Liberty

More on the false negative with antibody tests: For those not familiar with the bayesian math, let's say you have a test that is 99% effective. To most people that sounds really really good and accurate. But let's say you have 1% of the population infected with the disease you're looking for. So you test 1000 people. There's 10 person really infected. But you also get 10 false positives (1%). This means you'll have 20 positives, and 50% of them are incorrect, with the 99% accurate test. Accuracy may be be lower than 99% with many tests, I've seen some thought to be 95%, so you get the idea..

Wow. Not that we needed more evidence that this pathological narcissist only thinks of himself, but there it is. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/us/politics/coronavirus-trump.html Reddit comments that capture it well: "Mr. Trump rarely attends the task force meetings that precede the briefings, and he typically does not prepare before he steps in front of the cameras" "This is why you know the man is a fucking psychopath. Normal people have total panic attacks about being unprepared for something like an EMERGENCY LIVE NEWS BRIEFING FOR THE ENTIRE NATION ON A DEADLY PANDEMIC. Trump *enjoys* doing this, with no preparation at all, and it's basically the highllight of his day every day because he gets to be in charge of the briefing and the cameras are all on him. What he actually says isn't even important." "It's really difficult to understand just how different he is from 'normal' people. He's in a human skin but he doesn't have the same mental processes as the rest of us, not at all. All that matters is that *he* is the center of attention, for as many people as possible. Everything else is just noise. So while most of us would completely shit our pants at the thought of being grilled on live TV by journalists with millions of people watching, for Trump that's practically his idea of heaven. The actual topic, the questions, the details, none of this matters to him at all. All that matters is that everyone is focused on HIM." ">he hastily plows through them, usually in a monotone, in order to get to the question-and-answer bullying session with reporters that he relishes It's SO obvious that he does this. He literally sounds like he RESENTS getting through the legit/important stuff, like it is a literal waste of his time."

Meanwhile, spin doctors like Scott Adams are claiming that Trump was actually making a sophisticated medical point, and Trump himself basically says he was talking about it, but was kidding. Video of Trump saying it was sarcastic: "Trump: I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen..." *facepalm*

Meanwhile, because his priorities are in order, Trump is trying to increase shipping rates to hurt Amazon (and everybody who order online) and bully the Washington Post during a time when everybody is ordering more online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/23/10-billion-treasury-loan-usps/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2765270

I didn't get any of that from the essay, but that's why we have a market.

It's frustrating that some still think political party is correlated with quality of response (I have the broader public in mind, not this board). The best responses have been deliberate and honest, even if they aren't ultimately the best outcomes. De Blasio is another that has consistently screwed up. He seems to panic and go to an extreme response at each turn. It's everything that bothers me about Trump. In this interview with an expert on the 1918 flu, who was part of the Bush task force to improve pandemic readiness, he says that the pandemic response plans called for no politicians to be in charged, because whoever it is, a large fraction of the population would take what they says with skepticism for political reasons. They said a highly respected apolitical scientist should be in charge, in this case Dr. Fauci. https://peterattiamd.com/johnbarry/ But Trump can't not have the spotlight on himself, so that part of the plan went out... Barry had interesting things to say about the US federal response to this crisis in the podcast..

Trump is always doing one thing and its opposite so that later he can claim he was right by pointing at one thing and gaslighting us about the other. A few days ago he was inciting protests in multiple states and journalists found links from the white house to the anti-lockdown protests. I think it's likely Fauci or something like that threatened to resign (and maybe start talking to the media about what's going on inside the WH) if Trump didn't at least try to manage the reopening a bit and not let it be a free for all (again). The dude was just telling people that maybe they should inject Lysol on a nationwide press conference, a week after he talked about antibiotics on the topic of a virus, and you think he's coming up with the rational plan for all this?

So many people are drinking bleach and eating their fish-grade chloroquine these days... A good reminder that half the population has an IQ under 100.

You do know that this is just the beginning of the pandemic, its been hitting most western countries for 1-2 months, and it's a bit early to calculate IFR and CFR, right? Also, to compare Japan with the US is funny. Here's a very collectivist country where people follow rules to a fault, don't shake hands, wear masks, where everything is constantly cleaned and social distance is the normal state of things... Does that sound like the US? Liberty, that is not the problem. The problem in US is our "experts" got everything wrong. If you take anything our "experts" told us and do opposite, we would be better. 1) They started saying no human-human transmission. 2) Then they started saying no asymptomatic transmission. 3) Then they started saying not many asymptomatic people. 4) Then they told us Dont wear masks. 5) Then Dr. Fauci said we will eventually do antibody tests but that is not the need of the hour. 6) Then they were telling us summer (heat, humidity & sunlight) has not much effect on Covid. While Japanese started with masks right away in January. While in late February Pelosi is going running around China town how it is good to go to shopping and walking tours and Blasio is recommending in early March what movies to go to, Japanese were wearing masks, disinfecting hands, subways, etc. It is not just a fluke that Japan had 3 deaths/million and US has 152/million. Our "experts" have been so good. Getting 0 out of 6 right. You're just giving talking points, not discussing actual science. The experts reported a preliminary report from China super early, and they didn't say there was no human to human transmission, they said there was no evidence of it yet. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absense, and early on, it's normal not to know what is going on. You need the evidence, you can't just make stuff up. This was reversed very quickly as more evidence came in and China stopped hiding/denying the situation (like Trump did). It still took weeks for Trump to stop saying it was a hoax, that it was totally contained and airtight and would disappear soon. I won't go through your whole list, but except for the masks, it's also just a bunch of talking points, not actual arguments. The mask thing was likely a lie, but they probably felt they had to do it because the PPE situation was such a clusterfuck that they couldn't have a run on it leaving frontline people exposed. The solution there was to actually have been prepared for this and for the federal government to not wait weeks to use the stockpile and defense production act, and coordinate the states to bring supply where it was most needed rather than force states to hoard and compete against each other, and to have a clear message to the population encouraging them to make/get cloth masks like in the Czec republic, rather than have Trump say that he won't wear masks and that they're totally optional.

Nice attempt at defending him. He doesn't know anything, and that's the problem, he's in charge, he's supposed to have been getting daily briefings on this from experts for months, and he's still an imbecile who confuses the population instead of informing them, and creates disorder in the public health response rather than lead it and create coordination and cooperation, and is surrounded by idiots because only idiots pass the loyalty test and all the real experts have to do everything they can not to be driven away. He knows less about the situation than some random person on the street who's been watching he news for a month, and that's a big problem.

You do know that this is just the beginning of the pandemic, its been hitting most western countries for 1-2 months, and it's a bit early to calculate IFR and CFR, right? Also, to compare Japan with the US is funny. Here's a very collectivist country where people follow rules to a fault, don't shake hands, wear masks, where everything is constantly cleaned and social distance is the normal state of things... Does that sound like the US?

Podcast episode on who's organizing the lockdown protests.. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/the-daily/coronavirus-lockdown-protests.html Of course a bunch of wealthy people and political operatives and law firms directly tied to the white house: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/the-daily/coronavirus-lockdown-protests.html

The stupid sh.. we have to waste time on: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/04/24/coronavirus-latest-news/ Birx reaction: https://v.redd.it/048ery4q0ou41

LOL, is this your way of easing into saying you're wrong? People who constantly talk about what we don't know usually do it when what we do know goes against what they'd like to believe. If the data supported them, they'd talk about "let's look at the facts, gents". But when it doesn't, they talk about what we don't know. It's a fairly effective technique if you don't know about it.

who needs to extrapolate to the rest of the country, for goodness sakes!!! apples to apples. NYC is the epicenter of the crisis, and because major media is NYC-centric, the mass hysteria was exported. why does the governor of michigan go stalinesque? because she wants to look like she is on top of things like cuomo. so of course this doesnt have to be extrapolated nationwide, because NYC's experience isn't the nation's experience. this 20% antibody positive rate makes covid less deadly than the flu. and if this result doesnt comport with how you want to think, then just call it a bad test. an inhale some more sand As we've seen at the country level, the hardest hit places are just showing other places what their futures will look like if they don't take measures to prevent it. Thankfully, most places took measures and we're starting to see them work. As for your hand waving of the error rate on these tests (which may be lower than 99% accurate, with a disease that is present in low-single digits of the sample, which means that actual false positives may be 50% or more), I think it says more about how you have a conclusion and try to back-fill the details rather than look at the data.

Remember, the sensitivity and specificity of these antibody tests matters a lot, and NYC is very different from the rest of the country, as the epicenter of the epidemic. There's got to be a lot of false positives in those tests even if 99%, and you can't extrapolate it to the rest of the country.

Don't quite think it's 100% the same. Costco will work with a supplier to white-label their product as Kirkland so suppliers can take advantage of two separate price points. OTOH, Amazon sellers themselves are largely white-labelers that work with factories in China and Amazon is seeing what's successful and going directly to these factories to create Amazon Basics. Sounds like the same to me, just done a bit differently because they have different business models. Costco has limited shelf space so they have to pick very carefully for volume and quality. If they didn't have those constraints, I think they'd be doing it differently.

"If every infection goes from causing 2.0 cases to only causing 0.7 infections, then after 40 days you have one-sixth as many infections instead of 32 times as many. That’s 192 times fewer cases." "Entire sectors of the economy are shut down. It is important to realize that this is not just the result of government policies restricting activities. When people hear that an infectious disease is spreading widely, they change their behavior. There was never a choice to have the strong economy of 2019 in 2020."

On the NY serology tests..

Thanks for the link. I read the Quillette article and the journal article from which the diagram was pulled. I understand the theory about how the AC could have pushed droplets from Table A to Table B. But I don't understand how Table C was infected by Table A, given that Table C was upstream from Table A with respect to the airflow from the AC unit. The other diagram in the journal article shows an exhaust fan adjacent to Table B and a dashed line running in the opposite direction of the airflow from the air conditioner. Are they saying that the exhaust fan recirculated contaminated droplets back into the AC system, rather than ventilating them to the outside? Fluid dynamics is complex, air doesn't move in straight lines or predictable patterns, would be my guess.

https://www.ft.com/content/0a4872d1-4cac-4040-846f-ce32daa09d99

"BREAKING: Gilead's drug Remdesivir has "flopped" in its first trial, according to the Financial Times"