I agree, it's "Hard to say." Although, if I had to battle a new virus with either "heterologous immunity" or "nothing," I'd take my chances on fighting armed with the "maybe something" versus "nothing," at least until we know for sure.
You're probably right. I could do better in that respect. It's often too easy to fall back on meeting snark with snark.
Due to media induced hysteria and subsequent citizen-absorbed panic, my town locked down needlessly in April/May when NY/NJ were getting slammed and we had no hint of any significant COVID-19 problem. Then, with the town at the brink of irreversible economic depression, the lockdown had to be lifted prior to our tourist season. Now, COVID cases are up 800% during our tourist season and any chance of a meaningful lockdown for this area has passed, due to sucking up the "OMG/ITALY/NY/NJ!" hysteria in April.
Hopefully when this pandemic is over, we'll never see one nearly this bad in our lifetimes. But if we do, one takeaway for me (other than the impossibility of predicting viral spread) will be, "You're only going to get one lock-down, so don't blow it." Don't lock-down because someone somewhere else needs to. Because once you push your population to the financial brink, they're not going to give you another shot at it. So use it wisely, when it'll have the most impact, not too early and not too late, or, don't do a lock-down at all. I'll leave "whether to lock-down at all" as a question for another day.
I'm not so sure its the politicization that's preventing people from buying in to 2nd, 3rd or 4th lock-downs, although it doesn't help. What I'm hearing is people have run out of money and don't think the benefits of another lock-down outweigh the downside for them and their families. Another lock-down equals bankruptcy. They're simply unable. They're saying, "I'll gladly take the 0.02% chance of dying, if it means I avoid bankruptcy and losing everything." (Most models are predicting another 25,000 American die, I used 80,000 / 328,000,000 population = 0.02%). Most people can't work through a lock-down and still make 5-6 times what the average American makes while not locked down, like you and I can.
Simpson's paradox has nothing to do with the total U.S. COVID-death numbers. It might apply to your conclusions about those numbers, but not the numbers themselves. No one is saying the overall average or trend, applies to all locations of all sizes at all points in time.
Simpson's paradox - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
This is great, I want to share it with someone.
I did. Click the blue Worldometer link in my post, go to the last graph at the bottom, then click the "7-day average" button below the graph. I generally include the source for everything I post, with a blue hyperlink, like that.
Correct.
It's my understanding that certain cities in TX are seeing their ICU capacity stretched. I'm not aware all counties in Texas are seeing their ICU capacity stretched. Are they? As far as the TX cities and counties that are seeing their ICU capacity stretched, yes, they're hitting their peak later, from what I can tell. That's my guess, for what it's worth.
This is a good question. I don't know, but we're going to find out. My guess would be that as NYC reopens, they'll likely see an increase in cases but nowhere near as high a peak as in April, due to developing (partial, not complete) immunity in the population. But there's no guarantee as to how much immunity exists. It's possible they could spike back up to where they were in April. Personally, I doubt it. My guess is that at least some of the people that had the virus have some level of immunity. But I could be wrong. Otherwise, if no one gets any immunity, we'd all get getting the virus again and again, each wave killing 0.5% of the population, until we've all had it 200 times and we're all dead. That's how the math works, if no one gets any immunity from past infection, with 0.5% case fatality rate, isn't it?
Simpson's paradox - Wikipedia
Ignoring it doesn't seem to help, which is what more than a few posters are advocating for because the deaths didn't immediately spike.
I know. I just wanted to be snarky
and poke fun at the standard on this thread. One minute, this thread has the highest of high scientific standards ever, everything must be peer reviewed or "it's fatally flawed.' Then, once published, even the peer reviewed ones are found to be, "biased, meaningless," and so bad they're shot full of holes by people who admit they didn't even read them (to hell with the peer reviewers and what they think now). Even posting raw numbers, raw data with no comment, causes people to literally hallucinate a "narrative" into the numbers and reject them, even from sources they're previously trusted and quoted themselves. Then, the next minute, the standard is, "Forget your pre-publication studies, your peer-reviewed studies, peer reviewers and raw data. I read it on twitter, so it's true!"
Updated article about Sweden.
Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale (Published 2020)
Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns.www.nytimes.com
So overall take aways are that Sweden hasn’t seen economic gains since this is a worldwide pandemic so it affects everyone. And the US economy fares worse because we don’t have as many social supports as other developed nations.
"The elevated death toll resulting from Sweden’s approach has been clear for many weeks. What is only now emerging is how Sweden, despite letting its economy run unimpeded, has still suffered business-destroying, prosperity-diminishing damage, and at nearly the same magnitude of its neighbors."
Collectively, Scandinavian consumers are expected to continue spending far more robustly than in the United States, said Thomas Harr, global head of research at Danske Bank, emphasizing those nations’ generous social safety nets, including national health care systems. Americans, by contrast, tend to rely on their jobs for health care, making them more cautious about their health and their spending during the pandemic, knowing that hospitalization can be a gateway to financial calamity.
“It’s very much about the welfare state,” Mr. Harr said of Scandinavian countries. “You’re not as concerned about catching the virus, because you know that, if you do, the state is paying for health care.”
Benefits to being small island nations
Oh, did North Korea open their border along the DMZ and I didn't notice?
