COVID-19 thread

[Moose-tache]

The US had its first 100+ death day yesterday. In New York state, where testing is most prevalent, the number of confirmed cases per million is comparable to Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, some of the hardest hit areas of Europe. So... the next 14 days are going to be interesting...

EDIT: Just found this gem:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday became the first senator to announce he had tested positive for covid-19, after working out with fellow lawmakers in the Senate gym only that morning. Not long after, Utah GOP Sens. Mike Lee and Mitt Romney announced they’d be going into self-quarantine because of being in contact with Paul...

I love that the Senate has gym buddies.

[Raphael]

Now Trump has tweeted in ALL CAPS that the cure shouldn't be worse than the problem, and that "we" will decide what to do at the end of a 14 day period. So it looks like, after a brief interval of acting like he's taking the whole thing seriously, he'll go back to his old "no big deal" attitude.

In Brazil, Bolsonaro is calling it a hoax on TV.

Over in Hungary, Viktor Orbán is very decidedly not calling it a hoax, but instead using it as an excuse to pass laws that allow him to rule by decree without parliament.

And in Israel, Netanyahu is not calling it a hoax, either, but instead using to to try to make it harder for the opposition to throw him out.

So, Trump moving back towards the "no big deal" position, Bolsonaro never left the "hoax" position, and Orbán and Netanyahu staying with the "very big deal, and a reason to give us more power" position.

Since those four men are best buddies, perhaps someone should ask the former two what they think about the attitude of the latter two towards the whole thing, and the latter two what they think about the attitude of the former two towards the whole thing?

[Mornche Geddick]

Meanwhile, a message for the web developers among you and the people you know:

https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2020 ... et-static/

I guess I'm (kindof) a developer, although mostly not web front-end, and my official job titles have been things like Mathematical Modeller, Data Scientist, and whatever other combinations of buzz-words is currently fashionable. But I've long longed for a long time for a less dynamic web not to save bandwidth but just to have webpages that don't break basic web usability standards like the back and forward buttons. All these dynamic social media sites suck because the second you click on a link in their feed your position is lost forever and not recoverable even if you press the back button one second later, which then leaves you back at the top of the "same" page when you were actually 20 minutes of scrolling and dynamic loading down.

I want all necessary information to successfully return to the same page a short time later to be encoded in the URLs, the way the web used to work before Javascript and client-side rendering took over everything. And I actually preferred it when everything was paginated because then you actually had control, unlike now when any given website could do anything at any time that some Javascript programmer looking for some nails to hit with their chosen hammer dreamed up.

Predictable behaviour is the most important property of a platform, and the web doesn't have it anymore.

I've got a link here to another relevant site. In these times I have to agree that designing webpages so that they are easy on the user isn't just being nice or polite or kind; it could save their lives.

[Pabappa]

I agree wholeheartedly with Copeland and that's pretty much how I design my own website too, with a few minor stylistic differences ( i use color instead of underlines to highlight the links, and i have the content all the way across the screen instead of gathered in the middle like his). But all in all I agree with his principles to the letter, ... stylistic differences are just that, things intended to make one website look different from another.

I only disagree with his name .... brutalist? Something that's designed to be user friendly should have a softer sounding name. To me its just old-school .... twenty years ago all websites looked like this, and there w as nothing remarkable about it. His comparison of the Pride and Prejudice novel to a single Twitter post is interesting because it's the exact same comparison we used upthread. And Twitter's not even that bad, not by a long shot ... compared to many other websites.

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https://electionbettingodds.com/week.html <--- its been a taboo, i think, for quite some time, but it's finally here ... people are placing bets on coronavirus now, with real money involved. linking to Stossel's site instead of the target because the target (Hypermind) has an unfriendly UI, which feeds right back into Copeland's point about how a good website should make it clear to the user which parts of it can and cannot interact with the user. Hypermind is likely doing it on purpose to encourage poeple to sign up, but it turned me off. (Not that I'd be betting on this anyway, but I was curious to see more details like I can on some other betting sites.)

[alice]

Posted without comment:

https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/statu ... 3173310464

[Raphael]

More in the same vein:

https://twitter.com/CharlesPPierce/stat ... 0484499456

Edit: The intro of the Wikipedia page on the publication where the piece this directs to was published:

First Things (FT) is an ecumenical and conservative religious journal aimed at "advanc[ing] a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society".[1] The magazine, which focuses on theology, liturgy, church history, religious history, culture, education, society and politics, is inter-denominational and inter-religious, representing a broad intellectual tradition of Christian and Jewish critique of contemporary society. Published by the New York–based Institute on Religion and Public Life (IRPL),[2] First Things is published monthly, except for bi-monthly issues covering June/July and August/September.

First Things was founded in March 1990 by Richard John Neuhaus, a clergyman, intellectual, writer and activist. He started the journal, along with some long-time friends and collaborators, after his connection with the Rockford Institute was severed.[3]

With a circulation of approximately 30,000 copies, FT is considered to be influential in its articulation of a broad Christian Ecumenism and erudite social and political conservatism. George Weigel, a long-time contributor and IRPL board member, wrote in Newsweek that, after its founding, the journal "quickly became, under [Neuhaus's] leadership and inspiration, the most important vehicle for exploring the tangled web of religion and society in the English-speaking world."[4] Ross Douthat wrote that, through FT, Neuhaus demonstrated "that it was possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian".[5]

[zompist]

Who cursed us to live in interesting times?

I wrote a blog post on the virus about 2 weeks ago. US cases then were just under 1000. Today: 43,500.

Trump made an insane tweet— "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!" As if by clockwork,the right-wing punditosphere has been floating the idea that we have to "start the economy up again" and make everyone go back to work.

Current worldwide fatality rate (take this with a truckload of salt because the only countries doing adequate testing are in Asia)— 4.4%. Maybe we won't worry about Italy's 9% rate.

US population: 327 million. Possible deaths: 14 million.

By comparison: deaths in 2018-19 flu season: 61,200. Total deaths in 2018, all sources: 2.8 million. Total US combat deaths in WWII, 419,000. Total deaths in the Holocaust: 11 million.

At last, Donald Trump has the chance to get some numbers really high. USA NUMBER ONE!

[chris_notts]

Trump made an insane tweet— "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!" As if by clockwork,the right-wing punditosphere has been floating the idea that we have to "start the economy up again" and make everyone go back to work.

There are suggestions that China is quietly doing the same thing:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... oronavirus

They probably have managed to more or less control it by initial harsh measures + ongoing restrictions to keep reproduction at or below 1, but the claims of almost no new cases may be slightly exaggerated.

Here's a good article on how things might play out. Not sure if anyone's posted it yet:

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavi ... 9337092b56

I guess it offers hope that some kind of semi-normalcy might be restored without having to wait until a vaccine is tested and available in a year or more.

[zompist]

The Medium article is good, but it veers into fantasyland at the end.

Yes, if we acted like South Korea we could beat down the virus. We're not acting like South Korea.

We don't have the testing. We don't have the social tracing. We don't have the ICU capacity. We don't have the masks and ventilators. We have a president who lies about the virus and just doesn't want to have the social distancing (what the article calls "the hammer") and refuses to take steps to provide what's missing and babbles about quinine cures.

The GOP pundits are not talking about "take the virus seriously, as South Korea did." Their approach is basically the "Do nothing" from the article. You can't skip the social distancing step; you can't put an arbitrary time limit on it; you can't treat all the things South Korea did differently as optional rather than necessary.

It doesn't have to be this way. But till the GOP gets their heads out of their asses, it will be.

(Things change quickly and I don't know what the UK situation is, except that it's also not South Korea.)

[KathTheDragon]

Boris announced this evening that people are not to leave their homes except by absolute necessity (shopping, one implied-short session of exercise daily, and the like) and the police will have the power to enforce it through fines. It's apparently as close as we can get to absolute lockdown without actually being lockdown.

[Ares Land]

From what I hear from measures in South Korea (and I'm being very careful here, there are lot of rumors going around...) I believe they would not be socially acceptable at least here, in France. I'm not OK with the government tracing me with my smartphone -- and I doubt Brits or Americans would be OK with it either...

Random comments:

- There's a bit of sense in Trump's madness. The quinine cure is actually hydroxychloroquine and an antibiotic, which is not as mad as it sounds (HCQ does something I don't understand to cell membrane, and the virus apparentdebatly uses gut bacteria as shelter, hence the antibiotic). The debate over here is completely insane. But there will be large scale test, which is the only way to settle it.
- Some people are blaming the Jews (see above. HCQ went from a non-prescription to a prescription drug, atun the decision of our former health minister, whose husband is called Lévy. Ha ha!). At times like this you feel like the virus isn't deadly enough.
- I don't think fatality rates are as high as 4%. Not if most of the population is asymptomatic.
- Doctors have all my trust, of course, when it comes to handling this disease as best they can. But they shoudn't set public policy, even in times of epidemics. A young medical doctors' union petitioned for a complete lockdown, basically shutting down all workspace, forbidding people from going outside entirely and replacing grocery shopping in favor of at-home delivery. But, you know, we don't have the logistics for that.
- I'm going to sound a little consie, but I'm really worried about the damage to the economy. That's framed as callous these days, e favouring money over people. But recessions kill people too.
- I'm worried that we're essentially giving up essential freedoms without much debate. I'm not a libertarian or anything, but do you really think these 'emergency measures' will go away as soon as the crisis is over? Judging from precedent, in such cases the crisis never really goes away, and neither do the emergency measures. After the 2015 terrorist attacks, we went under a state of emergency, and five years later I'm still frisked at work every morning.
- Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of containment and lockdown, as appropriate. But I'm really troubled by suggestions that it should last for months. Leavin aside the economy (but see above), the mental health implications alone are staggering. Also, not everyone is comfortable staying months with family. There are a lot of dysfunctional families around. Is anyone considering that we're essentially trapping people with abusive spouses, or children with abusive parents?

[MacAnDàil]

I agree about abusive families.

But 1) The medical systems are already strained under BJ and Macron. It'll be even more the case with Covid19. And the fatality rate rises heavily when there are no doctors or ICU beds left.

2) I've been waiting years for people to eventually place more importance on health and life rather than the economy. Recessions don't kill. Evictions do. Inequality does. Even more proximately, starvation does. What we're lacking is not the money, but the distribution and good use thereof.

[alice]

Again, without comment, from https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the ... ronavirus/

More is at stake than lives and money: namely freedom. Even for those of us who are by no means libertarian, the increasingly draconian measures put in place across the nation, especially in California, to isolate people and prevent them from moving at will are raising serious questions about whether Americans are in a dress rehearsal for tyranny.

(bolded by alice)

[Mornche Geddick]

I only disagree with his name .... brutalist? Something that's designed to be user friendly should have a softer sounding name.

I think it implies you should be "brutal" in cutting out the junk and clutter. Like unnecessary animated photo images that magnify when you mouse over them (hey, UK university websites, I'm talking about *you*).

One point he doesn't make, all this extra javascript cruft is wasting electricity and adding to the world's CO2 emissions. So, if you are resisting it, Pabappa, well done to you!

[Moose-tache]

"Dress Rehearsal for Tyranny" is the name of my '70s Hair Metal band.

As usual, I am baffled. The obvious thing for a president to do in a situation like this is to take credit for saving as many lives as possible. Everybody likes saving lives. It's a great sound bite. Why not just take the sound bite and run?

On Brutalism: I'm pretty sure a style of web design made to mimic Brutalism would just be the raw html exported as a jpg.

[Pabappa]

Im taking a break from politics because my life is too stressful right now. as I said upthread, people are coming together in ways that they havent before. we had some of that impromptu street singing the same day I posted about the two dads walking on the pond, but i didnt see the singers.

if trump wants to look big he should refrain from political grandstanding and just make it look like only Democrats do that sort of thing. thats all i'll say.

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I think it implies you should be "brutal" in cutting out the junk and clutter. Like unnecessary animated photo images that magnify when you mouse over them (hey, UK university websites, I'm talking about *you*).

Yeah I figured as much and I dont have an academic objection, just a sentimental one.... i like soft things, and webpages in the brutalist style are *easier* to use than the bloated ones we see on Twitter, not harder.

[Moose-tache]

Everyone's throwing in their two cents about what will happen, so I might as well too!

I finally got around to reading that Medium article, and it talks about 75% infection as the worst case scenario, and sort of implies that 25% is the best case scenario, if the government does nothing. I don't really know where they're getting these numbers from.

In Hubei, 0.1% of the population was infected. In Daegu it was 0.3%, and in Lombardy it's 0.3% and growing. But there is no community on Earth larger than a crowded Chuck-e-Cheese that has an infection rate above 1%. Granted, some of those places have a low rate because of lockdowns, and some have a rate that is low but growing. But if there are no sizeable populations with 1% or more infected, how can we be confident that the upper limit is between 25% and 75%? It can't be based on historical outbreaks, because other coronaviruses like SARS infected even fewer people. The same is true of many other viruses, from swine flu to good-ol' influenza.

If anyone has ever been on a cruise, you know that we already have a maximum infection rate. Of the passengers on board the Diamond Princess, 19% were infected with Covid-19. All of them were tested, so we know that for sure. Cruise ships are probably the filthiest place on planet Earth. I have seen a woman at a buffet pick up a piece of fried chicken, think twice about it, then put it back. Hell this same boat had a norovirus outbreak just a few years ago. Sharing a cruise ship with other people is like sharing a tongue. So if 19% of those disgusting animals got the virus, that is the absolute upper boundary of how many individuals in a given group can become infected. You couldn't have a higher infection rate at a pangolin kissing booth.

Of course, 19% as a maximum doesn't tell us what is the most likely percent, as even in the US where government response has been patchy and delayed, there is extensive social distancing. Most people I know throughout the country have not left their house except to buy groceries in several days, and many have not even done that. In our household we are not going outside anymore. At all. We're not even checking the mail. So to figure out the future infection rate, we need to know the current infection rate and the impact of social distancing. The current rate is tricky to determine, but it's probably something like twice the number of people with symptoms, which in turn is much larger than the number of confirmed cases. So let's assume somewhere between 150k and 200k currently have the virus in the US. In our case, that's where it will stay, since no one has any contact with other human beings. Any "new" cases will just be more of those 150-200 thousand being discovered by doctors or coroners. Unless coronavirus learns to open our front door like a velociraptor, it's spread as far as it can go. That would put the infection rate at 0.06% of the population. Of course, most places don't have the kind of social distancing we have, hence the range of possibilities.

So there you have it. The infection rate is between 0.06% and 19%. I look forward to a spirited explanation of why I am stupid and should feel bad about myself.

[Raphael]

- I'm worried that we're essentially giving up essential freedoms without much debate. I'm not a libertarian or anything, but do you really think these 'emergency measures' will go away as soon as the crisis is over? Judging from precedent, in such cases the crisis never really goes away, and neither do the emergency measures. After the 2015 terrorist attacks, we went under a state of emergency, and five years later I'm still frisked at work every morning.

I have my doubts that they will keep us under lockdown for the rest of human history or something. Even the dumbest or most authoritarian-minded politicians wouldn't think that's a good idea.

[Raphael]

More:

https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/stat ... 5129346050

and more:

https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/12 ... 1634386952

I know that this phrase is basically a tired old cliché by now, but imagine if Barack Obama had said something like this during his presidency...

[Ares Land]

I agree about abusive families.

But 1) The medical systems are already strained under BJ and Macron. It'll be even more the case with Covid19. And the fatality rate rises heavily when there are no doctors or ICU beds left.

2) I've been waiting years for people to eventually place more importance on health and life rather than the economy. Recessions don't kill. Evictions do. Inequality does. Even more proximately, starvation does. What we're lacking is not the money, but the distribution and good use thereof.

Containment measures won't help with distribution and good use. If anything, inequalities will be made worse. Small businesses will close (Amazon and Wal-Mart'll be OK, t hough). We're looking at severe loss of revenue for people in the gig economy... and they still need to pay rent!
I'm in favor of a lockdown, actually! But I understand that government are trying to consider the economy as well. (I mean, to a reasonable extent. Not like some Republican pundits...)

I have my doubts that they will keep us under lockdown for the rest of human history or something. Even the dumbest or most authoritarian-minded politicians wouldn't think that's a good idea.

In France we're now under 'état d'urgence sanitaire'. Which so far can't be extended beyond a month, of course, but we all know the crisis will last longer.
Of course, everyone expects that the virus will go away somehow and everything will be back to normal.
Now then, based on data from other coronaviruses: there's no reason to expect it will. Natural immunity could last only a few months. It was supposed to go away with rising temperature, but if I understand correctly, coronaviruses aren't that sensitive to hear.
Sure, maybe there'll be a vaccine, but it'll take years to develop.

Now, wouldn't it be awfully convenient, even in a reasonably liberal democracy like France, if the government were to find itself still in a state of emergency next year, and thus able to forbid large social gatherings, like demonstrations?