Do we Cancel Everything? You still Travelling??

[Bob Scott 7,719]

1 minute ago, Alan_A said:

That may be true of some of the folks here.  Having spent 30 years of my life advising businesses and trying to make them more competitive - my clients have included AT&T, IBM, Bertelsmann AG, KPMG, Ernst & Young, The Boston Consulting Group and The Wall Street Journal - I'm not one of them.

This is a complex problem.  Binaries and straw men don't really capture it.

No they don't, and my comment was not directed at you.  Upthread there are a number of comments that reflect the idea that economies don't matter when lives are at stake. 

[Alan_A 1,650]

@w6kd - duly noted! 😎

About the complexity of actually managing the economy through all this - I'm not sure if the article is going to be sharable, but Rich Lesser, CEO of The Boston Consulting Group (not a person I'm directly involved with) is advising the Business Roundtable, and had this to say today about their current concerns.

If members can't get to the link, let me know and I'll do some selective cutting and pasting.

[KevinAu 441]

41 minutes ago, w6kd said:

The day is fast approaching that government is not going to be able to pay a third or more of the population to stay home, and at that point those people will be forced to make some uncomfortable choices. 

It seems that some of the folks here think that economics don't matter...that economic collapse doesn't have a price in lives.  I think we're going to see that idea refuted in real terms in six months or so when large parts of northeastern Africa are in the grips of an epic famine due to drought and locust pestilence, and with the rest of the world's nations struggling to take care of their own, the help needed to keep millions from starving there will not be coming. 

Well then, the government better get their act together so that there are enough tests and masks. The people better get their act together and stop refusing to mask up or stay home when directed. We are indeed running out of time.

If you really cared for the economy, you should have been arguing for a hard close of everything for 3 weeks, everywhere, all at once, back in march, strictly enforced. Then we would have had all of this shutdown nonsense behind us weeks ago. If you want to reopen the economy, you should be arguing that everybody has to wear masks.

All I see are people wanting things both ways. They want to reopen the economy and they don’t want to wear masks or wait for the testing to be adequate. If you do this without the masks and without the testing, we will be right back where we started and that will destroy the economy even more.

[MartinRex007 390]

1 hour ago, Alan_A said:

A revised CDC estimate projects that by June 1 there will be 200,000 cases per day, up from the current level of 25,000, and 3,000 deaths per day, up from the current total of 1,750.

Something is wrong here, 200,000 cases per day in the US? Currently about 12,884 new cases are being reported, unlikely it would ever reach 200,000 per day? Cases per day in the world currently is 57,420. That's one statistic I would question?

Martin 

Edited May 4, 2020 by MartinRex007

[KevinAu 441]

8 minutes ago, MartinRex007 said:

Something is wrong here, 200,000 cases per day in the US? Currently about 12,884 new cases are being reported, unlikely it would ever reach 200,000 per day? That's one statistic I would question?

Martin 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-administration-privately-estimating-daily-165600753.html

That’s the government’s own estimate from the effects of reopening the economy.

Edited May 4, 2020 by KevinAu

[MartinRex007 390]

15 minutes ago, KevinAu said:

That’s the government’s own estimate from the effects of reopening the economy.

Understand, I'm just rather skeptical! The lower limit of their confidence number is around 10,000, that number seems more likely. Their estimated range goes from 10,000 up to 1 million. What that tells me is there is a lot of uncertainty in those estimates. 

Martin 

Edited May 4, 2020 by MartinRex007

[KevinAu 441]

5 minutes ago, MartinRex007 said:

I don't see those numbers in the CDC report?

Martin 

I don’t know, I haven’t looked through it. That’s just the headline that’s been crossing. 200,000 new cases per day sounds out of control even for what they want to do.

[Alan_A 1,650]

6 minutes ago, KevinAu said:

I don’t know, I haven’t looked through it. That’s just the headline that’s been crossing. 200,000 new cases per day sounds out of control even for what they want to do.

Agree it's quite a change, but it's in there.  Slides 10 and 11 of the PDF - 10 is projected cases and 11 is projected deaths.

EDIT: There's nothing in the presentation about what, if anything, might have changed in their modeling.

Edited May 4, 2020 by Alan_A

[MartinRex007 390]

Always look at the range of their confidence limits when looking at these models, that tells you a lot about the uncertainly of some of the models assumptions. This is a common problem with any statistical inference.

Martin 

[Alan_A 1,650]

Good point - the coverage is going with the projection, not the range.

One thing we don't know is what was presented - we have the slides, but we weren't in the room.

Edited May 4, 2020 by Alan_A

[Alan_A 1,650]

More data - a new study (I'm not sure of its review status) of the Boston area suggests that...

Quote

...enforcing strict social distancing followed by a policy based on a robust
level of testing, contact-tracing and household quarantine, could keep the disease at a level
that does not exceed the capacity of the health care system. Assuming the identification of
50% of the symptomatic infections, and the tracing of 40% of their contacts and households,
which corresponds to about 9% of individuals quarantined, the ensuing reduction in transmission
allows the reopening of economic activities while attaining a manageable impact on
the health care system. Our results show that a response system based on enhanced testing
and contact tracing can play a major role in relaxing social distancing interventions in the
absence of herd immunity against SARS-CoV-2.

This is one of several studies discussed in a Twitter thread by Josh Michaud of the Kaiser Family Foundation - it's a roundup of current work on contact tracing, the challenges involved, and the role it might play in allowing a safe resumption of some level of economic activity.

With the usual caveats - it's all worth a look.

 

[n4gix 4,947]

2 hours ago, w6kd said:

Here in Colorado over half of our fatalities are over 80 years old...many of those never left their assisted living facilities or nursing homes.

Here in Indiana the majority of deaths fall to the age range of 40-59 totaling 47.5%.

80+ only accounts for 10.4% of total cases...

More disturbing is my county's mortality rate of 4.67%. The state's mortality rate is 5.68%.

Since I am wholly dependent on the VA for my health care, having to risk VA hospitalization should I contract Covid-19 frankly is terrifying...

...considering the reported state of outcomes in various VA facilities!

[MartinRex007 390]

1 hour ago, Alan_A said:

One thing we don't know is what was presented - we have the slides, but we weren't in the room.

True, and they don't mention what model was used or what the assumptions were. It's hard to imagine 200,000 new cases a day, but I will add that the projections from the graph do match up pretty good with the real data so far, at least for new cases. The death model is not as good with real vs. projected. Here is a reference for the models used for the death calculations. 

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/forecasting-us.html

Martin

 

[SteveFx 258]

51 minutes ago, n4gix said:

Here in Indiana the majority of deaths fall to the age range of 40-59 totaling 47.5%.

 

That sounds strange 

Indiana seems to have a dashboard here 

https://www.coronavirus.in.gov/2393.htm

If you select deaths in the demographics it seems to suggest that 74% are over 70?

[Alan_A 1,650]

More on that projection of 200,000 cases per day - it was developed by an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins to model a variety of reopening scenarios.  The modeling wasn't finished, and he doesn't know how it got turned into a presentation deck.

This is from a Washington Post story that just went up - might be behind a paywall, so here's an excerpt:

 

Quote

The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disavowed the report, although the slides carry the CDC’s logo. The creator of the model said the numbers are unfinished projections shown to the CDC as a work in progress.

The work contained a wide range of possibilities and modeling was not complete, according to Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who created the model.

He said he didn’t know how the update was turned into a slidedeck by government officials and shared with news organizations. The data was first reported by the New York Times.

“I had no role in the process by which that was presented and shown. This data was presented as an FYI to CDC … it was not in any way intended to be a forecast,” Lessler said.

Lessler said that while the exact numbers and charts in the CDC document may differ from the final results, they do show accurately how covid-19 cases could spiral out of control. He said 100,000 cases per day by the end of the month is within the realm of possibility.

 

Further comments make it sound as though the variability is based on a range of re-opening scenarios. The article goes on to discuss other models.

Lots of unanswered questions, but it seems the projections aren't fully baked.

A lesson here (note to self) on the dangers of going with a single report.

Edited May 4, 2020 by Alan_A