It literally represents an exponential existential threat
Have you noticed that these three words – “literally,” “exponential,” and “existential”- have become more popular, while at the same time they’ve nearly lost their original more narrow meanings and have come to be used as mere intensifiers?
add pandemic to that list and a few others.
The Great Coronavirus War Is Upon Us
https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2020/03/12/the-great-coronavirus-war-is-upon-us-n2564545
To a popular culture that laps up creepy zombie movies, the virus certainly knows how to use its greatest weapons: fright and panic. As of early this week, the relatively lightweight bug had killed fewer than 30 Americans. But we seem to be acting as if it has already killed 200,000 of us.
Heh, and here I find myself beefing to myself about seeing the use of “epicenter” where a mere “center” will do. But then, tragedies ain’t been tragic for near or over a century, so who’m I to complain?
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said on Thursday that lawmakers should consider a swath of measures, including “no-strings” universal basic income (UBI) programs, as a response to the economic impacts of the Chinese coronavirus. The freshman lawmaker weighed in on the ongoing debate over an economic relief package designed to combat the ramifications of the coronavirus. She said while proposals, like expanding unemployment insurance, are good, they are not enough and pushed for far more drastic, big-government measures.
Artfldgr:
I believe that a lot of people think the word “pandemic” means “like the Andromeda Strain.”
And, as I wrote in this post earlier today, a lot of people have practically zero risk tolerance.
Thursday on ABC’s “The View,” co-host Meghan McCain suggested President Donald Trump’s coronavirus response “could be the silver bullet that takes out this administration.” McCain said
–=-=-=–=-=
Broadway will shut down for four to six weeks beginning tonight, due to the coronavirus outbreak, several sources told The Post. In what is the worst crisis the industry has faced since the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, several shows will not be able to recover.
-=-=-=-=-
Former Vice President Joe Biden rolled out his plan to combat the coronavirus, also know as COVID-19, on Thursday as the virus rapidly spreads throughout the United States.
[rapidly?]
-=-=-=-=-
Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday said the Trump administration’s coronavirus response has been a “colossal” failure.
[calls for tests to be in the millions… logistics and ability be damned]
-=-=-=-=-
New Mexico Health Secretary Kathy Kunkel has announced a temporary ban on public gatherings of 100 people or more, as the state’s efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus have rapidly intensified. The ban, which took effect immediately, will apply to stadiums, arenas, conference centers and theaters. However, airports, public transportation and shopping malls are exempt from the order. It also will not apply to weddings, funerals, restaurants, bars, hospitals and schools — at least for now.
[there are 4 confirmed cases, zero deaths in new mexico]
-=-=-=-=-
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman reached out to clubs Thursday morning to tell them the regular season would be suspended due to the spread of the coronavirus, a source indicated to The Post.
[no word on womens wrestling or nascar]
-=-=-=-=-
Jim Cramer has a radical plan to fight the economic toll of the coronavirus: suspend federal tax collection. “The federal government should not be taking in any money whatsoever from any major companies, so the major companies can have the cash flow. Also with individuals, so individuals can have the cash flow,”
[i wish… i filed as fast as i could so i wont lose my home]
-=-=-=-=-
The House and Senate Democrats are so concerned about the American public that they decided to pass a bill stripping the President of his legal authority to impose travel bans to protect American citizens.
[nothing like saying he is doing nothing, then reverse something]
-=-=-=-=-
“In the U.S., people are receiving conflicting messages from the CDC and the Trump administration,” he said. “When one organization is saying it’s urgent and another says it’s under control, it makes people worry.”
[doctors doing their part to confuse as much as stock bulls and bears arguing]
-=-=-=-=-
Hospitals are bracing for an onslaught of patients as the coronavirus spreads in the United States, with experts warning that a spike in cases could overwhelm the health care system.
[nothing like the h1n1 flu with obama, who they said handled it great! 18,000 died and 300k were infected… not 1300 infected and 38 died… which is horrid]
-=-=-=-=-
Border Patrol agents have detained 333 Chinese nationals attempting to enter the United States illegally, according to Department of Homeland Security data
[while people are fleeing California to places that dont want them]
-=-=-=-=-
its like being the tiny doll at a country fair shooting gallery, go this way, ping, go that way ping… go this way and that way, ping ping.. grab toilet paper… plunk ping…
MLB has cancelled spring training and is postponing the regular season until further notice. I am now officially PO’d at the MSM-DNC scum for panicking 150 million odd people to send them hoarding TP and going full chicken little.
“MLB has cancelled spring training and is postponing the regular season until further notice. I am now officially PO’d at the MSM-DNC scum for panicking 150 million odd people to send them hoarding TP and going full chicken little.”
And looking at the list Artfldgr just posted, this is going to get much worse. If the left wanted to destroy the country by chaos, I think this virus just did the job for them. By the weekend I expect the entire country shut down as all the panic dominoes fall. Hope you have a good supply of ammo; were going to need it.
“while at the same time they’ve nearly lost their original more narrow meanings and have come to be used as mere intensifiers?” – Neo
I think the change has been ginormous.
Yes. And I hate it. At least the latter two of the three. They used to be very useful and specific descriptive words (like the word ‘liberal’, ha!), and now they aren’t. Sad!
Oh, c’mon, AesopFan, at least literally, exponential, and existential used to be words with actual meanings. 🙂
My daughter called just now from Florida to complain that the stores have no toilet paper. This makes very little sense; TP doesn’t come from the Far East. We are a country of people without brains AND without toilet paper.
BTW, the exponential factor of growth is a feature of an old, old Hindu story of a sage (Krishna in disguise, of course) who played chess with a king, and claimed a very simple reward for winning: one grain of rice on the first square of a chess-board, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on until all the squares had been used. The king, obviously innumerate, happily agreed. At the end, he wasn’t quite so happy.
The math also plays into the old Hemingway quote (not quite as old as the rice story) where a character in one of his books is asked how he went bankrupt: Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly.
If there are 2048 grains of rice on one of the squares (the king’s debt), how many did he owe on the preceding one?
Only 1024.
https://owlcation.com/stem/Rice-on-a-Chessboard-Exponential-numbers
Why is it called exponential? Because 1 is 2**0 (2 to the zero power, by definition), 2 is 2**1 (2 to the first power), 2 is 2**2 (2 squared), 4 is 2**3 (cubed), and so forth: the exponent grows by 1 on each iteration, but the quantity is doubled.
Artfldgr:
Actually, in the US in the H1N1 pandemic, about 59 million people were infected.
And 12,000 died.
Originally it was not thought that anywhere near that number of people had been infected. But later, as health officials learned more, they discovered that the virus had been very very widespread.
But almost no one is aware of that big story.
Here is a recent use of “literally.” Mekita Rivas had her 15 minutes of fame when NYT columnist Mary Gay repeated her tweet on Brian Williams’s MSNBC show that instead of spending $500 million campaign ads, Bloomberg could have given a million dollars to every American- while also admitting that there are 327 million Americans.
Even a fourth grader could see the math behind those figures was not a million dollars per American, but less than $2 dollars per American. A million divided by a million equals 1: not exactly Ph. D. level math. This mathematical misstep became viral.
Mekita Rivas responded, and instead of acknowledging her mistake, doubled down and included “literally” to her response. #FakeNews Journalists Mekita Rivas, Mara Gay Should Avoid Mathematics.
Granted, when you take Michael Bloomberg’s estimated net worth of $55 billion instead of just the $500 million he spent on campaign ads, there is more moolah to divvy up, but there is still not enough to substantiate her claim. Michael Bloomberg fortune would be wiped out after he handed $1 million apiece to 55,000 individuals. Which is a far cry from 327 million people. Had he divvied his fortune up equally, each American would have gotten less than $200.
In the face of such egregious misstatement of the facts, how do we translate Mekita Rivas’s use of “literally.” Does “literally” in this case mean “emphatically not so?” 🙂
And journalists wonder why so many have contempt for them.
https://twitter.com/jeffmgould/status/1235844527480397826
Oops – typo in my math. The sequence is 1, 2, 4, 8, etc.
Missed the edit window by thaaaat much.
Doc Zero gives some perspective on why we get things out of proportion and then go into procrastinated panic attacks:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1237355746230177792.html
California Governor Bans Large Gatherings, Exempts Disneyland
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/elliebufkin/2020/03/12/california-governor-bans-large-gatherings-exempts-disneyland-n2564824
“But one element of Californian life that often attracts enormous crowds of people was mysteriously exempted from restrictive ban: Theme parks Disneyland and Universal Studios. . . . .[T]he attractions that bring in people from all over the globe will not be required to comply with the policy that all other Californian venues must. . . . [California Governor] Newsom said the parks’ exemption was ‘because of the complexity of their unique circumstances.'”
—– —– —– —– —–
And we wonder why many people don’t take these sorts of things seriously. — M J R
Disneyland closed today anyway through the end of March at least.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/2020/03/12/coronavirus-disney-announces-closure/5030549002/
I have been watching HOW the news is reporting, and they are definitely making it worse… how? by leaving out information… they claim the cases are going up, but they do so without telling you how many cases. So if it went from 38 dead to 40 dead… they are reporting that the numbers keep rising.. but without quantities, its whatever you think it is or fear it is. on the reporting of the democrats house proposal, they dont report the pork added to it, nor are they clear what is there that would be useful (like to people like me who are unemployed and may not be able to get interviews as people are in panic mode).
and while the numbers are rising world wide..
they are rising really slowly
128,343 cases
4,720 deaths
68,324 recovered
anyone other than myself (and the charts and graphs i programmed i may put up) that these numbers have not changed all that much? if you remove china 3,172 deaths… then this is over 1548 deaths world wide.. if you subtract from that, italy and iran…
The total for the rest of the world is 292
repeated for clarity, remove china, Italy, and Iran from the totals, and all this globally and on the markets and more is for 300 people dead…
IF you subtract those same three locations from the confirmed case list the remaining cases 24,874
after china, italy and iran, would be south korea with 66 deaths…
In the US there are 132 suicides per day… (48,180 per year)
there are 46 murders in the US each day (16,790 per year)
14 people a day die at work
how many deaths in the US from corona virus since January?
40…
yes… the number is rising and rising to 40 died in the US so far
That’s not even enough to have 1 per state..
40 out of 330,000,000
If it was 40 a day it would be 14,600 in a year…
This is insane…
I was about to enter the following . . .
*NOTE* I am informed that Disneyland is closed. Therefore,
– either they closed voluntarily, despite the exemption, or
– the Townhall dot com article linked above is in error.
. . . but Bryan Lovely [above, 8:27 pm] beat me to it.
Does anyone know whether it was voluntary — or did Townhall dot com get it wrong?
UPDATE –According to Hollywood Reporter,
“The news came as something of a surprise as just hours prior, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Disneyland and other large theme parks were not required to comply with his order against large gatherings to counter the spread of the coronavirus. Newsom noted that he spoke Wednesday with Disney’s executive chairman, Bob Iger, about the situation.”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/disneyland-close-due-coronavirus-1282529
OVER ‘N’ OUT . . . M J R
The late language crank, Edwin Newman, lamented the incorrect use of “massive.” Incorrectly and overly used at that.
Poor Ed.
Kinda looks as though the epidemiologists have overlooked a major symptom of this Wuhan Coronavirus, doesn’t it? Clear as day, this stuff causes vast swaths of people to lose their cotton-picking minds. But on the bright side at least the heretofore forlorn crazy people find comfort in strengthening ranks.
Disney World also closing, just reported on Florida tv. Schools in Connecticut closing as of tomorrow, along with the casinos cancelling all events. The madness won’t stop. The country will be gone by the end of the weekend. The most amazing weapon ever produced.
even as someone coming hong kong who believe this is no laughing matter the madness is getting ridiculous. of 1000 people needing hospitalization there were probably 10000 if not more people contracted the virus and felt nothing worse than a common cold. the death rate is probably ending up being 2 to 3 percent among the people experiencing syndromes severe enough to seek medical help which is probably no more than 20 percent of everyone who had contracted the disease. when this thing blows over with no significant damage remember who took advantage of a medical crisis to incite panic and ruin a prospering economy just to hurt the incumbent president so their preferred candidate will win the upcoming election.
Personally, I am more than tired of the msm hysteria. Time to declare a national emergency and shut them down. Save the children, trannies, drag queens, and whatevers.
“Why is it called exponential? ” (said someone above).
I am not a math person, but somehow I managed to get some basic concepts pretty well embedded in my brain. It had not occurred to me that people (especially journalists of the Brian Williams sort) are using the word without knowing what it means. Explains a lot.
As for “existential”, I remember an acquaintance, prior to the 2016 election, saying dramatically that Trump was an existential threat. Yet here we still are.
“I remember an acquaintance, prior to the 2016 election, saying dramatically that Trump was an existential threat.”
He probably was to that acquaintance’s ego. Over three years later and people like him are still spending every waking moment in a state of panic over Trump’s threat to their self-image. Trump is the SMOD and their undeserved pride is the Earth.
How else do you explain the frantic, desperate nature of their perpetual attacks on him? Take the coronavirus. Do you think even one of the Democrats or media creatures hyperventilating over how this is Trump’s Katrina has asked themselves this question – “If we make this thing the biggest story ever and the virus peters out in late April or early May, how do we stop Trump from spending all summer campaigning as the god-king who saved America from the viral apocalypse?”
Mike
AesopFan:
I never heard that version of the grains-of-wheat-on-a-chessboard story before. The usual version has the king asking the man who invented chess what reward he would like for inventing such a good game. The inventor’s name is often given as Sissa ben Dahir.
https://numbers.carma.newcastle.edu.au/page/lvl3/8.html
Also, if you save for retirement or keep a pantry stocked with a few weeks of supplies, you’re a hoarder, selfishly killing the future of the planet.
Say what? And note the date.
http://archive.is/0XguA
http://archive.vn/mOM3N
From
https://mobile.twitter.com/HarmlessYardDog/status/1237877472915386369
bof on March 12, 2020 at 11:39 pm said:
AesopFan:
I never heard that version of the grains-of-wheat-on-a-chessboard story before.
* * *
There are several versions, but there was a good exposition of the math on that particular link. Thanks for yours.
“if you remove china 3,172 deaths… then this is over 1548 deaths world wide.. if you subtract from that, italy and iran…
The total for the rest of the world is 292
repeated for clarity, remove china, Italy, and Iran from the totals, and all this globally and on the markets and more is for 300 people dead…” – Artfldgr
I’m seeing a barrage of stories about this, that, and the other closing.
One comment I saw on that suggested (1) avoiding lawsuits along the line of “Reckless endangerment,” if someone comes to your place and gets sick; and (2) mostly for universities, avoiding having to deal with sick students, health clinic crises, and whiny snowflakes.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/03/harvard-tells-students-to-move-out-of-dorms-by-sunday-due-to-coronavirus/
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/03/video-students-at-u-dayton-fill-street-after-school-announces-housing-closure-over-coronavirus/
Note the last picture at the second link: a large crowd of students protesting closures to … avoid gatherings of large crowds.
“I just don’t know.” I have changed my mind several time over the past few days and I am reading things about parts of Italy where they assumed this was a wicked but passing type of flu with hospitals ready to help people, no one coming at first and now they are screwed running out of everything to give proper treatment and support. I think this might be true.
I have a daughter-in-law who was commissioned in the Public Health Service, same rank as a Naval Lt. Jg as an RN and over the years has four college degrees, two in nursing, and now working on her nursing Phd., she is almost five foot tall and a smart woman. She has been an in-charge at a prestigious Senior Center and dealt with a lot of the geriatric population at their final years and she is concerned with the possible outcomes of this go around of this particular virus. She also dislikes President Trump but she was pleased when he said people need to stay put and stop traveling so the health care people can flatten the bell curve on this and have time to deal with people as they become ill.
It would be wonderful if this turns out to be the media scare of the new century and just kind of withers away like some of the past mega health scares have in the past but from the little bit I know I think this was in rather deadly for us old folks, like me, I am working on part of one kidney with other old people stuff. So now, my wife, who is my age with a bit of heart stuff and pre-diabetic, is going to join me while we kind of hibernate for a bit, she purchased enough food to last us a month or more with an extra six liters of wine, three white and three red. And we are going scarce for now and we can stay home, do a lot of yard work, grass is growing in South Texas and leaves are coming out and we can read books, watch movies on TV and mess around with our computers and it will be a rather painless quarantine.
As I often do, I did not address the topic of language and the use of the rather use to mean, perhaps more than they did at one time. Sorry, I became sidetracked with the ‘Virus Thing’. One thing I do know is that I never got the existential thing at all, eve with a lot of college classes that addressed that.
My feeling about the existential stuff can best be summed up with and experience I had in the Army when about the only General I ever saw was touring our top secret facility in Germany where we did electronic eavesdropping on the various Commie Countries to the East. He stopped to talk to once of our men working a multiple radio intercept position inside a room tucked into the back of a building, free standing inside and old Luftwaffe hanger. He said, “Son, where are you from?” and the reply was, “Texas, Sir!” and then the General said, “Anything I can do to help you?” At that time the Texan took off his headset, we did not have to come to attention because we were supposed to keep working, the Texan stood up and said very clearly and kind of loud, “Sir, Existentialism, Sir I just don’t get it ! “
Existential is the most overused word of the last three years. It’s used more in one day on CNN/MSNBC than Sartre used it in his lifetime.
It is time for Trump to never let crisis to go waste. The incompetent Obama Era staffers at the CDC and FDA need to be bypassed and investigated by a special commission. Finally Trump has an opportunity to blast Swamp Creatures.
Any legal obstacles to removing poorly functioning bureaucrats need to be changed legislatively. There need to be criminal penalties for obstructing elected officials. Inspector Generals should be expected to resign as part of a new administration.
It is time to find bureaucrats to demonize. Make them famous for their political affiliations and game playing, then go after their subordinates. Raise the outrage to the same level that the MSM has been employing against Trump. Replace Inspector Generals with outsiders from Red States.
It is time for War, a War on the Swamp.
The Swamp is “literally” killing people with their bureaucratic games. The lack of testing is leading to an “exponential” increase in risk. The country is facing an “existential” risk to its very survival as a functioning society.
Extremely good text.
One month ago I was telling people to boost their immune system (healthy food, vitamins, sleep, exercise, relaxation) because the virus was gonna come… and they looked at me as I was some crazy maniac.
Right now, it’s the opposite: I’m telling people to chill down, and they look at me as I was out to touch with reality. And damn, this is worse than the usual flu, but not terribly worse. In a couple of months everything will be back to normal. And the body count is not that high. You’re still more likely to die of cancer than of corona-chan right now. And cancer is not gonna vanish next year with some vaccine and is not gonna weaken after a few weeks.
Dick has an even nicer fantasy than I do, and certainly it should be easier to get rid of poorly functioning top bureaucrats. Whether from Obama, Bush, or Trump. Trump’s actually been pretty good of getting rid of Trump appointed folk who don’t seem to be doing the job. Plus, he’s been on top of “what the job is”.
.
There are two types of errors – doing too much, or not doing enough. False positive & false negative. We might not need so much “panic”, but ending all optional “going out to be with / meet other people” seems prudent right now. It’s far better for rich OECD folk to “do too much” and minimize the problem, while the problem can still be mitigated.
“Mitigation” will be a big word this year.
Here’s a fine article on the exponential growth issues:
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
The huge deciding issue is health care, and how many folk will die if the local health care facilities, including doctors, nurses, & supplies get overwhelmed.
How many infected folk will have died in the US by end of summer, mostly old?
1,000? 10k? 100k? 1,000,000?
Without taking very strong measures now, some might call it panic, the likelihood of 100k is much much higher. Because of exponential growth. Even with the strong measures, it’s fairly likely (50%?) to be over 1,000 but this means no state nor city has an outbreak that overwhelms the facilities there, because that exp. curve was “flattened” enough to be handled.
Maximum prudence short of panic. Walk, do not run, for
the exithome, and minimize your meetings with others, while keeping a yard long social distance from any you meet. Somehow “literally maximum prudence” doesn’t sound so good, even if it’s accurate.Wash hands with soap. Often.
No general existential threat – yet very life threatening to all older folk.
Have you noticed that these three words – “literally,” “exponential,” and “existential”- have become more popular, while at the same time they’ve nearly lost their original more narrow meanings and have come to be used as mere intensifiers?
Hi. I’m a computer scientist, specializing in Programming Language Theory, and a mathematical physicist. AMA.
(This means I work in two disciplines where “literal,” “exponential,” and “existential” have very specific, well-defined, unambiguous meanings.)
But, per Dr. John McWhorter’s wonderful series, I’m aware that language changes, and one of the most common phenomena we see is loss of specificity/words becoming placeholders. All we can do about it is choose to be bemused.
Tom “T-Bone” Stankus sings Existential Blues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMzV2VNN2sg
Is it schizo-paranoia or just existential blues?
Without taking very strong measures now, some might call it panic, the likelihood of 100k is much much higher. Because of exponential growth. Even with the strong measures, it’s fairly likely (50%?) to be over 1,000 but this means no state nor city has an outbreak that overwhelms the facilities there, because that exp. curve was “flattened” enough to be handled. – Tom Grey
100k dead, or world wide?
World wide we would need 2007% increase from this mornings numbers
IF the US you would need 256,410% increase in deaths
since 1 December, we have 40 deaths… about 10 a month..
the early days of a “pandemic” are the ones where numbers are higher
but if that rate holds, it will take 833 years to get to 100k in the US
but lets say it goes to 1000 a month, then its just 8.3 years to hit 100k
Are you seeing a problem with these numbers reaching this expansion?
To hit 100k this year by next December…
the numbers per month would have to jump to 11,107 each month to December..
we would have to go from 40 in 4 months to 360 a day
Are you seeing a problem with these numbers reaching this expansion?
Your kind of talking is putting gasoline on a match and claiming the world is burning…
Given the numbers, where its the worst, it cant get that far that fast with the current condition
the numbers for the H1N1 spanish flu numbers were greater out of the gate by huge margins.
(The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history.
It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin. )
we forget that right now, we have the highest rate of elderly people alive in history
we have not had young renewals thanks to feminism, and import people from countries to hide a decline that would cause people to abandon the left if they could see it (ergo the left making importation of people and open borders the most critical thing!! the minute we find out what our advice has actually done and its implications for everything from finance to war, we would respond rationally and they would be defenseless to explain)
In Italy 34.98% are in the higher age and higher negative outcomes
they have very few young people…
(in fact all western modern states with one ideology have collapsed demographically
you just cant see it as our ability to live longer is hiding it, and so is immigrant importation)
MBunge: “If we make this thing the biggest story ever and the virus peters out in late April or early May, how do we stop Trump from spending all summer campaigning as the god-king who saved America from the viral apocalypse?”
Heh. Hadn’t thought of that. Let’s hope it plays out that way.
100k dead worldwide by … end of 2021 (almost 2 years), is my 50% (at this second) prediction. Over 1000 in the US by the end of summer …still over 40%, even with the many strong measures being taken.
One so-far unmentioned group is drug addicts. Many are addicted to drugs which are dependent on trade with China, so street prices have been shooting up.
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid-19-update-for-march-13-2020.html
Bayesian Prior Probabilities are information and analysis estimates. Those wanting to talk numbers without talking probabilities are far too imprecise for making decisions. Would you bet $10 that there would be fewer than 1000 US coronavirus deaths by end of summer (22 Sep)? Or would you rather bet there would be more such deaths in the US? For me, about either.
How about 10,000 US deaths? I would only bet on fewer, given today’s info, but a few more outbreaks (so far none in the US) could change that.
How about 200 US deaths? I would only bet on more.
The big problem with actual betting on more death is that, once the bet is made, one starts rooting for the result bet on. So it’s wise to bet on the good result, so as to be rooting for goodness. So while I’m willing to guestimate more death, I wouldn’t want to bet on more death. (Unless very good odds?)
Another topic not much directly discussed is betting markets. A quick search (DDGo) shows mostly stock market and bond markets as betting markets — which has been covered here, somewhat.
I also tried one, non-secure site (blocked by security at first):
https://community.betfair.com/chit_chat/go/thread/view/94038/31631833/coronavirus-betting-markets
But my Slovak ISP blocks that site, too, so I can’t see it. Oh well. Interesting, no?
Here is a page I added to one of my Astrophotography websites that I will update daily:
https://snrcalc.now.sh/covid19
Each day I’ll visit JHU’s GitHub repository and download the time series data for USA Confirmed Cases, Deaths, and Recoveries. I’ll import it into Excel and build Pivot Tables and Charts, then take a screenshot and upload it to my site.
Ideally I would import just the time series data to my website and then let you visualize it with charting software. One step at a time.
A friend just alerted me to this website:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
It contains the same time series data as mine so I’ve decided to make this the first and last day that I update my site.
No way. That’s too low.
The death toll seems to be about 1% from the total infected over 60 years old. The death toll under 60 years old can be dismissed since they’re a very small part.
The real number of infected people can be extremely high, though. This virus is contagious as hell.
A quick calculation using US: There’s about 70 million people over 60. Chances are around 50% of them will be infected (maybe more). The final death toll should be be around 350k, only in US. It could be smaller since we’re already in March and the summer will be here in a couple of months. Let’s say 300k.
It’s not that high. Last year flu had a 100k people death toll, same country.
EU has about the same number of people over 60, so numbers should be similar.
Yann:
You have no idea what the death toll will be. And that’s not just you who has no idea. No one has any idea.
That’s because neither you nor anyone else has a clue how many people have been infected, or how susceptibilities and treatment capabilities vary in different populations and different countries.
By the way, with H1N1, the worldwide death toll was apparently 150,000–575,000, when all was said and done. Note the wide variation in the lower and higher figure – that’s because we still don’t know how many died. What’s more, the early figures of how many were infected were way WAY lower than the later figures. That’s what drove the estimated death rate down, in the end – the fact that many more people ended up infected with mild symptoms.
Here is another howler from the BBC news in UK.
This post is from the 11:37 mark of this https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-51866403
The Department of Health and Human Services will give $1.3m to two laboratories vying to create new test kids for Covid-19 that can detect if a person is infected in less than an hour.
===========================
Hey tester, leave those kids alone!
MBunge, Mac:
That’s easy.
They’ll just say that whatever number of deaths and illnesses happened it was Trump’s fault because (fill in the blanks) and if they’d been in charge none of this would have happened. And they will keep pointing to the stock market, too, unless it recovers 100% and more.
Trump to declare national emergency today at 3pm. Yep, let’s just add more to the panic and shut the country down further. I’m not one to generally criticize Trump, but I don’t view his latest efforts as positive. I don’t see how the country recovers from this economic displacement. I guess we’ll see what happens at 3pm.
physicsguy:
It’s not at all clear to me how that would add to the panic. We already have a de facto national emergency. Plus, it’s kind of standard. See this:
The MSM will treat this differently, of course, as they do everything Trumpian.
neo – “They’ll just say that whatever number of deaths and illnesses happened it was Trump’s fault because (fill in the blanks)”
1. Trump’s base won’t care what they say.
2. For the rest of the country, Trump can respond with facts like how he saved lives by shutting down travel from China while Democrats were obsessed with impeachment.
Mike
MBunge:
Yes, it really depends on how many people the Trump forces can reach with the corrective.
Yes, it is truly amazing how many people seem to think these words are just intensifiers. A few years ago I heard a newscaster on TV say “Fenway Park literally exploded tonight…” It hadn’t. He was just talking about a big crowd or something.
Neo, I hope you’re correct. I just look at what happened to the market after Monday’s address, and what has happened across the states since then. Everything is shutting down here in CT due to Lamont’s directive that no gatherings over 250. I haven’t been able to find how this affects businesses that employ more than 250 per shift, e.g. Pratt, Sikorsky, etc. I know restaurants, etc are already suffering. Can the country really afford a 6 week shutdown? I base that on Lamont’s declaration of the emergency going to AT LEAST Apr 30.
physicsguy:
I said I wasn’t so sure it would add to the panic. But I’m certainly not sure it wouldn’t. However, the panic is already at some sort of intense pitch. The financial markets’ reaction certainly adds to that, in an escalating feedback loop.
Neo, I just came across this. Dow was up almost 5% until Trump announced the national emergency, then they fell back.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/us-stocks-march-13-2020
Where is the border between Maximum Prudence and panic?
Panic buying of TP is not quite panic-panic.
(When in danger, when in doubt. Run in circles, scream and shout.)
(I like doggerel.) Is having everybody stay at home prudence? or panic?
(-prudence)
The goal is to minimize infections. Trump’s actions will do that — and in retrospect it would have been a bit better to do it sooner.
Plus, making cash available to those wanting to the solve problems by throwing money at the problem, is more likely to allow some problem solvers to get enough money to solve the problem. Maximizing speed / minimizing time before solution, NOT spending the cash most efficiently.
Trump’s CDC, filled with Dem bureaucrats, has been lousy in testing. That’s changing, rapidly, partly due to the criticism against Trump. Even if the criticism is unfair, now, it can help in making better gov’t decisions and actions.
The Dow and markets are likely to be doing quite a bit of yo-yoing up and down until the peak infection rate has passed, or some better treatment is made, or both.
We have the Diamond Princess. That case, the ~4000 people in the ship (passengers and crew) were tested. 700 people were ill when they were tested, most of them passengers, old people. ~35 were severe and 7 have died.
A strict quarantine was enforced, and that’s why the percentage of infected are under 20%. Under more normal circumstances, 50% of the population is a reasonable prediction.
The main disagreement when it comes to predictions is the death/infected ratio, which only can be calculated if you know the real number of infected. The only case when we know that number is the Diamond Princess, since everyone was tested, and that can give us a clue about the order of magnitude.
As additional info, here you have a pdf about a flu outbreak in a cruise. Two people died out of 300 syntomatic cases, and that was flu.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3865717?seq=1
The coronavirus is not much worse than the flu. The problem is that without herd immunity, it spreads fast, wide and collapses hospitals. If that becomes seasonal, chances are it’ll become another common seasonal flu-like illness.
Yann:
Excuse me, but I expect that the demographics of the population on the Diamond Princess cruise ship are not representative of the population of the USA. I would expect that the Diamond Princess passengers were older for instance. There appears to be a big increase in the risk and severity of the illness for people over 60.
om:
Of course, that’s why in the calculation I made in my first comment, I used only the demographics over 60 years old (about 70 million people in US and 80 million people in the EU). The death toll in young and middle aged people is an small percentage in comparison, and can dismissed if you’re approximating the total one.
In Italy, for example, there has been only one death under 50 years old, out of more than 100 deaths to date.
Yann:
And of course we will have to correct our assumptions based on the data for people over 60 who are in assisted living facilities versus those over 60 who are not, because nearly all the fatalities so far are from one facility in that subset of the older population in the USA IIRC. In Italy, who knows so far.
I’m not sure how to link to it, but today’s recently updated Italy stats show that while almost 25% of cases are in people 50 and below, only 6 of 1017 deaths are in people 49 and under. (Yes, the two data sets use different age brackets, so some percent of the 24 deaths in 50-59 would presumably involve 50-year-olds.) Over half the deaths in Italy are in people 80+.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=522&v=Kas0tIxDvrg&feature=emb_logo
That’s a link to a short video that both illustrates and explains some of the mathematical aspects of epidemics — e.g. exponential growth, inflection points, logistic growth, and why exponential growth doesn’t go on forever.
But literally nothing about existential threats.
Ralph Stanley “Oh Death”
https://youtu.be/2xmRWj7gJEU
i was thinking about R0 and what it means, but also whats missing..
IF i had the time and the inclination i would attempt to modify that formula in terms of computing momentum quotient.. its really a unbounded potential that after the first period T, one could calculate a momentum and compute a better rate going forwards. not so much that this would be a fixed predictive amount, as you can recalculate momentum, but that without it changing, there are rates of infection that are just not possible… even without momentum, there are rates for which no disease on the planet has ever expressed such an actual rate (except in the movie horror films where people get touched and infection spreads in seconds – not possible (the closest thing possible within a real biological framework would be a pathogen that makes a toxin like ricin which it exudes as it produces it))
100k dead worldwide by … end of 2021 (almost 2 years), is my 50% (at this second) prediction. Over 1000 in the US by the end of summer …still over 40%, even with the many strong measures being taken. – Tom Grey
A prediction with no basis isn’t even a guess… – Artfldgr
Brian Morgan on March 13, 2020 at 10:58 am said:
Each day I’ll visit JHU’s GitHub repository and download the time series data for USA Confirmed Cases, Deaths, and Recoveries. I’ll import it into Excel and build Pivot Tables and Charts, then take a screenshot and upload it to my site.
I am already doing this and putting data up on a custom covid-19 site..
the charts are google and i am about halfway through the sites structure so i can rerun the programs taht generate the datafiles for the google api…
been doing this since the begining…
ie. notice when i put up the links to kaggle datasets, of which the data you mention is collected from (as well as the github location for the johns hopkins website)
Yann on March 13, 2020 at 12:07 pm said:
100k dead worldwide by … end of 2021
No way. That’s too low. – Yann
no… its way too high so far..
if you haven’t paid attention… its taken 4 months to get to 5000 and that’s including the big 3000 plus boost from china… take that away, and your going 5 months with under 2000 dead…
between now and then we are going to do better at slowing it..
so there is no way its going to reach that kind of number
even less so if it follows other flu patterns (ie. like h1n1 etc) and peters in the summer…
Doc Zero hits the gold with this one – going to put it on the MSM thread as well, with slightly different excerpts.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1238439930973609984.html
Why do we get so much delusional fearmongering in times of crisis? Because it works. It gets clicks and riles people up against designated hate objects. The dopamine hit is enormous. Money often changes hands. And when the doomsday predictions don’t happen, there is ZERO penalty.
…
Modern society has a weird passive-aggressive combination of lethargy and frenzy that provides the perfect environment for doomsayers. You have to predict outrageously magnified disasters to get people to care, and once they start caring, they become obsessively focused.
The dark side of the “preference cascade” phenomenon creates stampedes. As soon as they see other people reacting to a crisis and it’s actually affecting daily life, the public suddenly shifts from apathy to frenzied activity and demands for SOMEONE to do SOMETHING immediately.
…
Social media unquestionably made the media worse by giving it a bottomless well of hysteria to dip into whenever it needs a quick fix.
…
The lesson modern media takes from the Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that crying wolf is wrong. It’s that the Boy should have cried louder, monetized his crying, demanded more funding for the Department of Wolf Control, and gotten himself on a few Rolodexes as a wolf expert. /end
@Artfldgr
The body count in Huabei is fake numbers. It’s probably much higher. Crematories went from working during the morning to work 24/7.
The numbers in the rest of China seem legit, but the quarantine imposed was brutal.
Western countries, this is just starting. This will develop during the next 6-8 weeks. The peak of mortality should happen in 4-5 weeks from now.
@KyndyllG
Yeap, it barely kills under 50-60. In China, some doctors and nurses died, but after having overworked and been sleep deprived for days (which screws your immune system). If you’re under 60, it’s gonna be like a cold.
I actually could have passed it, could have caught it from a nurse in a hospital that has some cases, and (if that’s it), it just like a weird and long flu.