zlacker

Recent events cast doubt on your judgment of the government there. Unlike e.g. New York they have dealt somewhat effectively with the pandemic. Seattle was hit first yet seems to have brought the situation under control with fewer deaths than other American cities. At the very least, they didn't force covid-positive patients into old folks' homes.

>>jessau+(OP)
There's a pretty big difference between Seattle and NYC in terms of size and population density. Like many orders of magnitude difference. But you're right that NYC didn't handle the outbreak very well.

>>VWWHFS+N1
MSA population: 19M/4M -> less than one order of magnitude

City population: 8.3M/750k -> one order of magnitude

City density: 28k/8400 -> less than one order of magnitude

This is not what one imagines when one encounters the sentence fragment "Like many orders of magnitude difference."

[EDIT:] Normally technical correctness is appreciated? If anyone here really thinks that New York has done a better job dealing with the pandemic than Washington State, I would love to see the reasoning. ISTM this argument from population proves too much; why can't it be invoked anytime New York's performance lags other states?

>>jessau+G2
you see there's a pretty big difference though

>>VWWHFS+43
They are not the same city, but no two cities are. Lots of denser and more populous cities in other nations have done better. Most of the most serious mistakes in New York were made at the state level; Washington State exhibited better governance. New York at least had some warning that the pandemic was coming. Washington had the USA patient zero.

>>jessau+G2
I figured by "one order of magnitude" you were trying to stress how different they were, but then I noticed you were the author of the post that was being refuted.

Beyond an order of magnitude in population, you have the cultural differences: Low usage of public transportation (compared to NYC), strict observation of social norms, comparatively high number of folks who can work from home, etc.

>>jessau+(OP)
There was a recent study that discussed the Washington response being so effective because it was based on an assumption that seems to have been wrong: that there was widespread, undetected transmission of the disease starting from the first case in the state on January 15.

The study results show that there was probably another case (or multiple) introduced around February 13, meaning that there had only been about two weeks of community transmission instead of the six that officials thought. But because they thought it had been spreading undetected for six weeks, they reacted very strongly and put in strict measures quickly.

So it was probably technically an "overreaction", but that's what made it so effective and kept the situation from getting as bad there as NYC and other places.

Here's an Ars Technica article about it: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/washingtons-covid-19...

And here's the actual study, which also includes a similar situation in early Europe cases: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.109322v1

>>jessau+(OP)
Well in Seattle, the major outbreak was in Kirkland at that senior center. We know now even in NYC, the vast majority of fatalities happened in senior and assisted living centers. Over 70% of fatalities in Canada, Ohio and other places have been elderly care centers[0].

It's pretty clear this disease wasn't anywhere near as bad as everyone was predicting, and I expect the 100k US fatality number to drop once a year has past and we can put some real data analysis on it. A lot of people have died due to not being able to get medical care too, and those 2nd order effects of these lockdowns will also be significant.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=70%25+fatalities+senior+centers+co...

>>djsumd+A91
what other singular event has killed 100k people in the US in less than 6 months outside of a couple wars?

not as bad as everyone was predicting...... are you fucking kidding me? and this number is after the major cities impacted literally fucking shut themselves down to help prevent the spread.

>>jatone+yt3
100k is a rough estimate. It might be higher, but will most likely be lower. The data will need to be pruned and carefully looked at. There are incentives for people to misclassify deaths at COVID19[0]. It will likely not get much higher than 100k as exponential growth doesn't continue indefinitely[1]. It's practically gone in Italy right now.

600k die every year from hearth disease. 700k died globally from mosquito transmitted illness[2]. There are tons of secondary effects. People in America have died of Malaria. Many have committed suicide (Including my best friend's flatmate). Many were told not to come to hospitals. Many hearth attacks were wrongly attributed to COVID if a patient tested positive for it.

We've seen massive amounts of people at beaches in Florida, Texas and other places, as well as these protests and riots, and there are no massive spikes in fatalities 2~4 weeks after those events. The WHO said asymptomatic spread was rare, then waked it back (probably because of political pressure from Dr Fauchi), even though it was known asymptomatic spread was probably not a major transmission in February[3]!

This entire thing has been one massive media manipulation, and in less than two days, the entire thing flipped from one global narrative to another, like a switch!

[0]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/#incen...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg

[2]: https://www.isglobal.org/en_GB/-/mosquito-el-animal-mas-leta...

[3]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomati...

>>djsumd+425
100k is a rough estimate. It might be higher, but will most likely be lower.

How is this going to happen? We haven't controlled the disease even by shutting lots of stuff down, and the political will does not exist to keep that stuff shut down. After everything reopens the disease will certainly kill more people. There won't be an effective vaccine until a great deal more research is done; that's a decade away at least. Effective treatments such as antibodies will not be scalable for many months. We'll be lucky if we hold USA covid deaths this year to 200k.