quote:

“They’re at war with the West. This story shows the world what Chinese citizens are dealing with,” he said.

I'm not predicting anything... but if one good thing could come of this it would be if Chinese citizens stood up and over threw the CCP.

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:
Politicians in India are taking a 30% pay cut- Time for Congress and other politicians to follow suit.

quote:

Coronavirus: President, PM, Ministers, MPs to take 30% salary cut for a year

https://www.businesstoday.in/c...ut/story/400283.html

I think PDJT, should do the same thing. Oh wait, nevermind.

Good news from Cuomo today:

Cuomo said the total number of hospitalizations, ICU admissions and daily intubations are down, which "suggest a possible flattening of the curve."

While New York may have reached the apex of coronavirus infections, the governor added, what happens next "still depends on what we do."

Also, the state's health care system "is at maximum capacity today," according to the governor. "The staff cannot work any harder. And staying at this level is problematic."

quote:

“they’re using it for soft power, essentially saying it’s a humanitarian gesture to try to curry goodwill with American people when some of the problems we’re facing are the direct result of Chinese policies.”

Cute.

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
why are the models changing dramatically ?

Just 2 weeks ago NY estimated they would have over a million active cases a few days from now.

Now it looks like NY will have about 10% of that.

NY has 106,024 active cases now

In recent days, NY sees about 10,000 new cases every day.

But NY is also now seeing 1,500 to 1,800 recovered every day

and about 600 deaths per day

put all that together, and that implies NY active cases will be (very roughly) 130,000 on 8 Apr

People started recognizing, it's not just the flu and changed their actions (as well as being forced to). Small changes to behavior make huge changes to the outcome of things like this that grow exponentially. Like if China had been honest, accepted help, and locked shit down early. We wouldn't have the worldwide crisis if they took early action.

People are coming around, if individuals had taken action in the US to stop unnecessary trips in public and practiced social distancing earlier, we'd have even less cases. Instead we have governor's making illegal proclamations about what is allowed and not (see paddle boarder guy).

Even the spring breaker who famously said "if I get corana, I get corona," has apologized.

Each tiny preventative action has a huge effective on the final numbers. That is why numbers and projections are changing so much. It's a moving target, as inputs change and data improves, so does the projections and confidence intervals.

^^^^^^

Oooooooorrrrrrrrr, the projections were simply wild ass guesses that completely missed the mark.

But don't worry, they can take credit for it either way.

a1abdj, Reread the last sentence. Garbage in, garbage out. Better the information, the better the confidence in a projection. If we really want to make a good projection, we should wait until June to do so. We will have much better data at that point and the confidence intervals will be much smaller. Until then, let's do nothing, since right now we don't have the data. It will be much easier to predict that way.

^^^^ I thought we were told even if we did everything perfectly, we would still have 100,000 deaths.

And you're basically admitting that the information and data we have been using was garbage. So we used garbage information to justify complete economic devastation and financial ruin for millions of people?

Balzé, of course the data is garbage, especially given the lies from China combined with information from countries that have different societies and different healthcare systems. It starts off a barely educated guess, and gets more reliable with more data.

I am in no way qualified to make policy decisions, and I'd hate to be tasked with it. There is and has been enough information for a long time to say this should be taken seriously though. Beyond that, we will not know what the correct course of action was until it's over, and we will not fully know how our preventative actions actions affected the outcome.

In a case like this with my limited knowledge, I'd say it's best to err on the side of caution. As an individual, I changed my actions months ago. I don't know the answers, and I don't envy PDJT having to make his best guesses for our country, but I trust him.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:

quote:

Does it look like the modeler's are just pulling this out of their asses?

There is a saying - "All models are wrong. Some are useful." These look wrong, and approaching malfeasance.

Yes.
There is another saying - "Garbage in, garbage out."

May I add: Figures lie and liars figure.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
^^^^ I thought we were told even if we did everything perfect, we would still have 100,000 deaths.

And you're basically admitting that the information and data we have been using was garbage. So we used garbage information to justify complete economic devastation and financial ruin for millions of people?

Winner winner chicken dinner.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
... if one good thing could come of this it would be if Chinese citizens stood up and over threw the CCP.

Interesting idea that I haven’t ever seen raised, either in connection with the pandemic or in the past. I admit I was astonished by the fall of the Evil Empire (USSR) and would have confidently predicted that it wasn’t going to happen in my lifetime (if ever). It seems even less likely to happen in China, though, for a couple of reasons.

One is something I probably first heard when I was in grade school and would no doubt be considered “racist” in some way now, and that’s the (supposed, at least) traditional Chinese respect for tradition and authority. The Nationalists and Communists seemed to falsify that notion to a degree, but that may have been abetted somewhat by the Japanese invasion of the country.

A stronger reason to doubt that the Chinese are going to rise up against the regime, though, is that they’ve had greater motivation to do so in the past than now without making any such attempt. The “Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution were horrible times that were much more clearly the fault of the leadership than this pandemic. I’m not very well informed about current conditions in the country, I readily admit, but it seems to me that the standard of living and life in general isn’t that bad for the average Chinese, unlike conditions in the Soviet Union before its collapse. As for political repression, that’s something people have gotten accustomed to countless times, and especially if they were born into such a system.

As I say, I’ve been wrong before about major political movements, but I would be very surprised if any significant changes result from COVID-19.

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:
a1abdj, Reread the last sentence. Garbage in, garbage out. Better the information, the better the confidence in a projection. If we really want to make a good projection, we should wait until June to do so.

Still won't really make the case, as the argument would logically fail as a post hoc (*). It's a reasonable hypothesis, it's even falsifiable (**), but only a hypothesis.

Unless we were to take two essentially identical populations, have enforced social distancing in one and allow the other to carry on normally, then compare the outcomes: We can't really know.

Yes, I know: "It only makes sense that..." But, still...

(*) Post hoc ergo propter hoc, or "this follows that." The seminal example being "The sun rises after the cock crows, therefor the cock crowing causes the sun to rise."

(**) Falsifiability is the assertion that for any hypothesis to have credence, it must be inherently disprovable before it can become accepted as a scientific hypothesis or theory.

quote:

it seems to me that the standard of living and life in general isn’t that bad for the average Chinese

I would agree, based on the horde of rude Chinese tourists I have seen on my recent trips abroad.

If Sweden stays the course we could have a pretty good data set among the Nordic countries. Sweden is letting it run it course while Denmark is fining citizens for going outside. Slight population difference but very similar otherwise in metrics that impact virus infections and deaths.

quote:

The “Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution were horrible times that were much more clearly the fault of the leadership than this pandemic. I’m not very well informed about current conditions in the country, I readily admit, but it seems to me that the standard of living and life in general isn’t that bad for the average Chinese, unlike conditions in the Soviet Union before its collapse. As for political repression, that’s something people have gotten accustomed to countless times, and especially if they were born into such a system.

As I say, I’ve been wrong before about major political movements, but I would be very surprised if any significant changes result from COVID-19.

sigfreund, I agree with all of that.
You're right, it's not likely... but it is possible. It would be hard to organize because the CCP keeps tight controls on news/information/internet. Still, many Chinese citizens know a lot more about the rest of the world and how it operates now than they did back in the “Great Leap Forward” days.

It's a no-lose for the purveyors of apocalyptic math.

If the CCP falls, I imagine that North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela probably won't be far behind.

Will that leave the United States as the world's last Communist country?

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:

Will that leave the United States as the world's last Communist country?

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
Will that leave the United States as the world's last Communist country?

Huh? WTH are you talking about? I wager that you have never actually lived in a Communist country.

This kind of statement rubs me wrong. I have lived in a Communist country. The US is still a bright beacon of liberty, at least more so than any other country.