Did you catch it ?

[PeterNSteinmetz]

We didn't have the type of information to know what steps to take.

The term "foolishly" may only apply with 20/20 hind sight. If it were more deadly, we would be glad of the lock-downs, social distancing, and so forth. More people are dying that what is normal this time of year, in the places with higher population such as NYC.
There is a new theory that suggests this virus originated outside of Wuhan- I note that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (emphasis mine):

"In early April, a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) raised the eyebrows of a number of genomic epidemiologists. It suggested that there were three distinct variants of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, spreading in different regions of the world—one predominantly in Australia and North America, one in China, and one in Europe. It also suggested that the variant circulating in North America and Australia was older than the one that appeared in Wuhan, China, at the end of December (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2020, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2004999117).

If this were true, the outbreak of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, would have started outside Wuhan, which contradicts scientific consensus."
https://cen.acs.org/biological-chem...letter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=CEN
Original reference:
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241

That is correct, we didn’t have very good information. So in my view, you don’t then start coercing people to do things they don’t otherwise want to do, unless you are really certain that what they are going to do or do is an imminent threat of serious injury or death to other people. Sort of a live and let live philosophy. It the politicians had followed that precept, we likely would have had a lot less collateral damage.

If it is clearly such a terribly dangerous virus that people having casual contact are an imminent threat, it will not be necessary to coerce people, particularly when any person can choose to stay home and avoid it if they want to.

Thanks for the link about the different strains. Interesting.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

More people are dying that what is normal this time of year, in the places with higher population such as NYC.

Is that true and there is a new report out? My understanding was that the MMMR from the start of April had failed to show an increase in total mortality. Though I did not note the New York numbers specifically.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

"In early April, a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) raised the eyebrows of a number of genomic epidemiologists. It suggested that there were three distinct variants of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, spreading in different regions of the world—one predominantly in Australia and North America, one in China, and one in Europe. It also suggested that the variant circulating in North America and Australia was older than the one that appeared in Wuhan, China, at the end of December (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2020, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2004999117).

If this were true, the outbreak of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, would have started outside Wuhan, which contradicts scientific consensus."

I had a quick look at this paper and it is definitely interesting. Seems like the closest relations to the bat virus are in China and the USA. It then seems to spread through east asia and China principally. Their figure 1 is quite intriguing to look at.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

My opinion is that things spread so rapidly that by the time one knows it is bad, or going to be so, it is already too late to decide to lock everything down. The world is was much more connected now than it ever was.

I suspect all attempts at quick initial lockdowns are basically going to fail in our very interconnected world. With a virus like this, where it takes a few weeks from when you catch it until you die, it will be quite a while before doctors in the region notice that something is amiss. The first case or two one thinks "hmm... that is strange, I wonder what happened to that patient" but it is not so obviously different than some random normal event. Then after a few more show up you start to thing, something may be going on here. With this type of virus that is often after many more people have been infected and likely infected someone who travelled halfway around the world. Definitely a challenging environment in that respect.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I would answer, "I don't know." To which I would add, "I don't think you know either." There simply isn't enough apples-to-apples data. NYC is not Omaha (to use the same example) in many more ways than population and population density.

Thanks for replying p, but that is sort of begging the question and not answering my question. Is there any sort of evidence which would persuade you that these lockdowns have not worked? That is the critical question.

If you can’t name any, then the belief in their efficacy is a non-falsifiable belief. There is no point then acting like it has to do with evidence because it doesn’t.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Sure... comparison of two near identical locations with similar demographics, population, geography, etc. We may see that as other states (not including NY, which is unique) start lifting lockdowns while others don't. Until then, it's a judgement call. I'm glad I'm not the one who has to make the call.

Ok, so which pairs of states would qualify as close enough in your judgement? Or how close would they have to be in quantitative terms? Also which demographic characteristics would matter do you think?

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

You've got 1404 posts on this forum and I dare say 1398 of them have been dedicated to explaining in great detail how you've found irrefutable evidence that coercive lock downs have not been shown to be effective and that anyone disagrees with your evidence is not going to change their mind and therefore is not worth bothering to discuss the issue with.

We get it. You're right, everyone else is wrong. Please post your address so we can send you the 'I was right on the Internet' medal. Happy now?

Pretty serious issue, don’t you think? The WHO projecting 250 million people will die of starvation due to economic damage from this thing. Likely that a fair share of that is due to these coercive lockdowns.

I would not say there is irrefutable evidence they don’t work. What I would say is that there is no good evidence they do work.

I will also further clarify. I do not think it is not worth continuing a discussion simply because someone disagrees with me. Rather, if another person cannot conceive of evidence which would persuade them of the truth of the proposition I am advocating, then there is no point in continuing. Their beliefs are non-falsifiable and no need to discuss those. Just creates unnecessary friction.

But hey, if you aren’t interested, then feel free to ignore those posts. This is a Covid-19 thread, not about flying, and sort of being tolerated by the moderators for now. Or if you really believe that fraction of posts, ignore me.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. If we knew, and if we had good data, we could weight the data to get a definitive answer. But we can't. That's the problem.

Well, I think you said you would not assert that the coercive lockdown prevents the spread of Covid-19 in terms of deaths or cases, but rather that you didn’t know, is that correct?

So then the policy question would be - if no one knows do you think it is ok to coerce people when we don’t know? That is essentially a political question, not a scientific one.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

By the way, legal coercion is not the only kind that exists. There is also economic coercion, such as when a governor recently decreed that any employees who refuse to return to work when meat-packing plants are ordered to reopen, because they think it's too dangerous, will be denied unemployment compensation. Is it right to coerce people to work in situations where there is inadequate personal protective equipment and social distancing provisions? In other words, is it right to coerce employees to work in a situation that hasn't been scientifically proven to be safe?

Firstly, if the governor decreed it, isn’t that a form of coercion by the government? Or legal coercion?

Or maybe you mean there is coercion by violence and threats of violence and coercion by threatening to take people’s property away? Of course you can usually only do the latter for longer periods of time or with larger amounts by threatening to do the former.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

You hit the nail on the head with that last sentence.

My answer would be that in a national emergency, we don't have the luxury of waiting for scientific proof of what the best course of action is. In situations like that, people who have been placed in positions of authority have a responsibility to evaluate the relative risks of various courses of action using whatever information is available at the time.

During the "Spanish" flu pandemic that started in 1918, if governments had waited for scientific proof that their mandatory restrictions would work, the final death count would likely have been far higher.

The U.S. instituted a draft more than a year before the Pearl Harbor attack. That's about as coercive as a legal mandate can get. If we had waited until there was proof that we would be forced into the war before instituting the draft, the year delay in building up our forces would have likely resulted in FAR higher casualties than we ended up with.

Sort of a purely political post, so likely best to discuss separately if you really want to.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

No one has produced sufficient evidence lock downs work. Like I said, you win. The question is, so what do you win? Its a bunch of old pilots on the internet. Nothing I nor anyone else on this forum does will have any impact on lockdowns. They stormed the Michigan capital building with guns yesterday for pity sake. And today? Michigan is still locked down. Didn't change a thing.

So yeah you're right, lockdowns don't work. That and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee somewhere. You being right changes nothing.

Well thanks for clarifying and sorry I missed your point.

While it certainly is largely a bunch of old pilots on the internet, I guess I am more hopeful that by raising awareness amongst the public that there is no good reason for these lockdowns, and even protesting in front of a statehouse, that we will bring an end to them sooner, thereby reducing the destruction and loss of life caused by these policies.

We are starting to see increasing resistance. Hopefully lawmakers will get the message and it will accelerate their leaving people alone.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Sadly, I doubt that will happen. The nature of public office attracts too many sociopathic power junkies with paraphilic domination and control fetishes. They get their rocks off on this sort of ****.

Rich

You may be right. But I believe we must try persuasion first and exhaust that as a possibility before other means are required. And simple refusal to comply, when done by enough people, can be a powerful force.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I wonder if showing up armed-to-the-teeth at and INSIDE the Michigan legislative chamber counts as "coercive."

Well, some would argue there are levels of coercion, from offering candy as a reward to using violence. I tend to be most concerned about those, normally propagated by criminals and the government, involving the use of force or threats thereof. Clearly these protestors made no direct threats.

It certainly was legal as firearms carriage is legal in the statehouse there. I always say better to show tyrants the weapons which will be used against them before it becomes necessary to use them.

I have a rather different reaction than that mentioned by MuseChaser to seeing protestors. If they are protesting the government I almost always have an initial reaction in favor of them and their position. Then I sometimes have to stop and think more carefully if what they are saying is actually pro-freedom (which many times it is not). So I guess individual reactions vary. But then I had very positive experiences with protests during the Vietnam and civil rights era as a youth.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Regardless, are stay at home orders the right move? Depends on which report you read. What will be interesting is if they reissue these orders when the "predicted" 2nd SARS-2 wave hits.

I will re-iterate and I suspect you know what is coming. There is NO empirical evidence that the coercive lockdown measures have decreased Covid-19 deaths or cases. Please show me a preprint or paper that says it does. I do not know what "reports" you are referring to but would be happy to see any serious study (not some talking head) which shows that coercive lockdowns help here.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Protests and disruption do nothing to convince people on the other side, and it alienates people in the middle who might otherwise have been swayed by logical argument. All it does it fire up the people protesting. This goes for a myriad of issues, not just this one.

This has been studied fairly seriously. Interesting article on this at Quartz - https://qz.com/901411/political-protests-are-effective-but-not-for-the-reason-you-think/

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Wouldn't be a bad idea to hope for a $1000/hr minimum wage and abolishing all taxes while you're at it. If you're gonna dream, might as well dream big.

I'll go for the abolishing taxes part.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Of course theres no current evidence. How can you have a "serious study" when the data is still being collected and quantified? Will there be? Yes. And it will be sooner than later with all the resources being thrown at all factions of the SARS pandemic. Just look at the number of prelim studies coming out of major universities and think tanks. As to the stay at home orders, once they determine their controls/knowns I'll bet a dollar you'll have your empirical evidence one way or another as there are a lot of people who want to ensure the next crisis point is handled better. I just wonder where we would be today had we known last December what we found out about in March?

Well, the one serious study we have looking at the data through last week, so about 8 weeks, by Reilly shows there is no effect of coercive lockdowns on Covid-19 deaths or confirmed cases, after controlling for population and population density (available here: https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/22/there-is-no-empirical-evidence-for-these-lockdowns/).

So one study says no effect. No studies say there is an effect. So I don't think this is well described as "some reports say one thing, others say another". The preponderance of the present evidence indicates no effect.

Definitely agree that better knowledge earlier of what was going on would have helped. The communist government of China may have done some significant harm there.

Another note on the lack of this kind of study. I have been searching pretty hard for references of studies where they empirically looked at whether interventions have slowed down epidemics. They have been surprisingly difficult too find. So far nothing but I am continuing the literature review.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

In Wickenburg AZ today we had several businesses opening. Police visited and showed the governor's order and said they had to clear the dining area. The owner said "I will not comply" and the police left. So far no arrests, 90 days in jail sentences, or big fines which Governor Ducey threatened last Wednesday. The sheriffs in Pinal and Mojave county said they will not permit and legal action to be taken in their counties based on his order. Several reasonable size protests about it over the last several weeks.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I guess you didn't look enough. The one below is from MIT. Do I think the stay at home orders in their current form were correct on face value? No. But we wont know until all the data is in.
http://news.mit.edu/2020/new-model-quantifies-impact-quarantine-measures-covid-19-spread-0416

Actually I have seen that paper before. I suppose it may be a bit unreasonable to expect pilots generally on a pilot's board to be able to read these very technical papers (and forgive me if you specifically are comfortable reading and interpreting this type of study).

If you read the paper itself (available here https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.03.20052084v1.full.pdf), rather than the summary at the news site, you will see that it is not an empirical study examining growth of the rate of cases with and without coercive lockdowns and comparing them statistically. (Little news snippets written by press agents or reporters often overplay the meaning or significance of a study and contain somewhat overblown and misleading quotes.)

Here is a brief overview of what the authors did. They tried to fit the rate of cases with two standard epidemiological models and it didn't fit so well. That was because of a commonly observed downturn in the growth rate of cases of Covid-19. They then added an additional 'quarantine' function which was learned from part of the data and showed that it gave a better fit to the data than the older models. Though they did not quantify the improvement in fit in a statistical sense relative to the noise in the dataset, but the improvements certainly look good.

This modeling study is not empirical evidence that the quarantine worked in the real world. It does claim that an additional function, beyond the classical models, is needed to fit what is going on with reported cases in those regions. But the effects which give rise to that function could be due to a whole bunch of possible causes -- could be the coercive lockdowns, could be voluntary social distancing, or could just be the natural course of this particular illness operating on a susceptible population which is smaller than the entire population.

I will also note that the data in the US does not show a difference in the level of this downturn between states with and without coercive lockdowns -- it seems to be there for both types of states. I have looked and this may form part of an upcoming preprint.

I do agree that a casual reader of the news release would conclude that this was a study which showed that quarantines work. However, I would still say one serious study showing that coercive lockdowns don't work and none that show they do. If you are comfortable critically parsing this type of work, happy to discuss its strengths and pitfalls in terms of attributing causation to coercive lockdown measures.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Here's a poll taken from April 24th to 26th.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/29/poll-voters-second-wave-coronavirus-216165

One way to interpret these results is that yes US citizens have been persuaded to buy into a very ill-advised and counter-productive lockdown strategy. The government went on a big PR blitz on this back in March to try and get people to comply with what they thought was the only way to deal with this. Given their resources, I am not surprised it was a successful PR campaign. "flattening the curve" and all that. Every person on my neighborhood board had suddenly become an expert on epidemiology and the need to "flatten the curve".