And you deserved it too. Claiming this is like a flu is ridiculous. People shut down not just the US but the whole world and still it's more deadly than the flu.
Apparently you didn't even read my thread title, let alone the op. I stated: " Latest Covid Trend Charts Confirm - No Worse than Really Bad Flu". Nowhere in my OP or afterwards did I say this is like the common flu. I repeatedly stated that the
Covid Trend Charts confirmed that the number of deaths will be on the order of a really bad flu. (Note the focus on trend).
And now that the kazoo gang has earned itself the badge of red-faced shame, some are back-flipping to no longer attack the IHME data driven graphs but to make lemonaide out of their prior lemons of skepticism.
Therefore I award you the "order of hutzpah"...in recognition bold reinvention of your stance on this issue.
Taking these one by one
- Yes, number of deaths is clearly UNDERstated. A lot of dead people have not been getting CV19 tests.
- I never said you can't trust models - you just have to understand that thanks to Trump's failure in testing, we have limited data and thus models will have large ranges and be subject to change. Yet, they are better than having no models at all. Plus they can rely on data from other countries for some parts of the models (i.e. rate of spread, etc.)
- Yes, we clearly have no idea how many people are infected. If true infection death rate is 0.66%-1% as per some studies, that means we HAD 1.2-1.8 million people infected 2-8 weeks ago.
- I never claimed or heard anyone else claim that "the IHME model assumes 'full compliance'". If someone did, don't lump me in with them.
And yet for each one of those items either you, or one of peers in the collective, claimed that those points made the model, and charts, invalid. No matter how I explained it as irrelevant to the trend lines, the Bronx cheer from the left was almost uniform. In short, you have it both ways.
There are a lot of examples throughout the world that have this settled.
For all the ones that failed on testing (including USA), the earlier the lockdown, the better the curve (and yes, this assume similar population density). This is true at country levels. This is true at State levels (Washington vs NY). This is true at city levels (SF vs LA).
I understand you need to pretend like lockdowns are useless and we'll never know if we needed them but somehow, with exception of countries that had done testing and tracking done well, a LOT of countries, including those that resisted this, have come around to the same conclusion and decided to shut down their economies. Why do you think that is?
First, to be clear, I haven't said "social distancing" to be ineffective and therefore useless. I have said the differences between kind of social distancing and the accurate measurement of their effectiveness is not settled...i.e. unclear. That some jurisdictions have gone from being pacifists to immediately using a nuclear bomb, from an "abundance of caution" (aka "panic"), nothing other than if you want to use a "nuke" and destroy tens of millions of jobs, wipe out savings, and bring commercial activity to its knees this is a good way to do it.
Second, the SD lockdown nuke as official policy is not uncommon. However, examples using conventional SD weapons are not. Few nations have the backbone to try using a long-term campaign of voluntary social distancing, or mitigation measures such as those described in the Imperial College Report because a) you don't know what will actually happen and b) it doesn't matter because democratic politics require a political leader to incinerate the social economic structure just to look like he/she is doing something.
Third, while there are few experiments on this basis, clearly Sweden has (so far) the courage to try it with a degree of moderation (too needlessly moderate in my book, but still much different that the "get out the economic nuke" option).
Here is the bottom line. To everyone's surprise the models way over-shot the impact of COVID-19 and the load on the medical establishment. Folks like Fauci said we 'had to be near perfect' to keep the death toll under 250,000 or so, yet we were very imperfect and yet we are speaking of 60,000, not 250,000.
None are sure why, but obviously the modeling has missed some things, including the possibility that the virus was over-rated in virulence in all but the most dense urban environments and states.
In other words, it only took a fire brigade team to put out a few brushfire hotspots to end this epidemic and we didn't have to put 10s of millions out of work. Rather than admit that even the more conservative models overshot (the one's they said were too conservative) NOW they ex post facto rationalize how it confirmed everything they believed.
cont.