The rate of front page posts is twice as high as expected.
Ha. The touchpad on my work laptop is stupidly sensitive. I'm constantly highlighting things and moving them to an entirely different paragraph because my palm flits too close to my touchpad. Or I double click somehow.
I saw something that in countries with good containment the overall death rate had declined to pre-containment levels. Not just beating COVID and flu but fewer car accidents, maybe other types of hazards. Also pollution is way down but that probably won't have much long term effect except. Maybe fewer asthma attacks short term. Also less property crime- maybe the criminals aren't following restrictions, but everyone staying home means fewer theft targets.
But someone posted the link here about how Italy's death rates are far higher than the covid numbers, suggesting that along with undiagnosed covid deaths, people are dying from things that they'd normally get treated for. Are we doing such a spectacular job social distancing that our overall mortality is following a South Korea route instead of an Italy route?
Maybe? It just seems optimistic?
Here's another example that just popped up in my feed. Doctor saying their hospital had no new C. diff infections this week because hygeine has been much more rigorous.
I think the problem with relying on data from thermometers that upload your data to the cloud is that people who own them are health conscious and conscientious. Thermometer-owners may be self-isolating and staying healthy, but we have to wait to see how Joe Public is doing.
Hmm. Well, then maybe the data is right but it's just hard to discern how much of it is an indicator of Covid19.
7 before seeing 6, which is also a good point.
True, also people who have to choose work or bankruptcy are less likely to own fancy wifi thermometers.
I was thinking if I were a law professor I could use 5 to argue that CoV2 inhibits the C. diff bacteria in patients.
4 Didn't the crisis in northern Italy overwhelm their healthcare system? That hasn't happened in the US. Yet.
I thought it was happening in New York already?
I read that there were still a few hundred free ICU units in NYC. They've been expanding capacity rapidly.
It's too soon to say.
You get some weird stuff in the news nowadays. This sentence is from the linked NYT story:
The trend has become so obvious that on Sunday, President Trump extended until the end of April his recommendation that Americans stay in lockdown.
The trend has become so obvious that event the president of the United States -- basically the last person you'd expect -- has noticed and acted on it.
I just had read the thing about setting up extra beds in Central Park and had assumed that meant they'd reached capacity in some fuzzy sense. I guess that doesn't mean that the standard of care has yet declined in a catastrophic sense.
6: I think the problem with relying on data from thermometers that upload your data to the cloud is that people who own them are health conscious and conscientious.
Also, I think a potential huge factor Could be that many people are proactively taking their temperature at the slightest sign of a symptom (or even for some no symptoms, just checking every day). For instance last week when my wife was suffering
from symptoms of a cold she took her temperature about twice a day; and all were normal. In "regular" times she would have taken her temperature zero times with those symptoms.
I assume the rate of temperature readings is way up, but both the increases in the disease itself or proactive monitoring would raise the rate. But given that there are far more without the disease than with, the second might be dominating the numbers.
The 1.2 million Chinese antibody tests that the Slovak government bought from local middlemen for 15 million euros ($16 million) are inaccurate and unable to detect Covid-19 in its early stages, according to Prime Minister Igor Matovic, who only took office last month. "We have a ton and no use for them," he said. They should "just be thrown straight into the Danube." Matovic may have an ax to grind as the testing kits were purchased [not received as aid, let us note] by the previous government, of which he has been a fierce critic for many things, including its record on fighting corruption. Still, similar difficulties have cropped up from Madrid to Istanbul
14: Obligatory reminder that when Zhou said that in 1972, he probably thought (due to a dodgy interpreter) that he was being asked about the Paris évenements of 1968, not the French Revolution of 1789, and therefore "too early to say" was not a bad answer.
I thought of 17, but surely they have a user ID attached to the data and know how to compare that to past years? Aren't they claiming that raw numbers of fevers are declining, not just ratios of above-normal over total temperature-takers?
17: Maybe the point in 17 is addressed in the article? I did not see it in my skim; I have lost the ability to read closely and critically.
Also, just to steal Mossy's wind here, the quote as normally given reinforces all sorts of dodgy stereotypes about the inscrutable Oriental who thinks in centuries because his culture is 5,000 years old.
19: Not a bad answer for 1789 either, considering there would be self proclaimed Islamic Revolutionary Guards massacring people 7 (and 47) years later.
20: I read their FAQ. Which includes this:
As of March 2020, we are seeing 2-3x the number of users taking temperatures than we've tracked in previous flu seasons
They say the rapid increase does not affect their"illness signal." But they don't specifically address the question of potential increased temperature taking by people with mild symptoms or even none whatsover.
19: Not a bad answer for 1789 either, considering there would be self proclaimed Islamic Revolutionary Guards massacring people 7 (and 47) years later.
Possibly not Islamic?
27: I was focused on the Revolutionary bit.
Let me explain math to all of you. (I studied it for many years before I went to college, so I'm something of an expert.) It seems to me, without doing any actual research, that flu fevers could normally be, like, an order of magnitude more common than the current Covid-fever outbreak. If so, then a 10% decline in the flu could make up for the entire increase in Covid fevers. Right? And I'm thinking that it's reasonable to expect social isolation to have a significant impact on the flu. (Nobody in my office has called in sick since work-from-home.)
I suppose heebie g already said this in 7, but I am including extra wordy goodness.
Note that on the "Trends" map, Kinsa reports that fevers have been decreasing in the last week nationwide. So we're not just talking about year-over-year changes or lower-than-normal fevers. Even in this season of low fevers, the trendline is down.
That does seem a bit suspicious to me, and sounds like it could be accounted for by JPS's 17 as people get increasingly panicked and buy more thermometers. Is it possible that Kinsa's PR people are over-reading the data to get their story in the news?
Good news everybody the # of deaths started being below trend the day before yesterday. I was a bit surprised, I thought social distancing was going to take a few more days to affect that.
And FFS consider the brands of "revolution" spinning their wheels in the US primaries and the GB GE and for that matter the PRC. "The people's war on the virus" or whatever it is.
Anyway tbc insofar as Zhou was insightful or inscrutable it wasn't in virtue of being Oriental.
31.last: agreed. I wasn't implying you would think Zhou was being inscrutable etc, but was expecting you to jump in and say that he wasn't.
17 immediately occurred to me as well, and their response seems pretty handwavy. Maybe they can control for it somehow (using only long-term customers with regular readings would be the obvious one, but why don't they just say so?), but it seems incredibly likely that loads of healthy people are starting to take their temperature just to be sure. I know I did, though I don't have a connected thermometer. My symptom-free parents are checking multiple times daily.
It looks, based on some very crude modelling, like the number of COVID deaths per day in the UK should top out on or around 10 April and decline steadily thereafter.
33: It genuinely seems impossible to me that they have any way to control for it. It's a classic case of endogeneity, and I don't see how they can get around it.
They could just look at the subset of thermometers who took their temperature last year.
I guess GY said exactly the same thing.
I think if they would also have to do something to adjust for the frequency of temperature checking among users, even among users who took their temperature last year. Like, take a random sample of this year's readings scaled to the number of readings for that thermometer at this time last year.
But again those people are probably more worried now so they are taking their temperatures more often instead of just when they already feel bad.
I fully believe there are now fewer flu infections and hospital-acquired infections because of our precautions we are taking now (also fewer car accidents, probably a lot of effects positive and negative from delaying going to the hospital for other reasons) but it would still be swamped by the effect of suddenly everyone taking their temperature.
Only if we think that last year, people were running fevers but feeling fine, and thus not detecting them the way we're detecting asymptomatic fevers now. But maybe that is a thing that happens.
Because of social distancing, it's now more difficult to get your temperature taken rectally and other methods result in lower readings.
You have to prop it up and just aim when you sit.
Whatever the utility of the Kinsa data as a measure of absolute levels of illness, it should tell you something about how the various regions compare with each other.
Can anyone past the paywall see if whether they even put this data through any basic validation?
It's the NY Times:
"In Troubled Times, Thermometers Mull Fever Reduction Options, Effortfully"
and they have a quote from a senior source close to the coronavirus who says that the figures are reliable.
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Somebody tell me this isn't true.
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Do you mull healthcare options the same way you mull wine? Because I don't see that reducing fever.
Not that anyone should say no to some mulled wine, mind.
Also, when's the last time the hajj was cancelled?
when's the last time the hajj was cancelled?
1798, apparently.
[Insert French-people joke here.]
French people were indeed the reason.
(And a minor contributing factor was, though it wasn't his fault, the inability of my distant relative, aviation pioneer and Ottoman artillery commander Thomas Mustapha "Ingiliz" Pasha, to stop Napoleon Bonaparte doing his thing at the Battle of the Pyramids.)
That would be a good name for a pool shark.
You need to scan and transcribe his journals.
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https://gdb.voanews.com/656768c5-91bd-4988-aaf1-db1c0ba066c6_w1023_r1_s.jpg
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Mini-ATM: I failed to notice various public holidays and consequently have an unexpected 4-day weekend from tomorrow. Except for this freelance one-on-one class tomorrow with a likeable but basically dumb and unserious undergrad. Who I really want to cancel on. What say you all?
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Why cancel Wimbledon? Just don't have an audience. Any player who goes close enough to the net to risk breaking social distancing will not be able to get the return and the ref is safe up in the tall chair.
59: I'd cancel. It's social distancing.
But why isn't tennis the perfect sport for COVID-19?
60: You discount the grunting. And transmission via the balls, which are fuzzy and handled by many tiny people with weak immune systems. Probably.
I'm super-gruntled. Surprise bonus weekend. Except stupid undergrad.
Except for this freelance one-on-one class tomorrow with a likeable but basically dumb and unserious undergrad. Who I really want to cancel on. What say you all?
Are their parents paying attention? Is it a holiday which they celebrate? If there's any tenuous justification, cancel away. This is not the season to overachieve.
56: if I had his journals, I would definitely do so, but as far as anyone knows he didn't leave any.
I've no idea. Bear in mind the Roc in its splendid isolation is not shut down at all.
63: It's true about the balls. But for Wimbledon, they could probably just use a new ball each set. That way, only one person touches the ball with a hand.
"Disgruntled" was supposed to be a play on "discount the grunting".
But another person hits the ball with a racket, really fucking hard.
68: Somebody didn't let the fact that Hitler didn't write any diary keep him from selling Hitler's diary.
Heh. Now I have this vision of all the ballpeople standing in perfect regimented stillness in purple-liveried hazmat suits. And occasionally falling, in perfectly rigidity, onto their heat-exhausted faces.
London is usually pretty cool and cloudy.
Anyway, reprobates, step up. One more vote on the underbrat.
My older brother named one of his favorite stuffed animals Wimbledon when he was little, and I was always so jealous that he had thought of such a cool name.
There was a whole stuffed-animal franchise about the Wimbledon Common. Wommblies or something.
Oh hmm. It did sort of look like a longhaired one of these womblies I'm now looking at. Shorter snout maybe but definitely rat-like.
Isn't being unreliable in the early days of an infection a general property of antibody based tests? The antibody response isn't immediate.
Most courts were closed, but my boss glimpsed some people playing tennis here in the Bay. Maybe couples with each other; maybe keeping track of balls so nobody touched each other's except with the racket. But then the new expanded shelter-in-place order a few days ago explicitly ordered closure of sporting facilities, naming tennis courts, golf courses, basketball courts, and oddly, pickleball courts.
(And separately playgrounds, which is going to be a pisser for parents.)
The closed play structures are indeed a pisser for parents.
Open play structures are a pisser for small children if you don't watch them.
Pickleballs surely are self-sterilizing.
I bet the ball pit at a Chuck E. Cheese could kill anybody who walks by it now.
Not as fast as the pizza if eaten by someone over thirty.
Underbrat cancelled. Underachievement for the fucking win. His mother, btw, was supposed to be a client as well, a twofer thing, but totally flaked. In fact ignored emails outright. So fuck her, even if she is paying the bill.
I believe the children are our future. Since I'm now afraid of the future, it's best to avoid teaching things to young people.
59:. Can you suggest a video-conference session?
You can be in charge of bolting the barn door after the horse has run off.
But then the new expanded shelter-in-place order a few days ago explicitly ordered closure of sporting facilities, naming tennis courts, golf courses, basketball courts, and oddly, pickleball courts.
I was amused, walking by a neighborhood park, to see that they had just attached a piece of wood across the basketball hoop . . . that works.
Well it's not as if anyone wants to play with a malingering hoop.
You can count on me! That barn door is shut and locked!
There were people playing tennis at Whetstone on Sunday. I took my stepdaughter to the Park of Roses for a walk. There were a fair number of people out, but not so crowded that it was hard to keep a safe distance. I wonder what it will be like when the roses start to bloom.
I guess maybe it was never a repeating thing.
For some reason I am really anxious for some sort of statistics or birds-eye-view of what kind of compliance with social distancing is happening across the country. Like, my beloved 60+ grandma colleague who had a kidney transplant last year is still visiting with her grandchildren and it's making me very nervous. Another colleague sent out an email asking if anyone wanted to get lunch and I honestly can't tell if he's kidding or not.
I turned away the neighbor kid the other day from coming over to play and felt really bad about it. I just can't tell what the norms are. And I know the norms are as varied as any other local measure. I just wish I knew how it was actually playing out.
99: Gallup's starting to poll on it, with specific questions.
To avoid having the neighbor kids think you view them as a vector, say they aren't allowed over because $5 was missing from your wallet the last time they were over.
I remember seeing an article about how much stricter Social Distancing rules are in European countries than in the US. I didn't find it, but this politco article about what things different countries are doing well is slightly cheerier: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/27/coronavirus-global-guide-152375
100 is reassuring. Presumably a decent chunk of those who aren't avoiding public places are because they're still going to work at hospitals or grocery stores. I'm glad to see that there isn't a huge partisan or regional split.
Our local total caseload doubled yesterday, and to me that is exactly right for the timing after spring break, ten days ago. There was a group of 70 college kids in Austin who chartered a plane to Mexico for spring break, and 28 of them are positive. Don't worry, they all flew home separately.
Also: my friend's parents go to a Texas Old People Church, and they passed around the communion cup. To be fair, this was 10 days ago, not 3 days ago. But well after we were all hunkered down at home. They all shared the same CUP to their MOUTHS!
re: OP, it's probably too early to tell.
There was that Washington Post (?) story the other day about the woman from Indiana who died, and her husband had been all 'this coronavirus was just something that was happening on TV, you know' and I wanted to yell at my computer. Our society's epitaph, right there. It's certainly how we got Trump . . .
I'm eagerly awaiting running out of something essential so that I can great a bag of Twix while getting the essential thing.
You want to know another thing that mystifies me? That it's so hard to get tested unless you have convincing symptoms, and yet the majority of tests are negative. Take my local county: 281 tests administered, 228 negative. 38 confirmed cases and a few pending. So what does everyone else have? Especially if we're all social distancing and stopping the spread of everything like the common colds and flu along with it? We were not testing very much until recently, and even now that's a pitiful number of tests for a town this size, so they're not testing anyone without good reason.
Re: NYC, I know someone who lives across the street from Brooklyn Hospital and he watched a refrigerator truck pull up for the bodies that won't fit in the morgue. I guess that's been in the news now, but when he told me, it brought it the fuck home for me like nothing else has.
108: Half of the symptoms are close to what I feel when I experience anxiety.
The other half of the symptoms are what I feel when I'm near trees having sex.
108: I just read that there was a really high rate of false negatives. I thought maybe I read it linked from somewhere here? Maybe not. Anyway, I remember the number 30%, but I don't know if that was 30% of all tests are false negatives or 30% of true positives will give a negative. Oh, here.
106: I think that's the woman in Arizona who drank fish-tank cleaner with her husband because it contained chloroquine; he died, she survived.
"Drank the fish tank cleaner" really should replace "drank the Kool-Aid. First off, it wasn't even Kool-Aid that had the poison, but some knockoff competitor.
I got an e-mail from work saying that if you are a frontline healthcare worker who had tested positive, you need 2 negative tests before they will let you back which makes me think they false negatives are a real thing.
False negatives and false positives are pretty much *always* a thing. The trick is to balance sensitivity and efficacy in a reasonable way, which can be hard.
A related question: are the people who can't read a room the same people who can't read a Zoom (and drone on for too long or raise a super-specific concern that's not broadly generalizable to the group)? Or are they different people? Someday maybe science will tell us.
It was weirdly hard to find good numbers, but my estimate sometime last week was that there were still probably twice as many cases of flu in the US as COVID. The flu is much less contagious than COVID, so social distancing is probably decreasing flu rates pretty rapidly. Plus stuff like bronchitis caused by an ordinary cold virus. It seems pretty plausible to me that you could get a big reduction in fevers that way.
108, 112: I've seen figures ranging from 30-50% to 70% sensitivity (true positives), and my nurse practitioner friend says her hospital is assuming 30% false negatives. She says she's hearing a lot of anecdotes of patients coming in with pneumonia, testing negative, but still needing a ventilator the next day.
19, 23, et sep.: Eppur si fuonny
112. You probably saw it in the NYT. At least I did. False negatives are distressingly common, especially if you aren't symptomatic. "Not symptomatic" does not mean "not contagious." Cheery thought, eh?
"Unfortunately, we have very little public data on the false-negative rate for these tests in clinical practice. Research coming out of China indicates that the false-negative rate may be around 30 percent. Some of my colleagues, experts in laboratory medicine, express concerns the false-negative rate in this country could be even higher."
I've been watching the Ohio daily briefings with their Governor, Public Health Director Dr. Amy Acton, and the Lt. Governor. It appears to be hugely popular. The 4 year-old niece of a newscaster dressed up as Dr. Acton for superhero day with a lab coat and graphs saying "flatten the curve". She's turned in to a rock star.
Sure, the stimulus was good, but Mitch McConnell says that's all we get.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reckons that social distancing in the UK might have cut R down to below one - estimating it now at 0.62.
That's based on a survey of contacts per day, compared with similar surveys under normal conditions. Lots of caveats of course.
Heebie, I can't find the comment to refer to, but NYT has the bird's eye view you wanted of how well people are staying at home.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-social-distancing.html?algo=top_conversion&fellback=false&imp_id=717424889&imp_id=683037459&action=click&module=trending&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer
Thanks, Yd. That is exactly the article I was hoping to read.
Speaking of rates of growth, how about those unemployment claims numbers? Holy shit.
125: Thanks, that's good news, if highly caveated. I did like this:
The researchers acknowledge limitations of their work, including the assumption that contact patterns from 2005-06 are similar to those in 2020. However, a more recent study conducted by the BBC shows similar contacts patterns in all but ages 13-17.
Those fucking kids, playing their fucking Fortnites. (Which of course is also good news.)
128: Holy shit indeed. Congress needs to get back in session and shovel more money at people now.
128: I don't mean this to be cheerful, exactly, but those unemployment numbers don't mean what they would in a recession. A very big chunk of them are people who have been laid off for the duration of the emergency, and whose jobs will reappear quickly when non-essential businesses can reopen. Another big chunk, of course, is jobs that aren't going to come back with the snap of a finger, but it's not the same as ordinary job losses.
130: All partly true, but I think heavily dependent on how many small-medium businesses go bankrupt while closed.
I wonder if you can still buy loose cigarettes on the street or if that's too vector-y?
From the Times (paywalled): American contractors in China are hijacking masks bought and paid for by French local authorities and sending them to the US.
Two presidents of French regional councils said that US enterprises were paying cash to take over containers carrying tens of thousands of masks as they were about to be loaded on to cargo aircraft at several Chinese airports.
Jean Rottner, president of the Grand Est region, which is the worst hit by coronavirus in France, said: "On the airport tarmac the Americans are taking out cash and paying three or four times the price for orders that we have placed. We really have to fight."
The region has ordered four million masks from China and two million finally arrived yesterday.
Renaud Muselier, president of Provence-Alpes-Cote-d'Azur (PACA), confirmed the American grab for Chinese masks. "The French order was made and the payment transferred. The masks were ready, but the difficulty is the shipment. There was a plane this morning that was leaving with a French order, but the Americans paid cash and the plane flew directly to the United States."
An official in the PACA region, which has ordered five million Chinese-made masks, said: "The Americans are buying them everywhere they can find them, whatever the price."
131: When demand bounces back, the "job creators" will step up. I do wonder what structural changes to the economy are going to result.
Lower wages and shittier benefits.
135: But offset by increased inflation....oh wait a minute.
(Actually not clear to me on the inflation; think there will be pressures in both directions.)
The basket of goods used to track inflation probably includes gasoline, which is now cheaper than PBR (probably, I'm not doing the math).
137: The other day Marketplace highlighted that the price-per-barrel of Canadian oil (which is admittedly not the good stuff) had fallen below $5. So you could buy a barrel of crappy oil for less than a pint of beer at a bar.
133: Call propo. The root source appears to be RT France. https://francais.rt.com/france/73464-muselier-sur-tarmac-chine-commande-francaise-achetee-americains-cash
https://www.globalvillagespace.com/after-blaming-us-bought-france-bound-face-masks-from-china/
All in all, his and other regions ordered some 60 million masks, the head of the south-eastern Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region Renaud Muselier told RT France on Wednesday.Subsequently Muselier admits he was repeating a rumor. https://www.liberation.fr/france/2020/04/02/masques-detournes-etait-ce-un-poisson-d-avril-non_1783918
Muselier, denied on Wednesday evening that he had been the victim. Denouncing on Twitter false information about an article in the daily newspaper Provence , which evoked a hijacking of the four million masks ordered by the southern region. The masks of the latter "are on the way and were not bought by a foreign power" , he continued. In fact, in his first statement, the elected official (who did not want to react to Liberation ) did not claim to have been directly affected by the American maneuver. But alluded, without further details, to a "French order" . Liberation was able to verify the facts on Wednesday with another region which, on condition of not being identified, confirmed that it had suffered from it.No one on the record confirming this; apparently none of the purported sources actually in China. To the extent any of it is true it appears to be Chinese companies breaking contracts or selling off cargoes opportunistically.
130, 134 I'm no economist but many sectors of the economy won't be able to just restart immediately, that's got to lead to a lot of suppressed demand. Congress needs to get back in session and prop the fuck out of the economy. And by economy I mean people. Just give everyone money.
The Times reran a Russia Today story without checking? They really are a hopeless rag these days.
I think they reran one of several French-language stories based on a Russia Today story without checking. As did the Telegraph.
To confuse the matter, one of the politicians said similar things on RTL, the radio station.
133: The Kraft family (owners of the New England Patriots and Trump buddy) just used the Patriots plan to bring back masks from China. They put up a couple million. Some of those (around 300,000) are going to NY, but most are going to MA. They ordered 1.7 million, but were only able to fit 1.2 million on the plane. I guess they'll have to go back for another 500k.
Maybe we're stealing them out from under the French.
Ohio, at least, appears to be trying to manufacture their own.
The Patriots have long had an interest in things that don't hold air.
Thanks, MC. It says something about my prejudices about unscrupulous American corporate actors that I believed it uncritically.
And says something else, I think, about what Trump has done to America's reputation.
I'm very concerned about whether my small town's unusually vibrant restaurant scene will ever come back. If a lot of them close, then the town is no longer going to attract people coming in from neighboring areas to eat, and then we could find a different equilibrium where those restaurants just don't come back.
125: That is one too many significant digits for that kind of estimate.
So, we're up to 16 cases in the county. One is a TSA guy, which probably means he passed the virus to people leaving, rather than arriving.
Further to 141, the Guardian has it on the front page. Jesus.
Today the City Council got through almost an entire public meeting on Zoom without being spammed by digital hooligans.
The basket of goods used to track inflation probably includes gasoline
"Core" inflation, which is what economists usually pay attention to, specifically excludes gasoline because energy costs tend to be volatile.
I did a Zoom meeting for work today that didn't get spammed. I was very disappointed.
Clearly, the engineers at Zoom Inc. put insufficient consideration into designing for the scenario in which they suddenly become the most pervasive form of interpersonal communication for all public and private functions, basically overnight.
153: That's probably a good idea. Score one for the economists.
A lot of economists are actually pretty clever, but don't ever tell them that.
