That was scary

[Ricky C]

On Saturday, April 11, 2020 at 10:09:40 PM UTC-4, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 18:31:37 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Saturday, April 11, 2020 at 11:14:56 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 10:44:49 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Saturday, April 11, 2020 at 8:21:51 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Then let's go back to work, suggest voluntary measures, and let it
burn out. Try to protect old people for the duration. The sooner it
burns out, the lower their risk.

The time has come to take your advice. The numbers are looking like...
another WW II. You didn't offer any numeric estimate of the costs, nor of
the benefits...

Hospitals are not saturated - they are almost empty - so the
flatten-the-curve thing was overdone.

No, the flatten-the-curve thing was (in many localities) was successful.

But you don't know that.

His assertion is every bit as supported as your assertion he was responding to and a lot more common sense. Actually, the two are not mutually exclusive. It can be overdone AND successful. But then I expect you aren't getting what flatten the curve was about.

One wants to "fail safe", and this is a fine indication of success.

But what will happen when people come out from under their beds? From
boredom or hunger. They will be just as suceptable and there will
still be plenty of viruses around.

That will be true if we do it too soon. So let's not do it too soon.

The South Korea data is a suggestion. The total case count had a steep
rise in early Feb, and jumped from near zero to about 6K. Then they
locked down and the slope went way down, but now it's over 10K and
still rising. So did the lockdown do anything but change the shape of
the curve?

Wasn't that the point? Now they can address the last few cases and remove it from their country. China has done that to Wuhan. South Korea current cases is declining at a steady rate and is on course for eliminating the disease from South Korea.

Can isolating people for any practical amount of time keep
them from getting infected, or just delay when it happens?

You only get infected from others who are infected through direct or indirect exposure. Eliminate the illness in everyone and it is gone. Is that hard to understand???

Bill Gates and Ezekiel Emanuel and other virus experts have the
answer: lock down for a year or 18 months until we can vaccinate
everyone. Thanks.

That's your straw man argument. We don't need a vaccine if we can eliminate the virus. Do they still vaccinate for smallpox?

Tell Italy and Spain your 'overdone' theory; do it from a safe distance, folk
might get angry.

The illogic offends me.

What illogic?

The void that ought to be filled with reasoning based on comparison of outcomes

The data is so bad it's impossible to determine causalities. The
economic effects are not in doubt.

The data is not so bad we can continue to work on eradicating the disease. Actually it is the economic effect that is unclear. Are you suggesting that Highland Technology won't be in business when this is over?

--

Rick C.

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

 

[Martin Brown]

On 10/04/2020 18:01, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 16:46:23 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 10/04/2020 16:06, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Test density is increasing exponentially but case rates are not
adjusted. My guesses are as good as anybody else' now.

No. You are woefully ignorant and *very* determined to remain so.

The German health system has run an antibody test in one of the hottest
spots on the planet and found that only 14% of the population has
actually got antibodies to the virus at present.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tests-show-15-of-people-are-now-immune-to-covid-19-in-one-town-in-germany/

That's a useful bit of data. Prefacing it with "willfully ignorant"
isn't. I didn't deliberately avoid seeing the German data.

You cherry pick data to suit your argument so often that it is difficult
to tell whether you are unaware of the scientific data or deliberately
refusing to look at it. You are a science denier at heart.

I have said for some time that we need general-population antibody
studies to understand the dynamics. The usual response was to ridicule
me for suggesting that antibody studies would be worthwhile. Now you
ridicule me because an antibody study has been done. Please explain
that.

I have never ridiculed you over needing more testing. More testing in
the population is the only way we will get back control before a vaccine
is available (and that is likely to be some long way off yet).

The next thing to estimate is what fraction of the population would
catch it if exposed. The current opinion is that "no-one has natural
immunity to coronavirus" but there are counter-cases.

There is no reason to suppose that anyone is immune to such a new
zoonotic virus. 80% apparently show no symptoms but become infective
carriers - that is what makes the thing so effective at community
transmission and why social distancing is so important now.

If 25% can get

it and 14% have had it, R0 is down about half. So it may peak and
decline soon, as it seems to have done in many places, especially in
europe. Austria and Luxembourg are nice tight test cases. Australia
had a nice bell peak of new cases a couple of weeks ago, with a total
of about 6K confirmed cases so far.

If that were true then it might back off once 60% of the people who are
susceptible to catching it have had it and recovered. But the evidence
from the very rapid exponential growth phase is that any such effect has
to be modest. The unchecked exponential growth before lockdown was
textbook pure A^t into a virgin entirely susceptible population.

Once the proportion of people becomes more than a third of the reservoir
you should see a clear deviation from exponential even in noisy data.

There seems to be some evidence now that the virus is worse for people
who do not have a few percent of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. The
extra risk factor for them being almost as bad as that for being male.

At this rate the infection will continue to cause serious problems for
at least another 6 multiples of 2 months or until a viable vaccine is
developed and deployed. Or governments realise that saving every
possible life now at any cost is nothing like an optimal strategy.

That's one common prediction: the virus will be a serious cause of
death for another year or more and nothing short of a vaccine will
ever stop it. Noted health scientists like Bill Gates have told us so.

Actually Bill Gates has been doing quite a bit of vaccine based research
against Polio, Malaria and HIV. He has some very talented advisors and
is capable of listening to them unlike that clueless bloviator Trump.

Trump was dismissing it as a hoax and "the sniffles" only a month ago.

System dynamics and waveforms and measurement and problem solving are
my life, and not always electronics. We don't just design electronics,
we manufacture and sell it. The patterns here are interesting. The
dynamics could well be similar to 1918. Or to the usual winter cold.

You clearly don't know what you are talking about but say it anyway.

The damage to our economies is not in doubt either.

Whilst I agree with this point. I do not agree with your Pollyanna
approach to laissez-faire pandemic control on a wing and a prayer.

Cite my saying anything like that. I have no power over the situation
and hence no "approach." I have mostly considered possibilities of the
dynamics. I have suggested that fear and panic are not productive.

I do predict a massive surplus of cheap never-used ventilators.

So do I. The Dyson ones will be incredibly stylish and ten times the
price of any other model if their usual MO applies. Or incredibly noisy
and totally ineffective if their hand drier team get the gig.

Even with loads of ventilators they are now in real danger running out
of the anaesthetic needed to sedate the patients hooked up to them. It
is easy to build extra physical hospital beds but hard to find all the
skilled staff needed to operate them (not least because PPE flaws seem
to result in medics getting ill themselves and all too often dying).

The UK has purchased an antibody test that appears not to work well
enough to be remotely useful in the field (and are presently trying to
get their money back). Wired has dissected the problem quite well:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-antibody-tests-uk-accuracy


There seems to be a lot of hostility to antibody testing.

Partly because at the moment it may not be reliable enough to be
worthwhile. That is the problem that the UK seems to have hit.

A test with false positives that incorrectly tells 5% of the population
they are immune when they are still at risk is not particularly useful.

OTOH it if does detect almost all genuine cases of having had the
infection you can still use it to gain some insight into the progress of
the infection even if you have to correct for the false positive bias.

I am not sure I entirely agree with their current favourite soundbite
that "a bad test is worse than no test at all". Even with its known
systematic errors a test that is 90% good and 10% bad still gives you
some useful information but it needs much more careful interpretation.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Ricky C]

On Sunday, April 12, 2020 at 4:39:11 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:

On 10/04/2020 18:01, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 16:46:23 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 10/04/2020 16:06, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Test density is increasing exponentially but case rates are not
adjusted. My guesses are as good as anybody else' now.

No. You are woefully ignorant and *very* determined to remain so.

The German health system has run an antibody test in one of the hottest
spots on the planet and found that only 14% of the population has
actually got antibodies to the virus at present.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tests-show-15-of-people-are-now-immune-to-covid-19-in-one-town-in-germany/

That's a useful bit of data. Prefacing it with "willfully ignorant"
isn't. I didn't deliberately avoid seeing the German data.

You cherry pick data to suit your argument so often that it is difficult
to tell whether you are unaware of the scientific data or deliberately
refusing to look at it. You are a science denier at heart.

I have said for some time that we need general-population antibody
studies to understand the dynamics. The usual response was to ridicule
me for suggesting that antibody studies would be worthwhile. Now you
ridicule me because an antibody study has been done. Please explain
that.

I have never ridiculed you over needing more testing. More testing in
the population is the only way we will get back control before a vaccine
is available (and that is likely to be some long way off yet).

The next thing to estimate is what fraction of the population would
catch it if exposed. The current opinion is that "no-one has natural
immunity to coronavirus" but there are counter-cases.

There is no reason to suppose that anyone is immune to such a new
zoonotic virus. 80% apparently show no symptoms but become infective
carriers - that is what makes the thing so effective at community
transmission and why social distancing is so important now.

If 25% can get
it and 14% have had it, R0 is down about half. So it may peak and
decline soon, as it seems to have done in many places, especially in
europe. Austria and Luxembourg are nice tight test cases. Australia
had a nice bell peak of new cases a couple of weeks ago, with a total
of about 6K confirmed cases so far.

If that were true then it might back off once 60% of the people who are
susceptible to catching it have had it and recovered. But the evidence
from the very rapid exponential growth phase is that any such effect has
to be modest. The unchecked exponential growth before lockdown was
textbook pure A^t into a virgin entirely susceptible population.

Once the proportion of people becomes more than a third of the reservoir
you should see a clear deviation from exponential even in noisy data.

There seems to be some evidence now that the virus is worse for people
who do not have a few percent of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. The
extra risk factor for them being almost as bad as that for being male.

At this rate the infection will continue to cause serious problems for
at least another 6 multiples of 2 months or until a viable vaccine is
developed and deployed. Or governments realise that saving every
possible life now at any cost is nothing like an optimal strategy.

That's one common prediction: the virus will be a serious cause of
death for another year or more and nothing short of a vaccine will
ever stop it. Noted health scientists like Bill Gates have told us so.

Actually Bill Gates has been doing quite a bit of vaccine based research
against Polio, Malaria and HIV. He has some very talented advisors and
is capable of listening to them unlike that clueless bloviator Trump.

Trump was dismissing it as a hoax and "the sniffles" only a month ago.

System dynamics and waveforms and measurement and problem solving are
my life, and not always electronics. We don't just design electronics,
we manufacture and sell it. The patterns here are interesting. The
dynamics could well be similar to 1918. Or to the usual winter cold.

You clearly don't know what you are talking about but say it anyway.

The damage to our economies is not in doubt either.

Whilst I agree with this point. I do not agree with your Pollyanna
approach to laissez-faire pandemic control on a wing and a prayer.

Cite my saying anything like that. I have no power over the situation
and hence no "approach." I have mostly considered possibilities of the
dynamics. I have suggested that fear and panic are not productive.

I do predict a massive surplus of cheap never-used ventilators.

So do I. The Dyson ones will be incredibly stylish and ten times the
price of any other model if their usual MO applies. Or incredibly noisy
and totally ineffective if their hand drier team get the gig.

Even with loads of ventilators they are now in real danger running out
of the anaesthetic needed to sedate the patients hooked up to them. It
is easy to build extra physical hospital beds but hard to find all the
skilled staff needed to operate them (not least because PPE flaws seem
to result in medics getting ill themselves and all too often dying).

The UK has purchased an antibody test that appears not to work well
enough to be remotely useful in the field (and are presently trying to
get their money back). Wired has dissected the problem quite well:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-antibody-tests-uk-accuracy


There seems to be a lot of hostility to antibody testing.

Partly because at the moment it may not be reliable enough to be
worthwhile. That is the problem that the UK seems to have hit.

A test with false positives that incorrectly tells 5% of the population
they are immune when they are still at risk is not particularly useful.

OTOH it if does detect almost all genuine cases of having had the
infection you can still use it to gain some insight into the progress of
the infection even if you have to correct for the false positive bias.

I am not sure I entirely agree with their current favourite soundbite
that "a bad test is worse than no test at all". Even with its known
systematic errors a test that is 90% good and 10% bad still gives you
some useful information but it needs much more careful interpretation.

I'm impressed you had the patience to respond in such detail and clarity explaining so much which should be patently obvious to anyone looking at the data. It will be interesting to see how he responds.

I really wonder about him sometimes. Clearly a very intelligent person, but he has very strange filters that prevent him from seeing the world as it is, but rather he sees it as he wishes it were.

I would love if he is right and a huge percentage of the population is automatically immune and a large proportion of the rest are already infected and symptomless. That would mean we will be seeing this disease truly end once the infection rate drops off. It is very unlikely to return. But if he is wrong the infection rate can persist longer since our measures are not reaching the really low R0 value required and more importantly. As soon as we exit lock down and return to work and school and... Easter, we will see this infection rise up again with a repeat of the late winter/early spring we are seeing now.

It is especially funny that Larkin keeps talking about the testing being "exponential" and so explaining the exponential disease rate... He ignores that the number of tests in the US has pretty much always been limited by the number of infected because we only test those who are symptomatic or who have been exposed to the disease, both related to the number of those infected. Larkin would like you to think the number of tests has always and still is limited by the availability of test kits.

I don't see any evidence that his ideas are right, but it would be hard to see in the data just now. I'm expecting to see a gradual reduction in the number of new cases consistent with the present numbers being from our limited lock downs and social distancing.

--

Rick C.

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

 

[whit3rd]

On Saturday, April 11, 2020 at 7:09:40 PM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 18:31:37 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Saturday, April 11, 2020 at 11:14:56 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Hospitals are not saturated - they are almost empty - so the
flatten-the-curve thing was overdone.

No, the flatten-the-curve thing was (in many localities) was successful.

But you don't know that.

I do know that, both from your report of empty beds, and from (local) news coverage
that shows an overflow-capable ward being disassembled so the beds
can be returned to the national stockpile.

Why would I (or anyone) not know? Success at one or more regions isn't enough, of course,
it just happens that the local situation came in under the prepared-for limits and seems
now to require less of a margin (fewer beds).

 

[David Brown]

On 11/04/2020 17:21, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 14:04:21 +0200, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 10/04/2020 22:10, John Larkin wrote:

Oh, a coder. Code does not involve science or causality, and
especially doesn't require any understanding of math or system
dynamics.

Really? So programming is another field that is completely outside your
area of knowledge?

I've written three compilers, three preemptive RTOSs, and designed one
CPU using TTL gates. I wrote the random-number generator for a DEC
language because the one they had was so bad; I got named in their
source code. Scores of embedded apps. Lots of filtering and signal
processing in software. I still code engineering programs for my own
use, but I have a small army of c and Python and VHDL programmers now,
so I mostly do architectures and hardware design, and tell the kids
what to code.

When I did more realtime programming, I generally knew how long it
would take for a chunk of code to execute. Kids these days haven't the
faintest idea, and are afraid to push interrupt rates or state machine
rep rates. Sometimes I have to get an oscilloscope and show them how
fast a 600 MHz dual-core ARM can really compute. We got some
interesting numbers on the Zynq+Linux.

You claim this, and yet you don't think programming involves science,
causality, maths or system dynamics? Is that because you simply don't
understand what those terms mean? Or that you are lying about the
programming you have done? Or that you think /you/ have done "real"
programming, but no one else does? Or - and I strongly suspect this -
you are a troll who finds perverse entertainment in annoying people by
saying blatantly stupid things.

 

[David Brown]

On 12/04/2020 04:52, Ricky C wrote:

That's your straw man argument. We don't need a vaccine if we can
eliminate the virus. Do they still vaccinate for smallpox?

Smallpox was eliminated by vaccines - so we don't need vaccines for it
/now/.

Measles was almost eliminated by vaccines, but there so many
"anti-vaxer" morons that the elimination failed, and there are still
outbreaks - so kids still need the vaccines. The same applies to polio.

Covid-19 can, hopefully, be eliminated by vaccines. Whether it will or
not is another matter - but good vaccines will certainly prevent it
being a problem.

But can Covid-19 be eliminated /without/ a vaccine? I don't think so.
It is far too wide-spread for that. It can be kept at bay by other
measures, and some places can be kept free of it, but if there is
freedom of movement, outbreaks will always return.

 

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 09:39:02 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 10/04/2020 18:01, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 16:46:23 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 10/04/2020 16:06, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Test density is increasing exponentially but case rates are not
adjusted. My guesses are as good as anybody else' now.

No. You are woefully ignorant and *very* determined to remain so.

The German health system has run an antibody test in one of the hottest
spots on the planet and found that only 14% of the population has
actually got antibodies to the virus at present.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tests-show-15-of-people-are-now-immune-to-covid-19-in-one-town-in-germany/

That's a useful bit of data. Prefacing it with "willfully ignorant"
isn't. I didn't deliberately avoid seeing the German data.

You cherry pick data to suit your argument so often that it is difficult
to tell whether you are unaware of the scientific data or deliberately
refusing to look at it. You are a science denier at heart.

I consider a lot of data and speculate about possible dynamics. That
is not an "argument." I could make an argument, but I haven't. I'd
probably wind up being wrong. I hate to be wrong, because it suggests
a lapse of good thinking.

That's the way some people design electronics: consider as many
outrageous possibilities as you can, and analyze the consequences of
each. Considering unsanctioned alternatives offends most people.

"Science teaches us to doubt." Or should.

I have said for some time that we need general-population antibody
studies to understand the dynamics. The usual response was to ridicule
me for suggesting that antibody studies would be worthwhile. Now you
ridicule me because an antibody study has been done. Please explain
that.

I have never ridiculed you over needing more testing. More testing in
the population is the only way we will get back control before a vaccine
is available (and that is likely to be some long way off yet).

I think active-infection testing is over-rated and abused, another
press mania like ventilators. It has to be done repeatedly on everyone
every week or two to be effective. If we had an antibody test, we
could let known-immune people back to work. I wonder what the number
will be. The 14% is at least a hint.

The next thing to estimate is what fraction of the population would
catch it if exposed. The current opinion is that "no-one has natural
immunity to coronavirus" but there are counter-cases.

There is no reason to suppose that anyone is immune to such a new
zoonotic virus. 80% apparently show no symptoms but become infective
carriers - that is what makes the thing so effective at community
transmission and why social distancing is so important now.

On cruise and military ships, about as bad as a transmission
environment as you could get, only a fraction of the population got
infected.

If 25% can get
it and 14% have had it, R0 is down about half. So it may peak and
decline soon, as it seems to have done in many places, especially in
europe. Austria and Luxembourg are nice tight test cases. Australia
had a nice bell peak of new cases a couple of weeks ago, with a total
of about 6K confirmed cases so far.

If that were true then it might back off once 60% of the people who are
susceptible to catching it have had it and recovered. But the evidence
from the very rapid exponential growth phase is that any such effect has
to be modest. The unchecked exponential growth before lockdown was
textbook pure A^t into a virgin entirely susceptible population.

Or R was very high among a minority of the population.

Once the proportion of people becomes more than a third of the reservoir
you should see a clear deviation from exponential even in noisy data.

In the graphs I've seen of most countries, exponential growth became
linear very early in the infection, when far less than a third had
been officially counted as cases. Even in countries that were not
locked down. Nothing grows exponentially forever. No country or ship
or nursing home has ever hit 1/3.

The Hopkins site shows that there have been 526K confirmed cases in
the USA, out of a population of 300 million, and the new case curve is
flat. Looks to me like the peak is about now.

There seems to be some evidence now that the virus is worse for people
who do not have a few percent of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. The
extra risk factor for them being almost as bad as that for being male.

Surely we evolve to resist viruses as they evolve to attack us.

At this rate the infection will continue to cause serious problems for
at least another 6 multiples of 2 months or until a viable vaccine is
developed and deployed. Or governments realise that saving every
possible life now at any cost is nothing like an optimal strategy.

That's one common prediction: the virus will be a serious cause of
death for another year or more and nothing short of a vaccine will
ever stop it. Noted health scientists like Bill Gates have told us so.

Actually Bill Gates has been doing quite a bit of vaccine based research
against Polio, Malaria and HIV. He has some very talented advisors and
is capable of listening to them unlike that clueless bloviator Trump.

Trump was dismissing it as a hoax and "the sniffles" only a month ago.

System dynamics and waveforms and measurement and problem solving are
my life, and not always electronics. We don't just design electronics,
we manufacture and sell it. The patterns here are interesting. The
dynamics could well be similar to 1918. Or to the usual winter cold.

You clearly don't know what you are talking about but say it anyway.

The damage to our economies is not in doubt either.

Whilst I agree with this point. I do not agree with your Pollyanna
approach to laissez-faire pandemic control on a wing and a prayer.

Cite my saying anything like that. I have no power over the situation
and hence no "approach." I have mostly considered possibilities of the
dynamics. I have suggested that fear and panic are not productive.

I do predict a massive surplus of cheap never-used ventilators.

So do I. The Dyson ones will be incredibly stylish and ten times the
price of any other model if their usual MO applies. Or incredibly noisy
and totally ineffective if their hand drier team get the gig.

Some MDs say that ventilators net damage people. They suggest
"proning", namely flipping patients over, to lie on their stomach
instead of their back. Seems to help. Reduces snoring too, another
great benefit to public health and domestic tranquility.

Even with loads of ventilators they are now in real danger running out
of the anaesthetic needed to sedate the patients hooked up to them. It
is easy to build extra physical hospital beds but hard to find all the
skilled staff needed to operate them (not least because PPE flaws seem
to result in medics getting ill themselves and all too often dying).

The UK has purchased an antibody test that appears not to work well
enough to be remotely useful in the field (and are presently trying to
get their money back). Wired has dissected the problem quite well:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-antibody-tests-uk-accuracy


There seems to be a lot of hostility to antibody testing.

Partly because at the moment it may not be reliable enough to be
worthwhile. That is the problem that the UK seems to have hit.

A test with false positives that incorrectly tells 5% of the population
they are immune when they are still at risk is not particularly useful.

OTOH it if does detect almost all genuine cases of having had the
infection you can still use it to gain some insight into the progress of
the infection even if you have to correct for the false positive bias.

I am not sure I entirely agree with their current favourite soundbite
that "a bad test is worse than no test at all". Even with its known
systematic errors a test that is 90% good and 10% bad still gives you
some useful information but it needs much more careful interpretation.

If we are managing based on statistical benefit, an antibody test that
is 95% accurate would be very useful. We could put tested-positive
people back to work. Each false-positive-immune person would be
working around 19 truly immune people.




--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[David Brown]

On 12/04/2020 00:40, Ricky C wrote:

On Saturday, April 11, 2020 at 1:44:55 PM UTC-4, whit3rd wrote:
On Saturday, April 11, 2020 at 8:21:51 AM UTC-7,
jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Look at the NUMBERS.

OK, that's probably good advice.

How long do we lock down until every single virus is gone?

That won't happen.

Then let's go back to work, suggest voluntary measures, and let
it burn out. Try to protect old people for the duration. The
sooner it burns out, the lower their risk.

The time has come to take your advice. The numbers are looking
like... another WW II. You didn't offer any numeric estimate of
the costs, nor of the benefits, but are ready to accept a
suggestion that (to my knowledge) no government on Earth wants to
implement.

And the ONLY QUESTION you think needs asking, is 'when does
COVID-19 become extinct'.

The illogic offends me.

With the current information we have on this virus there is no reason
to think it will "burn itself out" without killing many, many people
that aren't our older, "worthless" members. Clearly this disease has
the potential for a single case to spread throughout communities of
older people leaving many deaths in the wake. So there is not likely
to be a point that we can say it has "burned out" allowing us to
resume all of our previous activities as if nothing had happened,
UNLESS, we literally contain this virus like we would Ebola and have
zero new cases.

The poster child for being able to do this is China having reached
zero new infections in Wuhan and starting to release from lock down.
But people say their numbers are fake and we should not believe them.
So, so then look at South Korea where the high water mark for the
last five days has been 53 cases per day.

Note also that Korea have found people who have had the virus,
recovered, and are now testing positive /again/. "Burn out" requires
either very tight containment (and we are way past that possibility, on
a world-wide basis), or massive immunity. And it looks like the
immunity is rather limited.

Yes, China and South Korea have contained it rather successfully - but
not perfectly. And if they let people in from other countries again,
they'll get new outbreaks and new cycles of lockdown. Ultimately, the
virus is not contained anywhere until it is contained /everywhere/.

It may be possible to reach a reasonable balance of testing, tracking,
quarantines, temporary local lockdowns, etc., that let most of the world
work fairly normally even though the virus is not eliminated. That
could be a workable way of dealing with the virus, even without a vaccine.

Clearly it is possible to deal with this virus and not allow it to
ravage the population as it "burns out". Others are doing it. Why
are they so much better at dealing with this than the western
countries?

There are many reasons. But note that some western countries are doing
okay too.

Why does the USA in particular need to be a second class country when
it comes to dealing with a pandemic?

Having a third class leadership doesn't help.

It's difficult to say. There seem to be many reasons, with combined
effects. Italy and Spain both had good national health services and
reasonable welfare states, but have been very badly hit. Germany is in
the middle of Europe, has lots of dense urban centres, lots of immigrant
areas with poorer people who don't speak the language well - and yet
it's doing (relatively) fine.

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-04-12 12:27, David Brown wrote:

On 12/04/2020 04:52, Ricky C wrote:

That's your straw man argument.  We don't need a vaccine if we can
eliminate the virus.  Do they still vaccinate for smallpox?


Smallpox was eliminated by vaccines - so we don't need vaccines for it
/now/.

Measles was almost eliminated by vaccines, but there so many
"anti-vaxer" morons that the elimination failed, and there are still
outbreaks - so kids still need the vaccines.  The same applies to polio.

Covid-19 can, hopefully, be eliminated by vaccines.  Whether it will or
not is another matter - but good vaccines will certainly prevent it
being a problem.

But can Covid-19 be eliminated /without/ a vaccine?  I don't think so.
It is far too wide-spread for that.  It can be kept at bay by other
measures, and some places can be kept free of it, but if there is
freedom of movement, outbreaks will always return.

The 1918 'flu went away, except in pigs.

Cheers

Phil 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

 

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 18:27:39 +0200, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 12/04/2020 04:52, Ricky C wrote:

That's your straw man argument. We don't need a vaccine if we can
eliminate the virus. Do they still vaccinate for smallpox?


Smallpox was eliminated by vaccines - so we don't need vaccines for it
/now/.

Measles was almost eliminated by vaccines, but there so many
"anti-vaxer" morons that the elimination failed, and there are still
outbreaks - so kids still need the vaccines. The same applies to polio.

Covid-19 can, hopefully, be eliminated by vaccines. Whether it will or
not is another matter - but good vaccines will certainly prevent it
being a problem.

But can Covid-19 be eliminated /without/ a vaccine? I don't think so.
It is far too wide-spread for that. It can be kept at bay by other
measures, and some places can be kept free of it, but if there is
freedom of movement, outbreaks will always return.

We can truly eradicate a virus that infects only humans. Smallpox,
polio, measles. Influenza and corona can jump species.

Coronavirus epidemics of various sizes hit most every year. They die
out without vaccination, and a new strain appears next cold season.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Evolution




--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 13:07:33 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-04-12 12:27, David Brown wrote:
On 12/04/2020 04:52, Ricky C wrote:

That's your straw man argument.  We don't need a vaccine if we can
eliminate the virus.  Do they still vaccinate for smallpox?


Smallpox was eliminated by vaccines - so we don't need vaccines for it
/now/.

Measles was almost eliminated by vaccines, but there so many
"anti-vaxer" morons that the elimination failed, and there are still
outbreaks - so kids still need the vaccines.  The same applies to polio.

Covid-19 can, hopefully, be eliminated by vaccines.  Whether it will or
not is another matter - but good vaccines will certainly prevent it
being a problem.

But can Covid-19 be eliminated /without/ a vaccine?  I don't think so.
It is far too wide-spread for that.  It can be kept at bay by other
measures, and some places can be kept free of it, but if there is
freedom of movement, outbreaks will always return.


The 1918 'flu went away, except in pigs.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I wonder how the planet becomes immune to one influenza strain, like
1918. Do we keep being infected at low level by its milder mutants,
enough to keep up some immunity?

Since viruses populate our cellular machinery, add RNA or even modify
our DNA, it's reasonable to ask if we can pass on an acquired immunity
to our descendents. It's not impossible and certainly would be
selected for evolutionarily.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 18:41:01 +0200, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 12/04/2020 00:40, Ricky C wrote:
On Saturday, April 11, 2020 at 1:44:55 PM UTC-4, whit3rd wrote:
On Saturday, April 11, 2020 at 8:21:51 AM UTC-7,
jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Look at the NUMBERS.

OK, that's probably good advice.

How long do we lock down until every single virus is gone?

That won't happen.

Then let's go back to work, suggest voluntary measures, and let
it burn out. Try to protect old people for the duration. The
sooner it burns out, the lower their risk.

The time has come to take your advice. The numbers are looking
like... another WW II. You didn't offer any numeric estimate of
the costs, nor of the benefits, but are ready to accept a
suggestion that (to my knowledge) no government on Earth wants to
implement.

And the ONLY QUESTION you think needs asking, is 'when does
COVID-19 become extinct'.

The illogic offends me.

With the current information we have on this virus there is no reason
to think it will "burn itself out" without killing many, many people
that aren't our older, "worthless" members. Clearly this disease has
the potential for a single case to spread throughout communities of
older people leaving many deaths in the wake. So there is not likely
to be a point that we can say it has "burned out" allowing us to
resume all of our previous activities as if nothing had happened,
UNLESS, we literally contain this virus like we would Ebola and have
zero new cases.

The poster child for being able to do this is China having reached
zero new infections in Wuhan and starting to release from lock down.
But people say their numbers are fake and we should not believe them.
So, so then look at South Korea where the high water mark for the
last five days has been 53 cases per day.

Note also that Korea have found people who have had the virus,
recovered, and are now testing positive /again/.

But do they get sick again? Or infectious? PCR is very sensitive and
they may have a few viruses, or bits of viruses, still in their
bodies.


"Burn out" requires

either very tight containment (and we are way past that possibility, on
a world-wide basis), or massive immunity. And it looks like the
immunity is rather limited.

Many countries have peaked and declined, with a small fraction of the
population known to have been infected.

Yes, China and South Korea have contained it rather successfully - but
not perfectly. And if they let people in from other countries again,
they'll get new outbreaks and new cycles of lockdown. Ultimately, the
virus is not contained anywhere until it is contained /everywhere/.

It may be possible to reach a reasonable balance of testing, tracking,
quarantines, temporary local lockdowns, etc., that let most of the world
work fairly normally even though the virus is not eliminated. That
could be a workable way of dealing with the virus, even without a vaccine.

If a vaccine is 12 to 18 months away, that's what has to happen.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 18:19:18 +0200, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 11/04/2020 17:21, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 14:04:21 +0200, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 10/04/2020 22:10, John Larkin wrote:

Oh, a coder. Code does not involve science or causality, and
especially doesn't require any understanding of math or system
dynamics.

Really? So programming is another field that is completely outside your
area of knowledge?

I've written three compilers, three preemptive RTOSs, and designed one
CPU using TTL gates. I wrote the random-number generator for a DEC
language because the one they had was so bad; I got named in their
source code. Scores of embedded apps. Lots of filtering and signal
processing in software. I still code engineering programs for my own
use, but I have a small army of c and Python and VHDL programmers now,
so I mostly do architectures and hardware design, and tell the kids
what to code.

When I did more realtime programming, I generally knew how long it
would take for a chunk of code to execute. Kids these days haven't the
faintest idea, and are afraid to push interrupt rates or state machine
rep rates. Sometimes I have to get an oscilloscope and show them how
fast a 600 MHz dual-core ARM can really compute. We got some
interesting numbers on the Zynq+Linux.

You claim this, and yet you don't think programming involves science,
causality, maths or system dynamics?

I haven't seen much of those. What science and math and systems
dynamics do you use? Sure, if you peogram a control loop you need to
implement a PID or something, but few programmers do that.

Is that because you simply don't
understand what those terms mean?

Don't be silly.

Or that you are lying about the
>programming you have done?

Look at my web site. Most products have a uP and I coded most of them.
And a lot of OEM stuff that's not shown.

Or that you think /you/ have done "real"
programming, but no one else does?

I never said that. I did say that most programmers use no science or
math in their work, and don't know much about the execution times of
their code.

On a dual-core 600 MHz ARM running Linux, if a high priority
application program runs a tight loop, it will be suspended
occasionally by other tasks and by the OS and drivers, like ethernet.
What is the time profile of the suspensions? How often might that
tight loop be suspended, and for how long?

On a small uP, like an LPC1754 running at say 100 MHz, given that we
want to do some analog input and analog output and run a calibrated
PID loop, and do some signal averaging and SPI reporting, all in a
timer-driven IRQ, what's the maximum safe interrupt rate we might run?

There are 13 ARMs on this board:

http://www.highlandtechnology.com/DSS/V220DS.shtml






--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
news:e3k69flamhd7eo296l05up64oevs2k7gmq@4ax.com:

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 13:07:33 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-04-12 12:27, David Brown wrote:
On 12/04/2020 04:52, Ricky C wrote:

That's your straw man argument.  We don't need a vaccine if we
can eliminate the virus.  Do they still vaccinate for smallpox?


Smallpox was eliminated by vaccines - so we don't need vaccines
for it /now/.

Measles was almost eliminated by vaccines, but there so many
"anti-vaxer" morons that the elimination failed, and there are
still outbreaks - so kids still need the vaccines.  The same
applies to polio.

Covid-19 can, hopefully, be eliminated by vaccines.  Whether it
will or not is another matter - but good vaccines will certainly
prevent it being a problem.

But can Covid-19 be eliminated /without/ a vaccine?  I don't
think so. It is far too wide-spread for that.  It can be kept at
bay by other measures, and some places can be kept free of it,
but if there is freedom of movement, outbreaks will always
return.


The 1918 'flu went away, except in pigs.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I wonder how the planet becomes immune to one influenza strain,
like 1918. Do we keep being infected at low level by its milder
mutants, enough to keep up some immunity?

Since viruses populate our cellular machinery, add RNA or even
modify our DNA, it's reasonable to ask if we can pass on an
acquired immunity to our descendents. It's not impossible and
certainly would be selected for evolutionarily.

Our DNA already sports a history of virus abatement.

 

[whit3rd]

On Sunday, April 12, 2020 at 9:32:30 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tests-show-15-of-people-are-now-immune-to-covid-19-in-one-town-in-germany/

I think active-infection testing is over-rated and abused, another
press mania like ventilators.

Ventilators are medical devices, not 'press mania'; if your connection to
the press is mainly looking at manic presenters, that's your personal
problem.

The South Korea success in fighting COVID-19 is why everyone will
continue to talk about active-infection testing; maybe it'll get quiet
in 2050, but don't expect any change soon.

It has to be done repeatedly on everyone

every week or two to be effective. If we had an antibody test, we
could let known-immune people back to work. I wonder what the number
will be. The 14% is at least a hint.

No. That was a number taken in Germany, in a hot-spot, and cannot be
considered useful in other societies or in the extremes of full precautions/
no precautions. For the population OF THAT HOT SPOT it does give
a baseline for 'all infections' independent of the number formally diagnosed
during the episode. Without other data on the region of interest, it
fills no obvious void in our knowledge, suggests no new ideas.


> Surely we evolve to resist viruses as they evolve to attack us.

That's uncertain; this virus selectively takes out older-than-reproductive
individuals. The selection process has no particular engagement with
the genetic mix in such a situation. Work on vaccine doesn't
count as 'evolution' in any normal sense.

If we are managing based on statistical benefit, an antibody test that
is 95% accurate would be very useful. We could put tested-positive
people back to work. Each false-positive-immune person would be
working around 19 truly immune people.

So, you want the Donald to get sick or forego a second term? BoJo has
his future secured, in that view of the future.

 

[Ricky C]

On Sunday, April 12, 2020 at 12:27:45 PM UTC-4, David Brown wrote:

On 12/04/2020 04:52, Ricky C wrote:

That's your straw man argument. We don't need a vaccine if we can
eliminate the virus. Do they still vaccinate for smallpox?


Smallpox was eliminated by vaccines - so we don't need vaccines for it
/now/.

So you are agreeing with me that if we eliminate the virus we won't need a vaccine?

Some diseases are hard to eradicate because they live in other animals or even the soil like anthrax. We don't know where the crap Ebola comes from. But coronavirus? Yeah, it may have leapt from another animal previously, but there is no indication we are being reinfected by the same means. Get rid of it in humans and we will be rid of it forever.

Not an easy task, but once we get the infection numbers down, aggressive contact tracing has a lot less impact than the shutdown we are presently in.

Measles was almost eliminated by vaccines, but there so many
"anti-vaxer" morons that the elimination failed, and there are still
outbreaks - so kids still need the vaccines. The same applies to polio.

Covid-19 can, hopefully, be eliminated by vaccines. Whether it will or
not is another matter - but good vaccines will certainly prevent it
being a problem.

But can Covid-19 be eliminated /without/ a vaccine? I don't think so.
It is far too wide-spread for that. It can be kept at bay by other
measures, and some places can be kept free of it, but if there is
freedom of movement, outbreaks will always return.

Wide spread is not the issue. The shutdown will allow us to get the numbers to a point that contact tracing can confine the disease.

If South Korea can do it, why can't we?

--

Rick C.

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

 

[mpm]

On Sunday, April 12, 2020 at 1:07:42 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:

The 1918 'flu went away, except in pigs.

So, if a pig has the sniffles, maybe I should wait a couple weeks for the bacon?

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-04-12 15:18, mpm wrote:

On Sunday, April 12, 2020 at 1:07:42 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:

The 1918 'flu went away, except in pigs.


So, if a pig has the sniffles, maybe I should wait a couple weeks for the bacon?

Nah, bacon is fully cured.

Cheers

Phil 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

 

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 17:04:19 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-04-12 15:18, mpm wrote:
On Sunday, April 12, 2020 at 1:07:42 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:

The 1918 'flu went away, except in pigs.


So, if a pig has the sniffles, maybe I should wait a couple weeks for the bacon?

Nah, bacon is fully cured.

How do you know it's not just asymptomatic?



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Ricky C]

On Sunday, April 12, 2020 at 7:15:28 PM UTC-4, Clifford Heath wrote:

On 13/4/20 3:44 am, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Many countries have peaked and declined, with a small fraction of the
population known to have been infected.

But those countries have not yet released lock-down and opened to
international travel. As soon as they do, it will be off like a rocket
again.

Not if they use effective case tracing. Oh, and they may have to limit outside travel.

The virus got away from most countries because they were essentially caught off guard. Now we know much more about it and can prevent the spread if the numbers become manageable again.

This is not fundamentally different from managing any other infectious disease. It may be easier to spread, but once we get the number of cases down, we should be able to keep it confined.

It's just a tragedy that we are going to see so many deaths before we get this under control when we watched it happen in China and then did nothing to prevent the spread here as it grew all across the country.

--

Rick C.

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