Living in Florida I wouldn't trust any official numbers of cases or deaths. Also case numbers in general are dependent on the quantity of testing available which is highly variable across states and across the country. Even deaths can easily be uncounted due to people dying without a Covid-19 diagnoses before (or after) death.
Why do you think deaths directly from the virus is more important than virus deaths + collateral damage? Are you trying to make the claim that lockdown measures are more destructive than the extremely infectious disease?
It is quite possible for lockdown measures to be more destructive than the disease they seek to prevent. Taken to an extreme, forbidding all human contact to protect against the common cold would be an example of such.
And it's definitely worth considering when trying to determine if a lockdown was "worth" it. If you locked down and 10k people died, the lockdown looks a lot worse when 9k of those deaths were due to suicides/"elective" procedures/missed cancer/etc. Especially if only 20k deaths were expected from the disease if there was no lockdown at all...
I don't pay attention to the NY Times, but have they had any opinion pieces suggesting that maybe the destruction of the economy is also a bad thing? And, maybe, someone besides a reporter or "health expert" should make some kind of attempt to determine if it is even possible to sustain these policies?
I really feel like I'm in a Tales from Dark Side episode.
The New York Times reporters generally consult experts when they write stories like these. Just because their is a reporters name next to it doesn't imply the reporter fabricated all the data they are using and that no health experts were involved.
Even in areas where they are opening up, people aren’t in any hurry to travel unnecessarily, be in crowds, go to restaurants, etc. Covid’s effect on the economy is going to be devastating no matter what the official policy is.
> Even in areas where they are opening up, people aren’t in any hurry to travel unnecessarily, be in crowds, go to restaurants, etc. Covid’s effect on the economy is going to devastating no matter what the official policy is.
Interesting that you have changed the topic. This is indicative of a broad problem that I am observing: nobody wants to discuss economic consequences and even mentioning this will result in either very heavy down-voting or outright deplatforming[1].
My question is rather specific to how long the economy can last while held in lockdown and whether the Times has ever reported such concerns.
The economy does things like bring us food and pay for the health care that is supposed to save us from the virus. Without the economy, we don't have food and we don't have health care.
If some percentage of the population is actively blocked from having jobs while having no income, no government subsidies, and no savings, then "civil unrest" becomes reality. This is historically true.
[1] If you think that discussion of the economy is somehow a hidden message about 5G, anti-vaxx, NWO, etc., then you really need to take some time to learn economics, and I would also suggest some critical thinking, philosophy, and reading comprehension review.
These seem to be general discussions about the state of the economy. They still are not making an attempt to forecast how long the economy can minimally support civilization without reopening. I don't see a "what is worse" analysis.
I also don't see any mention of the myriad studies published demonstrating how mortality rates increase in many different ways during periods of economic decline.
== nobody wants to discuss economic consequences and even mentioning this will result in either very heavy down-voting or outright deplatforming[1].==
This is a false and a simple google search would have proved it (as another poster did). It sounds like you have a predetermined bias. Maybe take your own advice on some of the suggestions you have for other people?
Mentioning how the economy provides healthcare and food kind of undermines your point as those things were never shut down.
Those things cannot make up the entire economy because people end up starving to death. Thus, at some point there is no other option but to reopen.
It is notable how you reinterpret my comment:
> The economy does things like bring us food and pay for the health care that is supposed to save us from the virus. Without the economy, we don't have food and we don't have health care.
You also seem to ignore other parts:
> If some percentage of the population is actively blocked from having jobs while having no income, no government subsidies, and no savings, then "civil unrest" becomes reality. This is historically true.
I’m not following your line of thought. Nobody claimed they made up the entire economy, and they don’t right now even amidst a multi-state stay-at-home order. So, I’m not sure what you are arguing against.
There are essential parts of the economy and non-essential parts of the economy and they can certainly exist without each other. In fact, they did when society’s first formed. Then, they focused on a different level of the hierarchy of needs but it was still an economy. Food was produced and houses were built before cars, cell phones, and video streaming ever existed.
I skipped the last part because while it is true that those things lead to “civil unrest”, you haven’t proved that we meet your own conditionals. What is “some percentage”? What is “actively blocked”?
For example, I see government subsidies all over the place. To the tune of $2 trillion so far with almost certainly more to come.
> I’m not following your line of thought. Nobody claimed they made up the entire economy, and they don’t right now even amidst a multi-state stay-at-home order. So, I’m not sure what you are arguing against.
> There are essential parts of the economy and non-essential parts of the economy and they can certainly exist without each other. In fact, they did when society’s first formed. Then, they focused on a different level of the hierarchy of needs but it was still an economy. Food was produced and houses were built before cars, cell phones, and video streaming ever existed.
> I skipped the last part because while it is true that those things lead to “civil unrest”, you haven’t proved that we meet your own conditionals. What is “some percentage”? What is “actively blocked”?
> For example, I see government subsidies all over the place. To the tune of $2 trillion so far with almost certainly more to come.
You have demonstrated a very poor understanding of economics. Chiefly, you appear to believe you understand everything in the economy since you feel some parts of the economy may be declared as essential or non-essential. This differentiation is impossible, best demonstrated in the I, Pencil[1] essay by Leonard Reed. The economy is more complex than anyone can comprehend.
As far as ancient man, you can, at this moment, give up all the luxuries of modern life and live in the mountains, but if everyone did that there would not be enough food.
The people currently forced out of work were producing things that increased our standard living and contributed to the wealth of civilization. This wealth makes its way, through various and complex ways, to nearly every corner of the economy. You will not be able to be certain there is enough food production or adequate health care without these people taking a part in the productive economy. The longer we go with parts the economy locked down, the more likely that very serious problems arise, such as empty grocery store shelves and hospital closures.
The government subsidies to retail consumers will result in increased consumer price inflation. This was last experienced in the U.S. in the 70s as a result of the "guns and butter" policies of the 60s, which the butter being what lead to the consumer price inflation. The same inflation has not arrived now because the increase in the money supply has been in financial instruments, which causes other problems but hasn't appreciably increased consumer price inflation.
Once higher rates (say, >10%) of consumer price inflation get going, it becomes extremely difficult to arrest. The usual way this is managed is either by increasing interest through Federal Reserve policies, which peaked at around 20% to take care of the inflation of the 70s, or through hyperinflation followed by the issuance of a new currency, which occurs after the value of every single asset has been completely wiped out, with examples if you want to know more being Weimar Republic Germany or Revolutionary War Continental Dollar. Note that interest rates held at less than 3% are still yielding percent of national budget in service to debt at I believe 5%, so if we have the problem of consumer price inflation hitting higher interest rates, the percentage in service to the debt is going to go up very quickly, though not instantly because the bonds have to expire.
Also of note is that a lot of people are complaining that the checks from the government are not arriving, as was popularly demonstrated in a recent clip of New York Governor Cuomo attempting to respond to a reporter asking him about what people who have not received their checks should do. New York is not the only state where there are reports of this problem.
And you've been downvoted in the last 10 minutes since I first went to this discussion.
You'll find plenty of discussion of economic issues on right of center forums, with the same sort of downvoting for concerns about opening up resulting in too many cases for healthcare systems to handle. Ditto that it may be wise to limit the total number of people who get it prior to our finding out if we can develop a vaccine for it.
> This is indicative of a broad problem that I am observing: nobody wants to discuss economic consequences and even mentioning this will result in either very heavy down-voting or outright deplatforming[1].
the most recent one is, "The cost of reopening the economy, in lives", then there is a bunch of stuff that is not relevant and just happens to have the word "economy" in it, in the topic "Covid-19: Impact on business sectors and the economy" there is very little discussion about the economy, people muse about virsuses instead. The only recent other one that doesn't flat out have 0 comments is "Stocks Are Recovering While the Economy Collapses".
Great. I can see why any comment of a person asking to discuss this should be met with so many downvotes they'll get throttled, while everybody else demonstrates their ongoing inability to discuss it, pointing at non-discussions as proof it's been discussed so extensively.
9 days ago, "71 Percent of jobless Americans did not recieve their March unemployment benefit" received 24 comments. Twentyfour! Oh well, I guess the meat is in all those "guerilla subthreads" then.
1. What you find interesting might not interest others; if you want to force a discussion on someone, call a hotline;
2. The comment wouldn’t have been heavily downvoted if it weren’t written in this “I’m woke and you sheeple aren’t” tone. (I didn’t even downvote that one for the record.)
3. Vote swings are a thing.
Also, just for your info, “so many downvotes...” a comment can be downvoted five times before it’s dead, so any non-dead comment hasn’t attracted a lot of downvotes. “They’ll get throttled” that’s nonsense, throttling is based on thread depth and comment frequency, not votes.
> Could you please stop breaking guidelines by commenting on downvotes?
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
Downvoting without argument is the equivalent of calling names, so the answer is no.
> if you want to force a discussion on someone, call a hotline;
Who wants to "force a discussion"? Why do people who don't want to discuss something get to punish those who do? And how is what I quoted not blatant violation of the guidelines?
> The comment wouldn’t have been heavily downvoted if it weren’t written in this “I’m woke and you sheeple aren’t” tone.
The tone is in your reading. Also, you don't know why people downvote, you're simply claiming it. So after you say I shouldn't "break the guidelines by talking about downvotes", you then proceed to talk about downvotes, while claiming things you have no basis for, something I didn't do nor would do, because I don't need to.
I’m saying worrying about “policy” when it comes to the economics is missing the forest for the trees. Even if everything opened up tomorrow, people aren’t going to spend money in large swaths of the market. It’s not open up and they will come.
> Demand is going to be decreased no matter if everything opens up or not.
Sure, but is it possible to posit that, or to at least discuss, some nuance of at least some variance of some sort:
A. Demand is going to be decreased, and a bunch of people are going to starve to death (or, more likely, take to the streets with their pitch forks and torches).
B. Demand is going to be decreased, and recovery will be difficult.
> everybody already knows that allowing lots of people to die is bad for the economy
We now know that half of all European deaths have been in care homes. The elderly in care homes are not significant contributors to the economy. (And over in resource-extraction states, most of the population is often regarded by local thinktanks as "superfluous" – Russia, for example, only needs about 10 million people to run its economy, and it makes little difference whether the virus affects the other ~135 million people!)
Of course, there is a need to flatten the curve so that the virus doesn't begin to affect, by overloading the healthcare system, those demographics that are major drivers of the economy. You also don't want people to be scared of going out and consuming. However, if the curve can still be flattened sufficiently with businesses open, then there is little mandate to call for keeping them closed just to protect that aforementioned elderly demographic.
I wonder if the people who just downvote you without comment don't realize that they're just proving your point, or if they just don't care about being that blatant.
The comment was asking for something that exists. It was only a google search away. Maybe OP should have done that search instead of making accusations that people are afraid to talk about something that they have already talked about.
> The comment was asking for something that exists. It was only a google search away.
There are hundreds of commments each day that do the exact same thing. They might get ignored, they might get an answer, and in other contexts, it's even a totally joyous occasion, AKA https://xkcd.com/1053/
> instead of making accusations that people are afraid to talk about something that they have already talked about
Maybe if people want to frame this as an unfounded accusation, they shouldn't blindly downvote a comment like that within minutes of it being posted (not just one or two downvotes either, everybody piling on while they still can).
As it is, it's demonstrated black on white. Or is there anything in my comments I "should have googled", too? What's the rationalization for them being punished? What rules do they violate?
The comment didn’t add to the discussion. It admits ignorance on the NYT and their reporting, then proceeds to criticize their performance anyways. Now, we get the “turnaround and play victim angle” because anonymous people on the internet clicked an arrow facing down.
Are downvotes “punishment”?
Was OP accused of violating rules?
How does downvoting prove the point that people are afraid to talk about opening the economy?
There is reviving or fixing the economy until the pandemic ends. The government can urge stores and businesses and offices to open but we’ll still have destruction if large amounts of people are afraid for their health to go out or to commute to work.
This is just my own experience but I think its just the usual political extreme sides arguing with each other.
On the tea party side we have these crazy gun toting nuts (I own guns myself) that are yelling freedom and other crazy things regarding the lockdown. Storming government buildings with open carry and at least to me look like fools
Then on the flip side in the Bay Area we have a bunch of tech workers, working from home and being comfy yelling that we cannot open up businesses and everyone is going to die that goes out. I look at my own company internal chat and its basically this.
Unfortunately both sides and a lack of overall national leadership has detracted from the real discussion. Our news agencies on both sides are playing the extremes and nobody is talking about the real issue.
Shelter-in-place does work but its only there to reduce the impact on hospitals. Its not there to prevent people from getting sick necessarily. We don't know how long this virus is going to be around. Maybe it disappears, maybe its here for a year. The whole point of sheltering is so hospitals can continue to work without being overburdened. I think in the Bay Area the hospitals have been extremely under-utilized.
What we need are discussions on how to reopen safely. What type of rules do people need to follow when we do reopen. I don't want to argue what is legally allowed but I think things like wearing masks in public, public temperature checks, more testing and forcing quarantine of those and those that have been around them are all sensible if we want to get the economy going again.
Well at this point it needs to be spread at a rate that keeps the hospitals filled (at say 80% capacity). So it’s probably good that you have people disregarding the lockdown, because at the present rate, it may take a really long time to reach herd immunity (which they say is 80% with immunity).
Of course without widespread and continuous testing for the virus and antibodies, who knows how to achieve that rate.
I actually am getting an antibody test through Quest tomorrow for $119. That way I’ll know if the chest cold and mild fever I had 6 weeks ago (with still lingering cough) was allergy related or the virus.
> Then on the flip side in the Bay Area we have a bunch of tech workers, working from home and being comfy yelling that we cannot open up businesses and everyone is going to die that goes out.
Based on polls, most Americans are for shelter in place and are afraid of economy opening up too soon. The people who are for opening are not concentrated within groups who lost jobs, but are rather spread out over the society.
The thing about lower paid workers is that they are also the most affected by Covid, most likely to get it, more likely to die from it and more likely to know someone who dies. More affected by healthcare price too if they dont die but merely need hospital. You can see that in stats from New Yourk too - middle class people able to work from home and just not as much affected as those who work in low paid jobs.
The place where I see most pressure for opening economy is HN - Bay Area tech workers. People here dont work in meat plants nor in essential services nor in Amazon. Their employers wont have them working in close proximity with other people even when those are having symptoms. They wont get Covid and wont spread it to elderly relatives regardless of whether economy is open or not.
I think this is again part of the problem with all the misinformation going around. At some point its too much, we have massive levels of unemployment and for many parts of the country, underutilized hospitals. We need a leader that helps focus the message on what criteria is necessary to open and how to do it safely. There are many countries that have sane rules and the exposure rate is pretty damn low. Instead of distracting the conversation about low-paid workers and who is most at risk. We should be looking at the data both the financial and health side and figure out how to manage both.
Answering one of your points is not "distracting the conversation".
Your claim was that one side is "Bay Area workers telling everyone to stay home". Answering it with "no actually this is not some kind of Bay Area tech only" phenomenon is completely legitimate. There is no rule that we should accept made up divisions between groups of people just because it suits you.
> There are many countries that have sane rules and the exposure rate is pretty damn low.
Sure, lets say German or Czech republic. The sane rules still involved closing stores, limiting amount of people in stores, closed schools, mandated hands sanitation upon entering stores. Mandated masks in public places or plexiglass between shoppers and sellers. Their hospitals also instantly limited non-covid related procedures and were underutilized and still are despite countries slowly opening. Both countries also had citizens who were fairly disciplined. Their top politicians did not claimed it is all hoax by opposing party to destroy the country.
Czech Republic reacted quite fast to first few sick people and mandated masks right away. Germany ramped up testing quickly and super high. They did contact tracing before virus spread.
> We need a leader that helps focus the message on what criteria is necessary to open and how to do it safely.
Maybe start by not forcing both-sides framework on everything. Or making strawman groups of Bay Area tech workers who are definitely only ones making America close.
Had there be elevated testing regime now, opening would be closer. Had there been faster reaction by the start of it all, the New York did not had to happen and America could be where Germany or Czech Republic is. And it does not seem to me that this state of things is both sides issue nor Bay Area techies issue.
Um, what flattening curve? Flattening growth rates just mean linear growth instead of exponential. Flattening total or active case numbers is what flattening the curve usually means.
Dead people don’t require medical attention. Flattening the curve is about hospitals getting overwhelmed even if similar numbers of people get sick and die either way. The difference between hypothetically 1 million deaths vs 1.2 million deaths makes a huge difference for 200,000 people.
I have a family member working in a major metropolitan hospital. They are not overwhelmed. By all accounts, our state is at or past the peak, and we are not even close to being overwhelmed. Many doctors and nurses are actually out of work as "elective" procedures are on hold.
Measuring the number of cases as the testing is being massively bumped out does not measure overload - actual death rate does.
Specific hospitals being overwhelmed or not is a different question. If we want to know how stressed the healthcare system is look at hospitalization rates, other proxy’s are pointless when you have hard data.
Deaths don’t track 1:1 with hospitalizations because some people die much sooner. The most at risk tend to die within 2 weeks, while others are still extremely sick and can die 6+ weeks after infection. Those people have lower rates of death per day, but may still require ventilators. Thus, a steady rate of new infections can look like a very slow decrease in deaths even as the heath system is getting more stressed.
the 7 day moving average means there is a lag in that curve for prediction. Incubation time of upto two weeks may not show itself for upto three weeks.
If you go to the site, they answer these concerns. The reporting is also delayed, and so can be very bursty. Here is the raw data, which shows a flatening.
That's a graph of growth rate again, showing similar data to the article. That roughly flat growth rate means linear increase in total deaths, day by day. To be flattening that total curve, the growth rate needs to keep decreasing.
It is not a graph of growth rate. It is a graph of death rate, and it shows the death rate on a day-to-day basis is pretty much constant for a while. If we have pretty much the same deaths per 100000 from one day to the next, where is the growth?
It is a graph of the rate of change of the total number of deaths, in units deaths/day. I.e., the growth rate of the death count. The total number of deaths is approximately the area under the curve, so if the curve stays constant as time goes on, the total area (number of deaths) increases linearly.
Well I take “growth” to be a “rate” (the velocity). So a “growth rate” would be acceleration.
That death curve is now flat for the last two samples, implying the rate is zero. The graph should be labeled deaths/million/day, which means the acceleration is zero and the velocity is constant.
Sorry, just drives me bonkers when the media tosses about words such as “the economy grew at a rate of ....”. I suppose English is more confusing with “Billy grew 10 cm” (implied over a year), compared with “Billy is growing 10 cm/year”.
The stacked graphs are probably the most valuable for me, this isn't a competition between countries and I think the stacked graph better represents that.
Seems to me that it's extremely valuable to compare the efficacy of different measures that were taken, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to compare the numbers between countries.
It's helpful if the X axis is not simply a date but in "days since community spread started", and you're relying on the represented numbers actually mean the same thing which depends on many things.
>Flattening total or active case numbers is what flattening the curve usually means.
When I clicked on it, the very first thing at the top was a graph showing "the number of newly reported cases each day". Since cases cycle out of the total too as the disease runs its course one way or another, if the number of new cases per day becomes flat and/or begins declining then so too will the total number of active cases (after a lag) right? Are you seeing something different from me in the article? I have uBO and NS on but whitelist the nytimes.com and nyt.com domains.
The units of the graph are cases/day. It's a growth rate. If it stays constant (flat), then the total number of cases will increase in a straight line. If it decreases to zero, the active cases will disappear a few weeks later.
>If it stays constant (flat), then the total number of cases will increase in a straight line.
What? After a set period of time, active cases become past cases. People recover (or die). If the number of new cases per day is flat, than the total number of active cases will also become flat (after a delay if it was growing previously). If the number of new cases per day declines, the number of active cases will also decline (all the way down to zero as you say if the number of new cases drops to zero). I am genuinely confused by what you're writing here. "Number of new cases per day" isn't the same thing as an increasing rate of new cases per day.
I like how they made an example of Texas where I live. My observation is that people in urban areas aren’t take this seriously from their frequent visits to stores for shopping, lack of face masks, eagerness for normalcy and so forth. The risk of exposure is multiplicative of population density. Counter-intuitively the lower risk rural areas appear to be taking this far more seriously.
It seems impatience will get the best of us. The only way to beat this is with very strict exercising of social distancing for not less than three months, healthy habits, and extreme sanitation. It seems urban areas are not willing to wait 3 months until there is an uncontrolled outbreak.
I got the heck out the SF Bay Area to semi-rural NorCal, and have a good 12 months of food that would normally get eaten anyhow. Curiously, I frequently see drivers speeding down the street here with their vehicle windows down, no masks, and acting like there's no such thing as a virus. One of the adjacent properties is constructing a house and multiple neighbors have been chainsawing pines and oaks nonstop for the past month. In 3 months, I've only been off-property once for an emergency dental visit.
I don't think there is, or ever will be, sufficient testing evidence to justify similar-to-past public interaction until if or when there is a safe and effective vaccine deployed that covers all strains. The prevalence is basically unknown and will only be worse when there is no longer mindshare or patience to keep up the fight... I think nearly all of this socioeconomic pain will be for naught because of the endgame.
Flu hits rural areas hardest, but hits them later than it hits cities. I wouldn’t make quick assumptions this early on.
This may be different, as people don’t take flu as seriously. But America is already loosening up. You also can’t see stuff as clearly in rural areas. The big risks are indoor gatherings at private homes, church, work, and school.
If you aren’t doing those things, you won’t see them happening. Whereas it’s easy to see people walking on an urban street as you drive by, or to watch the news going to a central urban location.
You see this with crime rates. People assume it’s a big city issue due to visibility, but crime rates tend to be higher in rural areas.
Coronavirus may well require urban density, but don’t be too quick to assume it as an axiom.
That data isn’t about flu. Got anything specific about flu vaccination rates in urban vs. rural areas? The HPV vaccine in particularly is an issue in the culture wars.
However, this gap could also be due to health system efficacy in general. So unclear if we might expect worse covid results in places with fewer/worse hospitals.
What is this based on? Most urban centers were the first places to shut down and first to require masks. From my family in Iowa, they seem to be taking far less precautions than what I’ve seen in Chicago. Iowa never even had a stay-at-home order.
In places that have opened back up, it isn’t being driven by the urban areas. Georgia and Florida aren’t opened because Atlanta and Miami forced the Governor’s hand. Do you think most of these protesters we’ve seen are from cities or outside?
Based just upon my unscientific observations and people I talk to. I see most people at my urban grocers without masks and hear from family and neighbors go to the store ever other day.
When I drove to my mothers house in rural area recently there were few people in the grocery store there and most were wearing masks. A few days later I drove to Fort Hood for a military deployment and again everybody in this tiny town of Gatesville were wearing masks in the store and really taking distancing seriously in the store.
That’s the exact opposite of what I’m hearing in Illinois. Stores in the city are strictly enforcing the mask policy (I’ve seen multiple people denied entry), the suburbs are a little less strict and the rural areas even less so.
Retconning the data? That's highly unpopular among a vocal minority. Typically these sorts of things show the raw data and allow people to extrapolate 'real' infection rates etc for themselves. Changing all data from before there was a change in the measurement standard would be putting extrapolation right into the data feed. I think the responsible thing to do might be to show error bars, then it would be more intuitive what happened.
You know what's not being reported on? I'm going through the charts on https://www.worldometers.info and I notice something. There's different tabs for "cases" and "active cases", and you can drill down into some individual countries (like the USA), and you can drill down into some individual States (like California).
So I'm going through it today, and one of the columns is total deaths. So for the purposes of this thread, Closed Cases = Deaths + Recoveries, and while there isn't a column for recoveries specifically, you can infer a couple of things from the data that is there.
First, the data sucks. Each State and in some cases, each county health department is responsible for reporting their own cases and deaths, but it seems not every place is making good efforts to track recoveries. If you drill into California and check San Francisco, and it's not limited to just San Francisco, you can see the "Active Cases" over in about the sixth column is only Cases - Deaths instead of Cases - (Deaths + Recoveries). Not all 58 Counties are like this, but you also have outliers like Humboldt where apparently 52 of 54 total cases are recoveries because there aren't any reported deaths and there's only 2 reported active cases.
It isn't limited to just individual counties in California. If you go back up a level to the USA and look at various States, you can see that New York is making some effort to track recoveries because at a glance, Active Cases does not equal Cases - Deaths, it's actually quite a bit lower than Cases - Deaths, which is good. But if you look below New York at New Jersey which has had the second highest number of cases, it would seem like every closed case has been a death, because Active Cases = Cases - Deaths, same probably with San Francisco County in California.
So when I last looked a few hours ago, the United States had about 964K Active Cases. This is probably both an overcount and an undercount. It's certainly an undercount because we obviously have no idea how many people are actively carrying it right now. But it's also an overcount because of the verified cases, recoveries are being underreported.
This bloody chart in the NYTimes is annoying. It is seemingly trying to apply some corrective measures to people's expectations about how much the curve is actually flattening in the country, that it is not equally flattened, and that reporting is fine. It's leaving out half the bloody story which is: recoveries. If the goal is to lead and not mislead with this piece, then by not attempting to address the discrepancy in reported cases and active cases, and how many closed cases are closed because of recoveries and not because of deaths, it will leave people with a sense that maybe the country is in worse straits than we think, or at least different pockets.
To be blunt, nobody knows. They don't know, the Administration doesn't know, apparently half the bloody Governors don't have a clue about a big part of the situation in their own States in addition to almost every other part of the situation, and if you assume that in terms of closed verified cases, recoveries outnumber deaths 4:1, then New Jersey should probably be subtracting somewhere around 30K Active Cases (assuming there have been 4x as many recoveries as their reported 8K deaths).
A lot of people are dying or dead, but what about the other side of this coin? How many are recovering, and why don't we know? Is it really the case that in New Jersey, not a single person has reportedly recovered and all the closed cases are actually deaths? The number that's getting trotted out by the media in terms of cases is 1.2M (implicitly, verified cases rather than actual cases). But we don't currently have 1M verified active cases, we may not even have 900K (yet) but the best available data I can find doesn't even reflect that.
My science background leads me to look at the situation as the NY Times does. I find this article compelling in motivating me to support sticking with protocols from science experts on social distancing, etc.
Last week I appeared on a very pro-Trump podcast. The starting point for the very pro-Trump person was freedom and the economy. Numbers like in this article seemed irrelevant to him, or even signs of people trying to seize more power.
If we want to lower the spread of this pandemic, our biggest challenge is influencing people's behavior. If telling people more numbers doesn't influence people how we intend, they may be verifiable and right, but if we want to save lives, including our own, we have to figure out what works.
Elsewhere in this thread somebody wrote
> Another story with tunnel vision.
> I don't pay attention to the NY Times, but have they had any opinion pieces suggesting that maybe the destruction of the economy is also a bad thing? And, maybe, someone besides a reporter or "health expert" should make some kind of attempt to determine if it is even possible to sustain these policies?
> I really feel like I'm in a Tales from Dark Side episode.
Currently the comment is downvoted to near invisibility.
But that perspective is motivating tens of millions of people. If we want to motivate them, we have to figure out how to respond. Spewing facts, however right, if it motivates people to stop listening, or downvoting instead of addressing is a matter of life and death.
How do we respond effectively to people with such views?
Changing people's minds to something they don't want to hear is really difficult. I have a personal hypothesis that some people are just really bad at abstract reasoning- they don't really get patterns, and they can't see the same pattern in a different context. Even something like, "If we're wrong and come out of this too early we may have to do this all over again next fall."
You, a living person with a face, have to become more trusted to that individual person than the alternatives. Do not talk about the issue during this 'trust phase'. Only then can you approach that person about their erroneous ideas and thoughts. They then have to decide, freely, what to do. This can take years or weeks to accomplish. That's the summation of a lot of work on the subject.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadAnd it's definitely worth considering when trying to determine if a lockdown was "worth" it. If you locked down and 10k people died, the lockdown looks a lot worse when 9k of those deaths were due to suicides/"elective" procedures/missed cancer/etc. Especially if only 20k deaths were expected from the disease if there was no lockdown at all...
Exactly. There has already been legal wranglings between DeSantis and the Miami Herald over this.
I don't pay attention to the NY Times, but have they had any opinion pieces suggesting that maybe the destruction of the economy is also a bad thing? And, maybe, someone besides a reporter or "health expert" should make some kind of attempt to determine if it is even possible to sustain these policies?
I really feel like I'm in a Tales from Dark Side episode.
Interesting that you have changed the topic. This is indicative of a broad problem that I am observing: nobody wants to discuss economic consequences and even mentioning this will result in either very heavy down-voting or outright deplatforming[1].
My question is rather specific to how long the economy can last while held in lockdown and whether the Times has ever reported such concerns.
The economy does things like bring us food and pay for the health care that is supposed to save us from the virus. Without the economy, we don't have food and we don't have health care.
If some percentage of the population is actively blocked from having jobs while having no income, no government subsidies, and no savings, then "civil unrest" becomes reality. This is historically true.
[1] If you think that discussion of the economy is somehow a hidden message about 5G, anti-vaxx, NWO, etc., then you really need to take some time to learn economics, and I would also suggest some critical thinking, philosophy, and reading comprehension review.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/business/economy/coronavi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/business/coronavirus-econ...
are two examples.
I also don't see any mention of the myriad studies published demonstrating how mortality rates increase in many different ways during periods of economic decline.
I suspect that's exactly the mechanism, which someone described very well here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23081538
This is a false and a simple google search would have proved it (as another poster did). It sounds like you have a predetermined bias. Maybe take your own advice on some of the suggestions you have for other people?
Mentioning how the economy provides healthcare and food kind of undermines your point as those things were never shut down.
This perfectly demonstrates my point.
Those things cannot make up the entire economy because people end up starving to death. Thus, at some point there is no other option but to reopen.
It is notable how you reinterpret my comment:
> The economy does things like bring us food and pay for the health care that is supposed to save us from the virus. Without the economy, we don't have food and we don't have health care.
You also seem to ignore other parts:
> If some percentage of the population is actively blocked from having jobs while having no income, no government subsidies, and no savings, then "civil unrest" becomes reality. This is historically true.
There are essential parts of the economy and non-essential parts of the economy and they can certainly exist without each other. In fact, they did when society’s first formed. Then, they focused on a different level of the hierarchy of needs but it was still an economy. Food was produced and houses were built before cars, cell phones, and video streaming ever existed.
I skipped the last part because while it is true that those things lead to “civil unrest”, you haven’t proved that we meet your own conditionals. What is “some percentage”? What is “actively blocked”?
For example, I see government subsidies all over the place. To the tune of $2 trillion so far with almost certainly more to come.
> There are essential parts of the economy and non-essential parts of the economy and they can certainly exist without each other. In fact, they did when society’s first formed. Then, they focused on a different level of the hierarchy of needs but it was still an economy. Food was produced and houses were built before cars, cell phones, and video streaming ever existed.
> I skipped the last part because while it is true that those things lead to “civil unrest”, you haven’t proved that we meet your own conditionals. What is “some percentage”? What is “actively blocked”?
> For example, I see government subsidies all over the place. To the tune of $2 trillion so far with almost certainly more to come.
You have demonstrated a very poor understanding of economics. Chiefly, you appear to believe you understand everything in the economy since you feel some parts of the economy may be declared as essential or non-essential. This differentiation is impossible, best demonstrated in the I, Pencil[1] essay by Leonard Reed. The economy is more complex than anyone can comprehend.
As far as ancient man, you can, at this moment, give up all the luxuries of modern life and live in the mountains, but if everyone did that there would not be enough food.
The people currently forced out of work were producing things that increased our standard living and contributed to the wealth of civilization. This wealth makes its way, through various and complex ways, to nearly every corner of the economy. You will not be able to be certain there is enough food production or adequate health care without these people taking a part in the productive economy. The longer we go with parts the economy locked down, the more likely that very serious problems arise, such as empty grocery store shelves and hospital closures.
The government subsidies to retail consumers will result in increased consumer price inflation. This was last experienced in the U.S. in the 70s as a result of the "guns and butter" policies of the 60s, which the butter being what lead to the consumer price inflation. The same inflation has not arrived now because the increase in the money supply has been in financial instruments, which causes other problems but hasn't appreciably increased consumer price inflation.
Once higher rates (say, >10%) of consumer price inflation get going, it becomes extremely difficult to arrest. The usual way this is managed is either by increasing interest through Federal Reserve policies, which peaked at around 20% to take care of the inflation of the 70s, or through hyperinflation followed by the issuance of a new currency, which occurs after the value of every single asset has been completely wiped out, with examples if you want to know more being Weimar Republic Germany or Revolutionary War Continental Dollar. Note that interest rates held at less than 3% are still yielding percent of national budget in service to debt at I believe 5%, so if we have the problem of consumer price inflation hitting higher interest rates, the percentage in service to the debt is going to go up very quickly, though not instantly because the bonds have to expire.
Also of note is that a lot of people are complaining that the checks from the government are not arriving, as was popularly demonstrated in a recent clip of New York Governor Cuomo attempting to respond to a reporter asking him about what people who have not received their checks should do. New York is not the only state where there are reports of this problem.
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
You'll find plenty of discussion of economic issues on right of center forums, with the same sort of downvoting for concerns about opening up resulting in too many cases for healthcare systems to handle. Ditto that it may be wise to limit the total number of people who get it prior to our finding out if we can develop a vaccine for it.
Wat? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr... No shortage of threads centered around lockdown economy. Not to mention guerrilla subthreads.
Great. I can see why any comment of a person asking to discuss this should be met with so many downvotes they'll get throttled, while everybody else demonstrates their ongoing inability to discuss it, pointing at non-discussions as proof it's been discussed so extensively.
9 days ago, "71 Percent of jobless Americans did not recieve their March unemployment benefit" received 24 comments. Twentyfour! Oh well, I guess the meat is in all those "guerilla subthreads" then.
* U.S. Economy Shrinks at 4.8% Pace, Signaling Start of Recession
* Coronavirus-afflicted global economy is almost certainly in recession
* Bolsonaro fires health minister, calls to reopen economy
* Covid-19: Impact on business sectors and the economy
* Germany's Covid-19 expert: 'For many, I'm the evil guy crippling the economy'
* US factory orders plunge 14.4% as economy grinds to halt
* US GDP shrank 4.8% in Q1 as the coronavirus dragged the economy into recession
* JPMorgan-economy contracting by 40% in second quarter, unemployment reaching 20%
* Coronavirus Ravages China’s Economy–and It’s Just Getting Started
* Trump faces 'biggest decision' on re-opening economy
* Ray Dalio: What coronavirus means for the global economy
* To save the US economy, policymakers need to understand small business 101
Three things:
1. What you find interesting might not interest others; if you want to force a discussion on someone, call a hotline;
2. The comment wouldn’t have been heavily downvoted if it weren’t written in this “I’m woke and you sheeple aren’t” tone. (I didn’t even downvote that one for the record.)
3. Vote swings are a thing.
Also, just for your info, “so many downvotes...” a comment can be downvoted five times before it’s dead, so any non-dead comment hasn’t attracted a lot of downvotes. “They’ll get throttled” that’s nonsense, throttling is based on thread depth and comment frequency, not votes.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
Downvoting without argument is the equivalent of calling names, so the answer is no.
> if you want to force a discussion on someone, call a hotline;
Who wants to "force a discussion"? Why do people who don't want to discuss something get to punish those who do? And how is what I quoted not blatant violation of the guidelines?
> The comment wouldn’t have been heavily downvoted if it weren’t written in this “I’m woke and you sheeple aren’t” tone.
The tone is in your reading. Also, you don't know why people downvote, you're simply claiming it. So after you say I shouldn't "break the guidelines by talking about downvotes", you then proceed to talk about downvotes, while claiming things you have no basis for, something I didn't do nor would do, because I don't need to.
Sure, but is it possible to posit that, or to at least discuss, some nuance of at least some variance of some sort:
A. Demand is going to be decreased, and a bunch of people are going to starve to death (or, more likely, take to the streets with their pitch forks and torches).
B. Demand is going to be decreased, and recovery will be difficult.
We now know that half of all European deaths have been in care homes. The elderly in care homes are not significant contributors to the economy. (And over in resource-extraction states, most of the population is often regarded by local thinktanks as "superfluous" – Russia, for example, only needs about 10 million people to run its economy, and it makes little difference whether the virus affects the other ~135 million people!)
Of course, there is a need to flatten the curve so that the virus doesn't begin to affect, by overloading the healthcare system, those demographics that are major drivers of the economy. You also don't want people to be scared of going out and consuming. However, if the curve can still be flattened sufficiently with businesses open, then there is little mandate to call for keeping them closed just to protect that aforementioned elderly demographic.
There are hundreds of commments each day that do the exact same thing. They might get ignored, they might get an answer, and in other contexts, it's even a totally joyous occasion, AKA https://xkcd.com/1053/
> instead of making accusations that people are afraid to talk about something that they have already talked about
Maybe if people want to frame this as an unfounded accusation, they shouldn't blindly downvote a comment like that within minutes of it being posted (not just one or two downvotes either, everybody piling on while they still can).
As it is, it's demonstrated black on white. Or is there anything in my comments I "should have googled", too? What's the rationalization for them being punished? What rules do they violate?
Are downvotes “punishment”?
Was OP accused of violating rules?
How does downvoting prove the point that people are afraid to talk about opening the economy?
On the tea party side we have these crazy gun toting nuts (I own guns myself) that are yelling freedom and other crazy things regarding the lockdown. Storming government buildings with open carry and at least to me look like fools
Then on the flip side in the Bay Area we have a bunch of tech workers, working from home and being comfy yelling that we cannot open up businesses and everyone is going to die that goes out. I look at my own company internal chat and its basically this.
Unfortunately both sides and a lack of overall national leadership has detracted from the real discussion. Our news agencies on both sides are playing the extremes and nobody is talking about the real issue.
Shelter-in-place does work but its only there to reduce the impact on hospitals. Its not there to prevent people from getting sick necessarily. We don't know how long this virus is going to be around. Maybe it disappears, maybe its here for a year. The whole point of sheltering is so hospitals can continue to work without being overburdened. I think in the Bay Area the hospitals have been extremely under-utilized.
What we need are discussions on how to reopen safely. What type of rules do people need to follow when we do reopen. I don't want to argue what is legally allowed but I think things like wearing masks in public, public temperature checks, more testing and forcing quarantine of those and those that have been around them are all sensible if we want to get the economy going again.
Of course without widespread and continuous testing for the virus and antibodies, who knows how to achieve that rate.
I actually am getting an antibody test through Quest tomorrow for $119. That way I’ll know if the chest cold and mild fever I had 6 weeks ago (with still lingering cough) was allergy related or the virus.
Based on polls, most Americans are for shelter in place and are afraid of economy opening up too soon. The people who are for opening are not concentrated within groups who lost jobs, but are rather spread out over the society.
The thing about lower paid workers is that they are also the most affected by Covid, most likely to get it, more likely to die from it and more likely to know someone who dies. More affected by healthcare price too if they dont die but merely need hospital. You can see that in stats from New Yourk too - middle class people able to work from home and just not as much affected as those who work in low paid jobs.
The place where I see most pressure for opening economy is HN - Bay Area tech workers. People here dont work in meat plants nor in essential services nor in Amazon. Their employers wont have them working in close proximity with other people even when those are having symptoms. They wont get Covid and wont spread it to elderly relatives regardless of whether economy is open or not.
Your claim was that one side is "Bay Area workers telling everyone to stay home". Answering it with "no actually this is not some kind of Bay Area tech only" phenomenon is completely legitimate. There is no rule that we should accept made up divisions between groups of people just because it suits you.
> There are many countries that have sane rules and the exposure rate is pretty damn low.
Sure, lets say German or Czech republic. The sane rules still involved closing stores, limiting amount of people in stores, closed schools, mandated hands sanitation upon entering stores. Mandated masks in public places or plexiglass between shoppers and sellers. Their hospitals also instantly limited non-covid related procedures and were underutilized and still are despite countries slowly opening. Both countries also had citizens who were fairly disciplined. Their top politicians did not claimed it is all hoax by opposing party to destroy the country.
Czech Republic reacted quite fast to first few sick people and mandated masks right away. Germany ramped up testing quickly and super high. They did contact tracing before virus spread.
> We need a leader that helps focus the message on what criteria is necessary to open and how to do it safely.
Maybe start by not forcing both-sides framework on everything. Or making strawman groups of Bay Area tech workers who are definitely only ones making America close.
Had there be elevated testing regime now, opening would be closer. Had there been faster reaction by the start of it all, the New York did not had to happen and America could be where Germany or Czech Republic is. And it does not seem to me that this state of things is both sides issue nor Bay Area techies issue.
Here are some clearer graphs:
https://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/#currently_... (active cases normalised by population)
https://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/#deceased&p... (deaths, absolute numbers)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...
Measuring the number of cases as the testing is being massively bumped out does not measure overload - actual death rate does.
Deaths don’t track 1:1 with hospitalizations because some people die much sooner. The most at risk tend to die within 2 weeks, while others are still extremely sick and can die 6+ weeks after infection. Those people have lower rates of death per day, but may still require ventilators. Thus, a steady rate of new infections can look like a very slow decrease in deaths even as the heath system is getting more stressed.
The number of tests per 1000 people is increasing each day in the US.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...
This means that it is increasingly likely to uncover more cases, independent of how many new infections there actually are.
Where is the data on overloaded hospitals?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-covid-deaths-per-mill...
That death curve is now flat for the last two samples, implying the rate is zero. The graph should be labeled deaths/million/day, which means the acceleration is zero and the velocity is constant.
Sorry, just drives me bonkers when the media tosses about words such as “the economy grew at a rate of ....”. I suppose English is more confusing with “Billy grew 10 cm” (implied over a year), compared with “Billy is growing 10 cm/year”.
It's helpful if the X axis is not simply a date but in "days since community spread started", and you're relying on the represented numbers actually mean the same thing which depends on many things.
Here's an example: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-deaths-trajec...
Here's a similar graph I like, with days since 100 cases on the x axis, and helpful doubling rate lines: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/infection-trajectory-flatte...
When I clicked on it, the very first thing at the top was a graph showing "the number of newly reported cases each day". Since cases cycle out of the total too as the disease runs its course one way or another, if the number of new cases per day becomes flat and/or begins declining then so too will the total number of active cases (after a lag) right? Are you seeing something different from me in the article? I have uBO and NS on but whitelist the nytimes.com and nyt.com domains.
What? After a set period of time, active cases become past cases. People recover (or die). If the number of new cases per day is flat, than the total number of active cases will also become flat (after a delay if it was growing previously). If the number of new cases per day declines, the number of active cases will also decline (all the way down to zero as you say if the number of new cases drops to zero). I am genuinely confused by what you're writing here. "Number of new cases per day" isn't the same thing as an increasing rate of new cases per day.
You are right about active cases.
It seems impatience will get the best of us. The only way to beat this is with very strict exercising of social distancing for not less than three months, healthy habits, and extreme sanitation. It seems urban areas are not willing to wait 3 months until there is an uncontrolled outbreak.
I don't think there is, or ever will be, sufficient testing evidence to justify similar-to-past public interaction until if or when there is a safe and effective vaccine deployed that covers all strains. The prevalence is basically unknown and will only be worse when there is no longer mindshare or patience to keep up the fight... I think nearly all of this socioeconomic pain will be for naught because of the endgame.
This may be different, as people don’t take flu as seriously. But America is already loosening up. You also can’t see stuff as clearly in rural areas. The big risks are indoor gatherings at private homes, church, work, and school.
If you aren’t doing those things, you won’t see them happening. Whereas it’s easy to see people walking on an urban street as you drive by, or to watch the news going to a central urban location.
You see this with crime rates. People assume it’s a big city issue due to visibility, but crime rates tend to be higher in rural areas.
Coronavirus may well require urban density, but don’t be too quick to assume it as an axiom.
https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional/flu-hits-rural-geor...
COVID-19 lacks a vaccine, making the flu comparison problematic.
That said you’re likely correct. I found this from cdc, with rates by state. At a glance, rural states have lower rates: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1819estimates.ht...
However, this gap could also be due to health system efficacy in general. So unclear if we might expect worse covid results in places with fewer/worse hospitals.
For underlying data you may need to look at BRFSS.
In places that have opened back up, it isn’t being driven by the urban areas. Georgia and Florida aren’t opened because Atlanta and Miami forced the Governor’s hand. Do you think most of these protesters we’ve seen are from cities or outside?
When I drove to my mothers house in rural area recently there were few people in the grocery store there and most were wearing masks. A few days later I drove to Fort Hood for a military deployment and again everybody in this tiny town of Gatesville were wearing masks in the store and really taking distancing seriously in the store.
Edit: Wanted to add that the legislatures suing the Governor over his stay-at-home order are from rural parts of the state. https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20200429/gop-legislators-qu...
So I'm going through it today, and one of the columns is total deaths. So for the purposes of this thread, Closed Cases = Deaths + Recoveries, and while there isn't a column for recoveries specifically, you can infer a couple of things from the data that is there.
First, the data sucks. Each State and in some cases, each county health department is responsible for reporting their own cases and deaths, but it seems not every place is making good efforts to track recoveries. If you drill into California and check San Francisco, and it's not limited to just San Francisco, you can see the "Active Cases" over in about the sixth column is only Cases - Deaths instead of Cases - (Deaths + Recoveries). Not all 58 Counties are like this, but you also have outliers like Humboldt where apparently 52 of 54 total cases are recoveries because there aren't any reported deaths and there's only 2 reported active cases.
It isn't limited to just individual counties in California. If you go back up a level to the USA and look at various States, you can see that New York is making some effort to track recoveries because at a glance, Active Cases does not equal Cases - Deaths, it's actually quite a bit lower than Cases - Deaths, which is good. But if you look below New York at New Jersey which has had the second highest number of cases, it would seem like every closed case has been a death, because Active Cases = Cases - Deaths, same probably with San Francisco County in California.
So when I last looked a few hours ago, the United States had about 964K Active Cases. This is probably both an overcount and an undercount. It's certainly an undercount because we obviously have no idea how many people are actively carrying it right now. But it's also an overcount because of the verified cases, recoveries are being underreported.
This bloody chart in the NYTimes is annoying. It is seemingly trying to apply some corrective measures to people's expectations about how much the curve is actually flattening in the country, that it is not equally flattened, and that reporting is fine. It's leaving out half the bloody story which is: recoveries. If the goal is to lead and not mislead with this piece, then by not attempting to address the discrepancy in reported cases and active cases, and how many closed cases are closed because of recoveries and not because of deaths, it will leave people with a sense that maybe the country is in worse straits than we think, or at least different pockets.
To be blunt, nobody knows. They don't know, the Administration doesn't know, apparently half the bloody Governors don't have a clue about a big part of the situation in their own States in addition to almost every other part of the situation, and if you assume that in terms of closed verified cases, recoveries outnumber deaths 4:1, then New Jersey should probably be subtracting somewhere around 30K Active Cases (assuming there have been 4x as many recoveries as their reported 8K deaths).
A lot of people are dying or dead, but what about the other side of this coin? How many are recovering, and why don't we know? Is it really the case that in New Jersey, not a single person has reportedly recovered and all the closed cases are actually deaths? The number that's getting trotted out by the media in terms of cases is 1.2M (implicitly, verified cases rather than actual cases). But we don't currently have 1M verified active cases, we may not even have 900K (yet) but the best available data I can find doesn't even reflect that.
Last week I appeared on a very pro-Trump podcast. The starting point for the very pro-Trump person was freedom and the economy. Numbers like in this article seemed irrelevant to him, or even signs of people trying to seize more power.
If we want to lower the spread of this pandemic, our biggest challenge is influencing people's behavior. If telling people more numbers doesn't influence people how we intend, they may be verifiable and right, but if we want to save lives, including our own, we have to figure out what works.
Elsewhere in this thread somebody wrote
> Another story with tunnel vision.
> I don't pay attention to the NY Times, but have they had any opinion pieces suggesting that maybe the destruction of the economy is also a bad thing? And, maybe, someone besides a reporter or "health expert" should make some kind of attempt to determine if it is even possible to sustain these policies?
> I really feel like I'm in a Tales from Dark Side episode.
Currently the comment is downvoted to near invisibility.
But that perspective is motivating tens of millions of people. If we want to motivate them, we have to figure out how to respond. Spewing facts, however right, if it motivates people to stop listening, or downvoting instead of addressing is a matter of life and death.
How do we respond effectively to people with such views?
"If we do this right and come out of it this summer, we're still going to have to do it again this fall"
You, a living person with a face, have to become more trusted to that individual person than the alternatives. Do not talk about the issue during this 'trust phase'. Only then can you approach that person about their erroneous ideas and thoughts. They then have to decide, freely, what to do. This can take years or weeks to accomplish. That's the summation of a lot of work on the subject.