Quote from: Pat;1126642Not true.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-is-far-higher-than-reported-11585767179

There can be both undercounting and overcounting going on at the same time & place.

Quote from: Pat;1126642Not true.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-is-far-higher-than-reported-11585767179

That doesn't actually contradict what I said. It merely speculates that the actual death toll may be higher because hospitals are over capacity and many people who die aren't being reported, which may well be the case. But the article itself mentions at some point that not everyone who has died is being tested because the hospitals are over capacity as it is. So we don't know.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1126641You're still not addressing or refuting a single actual thing I said

It's grouping all your arguments and addressing them all with one refutation - the basis of everything you said is an unproven, unsupported conspiracy theory which is flawed for the same list of reasos I gave for all conspiracy theories.

It makes you look foolish. Like you're one of those guys who thinks he's smarter than everyone else when he's actually dumber.

Clear enough? It's impossible to respond to a conspiracy theorist. For example, if given a list of 10 things the media says, if you show 1 is wrong then the fact that 9 things they said are correct gets warped into "If 1 was wrong, how do we know the others are not also lies just cleverly disguised". If I say, "the people who died who had the virus almost entirely died from the virus and all medical sources say they did" a conspiracy theorist just claims those medical sources are lying. See, that's how conspiracy theories work - they are based on assumptions which cannot be disproven while demanding 100% proof for any claims made against the theory.

It's foolish thinking. Smart people don't base their beliefs on conspiracy theories and then find vague allegations to support those theories while ignoring anything which runs counter to the theory. You are behaving like a fool.

Quote from: S'mon;1126644There can be both undercounting and overcounting going on at the same time & place.

That's the point. It's not an uncontroversial statement to say they're counting everyone who's been infected. In fact, it's just flat out wrong. They may be overcounting where there are relatively few cases, but they're also undercounting where the system's under stress. In many cases, they're having to make clinical diagnoses without benefit of tests, and since it shares many symptoms with the seasonal flu, it's impossible to be conclusive. Pretending these numbers are exact and certain is silly, and claiming they're being deliberately fudged is an extraordinary claim that requires, well, at least some evidence.

Also, the argument that some people will die of other things while they just happen to be sick with COVID-19 is true, but largely irrelevant. If someone fell off a cliff while coronavirus positive, the doctor will probably correctly attribute the cause of death to falling off a cliff. But if that person is dying of cancer, then it's probably the coronavirus that killed them because the disease is acute, with a mean time between infection and death of roughly 2 weeks. If the expect time to death while suffering from another terminal condition is longer, it's a safe bet to say the novel coronavirus is the cause.

Quote from: Mistwell;1126646It's grouping all your arguments and addressing them all with one refutation - the basis of everything you said is an unproven, unsupported conspiracy theory which is flawed for the same list of reasos I gave for all conspiracy theories.

It makes you look foolish. Like you're one of those guys who thinks he's smarter than everyone else when he's actually dumber.

Clear enough? It's impossible to respond to a conspiracy theorist. For example, if given a list of 10 things the media says, if you show 1 is wrong then the fact that 9 things they said are correct gets warped into "If 1 was wrong, how do we know the others are not also lies just cleverly disguised". If I say, "the people who died who had the virus almost entirely died from the virus and all medical sources say they did" a conspiracy theorist just claims those medical sources are lying. See, that's how conspiracy theories work - they are based on assumptions which cannot be disproven while demanding 100% proof for any claims made against the theory.

It's foolish thinking. Smart people don't base their beliefs on conspiracy theories and then find vague allegations to support those theories while ignoring anything which runs counter to the theory. You are behaving like a fool.

You have nothing, so are instead appealing to a hypothetical straw man of what you speculate I might say and are calling that a "refutation" cuz you don't know the difference between making wild accusations while misrepresenting what people said and actually refuting their stated points. Got it.

Quote from: SpinachcatDr. Birx even admitted the death toll is bullshit. She said "If Someone Dies With COVID-19 We Are Counting That As A COVID-19 Death". What a joke!

Quote from: Pat;1126649Also, the argument that some people will die of other things while they just happen to be sick with COVID-19 is true, but largely irrelevant. If someone fell off a cliff while coronavirus positive, the doctor will probably correctly attribute the cause of death to falling off a cliff. But if that person is dying of cancer, then it's probably the coronavirus that killed them because the disease is acute, with a mean time between infection and death of roughly 2 weeks. If the expect time to death while suffering from another terminal condition is longer, it's a safe bet to say the novel coronavirus is the cause.

I'm with Pat here. Spinachcat and VisionStorm are describing this as if it is laughable overcounting. Given a new disease and limited resources, it's not like we can do exhaustive autopsies on all covid-19 deaths. Under the current circumstances, it's a clear and reasonable simplification. If someone who dies has both heart disease and covid-19, or both cancer and covid-19, then it's quite reasonable to count that as a covid-19 death.

I gave a specific analysis before about expected deaths, in Post #164. If there are a million people actively infected, we'd expect roughly 200 deaths over the last ten days from other causes in that group. That's an insignificant correction on the 50,000 deaths we have actually seen, and still is even if twenty times as many people are actively infected.

Plus, as others have noted, there are also known sources of undercounting because of limited testing.

Greetings!

I'm not sure where the deep passion comes for conspiracy theories. The Chinese government knew X, the American government knew X but failed at Y. Geesus. It is non-stop on the internet and sub-news, like every other day. So many of these fucking journalists speculating on a thread of puffy maybe evidence, if this, maybe that, they should have known X, blah, blah, blah.

I am far more confident of Occam's Razor at work. People--and governments--are full of fear, anxiety, greed, ambition, and sheer incompetence and baseless, career-saving smug arrogance--all eager to say the right things to the throne so as to secure their career and make themselves otherwise look good, smart, and deep. I think lots of things--like the virus we have here--takes them all by surprise, blows their smug models down the shitter, and makes them all feel powerless and stupid as fuck, as most of them don't have a fucking clue what to do about the virus. It's all a big clusterfuck, with them groping in the dark in the shower room, trying to find the bar of soap that fell on the floor.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Also, a bit about Italy.

Quote from: Jaeger;1126630Actually, New York, New jersey, and Detroit followed a similar philosophy to some regions in Italy early on:
https://in.news.yahoo.com/italy-launched-hug-chinese-campaign-065339340.html

Luckily, the rest of my country listened more to Trump and was a bit more proactive and prudent.

Nobody got it perfect.

I agree that no one got it perfect. But I think you're mischaracterizing Italy here. This was a singularly ill-considered campaign in the city of Florence, but it doesn't represent national Italian policy. On the national level, Italy instituted a travel ban to China earlier than the U.S., and it was more complete.

QuoteItaly imposed a ban on flights from China on 31 January, immediately after a Chinese couple in Rome tested positive for the virus. The U.S. began to restrict flights from China four days later. But while Italy enacted a full ban, the U.S. policy was only a restriction, with wide exemptions.

On February 4 the U.S. State Department issued a level 4 travel advisory mandating that foreign citizens who had been to China be turned away, and Americans who had been to China must undergo screening and possibly be put in quarantine for 14 days. But the restrictions contained wide exemptions, largely because of fears over the economic impacts of a full ban. Flight routes between the U.S. and China have been steadily cancelled over the past month, but in a piecemeal fashion and at the discretion of airlines.

By contrast, the Italian ban four days earlier was complete, with no exemptions. Italy was the first and only EU country to have a flight ban from China, and yet the country is now the epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak in Europe with the highest number of cases outside China.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2020/03/12/italy-banned-flights-from-china-before-americait-didnt-work/

QuoteItaly was one of the first nations to quickly impose a travel ban on all flights from China after detecting its first case of the novel virus on January 29, 2020. The following day, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte declared a state of emergency for a minimum period of six months. But within 20 days, that single case had ballooned into more than 12,000.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/worse-than-war-how-coronavirus-in-italy-proliferated-to-a-breaking-point

Given that Italy had an earlier and more complete ban, it seems to me that the travel ban is clearly not key to fighting the virus. It seems more like a Maginot line to me -- largely ineffectual.

Quote from: Pat;1126634And your solutions sound horrific. Perpetual government tracking of its citizens, having to carry digital papers at all times, and concentration camps is about 3 Orwells beyond a dystopian nightmare. Not to mention, it's completely unnecessary.

Ehr.. what? The government tracking is already happening. Cell phones lock on a transmitter cell and the police can request the relevant data from the telco companies. In Italy, a cell phone to be homologated must keep the lock even when it's turned off. Meaning the only way to not be tracked is to leave your cell phone at home. Even if in the US this is not the case, the point stands: if you're carrying around an active cell phone, you're essentially broadcasting your position at all times, and the government can access that data.

The "dystopian nightmare" is what they're using in South Korea. There's an app there which will track if your position is coming close (within 100 meters) to the path of someone else who became a confirmed COVID case and warn you if this is the case. As for "concentration camps", once again, that's what they're using in some of the countries which better controlled the virus spread: they will *enforce* quarantine (rather than trusting people to voluntarily self quarantine) by moving them in a previously prepared site (generally similar to an hotel, a building with lots of single rooms) and forcing them to stay there for 14 days. Meanwhile, they will provide food and basic necessities for free.

I get that basically being forced to house arrest in a room which is not even in your home is annoying, but I think calling being forced to this for 14 days "a concentration camp" is overstating things. Besides, it's obvious that these measures are only going to stay in place until the virus is under control.

Quote from: jhkim;1126666Given that Italy had an earlier and more complete ban, it seems to me that the travel ban is clearly not key to fighting the virus. It seems more like a Maginot line to me -- largely ineffectual.

Italy's travel ban was put in place for people with direct flights from China, but guess what: you can start from China, travel to one or more intermediate destinations, then go to Italy!
Travel bans, for a virus with asymptomatic spreaders, are utterly useless unless they're total i.e. you ban travel from everywhere to your country. And that should also include ground and ship travel. Essentially you'd need to completely close off the borders because anyone who comes in is a potential vector and they might not even know it. It's a lot easier for islands, but even then, it's not easy at all.

Quote from: Luca;1126673Italy's travel ban was put in place for people with direct flights from China, but guess what: you can start from China, travel to one or more intermediate destinations, then go to Italy!
Travel bans, for a virus with asymptomatic spreaders, are utterly useless unless they're total i.e. you ban travel from everywhere to your country. And that should also include ground and ship travel. Essentially you'd need to completely close off the borders because anyone who comes in is a potential vector and they might not even know it. It's a lot easier for islands, but even then, it's not easy at all.

Yes, the only travel ban that works is a complete ban on travel. Either before there are any infections, or combined with effective contact tracing of all current infections.

Re undercount/overcount; the 'excess deaths' figures (all-cause mortality over typical for month) numbers are a good indicator, and are what convinced me the virus is pretty lethal. Hard hit places are seeing substantial increases on expected monthly mortality.

Quote from: Luca;1126672Ehr.. what? The government tracking is already happening.

That's also horrific, but treating it like a fait accompli is why it was so easy to erode those basic rights, piece by piece, over the years. Each new abrogation needs to be fought, tooth and nail.

Quote from: Luca;1126672I get that basically being forced to house arrest in a room which is not even in your home is annoying, but I think calling being forced to this for 14 days "a concentration camp" is overstating things. Besides, it's obvious that these measures are only going to stay in place until the virus is under control.

Fair enough. While the privacy rights are likely to be lost permanently, it is unlikely they'll keep people in camps indefinitely. But we need to take a hard look at any sweeping new powers supposedly aimed at giving the government the right to do that kind of thing.

Quote from: S'mon;1126676Yes, the only travel ban that works is a complete ban on travel. Either before there are any infections, or combined with effective contact tracing of all current infections.

The reason the new coronavirus is so difficult to contain is because of the lengthy asyptomatic period during which those infected are still shedding the virus, as well as the carriers who never develop symptoms buy are still infectious. One person can pass the disease to a lot of people in that time, and may never even realize they were doing it, which makes contact tracing far more difficult. And since it's impossible to diagnose without tests, and there was both a shortage and many tests had a high percentage of false negatives, the net became a sieve.

Quote from: Luca;1126632I don't completely agree with this. Yes, the situation is unprecedented, but it had been foreseen previously. Maybe those who reacted so well started with previous experience due to the SARS outbreak of a few years ago, but the thing is: they were far better prepared.

Had western countries prepared themselves by building strategic stockpiles of face masks to distribute to the population, proper ways of tracking contacts (like phone apps who can anonymously track proximity by numeric IDs and "deanonimize" once it is found you have had close contact with an infected by warning you and the government), places to send people for mandatory quarantine (with all incurred expenses paid by the government) etc., the spread could have been contained much better and without needing such draconian measures as to destroy the country's economy. Of course, not having done that beforehand, once the first person was infected, it was already too late and countrywide lockdown became the only realistic response.

Hopefully at least *some* of the countries will learn from this. I'm not holding my breath for mine, given the pathetic state of our politics, but we'll see.

PPE has a shelf life if vast amounts of it had been ordered and stored it would have been declared a waste. Likewise if plans had been put in place for mass tracking  and  mandatory quarantine they would have  been condemned . If Trump had done it the media and the rest of the leftists  would have had a fit and it would have been challenged in Federal court.

Quote from: Gagarth;1126684PPE has a shelf life if vast amounts of it had been ordered and stored it would have been declared a waste. Likewise if plans had been put in place for mass tracking  and  mandatory quarantine they would have  been condemned . If Trump had done it the media and the rest of the leftists  would have had a fit and it would have been challenged in Federal court.

U.S. exports of surgical masks, ventilators and other personal protective gear to China skyrocketed in January and February, when the coronavirus was wreaking havoc in the country where it began and as U.S. intelligence agencies warned it would soon spread.
American companies sold more than $17.5 million worth of face masks, more than $13.6 million in surgical garments and more than $27.2 million in ventilators to China during the first two months of the year, far exceeding that of any other similar period in the past decade, according to the most recent foreign trade data available from the U.S. Census Bureau.

He was warned by his intel. He did not listen. He let America sell PPE to China. America first. America first. Please stop the winning I can't take it.