quote:

Originally posted by maladat:

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Originally posted by trapper189:
I like graphs, especially the ones in color. Let's think about those pretty graphs for a second. They are proporting to show a trend in the number of people infected. That seems simple. How do we find out which people are infected? Well, we test people. Still simple. What happens if we test more people? We'll find more infected people. Simple again.

What happens if we test people faster than the Italians did because we had more time to ramp up our testing capacity than they did?

Lies, damn Lies, and then there's statistics.

If your argument is that we're doing a better job with testing, you might want to reexamine that idea.

As of the day before yesterday, Italy had performed 148,657 tests and the US had performed 41,552. ( https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing )

With more than five times the population, we had performed fewer than 1/3 as many tests.

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Tony Spell, pastor of Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, said no "dictator law" could keep people from worshipping God, according to the local news.

“The virus, we believe, is politically motivated,” Spell told WAFB. “We hold our religious rights dear and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says.

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Originally posted by bozman:
Really... At this point, I can no longer read this thread with the constant negativity, bickering, egos, etc.

I come to this thread for information and the data that can be confirmed with a high level of QA/QC.

At this point, I wonder if some of you wouldn't rather get the virus and succumb to it to prove your were right/wrong. At least the bickering would stop if that were to happen.

Jesus guys, we are all on the same damn team.

Again... With respect.

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Originally posted by maladat:

A calm, rational discussion of data and statistics is not hysteria, but by all means, continue using personal attacks to dismiss viewpoints you don't agree with rather than actually trying to justify your own.

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Originally posted by Dakor:

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Originally posted by maladat:

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Originally posted by RHINOWSO:

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Originally posted by maladat:
Same curve, 10-11 days behind.

If we have the same number of cases as Italy, that's a win, considering we are 5.5 times larger.

Totally irrelevant. When the number of cases is small, the growth in number of cases depends on the number of cases, it doesn't have anything to do with the total population.

The graph I posted shows growth in cases from the day each country reached 100 confirmed cases. It shows the exponential growth of cases in Italy and the US is essentially the same, COVID-19 just got loose in Italy a little earlier.

Unfortunately the numbers are difficult to compare b/c of exponential growth. Go back to 2/21 and there is only a 7 patient difference between the countries. Yet look at the difference between the infected population now between the U.S. and Italy. Do you concur? Also, under what circumstances did the infection spread? The latter is the biggest issue that goes into such an analysis and use of stats is flawed if one doesn't understand the actual drivers to the data.

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Originally posted by Warhorse:
.... if they are being honest and open.

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Originally posted by maladat:


If your argument is that we're doing a better job with testing, you might want to reexamine that idea.

As of a few days ago, Italy had performed 148,657 tests and the US had performed 41,552. ( https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing )

With more than five times the population, we had performed fewer than 1/3 as many tests.

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Originally posted by trapper189:

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:


If your argument is that we're doing a better job with testing, you might want to reexamine that idea.

As of a few days ago, Italy had performed 148,657 tests and the US had performed 41,552. ( https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing )

With more than five times the population, we had performed fewer than 1/3 as many tests.

Over what time period with respect to the graphs? For example, how many tests did Italy process two weeks in and how many did the USA process two week in?

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Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

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Originally posted by Dakor:

Too little information to go by to simply say “well Italy and the US are exactly the same” when it comes to this virus.

Indeed. See the article I just posted.

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A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data
By JOHN P.A. IOANNIDIS

....

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.

....

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Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
An interesting article:

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

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We know enough now to act decisively against Covid-19. Social distancing is a good place to start
By MARC LIPSITCH MARCH 18, 2020

In a recent and controversial First Opinion, epidemiologist and statistician John Ioannidis argues that we lack good data on many aspects of the Covid-19 epidemic, and seems to suggest that we should not take drastic actions to curtail the spread of the virus until the data are more certain.

He is absolutely right on the first point. The U.S. has done fewer tests per capita so far than almost any rich country in the world. And many critical details of the epidemiology — including the absolute number of cases, the role of children in transmission, the role of presymptomatic transmission, and the risk of dying from infection with SARS-CoV-2 — remain uncertain.

On the second point, I would say that his article did what contrarian writing should do: started a discussion. We spoke by phone on Tuesday, not long after his article appeared, and found that we had more in common than it appeared when I first read it.

So without trying to characterize Ioannidis’ view, I will state a strongly held view of my own: We know enough to act; indeed, there is an imperative to act strongly and swiftly. It is true that we can’t be sure either how many infections there have been in any population or the risk of needing intensive care or the case fatality rate. These uncertainties are two sides of the same coin. Nonetheless, two things are clear.

First, the number of severe cases — the product of these two unknowns — becomes fearsome in country after country if the infection is allowed to spread. In Italy, coffins of Covid-19 victims are accumulating in churches that have stopped holding funerals. In Wuhan, at the peak of the epidemic there, critical cases were so numerous that, if scaled up to the size of the U.S. population, they would have filled every intensive care bed in this country.

That is what happens when a community waits until crisis hits to try to slow transmission. Intensive care demand lags new infections by about three weeks because it takes that long for a newly infected person to get critically ill. So acting before the crisis hits — as was done in some Chinese cities outside Wuhan, and in some of the small towns in Northern Italy — is essential to prevent a health system overload.

Second, if we don’t apply control measures, the number of cases will keep going up exponentially beyond the already fearsome numbers we have seen. Scientists have estimated that the basic reproductive number of this virus is around 2. That means without control, case numbers will double, then quadruple, then be eight times as big, and so on, doubling with each “generation” of cases.

To stop an epidemic like that permanently, nearly half the population must be immune. While the exact number of people infected in each population is unknown, current estimates are that for every symptomatic case there is about one asymptomatic or very mild case.

In populations with good ascertainment of symptomatic cases, the number of infections is perhaps double what is observed (in the U.S., where testing is limited, true cases are a much higher multiple of reported cases). In well-tested countries, we can be nearly certain that no population has reached anywhere near half of its people infected. That means that when each country lets up on control measures, transmission will increase and the number of cases will grow again.

It is crucial to emphasize that a pandemic like this does not dissipate on its own, as Ioannidis suggested as a possibility. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 was hammered into submission by intense public health measures in many places, which were effective because transmission was mainly from very sick people. Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which emerged in 2012, is a weakly transmissible infection that causes outbreaks in hospitals, but is otherwise much less contagious than Covid-19.

There are two options for Covid-19 at the moment: long-term social distancing or overwhelmed health care systems. That is the depressing conclusion many epidemiologists have been emphasizing for weeks, and which was detailed in an analysis released this week by the Imperial College London.

Ioannidis is right that the prospect of intense social distancing for months or years is one that can hardly be imagined, let alone enacted. The alternative of letting the infection spread uncontrolled is equally unimaginable. We certainly need more data. Even more than that, we need a breakthrough to make effective treatments, vaccines, or other preventive measures available at scale.

Waiting and hoping for a miracle as health systems are overrun by Covid-19 is not an option. For the short term there is no choice but to use the time we are buying with social distancing to mobilize a massive political, economic, and societal effort to find new ways to cope with this virus.

Marc Lipsitch, D.Phil., is professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics.

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Originally posted by chellim1:
Come on , guys... that's been posted.
Same article posted 3x in a row?