http://www.publichealth.lacounty.gov/phcommon/public/media/mediapubhpdetail.cfm?prid=2328 It's unlikely that these reports are going to stop. The first sentence says a lot. There is also this: Just so we are clear, I am not an advocate of a binary approach either. Quarantine the elderly and immuno-compromised. Practice social distancing but for fuck sakes don't burn the world down. Total lockdown/quarantine was a mistake. I have a hard time believing I could be convinced otherwise.
It's a good thing that you are not in a position to get people killed with your inability to listen to actual experts we have posting in this thread. We have people here who are in the decision making chain explaining what's going on. Describing how infection spreads and how this disease is working. Going out of their ridiculously busy days to keep us in the loop. And you for some reason need to be pushing back, implying that they don't know what they are doing. Because of what? youtube video research and a gut feeling? You aren't even bothering to try to understand what Net and DD are telling us. Eventually they are going to get tired of the constant undermining and quarantine quarterbacking and they'll just stop posting. And the rest of us will lose the benefits of their knowledge and experience. All because you don't think that you can be convinced by facts.
I’d wager a bet 99.9 percent of civilians don’t have access to the info we’re getting for free. And those who do, don’t have the ability to ask questions that we do
Meh, that, too, is part of the equation... people that are smart, but don't get it, or don't care. I'm no expert, but for the past 2 weeks I have been immersed into groups of experts who do this shit for a living. They're the first ones to say "our data is crap, and our models are crap, and we may be overreacting", but they are also of the belief that it's better to overreact than to under-react. They are updating their understanding and recommendations daily based on new data. They are also the ones saying that they're happy to do what the data leads them to, but that they don't have the data, so they want to wait for the data. The fact that idiotic leadership was so slow to react to the warnings of experts from months ago is what got us into this mess in the first place, and there's no silver bullet to get us out of it... just unfuck logistics, ramp up supply, develop tests, and get people tested. However long that takes. Their biggest fear right now is weak leadership. Those that are going to listen to people who don't know any better and fall under the pressure to "let us go back to the gym" or "get a haircut". Whether it's a US Governor, or a Quebec Premiere who wants to send kids back to school way too soon... at least up here the population told them to go fuck themselves and pushed the leadership back to doing the slow, unrushed thing. I'm just grateful that my political leadership is strong, and willing to make hard calls... and that our systems are responding incredibly fast, and that our healthcare system works, for the most part. Really, I could care less what some people in the US decide to do... because I think I won't be directly impacted by it. Over the next 3-6 weeks we'll get to watch things unfold, and watch what happens to those areas that rush things. My country has made a point to keep as many people from crossing over our borders as they can to help protect us from those that may be a bit reckless in their decision making. What a lot of people have to understand is that even the best info you're seeing online and in the media is dumbed way the fuck down to try and explain it to the masses. It is incredibly complex stuff, and the vast majority of people reporting on it are morons who tend to get stuff wrong or don't understand that complexity and nuance. It's hilarious to see people with zero subject matter expertise try and argue against the position of those experts. You all might be interested to know that my project is one of the 4 mentioned in this press release: https://www.newswire.ca/news-releas...nadians-and-secure-our-economy-833271498.html
Great first round of results, key word being "first". Since we can't know for sure if their sample was somehow skewed or biased, let me know when you feel completely safe and confident rolling it out to 330 million people. Also, presence of antibodies does NOT equal immunity. It also doesn't mean the virus won't mutate....do you see where this goes? We have had years of research on the flu, and we still express uncertainty. The downside of this is grim business: get it wrong adn we just made a bad situation far worse. First rounds of results in LA county are positive, and that's fantastic. Do not pretend we ignore these reports, we do not. We can't afford to, because they might unlock the next round of countermeasures. "We may need to re-think public health strategies"....yes, we do that on a damn-near hourly basis. You can't selectively quarantine. Hell, we can't blanket quarantine either, apparently. But please, explain to me how you can select who has to stay at home and who doesn't? Who can't air travel and who can? Who is totally acceptable to risk being a carrier going into a previously uninfected environment? The elderly and immuno-compromised are at higher risks, based on what we know now. We also know that this apparently hits harder in minority communities. Do they have to stay home as well? Based on even less information than we have now? It's not like we have otherwise healthy 20, 30 and 40-somethings dying from this....oh, wait. Again, this isn't new. When a pandemic hits, the first thing you do is isolate. Period. This way you avoid selectively (and arbitrarily) crashing a few economies. The virus doesn't give a fuck about your demographics, neither should we: anyone can spread it, so we all sit the fuck down. Again, your opinion does not defeat actual expertise, nor does your Monday morning quarterback mean that the decisions we've made since February 28th were wrong. You ever notice how they never promote a coach from the stands? And again, what WAS the alternative to a global shutdown, especially when that's the only thing we have seen in other countries that worked? The quarantine does 3 things: 1) slows the spread to buy precious time (again, months of which was wasted) to stabilize supply chains, prep our health care system and study this virus. 2) ensures the infections that DO set in fizzle out without risking millions. Imagine if NYC had the exact same level of infections as they do right now, and you could still get on the train with literally millions of passengers exposed to those infections. and 3) prevents the spread reaching further than we could address it. For example, if it hit parts of Florida that are saturated in nursing homes before they got a chance to prepare, those whole communities go into a panic...and they spread it even further. The simple problem is we are all in this together. The people in charge blew this off for damned near 2 straight months, which is mind-blowing considering just the stakes of what we have already lost. Now we are all stuck working with shitty options, and the division makes it that much worse. The one thing that should have emerged from this is actual fucking leadership through a crisis. It hasn't and I am hoping against all present evidence that we as a nation think about that and fix it. This isn't a red vs. blue, us vs. them issue. I think, unfortunately, we have had so many things thrown our way in that context, it seems as though that's all everything is. We haven't had to confront a threat as a unified nation since 9/11, but that's kind of what is called for. This is killing our countrymen and we'd be better served by figuring out how to help, because if we're not very careful, it will happen to us next. This is a well-written piece about why this is so fucked: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/
Luckily you have Fauci leading up the task force, as he won the Freedom medal from Bush for his handing of AIDS. Now if only the Administration and others would actually follow his advice.
Don’t not flatter yourself. “Not an expert”? You’re a logistics and security engineer. If you were legit crazy, you would be a very, very scary person to be on the bad side of.
Yeah, I may be half decent at the computer side of things (data ingress systems, etc), but that's the easy part... knowing what data to grab, and how to use that data in relation to all the other data... that's the hard part. That's where you need the guidance of the expert economics and epidemiology people to help. That's the part that is just so over my head it's not funny... I feel like the dumbest guy in the room when they all start talking. And I'm OK with that. I posted this before, and I'll post it again.... go to minute 11 and just watch for 10 minutes. This is one of the guys that we've been meeting with this past week (and he wants to be more involved with our project moving forward, as he's really intrigued by how we're doing some things, which is beyond flattering). They are not just taking a wild guess by looking at totals from Germany, or quoting a web site... they are doing hard math (literally... hard math) and applying pandemic modelling that they have worked on for decades, with their colleagues around the world. These fuckers are the subject matter experts, hands down. Dan here is afraid of people leaving social distancing any time soon. "If you switch off your effort, it all comes back." Go to minute 45 or slightly before and you'll see he goes through a bunch of various scenarios. That is plenty good enough for me, and nothing anyone around here says will convince me otherwise. I've attached a few screen caps from the video... and I highly recommend everyone watch it, so that you can see just how fucked up any MSM reporting is on this shit.
To overreact... as in err on the side of caution. Stay at home, social distancing, etc. That will result in fewer deaths, less of an impact on the health system, etc.
To further expand on that... basically, if it turns out we didn't need those measures, well, that sucks, but not as much as if we needed those measures and didn't do them.
I guess it kind of makes the assumption that you give a shit about people dying, rather than just treat a ton of deaths as acceptable collateral damage. For instance, THE political hot question that we've been tasked to provide data for, from the Canadian government, is "how many deaths are acceptable?" It's kind of a given that we can't just wait for it all to go away before letting people back out, but when we do let people back out earlier than ideal, how many deaths can we expect? That's the modelling we're working on right now, among other things. We're also working on modelling that will allow business to make more informed decisions to let them get back to work with less risk to their staff and the public. Kind of like "you're a logger in Northern BC, go work" vs "you're a bank teller in the middle of a high density outbreak, stay home" vs "you're a bank teller for the same company, but your branch is doing fine so go to work with moderate precautions."
I'm amazed by the relative restraint that has been shown towards someone who states that facts are unlikely to sway his opinions. It'd be funnier to me if those kind of opinions weren't dangerously stupid and causing real people to really die.
This struck a chord with me, because no one is holding a sign saying "I want to go back to cutting hair", or "I want to clean teeth" or "I can't wait to caddy and sell Michelob Light to these old fucks". I can't put a precise term to it, but I think that is very important to note.
The stupid may seem to be winning, but don't let it get you down. Most people seem to get it, at least from what I've seen NOT on the news... Whether it's local communities making noise at 7pm to thank first responders and healthcare workers, or massive protests in Israel showing social distancing... the Stupid isn't everywhere.
In other news, every week the lead data scientist on my project takes a step back and evaluates our efforts against other teams that all seem to be doing the same thing. I'm not sure if yesterdays results make me happy or sad: "It appears the work done by others is no more (and in some ways, behind) the work we’re doing. Both Kaggle and Namara just post scraped public data sets (as far as COVID is concerned at least). I assumed, incorrectly, that others would have built relational master datasets by now, but that does appear to be the case (Unless I’ve overlooked something?). For example, Combined_key errors we found and fixed in our sets are still present in the data provided by Namara. I’ll will follow up with the Roche folks to see if they got something special hidden away. So good news is it looks like were still on point on this stuff. The good/bad news is scraping manually still has value to the project. Importing into a relational model manually is still in our wheelhouse.Johns Hopkins was well ahead of the curve on their aggregator. Doesn’t look like anybody’s got much past that yet."
I think it's really important to remember that the people protesting are in the extreme minority. Someone on twitter posted a short video of the protest here in Ohio. It was taken from a building about two blocks away and it really puts it in perspective. There was maybe 75-100 people there. It looks like a lot since they were all crowded around the capitol building and all the pictures are taken on the ground in the middle of the protest. Most people are trying to do the right thing I think. Don't let a very few morons get you down. https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1252303895591780352