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Heroes Community > Other Side of the Monitor > Thread: Politics in the U.S.
Thread: Politics in the U.S. This Popular Thread is 153 pages long: 1 20 40 60 80 100 120 ... 125 126 127 128 129 ... 140 153 · «PREV / NEXT»
JollyJoker
JollyJoker


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 05, 2020 09:06 AM

Salamandre said:
By your own arithmetic, France is at 15% - which means a 0,3% death probability. Germany even lower then. And my equation used US at 5%, the lowest estimated infection rate, not higher. So we are everywhere under 1%.
You want to speculate and go up to 1,5% because New Zealand case only, fine, I don't see much of a change in its life-threatening pattern.

"Wait and see" is once more speculating, we will do the math again at that moment instead of throwing figures from a crystal ball.
What are you talking about? FRance is at 15% MORTALITY at this stage, not at .3%. Germany is at 5.
More importantly, South Korea, the testing champions, are at 2.15% mortality.

Sure, there will be some dark figure. But currently it seems that immunity against covid-19 will be only for a limited time, and that time is all the shorter the less serious the infection was. Which means, someone who has had it, but didn't suffer from any symptoms, may be immune for only 6 weeks or 2 months, and since the virus mutates, the next infection might be more severe.

However, mortality isn't everything. 20% of the positive tested are seriously affected and are severely ill for a longer period of time. The more are affected, the more seriously ill persons there are. Not only is that overloading health systems, if the virus spreads unhindered, the high number of seriously ill people will also affect the economy.

As I said, there is actually no need to speculate because we will see the effects quite clearly. In India. In Africa. In South America. Probably in Russia. And of course in the US.

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Salamandre
Salamandre


Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
posted July 05, 2020 09:41 AM

France at 15% mortality rate...

You choose to ignore the only study estimating the totality of infections by country, symptomatic AND asymptomatic cases, then continue your fictional arithmetic - the ratio between only tested people and deaths.  

I think I've had enough of this continuous bullying and antagonizing for the sake of, please ignore me from now, there is nothing to come from discussing with you, on any topic. I'm done.
____________
Era II mods and utilities

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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 05, 2020 11:16 AM

*tags sal's hand and leaps like a monkey into the ring; full of meth, bath salts, and pcp*

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Zenofex
Zenofex


Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
posted July 05, 2020 11:39 AM

JollyJoker said:
Your link  says it's guesswork.

My simple arithmetic says, in Germany we were pretty good in finding the infected, and we are at 5%. The US are at 5% as well. France is at 15%. Guessing that there are way more infected, is just reading tea leaves.

Okay. Look at New Zealand. Declared themselves corona free. 1530 infected and 22 dead. 1.4% mortality. That's it. No reason to go lower.

Thing is - that's optimal situation. If too many are sick, people die because they can*t be treated. If the whole world gets it - 1oo million dead. More, though, due to treatment problems with too many sick at the same time.

These "mortality rates" are not even fiction, they are just guesswork if you don't know the number of infected people. And you don't, nobody does. Official figures show the number of tests made which turned out positive + the number of people who died and were positively tested - whether they were killed by the corona-virus or by another disease is a completely different story which is still debatable. 100 million dead is major bull**** even if you take the very same apocalyptic mathematical models to be godlike accurate because they say that there should have been mass graves in each and every county which lightened the measures since May and there aren't. Ignoring cases which don't help the Judgment day models like Belarus, pretty much the entire Eastern Europe, Sweden, etc., is as scientific as picking a line from the Bible which appears to match something in the real world and claiming that you've proven that the entire Bible has been scientifically validated as the book of truth.

And by the way, since when mathematicians have a say on medical matters? They literally don't have a clue what their models represent in the real world if they don't have a reliable data to use a base and since the specialists in the area of the actual disease still don't have a good understanding of how it behaves, how exactly do you expect that entry data to be anything different from garbage?

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JollyJoker
JollyJoker


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 05, 2020 12:19 PM

Look. I don't say the mortality rate IS so and so. I just say that it's guesswork, and the only thing we have are the numbers we are given, and that is 1) numbers of infected; 2) numbers of dead people dying from the virus.
The first number is obviously uncertain. Not all positive cases may have been positively tested. The second number is debatable as well, in both directions: have all cases been found? Have all found cases been dying from coronavirus?

However, there are other ways to deal with mortality. Looks at this:
This is an article (with a table at the bottom that compares the average numbers of dead people in the last 5 years with those of the heavy influenza year 2018 and with 2020. The red line is basically the covid effect and it amounts to nearly 10.000 dead over 11 weeks (in Germany). I find that pretty conclusive.

The other question is, how many people are ACTUALLY infected. We had a study in Germany as well, but it was unreliable.

At present, for me the most significant numbers are those of South Korea, since they have been testing right away, with drive-in test stations and whatnot, and the difference of people infected and people officially infected should be lowest worldwide. As I said, in South Korea, mortality at this stage is at 2.15%.

I don't see any reason to expect mortality to be lower than 2% at this time.

There is another thing to consider, though. Take the US and their low level of measures. They currently have officially 2.84 million infected and officially 129.500 deaths which is a mortality of 4.56%. If mortality was at something like .5% only, then this would mean there were a lot more infected, NINE TIMES MORE INFECTED, which would mean in the US were 25 million infected people at large at this point (and in the last week). Considering the partly low level of measures, the actual number of infected would have been already skyrocketing much faster.

In short, I don't see any good reason for optimism with mortality rates. 2%, maybe 1.5% seems a fair assumption.

So think about Brazil. 208.000.000 population, basically no measures, chances are they will all get it. 1.5 to 2% would mean 30 to 40 million dead people...

We'll obviously see what happens.

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blob2
blob2


Undefeatable Hero
Blob-Ohmos the Second
posted July 05, 2020 12:24 PM

Not to mention in some countries for some time doctors didn't identify the cause of death as Coronovarius related but rather from co-existing diseases. The "paperwork" was changed later on...

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OmegaDestroyer
OmegaDestroyer

Hero of Order
Fox or Chicken?
posted July 05, 2020 12:31 PM
Edited by OmegaDestroyer at 12:32, 05 Jul 2020.

Reminds me of this gem awhile back.


____________
The giant has awakened
You drink my blood and drown
Wrath and raving I will not stop
You'll never take me down

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JollyJoker
JollyJoker


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 05, 2020 02:00 PM

They aren't laughing anymore in Florida, though.

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Zenofex
Zenofex


Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
posted July 05, 2020 03:35 PM

No country in the world can be used as a baseline about how the virus spreads or how effective are the counter-measures if you don't know when was the first case (the notorious "patient 0") on the given territory and I'm yet to see a single article worth reading which examines that topic. The testing started after the countries started applying lockdowns and the tests themselves are not proven as accurate (they are not even the same in every country). You have no useful data for input, instead you have assumptions and presumptions. This is worthless for anything beyond news headlines.

Regarding Germany:

Quote:
For the 2018/19 season, no estimate of excess-mortality could be made, as the necessary data of the Federal Statistical Office are published with a time delay. However, the estimate for the 2017/18 season (still lacking in the last annual report) has been supplemented: approximately 25,000 influenza-related deaths exemplify – together with other parameters – the extraordinary severity of the flu epidemic 2017/18.


The season in question has a similar number of deaths attributed to flu in Italy as well so apparently it was hard everywhere. I'm not sure how it was in Bulgaria at that time but we have full hospitals for weeks with each and every flu epidemic anyway - across the entire country - with estimated mortality of 1200-1800 (up to 2000) per season.

UK had multiple hard seasons for the last 20 years, the one from 1999/2000 (19 000 - 22 000 flu-related deaths according to the different sources) seemingly the toughest - but excessive numbers from and past the winter season are not actually news.

Etc. COVID-19 being a new virus is likely to hit harder than seasonal flu - although the information available thus far per country does not support a general conclusion like that because some countries don't have any notable raise of their mortality rates - but these millions of dead people sound beyond fantastic based on all the data accumulated so far. Besides, they are not even agreed upon. There are at least several other studies I've seen which suggest mortality below 1% and mostly among generally vulnerable groups of the population. So, Brazil losing a 30-40 million people (actually, it's 3-4 million using your numbers ) sounds massively exaggerated, especially given that the death toll worldwide for more than half an year is just above half a million officially. Same applies to other countries.

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JollyJoker
JollyJoker


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posted July 05, 2020 05:33 PM

Yes, 3-4 millions, sorry for that.

Not sure why you link the RKI report of last year, though. Yes, 25.000 deaths were estimated in 18/19, so?

The thing is that most European and Asian countries locked down pretty hard and got infections down to managable levels. Others didn't, though, the US among them, Brazil especially among them, Africa in general among them, and so on.

My point is simply that we will see what will happen. Brazil might try to "fake" their stats, but the US won't, and we will all see, what happens, so there is no need for a war of opinions.

The one thing I say is, and I repeat the point, if you look at the US and you assume a very low mortality rate, then you would have many times more infected than the nearly 3 millions they have, and in that case things should be pretty chaotic or become so sooner than later.
Same as Brazil, mind you.

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Blizzardboy
Blizzardboy


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Undefeatable Hero
Nerf Herder
posted July 05, 2020 05:40 PM
Edited by Blizzardboy at 17:59, 05 Jul 2020.

What we might discover months from now or a year from now is that COVID has been spreading largely undetected in the southern US for a long time and the reason we're hearing about it now is because it is finally coming to light. The south dragged its feet on containment and we can partially blame governors and state governments for that. I was a fairly short distance away from the #1 epicenter and things are relatively calm now, but New York took things more seriously.  

There also might be a much more infectious version of the virus currently active in the US. Like maybe COVID19 infected a member of the National Rifle Association and then it developed a weaponized artillery system from him and started spreading much faster.

A new strain of coronavirus is more infectious but doesn't make people any sicker than before, according to a global study

This strain may currently be most active in the US, once the virus came into contact with the NRA.

As far as the mortality rate: that will be impossible to accurately determine anytime in the near future. Nobody knows the exact number of asymptomatic or mostly asymptomatic cases. A much more serous question is how dangerous the virus is once a person has already been infected, in terms of immunity and resistance. The antibodies don't stay in the system for very long after an asymptomatic case, which is pretty standard AFAIK.
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OmegaDestroy...
OmegaDestroyer

Hero of Order
Fox or Chicken?
posted July 05, 2020 10:52 PM

What I want to know are the real numbers in China.
____________
The giant has awakened
You drink my blood and drown
Wrath and raving I will not stop
You'll never take me down

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Zenofex
Zenofex


Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
posted July 06, 2020 07:41 AM

JollyJoker said:
Yes, 3-4 millions, sorry for that.

Not sure why you link the RKI report of last year, though. Yes, 25.000 deaths were estimated in 18/19, so?

The thing is that most European and Asian countries locked down pretty hard and got infections down to managable levels. Others didn't, though, the US among them, Brazil especially among them, Africa in general among them, and so on.

My point is simply that we will see what will happen. Brazil might try to "fake" their stats, but the US won't, and we will all see, what happens, so there is no need for a war of opinions.

The one thing I say is, and I repeat the point, if you look at the US and you assume a very low mortality rate, then you would have many times more infected than the nearly 3 millions they have, and in that case things should be pretty chaotic or become so sooner than later.
Same as Brazil, mind you.

I'm quoting the article about Germany to note that you can have severe flu seasons with X times higher mortality rate than usual even in countries like yours, where the healthcare is considered exemplary compared to other countries. Less than 10 000 COVID-related deaths compared to 25 000 "regular flu"-related ones doesn't quite sound like the disease that will bring about the end of civilization and justify kicking the economy in the balls, does it?

As for whether the lockdowns have helped and to what degree - this is far from certain. I'll have to repeat that you don't know when the virus appeared and how many people were already infected when the lockdowns started. In Germany you didn't even have a full quarantine like in Italy, same with Switzerland which borders Italy but is not buried in corpses (around 2000 dead to date). There is no visible correlation between the restrictivity of the measures and the widely advertised "flattening the curve" effect when you look at the numbers from the different counties. Why? Because nobody knew (and to large extent - still doesn't know) s**t about how the virus spreads exactly, does it become more or less dangerous with time, how often it mutates, how infectious it actually is (including the various mutations), how accurate are the tests, how to define if a patient who already had major health issues and died positive has been killed as a result of the infection or from the already existing disease and a truckload of other variables which none of these hastily put together - i.e. grossly oversimplified, yet overadvertised - mathematical models has taken into account. Yes, we'll wait and see, it could turn this or that, but when the summer ends and the new flu season starts, this nightmare of a pseudo-science will flood the news when people start filling the hospitals due to the allegedly trivial seasonal diseases which nobody has applied lockdowns for, ever. And THEN it will get ugly.

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JollyJoker
JollyJoker


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Undefeatable Hero
posted July 06, 2020 09:51 AM

You are viewing this from the wrong perspective.

No one has ever done anything to contain the flu. Based on that, yes the 2017/18 flu season was a heavy one and cost a lot of lives. But we have a lot of experience with the flu.

Now look at what happened in New York - no one doing anything. And suddenly they had 1000 dead people a day, hospitals were overloaded and dead bodies had to be stored in pavillons in Central Park. Same thing earlier in Northern Italy, in Madrid and in the UK.

So the question isn't whether it was right or wrong to do something against covid - that question has long been answered. The question is, which measures have been necessary and good and which one haven't. And when it seems difficult to answer it NOW, how difficult has it been, when people actually started to die in masses?

Back to the flu - before covid, people with the flu would crowd the doctors and make sure to infect others as well.
With the hygienic routine that has been developed now, regular flu will spread way less in future years.

Crying about the economy now doesn't make sense, first and foremost because that train has left station a long time ago. However, in many regards covid and the measures coming with it is just accelerating a process that has started some time ago.
Covid has done a lot for climate protection. Air traffic hit a massive low, car trafiic (home office) as well. Also accelerated has been the downfall of inner city shops versus online trade. And so on. What would and actually should have been an evolutionary process, has become more like a revolution with the economy now suffering under the effects. And while things in theory could roll back to normal in many regards, this just doesn't seem to happen. People have been burned, lived with it and are in no hurry now to return to the old ways, since they have seen that the closing of stuff and so on hasn't been the end of the world.

Or take car industry. They had a problem before covid, because they need to bring down co2 average fleet emission and can't do it, actually, because they produce and sell the wrong type of cars, with the right types not finding enough customers and are not supported well enough for that to happen.
Now, car sales are down by horrifying percentages - but covid is just the straw breaking the camel's back here. Because the truth is, electro cars are really usable only in innercity travels.

Less business travels and face-to-face meetings are good; but it will hurt car sales and air traffic and on the other hand will need yet more satellites, servers, higher data speeds and so on. Economy won't be the same again, simple as that.

I think, we have a good system now in Germany, how things are handled with completely local reactions to new "outbreaks" - but the real test is yet to come when schools and so on will reopen after the summer holidays. Currently it's planned to do it without any kind of restriction, and we'll see where this leads.

Remember, there is still no drug that will save people dying from covid (anti-inflammatory meds MAY help in those cases where people die from inflammation overload) and there is no vaccine.

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Zenofex
Zenofex


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Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
posted July 07, 2020 08:01 AM

I don't know what is the "right" perspective. The fact that the lockdowns brought about some unexpected benefits like the reduction of the pollution (the air has never been this clean, that's true) is beside the point because they are not sustainable unless you maintain some sort of permanent travel bans within and outside of a country. As soon as the heaviest restrictions were lifted, the cities got their smog caps back - which is especially cool in this context because polluted air is quite certainly known to accelerate the development of health issues. But who cares about that? If you tell your fellow Joe that the car he's driving contributes to deaths of thousands of people in his city each year, his reaction would be the same as if you tell him that the COVID lockdowns have caused enough long-term collateral damage to kill much more people than they have allegedly saved. People's thinking has not changed in the slightest in this regard.

Analyzing the economy sector-by-sector depends on what country you're looking at. For Germany it's the cars who took the heaviest hit, for Bulgaria it's the tourism, etc., but everywhere pretty much the entire economy suffered from a chain reaction. The problem at the moment is not so much that it happened because you obviously can't reverse the past, but that it's not over and the best parts are yet to come. Inflation will increase, savings will disappear, living standard will drop - this is already happening but the effect will be much greater during the winter when there are always bigger expenses. And the best part is that on top of it all you have the superstar virus which will overlap with seasonal flu and since the media have already created a monster image for it - despite all available data which does not agree with such a conclusion (if this is correct for example - it's not peer-reviewed yet - then all predictive models drawn so far can be converted to toilet paper for mass usage as per the modern fashion) - AND because most of the governments have already gained enough public scare inertia to be unable to back off if they are not forced by the population, things can get only worse. See, this is not over, it just begins and if it goes like that, there will probably be other lockdowns as soon as mid-autumn. If there is a way to make things better, it starts with looking at the real data and drawing conclusions from it, not from mystic apocalyptic predictions based on nothing.

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JollyJoker
JollyJoker


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Undefeatable Hero
posted July 07, 2020 08:56 AM

I don't disagree. But Cov19 isn't the first pandemic and won't be the last. We did kill smallpox via obligatory vaccinations (500 million dead in 100 years, worldwide). Face masks and social distancing (in some situations) will keep ALL flu diseases down, which is a good thing, and if you look at the amount of flu pandemics, like Hong Kong Flu, Asian Flu, Spanish Flu, SARS, Swine Flu and so on, it was just a matter of time something like this would happen (I mean, that a serious effort is made to contain things), because the world is now a village and we have the scientific power and the means to.

Sure, economically it will be two crappy years, but economy has been up and down anyway. 2001 a terror attack, 2008 the banking crisis, and now 2020, Covid lockdown. The next one might be something like 2032 clima lockdown or something like that.

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JollyJoker
JollyJoker


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 09, 2020 08:10 PM

Okay, serious question:

Is the Trump government actively trying to bring the US down? Maybe to declare a state of emergency, when things are going South?

I mean, the government looks as if they wanted to promote the spreading of the virus, right?

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Galaad
Galaad

Hero of Order
Li mort as morz, li vif as vis
posted July 11, 2020 09:21 PM

71k new cases in the US yesterday...
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JollyJoker
JollyJoker


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 11, 2020 10:06 PM

Ah, you know, they are just testing more...

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JollyJoker
JollyJoker


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 12, 2020 11:29 PM

What's the matter, guys, no one defending Trump anymore? Seen enough of that lying incompetent?

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