Why I think that Swedens no-Lock-down' approach will probably have less overall deaths.
Im going to try to make this sort ish, There are lots of caviats, and so on im going to skip over in the quest for brevaty but will reply if people are intested.
Two roads to heard immunity.
Swedish is split at the movement the virus is retreating in Stockholm and the surrounding county, but growing in most of the rest of the nation. theses two combine to give a overall R of below but very close to 1. The althoratys in Sweden think that 25% of the city has had the virus.
In NYC a recent anti virus study suggested that 24.7% of NYC have also been infected,
On the day that the anti virus test was done in NYC 0.11% of the population had died. by contrast in Stockholm it was 0.06% roughly half.
Looking at the death fingers from any contrary, but Ill use the UK, 157 people under 20 have died but over 10,000 of the over 80 cohort. How many people die is as strongly related to who (by age) gets the virus as any mesher. if you could work out how to get to 'heard immunity' levels by only young and healthy people getting the virus you could get though this with only a limited number of deaths.
There is no magic bullet that will do that for you, but by doing things like keeping bars open, where lots of young people go. and recommending old and sick people stay at home as much as possible, you can shift the dynamic sufficiently to make a big difference. if you confine everybody equally then it will spread equally in all demographics, there for lots of old people will get it and die.
I'm going to predict that Sweden will when this is all over have less deaths and not have trashed its economy. but facts will only be truly comparable in perhaps 12-18 months.
I'm going with the premise that a vaccine is over 6 months away and that lock-downs can not be sustained that long. and track and trace apps will be a delaying factor not a game changer. Therefor I suspect that heard immunity is going to have to be the thing that ultimately beets the virus, not all will agree and yes New Zealand looks to have done it without but is now stuck unable to open its boarders.
#grammar police
FEWER overall deaths....
Excuse me officer, am I allowed to say something like "less than 200 MPs"?
Alastair's last lead used fewer (one time) when, under the usual logic, it should have been less - a switch you see a lot less often - and nobody said a word. Clear evidence of FEWER bias among some PB'ers.
Clarity and not sounding weird are both far more important than rigid grammar. I’m aware data is a plural word. I’ll still treat it as singular. If fewer feels more natural than less, I’ll use it without worrying too much what Fowler might say.
The example I was thinking of was a percentage. Less than 1% is usually preferred to Fewer than 1%.
Fewer versus less is the debate revolving around grammatically using the use words "fewer" and "less" correctly. According to prescriptive grammar, "fewer" should be used with nouns for countable objects and concepts. According to this rule, "less" should be used only with a grammatically singular noun. Wikipedia
And prescriptive grammarians are full of shit.
Grammar is a study of how a language is used, not a list of rules that needs to be followed.
As the very article you are quoting states fewer vs less was a 'rule' made up in the late 1700s on the whim of one guy.
There is no textual evidence that supports the draconian application of fewer vs less that prescriptivist claim.
To me its a question of what it sounds like. You hear people say things like "Me and my Dad" and it sounds like nails on a blackboard.
And yet to me, as a 28 year old millennial, that sounds completely natural.
OT from politics but children and the way they perceive things can be cute. I just gave my daughter (aged six) her favourite cereal for breakfast and showed her it was the last of the box (so she would understand we had no more tomorrow) and she said "that's OK we can get more after the coronavirus".
She understands she's not allowed to go to school, or to the playground or shopping for toys due to the virus but I explained even with coronavirus we're still OK to get more food.
“ Petition Extend maternity leave by 3 months with pay in light of COVID-19 In light of the recent outbreak and lock down, those on maternity leave should be given 3 extra months paid leave, at least. This time is for bonding and social engaging with other parents and babies through baby groups which are vital for development and now everything has been cancelled.”
It’s all very cute discussing the past, quaint even. The economic challenges we face make 2008 look like a picnic.
I trust this government will receive the same support it gave the Brown government when it battled that crisis.
I think we might actually learn something from this crisis once it's all over, the sooner the better, and we might change the way we do a lot of things.
More of a focus on public health and prevention of disease. More working from home, or more locally, and more flexible jobs. Less commuting, and a push to adopt greener transport sooner. A better deal for the people who really are essential, by increasing the minimum wage faster and providing more support. We might even at long last have a go at providing a national social care service.
Trade and industry are going to have to change to. We can't rely on getting critically important goods from the other side of the planet. We need to think much more carefully about how robust industries and services are. We need to do more manufacturing in the UK, and if not the UK then with countries we can trust.
Of course we might simply ignore what has happened and try to go back to the way things were a couple of months ago, but I suspect that the wider public has had their eyes opened by what has happened, as I know I have.
We were going to make cuts - don't forget that the Labour manifesto in 2010 would have spent slightly less than the coalition did.
As I have been pointing out the problem wasn't cutting spending but what was cut and how.
When the Tory PM writes to his Tory council leader saying look here, why are you cutting front line services when we have made all this money available to you, the council leader details no you haven't, and number 10 responds yes we have that's the austerity problem in a single example.
It's not enough to say "we spent more on the NHS". What did you spend it on in the NHS? More money spent but savage cuts to provision shows money being syphoned off to more traditional Tory causes like consultants and lawyers and pointless layers of management.
OT from politics but children and the way they perceive things can be cute. I just gave my daughter (aged six) her favourite cereal for breakfast and showed her it was the last of the box (so she would understand we had no more tomorrow) and she said "that's OK we can get more after the coronavirus".
She understands she's not allowed to go to school, or to the playground or shopping for toys due to the virus but I explained even with coronavirus we're still OK to get more food.
And now you better hope they have some in the supermarket today so she can have some tomorrow.
Ian Watson also tweeted that Labour had lost 4 General Elections in a row, and by implication Keir Starmer & his new General Sec aren't keen to make it 5. Labour still have to win 113 seats for a majority.
Politically it is almost impossible to imagine any party at all joining with the Conservatives to form a government. They have no friends whatsoever. Labour is led by someone sane, if rather dull, and the SNP are quietly kicking independence into the long grass of aspiration. The Tories need to lose 45 seats or so to be out of office. As Labour are the only other show in town they would form the government. Labour winning 113 seats does look impossible. Tories losing 45+ does not. It all depends on what you mean by winning. I guess that KS's policy will be to keep all the other parties onside for a rainbow coalition.
I think it is "fewer" when dealing with whole numbers, e.g. numbers of people, but "less" with a continuous scale e.g. money. Percentages of whole numbers are a grey area.
French has a much neater system using partitive articles (du, de la vs des) to indicate the countability of a noun.
Why I think that Swedens no-Lock-down' approach will probably have less overall deaths.
Im going to try to make this sort ish, There are lots of caviats, and so on im going to skip over in the quest for brevaty but will reply if people are intested.
Two roads to heard immunity.
Swedish is split at the movement the virus is retreating in Stockholm and the surrounding county, but growing in most of the rest of the nation. theses two combine to give a overall R of below but very close to 1. The althoratys in Sweden think that 25% of the city has had the virus.
In NYC a recent anti virus study suggested that 24.7% of NYC have also been infected,
On the day that the anti virus test was done in NYC 0.11% of the population had died. by contrast in Stockholm it was 0.06% roughly half.
Looking at the death fingers from any contrary, but Ill use the UK, 157 people under 20 have died but over 10,000 of the over 80 cohort. How many people die is as strongly related to who (by age) gets the virus as any mesher. if you could work out how to get to 'heard immunity' levels by only young and healthy people getting the virus you could get though this with only a limited number of deaths.
There is no magic bullet that will do that for you, but by doing things like keeping bars open, where lots of young people go. and recommending old and sick people stay at home as much as possible, you can shift the dynamic sufficiently to make a big difference. if you confine everybody equally then it will spread equally in all demographics, there for lots of old people will get it and die.
I'm going to predict that Sweden will when this is all over have less deaths and not have trashed its economy. but facts will only be truly comparable in perhaps 12-18 months.
I'm going with the premise that a vaccine is over 6 months away and that lock-downs can not be sustained that long. and track and trace apps will be a delaying factor not a game changer. Therefor I suspect that heard immunity is going to have to be the thing that ultimately beets the virus, not all will agree and yes New Zealand looks to have done it without but is now stuck unable to open its boarders.
#grammar police
FEWER overall deaths....
Excuse me officer, am I allowed to say something like "less than 200 MPs"?
Alastair's last lead used fewer (one time) when, under the usual logic, it should have been less - a switch you see a lot less often - and nobody said a word. Clear evidence of FEWER bias among some PB'ers.
Clarity and not sounding weird are both far more important than rigid grammar. I’m aware data is a plural word. I’ll still treat it as singular. If fewer feels more natural than less, I’ll use it without worrying too much what Fowler might say.
The example I was thinking of was a percentage. Less than 1% is usually preferred to Fewer than 1%.
Fewer versus less is the debate revolving around grammatically using the use words "fewer" and "less" correctly. According to prescriptive grammar, "fewer" should be used with nouns for countable objects and concepts. According to this rule, "less" should be used only with a grammatically singular noun. Wikipedia
And prescriptive grammarians are full of shit.
Grammar is a study of how a language is used, not a list of rules that needs to be followed.
As the very article you are quoting states fewer vs less was a 'rule' made up in the late 1700s on the whim of one guy.
There is no textual evidence that supports the draconian application of fewer vs less that prescriptivist claim.
To me its a question of what it sounds like. You hear people say things like "Me and my Dad" and it sounds like nails on a blackboard.
-Who just scraped nails on a blackboard?
-Me and my Dad
I would say that is standard spoken English, and to my ears sounds a lot better than "my Dad and I"
But in any case, I really enjoy hearing non-standard forms of English, I find they enrich and enliven language. I can't really understand why people object in spoken /informal contexts.
Less is always ok except maybe in formal contexts, or where you don't want to be corrected by pedants (although you are helping to make them happy by giving them the opportunity, so why not spread a little joy in these difficult times).
US government projections of 3,000 virus deaths a day in June as it spreads into rural areas. If that is right, the long tail will ensure the Trump administration’s response to covid-19 and the inadequacies of the US healthcare system will be front and centre well into autumn.
If the US follows anything like the normal pattern that will prove to be wildly pessimistic. They may well have had peak deaths (daily) already although there will be a very long tail.
We are currently running above the 95% percentile CDC projection for deaths per day in the USA. 3000 a day in June is their mid point.
Probably driven by dealerships being closed. What is interesting though is that brands are looking at how they can do an online sales model - all would quote for a vehicle but you'd then go in and haggle. If the Tesla approach of "here's the price" now becomes more widespread then what future for the theatre of going into a car showroom and having to witness sales bod having to go see the boss whilst sucking teeth whilst you push them on price?
Ian Watson also tweeted that Labour had lost 4 General Elections in a row, and by implication Keir Starmer & his new General Sec aren't keen to make it 5. Labour still have to win 113 seats for a majority.
Politically it is almost impossible to imagine any party at all joining with the Conservatives to form a government. They have no friends whatsoever. Labour is led by someone sane, if rather dull, and the SNP are quietly kicking independence into the long grass of aspiration. The Tories need to lose 45 seats or so to be out of office. As Labour are the only other show in town they would form the government. Labour winning 113 seats does look impossible. Tories losing 45+ does not. It all depends on what you mean by winning. I guess that KS's policy will be to keep all the other parties onside for a rainbow coalition.
I think that this overstates it. Firstly a rainbow coalition with a very small majority of, say, 10, would find life incredibly difficult against a Tory party of 320 MPs. Secondly, do not underestimate the ability of bribery/fulfilment of some political aspiration for one of the smaller parties in exchange for support short of a coalition. I think a Conservative party over 310 makes any other government pretty much unviable.
US government projections of 3,000 virus deaths a day in June as it spreads into rural areas. If that is right, the long tail will ensure the Trump administration’s response to covid-19 and the inadequacies of the US healthcare system will be front and centre well into autumn.
If the US follows anything like the normal pattern that will prove to be wildly pessimistic. They may well have had peak deaths (daily) already although there will be a very long tail.
We are currently running above the 95% percentile CDC projection for deaths per day in the USA. 3000 a day in June is their mid point.
Its already almost flat. It will start to decline within a couple of weeks as the various lockdowns have greater effect and the lags work their way through.
Edit April 21st will probably have been their peak.
Why I think that Swedens no-Lock-down' approach will probably have less overall deaths.
Im going to try to make this sort ish, There are lots of caviats, and so on im going to skip over in the quest for brevaty but will reply if people are intested.
Two roads to heard immunity.
Swedish is split at the movement the virus is retreating in Stockholm and the surrounding county, but growing in most of the rest of the nation. theses two combine to give a overall R of below but very close to 1. The althoratys in Sweden think that 25% of the city has had the virus.
In NYC a recent anti virus study suggested that 24.7% of NYC have also been infected,
On the day that the anti virus test was done in NYC 0.11% of the population had died. by contrast in Stockholm it was 0.06% roughly half.
Looking at the death fingers from any contrary, but Ill use the UK, 157 people under 20 have died but over 10,000 of the over 80 cohort. How many people die is as strongly related to who (by age) gets the virus as any mesher. if you could work out how to get to 'heard immunity' levels by only young and healthy people getting the virus you could get though this with only a limited number of deaths.
There is no magic bullet that will do that for you, but by doing things like keeping bars open, where lots of young people go. and recommending old and sick people stay at home as much as possible, you can shift the dynamic sufficiently to make a big difference. if you confine everybody equally then it will spread equally in all demographics, there for lots of old people will get it and die.
I'm going to predict that Sweden will when this is all over have less deaths and not have trashed its economy. but facts will only be truly comparable in perhaps 12-18 months.
I'm going with the premise that a vaccine is over 6 months away and that lock-downs can not be sustained that long. and track and trace apps will be a delaying factor not a game changer. Therefor I suspect that heard immunity is going to have to be the thing that ultimately beets the virus, not all will agree and yes New Zealand looks to have done it without but is now stuck unable to open its boarders.
#grammar police
FEWER overall deaths....
Excuse me officer, am I allowed to say something like "less than 200 MPs"?
Alastair's last lead used fewer (one time) when, under the usual logic, it should have been less - a switch you see a lot less often - and nobody said a word. Clear evidence of FEWER bias among some PB'ers.
Clarity and not sounding weird are both far more important than rigid grammar. I’m aware data is a plural word. I’ll still treat it as singular. If fewer feels more natural than less, I’ll use it without worrying too much what Fowler might say.
The example I was thinking of was a percentage. Less than 1% is usually preferred to Fewer than 1%.
Fewer versus less is the debate revolving around grammatically using the use words "fewer" and "less" correctly. According to prescriptive grammar, "fewer" should be used with nouns for countable objects and concepts. According to this rule, "less" should be used only with a grammatically singular noun. Wikipedia
And prescriptive grammarians are full of shit.
Grammar is a study of how a language is used, not a list of rules that needs to be followed.
As the very article you are quoting states fewer vs less was a 'rule' made up in the late 1700s on the whim of one guy.
There is no textual evidence that supports the draconian application of fewer vs less that prescriptivist claim.
To me its a question of what it sounds like. You hear people say things like "Me and my Dad" and it sounds like nails on a blackboard.
-Who just scraped nails on a blackboard?
-Me and my Dad
I would say that is standard spoken English, and to my ears sounds a lot better than "my Dad and I"
But in any case, I really enjoy hearing non-standard forms of English, I find they enrich and enliven language. I can't really understand why people object in spoken /informal contexts.
Less is always ok except maybe in formal contexts, or where you don't want to be corrected by pedants (although you are helping to make them happy by giving them the opportunity, so why not spread a little joy in these difficult times).
“My Mum and my Dad and my Gran and I went off to Waterloo, My Mum and my Dad and my Gran and I and a bucket of vindaloo!”
Yep. There are conventions and I don't want to push this point too hard but a good friend, bestselling author, once said to me that English serves the writer not the other way around. If you become a slave to it then you are just that. Pedants are a pain in the ass. And data is always singular unless you want to sound like a complete geek.
Data is singular for the same reason that book is singular.
Well, one says "a book". But does anybody say "a data"?
1. The idea that if somehow Sars CoV 2 was a weapon it was a terrible failure. This is just plain wrong and has next to no merit. It'd have been rather good. I did go through the concept a week or two back on here of sub threshold strategies and weapons that are designed to cripple and damage but not invite (due to the nature of the damage or the uncertainty of the source) a proportionate response. Its a well known concept and is something that plague warriors have understood for decades.
2. We do not know either way how the virus got into the human population, we just don't, we have conjecture we have what sounds right and logical but we do not have certainty.
3. The China issue is less about whether they couldn't mop up properly in their BSL 4 labs but how much they told the world, how much they withheld, how much they may have actually fed positively false information, why they appear to be behind public disinformation efforts and how much they've lost the head when someone suggests their handling of it needs looking into.
4. Trump may be a first rate clown that automatically reduces the credibility of anything just by opening his mouth but do not assume everyone around him including the US & Western Intelligence agencies are all clowns as well.
Perhaps not. But as this article points out, the odds are considerably in favour of a natural transmission route:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-scientists-think-the-novel-coronavirus-developed-naturally-not-in-a-chinese-lab/ There’s a simpler, if less flashy, explanation for the emergence of a new SARS. A study, published in 2018, of four rural villages in Yunnan province located near caves containing bats known to carry coronaviruses found that 2.7 percent of those surveyed had antibodies for close relatives of SARS. Thousands, if not millions, of people are exposed to wild coronaviruses every year. Most of them aren’t dangerous, but “if you roll the dice enough times,” Goldstein said, you’ll see a bad one....
Nine challenges in modelling the emergence of novel pathogens
Epidemics, Volume 10, March 2015, Pages 35-39
Whole thing is worth a read but think you'd be interested in their "Challenge 7".
7. Expand models for emerging infections to account for host immunity
Most models of emerging infections assume a completely susceptible host population, but this is not valid if parts of the population have been exposed to low doses of the pathogen or to less virulent ancestors or related pathogens. Those in frequent contact with animals may have been exposed to zoonotic pathogens such as SARS-CoV or influenza, and more elderly sub-populations might have historic exposures.
These partially immune groups can cause profound dynamic effects. Having a population fraction immune, or partially immune, can facilitate disease persistence by reducing the chance of extinction in the post-epidemic trough (Pulliam et al., 2012). If those most at risk of exposure to a zoonotic pathogen are those with the highest levels of immunity (because of multiple previous exposures), they could form an effective barrier preventing an infection from spreading to the rest of the population; such a pattern is seen for influenza antibodies in numerous studies of swine industry workers (Myers et al., 2006). Data from this scenario might also lead to underestimation of the reproduction number of the pathogen if it spreads into a population that is truly naive. Models could help distinguish between pathogens that fail to spread because their transmissibility is low in all humans, versus those that fail because of low transmissibility in the human population in contact with the reservoir. We need to understand when these effects matter, and how to identify them.
agree very worthwhile read. Point 4 jumped out at me as something that hadn't really struck me before and would explain the 'natural' dying down of this diseases. Buried in it is a truly critical observation. The most connected people (potential super spreaders) get the disease early, recover and become immune, so get taken out the spreader pool and so there influence peaks early then decays. If say 5% are hyper connected they get it early, do the damage, but then stop do the damage. In the jargon, these time bound non-stationarities are critical.
Fascinating.
This sounds important. I'm trying to get my head around it.
A greater proportion of hyper connected people than the average rate for the population will have already caught the virus because of their increased connectedness. The hyper infectious ones will have been super spreaders. Most of these will now largely be immune and so they have been taken out of the pool. Are we saying/hoping that maybe a majority of hyper connected individuals will have already caught the virus?
However there are still a large majority of people who have yet to be infected and some of these will prove to be hyper infectious when they get infected. Some of these will be hyper connected individuals as a result of their jobs and so they will also be super spreaders. Some, by chance, will happen to be hyper connected at the time they become infectious by chance, e.g by attending a large gathering of people when they happen to be infected. So they will also be super spreaders.
Does the above make sense? One obvious conclusion seems to be to avoid hyper connected people unless you know them to be immune and to avoid large gatherings. But I guess we already know that. Also avoid potentially hyper infectious people. But of course these aren't identifiable until after the fact.
There is simply a segment of the internet population that will see anything the government does as having a nefarious intention.
That's unfair to the web. What it does do is make it possible for everyone in the world to see the rants of the most upset person in the world on any given topic. Previously this would have been restricted to their immediate family, anyone who strayed too close in the pub and letters written in green ink to the Press.
The question is why the Press have started given prominence to these extremes of opinion where they would have filed the green ink letters in the round receptacle before?
Comments
NEW THREAD
She understands she's not allowed to go to school, or to the playground or shopping for toys due to the virus but I explained even with coronavirus we're still OK to get more food.
Extend maternity leave by 3 months with pay in light of COVID-19
In light of the recent outbreak and lock down, those on maternity leave should be given 3 extra months paid leave, at least. This time is for bonding and social engaging with other parents and babies through baby groups which are vital for development and now everything has been cancelled.”
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/306691
More of a focus on public health and prevention of disease. More working from home, or more locally, and more flexible jobs. Less commuting, and a push to adopt greener transport sooner. A better deal for the people who really are essential, by increasing the minimum wage faster and providing more support. We might even at long last have a go at providing a national social care service.
Trade and industry are going to have to change to. We can't rely on getting critically important goods from the other side of the planet. We need to think much more carefully about how robust industries and services are. We need to do more manufacturing in the UK, and if not the UK then with countries we can trust.
Of course we might simply ignore what has happened and try to go back to the way things were a couple of months ago, but I suspect that the wider public has had their eyes opened by what has happened, as I know I have.
As I have been pointing out the problem wasn't cutting spending but what was cut and how.
When the Tory PM writes to his Tory council leader saying look here, why are you cutting front line services when we have made all this money available to you, the council leader details no you haven't, and number 10 responds yes we have that's the austerity problem in a single example.
It's not enough to say "we spent more on the NHS". What did you spend it on in the NHS? More money spent but savage cuts to provision shows money being syphoned off to more traditional Tory causes like consultants and lawyers and pointless layers of management.
-Me and my Dad
I would say that is standard spoken English, and to my ears sounds a lot better than "my Dad and I"
But in any case, I really enjoy hearing non-standard forms of English, I find they enrich and enliven language. I can't really understand why people object in spoken /informal contexts.
Less is always ok except maybe in formal contexts, or where you don't want to be corrected by pedants (although you are helping to make them happy by giving them the opportunity, so why not spread a little joy in these difficult times).
I think a Conservative party over 310 makes any other government pretty much unviable.
Its already almost flat. It will start to decline within a couple of weeks as the various lockdowns have greater effect and the lags work their way through.
Edit April 21st will probably have been their peak.
A greater proportion of hyper connected people than the average rate for the population will have already caught the virus because of their increased connectedness. The hyper infectious ones will have been super spreaders. Most of these will now largely be immune and so they have been taken out of the pool. Are we saying/hoping that maybe a majority of hyper connected individuals will have already caught the virus?
However there are still a large majority of people who have yet to be infected and some of these will prove to be hyper infectious when they get infected. Some of these will be hyper connected individuals as a result of their jobs and so they will also be super spreaders. Some, by chance, will happen to be hyper connected at the time they become infectious by chance, e.g by attending a large gathering of people when they happen to be infected. So they will also be super spreaders.
Does the above make sense? One obvious conclusion seems to be to avoid hyper connected people unless you know them to be immune and to avoid large gatherings. But I guess we already know that. Also avoid potentially hyper infectious people. But of course these aren't identifiable until after the fact.
The question is why the Press have started given prominence to these extremes of opinion where they would have filed the green ink letters in the round receptacle before?