Are you worried about coronavirus?

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990

The ones that turn hateful and delusional choose to do so.

Those that turn hateful by choice rarely are among the crowds and you can rarely discern them.
A person that is “hateful by choice” is cunning enough to hide it and so they are usually high in the social ladder.
The loud ones, the ones in rallies, in flat earth conventions and YT videos are not in that category. The ones selling all that conspiracy crap to them, maybe, but the followers are not. If they were such deliberate people, they would be leading the pack, not following it.

@Gia @Kaworu_Nagisa

Someone who likes hiking while I like swimming is absolutely not the same as someone who votes for the neonazi party and me.

I agree with Gia. There is a difference between “different world views” and “disagreeable world views”.

Well, voting for something does not make you that something immediately. If someone goes to the rallies and actually works towards such ugly goals, then they graduate to “disagreeable world views”, but as it was earlier said, that is a gradual process, so a friend could spot it early and help.

To keep it relevant with the corona-virus specifically, I do not think that a person that believes that the whole thing was overblown or thinks that they whole thing is a huge socio-economic experiment should be ostracised. That person is still quite fine and not really dangerous to anyone.
If they went around hugging people on purpose and sneezing on them, then things turn different because they are actively promoting a bad practice that is dangerous.

You can see this with the degradation of the quality of US presidents over time,

I really do not want to get into politics, so the only thing I want to say is that the main degradation is that people stopped viewing the parties as something that represents them, but as something to belong to. That might seem minor, but it actually makes a huge difference and it feeds that “us vs them” mentality we are talking about. Suddenly the axis of judgement for most of them is not “right or wrong”, “logical or illogical”, but “does it come from our side or not”.
That is the real danger in a wide spectrum within society and while a lot of people were optimistic that a serious all-encompassing issue like the coronavirus would unite society, instead even the existence of the virus turned to be a “depend on which side is talking” issue. Some places failed to unite even against a pandemic and that is maybe the most worrying symptom.

Believe me, some people do not want to be reasoned with. Conspiracy theorists and the willful ignorant prefer to live in their bubble

Some don’t. I didn’t say anything about extending our efforts to everyone. I am not about to make a YT channel to debunk anti-science videos, but I can at least do that for my friends, that is all I am saying :slight_smile:

If you haven’t had to lead people in adverse situations or teach

I have done both and I agree that it is hard. Also I am not saying that “everyone is special” somehow (which is quite wrong anyway). I am saying that they do not have to be pushovers that believe anything they listen to. People can be taught to apply some critical thinking if you go around and show them how.

A fellow villager here - a facebook “friend” - kept uploading silly things about the corona-virus. Time and again I popped under his posts and told him to think of the discrepancies in the things he was sharing willy-nilly, but I was always deliberately polite and calm.

  • Initially he ignored me.
  • After I kept ruining his fantasies he got annoyed and told me not to read his posts if I do not like them.
  • Some posts later he tried to insult me.
  • After I ignored his insults and repeatedly stuffed him with reasonable arguments he shut up
  • Then everytime I posted under his articles he’d try to talk things out
  • Now he is out there actually thinking some things and posting “doubts” on other people’s over-the-top FB reposts.

I could have stopped the process in step one, after the first two-three posts which he failed to consider any other points, but I didn’t. Not really because I am a good person, but because I like arguing. People are not stupid. Some might be too far gone and there is nothing we can do, sure (like we can see in the first minute of the video), but there are people we can actually help, especially if we stay calm and treat them correctly without insulting them for falling for scams and peddlers of fantasies.

And even if we do not want to help actively @Eugene is correct. We need to be venturing out of our comfort zone and stand up for what is correct and scientific. Just re-thinking about such issues and having to explain them to others is a great mental exercise and it keeps our minds fresh, imho.

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991

Seems like we will be №2 one week later

Usually these buildings host exhibitions like cat show

900×465 486 KB

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994
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995

That led me to this, LOL. Someone with a sense of humour in that factory…

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996


list of vaccines and therapeutic drugs, visualized development progress

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998

Let see if the mortality rate is going to be more homogeneous among different countries.

MORTALITY RATE BY COUNTRY

Country deaths positives 16 APR 8 MAY Diff.
Germany 7.510 170.588 2,9 % 4,4 % +1,5%
US 77.180 1.283.929 4,9 % 6,0 % +1,1%
Spain 26.299 222.857 10,5 % 11,8 % +1,3%
Sweden 3.220 25.921 10,6 % 12,4 % +1,8%
Netherland 5.440 42.581 11,3 % 12,8 % +1,5%
France 26.233 176.202 12,2 % 14,9 % +2,7%
Italy 30.201 217.185 13,1 % 13,9 % +0,8%
UK 31.316 212.629 13,2 % 14,7 % +1,5%
Belgium 8.581 52.596 13,9 % 16,3 % +2,4%

Let me notice that:

  1. It is still increasing in every country.
  2. The gap between Germany/US from one side and the other countries is still very big.
  3. If what specialists are saying about the mortality rate (it should be between 2% and 3% maximum) is true, then this means that there are out there a lot of people positive without symptoms and not yet tested/discovered.
  4. A rapid calculation says that in the countries with higher mortality rate (the second block in the table) 3 out of 4 positives (or ex-positive) are still free to go around (do not present symptoms). In fact, for example, to obtain a mortality rate of around 3% in Italy, we should have a real number of positive of 1 million rather than 217k.

Note: if you choose other countries, for example Russia you get 0,9%. My personal choice of the listed countries is barely an attempt to consider those countries where I would expect that the number of deaths is reported correctly. But we cannot be sure of that.

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999

On a lighter note. Isn’t it amazing what covid is bringing online for the world to enjoy. Random English pursuits like knob-eating…

If you want to watch the live knob-eating it’s on the Dorset Tea FB page today apparently… My money is on the woman from Cockermouth.

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1000

You left out the countries where it is not increasing… :man_facepalming:

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1001

Additionally, those numbers are not even useful. That shows the mortality rate compared to known cases, not the actual mortality rate. What you’re really measuring with that data is how far community spread is outpacing testing capacity. This is why I ignore most numbers the media shows - they don’t have statisticians, they have journalists pontificating about what they think the numbers are saying.

For example, let’s say we have population A and population B. Pop A has 1000 people with a testing rate of 10%, 50 confirmed cases, with 45 recoveries and 5 deaths. That’s a 10% mortality rate among confirmed cases. Pop B has 10,000 people with a testing rate of 5%, 200 confirmed cases, with 10 deaths and 190 recoveries, for a 5% mortality rate among known cases. It seems like, somehow, it’s killing twice as many people in Pop A, right? Well, probably not.

For simplicity, we’re assuming that all relevant deaths were confirmed cases, that is, nobody died of the virus without being included in these stats. You can work the numbers out with that as an additional factor, but it’s not useful for this illustration.

Now, let’s say that Population A had much worse community spread than Population B (you can play with these numbers on your own as well, the point of this illustration is to show how incomplete models can give misleading data.) So, let’s say Pop A had a true infection rate of 50%, and Pop B had a true infection rate of 10%. In that case, Pop A had 5 deaths for 500 infected, a true mortality rate of 1%, whereas Pop B had 10 deaths for 1,000 infected, a true mortality rate of also 1%.

This is why extensive testing is important - we don’t know what we don’t know, and the numbers don’t help anyone without being able to better predict the missing variables.

Side note, I didn’t actually plan for these to end up being the same true mortality rates. I was literally just making up illustrative numbers and calculating as I went, so that was neat.

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1002

I simply repeated the calculation on the previous list I posted some time ago. See referral linked to the updated list.

1003

I completely agree with your analysis (as I already wrote in the past in this discussion). Nevertheless, we can only rely on the given numbers since any other hypothesis is a mere speculation. I want to point out just this. If we will test the large majority of the population, the mortality rate should decrease in a consistent manner reaching at the end a value close to the real value. We don’t know this value exactly but we can assume that in order to reduce mortality rate we should have a consistent increase of infected people so that the denominator is greater than now.

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1004

Statistics is very tricky.

My main objection with the second table, apart from possibly invalid conclusions, would be the column that shows the difference in percentage points. The numbers appear as if every country increases a tiny bit, with only between 0.8% to 2.7%, but this is false. The increase in Germany is from 2.9% of the positively tested to 4.4% of the positively tested, which is an increase of a factor 1.51 (that is, a 51% increase), while France increased from 12.2% to 14.9%, which is an increase by a factor 1.22 (so only a 22% increase).

In other words, from the last column it cannot be appreciated that the situation in Germany is growing “worse” than the situation in France.

Note that looking at the factor is improper as well, if a country goes from 0.2% fatality to 0.6% fatality, it increases by a factor of 3 (or 200%), but considering the measured mortality rate was tiny to begin with, it’s not as bad as it appears.

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1005

Yes, but you should also consider the starting point. Is it realistic to have Germany one month ago with 0,9% of mortality rate? And in the last table is it realistic to have still Germany at a rate that is so low? If the Numbers will converge to a common average mortality rate (if) than who is far from the average must fill a larger gap. Let me make a mere hypothesis. If a country in some way declared less deaths than the real number (and this is not an accuse to Germany or Russia) to fill in the gap they have to declare now more cases than the expected curve experience by the majority of the other country. Conversely, if some country labelled as Coronavirus-related deaths other deaths caused by other pathologies, (and this is not an accuse to Italy or Spain), they must declare a less number of deaths or a larger number of infected people to reduce mortality rates. Since we see that the majority of western countries (on which we rely on, I suppose) declare a MR of 12-14% and now the numbers are becoming quite large to be statistically relevant, the conclusion is - imho - that or the MR is 12-14% or we have a large number of infected people not considered in their numbers.

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1006

I think you’re reasoning the wrong way there. You’re now trying to explain the numbers from the conclusion as starting point. You should instead make a conclusion from the numbers (or make an hypothesis beforehand, and test it with fresh numbers).

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1007

I’m not sure that an incomplete list from a previous analysis is a good basis for ongoing discussion.

I found this interesting, and probably relevant:

https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries?fbclid=IwAR2EggKuMmp34iZekKtDT53kI1ZCTSaE6e3mJr7pWz7MpDuSpFb2IcCAZDA

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1008

random antibody test is way to know real % of infected (in past), of course its larger than from PCR (real time) testing

  • it will reduce MR (by virus directly)

difference in number of any deaths between (now) and (usually) is way to know real consequences (by virus directly AND by system collapse)

  • it will increase total MR (by situation as a whole)
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1009

This can be true. The argument in my last post mixed a little bit conclusion with hypothesis.

But mine is not a theorem. I want only to point out that, if the target MR is 2%-3% (hypothesis) - as suggested by many specialist - then the numbers that are becoming now relevant are saying something different. This didn’t lead me to conclude that the hypothesis is wrong, but I’m considering if there is another effect that can be responsible of such results. The only effect I can see affecting the measured MR (experiment) versus the expected one (hypothesis) is that the “real denominator” (infected people) is - by far - larger than what we are able to measure now looking only around hotbeds.

As said by @stone.defender the antibody test is the key. It should be done on a good sample, representative of the entire population in terms of age, location, sex, kind of work, etc. and should be done in large number in order to have a significant result from a statistical perspective.

Yesterday Italian Gov announced such a plan for 150.000 persons. I don’t know if it will clarify how things are going really, but if we continue to test only people who have been in contact with an hotbed, you do not get for sure reliable results.

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1010

For a pandemic that required people to stay at home, the ban was lifted too early.

Yesterday I could not go outside. Today I can shake hands with tourists, while covid is still around. Doesn’t make sense to me.

I was worried in the beginning but not scared. Now I’m not worried, I’m beyond scared, I’m about to get a permanent palm imprint on my forehead and that is not very nice.

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1011

Chances are your government chooses policy by what will keep the current leader/party in power, not by what makes sense.

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1012

The thing that struck me most about this documentary is the fact that it was the second wave not the first that brought unprecedented death. We are clearly making the same mistakes. We can’t allow people who claim they believe in science but obviously don’t to spread this virus like wildfire. This Virus spreads fast it has already mutated once, it will mutate again. Go players are generally an intelligent breed they will follow the science and hence will, protect themselves, protect your family, protect your friends. Please watch this documentary , it is scary but it is also helpful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDY5COg2P2c

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