shoshin

huh? The numbers are going down. Just what we’d want.

They'd be goofy to require that.

If WDW is opening, they might as well open everything. I love WDW but you're about as safe french kissing a bat in a wet market as avoiding germs there. I bet the farm they will have rapid tests to gain entry.

Mondays are usually low. Today through Friday will give a better window of where we are maxing out this week. If we stay under 1300 deaths today and tomorrow, that will be a really good and reliable trend down.

He would know something about data manipulation. (He's a crazy genius, but don't discount the crazy. I have no idea about his conclusions here and don't have the energy to dive into their actual data.)

The stock market will recover faster than unemployment will. The odds of us getting to single digit unemployment before next summer are low. Companies are going to rush back in at first but they will be slow to re-establish full employment and small businesses especially restaurants that still can't open at capacity will really struggle to move ahead. Saw a stat that since 1948, we have had 11 months total of double digit unemployment. We may get to that consecutively in 2020-21, although I sure hope not. We've had work from wherever since I started. I would say the biggest tradeoff is quality of team-building and idea-exchange. You can do it virtually and we do but it's never as fulfilling. We still are doing it because that's what people want but I'm convinced we're less innovative and less of a tight team because of it. Still...people love it and no one wants to change. So.

Russia, WMDs, Brexit: What is the point of having thread titles if everything is just a ceaseless high volume post campaign? ***

Well said. I stated it a few times in subsequent posts in other ways. I didn't say anything about news programming--I leave that bit of fun for others. *** Seeing the aggregate tests bounce around in the 350K-450K range for a while now. I really wonder if we're about maxed out on testing until the rapid tests come online. I'd have thought we would get higher but if cases fall, we may not need to.

It is well covered in the evolutionary bio literature but stated succinctly, our bodies are wired to react to fight or flight in stress by activating a hormone chain that stops digestion, increases heart rate, releases all the action hormones for a 25 second moment that can save us from the wild dog. But in modern times in lower level stress situations like “I don’t have money to pay the visa bill,” our bodies churn out the fight/flight hormones in lower quantities but over a much longer time period than we were geared to handle. The title of the one book I mentioned above makes the point well, “Why zebras don’t get ulcers.” Zebras don’t have a “hum” of low mental stress like many people do. This is getting way off topic but it’s a great field and the Stanford course Sapolsky teaches is well worth 30 or so hours.

Exactly, and yet the way in which modern humans undergo stress creates long term low level fight/flight reactions. We are wired to activate fear reactions in response to perceived threats. We live in a world where the lion is not lurking in the weeds and thus are biologically poorly adapted to the non-threats of everyday life.

Find me where I said, "You really want to dig in on the position that it was human nature alone that made the world afraid of a virus from which 99% recover?" Otherwise just keep up your strawman discussion with yourself and general shouting at others. You seem to have the time for it while the rest of us contribute to this discussion. A good starter book on evolutionary biology would be one of Sapolsky's like Why Zebra's Don't Get Ulcers. Some of his Stanford courses are online too. Good stuff. My brother was one of these. He went from volunteering on the Covid floor ("hero") to furloughed ("zero") because most of the hospital was shut down for all but critical procedures in the span of about 4 weeks.

I'll leave you to argue with your strawman. This goes with some other thinking that in countries where they still get the (evil) TB vaccine like India and Japan, rates of infection are lower because there's some immunity from having developed those antibodies. The articles about this are somewhere in this thread but it was interesting and scientific speculation--no proof on it yet.

There are a bunch of demographic reasons why "Look at Sweden" is not checkmate on the US, not the least of which is how many Swedes live alone and their population density. But also others. Legally, Sweden gets a lot of credit for not locking down, but in behavior, they did something like a lot more like what we are doing right now. Most people working from home, distancing, and masks. We would do worse than Sweden per capita given our densities and population differences had we tried this but it is my hope that we do what Sweden did this fall and don't implement any more shutdowns.

Pretty condescending. As an animal, we are wired to sense danger. That's something we can and do overcome often but it's a survival instinct hard-wired into us. Read some biological evolution books if you want to read up on it. The very good news is that as humans, we never have to do the things we are wired to do. So you can go climb a mountain, move towards the stick in the grass, etc.

Humans before the most recent generations lived because they saw a stick in the grass and moved away from it because they thought it might be a snake. Biologically, we fire up our fight/flight response at the slightest danger and are constantly on alert for danger. We are not biologically wired well to live in the current safe atmosphere we live in, which is almost entirely not fraught with danger. We run at low level anxiety that is biologically very bad for us: "Zebras don't get ulcers." We are human and have the ability to push against our biology but it's still how we are naturally wired.

It is human nature to live in fear. It is biologically part of us as part of our survival mechanism. "them"? [Edit: Nevermind--you mean the "complexes"]

We were swimming in uncharted waters in February and early March. Cases were going up exponentially in Italy and hospitals there were being overrun. Here, cases were just starting to rise. The shutdown was justified while we got our arms around the problem, and it was a legitimate one. Even when Trump pushed to extend it beyond the initial 15 and encouraged states like GA not to open, it was justified though it was starting to lose its edge by then because we could see what was happening in Italy (cases were falling). The slow reopening is going well. Most people who are complaining like it's the end of the world on either side are getting what they want within weeks, so we can debate the edges of the reopening (reopen this week vs 3 weeks from now, reopen no restaurants vs 50% capacity, etc) but we're all headed in the same direction, with northern cities the slowest to reopen, as makes sense given their population density and use of mass transit, combined with more seed cases. There's a ton of social media screaming but we're all getting there. In the fall, we will have a much better handle on things for what happens as cases start to rise including treatments, PPE, distancing measures, etc. If we shut down again, it will be a disaster. I don't think anyone will survive that politically.

Things that have not come true. - crippling supply chain disruptions - 2M deaths - no more meat - mask wearing creating a run of robberies - Internet shutdown because of changes in usage - power outages - the deaths of upstate people because Cuomo allocated resources to NYC - unending lockdowns - massive case spikes as areas reopened - (18 months at least to a vaccine is not "not true" yet but could prove wrong) The prediction business on Covid is driven by a lot of hype. Party is not relevant. Just human nature to live in fear. Weekends have a more dramatic effect on death counts than case counts.

2 days in a row where we didn’t lead the world in deaths too. I wish that were more because ours was dropping like a rock and not at the expense of a rising Brazil but it does feel good to not see America as number 1 in deaths.

The day before, Musk tweeted just the graph from that article that shows a person’s mortality increases 100% when they get Covid unless they are children (where it increases maybe 25-50%). I hadn’t googled the article but thanks for that. It’s one-sided and understates the Sweden case but still good especially on the panicked groupthink that lead to the extended shutdown, though he is ignoring some other groupthink trends that ignore science (vaccines, masks).

Boatload of tests. Probably explains yesterday’s lower test day. Lumps of data in the line. Texas has been particularly roller coaster in its reporting. Similar situation in Ocean City NJ. Boardwalk was tame because so much was closed but the beach didn’t have almost a soul with a mask. Everyone was just enjoying the nice day on Sat morning and today. Sunday was cold as *****.

Also this on hospitalizations. Definitely something to keep an eye on. I skimmed the states and am not sure what state contributed to the jump significantly. MN, KY, MD all seem on the rise but many more on the decline so I can't make the aggregate in this Tweet work at a state by state level. (Part of me wonders if the increase might be due to some states not reporting before this week...keep on eye on this in the next 2-3 weeks to see the trend.)

Cool data visualization that allows you to view hospitalization (and other) data over time. I know that for my state, the hospitalization data is lumpy and not perhaps the most reliable, but it's a good resource for viewing any state compared to another quickly.

Tests leveling in last week to 10 days. %positive much less meaningful except maybe locally. Case counts (flat) in the last 2 weeks are a much improved indicator of spread. If tests remain level, case counts can be viewed as a leading indicator with hospitalization as the measure of usage of our most limited resource. I would expect tests to increase at some point as rapid diagnostic tests (hopefully accurate ones) become available and are in widespread use at larger places of business.