Calm the F**K Down! - What is wrong with everyone?

I'll just leave this here. Until these graphs are levelling or dropping, arguing about numbers is a waste of energy.

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

coronasceptic wrote:

here's a number wrote:

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

dude......just stop

is this prediction going to be as accurate as 'we'll only have 1600 more cases MAX by April 1" ?

(in case you missed it, we just had 1,800 in ONE day.)

There were NOT 1,800 new cases in one day. The testing has been ramped up so 1,800 cases were IDENTIFIED. As testing expands the identification of already existing cases will be captured.

LOL, you better check out this study and pray the god that your health system can deal with the thousands of simultaneous critical care patients that will need ICU stay for 1-3 weeks

coronasceptic wrote:

coronasceptic wrote:

Not according to highhoppingworm. The number of actual new cases is much higher than the number identified by testing. I was asking what the actual number is, not the test results. He has the information.

Another unanswered question: The total number of Covid deaths in the US is now approximately equal to the daily accident death total on our roads. Why isn't everything shut down permanently - to save lives.

Are automobile accidents deaths doubling every week? ? ?

If a new car came out that was projected to double traffic deaths every 10 days.......you don't think people would freak out ? ? ? You think that car would be allowed on the road?

coronasceptic wrote:

I'm looking at the numbers, every day, in every country. I do not see anything nearly as serious as the number of flu deaths, auto accidents, suicides every year. I know the numbers will grow in the US, but I just don't see the millions of deaths on the horizon that we're being commanded to believe.

And if you're going to throw out some number below "millions", why is 25% unemployment, worldwide despair, inflation the answer?

Why do you think China shut down an entire region, built new hospitals, and plunged its economy into recession if they didn't think the threat was real? Was it just a hoax by their liberal media to take down their president?

Also, I don't understand why you think the number of auto accidents, etc. is relevant to coronavirus. Yes all those other deaths are human tragedies but the difference is they are spread out evenly throughout the year and the country so there is no undue pressure placed on our healthcare system.

Our health care system is not set up to deal with the type of large spikes that are anticipated. What happens if someone has a heart attack and the hospitals are full? Or if someone is seriously injured in a auto accident but there are no available medical personnel? It's not just the absolute deaths it's what happens if we can't provide treatment for everyone that needs it. You can't see that would be a problem?

Thanks for this post. The hubris of "Facts," corasceptic, dunes, and wigins is appalling. All these self-appointed experts who are "looking at all the numbers" and "just not seeing" what all the actual experts are are the perfect embodiment of the aphorism, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." These guys (like all of us) have access to a ton of numbers but don't have any knowledge to compare, interpret, or extrapolate from them.

But, like Trump with his "knack for this" and his uncle who worked at MIT, they assume that their native smarts (such as they are) qualify them to have insights that discredit those of people who have studied a given subject for decades. They call this common sense, which I suppose is an admirably (if irrelevantly) democratic way of looking at intelligence. These are the same guys who deny anthropogenic climate change (always claiming that the experts are ignorant of some factor that is perfectly obvious to themselves) and the effects of the Vaporfly, despite numerous studies, statistics, and anecdotes. It is a knee-jerk, almost sociopathic, response to living in a world where other people are smarter than oneself--and it would be only annoying if it weren't so dangerous.

Look, we all know that the fatality rate of Covid-19 will likely not turn out to be as ghoulishly high as it seems now, because so many more are infected with it than we realize. But the absolute numbers of deaths in Italy and Iran should make us take this seriously. And the argument that underlying causes and preconditions can explain some vast majority of deaths in other countries should not bring anyone comfort; those same risk factors--smoking, diabetes, obesity, compromised environment--pertain in the U.S. and will lead to similar outcomes. Why this would be a reason to discount the danger of this virus is beyond me.

But this gang of know-nothings--as evidenced by their marshaling of suicide rate and car accident statistics--is more interested in "winning" some theoretical argument than reckoning with the totality of the facts. If they can outmaneuver others by making multiple similar arguments (rather than trying to defend just one) and by pulling in unrelated information and implying correlation or relevance where there is none, they hope to flood the arena with gibberish and drive out more sober-minded, serious people. That is how they win. I am not sure how to play this game, myself. I hate the idea of a public sphere overrun by the loudest, most idiotic among us--but I also hate the idea of wasting time arguing in good faith with know-nothing nihilists. It's tough to know how to proceed. In the meantime, I'm staying in.

Haha. Right on

Vancomycin wrote:

It's hilarious how you've pivoted from "this is all useless" to "the containment measures are necessary, but the panic is dumb" and now back to the "there's no evidence for significant lethality."

Seems like you are just trolling for whatever gets you bites. It's working. Nice work

What would make you accept this is NOT overblown? Honest question.

First of all, you must be one of those one dimensional thinkers that cannot hold more than one thought in your brain at one time.

A) I never said this was ALL useless, I think Some things are overboard, others are warranted

B) I'm fine with containment, just not fine with the scare tactics

C) The panic is extremely dumb

D) It's not even close to being as deadly as the flu

I don't know what pivot you are talking about, the message has been crystal clear. But, since you asked nicely, here you go.

I obviously believe the coronavirus is real and it kills people and that's bad. I obviously know it's a threat and should be taken seriously. What I do not believe, is that the news media needs to keep a running ticker of how many new infections there are each day, because that's bullsh!t. They are inciting panic and what they are reporting is not real. More testing does not indicate that the virus is rapidly spreading, it indicates that we are finally testing more people. All I hear is "____ new cases today as cities lock down. Blahh Blahh Blahh. It's bullsh!t.

I don't know why people hate numbers, You can land a rover on mars within a few yards of your target all with math. This virus shows no signs of being as deadly as the flu. The experts are using fuzzy math. In the same breath that they say there are probably thousands if not hundreds of thousand more infected people, they will quote you a death rate anywhere from 1% to 20%. That's not math, that's bullsh!t. If I want to know how safe airplanes are and google the death rate, I get the number of deaths as compared against ALL FLIGHTS, not just the number of deaths as compared to people on planes that crashed. Saying that the death rate is confirmed cases divided by known deaths is a lie. That is not how they calculated the flu death rate. It's a lie now and it will always be a lie no matter how many times an "expert" says it.

What would make me believe it's not being overblown?

How about some evidence that the virus is actually as deadly as they want you to believe. As I've stated so many times, the coronavirus doesn't come anywhere near to keeping pace with the flu deaths. You can say that's because the flu is established, or because the coronavirus hasn't mutated, or whatever reason you want to say, but that doesn't change the fact that each and every single day, the flu kills more people in the United States than the coronavirus does. That's not a guess, it's not a projection, it's a fact!

What if I told you that back in 1718, over a 6 month period, a virus spread through Africa where 48 million people got sick, just shy of 1 million of them required hospitalization and 80,000 died. Would you call that a pandemic? Would you be afraid if that happened now? Well, guess what, what I just described was the 2017/2018 flu season here in the United States. No one called it a pandeminc. There was no panic, no stock market crash, no daily count on the news, which would have averaged 444 people per day. Imagine on the news each night.

Another 266,000 people were infected today and another 444 have died from the _______. I guess the flu is not sexy enough tor prime time.

This response is not in proportion to the threat. They took a serious situation and turned it into a side show.

When will I accept that it's NOT overblown? When will you accept that it IS,

22,000 is still more than 115

370,000 is still more than 7324

Don't read this. It's from an expert and it makes way too much sense. Plus I'm not sure your attention span will hold for the lengthiness of the article. If by chance you do read it please feel free to construct an educated response if you do desire to strengthen your argument.

A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data

By JOHN P.A. IOANNIDIS MARCH 17, 2020

The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.

At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact.

Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the pandemic dissipates — either on its own or because of these measures — short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable. How long, though, should measures like these be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?

Vaccines or affordable treatments take many months (or even years) to develop and test properly. Given such timelines, the consequences of long-term lockdowns are entirely unknown.

The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.

This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.

The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.

Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.

That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.

Could the Covid-19 case fatality rate be that low? No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes. In fact, such “mild” coronaviruses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter.

These “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, though the vast majority of them are not documented with precise testing. Instead, they are lost as noise among 60 million deaths from various causes every year.

Although successful surveillance systems have long existed for influenza, the disease is confirmed by a laboratory in a tiny minority of cases. In the U.S., for example, so far this season 1,073,976 specimens have been tested and 222,552 (20.7%) have tested positive for influenza. In the same period, the estimated number of influenza-like illnesses is between 36,000,000 and 51,000,000, with an estimated 22,000 to 55,000 flu deaths.

Note the uncertainty about influenza-like illness deaths: a 2.5-fold range, corresponding to tens of thousands of deaths. Every year, some of these deaths are due to influenza and some to other viruses, like common-cold coronaviruses.

In an autopsy series that tested for respiratory viruses in specimens from 57 elderly persons who died during the 2016 to 2017 influenza season, influenza viruses were detected in 18% of the specimens, while any kind of respiratory virus was found in 47%. In some people who die from viral respiratory pathogens, more than one virus is found upon autopsy and bacteria are often superimposed. A positive test for coronavirus does not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.

Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?

The most valuable piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that’s information we don’t have.

In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work. School closures, for example, may reduce transmission rates. But they may also backfire if children socialize anyhow, if school closure leads children to spend more time with susceptible elderly family members, if children at home disrupt their parents ability to work, and more. School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.

This has been the perspective behind the different stance of the United Kingdom keeping schools open, at least until as I write this. In the absence of data on the real course of the epidemic, we don’t know whether this perspective was brilliant or catastrophic.

Flattening the curve to avoid overwhelming the health system is conceptually sound — in theory. A visual that has become viral in media and social media shows how flattening the curve reduces the volume of the epidemic that is above the threshold of what the health system can handle at any moment.

Yet if the health system does become overwhelmed, the majority of the extra deaths may not be due to coronavirus but to other common diseases and conditions such as heart attacks, strokes, trauma, bleeding, and the like that are not adequately treated. If the level of the epidemic does overwhelm the health system and extreme measures have only modest effectiveness, then flattening the curve may make things worse: Instead of being overwhelmed during a short, acute phase, the health system will remain overwhelmed for a more protracted period. That’s another reason we need data about the exact level of the epidemic activity.

One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.

In the most pessimistic scenario, which I do not espouse, if the new coronavirus infects 60% of the global population and 1% of the infected people die, that will translate into more than 40 million deaths globally, matching the 1918 influenza pandemic.

The vast majority of this hecatomb would be people with limited life expectancies. That’s in contrast to 1918, when many young people died.

One can only hope that, much like in 1918, life will continue. Conversely, with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake.

If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.

John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center.

Great rebuttal! Nice work

Lol Facts Matter is an 8chan troll

Now ask yourself: how do I know whether I have an underlying health condition or not?

This is the UK report that rattled our own government the other day to ramp this up so significantly.

It will be fairly easy to see if things are as dire as it warns, much like the "10 Days to Collapse" thing that's running out of time, but like a lot of things, if we follow what it suggests, things WON'T be as bad, and many will wonder why we took action at all.

Read it. If not, the story is basically this: Millions dead in the US if we do nothing, 1-2 million dead if we continue as we are right now. China-style lockdown to cut the number of deaths into the single- or double-digit thousands. Vast numbers of the dead will be in the 70s and 80s age groups.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

I just wanted to say I found this post to be extremely well-written.

I get it. It's not really about the corona virus but the world's idiots.

Would be a great post, were it not so terrible wrong. The earth is not flat, man made climate change is real, science is real and Trump is an idiot. So now what do you have?

You seem to be the one who doesn't believe in science or facts. I gave you facts. Facts about flu deaths, facts about coronavirus deaths as reported to us by the experts that you love so much. One is higher than the other. If you want to believe that will change and the coronavirus will catch up or surpass the flu, YOU are the one speculating, not me. I don't know why you twits don't understand that. YOU are the ones that are spreading lies based on guesses, fear and junk science. All I do is report the facts.

Get over yourself Bozo, your projecting is obvious. You are not as bright as you think you are.

It is insane that the "deniers" argument is now: we should WAIT until millions are infected, hundreds of thousands in critical care, tens of thousands dead, and unlimited growth unstoppable before we do anything. How can they possibly think that makes sense in their head?

highhoppingworm wrote:

You do understand that actions that save lives (AKA keep death tolls below the millions) are the same actions that generate economic impact right? These aren't two non-correlated things.

WTF dude?

Please stop comparing death rates to the flu for once : due to the speed this virus spreads this is about managing a logistical problem in hospitals. Try to read that sentence a few times and maybe you at last understand the problem.