OT: Open for Business Until Everyone is Sick

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:40:08 PM UTC-7, mpm wrote:

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 9:23:16 PM UTC-4, Ricky C wrote:

I guess this is not the same country that was bombed at Pearl Harbor and came back to win a world war or that hunted down Osama bin Laden...

Technically, Hawaii was only a territory at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, but I concur with your sentiments.

It's was an attack against the U.S. base. Doesn't matter where it was.

What a bunch of wusses.

Here (Florida) it seems that every retailer it trying to out-do the next guy when it comes to protecting us against the Coronavirus. The other day, I saw a line outside the Walmart that was at least an hour long in order to get in the store. (They are throttling the store's occupancy -- all in the name of safety, you know.) What a bunch of BS. People are more likely to catch the coronavirus standing in that ridiculous line.

I really hate that many of the markets and gas stations are closing the bathrooms in the name of CV-19.

I really hope this passes soon.
I neither want nor need a "nanny state" trying to force me from catching the cold. (even though I realize of course the novel coronavirus is more serious that just an ordinary cold.., but when and where will the madness stop?)

 

On Fri, 1 May 2020 17:20:03 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 3:30:27 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 1 May 2020 15:11:46 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 10:47:06 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

30% antibody positive in some places.

Not according to published error estimates. You have to ignore reality
to quote a number without giving its error bars.

Without knowing what "some places" means, I'll suggest that's misinformation.

Lookie here for a little reality:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/experts-demolish-studies-suggesting-covid-19-is-no-worse-than-flu/

It's important to read past the introduction here; the second page is where the
antibody-positive result has a lower bound computed; it's no less than zero,

If nobody has ever had this, why all the panic?

you'll be
glad to hear. To claim much more than zero, like 30%, is ... extraordinary. We await evidence.

You wouldn't believe anything I said.

google antibody tests new york

or antibody tests germany

or something.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 5:43:24 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 01 May 2020 11:25:23 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 1 May 2020 20:11:34 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Exactly. The more we lock down, the more our population is fertile for
reinfection. Even with a 100' wall around the US, and airports shut
down forever, there will be reservoirs of virus here for years, passed
around silently.

It's not practical to test the entire US population every week and
stomp out new seeds.

It shocks me that this kind of stuff needs to be explained on an
engineering newsgroup.

Sadly, I'm not shocked.

Every engineering school should have a mandatory course, How To Think
201.

If there was one at Tulane when John Larkin was studying there, he must have skipped most of the lectures.

He does seem to have studied hard in the course that taught him how to be a thoroughly gullible twit, or he may just have a natural aptitude.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Fri, 1 May 2020 19:05:02 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:46:42 PM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 1 May 2020 17:20:03 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

glad to hear. To claim much more than zero, like 30%, is ... extraordinary. We await evidence.

You wouldn't believe anything I said.

Talk is cheap. What can you submit to peer review? Results without
reference to input data, and with incredible error estimates, are the only inputs
you've offered, and rejection was for cause, not just attribution.

It's not just me; folk who deal in knowledge and understanding ALL apply similar
peer review requirements.

Post some links to your peer-reviewed publications.

Or some of your electronic designs.

Or some cat pictures.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Ricky C]

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 10:25:49 PM UTC-4, Les Cargill wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
snip

Exactly. The more we lock down, the more our population is fertile for
reinfection.

No, assuming the lockdown works, they're exactly as likely to be
infected once the lockdown ends. There's only exposure or not-exposure
offered by lockdown. It's just delay.

That seems to be true in the US, but not in many other places. So, an intelligent person would, instead of just condemning the idea of lock down, ask what are we doing wrong and how can we improve it?

--

Rick C.

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

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 3:05:45 AM UTC+10, Piotr Wyderski wrote:

Ricky C wrote:

I guess I'm asking why? Obviously isolation should do the job. We don't even need to get the R0 number down to zero. We just have to get it enough below 1.0 that the new infections drops more rapidly than it's doing now.

Then the very same isolation should eradicate common cold or flu as
well, which didn't happen.

It does seem to have happened in Australia, where the lock-down is being observed well enough to produce a rapid fall in the number of new cases reported each day.

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

This should have been the start of our annual flu season - I got my annual flu jab yesterday - but we've had remarkably few cases of flu so far.

We still don't know what the other reservoirs
of the virus might be. Are you going to kill all the bats on the planet,
for example?

Bats aren't a reservoir of a virus that can infect us. Covid-19 is clearly descended from such a virus, but it probably mutated before it could infect wherever intermediate species it went through before it got around to acquiring the modification that let it infect us.

I recently posted a link to a recent PNAS paper about potential sources of zoonoses - their conclusion was that it didn't matter much which species the zoonose ancestor happened to infest - there just had to be enough of them for random variation of inherited characteristics to have a finite chance of throwing up something that could infect humans.

Getting rid of bats would get rid of just one of a multitude of potential reservoirs.

> And this is not limited only to animals. There are countries which
cannot afford the level of healthcare we have, even remotely. Some day a
plane from one of them might land and then everything will start all over again. In order to win we must try to fix the problem globally,
which is not happening nowadays. Every single country pursues its own unique attempts, sometimes they are even stealing the PPE belonging to their neighbours to supplement their own stock.

Epidemics are going to be with us for quite a while yet. The trick we need to find is a way of detecting them early. We know how to stop them spreading once we've recognised them as an epidemic - though the US does seem to be woefully inept at actually doing it.

> > The lock down in China worked a charm.

New Scientist claimed that vigorous contact racing and rigorous isolation of anybody who might have got infected for 14 days from the contact was what actually made the difference. Lock down helped by limitng the number of contacts that had to be traced.

Provided that the Chinese reports are, errr..., not using creatively the
concept of truth...

They are now relaxing their lockdown - we've had on-site reports of more traffic on the streets and in railway stations.

There's no reason why we can't make these things work here in the US and throughout Europe.

In Poland we have been locked down since March 10, with the police
helicopters constantly monitoring major cities for illegal gatherings
and so what? 228 new cases only today and it is still early evening.
On May 6 the schools are supposed to restart their activities; large
shopping centers on May 4. We have been in isolation for almost two
months and the disease is quickly spreading. Three weeks you say?

Lock down just makes contact tracing easier. You can impose lock down by fiat.

Getting contact tracing going takes more work.

Now the EU is mostly switching to the Swedish model: let regular people
live their lives and isolate the most vulnerable ones.

Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and other have done better.

Not me. I can wait it out.

No, you can't, I'm afraid. The virus as we know it or its mutations are
here to stay. Forever or for at least a very long time. The second
strike is expected to hit us this autumn.

There will eventually be a vaccine. Places that can do contact tracing and quarantine won't have infected people running around infecting other people before we get the vaccine. Some countries are too incompetent to do that well.

Some of us will develop immunity one way or another, some else will
perish. We are way past the point of no return, so catching it is just a
matter of time.

If you have the bad luck to live in a country that can't manage epidemic control. More fortunate places can wait until there is a vaccine.

The US alone have 1.1e6 confirmed cases today, probably
3x that number not diagnosed.

There's nothing particularly probable about that factor of three.

What reliable evidence there is suggests that perhaps one third or fewer of all cases of Covid-19 infection are are asymptomatic. Some new and not all that reliable tests for antibodies to Covid-19 have suggested higher numbers, but one has to suspect that that they are detecting antibodies to other corona viruses - perhaps the one that is responsibly for about a quater of the cases of the common cold.

> This already is on the order of 1% of your population and still growing. Sorry.

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

The US has been appallingly inept in trying to contain the epidemic.

The number of new cases per day has been more or less steady at about 30,000 per day for a month now. Italy did a poor job of containing the epidemic, but at least their new case per day numbers did start decreasing, even if rather slowly.

The US could have done worse, and sustained the exponential increase for even longer, but their claim to be an advanced industrial country looks very dubious.

Trump may be part of the explanation, but the fact that they don't have universal health care may reflect a more fundamental - and more important - defect in the way their society works.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 3:47:06 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 1 May 2020 19:05:39 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Ricky C wrote:

I guess I'm asking why? Obviously isolation should do the job. We don't even need to get the R0 number down to zero. We just have to get it enough below 1.0 that the new infections drops more rapidly than it's doing now.

Then the very same isolation should eradicate common cold or flu as
well, which didn't happen. We still don't know what the other reservoirs
of the virus might be. Are you going to kill all the bats on the planet,
for example?

And this is not limited only to animals. There are countries which
cannot afford the level of healthcare we have, even remotely. Some day a
plane from one of them might land and then everything will start all
over again.

Exactly. The more we lock down, the more our population is fertile for
reinfection. Even with a 100' wall around the US, and airports shut
down forever, there will be reservoirs of virus here for years, passed
around silently.

Actually that seems most unlikely. Typhoid Mary was a silent carrier for the typhoid bacterium that lived in her gut. If you get Covid-19 you either die of it, or your immune system gets rid if it.

As many as 30% of Covid-19 infections may be asymptomatic. The antibody tests that seem to be saying otherwise are almost certainly wrong - probably reacting to antibodies to the corona virus that cause a quarter of the cases of the common cold.

It's not practical to test the entire US population every week and
stomp out new seeds.

But is it practical to test everybody who presents with Covid-19 like infection, and contact trace where it came from and isolate all the people who might have caught it from them for 14 days from that contact. New seeds can be stopped from germinating into a new epidemic.

The US health system isn't well suited to doing this, but now might be a good time to clean it up and remove a few other of its obvious defects.

<snip>

The lock down in China worked a charm.

Provided that the Chinese reports are, errr..., not using creatively the
concept of truth...

There's no reason why we can't make these things work here in the US and throughout Europe.

<snip>

> Some people propose two years.

Places where lock down has been done right - and backed up by aggressive contact tracing - needed about six weeks. South Korea relied on contact tracing alone and that worked equally quickly.

<snip>

> 30% antibody positive in some places.

According to some very dubious antibody tests, which seems to be getting a huge number of false positives. I suspect that it is also reacting to antiobodues to the corona virus that causes a quarter of the caes of the common cold.

Even in California, random population antibody tests are coming back
in the 4% range.

And the antibody test being used is extremely dubious.

Colorado, sparsely populated, has tests coming in at the 7% to 18%
range.

And the antibody test being used is extremely dubious.

Too bad that we don't have data from past years' winter colds and flu.
This pattern may not in fact be novel.

The antibody test may in fact be telling you about the past years winter colds - or at least the 25% caused by a different corona virus.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 4:11:38 AM UTC+10, Piotr Wyderski wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Exactly. The more we lock down, the more our population is fertile for
reinfection. Even with a 100' wall around the US, and airports shut
down forever, there will be reservoirs of virus here for years, passed
around silently.

It's not practical to test the entire US population every week and
stomp out new seeds.

It shocks me that this kind of stuff needs to be explained on an
engineering newsgroup.

It shocks me that this kind of ignorant exaggeration doesn't get shot down in an engineering newsgroup.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 4:25:33 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 1 May 2020 20:11:34 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Exactly. The more we lock down, the more our population is fertile for
reinfection. Even with a 100' wall around the US, and airports shut
down forever, there will be reservoirs of virus here for years, passed
around silently.

It's not practical to test the entire US population every week and
stomp out new seeds.

It shocks me that this kind of stuff needs to be explained on an
engineering newsgroup.

Sadly, I'm not shocked.

Of course John Larkin is one of the people most in need of correct explanations, while remaining impervious to any correction of his own - decidedly imperfect - attempts at explanation.

He is an exponent of climate change denial, which is of a piece with his delusions about the Covid19 epidemic.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 8:32:23 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 1 May 2020 21:54:46 -0000 (UTC), Jasen Betts
jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2020-05-01, John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:


Efficiency benefit from dense populations is on the side of the microbe.

Yes. The R factor is a radical function of population density.

No, it's a radical function population mobility multiplied by density

The worst part of this pandemic may be the shear tedium.

John Larkin getting shorn of his sillier ideas? If only.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

mpm <mpmillard@aol.com> wrote in
news:2c958448-deb1-49bb-a916-0a601f58d07e@googlegroups.com:

Technically, Hawaii was only a territory at the time of the Pearl
Harbor attack, but I concur with your sentiments.

A stolen Territory that was filched in 1898, after it was previously
filched from its native people in 1893.

 

[whit3rd]

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:46:42 PM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Fri, 1 May 2020 17:20:03 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 3:30:27 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 1 May 2020 15:11:46 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 10:47:06 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

30% antibody positive in some places.

Not according to published error estimates.
Lookie here for a little reality:\
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/experts-demolish-studies-suggesting-covid-19-is-no-worse-than-flu/

It's important to read past the introduction here; the second page is where the
antibody-positive result has a lower bound computed; it's no less than zero,

If nobody has ever had this, why all the panic?

A better question, is if you noted the referenced article, didn't you notice the
sentence that starts "The point is not that..." which addresses that issue?

I tell you a fifth time (three previous postings by me, one by another)
that error estimates are a critical omission; others concur, that's NOT just from me.

If your pet theory needs the protection of repeated falsehoods,
science offers a solution: euthanize that pet.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 01/05/2020 10:24, Ricky C wrote:

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 5:07:46 AM UTC-4, Piotr Wyderski wrote:
Ricky C wrote:

What is wrong with this country that a simple virus defeats us?

The reason is offshoring, which used to be advertised as a great
idea. In result a country that was able to send people to the Moon
can no longer produce rubber gloves or cloth face masks on its own.
Marvelous. Same in the EU.

They outsourced to China and elsewhere to get stuff much cheaper. It
only goes wrong when the global supply lines get seriously disrupted by
abnormally high demand for the same goods simultaneously with the
manufacturing centres being closed due to workers being sick.

UK was caught short by having almost zero stock of high grade PPE
despite an exercise Cygnus 2016 check pandemic preparedness highlighting
the problem . BMJ are sufficiently vexed to threaten legal action
against the government to force publication (leaked copies exist)

https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1732

It's time to redefine alliances with China in the center, the
existing solutions have simply failed recently.

Best regards, Piotr

So you think the virus is continuing to spread because of a lack of
PPE and not the number of people not following the stay at home
orders?

That is how it is killing front line medics and care home workers (as
well as many of the people that they are supposed to be looking after).

It is still spreading pretty fast in the UK despite the stay at home
orders being followed to the letter by a population that has been scared
shitless by government propaganda. Care homes and prisons are hotspots.

Although we have notionally passed the peak in the general population
because no-one is going anywhere it is raging in care homes and the
daily fatality number remains stubbornly high around 600-800 per day.
(lower at weekends because of reporting delays)

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Winfield Hill]

George Herold wrote...

A farmer friend (Bruce) is slaughtering another cow.
I'd buy more meat if I had any more room in my
freezer. We had Bruce T-bones the other night.
Umm.

Aha, gone from eating Bruce's cow to eating Bruce?


--
Thanks,
- Win

 

[George Herold]

On Tuesday, May 5, 2020 at 12:14:21 PM UTC-4, Winfield Hill wrote:

George Herold wrote...

A farmer friend (Bruce) is slaughtering another cow.
I'd buy more meat if I had any more room in my
freezer. We had Bruce T-bones the other night.
Umm.

Aha, gone from eating Bruce's cow to eating Bruce?

Grin.. in my best Hannibal Lecter voice,
"He goes very well with a fine Chianti."
GH

--
Thanks,
- Win