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

The herd fans love Sweden, but they bought 6-12x as many deaths as their Scandanavian neighbors with no better economic results. It's nice to have a few more things open, but it doesn't seem worth it.

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The herd fans love Sweden, but they bought 6-12x as many deaths as their Scandanavian neighbors with no better economic results. It's nice to have a few more things open, but it doesn't seem worth it.

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There is no stopping a virus with this transmission rate, this high a number of asymptomatic carriers, and no natural immunity. I'd venture to say that Sweden's Scandinavian neighbors just delayed the inevitable.

You don't need to stop it, just keep R<1 and do that until you've got vaccine in pocket (keeping fingers crossed).

They mandated social distancing early instead of trying mitigation. The idea behind suppression was to get incidence down low enough to buy you time to build up public health monitoring and social conditions like mask acceptance & other modifications to ok more physical proximity. They've got better mask acceeptance than we do. They'll still potentially have to toggle back and forth between more and less restricting of proximity, though. There's no free lunches with COVID.

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I've mentioned a few times. No place has yet to achieve herd immunity, so no place is "through" the first wave. NY like many places has successfully mitigated cases, but it isn't necessarily done with COVID.

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So you think the first wave won't end until herd immunity is reached?

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I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your arithemtic, there, Lou. Sweden has had 5,500 deaths in a population of 10M whereas California has had ~7,000 deaths on 4 times as large a population. The per capita mortality rate in Sweden (502 per M) is triple that of California (177 per M) Anyhow, the case positivity rate is the standard I set to show relative control of the virus. Sweden is higher than California in that metric too.

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First, you're shifting the goal posts. You literally just compared California's and New York's current positivity rates, not their death rates.

Second, I never said that Sweden has done better overall than anyone, so you're fighting a strawman there, champ.

Third, Sweden's last reported positivity rate was 7.5% on July 5. California's today was 8.3%. If we are using positivity rates, then California's lockdown is underperforming based on your metric, at least the first metric you used (and not the one I would choose, especially since it's pretty clear that that metric as a proxy for lockdown effectiveness does not reflect reality).

Fourth, your link is another shift in the goal posts. That's an all-time average, not a positivity rate by day. If we are using that metric now, then NY's is at 9.06% and CA at 6.19%. I'm not sure why you keep shifting in new data, but your main point was using this:

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Yesterday the case positivity rate for California was about 8 times that of New York.

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to argue that New York's lockdown is more effective than California's. My point remains that using the positivity rate as a proxy for effectiveness is ridiculous, as countries without lockdowns have lower positivity rates. Even excluding Sweden, use Taiwan as an example. Their current positivity rate is 0.2%. Clearly, positivity rate is not a good data point for comparing lockdowns. Therefore, I'm going to ask again:

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Do you have data to support NY lockdowns being stricter or more effective than California’s? If not, how do you explain CA spiking but not NY? How is that easier to believe than that Farr’s Law has just reached the end of its cycle in NY?

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What flu death rate are you using?

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It’s not mine. Unlike Fauci, I don’t pretend to be an expert. Anyway, I’ve read multiple times that for a typical flu, the mortality rate is 0.1%.

The CDC (the experts) forecast a COVID mortality rate of 0.26%.

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They mandated social distancing early instead of trying mitigation. The idea behind suppression was to get incidence down low enough to buy you time to build up public health monitoring and social conditions like mask acceptance & other modifications to ok more physical proximity. They've got better mask acceeptance than we do. They'll still potentially have to toggle back and forth between more and less restricting of proximity, though. There's no free lunches with COVID.

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IMO - like some states here (mine being one), the restrictions just delayed the inevitable. That’s a good strategy if we end up with a vaccine and can get it distributed all within a few months, otherwise I don’t understand how a virus won’t be a virus.

As for comparing our response and results-to-date to countries smaller than our major cities, populated homogeneously, educated very differently, culturally light years different, economically very different, etc., might be fun in the abstract, but doesn’t mean much in the real world.

Question for you - “masking” as is practiced in the US now - any mask will do, worn every way imaginable with most pulling it down often to talk and catch a breath - How big a difference is it making?

And now let’s say we got everybody a real mask, trained them how to use it and everybody did is religiously - could we go back to normal life with the spread slowed to a manageable rate?