outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Plus add in all the deaths of people with other health issues who can't or won't be seen by a doctor for fear of either contracting the virus in a medical facility or fear of adding to the load of an overwhelmed health system. Unquestionably, there are more non-covid cause of deaths occurring during the pandemic than there would be sans pandemic.

gah thanks Karl, I knew there would be a big fucking leap in there somewhere but I had a 5yo asking me basic arithmetic at the time so spotting that delightful cyan-on-white "per extended flu season" on my phone escaped me.
That was my one annual "ignore warning signs and gracefully assume interest in uncovering some sort of truth" pass to a random blogger, see ya next year, dickheads.

xp BrianB
one benefit of using excess mortality as a metric is that it does account for those kinds of indirect deaths

lol kinder

no worries!

they clearly understand how they're manipulating the reader

ofc they do. it's all of a piece with the type of rhetoric they employ, too, which is rife with appeals to emotion and appeals to prejudice. the statistical manipulation is just window dressing to give the appearance of factual objectivity. But the author knows that without an ample supply of outraged emotional rhetoric to clue them in to his position, his audience would not understand the statistical lies he tells them and fail to get his point.

It’s also incredibly complicated to figure out the true excess deaths because there exists no comparable year where we had a lockdown that essentially wiped out regular flu transmission and greatly reduced transportation, crime, and work related accidents.

conservatives turn to statistics to try to justify their already-formed beliefs, then act like it's the stats themselves that lead them to their beliefs.

that was a great debunking KM

Total Cases - 252,245
Total Deaths - 2,305

These figures make me suspect that Russia is a) getting the outbreak later than everyone else, b) testing a lot more people, thus finding milder cases, and c) fiddling the fatality figures.

oh boy.

re: the takedown of the stats upthread (well done KM), you're right, all of these authors aren't misguided folks who don't know how statistics work, they're just assholes that know they only have to create charts that pass the 3 second sniff tests for dummies and people who already have their minds made up.

I've continued wasting time refuting these posts but not directly to the stupid author, but people on my own wall, so that any well-meaning gullible people I know aren't seduced by it, or so they can share it on their walls, and when we're done, a whopping 3 people's minds are changed out of 111 million.

andrew gelman's blog is great on this. he's very good, but it's also (for an academic) very willing to go on the record with criticisms of his peer's work.

here's a good post about that *insane* whitehouse CEA tweet defending the IHME model

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/14/so-much-of-academia-is-about-connections-and-reputation-laundering/

otm

Tragically otm, yes.

I just posted this here: COVID-77

Seems as reliable as the IHME model IMHO

Johns Hopkins is offering a coursera on contact tracing

https://www.coursera.org/learn/covid-19-contact-tracing?edocomorp=covid-19-contact-tracing

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3084440/coronavirus-call-hong-kong-covid-19-survivors

had this been posted before? very bad news on several levels:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/11/south-korea-struggles-to-contain-new-outbreak-amid-anti-lgbt-backlash

The politics of ‘hygiene’ is to be feared. Once people sort populations into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ dangerous forces take control.

nbd

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/coronavirus/os-ne-coronavirus-adventhealth-unreliable-covid19-tests-20200516-hc75jz5ipvdv3iv4qucg3kwiey-story.html

Bordeaux today:

A Bordeaux, ce samedi, les consommateurs étaient de retour dans la rue Sainte-Catherine.https://t.co/7nsMwN4Qt5 pic.twitter.com/CuDubnjcok

— Sud Ouest Bordeaux (@SO_Bordeaux) May 16, 2020

consommateurs gonna consommateurs

tis devoutly to be wished
seriously though: yikes

https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-coronavirus-per-capita-death-rate-among-highest-2020-5

tbf it is easy on rue st catherine to take a telephoto shot that exaggerates the crowds and how close people are. from the camera position to the end of the road is about a kilometre probably. what i worry about is all the people in those shops! even if they do limit the clientele.

xpost

I saw several people wearing masks under their noses today. Not for two seconds to take a breath. Permanently affixed there

I have a theory about why a few of them had so many kids with them

Was on a plane yesterday (necessary family-related issue) and saw a good deal of mask-under-the-nose styles during the flight, and also switching planes in Dallas.

about as effective as wearing it in yr ass

Imo cock masks >>> ass masks.

Last night I saw a guy walking along coughing hard and spitting, not covering his mouth at all, while wearing a mask around his neck. Fortunately he was on the other side of the street from me. First person I've seen out walking around who seemed obviously sick.

Today I was coming back from a dog walk just as our mail was being delivered, and the mailperson followed me up onto my porch to ask if she could say hi to the dog and stood just outside the door so I would have had to basically shut it in her face. I told her he wasn't good with strangers (true), but she said, "Oh, I know him." Eventually I just gave up and put the dog outside so I could close the door and get away from her.

there is at least some ill-fitting masks slipping off noses going on, but, yeah, a lot of people will never ever get it.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/05/15/good-news-on-the-human-immune-response-to-the-coronavirus

^ recent paper found that people infected with the virus have been producing strong adaptive immune responses, which bodes pretty well for people not getting re-infected, eventual effective vaccines, and possible monoclonal antibody treatments in the shorter term. idk if anyone has linked it upthread, but that whole blog is pretty good for sifting through the virus treatment news churn.

I saw several people wearing masks under their noses today.

Mouthbreathers, it's OK.

every one of them was David LEe Roth

Thanks for that circles

yes, excellent source, circles. thank you.

Was on a plane yesterday (necessary family-related issue) and saw a good deal of mask-under-the-nose styles during the flight, and also switching planes in Dallas.

― ... (Eazy), Saturday, May 16, 2020 3:24 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

What's air travel like right now? Do airports and planes seem kind of empty? What kind of precautions are they taking?

https://twitter.com/HorsemanKovpak/status/1261723559082278916/photo/1

lool!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYKK4rMWkAEMi0c?format=jpg&name=medium

Quarantine day 100: pic.twitter.com/TLwubAkwiR

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) May 15, 2020

^ worth a chuckle

Yes, but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWD_VPiMlso

for like just a second, i thought that guy had managed to duplicate the golden girls guy voice

anyways, no "hallelujah" no credibility

The state of Georgia made it look like its covid cases were going down ***by putting the dates out of order on its chart*** May 5 was followed by April 25, then back to May again, whatever made it look like a downslope. https://t.co/H8pSvY6rxn

— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) May 17, 2020

Pools WERE OPEN in NYC yesterday! So much for allegedly having smarter politicians.

My best bet for staying alive seems to be staying in the hospital as long as possible.

xp
"The x axis was set up that way to show descending values to more easily demonstrate peak values and counties on those dates. Our mission failed. We apologize. It is fixed."

I wonder how long I could get away with this if I tried it...

haha hoos asked whether ppl could see how they were playing tricks w that on tweeter, i didn't see it because WHO WOULD EVEN EXPECT THAT A GRAPHMAKER WOULD SCRAMBLE THE ORDER OF VALUES ON THE AXIS wtf

my wife jots down Georgia cases/deaths stats every day and she noticed those graphs were wrong as soon as she saw them

Wow

BREAKING: President Trump says he is taking hydroxychloriquine and has been doing so for weeks. @CBSNews #Covid_19

— Paula Reid (@PaulaReidCBS) May 18, 2020