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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Right. And a whole lot more people appear to have it than confirmed numbers suggest. https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...iously-thought

Everyone understands that the number of real cases much exceeds the number of reported cases, which was one of the main issues in The Atlantic piece I linked a few days ago. There seem to be some rather fundamental problems with the Stanford/Santa Clara study reported in the Guardian piece, which you can find discussed all over the place if you care to look.

There is also a good bit of limited thinking at work here:

1. People flip about about acute and sudden deaths but don't focus on deaths over time (9/11 effect; school shooting effect, etc.);
2. People are highly suggestible when shown doom porn, and the media is feeding them a steady diet of that: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4...d-help-reelect
3. Americans are generally confused by math: https://theconversation.com/math-mis...ovid-19-134520

I am old enough to remember six weeks ago when some of us were flipping out about what we were hearing from informed medical sources, and others of us were telling everyone that this is just flu. You can put that episode in your "limited thinking" files.

The unknown denominator is a devil here. We know it's really fucking high based on all studies of controlled groups to date (the cruise ship was something like 50% asymptomatic). But we also know the death rate is under-reported, and adjustments in the numerator change findings more than small changes in the denominator.

In other words, it's both the numerator and the denominator that are uncertain.

But we know that even if there were a lot of covid deaths attributed incorrectly to other causes, it still was not a significant amount. You saw no news stories in January or February talking about strange upticks in deaths. You did hear stories about a nasty flu, but even then, the flu death numbers weren't unique.

To the contrary, we have seen solid reporting that the actual deaths from the virus can be 10x the numbers of people who are tested, in places like Italy, Spain and New York.

And now more than .1% of the population of NYC is dead, which shows both that the disease is much deadlier than the flu and that it hasn't been circulating widely yet undetected in other parts of the country.

We had to flatten the curve, and we have to protect doctors. But there is a much needed discussion about how long and to what extent such efforts have to be kept in place. And people need to get over this kneejerk emotional need to make everything an argument of absolutes. This is an argument about balancing things moving forward. Which is a very positive message. People screaming, "If we go back, we're doomed!" are not helping anything. The question is to what extent and in what fashion do we start wading back into the pool?

"We" have been having this conversation, in the sense that "we", by which I mean both Icky and myself, have said you can't get anywhere close to normal until you have really widespread testing and the ability to isolate people who test positive and do contact tracing. That is "the fashion" in which we start wading into the pool. I'm more optimistic that this will happen in California than anywhere else in the country, because our infection rate seems to be low, our state and local authorities have done a good job, and it's pretty easy to stop people at the border and test them.