All things CoronaVirus

[MDlaxfan76]

"I believe the children are the future:"

https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2 ... /24611459/

However, this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that turning students away worsens the pandemic.

“It’s the worst thing you can do,” he told Today on Wednesday. “Keep them at the university in a place that’s sequestered enough from the other students, but don’t have them go home because they could be spreading it in their home state.”

White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx issued similar advice. “Please isolate at your college,” she said in an Aug. 29 press conference. “Do not return home if you’re positive and spread the virus to your family, your aunts, your uncles, your grandparents."

Makes sense, I recall a number of us made this argument over the past weeks as well. If you're gonna bring 'em all together, then for darn sure don't get them infected and send them home again. Nope, own it, isolate and recover.

If you're not prepared to do so, don't open yet. Get prepared.

[Catbird]

"I believe the children are the future:

[wgdsr]

for kicks i'll take the under. they've now gone sufficiently past what my models suggest.

I hope/pray for the under too.

Cases and deaths seem to be going sideways now rather than continuing to drop. And if we just keep going sideways from here with no uptick from cold/flu season, that gets you to 300k by year end (1k per day x 120).

So still 3-5X what was being forecast back in late April, early May at the height of the Re-Open!!! hysteria.

i saw a rep from uhme last night or this morning do a 5 min interview on this. they asked him why the change and he said "they're seeing less adherence to mask use, look at the midwest states". i know they're dumbing it down some (but how does he even know that?), but every interview i see one of these folks make is the same and their projections just have seemed nonsensical. the 60-70k they stubbornly sat on until we were right up against it... we discussed this and i disliked it mostly bc it looked very much like it was affecting policy (it'd been reported repeatedly that the admin was using them). and at that point... nonsensical.

some states have been stubborn on deaths recently relative to cases and that's disconcerting, but there's too much we don't know about tests/cases to draw inferences from that other than if you look at it as black and white -- the bias right now is to the downside, not the upside. imo. and they have dropped about 20% from the peak, if not at the same rate as cases.

as far as cold/flu season, vectors for that are often schools and workplaces, which are more sparse vs a regular year. and it very well could be with the colder weather there'd be less interaction, not more, this year vs warmer months. or that'd be the guess here. i won't get started with t cells and immunity. colleges, i don't know what the population is, but at least there's guardrails there that may have not been there in the summer with "increased" testing on campuses and rules and regs.

of course, feel free to chalk it up to a rando on the internet. fine with that. we'll see!

interesting take on the earlier estimate, but I'm sure you recall that their projections were based on explicit assumptions of maintaining policy discipline and mobility rates...unfortunately not all adopted the policies and there was almost no policy discipline.

we'll disagree on this, but that's a cop out. they had death rates dropping a week out from 2,000 per day to under 500 (it takes longer than a week on average to die of the virus?) and this discussion was in late april. and it wasn't all of a sudden the first week of may that the floodgates were thrown wide open everywhere in the u.s. (even if it were, it takes a while on the lag). cases declined by a third until mid-june. between that, sweden and the interviews, i haven't been able to take them seriously.

I'd agree that their model adjustment did take longer than I thought necessary...but it was super clear what the assumptions were. They had this thing going to near zero in august...but only with universal policy discipline and social compliance through the end of June. It was pretty darn obvious that we weren't following the model's assumptions...that's what I was saying at the time too.

But yup, we knew in mid-late April, much less May, that there were big policy headwinds coming from the Oval Office down to governors. Foot dragging by some, impatience by nearly all states. Far, far from the universal behavior necessary.

yeah, we won't agree. there wasn't some switch turned on that made them miss their models. imo.
they did it all by themselves.
https://citymapper.com/cmi

the u.s. is not doing business as usual. and certainly didn't see some huge spike in may. i don't know all that they put into them, but from what i've seen on wide misses, not anticipating any policy changes as cerrain results rolled in, drawing conclusions on things like "decreased mask adherence" (maybe they've actually polled and filmed a lot of the u.s., so i'll try to reserve final judgment), and from dumbed down interviews what i believe to be rudimentary inputs... i'm where i am with them. their 70k projection wasn't one that included masks, masks, masks for everyone all of a sudden.

anyway. given their now large sized adjustments, i doubt the present admin follows them as much anymore. maybe they've got a new modeler?

[ggait]

By definition, no one "knows" what the future will be.

And while I hope you are right in taking the under WG, I'd note that UW IHME has been doing reasonably well in terms of its projections recently.

Except for being a bit too optimistic:

On June 11 they said 170k @ October 1. We hit that on August 13.
On June 24 they said 180k @ October 1. We hit that August 22.
On July 7 they said 200k @ November 1. We'll hit that by mid-September.

So we should take their most recent projections seriously:

On August 6 they said 300k by December 1.
On September 4 they say 410k by January 1.

[wgdsr]

By definition, no one "knows" what the future will be.

And while I hope you are right in taking the under WG, I'd note that UW IHME has been doing reasonably well in terms of its projections recently.

Except for being a bit too optimistic:

On June 11 they said 170k @ October 1. We hit that on August 13.
On June 24 they said 180k @ October 1. We hit that August 22.
On July 7 they said 200k @ November 1. We'll hit that by mid-September.

So we should take their most recent projections seriously:

On August 6 they said 300k by December 1.
On September 4 they say 410k by January 1.

we agree no one knows. i only bring up ihme as they bring themselves up. they make headlines, they're interviewed, they're followed. probably the same reason you do.

i have no idea if anyone else is more accurate. models are in use bc they can be constructive if useful. it's up to any entity that uses them to assess that. personally, i think there's a decent risk they are or were counter productive. partly bc it's tough to "know". their swings to either side don't give me any more confidence in how they come to their numbers, or caution/hope in what's next.

no one cares what i think, or should, so it's all good. but under. well under.

[ggait]

Makes sense, I recall a number of us made this argument over the past weeks as well. If you're gonna bring 'em all together, then for darn sure don't get them infected and send them home again. Nope, own it, isolate and recover.

Keeping the kids on campus once they've arrived does make sense. The schools are actually in better shape than society generally to do test/trace/isolate etc. In many ways, a college campus is a great Covid laboratory.

Many are actually doing some cool things. Like daily testing of the waste water coming out of a particular dorm to tell very early on if any kids in that dorm are positive. Or doing saliva testing at very high volumes. Or using smart phone apps to do contact tracing.

The problem for the schools is that they very quickly run out of quarantine space and wind up basically imprisoning huge portions of their students. Hard to see that sustaining.

Take LAC Colorado College. Enrolls 2,000 kids and requires most kids to live on campus. School started 8/24. After about a week they had 10 cases. So the school went full online and put three entire dorms (about 500 kids) onto full quarantine for two weeks. Imagine paying $75k a year to have your kid in a jail cell while he does Kahn Academy?

Once your kid serves out his two week jail sentence, then what do you do? While being at home sucks, I don't think any kid is going to hang around for any more of that shirt. Since a rinse/repeat seems pretty likely.

Thank god my kid (and most of the friend group) bailed from the dorms for student apartments. The school is doing big time testing and has a big medical center/school. So so long as the lap top and wifi hold out, they should be able to muddle through come what may.

[youthathletics]

Makes sense, I recall a number of us made this argument over the past weeks as well. If you're gonna bring 'em all together, then for darn sure don't get them infected and send them home again. Nope, own it, isolate and recover.

Keeping the kids on campus once they've arrived does make sense. The schools are actually in better shape than society generally to do test/trace/isolate etc. In many ways, a college campus is a great Covid laboratory.

Many are actually doing some cool things. Like daily testing of the waste water coming out of a particular dorm to tell very early on if any kids in that dorm are positive. Or doing saliva testing at very high volumes. Or using smart phone apps to do contact tracing.

The problem for the schools is that they very quickly run out of quarantine space and wind up basically imprisoning huge portions of their students. Hard to see that sustaining.

Take LAC Colorado College. Enrolls 2,000 kids and requires most kids to live on campus. School started 8/24. After about a week they had 10 cases. So the school went full online and put three entire dorms (about 500 kids) onto full quarantine for two weeks. Imagine paying $75k a year to have your kid in a jail cell while he does Kahn Academy?

Once your kid serves out his two week jail sentence, then what do you do? While being at home sucks, I don't think any kid is going to hang around for any more of that shirt. Since a rinse/repeat seems pretty likely.

Thank god my kid (and most of the friend group) bailed from the dorms for student apartments. The school is doing big time testing and has a big medical center/school. So so long as the lap top and wifi hold out, they should be able to muddle through come what may.

Colleges are really implementing Herd Immunity, via small pods. Some may call that intentionally designed but not openly discussed.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Makes sense, I recall a number of us made this argument over the past weeks as well. If you're gonna bring 'em all together, then for darn sure don't get them infected and send them home again. Nope, own it, isolate and recover.

Keeping the kids on campus once they've arrived does make sense. The schools are actually in better shape than society generally to do test/trace/isolate etc. In many ways, a college campus is a great Covid laboratory.

Many are actually doing some cool things. Like daily testing of the waste water coming out of a particular dorm to tell very early on if any kids in that dorm are positive. Or doing saliva testing at very high volumes. Or using smart phone apps to do contact tracing.

The problem for the schools is that they very quickly run out of quarantine space and wind up basically imprisoning huge portions of their students. Hard to see that sustaining.

Take LAC Colorado College. Enrolls 2,000 kids and requires most kids to live on campus. School started 8/24. After about a week they had 10 cases. So the school went full online and put three entire dorms (about 500 kids) onto full quarantine for two weeks. Imagine paying $75k a year to have your kid in a jail cell while he does Kahn Academy?

Once your kid serves out his two week jail sentence, then what do you do? While being at home sucks, I don't think any kid is going to hang around for any more of that shirt. Since a rinse/repeat seems pretty likely.

Thank god my kid (and most of the friend group) bailed from the dorms for student apartments. The school is doing big time testing and has a big medical center/school. So so long as the lap top and wifi hold out, they should be able to muddle through come what may.

Colleges are really implementing Herd Immunity, via small pods. Some may call that intentionally designed but not openly discussed.

Some

[MDlaxfan76]

Makes sense, I recall a number of us made this argument over the past weeks as well. If you're gonna bring 'em all together, then for darn sure don't get them infected and send them home again. Nope, own it, isolate and recover.

Keeping the kids on campus once they've arrived does make sense. The schools are actually in better shape than society generally to do test/trace/isolate etc. In many ways, a college campus is a great Covid laboratory.

Many are actually doing some cool things. Like daily testing of the waste water coming out of a particular dorm to tell very early on if any kids in that dorm are positive. Or doing saliva testing at very high volumes. Or using smart phone apps to do contact tracing.

The problem for the schools is that they very quickly run out of quarantine space and wind up basically imprisoning huge portions of their students. Hard to see that sustaining.

Take LAC Colorado College. Enrolls 2,000 kids and requires most kids to live on campus. School started 8/24. After about a week they had 10 cases. So the school went full online and put three entire dorms (about 500 kids) onto full quarantine for two weeks. Imagine paying $75k a year to have your kid in a jail cell while he does Kahn Academy?

Once your kid serves out his two week jail sentence, then what do you do? While being at home sucks, I don't think any kid is going to hang around for any more of that shirt. Since a rinse/repeat seems pretty likely.

Thank god my kid (and most of the friend group) bailed from the dorms for student apartments. The school is doing big time testing and has a big medical center/school. So so long as the lap top and wifi hold out, they should be able to muddle through come what may.

my alma mater, Dartmouth, has freshmen and seniors on campus this term, meaning much more quarantine space.

[MDlaxfan76]

Makes sense, I recall a number of us made this argument over the past weeks as well. If you're gonna bring 'em all together, then for darn sure don't get them infected and send them home again. Nope, own it, isolate and recover.

Keeping the kids on campus once they've arrived does make sense. The schools are actually in better shape than society generally to do test/trace/isolate etc. In many ways, a college campus is a great Covid laboratory.

Many are actually doing some cool things. Like daily testing of the waste water coming out of a particular dorm to tell very early on if any kids in that dorm are positive. Or doing saliva testing at very high volumes. Or using smart phone apps to do contact tracing.

The problem for the schools is that they very quickly run out of quarantine space and wind up basically imprisoning huge portions of their students. Hard to see that sustaining.

Take LAC Colorado College. Enrolls 2,000 kids and requires most kids to live on campus. School started 8/24. After about a week they had 10 cases. So the school went full online and put three entire dorms (about 500 kids) onto full quarantine for two weeks. Imagine paying $75k a year to have your kid in a jail cell while he does Kahn Academy?

Once your kid serves out his two week jail sentence, then what do you do? While being at home sucks, I don't think any kid is going to hang around for any more of that shirt. Since a rinse/repeat seems pretty likely.

Thank god my kid (and most of the friend group) bailed from the dorms for student apartments. The school is doing big time testing and has a big medical center/school. So so long as the lap top and wifi hold out, they should be able to muddle through come what may.

Colleges are really implementing Herd Immunity, via small pods. Some may call that intentionally designed but not openly discussed.

Some

[youthathletics]

Makes sense, I recall a number of us made this argument over the past weeks as well. If you're gonna bring 'em all together, then for darn sure don't get them infected and send them home again. Nope, own it, isolate and recover.

Keeping the kids on campus once they've arrived does make sense. The schools are actually in better shape than society generally to do test/trace/isolate etc. In many ways, a college campus is a great Covid laboratory.

Many are actually doing some cool things. Like daily testing of the waste water coming out of a particular dorm to tell very early on if any kids in that dorm are positive. Or doing saliva testing at very high volumes. Or using smart phone apps to do contact tracing.

The problem for the schools is that they very quickly run out of quarantine space and wind up basically imprisoning huge portions of their students. Hard to see that sustaining.

Take LAC Colorado College. Enrolls 2,000 kids and requires most kids to live on campus. School started 8/24. After about a week they had 10 cases. So the school went full online and put three entire dorms (about 500 kids) onto full quarantine for two weeks. Imagine paying $75k a year to have your kid in a jail cell while he does Kahn Academy?

Once your kid serves out his two week jail sentence, then what do you do? While being at home sucks, I don't think any kid is going to hang around for any more of that shirt. Since a rinse/repeat seems pretty likely.

Thank god my kid (and most of the friend group) bailed from the dorms for student apartments. The school is doing big time testing and has a big medical center/school. So so long as the lap top and wifi hold out, they should be able to muddle through come what may.

my alma mater, Dartmouth, has freshmen and seniors on campus this term, meaning much more quarantine space.

Which means what? They are okay with kids catching it as long as they hide while sick, positive, or symptomatic. Seems like the definition of allowing herd immunity to be acceptable in small sectors.

Say what you mean.

[ggait]

CC is definite NOT doing herd immunity. The end of the Q coincides with the end of Block 1 of their block plan.

After the Q the kids are going home most likely.

And no big college is doing it either. Because that would be a Covid bomb for the college town.

Basically no one in the world is trying herd immunity. Sweden an UK tried early on and failed.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/stat ... 34016?s=20

[MDlaxfan76]

Makes sense, I recall a number of us made this argument over the past weeks as well. If you're gonna bring 'em all together, then for darn sure don't get them infected and send them home again. Nope, own it, isolate and recover.

Keeping the kids on campus once they've arrived does make sense. The schools are actually in better shape than society generally to do test/trace/isolate etc. In many ways, a college campus is a great Covid laboratory.

Many are actually doing some cool things. Like daily testing of the waste water coming out of a particular dorm to tell very early on if any kids in that dorm are positive. Or doing saliva testing at very high volumes. Or using smart phone apps to do contact tracing.

The problem for the schools is that they very quickly run out of quarantine space and wind up basically imprisoning huge portions of their students. Hard to see that sustaining.

Take LAC Colorado College. Enrolls 2,000 kids and requires most kids to live on campus. School started 8/24. After about a week they had 10 cases. So the school went full online and put three entire dorms (about 500 kids) onto full quarantine for two weeks. Imagine paying $75k a year to have your kid in a jail cell while he does Kahn Academy?

Once your kid serves out his two week jail sentence, then what do you do? While being at home sucks, I don't think any kid is going to hang around for any more of that shirt. Since a rinse/repeat seems pretty likely.

Thank god my kid (and most of the friend group) bailed from the dorms for student apartments. The school is doing big time testing and has a big medical center/school. So so long as the lap top and wifi hold out, they should be able to muddle through come what may.

my alma mater, Dartmouth, has freshmen and seniors on campus this term, meaning much more quarantine space.

Which means what? They are okay with kids catching it as long as they hide while sick, positive, or symptomatic. Seems like the definition of allowing herd immunity to be acceptable in small sectors.

Say what you mean.

I was responding to ggait and the difficulty he suggested of having enough quarantine space if you already have full dorms...no more or less than that.

[youthathletics]

CC is definite NOT doing herd immunity. The end of the Q coincides with the end of Block 1 of their block plan.

After the Q the kids are going home most likely.

And no big college is doing it either. Because that would be a Covid bomb for the college town.

Basically no one in the world is trying herd immunity. Sweden an UK tried early on and failed.

gg - what do you then call it? A calculated decision was made to bring people back together en masse, knowing what we ALL do about the virus...a fools errnad?

The underlying calculated risk that we are all taking is providing defacto herd immunity, while playing russian roulette, no?

[Brooklyn]

Brook, you've lost me on this one.
I think trying to blame a President, current or prior, for a particular terrorist act is almost unavoidably going to be misplaced.

Sure, the military during Clinton's term may have had a shot at Bin Laden, but there are no sure things in such matters. And sure, Bush had been President for 8 months and the IC didn't detect and prevent the threat in time under his Administration. But seriously, we are going to assign blame on the sitting POTUS for an act of terror? Yes, the buck stops at the top, but let's save our sharp critique for the acts of POTUS for which they really deserve such critique.

I'm startled that you do not remember the endless "Blame Clinton!" posts we had on LP. It was said by some right wing delusionals that Osama bin Laden's head had been offered to Clinton on a silver platter by the Sudanese government. This myth was made up by the right wing delusionals but was just another myth which was easily refuted by patriots. This especially since OBL was not under international indictment at the time and could not have been legally apprehended. Despite it easily being refuted the delusionals continued to pretend Clinton was responsible for OBL remaining a menace.

tRUMP published a book called "The America We Deserve" in 2000 in which he claimed he pointed out OBL in some way to Clinton who supposedly refused to take him out. Later, Trump said he predicted the 9/11 attack which Clinton refused to heed. However, this claim has not been supported with any historical proof. But delusional right wingers went with the fake claim for years.

At first, Giuliani denounced the claim that Clinton was responsible for 9/11. Then when he ran for the republican nomination he suddenly decided that Clinton was a proper target and started to reecho the "Blame Clinton" garbage.

Despite all this right wing delusionals continued to pretend Clinton was to be blamed. Naturally, we patriots posted more than sufficient proof to refute any of the garbage. Clearly it was Bush who disregarded warnings that there was an attack - he even relaxed airport security measures which enabled 9/11.

Bottom line: blaming Clinton for 9/11 is an act of delusionalism. But it is and will always be par for the course for right wingers. If we had access to LP archives you would find an endless array of posts from mindless right wingers who repeatedly made this crazy, unproven, and unsupportable claim. Thayt remains a fact whether anyone chooses to believe the truth or not.

[MDlaxfan76]

Brook, you've lost me on this one.
I think trying to blame a President, current or prior, for a particular terrorist act is almost unavoidably going to be misplaced.

Sure, the military during Clinton's term may have had a shot at Bin Laden, but there are no sure things in such matters. And sure, Bush had been President for 8 months and the IC didn't detect and prevent the threat in time under his Administration. But seriously, we are going to assign blame on the sitting POTUS for an act of terror? Yes, the buck stops at the top, but let's save our sharp critique for the acts of POTUS for which they really deserve such critique.

I'm startled that you do not remember the endless "Blame Clinton!" posts we had on LP. It was said by some right wing delusionals that Osama bin Laden's head had been offered to Clinton on a silver platter by the Sudanese government. This myth was made up by the right wing delusionals but was just another myth which was easily refuted by patriots. This especially since OBL was not under international indictment at the time and could not have been legally apprehended. Despite it easily being refuted the delusionals continued to pretend Clinton was responsible for OBL remaining a menace.

tRUMP published a book called "The America We Deserve" in 2000 in which he claimed he pointed out OBL in some way to Clinton who supposedly refused to take him out. Later, Trump said he predicted the 9/11 attack which Clinton refused to heed. However, this claim has not been supported with any historical proof. But delusional right wingers went with the fake claim for years.

At first, Giuliani denounced the claim that Clinton was responsible for 9/11. Then when he ran for the republican nomination he suddenly decided that Clinton was a proper target and started to reecho the "Blame Clinton" garbage.

Despite all this right wing delusionals continued to pretend Clinton was to be blamed. Naturally, we patriots posted more than sufficient proof to refute any of the garbage. Clearly it was Bush who disregarded warnings that there was an attack - he even relaxed airport security measures which enabled 9/11.

Bottom line: blaming Clinton for 9/11 is an act of delusionalism. But it is and will always be par for the course for right wingers. If we had access to LP archives you would find an endless array of posts from mindless right wingers who repeatedly made this crazy, unproven, and unsupportable claim. Thayt remains a fact whether anyone chooses to believe the truth or not.

ohhh, I do recall these lines of argument. I didn't agree with them then nor now, nor the blaming of W by some, then or now.

I just think blaming Bill or W are both overreach.

Both can be critiqued, fairly, I think for various decisions made on all sorts of topics, in some cases quite sharply, but actually blaming either for this terrorist act's success is a bridge too far for me.

[Brooklyn]

ohhh, I do recall these lines of argument. I didn't agree with them then nor now, nor the blaming of W by some, then or now.

I just think blaming Bill or W are both overreach.

Both can be critiqued, fairly, I think for various decisions made on all sorts of topics, in some cases quite sharply, but actually blaming either for this terrorist act's success is a bridge too far for me.

Blaiming GWB is not an overreach. He was fully responsible for what happened under his regime.

Now compare the idiot in chief who says he "inherited a mess" from Obama while claiming to have successfully improved the economy. In fact Obama improved it, tRUMP screwed it by his futile handling of the trumpvirus which forced the economy's shutdown. Heck, I'll make a bet with you ~ in another year or so, I'm betting Petey, 6', or some other right winger will blame Obama and/or the Democrats for the trumpvirus and its consequences. Bear in mind that tRUMP has already attempted to blame Obama:

https://www.google.com/search?q=blame+o ... e&ie=UTF-8


Soon other right wing delusionals will do the same. It's just part of the mental illness so many of these people suffer from.

[MDlaxfan76]

ohhh, I do recall these lines of argument. I didn't agree with them then nor now, nor the blaming of W by some, then or now.

I just think blaming Bill or W are both overreach.

Both can be critiqued, fairly, I think for various decisions made on all sorts of topics, in some cases quite sharply, but actually blaming either for this terrorist act's success is a bridge too far for me.

Blaiming GWB is not an overreach. He was fully responsible for what happened under his regime.

Now compare the idiot in chief who says he "inherited a mess" from Obama while claiming to have successfully improved the economy. In fact Obama improved it, tRUMP screwed it by his futile handling of the trumpvirus which forced the economy's shutdown. Heck, I'll make a bet with you ~ in another year or so, I'm betting Petey, 6', or some other right winger will blame Obama and/or the Democrats for the trumpvirus and its consequences. Bear in mind that tRUMP has already attempted to blame Obama:

https://www.google.com/search?q=blame+o ... e&ie=UTF-8


Soon other right wing delusionals will do the same. It's just part of the mental illness so many of these people suffer from.

well, we'll just need to disagree on W.
I'm all for the buck stops here responsibility and humility, but I reject blaming Presidents for everything that happens.

We do agree that the economy was moving in a solid direction during Obama's tenure and that Trump inherited that momentum. And we do agree that some right wingers are quite delusional in their lack of recognition of such.

I'm actually not so sure that the economy was exactly healthy though, as like you I suspect, the concentration of wealth very much continued during Obama's tenure. Do we blame him for that? I don't. Why? Because I don't think he was actively working to make that happen, indeed he would have preferred the opposite, and he, like any other President, is constrained in how much they can actually do themselves.

I look at a combination of what happens during a President's tenure, sure, but I also look at what choices they make, their intent behind such choices, etc. I recognize that much of what happens is not actually in their control, powerful as they may be.

BTW, some (including Trump) have already tried to blame Covid on Obama...

[MDlaxfan76]

for kicks i'll take the under. they've now gone sufficiently past what my models suggest.

I hope/pray for the under too.

Cases and deaths seem to be going sideways now rather than continuing to drop. And if we just keep going sideways from here with no uptick from cold/flu season, that gets you to 300k by year end (1k per day x 120).

So still 3-5X what was being forecast back in late April, early May at the height of the Re-Open!!! hysteria.

i saw a rep from uhme last night or this morning do a 5 min interview on this. they asked him why the change and he said "they're seeing less adherence to mask use, look at the midwest states". i know they're dumbing it down some (but how does he even know that?), but every interview i see one of these folks make is the same and their projections just have seemed nonsensical. the 60-70k they stubbornly sat on until we were right up against it... we discussed this and i disliked it mostly bc it looked very much like it was affecting policy (it'd been reported repeatedly that the admin was using them). and at that point... nonsensical.

some states have been stubborn on deaths recently relative to cases and that's disconcerting, but there's too much we don't know about tests/cases to draw inferences from that other than if you look at it as black and white -- the bias right now is to the downside, not the upside. imo. and they have dropped about 20% from the peak, if not at the same rate as cases.

as far as cold/flu season, vectors for that are often schools and workplaces, which are more sparse vs a regular year. and it very well could be with the colder weather there'd be less interaction, not more, this year vs warmer months. or that'd be the guess here. i won't get started with t cells and immunity. colleges, i don't know what the population is, but at least there's guardrails there that may have not been there in the summer with "increased" testing on campuses and rules and regs.

of course, feel free to chalk it up to a rando on the internet. fine with that. we'll see!

interesting take on the earlier estimate, but I'm sure you recall that their projections were based on explicit assumptions of maintaining policy discipline and mobility rates...unfortunately not all adopted the policies and there was almost no policy discipline.

we'll disagree on this, but that's a cop out. they had death rates dropping a week out from 2,000 per day to under 500 (it takes longer than a week on average to die of the virus?) and this discussion was in late april. and it wasn't all of a sudden the first week of may that the floodgates were thrown wide open everywhere in the u.s. (even if it were, it takes a while on the lag). cases declined by a third until mid-june. between that, sweden and the interviews, i haven't been able to take them seriously.

I'd agree that their model adjustment did take longer than I thought necessary...but it was super clear what the assumptions were. They had this thing going to near zero in august...but only with universal policy discipline and social compliance through the end of June. It was pretty darn obvious that we weren't following the model's assumptions...that's what I was saying at the time too.

But yup, we knew in mid-late April, much less May, that there were big policy headwinds coming from the Oval Office down to governors. Foot dragging by some, impatience by nearly all states. Far, far from the universal behavior necessary.

yeah, we won't agree. there wasn't some switch turned on that made them miss their models. imo.
they did it all by themselves.
https://citymapper.com/cmi

the u.s. is not doing business as usual. and certainly didn't see some huge spike in may. i don't know all that they put into them, but from what i've seen on wide misses, not anticipating any policy changes as cerrain results rolled in, drawing conclusions on things like "decreased mask adherence" (maybe they've actually polled and filmed a lot of the u.s., so i'll try to reserve final judgment), and from dumbed down interviews what i believe to be rudimentary inputs... i'm where i am with them. their 70k projection wasn't one that included masks, masks, masks for everyone all of a sudden.

anyway. given their now large sized adjustments, i doubt the present admin follows them as much anymore. maybe they've got a new modeler?

The Administration has Dr Atlas...

I think you're asking too much of a medical model to be able to predict the stupidity that ensued politically. They laid out a model, made clear what their assumptions were (which did not include such political stupidity) and indeed fell far short on deaths projected versus what subsequently happened.

Indeed, they seem to continuously miss to the downside, as our social/political choices keep following a worse trajectory than their base case assumptions.

That's not exactly reassuring given this new extended projection.

Let's hope that they've overswung, (out of frustration?) and are assuming much worse political/social choices, or worse impacts, than actually occur. But even as of today, their model is short of the actual #'s rolling in.