re: Here’s some evidence that certain reporters want more testing so that things look worse

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Do you think the "voluntary shutdown" had anything to do with the hysteria purposefully created by the Left, the CDC and media?

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I mean, it was related to what they saw going on around the world.

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Yeah, so the dimmest among us stopped going to restaurants and the mall before their Governor told them to - because the CDC and CNN told them there was a 1 in 10 chance they'd die if they didn't stay home.

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It wasn't just the dimmest - it was almost everyone. Look at the opentable data. Restaurants went to zero almost overnight.

The mortality estimates, though, were always inexcusable. I'm still pissed at Trump for letting those people railroad him.

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I mean, it was related to what they saw going on around the world.

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What did they see? They saw what was fed to them by the media, which has always managed Coronavirus as a political weapon.

At the end of the day the virus is whatever the virus is, and assuming it was going to kill everybody was political and/or stupid.

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It wasn't just the dimmest - it was almost everyone. Look at the opentable data. Restaurants went to zero almost overnight.

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There were a LOT of people that did not avoid normal living until there was no place (restaurants, gyms, theaters, shopping) left for them to patronize. If you don't like the rest being labeled "dim" then we'll just call these folks "smart."

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The mortality estimates, though, were always inexcusable. I'm still pissed at Trump for letting those people railroad him.

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What about Coronavirus is even remotely remarkable besides the inexcusable mortality estimates?

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What about Coronavirus is even remotely remarkable besides the inexcusable mortality estimates?

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Seriously?

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the problem is, i'm pretty sure, the data you're comparing is equating government subsidies as legitimate salaries/economic behaviors

have these studies removed the government payments from the equation? i got 100 SFP dollars that says this drastically changes GDP and economic comparisons

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Not sure. Fair point though. Though countries have fat doles.

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you believe the "virus problem" can be solved

there may be a miracle vaccine down the road, but until then, there isn't much we can do other than kill our economies to stop the spread

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Solved might be strong, but effectively managed such that society can return to normalcy? I mean, the're playing baseball in Taiwan in front of crowd. I miss baseball.

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almost nowhere has the same governmental regulations now as in February, either

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I suppose this the part where you can help me better understand the ongoing restrictions that exist on commerce. Perhaps I'll ask it this way. What is the government keeping closed that you think it should be allowed to be opened that would actually be opened if such an allowance did occur? I ask that, not even as a challenge. Genuinely curious.

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Testing is a critical means to a particular end, but not an end in of itself. You gotta do all that other stuff. (contact tracing & isolation, stiffer mitigation of hotspots) too. Whenever we get around to having a second wave, we'll be happy we have this robust testing capacity.

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"Nobody knew what a contact tracing program was," @NYGovCuomo says, of program in NY.

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LINK

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"Nobody knew what a contact tracing program was," @NYGovCuomo says, of program in NY.


LINK

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I'm quite sure the CDC knows what contact tracing is. It's literally epidemiology 101 going back to Typhoid Mary. Half the plot of Contagion and And the Band Played On are about the mechanics of contact tracing. Incidentally, one of the great failures of this whole ordeal is that the CDC hasn't led from the the front on testing / tracing / isolation. It's sort of why they're there and in their absence you have no nothing state officials running the show.

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Germany with 4 times the population has about 200

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Remind me the amount of tests Germany is doing each day again?

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My point hasn't shifted. You're saying that a particular news outlet is giving the overall case figure without the necessary context that the case figure came from a record testing day and that the case positive figure is 11.25% and it is misleading to do so. Indeed it is. But it is equally as misleading for you to not offer the additional context that 11.25% is a really bad case positivity rate. Californa is around 8% and that's also bad. New York and New Jersy are less than 1%. The rest of the first world is pretty low as well. 11% ain't it.

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Is it not possible that a high positivity rate could be caused by the self selection of those receiving the tests?

I'm not sure how a high positivity rate is indicative of anything other than the screening process for receiving the test being effective.

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Yes. Yesterday the case positivity rate for California was about 8 times that of New York. California is really big, I suspect a few places with California are driving the an outsized number of cases. I'm disinclined to believe that the disease has run its course in NY because the data suggests only 25% of of the population has had the disease which is not enough to confer herd immunity. I am open to the possibility that there other factors driving differentiating in these outcomes.

What I feel comfortable saying is that S. Korea and California have about the same population. California will have more people die of COVID by Wednesday as S. Korea has had since this whole thing began. Can you explain why that is?

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That's backwards and fails to account for whether New York having already gone through its first wave is accountable for New York's current condition. Using this logic, Sweden's lockdown is more effective than California's even though Sweden is not under lockdown.

ETA: My reference to Farr's Law is not to herd immunity. We can debate the proper threshold for population-level immunity, but under Farr's Law, why does a new virus follow a bell curve pattern? Because the number of susceptible persons lowers as the virus makes its way through a population. Those persons have gone from susceptible to infected to recovered (or dead). Accordingly, the higher prevalence in a population, the harder the virus must work to keep its R0 up. New York's prevalence is significantly higher than California's, so if you assume an equivalent lockdown effect, then it would make sense for California to still have a higher infection rate, correct?

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Yes. Tell me.

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A novel virus, with no vaccine available that kills at a rate 10-50 times the seasonal flu - and bears with it hard-to-explain markers of non-lethal impact (organ damage, etc.).

Did we all just imagine that the hospitals in NYC got full just from virus patients?