I keep trying to figure out why the world went ballistic over Covid 19.
There's been a string of scary viruses but international panic didn't ensue. Deadly influenza circulates but international panic didn't ensue.
Yes, first world societies have become increasingly risk averse and legislated to reflect that. Health and safety is a suffocating, saturating blanket which employs thousands directly and indirectly. Its tentacles reach further and wider.
But I think there's more. The world has been primed with hysteria over the spectre of rising seas, the extinction of species, and searing temperatures that will become frankly non survivable. In the very near future no less. The masses appear to believe these predictions based mostly on modelling, some manipulated imagery and an acceptance that the science was settled and the scientists infallible. We are collectively cowering and unable to control our destiny.
Then, along comes a new and unknown threat. Covid 19.
The threat pretty quickly magnifies with modelling. We are conditioned to trust modelling because modelling gave us all the climate change predictions which are now part of our wall paper. Our articles of faith.
So a critical mass is already scared witless. The media provides evidence of that daily.
BUT at last a threat we can exercise some control over. We can don our masks and keep our distance. Make lifestyle changes with immediate individual consequences if not collective. Quickly we are aided and abetted by the authorities. Perhaps most importantly, validated.
Lock down, Stay home, Stay safe.
What relief.
Trouble is, one man's relief is another man's aggravation.
Brendan O'Neill: Liz Truss and the tyranny of ‘the markets’
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Ah for the good old days when drink driving was cool, work place deaths were just a thing that happened and we lived with (or not depending) a million deaths in a flu pandemic. Now, thanks to climate change (?), we’re putting in place measures to protect millions from death. What losers!
Saw an old guy have a major meltdown in the supermarket today - some issue with not being able to pay for his items, maybe he wanted to use a cheque or something - I know of another old person with that problem, she hasn't got beyond cash yet, on pension day she goes to the bank and gets her pension out but that doesn't work now either - her daughter is doing her shopping for now.
But back to the old dude - the queue to get in was about 45 minutes because the supermarkerts were closed this morning I guess.
And the checkout queues reached way down the aisles, which is a pain in the proverbial because there is always someone standing where the the item you are looking for is and you know that two meter thing in aisles about 1500mm wide don't work out that well with shopping trolleys and all
So this poor old dude having spent the best part of a hour shopping for a few essentials gets to the checkout and strikes another problem and totally looses it and I mean totally.
In the end a cop came and took him away and hopefully found a way to resolve his issues.
Can I use the "F" word on this blog Lindsay?
FIASCO - there I've gone and said it
Why? Call it the 'The Enormous Millennial SJW Turnip'
For a good 5 years we lived with 'woke' and 'safe spaces' and 'political correctness' and 'me too' crap. It was long past due to stop. Millennial’s Outrage Industrial Complex extended beyond its natural time thanks to political interference.
It was clear, to me at least, that when it went 'pop' it was going to have to be seismic. A shockwave that knocks everyone and everything flat. And so here we are.
Ref. http://nzb3.anarkiwi.co.nz/2019/03/24/the-enormous-millennial-sjw-turnip/
I too wondered why the reaction has been different to other flu epidemics Lindsay. I put it down to China’s reaction to it by shutting down their own cities and regions. We know that the numbers and information out of China have been wildly inaccurate and subject to misinformation, so I suspect that our reaction has been based on their reaction.
It’s a virus that seems easily transmitted, but only devastating to a small % of the population. China has serious air quality issues and male smoking rates that made them more susceptible to it. Issues we don’t face here in NZ.
Andrei, I used exactly the same word yesterday when I drove to the supermarket, saw the queue and drove straight home. I said to husband, "I am not participating in that fiasco."
I realise I am only putting off the inevitable but yesterday I had just finished watching the Californian doctors so eloquently put their case for stopping the lock downs and was in no mood for smiling and tolerance (not something I generally struggle with though I draw the line at agreeing with anyone who tells me what a great job Jacinda is doing).
Funnily enough the data from China, Italy and France all suggest that current smokers are significantly under represeted in the "grim" death toll Brian Marshall.
Of course it is highly feasible this is so - if smoking is bad for people then it is probably very bad for viruses as well. Smoking according to received widom damages DNA while the virus we are hand wringing over is naked RNA, a closely related entity to DNA
The thing about most people is that they are linear thinkers whereas the world we live in is highly non linear - that is they think A=>B when B actually depends on multple inputs that all interact with each other in indeterminate ways
In the political arena this is sometimes articulated as "the law of unintended consequences" when a policy A promoted to bring about B actually results in C
And no deep thinker is going to be at all surprisd if the death toll and impacts on public health from the lockdown far exceed those of the virus itself = in fact the evidence that this is occuring is starting to emerge - though in the short term expect the powers that be try to cover this up.
In New York and the Uk they are urging Doctors writing death certificates to code COVID-19 without actually verifying its prescence to inflate the totals
And in another example today in Stuff there is a doom and gloom article about small number of people presenting at hospital with strokes testing positive for the virus and being ascribed as coronavirus deaths thus violating the first principle of statistics - Correlation does not imply causation. As an extreme example if somone is runover by a train and tests positive for COVID-19 it would be reprehensible to code the cause of death COVID-19
With the smoking study which has been replicated in three countries there is a plausible hypothesis to explain the observations - the stroke stories are purely anectdotal and there is no working hypothesis to use to provide for further study which would give us new insights into the progression of this virus or ways to mitigate its effects
I actually linked the French Study in my previous comment -Blogger must have stripped it
https://www.qeios.com/read/article/574
Rumour from a few doctors has it that this is happening here also. "In New York and the Uk they are urging Doctors writing death certificates to code COVID-19 without actually verifying its prescence to inflate the totals"
I never thought I would ever see the day when CASH became a dirty 4 letter word.
How do the drug dealers cope I wonder?
An open letter to Jacinda Adern re: COVID-19
A journalist, Peter Drew, asking similar questions. Seems a fair summary of events.
{via Utopia etc, a blog on your list}
There was some initial scary data from China, i.e. fatality rate of 3% (worse than Spanish Flu).
Latest UK estimates are 0.9%, so less than the Spanish Flu, but still about 9 times deadlier. Lowest I have seen is about 6 times deadlier.
Assume it's 9 times, what kind of response does that warrant? And there's a strong local effect as well, here in NZ our fatality rate is extremely low.
But we don't know yet what the fatality rate is of the Covid-19 response: isolating people, wrecking the economy, may show up as a spike in NZ death toll as well.
Berend de Boer - the estimates you have seen are all unreliable
To calculate the Case Fatality Rate CFR you need two numbers
The number of fatalities from this disease
Problem number 1
When somone who has multiple significant health issues dies it is a question of ascertaining which issue is the primary cause but with COVID-19 the disease dejour
there is a rush to ascribe this as te primary cause - so much so that people who have did of heart attacks and strokes with no symptoms of viral lung disease hae been attributed as COVID-19 deaths. This is something that has beenhighlighted by Italian and Icelandic authorities as an issue
You need a clear definition of what a COVID-19 death is and strictly spaking that would be pneumonia in the presence of COVID-19
Problem number 2
Such is the prominance of COVID-19 in peoples minds there is a temptation and a political imperative to assume any death from pneumonia is related to COVID-19 without verifying its prescense but deaths from pneumonia are not uncommon in normal times in the sick and
elderly.
Both of these problems lead to the overstating of the numerator in the calculation
Problem number 3
There are famously many known cases of people contracting COVID-19 and being asymptomatic and as yet nobody has a handle on how many cases have gone undetected. In order to calculate the CFR you need to know this number for the denominator of the fraction.
Those initial scary CFRs were estimated by using the number of cases presenting at hospitals as the denominator leading to a CFR estimate that may be out by 2 orders of magnitude.
Wha is abundantly clear and as been for two months now is that children and healthy adults have absolutely nothing to fear from this bug.
Which is why this whole thing is crazy - we are nuking the economy to trying to extend the lives of people who are, in 98.9% of the cases, dying anyway
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