cobafdek

Uh oh, anti-Trumpers: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-who-idUKKBN26U1ZW Trump wins.

Another IYI not keeping up! Written like a true bot! Only bots live in Markov processes. The rest of us are in the real world. The real world is non-ergodic. In a non-ergodic world, the so-called "fallacies" and "biases" of behavioral economics are not necessarily irrational.

Finally, we agree. You should stop posting here. Or at least you need to be more careful what you post. Orthopa earlier outed you as a fake MD. Now you're outed as a fake Taleb reader. Taleb: "Everything after the 'but' contradicts what came before." Taleb says the sunk cost fallacy isn't really a fallacy:

So basically, the conspiracy theories being peddled by Trump and eaten up by his followers. LOL. ;D How convenient, but not surprised that a Trump supporter would try to mislead by distorting the truth. You never asked me about the Wuhan lab theory. For the record, I don't believe it. The plain meaning of Taleb's tweet is clear: when he says "IYIs on Trump," he's talking about you.

If you have any facts to share on COVID19 or the response to the crisis, go for it. Otherwise, you're the Trump propaganda bot. What is a China propaganda bot? Is this one? “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” If you have to ask, you've failed the Turing test. What ever happened to 'infidels'? What's up with the newfangled name calling? Such clever propaganda -- all criticisms are just lies from the infidels. You are falling for it head over heels. Yes, anyone who disagrees with them is a 'bot', 'traitor', 'not a patriot', etc. Yet they're the ones who want to deny states suffering from crisis aid and they're the ones who put a sociopath in office that will "destroy the system". They came over from the politics section section because they can't stand by while their dear leader is criticized for his terrible management of the pandemic! Sunk cost fallacy! Trump bag holders... Taleb on the above victims of TDS: ". . . victims of paranoia can find a narrative that impeccably matches all facts, people collectively fall prey to these shared delusions. 'Intelligent' people can be more vulnerable Remember the Iraq WMDs or IYIs on Trump"

Bots, as well as anti-Trumpers deep in TDS, can't recognize negotiation tactics and diplomacy. If you have any facts to share on COVID19 or the response to the crisis, go for it. Otherwise, you're the Trump propaganda bot. What is a China propaganda bot? Is this one? “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” If you have to ask, you've failed the Turing test.

Chinese propaganda bots have infected CoBF. Examples: How to politicize a pandemic and basically blackmail people in doing your pet wishes while witholding the help that they need and deserve by being, y'know, part of the country. What he calls bailouts are actually just being a single country. When New Orleans or Mississippi or Florida gets hit by a huge hurricane and they get help, are they getting "bailed out" by the other states or is helping the worst hit places just the function of a government? The most urban states are worse hit first by pandemics, that's biology, but he's claiming this is some kind of political thing to punish enemies. How sociopathic do you have to be as people are suffering and dying? Don't the urban coastal states pay a lot more to the federal government than many of the poorer states that aren't too badly hit yet? So they are supposed to pay more and get less in return? When he bailed out farmers when his tarrifs hurt them, that was fine because it was political allies, right? Is he trying to break up the United States?

The manufacturers of that test report specificities of 99.2% for the IgM and 99.5% for the IgG, which sound excellent. But these are based on validating their tests by "Clinical Diagnosis/Confirmed," which presumably means symptomatic cases confirmed with a +RT-PCR. So that's the selection bias. It might be useful in a hospital setting. But when survey testing a larger and different population (asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic), they will get more false positives, which means lower specificity. It's interesting their package insert admits this much at the very end: "Some cross reactivity was observed with samples positive for SARS-CoV antibody and Rheumatoid Factor. It is possible to cross-react with samples positive for MERS-CoV antibody. Positive results may be due to past or present infection with non-SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus strains, such as coronavirus HKU1, NL63, OC43, or 229E." But they present no data on how large this cross-reactivity is. If large, specificity might be much lower. So it's probably not useful for community-wide testing for contact tracing, where a positive test will need to be confirmed by the RT-PCR.* *One way it may be possible: Abbott's ID NOW COVID-19 test (a PCR test), according to my hospital which is about to deploy it (and according to Abbott - if they can be believed) has a very low false positive rate. It could therefore be used to confirm a positive serological test that has an unacceptably large false positivity. Abbott's rapid test, however, would have to be more widely available outside the hospital setting. The McKesson test could still be useful for epidemiological purposes. Epidemiological models could use a range of false positive numbers to adjust their past models in order get better estimates of CFR and IFR. I'm still waiting for Mt. Sinai's serological (ELISA) test (brought up in this thread last month https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.17.20037713v2). I think they test for antibodies to different Covid-19 proteins. They claim no cross-reactivity to other non-Covid19 coronaviruses. I bet the South Korean tests will be revealed also to have poor performance characteristics. So that a large factor for the relative success in that population was psychological. When they see a lot a weird "scientific" testing being done, combined with all that highly publicized spraying of the sidewalks/streets/buildings with whatever homeopathic fluid by men in hazmat suits, it's great propaganda to enforce quarantining.

Bill Maher, and the whole Trump-is-a-War-Criminal-He-did-Nothing-in-February crowd, get taken to the cleaners by Congressman Dan Crenshaw:

It's ok, it only cost our economy trillions of dollars. No big deal. Let's not hold our federal gov't (CDC/FDA which botched testing and did not prepare back in January/Feb) accountable... Actually, let's put all the blame on the lesser guys in federal government/state/local leaders (don't they run the FDA/CDC?), but leave nothing for the guy at the top. We need to provide him the asymmetry he always gets from his followers: no downside, only upside. Zero skin in the game "I take no responsibility" POTUS. Should the President fire Fauci/Birx?

Should the President replace Fauci/Birx? At the end of the day the president owns the national response. If Fauci/Birx are providing bad advice then they should be replaced. If you watch 5 or more of Trump’s daily updates you will quickly realize who the problem is. Is that what a world class national response to a global pandemic looks like? ARE they providing bad advice?

Should the President replace Fauci/Birx?

Today, yes, I think the risk is acceptable, based on general reports of curve flattening and general lack of overwhelmed local ERs and ICUs. The "re-opening" of local economies should be conditional on: 1. universal mask usage 2. maintaining 6-ft social distancing 3. no large crowds This can allow many businesses, restaurants, maybe some schools to re-open. The decision regarding timing, pace, and extent of re-opening will be left to state governors and local authorities, who can fine-tune the above conditions, based on local factors. If a surge of serious cases start to show up in ERs and ICUs, they'll have to clamp down again. The federal government level can mostly give permission to states and localities to open up around April 30 (maybe even before), when they feel ready. They can veto crazy decisions that might happen in some regional southern areas, such as large church services, movie theaters, sports arenas. As you say, there is no good medical treatment/vaccine, and testing has been disappointing. (Whenever you rush out with new tests for a new disease, being unable to evaluate accuracy and reliability systematically, we really can't trust the results.) But you don't need testing or treatment in new pandemics, since the only effective measure is various levels of quarantine and travel restrictions. (If South Korea had no testing but had only lockdowns, they would have still been fine.) Today, I think the risk of economic recession/depression (deaths, suicides, depressions, lack of confidence in authorities) is greater than the risk of swamping the medical system, especially if the heavy lockdown extends beyond April 30. I think this feeling is widespread, and is percolating from the bottom-up. Any heavy handed top-down governmental restrictions will be answered by spontaneous bottom-up rebellion - so in a way, I think your question is moot. Improvement in testing should go on, but their utility will primarily be in retrospective analysis for future outbreaks. We don't need precise knowledge from test results to know what to do now (again, the only thing to do is isolation with masks and some form of quarantine). And even if a vaccine is developed, I don't have confidence that it will be effective or safe enough, especially if it comes earlier rather than later.

Anthony Fauci MD. And war criminal, behind the War Criminal. Fauci has effectively joined the campaign to re-elect the President. "Fauci said that the 'first and only time' that he and coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx talked to Trump about 'shutdown'-like mitigation policies, 'the president listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation.'” "When Fauci and Birx went to Trump a second time advising him to extend the White House’s social-distancing guidelines through the end of April, Trump 'went with the health recommendations,' Fauci said." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/13/coronavirus-anthony-fauci-clarifies-comments-that-sparked-firing-fears.html Anyone surprised that Fauci's statements (above) were left out of the Washington Post's account of today's briefing?: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-calls-fauci-a-wonderful-guy-the-day-after-promoting-a-tweet-that-called-for-him-to-be-fired/2020/04/13/4f450d2a-7d9d-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html

For the record, I fault the administration for: 1. Listening to Fauci which likely contributed to delaying the China travel ban back in January. 2. Over-reliance on models. 3. Not mandating, or at least strongly recommending, masks or similar facial covering. Netanyahu is a friend of the President. You can bet the administration is considering (or at least should be) adopting his idea for cellphone tracking and stiff penalties. I'll go further and propose similar penalties for not wearing a mask. Let's say you're part of the task force discussion. Where do you come down on this issue?