's NOT true. 

being the spokesperson and  the main person to be able to talk to it means she has a crazy amount of influence. The fact that we're talking about it should indicate how much power she does or doesn't have. You're right that she doesn't have legal authority, but don't mistake that for actual power. 

As an example, Trump  announced that he has total authority to tell states when they can and cannot open. He does not have that legal authority, but he has a tremendous amount of power as far as influencing states to reopen. 

 

[Ran]

Also, the SEIR model from FHM is on Github

Quote

 

for those who know how to use the statistical coding stuff.

[Mudguard]

32 minutes ago, Ran said:

Also, the SEIR model from FHM is on Github

for those who know how to use the statistical coding stuff.

Looking through some of their files, it looks like the initial R0 they used varied from 6.6 to 8.2.  That seems pretty high, but there are some estimates in that range.  A study I read provided a range from about 4 to 9 early in Wuhan.  Right now, it's hard for me to tell whether the data actually supports these numbers or whether they are selectively choosing numbers to fit their desired projection.  There's so much noise and uncertainty to the data that it renders the models marginally useful for long term projections (i.e. 30 days or more).  Small errors in estimating R0, the average time of transmission, etc., all can lead to projections that are off by an order of magnitude for 30 day projections. 

That said, testing in early May should be able to validate whether 25% of Stockholm has been infected.  There should be at least several antibody tests that are accurate enough to perform that study.  If true, this would be incredibly good news.  I'm naturally a skeptic, so I'm still leaning to it being wrong, but we shall see.  Many more of these studies should be finished over the next month.

[Zorral]

Rich people believe they are safe and thus have social gatherings.  In secret so they don't get 'shamed.'

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/23/opinions/covid-19-secret-rule-breakers/index.html

Quote

 

Most of the people I talked to are middle class or affluent. It takes money to have a dining table in your backyard in Washington. And a lot of money to have a live-in chef.

It would appear that just as the rich are more easily able to outrun Covid-19 than the working classes, they may also be more able and willing to break the shelter in place rules.

 

Plus, if they do get sick, they get the very best medical attention and treatments.

But a doctored video interview of What About Her Ice Cream Freezer is of enormously more significance in exposing class difference.

[Mudguard]

Some good news and some bad news.

Good news: Preliminary antibody study from New York found that 13.9% of New Yorker's statewide and 21% of NYC residents were positive for antibodies.  The sampling wasn't random, so it's possible that the number are not representative of the general population.  I don't know which antibody test they used from the 100 plus tests that are available, but I hope they chose a good one.  Still, at that high of percentages, the errors from false positives are likely relatively low.  The results support the findings in Germany, Sweden, and other places that the numbers of infected may be much, much higher than originally estimated.  I hope they are tracking these test subjects to make sure that none of them get reinfected later on, which could mean that immunity may be short lived or that there was a problem with the original testing.  It would also be useful to try and determine the number of active infections through PCR based testing of a random sample of the population.

Bad news: a report was accidentally leaked early by the WHO on the results of a controlled trial of remdesivir in China, which did not find any significant improvement in outcomes after treatment with remdesivir.  There are other studies ongoing, so this is not the final nail in the coffin, but I think it's time to adjust any expectations that you might have that this drug will have a significant impact.  At best, the effect is likely to be small.  We'll probably end up adding this to chloroquine on the heap of failed drug candidates.

[Consigliere]

Our lockdown measures in South Africa are going to be eased slightly from 1 May. Our lockdown has been quite strict in that people were not even allowed outside for exercise and the sale of tobacco and alcohol was prohibited which did lead to some looting. The president announced that some business will be allowed to open from 1 May and businesses have been informed to prepare for a phased opening but advised that all persons who can work remotely should continue to do so. Also called on all citizens to wear a face mask when out in public. 

Tobacco sales will now be allowed but the sale of alcohol is still prohibited. Borders will remain closed apart from repatriations. Inter-provincial travel remains prohibited apart from the transport of goods and exceptional circumstances like funerals. Public transport will resume but with stringent hygiene practices and all passengers are required to wear face masks.

An additional 73,000 military personnel have been called up to assist police as well as aiding in services such as water supply and infrastructure. We currently have 3953 confirmed cases with 1473 confirmed recoveries and 75 deaths. 143,570 tests have been conducted (62% by the private sector). Efforts being made to significantly increase testing capacity in the public sector. 

[Zorral]

47 minutes ago, Mudguard said:

The sampling wasn't random, so it's possible that the number are not representative of the general population. 

The stories here used the word 'random.'  Those who were tested had come out of or were going into supermarkets and box stores.  So I dunno. This is the most complete account I've seen:

https://gothamist.com/news/new-york-antibody-test-results-coronavirus

I don't think it indicates more, really, than what we know already: white people with incomes, white people who can self-isolate in less dense areas of the state,  are infected at a significant lower number than everybody else, except, of course, the wealthy.

 

[Fez]

11 minutes ago, Zorral said:

The stories here used the word 'random.'  Those who were tested had come out of or were going into supermarkets and box stores.  So I dunno. This is the most complete account I've seen:

https://gothamist.com/news/new-york-antibody-test-results-coronavirus

I don't think it indicates more, really, than what we know already: white people with incomes, white people who can self-isolate in less dense areas of the state,  are infected at a significant lower number than everybody else, except, of course, the wealthy.

Testing people who are going to a specific type of location is by definition not a random sample, it's a convenience sample. Now, maybe the N is large enough and the convenience is general enough that the selection bias isn't that bad. But it's not a random sample, and we have to bear that in mind.

[Fragile Bird]

This is a great story in the NYT about the development of the idea of using social distancing to fight pandemics.

George W. Bush read a book about the Spanish Flu (imagine, a president who reads books!) and he was so concerned he asked these doctors to create a plan on how to fight the spread of a pandemic. One of them was chosen beacuse he actually knew how to run a hospital. They happened to learn about another researcher's daughter's high school science project about how social groups in high school might be the ideal vector to spread a pandemic, and were intrigued by the ideas. They were at first met with two words, "shut" and "up". But they kept working on their ideas. The project was continued by the Obama administration.

Quote

The effort began in the summer of 2005 when Mr. Bush, already concerned with bioterrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, read a forthcoming book, “The Great Influenza,” by John M. Barry, about the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918.

Mr. Bush’s concern was elevated by a string of new outbreaks caused by infectious diseases transferring from birds and other animals to humans, including an avian flu outbreak that year in Vietnam. Because there was no vaccine for these new threats, they could spread rapidly.

...........................

To develop ideas, the Bush administration enlisted Dr. Hatchett, who had served as a White House biodefense policy adviser, and Dr. Mecher, who was a Veterans Affairs medical officer in Georgia overseeing care in the Southeast.

“‘Someone from the White House is on the phone,’” Dr. Mecher, then 49, recalled his secretary telling him in the fall of 2005, her voice expressing some disbelief.

A blunt-speaking, Chicago-born intensive care physician, Dr. Mecher had almost no pandemic policy expertise. Instead, he was recruited because they needed someone who understood how a hospital actually worked, said Dr. Rajeev Venkayya, who was a special assistant to Mr. Bush for biodefense.

Dr. Koonin, who worked on preparedness planning at the C.D.C., also played a key role.

“Strategic, out-of-the-box thinkers,” is how Dr. Venkayya, who now oversees vaccine production at Takeda, a Japan-based pharmaceutical company, described what he was looking for.

..........................

It was about that time that Dr. Mecher heard from Robert J. Glass, a senior scientist at Sandia in New Mexico who specialized in building advanced models to explain how complex systems work — and what can cause catastrophic failures.

Dr. Glass’s daughter Laura, then 14, had done a class project in which she built a model of social networks at her Albuquerque high school, and when Dr. Glass looked at it, he was intrigued.

Students are so closely tied together — in social networks and on school buses and in classrooms — that they were a near-perfect vehicle for a contagious disease to spread.

Dr. Glass piggybacked on his daughter’s work to explore with her what effect breaking up these networks would have on knocking down the disease.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html

[Whitestripe]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

Testing people who are going to a specific type of location is by definition not a random sample, it's a convenience sample. Now, maybe the N is large enough and the convenience is general enough that the selection bias isn't that bad. But it's not a random sample, and we have to bear that in mind.

FWIW, they tested people at a large grocery store in my little corner of upstate NY. (I don’t happen to go to that particular grocery store on the regular, but I have before.) I don’t remember a whole lot about statistics, but knowing the location and venue, it’s a pretty fair cross section of who lives here.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

38 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

This is a great story in the NYT about the development of the idea of using social distancing to fight pandemics.

George W. Bush read a book about the Spanish Flu (imagine, a president who reads books!) and he was so concerned he asked these doctors to create a plan on how to fight the spread of a pandemic. One of them was chosen beacuse he actually knew how to run a hospital. They happened to learn about another researcher's daughter's high school science project about how social groups in high school might be the ideal vector to spread a pandemic, and were intrigued by the ideas. They were at first met with two words, "shut" and "up". But they kept working on their ideas. The project was continued by the Obama administration.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html

Don't say kids can't change the world.

[The Anti-Targ]

3 hours ago, Mudguard said:

Some good news and some bad news.

Good news: Preliminary antibody study from New York found that 13.9% of New Yorker's statewide and 21% of NYC residents were positive for antibodies.  The sampling wasn't random, so it's possible that the number are not representative of the general population.  I don't know which antibody test they used from the 100 plus tests that are available, but I hope they chose a good one.  Still, at that high of percentages, the errors from false positives are likely relatively low.  The results support the findings in Germany, Sweden, and other places that the numbers of infected may be much, much higher than originally estimated.  I hope they are tracking these test subjects to make sure that none of them get reinfected later on, which could mean that immunity may be short lived or that there was a problem with the original testing.  It would also be useful to try and determine the number of active infections through PCR based testing of a random sample of the population.

 

It's not the best news, since the statewide CFR based on 13.9% of ~19,000,000 infected is 0.8% which is more than double the 0.3-0.37% being talked about a little while back. The NYC data is better looking with CFR coming in at exactly 0.3% (Edit: Googling stats about NYC has me a little confused, one stat said metro NY is 18M, but another bit of information says 64% of NYS lives in metro NYC which is 12M, and City population is 40% (7.7M) and NYC deaths are said to be 11K, so I am not sure what the 21% infected figure represents in terms of population coverage the 0.3% CFR is based on the best case scenario of 11K deahts spread over 18M people, but that could be  / is likely to be wrong). If deaths (and infection) outside NYC are mostly in over 70s and in NYC it's more distributed then that would explain the difference. But this may also demonstrate an indication that a strict lockdown limits exposure to the at risk age groups, whereas a laxer lockdown does not protect those age groups very well. This may be partly because younger infected are still coming into contact with older people who are staying out of public spaces (care workers for example), but also may be partly that older people are envious of younger people being able to live a more normal life and so they engage in riskier behaviour because they want to have a life too. So there may be value in everyone sacrificing more in solidarity to the older age groups, rather than flaunting our greater freedom of movement and social contact.

Non-random testing doesn't mean the numbers are possibly not representative, it means they are probably to almost certainly not representative.

[Kalbear]

38 minutes ago, Whitestripe said:

FWIW, they tested people at a large grocery store in my little corner of upstate NY. (I don’t happen to go to that particular grocery store on the regular, but I have before.) I don’t remember a whole lot about statistics, but knowing the location and venue, it’s a pretty fair cross section of who lives here.

It's a really bad one to gauge, say, people who are staying at home. 

[Zorral]

The first modern pandemic
The scientific advances we need to stop COVID-19.
By Bill Gates

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Pandemic-Innovation

This memo shares my view of the situation and how we can accelerate these innovations. (Because this post is long, it is also available as a PDF.) The situation changes every day, there is a lot of information available—much of it contradictory—and it can be hard to make sense of all the proposals and ideas you may hear about. It can also sound like we have all the scientific advances needed to re-open the economy, but in fact we do not. Although some of what’s below gets fairly technical, I hope it helps people make sense of what is happening, understand the innovations we still need, and make informed decisions about dealing with the pandemic.

[The Anti-Targ]

32 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It's a really bad one to gauge, say, people who are staying at home. 

Probably doesn't give a good picture for over 70's still living independently who are probably getting younger friends and family members to shop for them or having groceries delivered. My mother gets everything delivered and hasn't gone more than 100 metres from her retirement village since our lockdown started.

However, in countries demographically, economically and democratically similar to the USA, UK etc my rule of thumb of Deaths x100 - 200 (1.0-0.5% CFR)= true infection rate is starting to be roughly supported by emerging data attempting to quantify true infection rate. So, if you don't want to wait for antibody testing data to get a rough idea of what your country's infection rate is then just do those simple multiplications and it's very likely your country's infection rate is within that range, and in almost every case it will be at least double the reported rate and 10-20 times more in other cases.

My working assumption is that NZ's true infection number is between 1600 and 3200. Our confirmed number is 1451, so we are not far off the lower end of that range. Australia is 7500 - 15,000 which is also not far off at the low end from the official 6600. The UK, by only reporting hospital deaths, is harder to quantify, but even only counting hospital deaths the number is 1.8M - 3.6M which is 10-20x higher than the official number. My guess for the UK though is they are probably not far off 10% of the population infected / having been infected.

[DanteGabriel]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

This is a great story in the NYT about the development of the idea of using social distancing to fight pandemics.

George W. Bush read a book about the Spanish Flu (imagine, a president who reads books!) and he was so concerned he asked these doctors to create a plan on how to fight the spread of a pandemic. One of them was chosen beacuse he actually knew how to run a hospital. They happened to learn about another researcher's daughter's high school science project about how social groups in high school might be the ideal vector to spread a pandemic, and were intrigued by the ideas. They were at first met with two words, "shut" and "up". But they kept working on their ideas. The project was continued by the Obama administration.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html

I just had to sit down for a minute because George W. Bush, whom I naively thought would be the dumbest and worst President of my lifetime, was at least still a person who read books, was motivated to prevent pandemics, and consulted with experts. It's amazing how quickly the bottom dropped out of the Republican Party.