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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 9:52 pm 
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Assume the household sizes are considerably bigger than 2.7, and that there are a lot more units per building than there should be. That neighborhood is noted for overcrowding and illegal sublets of the kind the census taker never seems to hear about. Hell, most of New York City is noted for it.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Wed May 13, 2020 3:46 am 
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It also has something to do with the definition of "household". The census definition of a household is a group of people who live together and share resources and expenses. It says nothing about the accommodations people live in. In most cases you can assume that a household has their own dwelling but this is not always the case. A single dwelling can contain two or more households. A family of three renting out a spare room to a couple gets put down as two households of three and two people, not a single household of five. A homeless shelter with beds for 50 single people gets put down as 50 households of 1.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Wed May 13, 2020 7:18 am 
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I guess those possibilities could explain matters - if the virus is inevitably and immediately spread to everyone in the house.

That two-thirds figure still looks way too big to me, though. Every time I think about it, my intuition starts screaming about the various ways that statistics can be used to lie.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Wed May 13, 2020 7:07 pm 
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Think about it this way. The chances of the virus spreading increases when you spend an extended period with an infected person in an enclosed space. If you walk by someone on the street, your chances of catching it are very low. If you sit next to someone on a bus for 10 minutes, you may or may not get it. If you work together with someone all day long at the supermarket, your chances of getting it are higher. If you live with someone who has the virus, in a tiny NYC apartment, your chances of getting it are extremely high indeed.

Most New Yorkers aren't doing very much or going places right now. So for most people, their primary risk factor is someone they share a dwelling with bringing it home.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Wed May 13, 2020 8:25 pm 
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If you share a dwelling with an infected person it's all but a given you're going to get it. Unless everyone wears a mask all the time in their own home then the sick person is going to taint all the dishes and silverware just by breathing at the table. Now once you know they're sick (assuming they ever show symptoms) you can banish them to some bedroom and make them wear a mask 24/7; but by then it's basically three days too late. Even if you somehow avoid breathing in their air you still put the virus in your mouth.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 14, 2020 3:44 am 
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Weremensh wrote:
Unless everyone wears a mask all the time in their own home then the sick person is going to taint all the dishes and silverware just by breathing at the table.

Considering that it is impossible to eat with a mask on, they're certainly spreading their germs. Some people's innate immune systems might be more able to resist infection, but they're definitely going to be exposed. Plus it's probably impossible to avoid sharing a bathroom with anyone else in a typical NYC apartment. And these viruses can stay active on smooth hard surfaces for days.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 14, 2020 7:46 am 
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It's always possible that my intuition is miscalibrated for this situation. More than possible, in fact.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 14, 2020 7:58 pm 
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Bit of a no brainer (on several levels), but Trump refused to treat this epidemic as a public health problem because he was afraid it would spook the stock market. Jared told him so, after all.

Republican perfidy, Nebraska style: cover up the cases at meat packing plants, hide the cases at nursing homes and of course keep neighboring states in the dark when their citizens are involved.

Nationally, try to get the CDC to falsify their numbers down, keep mum about climbing case numbers in the red states which are now 'reopening', defund coronavirus research because the researcher pointed out that the virus was not created in a Chinese lab, and while everyone is looking at the virus poison a few babies.

An interesting thought: how are we going to do contact tracing when the cases involve the low rent cretins who are up in arms about wearing masks? Sure, we can pull all their phone data and determine where most of them have been in three dimensions and who they were with for the last few weeks; but that's hardly going to be the first choice of the criminals in the White House who are urging them to spread the virus, now is it? Absent their buy in or significant duress, the cretins are the reservoir the virus will live in while the rest of the country deals with this mess.

No great surprise here, but going for herd immunity without a vaccine remains a fast way to kill a few million Americans.

Oh, and of course with some 27 million people losing their health insurance it's vitally important that the Affordable Care Act be killed just in time for the next big spike in Covid cases. I'm sure the Supremes can't wait to hear this one.

Finally, just because I find it amusing: a tweet that "29.8% OF ECONOMISTS SAY STATES REOPENING ECONOMIES AT RIGHT TIME, 31.6% SAY STATES REOPENING TOO SOON, 14% SAY REOPENING OVERDUE, WSJ SURVEY SAYS" attracted the response 100% of epidemiologists surveyed say economists should stay in their lane. Those epidemiologists are getting a bit tired of this, I suspect.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Fri May 15, 2020 9:15 pm 
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That thread you linked to about contract tracing, where the author claims that countries where they've done that are deferential to authority?

May I remind him that we had kids catapulting Molotov cocktails at police armoured vehicles less than 6 months ago?

Deferential to authority my arse. No, we cooperated with contact tracing because we damn well know that pandemics are serious business, and because we can tell the difference between garbage political leaders and the apolitical public health system.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sat May 16, 2020 6:52 pm 
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I suspect they were more considering Singapore and South Korea than Hong Kong.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sun May 17, 2020 11:38 am 
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I'll give you Singapore but Koreans held massive protests and impeached their last president over corruption. And in the distant days of 2005, visiting Korean protesters in HK (WTO conference) were regarded by locals as scarily hardcore.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Mon May 18, 2020 7:41 am 
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IMO culture regarding deference to authority is more complex then degrees of docility.

And my impression of the US is that they have a comparable strong streak of unorganiozed NIMBY stubbornness (for lack of a proper name). Sort of the idea, that if you are an upright citizen in good standing, you don't need to keep track of laws and commands by the government, because if the government tells you to do things differently, then you always did, it's tyranny. Or the "I have rights, i can't enumerate them or explain how they refere to this situation, but you commanding me around sure violates them".

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 9:38 pm 
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The other thing is that over 40% of deaths in New York State were in nursing homes. I read that Cuomo ordered nursing homes to accept not yet fully recovered COVID patients in order to free up hospital beds. That seems like the worst idea ever.

Cuomo is better at playing a good leader on TV than he is at making decisions. He's yelling at homeless people for sleeping in and presumably contaminating subway cars (where are they supposed to go?), and continued to cut Medicaid even after the outbreak started.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 11:15 pm 
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Yeah, it didn't help that he spent a week or two playing politics with NYC when the epidemic hit.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Tue May 26, 2020 3:23 am 
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So, as from Monday we're going down to merely a level three lockdown.

This is in contrast to the level five lockdown that we started out at (summary: if you're outside your own property, then you'd better be either buying food, or visiting the doctor, or working in a doctor's office or grocery store or other 'essential service'), and in contrast to the level four we dropped to after a while (permitting a wider variety of stuff to buy, and a wider variety of workers to return to various work). Now (as from Monday) almost everyone goes back to work - but are cautioned to use masks, maintain social distancing, wash hands frequently, and so on. With the distinct possibility of certain regions going back to levels four and/or five if necessary. Or perhaps dropping to level two or even one in certain circumstances... though since the entire lockdown rules seem to be getting created and adjusted at pretty much the last minute, it's anyone's guess what level two or one would look like in practice.

There have been a number of complaint about the detail of our lockdown regulations (in particular, there's a lot of unhappiness - especially among smokers - with the idea that cigarette sales are banned right down into level three, and there's some questions over whether there has been sufficient delivery of food parcels to those unable to find another source of food); but in broad strokes, it seems to have mostly worked so far.

That is to say; of the twenty-three-odd thousand people who are known to have the virus in the country, a teensy smidge over half have recovered; of those who have had the virus, and either lived or died, a little under 4% have died. The numbers of people who have the virus at all has been kept lower than it would presumably otherwise have been... but the number of people who have the virus at all is still growing. And (despite some very quick improvisation during the lockdown) we only have a limited number of hospital beds... people who get the virus after those run out are going to be in trouble.

We're still at the start of this. We haven't hit the really bad news time yet.

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