- Re: More interesting stuff Archived Message
Posted by walter
on May 1, 2020, 10:44 pm, in reply to "More interesting stuff"
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It's an interesting article with good links, though I think the writer is shoehorning the maths without taking due account of the known realities. I think there's a lot of lockdown-induced despair which gives appeal to hopeful claims many of which have been refuted before. Unfortunately there's no left unity, not even a coherent policy proposal - think what mincemeat could be made of the government's handling of the crisis. Even if they got the health aspects right there is still a financial emergency as they use the crisis to defraud the public and to chuck money up the ladder. But I think arguing against the seriousness of the health crisis is the wrong approach - because (as I try to show below) the arguments being made aren't good ones, going by what is being posted and comparing with realities, which most such articles ignore or use selectively. For example, one thing that keeps being claimed is about the infection fatality rate - which might be similar to seasonal flu, but the transmission rate is much higher - the seasonal flu will not infect anything like the same numbers of people. Is Dan imagining the new reality in his ICUs? The claimed low IFR is a bit of a red herring without knowing how many have the disease; but as of yesterday, 15.6% of those tested positive for Covd-19 in the UK have died, the highest figure among major populations along with Belgium. That should fall as more are tested, but it hasn't been falling. The Imperial College forecasts were close to those made here by Dan in a back-of the envelope calculation a week earlier, when the Herd Immunity wheeze was first floated. The maths link (from "Farr's law is observed...") is, it seems, to some real epidemiological modellers. I wish we had them instead of those at the Imperial College. Can I just point something out from this paper: "....and also acknowledges the fact that epidemics and outbreaks do not peak and end simply due to depletion of susceptibles, but because of a complex constellation of public health actions and behavioral changes that may modify the course of an epidemic and reduce the effective reproduction number during an outbreak (Fisman et al., 2013)." Is this the key? Epidemics behave in a certain way as characterized by Marr in the 1800s, but it's not a given; rather, due to "a constellation of public health actions and behavioural changes". If the present writer is using this to argue there was no need for a lockdown because of this theory I think this is therefore where his argument goes wrong. This caught my eye, on excess mortality: "Even if we accept all reported C19 deaths resulted from it, which is a very long stretch, clearly something else is also pushing up excess mortality in England and Wales." He says it must be the lockdown but in the UK these excess deaths happened as soon as the Covid-19 deaths rose, would the lockdown start killing appreciable numbers of people so quickly? Meanwhile he overlooks the obvious - the virus displacing other treatments, and the health service crisis dissuading people from getting treatment. I see more claims being trotted out for Sweden but they are doing very badly according to deaths (as posted here in several places, eg here was my attempt https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1587980201.html). Why no mention of their death rates? I realize there's a lot more in the article but that's as far as I have got, sorry. Cheers |