Dutch scientists contradict scientists on settled science...

[server]

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 06:02:32 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Wednesday, August 5, 2020 at 7:49:33 AM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 05.08.20 um 13:28 schrieb Phil Hobbs:

I wear a mask when I\'m in the store or someplace like that, but
primarily to be polite to the people who work there.

Same here. I\'m not infected, I don\'t pose any risk to anyone, but
there\'s no way they can know that. Plus then I don\'t have to shave.

Masks are mandatory in grocery stores here, usually enforced, so I
keep my American Flag mask in my pocket. Problem is, it gets all
tangled with my glasses, and fogs me up, so I take off the glasses and
can\'t see what I\'m buying. It\'s just a plot to get us to buy more.

But it\'s easy to shop now, no more density metering, no lines to get
in. Saturday a bit before noon is great at Safeway; lots of parking,
all stocked up, zero wait to check out. Sunday afternoon is a
nightmare.

I\'ve probably has the virus anyhow.

Half, maybe less, of the people here wear a mask outdoors.

Me too, but primarily for the same reason I have a 10 dB pad
on the input of my spectrum analyzer normally.

Cheers

Gerhard


I should have done that before I shot my SNA-33. :-(

Only a 10dB pad? You\'re a wildman!

Cheers,
James \"20dB SA pad\" Arthur

20 dB is sensible on a sampling scope, and the math is easier than
10dB. It\'s a 10:1 probe.






--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-08-07 10:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 06:02:32 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Wednesday, August 5, 2020 at 7:49:33 AM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 05.08.20 um 13:28 schrieb Phil Hobbs:

I wear a mask when I\'m in the store or someplace like that, but
primarily to be polite to the people who work there.

Same here. I\'m not infected, I don\'t pose any risk to anyone, but
there\'s no way they can know that. Plus then I don\'t have to shave.

Masks are mandatory in grocery stores here, usually enforced, so I
keep my American Flag mask in my pocket. Problem is, it gets all
tangled with my glasses, and fogs me up, so I take off the glasses and
can\'t see what I\'m buying. It\'s just a plot to get us to buy more.

But it\'s easy to shop now, no more density metering, no lines to get
in. Saturday a bit before noon is great at Safeway; lots of parking,
all stocked up, zero wait to check out.
It\'s like that here too. We\'re way past the peak, fortunately.

I\'ve probably has the virus anyhow.

One of the antibody tests has a low enough false call rate to be useful
IIRC.

Half, maybe less, of the people here wear a mask outdoors.



Me too, but primarily for the same reason I have a 10 dB pad
on the input of my spectrum analyzer normally.


I should have done that before I shot my SNA-33. :-(

Only a 10dB pad? You\'re a wildman!

Cheers,
James \"20dB SA pad\" Arthur

20 dB is sensible on a sampling scope, and the math is easier than
10dB. It\'s a 10:1 probe.

I have enough sampling heads that I treat them as disposables. Haven\'t
blown one up yet. The 70820A\'s bridges are built in, so that\'s another
story.

Cheers

Phil \"The SA has a 10 dB pad built in\" Hobbs


--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[Gerhard Hoffmann]

Am 07.08.20 um 14:55 schrieb dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com:

On Tuesday, August 4, 2020 at 4:41:15 PM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 04.08.20 um 22:10 schrieb John Larkin:


No-lockdown Sweden isn\'t doing as bad as some nearby countries. We\'ll
really find out in winter.

Sometimes I wonder what is the color of the sky on your home planet.

Only 40% more deaths per Meg of inhabitants than even US, or > 12 times
more than neighboring Norway. Hotels were at 15% capacity, normally 75%
in June. No wonder, nobody wants to visit the hotspot.

Sweden\'s Nordic neighbors have opened the borders amongst each other,
but not to Sweden.

Dream on.

Gerhard

But why only compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors?

Because there is not much difference between Norway and Sweden, same
structure, different implementation. There\'s a big difference between
Norway and Northern Italy.

This Danish economist compares mortality in 24 European countries
and finds no relation of death rates to lock-down level. Sweden\'s
death rate is higher than its locked-down neighbors, but lower than
strict lock-down UK, Spain, and Italy, and only slightly higher
than strict lock-down France.

Strict lock down followed from the piles of deep frozen dead corpses,
they did not lock down before it was way too late. But even then it
worked, it just took some time to reduce the numbers until they could
follow the infection chains again.

In Germany we did it quite early, no overflows of the hospital system.
We could even import cases from the other side of the french border,
even fly in some Italians who required respiration.
We were able to follow many infection chains and confine them. Mostly
winter tourists, low-wage meat industry workers from the Balkan and
religious people who did suppose wrongly that coming together to
praise the $(GOD) of their choice could not be punished.

(That much praying, i.e organized begging for better than my
pre-planned outcome would really annoy me if I was $(GOD).
And that mostly on Sunday, my day OFF!)


Our GNP dropped by 10%, Sweden dropped 9.5%. Now that\'s an advantage!
It seems, Sweden was not so shut-down-free after all.
Our newest numbers in .de are nearly back to normal for the inland,
exports have not yet recovered that good.

And now that the restrictions are lifted here, the numbers are
rising again. Tourists. And we\'ll see the results of last weekend\'s
Anti-Corona-demonstration next week. 20000 sheeple. Let\'s make a
chain of humans! Firmly hand-in-hand against that non-existing virus!

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665588

Summarized here (without the need to download the paper)
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/08/did-lockdowns-work-evidence-says-no.php

In the U.S., the places with the strictest lock-downs (New York, New
Jersey) had by far the highest death rates.

No, they had lock downs because of the highest death rates by far.
And the lock downs were not that strict. As long as you meet
unmasked people in the subway and then leave town to your
healthy habitat, there is a sneak path.

But now that the virus

has run its course through those states and they\'ve killed a huge
portion of their elderly nursing home population, through no effort
of theirs,

There are enough states left to keep you busy for some months
with this method of locking down when it\'s really too late.

The Chinese arc-welded the doors of those who protested too much.
No, I don\'t support that. But they got it fixed.

Cheers,

Gerhard

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, August 8, 2020 at 12:51:19 AM UTC+10, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 06:02:32 -0700 (PDT), dagmarg...@yahoo.com
wrote:
On Wednesday, August 5, 2020 at 7:49:33 AM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 05.08.20 um 13:28 schrieb Phil Hobbs:

<snip>

> I\'ve probably had the virus anyhow.

How did you calculate this probability? Granting that you are susceptible to all sorts of idiot claims about people getting the virus and not getting sick - 15+/-3% seems to be the actual proportion of cases that were asymptomatic and got a positive PCR test - it\'s probably just more of your wishful thinking.

> Half, maybe less, of the people here wear a mask outdoors.

Wearing a mask outdoors doesn\'t strike me as cost-effective if you aren\'t part of a crowd.

<snip>

---
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, August 8, 2020 at 12:39:09 AM UTC+10, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 09:20:22 +0100, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 06/08/2020 15:50, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 6 Aug 2020 10:33:43 +0100, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 06/08/2020 09:38, Bill Sloman wrote:

This thing seems to peak and fade at low case infection levels, far
below 80%.

Only when looked at by John Larkin.

It only stops rising exponentially when there are strong interventions.

That creates \"The reserve army of the uninfected.\"

It doesn\'t create them. They were there before the epidemic started.

>That works about as well as Communism worked.

The USSR did well enough in WW2 to beat the Germans. US capitalism is doing truly rotten job of slowing down the Covid-19 epidemic in the US.

The recent failure in infection control in Australia - in the state of Victoria - seems to have been driven by the choice to use cheap and poorly trained commercial security to enforce quarantine on travellers arriving from over-seas. The private sector may have it virtues, but this illustrated one of it\'s vices.

<snip>

UK test and trace is predictably a disaster run by dodgy subcontractors
who have previous for defrauding the Ministry of Justice! The UK\'s DIY
\"world beating\" phone app is a steaming heap of dingoes kidneys.

<snip>

Curious and relatively good. The places seeing a secondary bump in new
cases are mostly not showing a corresponding bump in deaths. Far
southern hemisphere might be an exception to that pattern, but all the
data is suspect now.

The irresponsible idiots who chose to socialise when they should be practicing social distancing are younger than the international travellers who brought the infection into their country in the first place. Being younger, they are less likely to get very sick - though it still happens.

They tend to be pretty good at infecting their elderly relatives, if they chance to socialise with them.

One has to wonder why John Larkin thinks that \"all the data is suspect now\".. I suspect that what he means is that it isn\'t telling him what he wants to hear, so he\'s looking for an excuse to ignore the bits he doesn\'t like, while cherry-picking the bits that he fancies.

There\'s also the point that deaths are a lagging indicator - typically it takes 18 days from finding out that you are infected to actual death (if the infection happens to kill you. When the US infection rate went up from about 30,000 per day to 60,000 per day, John spent a fortnight reminding us that the death rate wasn\'t going up

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

It didn\'t end up going up in proportion to number of new cases (see above), but it definitely went up, it a couple of weeks later.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 10:55:15 PM UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Tuesday, August 4, 2020 at 4:41:15 PM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 04.08.20 um 22:10 schrieb John Larkin:

<snip>

In the U.S., the places with the strictest lock-downs (New York, New
Jersey) had by far the highest death rates.

They got the \"strict\" lock-downs only after the death rate went through the roof.

There\'s typically an 18 day lag between knowing that you are infected with Covid-19and eventual death (if it kills you), so it was a case of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted.

But now that the virus has run its course through those states and they\'ve killed a huge
portion of their elderly nursing home population, through no effort
of theirs, their deaths are falling and now California (strictly-
locked-down for nearly five months), has the most new cases.

James Arthur confuses the cause - the high death rate - and the effect it produced - some lockdown.

California doesn\'t seem to have been all that strictly locked-down by international standards.

In short, in the U.S., and Europe, there\'s precious little evidence
that locking up healthy people reduces SARS-CoV2 spread or mortality.

Locking down enough of the population hard enough does make a difference. Mostly what you are talking about is the effect on the population of seeing a lot of people get sick and die, and a lot of fuss in the newspapers about overloaded hospitals. That changes peoples\' behavior even when the politicians are spending most of their time worrying about the effect on the economy.

What really works is vigorous contact tracing and getting people who might have got infected to self-isolate for 14-days from the contact that that might have infected them. It\'s a skilled and labour intensive job, and the US medical system doesn\'t seem to be funded in way that encourages them to take it seriously. The UK National Health should have been able to do it, but apparently some recent Conservative government decided that it was something they they could get away with skimping on.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Ricketty C]

On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 10:39:09 AM UTC-4, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 09:20:22 +0100, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 06/08/2020 15:50, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 6 Aug 2020 10:33:43 +0100, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 06/08/2020 09:38, Bill Sloman wrote:

Covid-19 is much less infectious, and 40% should do the job.

It isn\'t all *that* much less infectious - estimates of R0 have gone up
and herd immunity now will require at least 60% uptake possibly more.

https://plus.maths.org/content/maths-minute-r0-and-herd-immunity

I have seen recent credible estimates of R0 at 5.7 which is more than
double what they estimated initially form the Chinese Wuhan data.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2020/04/07/the-covid19-coronavirus-disease-may-be-twice-as-contagious-as-we-thought/#3ea2d9929a6a

That puts herd immunity for Covid up at 80+%
(assuming we can get a fully working vaccine)

Only if everyone is suceptable.

https://reason.com/2020/07/01/covid-19-herd-immunity-is-much-closer-than-antibody-tests-suggest-say-2-new-studies/

What if R is high but only among a fraction of the population?

The fraction of the population that do not get infected appears to be
vanishingly small. You forget that hapless US choir that managed to put
a bound of 87% on it and so killed some of their members.

The proportion of those infected that are truly asymptomatic has been
going down as more symptoms are added to the official list. But you are
still infectious without showing symptoms - that is how it escapes.

This thing seems to peak and fade at low case infection levels, far
below 80%.

It only stops rising exponentially when there are strong interventions.

That creates \"The reserve army of the uninfected.\" That works about as
well as Communism worked.

Most of Europe is losing control again now with rising summer spikes as
young holiday makers and alcohol fuelled antics break social distancing.

UK locked down late and was well into exponential growth because somehow
the experts advising the government had not noticed that the doubling
time was not the 5 or 6 days of their models but 3 days in reality. A
week delay of lockdown made the problem in the UK and resulting
fatalities 4x higher than what they could have been.

Even so it was a lockdown that was essential in London but not really
needed in most of the rest of the country. UK is incredibly centralised
the entire country is run for the benefit of London and the South East.

UK test and trace is predictably a disaster run by dodgy subcontractors
who have previous for defrauding the Ministry of Justice! The UK\'s DIY
\"world beating\" phone app is a steaming heap of dingoes kidneys.

R is often circular reasoning.

I don\'t particularly like R because it is not easily derived from
measurable data and is subject to ad hoc modelling assumptions. The case
doubling time (data smoothed as a 7 day rolling average) is much better.

Only when we find the herd immunity threshold will we truly have an
accurate value for R0. The slop in the UK values is huge right now.

Curiously they are seeing rising infection rates but much lower hospital
admissions (thought to be because most of them are fit young people).
The same anomaly was observed in Germany when the ski set were infected
right at the outset (German efficiency also played a part).

Curious and relatively good. The places seeing a secondary bump in new
cases are mostly not showing a corresponding bump in deaths. Far
southern hemisphere might be an exception to that pattern, but all the
data is suspect now.

The other rather large exception is the many southern US states which have seen both the infections and the deaths rise. The only times when the death rates don\'t appear to be rising is when the infection rise is recent (since it takes some weeks to die of this horrible disease) and when the rise is only slight where the improvements in care mitigate the deaths.

This is not rocket science. If you don\'t ignore the data you don\'t like, the facts are easy to see.

Meanwhile Larkin is taking all the same precautions to stay infection free as the people he denigrates. Yeah, pretty much what you would expect from someone like him.

--

Rick C.

---+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
---+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[server]

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 10:55:53 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-08-07 10:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 06:02:32 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Wednesday, August 5, 2020 at 7:49:33 AM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 05.08.20 um 13:28 schrieb Phil Hobbs:

I wear a mask when I\'m in the store or someplace like that, but
primarily to be polite to the people who work there.

Same here. I\'m not infected, I don\'t pose any risk to anyone, but
there\'s no way they can know that. Plus then I don\'t have to shave.

Masks are mandatory in grocery stores here, usually enforced, so I
keep my American Flag mask in my pocket. Problem is, it gets all
tangled with my glasses, and fogs me up, so I take off the glasses and
can\'t see what I\'m buying. It\'s just a plot to get us to buy more.

But it\'s easy to shop now, no more density metering, no lines to get
in. Saturday a bit before noon is great at Safeway; lots of parking,
all stocked up, zero wait to check out.
It\'s like that here too. We\'re way past the peak, fortunately.


I\'ve probably has the virus anyhow.

One of the antibody tests has a low enough false call rate to be useful
IIRC.


Half, maybe less, of the people here wear a mask outdoors.



Me too, but primarily for the same reason I have a 10 dB pad
on the input of my spectrum analyzer normally.


I should have done that before I shot my SNA-33. :-(

Only a 10dB pad? You\'re a wildman!

Cheers,
James \"20dB SA pad\" Arthur

20 dB is sensible on a sampling scope, and the math is easier than
10dB. It\'s a 10:1 probe.

I have enough sampling heads that I treat them as disposables. Haven\'t
blown one up yet. The 70820A\'s bridges are built in, so that\'s another
story.

I\'ve bought some ebay heads that had a bad channel; I don\'t think I\'ve
blown one up myself. I have a shelf lined with SD-series heads with
original value, adjusted for inflation, a good chunk of a megabuck.

Does anybody know of an outfit that can repair 11801-series scopes?
The heads are hybrids and likely not repairable, except for the
eeprom.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9lyg8cxelpgj3fb/AACpUnryGVT7TC-_GbcboEmFa?dl=0





--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 05:55:10 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Tuesday, August 4, 2020 at 4:41:15 PM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 04.08.20 um 22:10 schrieb John Larkin:


No-lockdown Sweden isn\'t doing as bad as some nearby countries. We\'ll
really find out in winter.

Sometimes I wonder what is the color of the sky on your home planet.

Only 40% more deaths per Meg of inhabitants than even US, or > 12 times
more than neighboring Norway. Hotels were at 15% capacity, normally 75%
in June. No wonder, nobody wants to visit the hotspot.

Sweden\'s Nordic neighbors have opened the borders amongst each other,
but not to Sweden.

Dream on.

Gerhard

But why only compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors?

I know some native-born Swedes. They think that Norwegians are stupid
barbarians.

 

[Lasse Langwadt Christensen]

fredag den 7. august 2020 kl. 19.45.21 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 05:55:10 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Tuesday, August 4, 2020 at 4:41:15 PM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 04.08.20 um 22:10 schrieb John Larkin:


No-lockdown Sweden isn\'t doing as bad as some nearby countries. We\'ll
really find out in winter.

Sometimes I wonder what is the color of the sky on your home planet.

Only 40% more deaths per Meg of inhabitants than even US, or > 12 times
more than neighboring Norway. Hotels were at 15% capacity, normally 75%
in June. No wonder, nobody wants to visit the hotspot.

Sweden\'s Nordic neighbors have opened the borders amongst each other,
but not to Sweden.

Dream on.

Gerhard

But why only compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors?

I know some native-born Swedes. They think that Norwegians are stupid
barbarians.

Scandinavia is like siblings, fighting and calling each other names is mandatory
but none of it is really serious

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 11:07:24 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
<langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

fredag den 7. august 2020 kl. 19.45.21 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:
On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 05:55:10 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Tuesday, August 4, 2020 at 4:41:15 PM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 04.08.20 um 22:10 schrieb John Larkin:


No-lockdown Sweden isn\'t doing as bad as some nearby countries. We\'ll
really find out in winter.

Sometimes I wonder what is the color of the sky on your home planet.

Only 40% more deaths per Meg of inhabitants than even US, or > 12 times
more than neighboring Norway. Hotels were at 15% capacity, normally 75%
in June. No wonder, nobody wants to visit the hotspot.

Sweden\'s Nordic neighbors have opened the borders amongst each other,
but not to Sweden.

Dream on.

Gerhard

But why only compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors?

I know some native-born Swedes. They think that Norwegians are stupid
barbarians.

Scandinavia is like siblings, fighting and calling each other names is mandatory
but none of it is really serious

If you draw a graph, how much people like one another vs how closely
they are related, it dips below zero somewhere just past first
cousins.

The Swedes aren\'t all that bright either. Some can\'t spin, or even ski
backwards. I\'m teaching a few.

DGMS about their cooking.

 

[whit3rd]

On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 7:39:09 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 09:20:22 +0100, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

It only stops rising exponentially when there are strong interventions.

That creates \"The reserve army of the uninfected.\" That works about as
well as Communism worked.

No, it doesn\'t create a crowd of uninfected persons. Childbirth does that.
It might PRESERVE uninfected populations, though.

Get a dictionary and look up those verbs...

Public health measures oughtn\'t be so confusing, but that seems to be
the direction your spin is aimed. Don\'t aim there, it\'s impolite.

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 14:58:17 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 10:57:11 AM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 07.08.20 um 14:55 schrieb dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com:
On Tuesday, August 4, 2020 at 4:41:15 PM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 04.08.20 um 22:10 schrieb John Larkin:


No-lockdown Sweden isn\'t doing as bad as some nearby countries. We\'ll
really find out in winter.

Sometimes I wonder what is the color of the sky on your home planet.

Only 40% more deaths per Meg of inhabitants than even US, or > 12 times
more than neighboring Norway. Hotels were at 15% capacity, normally 75%
in June. No wonder, nobody wants to visit the hotspot.

Sweden\'s Nordic neighbors have opened the borders amongst each other,
but not to Sweden.

Dream on.

Gerhard

But why only compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors?

Because there is not much difference between Norway and Sweden, same
structure, different implementation. There\'s a big difference between
Norway and Northern Italy.

But if you\'re arguing that lock-down results depend on a country
being exactly like Sweden, then there\'s no applicability to the
rest of the world.

If lockdowns worked, there ought to be some correlation between the
stringency or timing of the lockdown> and mortality. Instead, I\'ve
only seen studies in Europe that find essentially no correlation,
and I see that in the U.S.A. the most locked-down states and facilities
places imaginable -- prisons and nursing homes -- have by far the
highest infection rates and deaths.

California, which locked down earliest and hardest (and longest),
was not saved by that strategy, they merely delayed their reckoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_lockdowns#United_States

They\'ve never let up, my mom\'s going crazy, and despite all of that
locking down, California is now the #1 source of new cases.

California cases seem to have peaked, with a PPM death total now about
half the US average and 1/6 of New York. By far most cases and deaths
have been in the far south, the LA area. California is BIG, about 800
miles from Mexico to Oregon. That\'s a long walk on the Pacific Crest
Trail.

The accumulated death total in San Franciso is now 72 PPM of
population, 1/27 of Manhattan\'s total.

SF is barely locked down, compared to a few months ago. The daily
death count is nearly zero now, after a peak in April.

 

[server]

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 07:50:06 -0700, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:

On Thu, 6 Aug 2020 10:33:43 +0100, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 06/08/2020 09:38, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, August 6, 2020 at 4:22:09 PM UTC+10, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 05 Aug 2020 16:29:52 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in
r6gmifhuv5bs9ntdp...@4ax.com>:
On Wed, 5 Aug 2020 21:34:41 -0000 (UTC), Jasen Betts
ja...@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2020-08-05, Joerg <ne...@analogconsultants.com> wrote:

snip

Yes. Shutdown forever.

That is the problem, without every body vaccinated with something that works 100%
eventually all the ones that have no natural anti-bodies will die.

*NO* 99% of all the people who get it will *survive*. An unlucky 1% will
die and 2% will suffer lingering after effects that may never go away.
If we can vaccinate to the herd immunity level then R will drop below 1
and the virus will be reduced to sporadic events incapable of community
transmission.

It produces less serious symptoms in the young so it will almost
certainly end up as a childhood disease like OC43 did after its initial
pandemic entry in 1890. Symptoms in adults and IFR almost identical to
today\'s Covid pandemic (though that one was from cattle not bats).

Wrong.You only have to vaccinate enough of the population to reach herd immunity levels.

That\'s something like 95% with something seriously infectious, like measles and there are enough lunatic antivaxers around to make this difficult.

Covid-19 is much less infectious, and 40% should do the job.

It isn\'t all *that* much less infectious - estimates of R0 have gone up
and herd immunity now will require at least 60% uptake possibly more.

https://plus.maths.org/content/maths-minute-r0-and-herd-immunity

I have seen recent credible estimates of R0 at 5.7 which is more than
double what they estimated initially form the Chinese Wuhan data.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2020/04/07/the-covid19-coronavirus-disease-may-be-twice-as-contagious-as-we-thought/#3ea2d9929a6a

That puts herd immunity for Covid up at 80+%
(assuming we can get a fully working vaccine)

Only if everyone is suceptable.

https://reason.com/2020/07/01/covid-19-herd-immunity-is-much-closer-than-antibody-tests-suggest-say-2-new-studies/

What if R is high but only among a fraction of the population?

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-08/ljif-etc080320.php

I\'d expect that some people are born with pre-loaded defenses against
this virus. Some simple thinking about evolution practically demands
it.

It also explains why some populations are hit harder than others.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Fri, 7 Aug 2020 14:58:17 -0700 (PDT)) it happened
dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote in
<dd90056f-314f-4ef6-9e5b-58465a36d0d1o@googlegroups.com>:

If lock-downs worked, the virus never would have left China.

James Arthur

Everybody knows the virus was created in the same US lab that created HIV,
then brought to China by US agents commanded by donald t.
d.t. being stupid enough not to see that that attempt to damage China would backfire.

Seems the Chinese have it much better under control than the chaotic US leadership.

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 08/08/20 00:53, John Larkin wrote:

California cases seem to have peaked, with a PPM death total now about
half the US average and 1/6 of New York. By far most cases and deaths
have been in the far south, the LA area. California is BIG, about 800
miles from Mexico to Oregon. That\'s a long walk on the Pacific Crest
Trail.

Maybe, maybe not.

https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/32/18#subj15

You can choose to interpret that as either
- John is right and realistic that the data is suspect
- John is wrong and optimistic about it having peaked
.... or both.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 07/08/2020 13:55, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:

On Tuesday, August 4, 2020 at 4:41:15 PM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 04.08.20 um 22:10 schrieb John Larkin:


No-lockdown Sweden isn\'t doing as bad as some nearby countries. We\'ll
really find out in winter.

Sometimes I wonder what is the color of the sky on your home planet.

Only 40% more deaths per Meg of inhabitants than even US, or > 12 times
more than neighboring Norway. Hotels were at 15% capacity, normally 75%
in June. No wonder, nobody wants to visit the hotspot.

Sweden\'s Nordic neighbors have opened the borders amongst each other,
but not to Sweden.

Dream on.

Gerhard

But why only compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors?

It makes it a fair comparison with the same sort of demographics,
population density, fitness and split between very rural and city.

Likewise between Belgium (strict lockdown done badly) and neighbour The
Netherlands (smart pragmatic measures done well). Otherwise both places
have pretty similar climate, geography and population density. If
anything Belgium has some distinctly more rural parts but also has more
slums. It seems this virus is exceptionally good at targetting
overcrowded deprived inner cities much like TB in the Victorian era.

This Danish economist compares mortality in 24 European countries
and finds no relation of death rates to lock-down level. Sweden\'s
death rate is higher than its locked-down neighbors, but lower than
strict lock-down UK, Spain, and Italy, and only slightly higher
than strict lock-down France.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665588

Summarized here (without the need to download the paper)
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/08/did-lockdowns-work-evidence-says-no.php

UK cocked it up royally. They had initially planned to follow The
Netherlands and Sweden with a herd immunity strategy but completely lost
their nerve and locked down hard when faced with exponential growth
doubling every three days that wasn\'t going to stop. They stopped doing
any test and trace at about the same time which was certifiable.

The lockdown did eventually stop onward transmission of the virus but
there is around two weeks inertia from the onset of lockdown before
things start to improve. It didn\'t help that to clear beds in the
hospitals they threw (untested) infected patients into care homes.

I am fairly convinced that the optimum strategy would have been to lock
down for those over 45 and with health conditions to keep the situation
within manageable bounds for the hospitals. They are talking about doing
that now but it is being decried as ageist by the tabloid press.

That is about the optimal breakpoint in terms of minimising fatalities
and hospital admissions whilst building up herd immunity in the working
population. There will be some collateral damage to an unlucky few.

De facto we have already lost control with the twenty and thirty
somethings crowded together in large groups on beaches sunbathing in an
alcoholic haze. UK folk turn spectacularly pink and flakey in the sun.
We have a spectacular heatwave this weekend - it\'s Covid party time

The bigger and more illegal the rave the less likely it is to follow any
of the rules or for the police to intervene (even if they find it).

In the U.S., the places with the strictest lock-downs (New York, New
Jersey) had by far the highest death rates. But now that the virus
has run its course through those states and they\'ve killed a huge
portion of their elderly nursing home population, through no effort
of theirs, their deaths are falling and now California (strictly-
locked-down for nearly five months), has the most new cases.

It isn\'t too surprising that the places that locked down the hardest
were where the death rate had become intolerable. That is a correlation
but the cause of the hard lockdown was the virus being out of control.

It is the death rate motivating the need for a hard lockdown and not the
other way around. This thing will not go away until we have an effective
vaccine and even then it will probably remain as a childhood disease.

In short, in the U.S., and Europe, there\'s precious little evidence
that locking up healthy people reduces SARS-CoV2 spread or mortality.

Snag is you can\'t tell who is truly healthy and who is an asymptomatic
carrier. The majority of the UK problems in care homes stem from agency
nurses on zero hours contracts who cannot afford to take a day off work.
The correlation with employing people in care homes on such draconian
terms and Covid pandemic death rate is *very* strong indeed. Sweden made
a rather similar mistake and had way to many care home deaths.

I am largely inclined to agree with you though. The global lockdown did
unnecessary and brutal damage to the economy that will blight the
careers of the next generation for the next decade. We could have made
more strategically sound decisions but they would have been difficult
for air head populist politicians to sell to the their citizens.

Some things are probably never coming back - excessive overseas business
trips for example. Zoom works well enough for most purposes.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[whit3rd]

On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 9:34:43 PM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 07:50:06 -0700, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:

What if R is high but only among a fraction of the population?

R is defined on a population, statistically; cherry-picking inside that
population is NOT DEFINED. So, the \'among a fraction\' is magical thinking.

I\'d expect that some people are born with pre-loaded defenses against
this virus. Some simple thinking about evolution practically demands
it.

This virus has evolved against those pre-loaded defenses. Your expectation
is contrary to experience. Fantasy is another word for that.

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 08/08/20 12:01, whit3rd wrote:

On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 9:34:43 PM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 06 Aug 2020 07:50:06 -0700, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:

What if R is high but only among a fraction of the population?

R is defined on a population, statistically; cherry-picking inside that
population is NOT DEFINED. So, the \'among a fraction\' is magical thinking.

Yebbut, you can define \"population\" in various ways.
One is \"population inside care homes\" and \"population
excluding care homes\".

There is some validity to that iff you countenance \"harvesting\"
the elderly.

In addition, the infection dynamics can reasonably be expected
to be different inside/outside care homes. The beneficial
actions are likely to be different in those situations.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 07/08/2020 12:39, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 6:20:31 PM UTC+10, Martin Brown wrote:
On 06/08/2020 15:50, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 6 Aug 2020 10:33:43 +0100, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 06/08/2020 09:38, Bill Sloman wrote:

snip

I don\'t particularly like R because it is not easily derived from
measurable data and is subject to ad hoc modelling assumptions. The
case doubling time (data smoothed as a 7 day rolling average) is
much better.

It\'s perfectly well defined if you are doing perfect contact tracing.
Each infected person can infect a number of other people, and if you
can count the number that person has infected you\'ve got an R value
for that particular person in their particular situation, at that
particular time.

It is an utterly crap measure that epidemiologists seem to like but has
too many hidden assumptions lurking under the bonnet.

Real data is rarely that good. There\'s nothing about looking at
doubling times that makes the data any better.

The doubling time is something you can determine from the smoothed raw
case data without *any* assumptions about the infection process.

The R-value for the population at a whole is is just the average of
all the individual R-values.

But it is a rubbish measure that invites tinkering to get the answer
that you want to see. The doubling time (or halving time) is much harder
to fake - it is *very* visible on a log graph against time. You merely
have to boxcar average over 7 days to take out weekend fluctuations.

Only when we find the herd immunity threshold will we truly have
an accurate value for R0. The slop in the UK values is huge right
now.

The herd immunity threshold won\'t give you an accurate value for R0.

It is the only thing that can. R0 is *NEVER* accurate.

It may give you a value for a particular population at a a particular
time, but the population is composed of different individuals, who
behave differently, partly because different people always behave
differently, and partly because human behavior can be influenced
their perceptions of the situation. Even the most fanatically
sociable person will put themselves about less in the middle of an
epidemic, even if it is mainly because the less fanatically sociable
will tend to avoid them.

Doesn\'t look like that on Brighton beach to me.

Curiously they are seeing rising infection rates but much lower
hospital admissions (thought to be because most of them are fit
young people).

What\'s curious about that?

If it was as terrifyingly deadly as you and Ricky seem to think they
would all be dropping like flies now. The fact is that they are not.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown