Meno_ wrote:MagsJ wrote:
"A’la EU stylee, and look how that worked out.
They obviously want to build links and be inna with these countries, at the expense of the US people and industries.. they want a piece of that Third-world economical-growth pie. Trade-blocking China from building major roads and whatnot, but it would be a happier picture if US citizens were also benefiting from these new trade deals and changes. That aspect is crazy, I agree.."
{I can't agree more
Euro centrism of say, 1500 plus years of dominance , can not be that easily whisked away.}
*UPDATE: One caveat is that a rough calculation applying the Santa Clara infection fatality rate to New York City's 11,000 COVID-19 deaths would imply that essentially all of city's residents have already been infected with the coronavirus. This seems implausible.
phyllo wrote:From the linked article :*UPDATE: One caveat is that a rough calculation applying the Santa Clara infection fatality rate to New York City's 11,000 COVID-19 deaths would imply that essentially all of city's residents have already been infected with the coronavirus. This seems implausible.
Carleas wrote:What do you mean by odd, and what specifically is it that you find odd?
"We have serious doubts about whether these experiments should be conducted at all," wrote Tom Inglesby of Johns Hopkins University and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard. "[W]ith deliberations kept behind closed doors, none of us will have the opportunity to understand how the government arrived at these decisions or to judge the rigor and integrity of that process."
That's not the same kind of oddness. I am talking about the behavior of experts and politicians.
We're in the middle of a once-a-century pandemic, so by many definitions everything about the current global situation is odd.
So you assume it is likely that there would experimentation like this in a lab in the city and also do not mention that the lab raised concerns about safety issues.Given that we're in a pandemic, how likely is it that it was first identified in a city with a research laboratory dedicated to studying this kind of virus? That depends on how many such laboratories there are, how many of them are in places where diseases with pandemic potential are likely to jump from animals to people, how much likely such a disease is to be in an area where an above average part of the population is an expert in the disease that's identified, etc.
I find the wording a bit tough to understand, despite it being in English, but correct me if I am wrong...Here is an article from 2006, about how multiple infectious disease labs were built in the area of China in which the 2003 SARS epidemic began, not too distant from Wuhan. Is that odd?
Then why has no one in the mainstream media mentioned this once they finally focused on the issue? That would quickly dispel some of the oddness. I appreciate you did some work to find some data.For US funding, what percent of labs that do this kind of work are US funded? We hear a lot about the Wuhan lab, but given that a lab is studying this kind of disease, how likely is it that the US is funding them? The CDC spent more than $600m in 2019 on "Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases", of which about $750k went to the Wuhan lab ($3.7m over 5 years). Presumably some part of the remaining >$599,250,000 went to other labs, probably also located in parts of the world that have generated multiple potential pandemics in the past decade. Given that there's a lab in a city with an outbreak, how likely is it that it's a US-funded lab? Seems pretty likely.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:Stanford study concludes that death rate from Covid19 no different from regular flu.
The complaints are that 1) the tests used had a high false-positive rate, 2) the study may have selected for people at higher risk of having the disease, and 3) the results imply a rate of spread that is implausibly high.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:China is not an ally
Karpel Tunnel wrote:The US government invested money in a lab that was working on corona viruses on the specific species of bat said to be the source of the virus.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:it meantions that a lot of scientists thought this type of research was dangerous and should be banned.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:That's not the same kind of oddness.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:So you assume it is likely that there would experimentation like this in a lab in the city and also do not mention that the lab raised concerns about safety issues.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:The disease has already spread from the region via humans. The labs were built after the earlier SARS outbreak, or?
Carleas wrote:This is absolutely true. According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, GDP fell $191.2 billion in Q1 2020. Q2 will probably be worse, and estimates of the total cost when it's all over are $1-2trillion.
For comparison, I did some math around the value on the other side of the scale: the dollar value of lives lost to COVID (see spreadsheet here), and my quick and dirty estimate is that the value of life lost from COVID in the US is at least $8 billion, and may be higher than $20 billion.
My method is very rough, and I can think of a few ways that it can be improved, but here is how I arrived at those numbers:
I found life expectancy data from the Social Security Administration, which shows how many years of life a person of a given age can expect. I couldn't find national demographics for COVID deaths by age, so I used NY death demographics as a proxy. Since their numbers are in age bands, I averaged the life expectancy for all the ages in a band, and I used the male life expectancy because 1) men die more frequently from COVID, and 2) men don't live as long. To exclude those who would have died anyway, I used the %, I used the numbers for people who either don't have a preexisting condition or for whom it is unknown whether or not they have a preexisting condition. That gave me [average years left] * [number dead (60966 on 4/30)] = [total lost years]. I then found estimates for the value of a year of life. There was significant variation, but I did the math for both $50k and $129k: [value of a year of life] * [total lost years] = [dollar cost of loss of life]. The result is $8,517,131,122.25, assuming $50k per life-year, and $21,974,198,295.41 assuming 129k per life-year.
Issues with this approach:
As the wiki page points out, there are better ways to estimate lives in dollars, but I don't know how to do the estimate using QALYs. On the one hand, my estimate may overestimate the true cost, because it treats life-years for all ages as equal in value, which we can be pretty sure they aren't.
On the other hand, I exclude the majority of deaths completely, which is definitely wrong, and probably orders of magnitude larger in effect: deaths with preexisting conditions under 65 are about a quarter of all deaths, and most of those will have a non-zero number of years left. I've basically treated those people as already dead.
Generalizing from the NY data probably isn't perfect.
Using only the male data isn't perfect, and under-counts the cost by 1-5 years per person.
The cost in lost GDP is for Q1, but most deaths tool place in Q2.
The cost in lost GDP includes the cost of both the loss of life and the lockdown-generated economic collapse.
Some additional questions:
- How many lives has lockdown saved? How many lives will it save? This estimates cost of what has happened, not what would have happened. If we think the lockdown has cut deaths in half, it's a very different outcome from what it would be if we think it was only cut by 5%.
- What percent of the loss of GDP is caused by formal lockdown, as opposed to voluntary social distancing? Sweden, the poster child for a less mandatory approach, still saw a 75% drop in movement. Does that mean that formal lockdowns are only responsible for the difference between that and whatever results they're seeing? Note also that Sweden's approach doesn't seem to have improved its economic outcomes (their economic losses are projected to be larger than Denmark and Norway, who have more aggressive lockdowns -- would like to know Gloominary's reaction to this as well).
And they have run large scale naval exercises meant to intimidate each other. Trade relations and being an ally are not the same. The whole Evil Axis, as labeled by the West, they have supported. The Cold War referred to in the articles I linked earlier. Russia and the US had treaties and trade during the much of the Cold War. They were not allies. The fact that China one of the few nations considered a real threat to the US given its nuclear arsenal, China's allies true allies, political style and the tensions that have been present for awhile, again.Carleas wrote:This is just too simple a summary of US-China relations. The countries are trade partners, parties to many treaties, the US has provided aid to China for decades. They cooperate frequently, and haven't had open military conflict since the end of the Vietnam war. It's true that there are territorial disputes, but by that standard Canada and Norway are at war over an island off Greenland.
I think it is very questionable that we would cooperate with them on easily weaponized research - part of the concerns of both the state dept. official and scientists - when we are concerned about their cyber warfare, nuclear stockpiles and actions in the region. I think it is very odd we were extending and expanding the research after State department officials said they were not meeing safety standards and also were concerned about the nature of the research. And it can easily be weaponized. Perhaps we did do research in labs in Russia during the cold war that could potentially lead to ways to improve nuclear weapons, and this was done in a lab State department officials said was not run well, but I'm a bit skeptical.The important point is that we cooperate with them on tons of things, it isn't at all surprising or suspicious that we cooperate with them on disease research, including by funding their labs located near to the epicenter of a previous potential pandemic outbreak.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:The US government invested money in a lab that was working on corona viruses on the specific species of bat said to be the source of the virus.
I don't think it was the exact bat species that was the source of the earlier disease, horseshoe or whatever it was this time. The complaining state dept officials were concerned about management and staff weaknesses in one memo and in another that there was a chance the lab would be the source of a SARS like pandemic.When you put it that way, it sounds suspicious. But it sounds down right boring if you point out that those bats were also the source of the last outbreak of a potential pandemic, that the funding began following that outbreak, and the lab is in the part of the world where those bats live and where that outbreak started.
Carleas wrote:How has life expectancy changed in the course of those decades? In the US it's recently fallen, but that's only happened in the past ~5 years. Prior to that it's been a steady upward trend. And globally the trend has been even better, with no drop off (pre-COVID, the virus that's actually killing people).MagsJ wrote:This isn’t new news, but here we still are, discussing a very serious matter.. decades later.
Gloominary wrote:Yup, medicine use to be more about holistic healing, then it became more about managing symptoms, keeping the sick alive, and dependent, and now it's gotten even worse, now it's about depopulation, mass murder, it's not medicine at all.
As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.
It is objectivist to consider it a calamity. That's a word with a built in negative evaluation. You are saying that if either of these groups manages to win the debates and swing things too far, bad things will happen. That's an objectivist evaluation of the consequences. Doesn't mean it's bad for you to be making an objectivist evaluation, but it's an implicit objectivist appeal. You're a part of the club.iambiguous wrote:So, in my view, if the objectivists from either end of the political spectrum prevail, it will truly be a calamity of epic proportions. Especially here in America where the overwhelming prepondeance of infections and deaths continue to prevail.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:It is objectivist to consider it a calamity. That's a word with a built in negative evaluation. You are saying that if either of these groups manages to win the debates and swing things too far, bad things will happen. That's an objectivist evaluation of the consequences. Doesn't mean it's bad for you to be making an objectivist evaluation, but it's an implicit objectivist appeal. You're a part of the club.iambiguous wrote:So, in my view, if the objectivists from either end of the political spectrum prevail, it will truly be a calamity of epic proportions. Especially here in America where the overwhelming preponderance of infections and deaths continue to prevail.
I'm not as pretentious as Moe.I'm coming closer and closer to making you Moe here. Alas, KT becomes less challenging with each post.
phyllo wrote:I'm not as pretentious as Moe.I'm coming closer and closer to making you Moe here. Alas, KT becomes less challenging with each post.
This month’s edition of Men’s Health delves into that question in an article titled “Which Stooge Are You?” Senior Editor Ron Geraci asked psychologists if the Three Stooges might represent some basic personality types found in men. When Geraci called them, the psychologists howled at first. But then they saw some truth in the Men’s Health thesis: Men are all variations of Moe, Larry or Curly.
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