You’ll have to explain this further please. — I like sushi

You're entire analysis is predicated on people dying shortly without a job and there's nothing that can be done about that.

You are quite explicit that saving 1 life in the US maybe at the cost of 1000 Indian lives. I took note that these are only "maybes" but for this maybe argument to work requires the presupposition that no policy exists to mitigate the consequences of wage slavery.

I am taking issue with your argument even in it's apathetic "maybe" form.

There is no ‘social distancing’ in India among the poor and they have, like many, many less developed nations, a severe lack of beds equipment and facilities. They are more concerned about starving than the virus. — I like sushi

You base this on what?

It is entirely possible to social distance among the poor as well as for the poor to benefit from social distancing among the well-to-do (such as travel restrictions etc.).

Iran is a poor country that ran the unmitigated spread experiment; there was no economic benefit for bold unmitigated spread and they went into lock-down.

I agree, starving is an issue. However, government policies that slow the spread of the virus and government policies that avoid starvation (as in avoid far more starvation than unmitigated spread of the virus) are not mutually exclusive. You are ignoring the fact governments can do something about starvation.

If Western government's are concerned about starvation in poor countries they too have policies available other than sacrificing their citizens to the virus to get economic growth rolling again. They can send food, funds and supply chain support.

You have setup a false dichotomy that leads to what you believe is a good point which is:

To repeat. I am not saying developed countries should or shouldn’t stop lockdown. I have said I am concerned that they will be far too cautious in lifting the lockdowns due to media pressures and scaremongering (maybe not in those words though). I’ve also stated that if there are few cases and it’s not dealt with elsewhere it will come back in waves unless strict measures are put in place to inhibit global movement (which will likely hurt the poorest even more). — I like sushi

Without your false dichotomy, being cautious is not a big problem that results in many poor dying.

When faced with an enormous risk, caution is advised. Keeping people alive and fed is not a very difficult policy task as supply chains and houses still exist.

Why the UK and US have been so desperate to avoid such policies is because it sets a bad precedent of market failure and the ease at which governments can intervene to correct such market failures; however, it's simply an unavoidable conclusion in this situation so even they are implementing such "people bailouts", just reactively and inefficiently while ensuring plenty of bailout money to the investor class is both more swift and more generous, instead of proactively and without large amounts of corruption.

To backtrack a bit:

The US and UK don’t have ‘strong institutions’. Compared to what countries? — I like sushi

I was very specific that the US and UK do not have strong social collectivist institutions to insulate people from dying due to market forces, compared to welfare state countries (i.e. continental Europe, Japan, South Korea, with a large variations in strength). In numerical terms, the life expectancy of poor people in the US and UK is significantly lower than the wealthy classes.

If you are talking about other institutions like the military, the US and UK do have these social collectivist institutions well funded, but they do not many insulate people from dying of market forces.

I don't think it's controversial that the US lacks such institutions.

It maybe more of interest the case of the UK, which has nominally welfare state institutions but has been mostly simply under-funding them since Thatcher in an attempt to get to the US system.

England has seen “significant widening” in life expectancy between rich and poor people, largely because of a fall in how long women in the most deprived parts of the country live, the latest figures show.1

The Office for National Statistics data show that life expectancy at birth of males living in England’s most deprived areas was 74.0 years in the years 2015 to 2017, whereas it was 83.3 years in the least deprived, a gap of 9.3 years. — British Medical Journal - though doesn't seem an academic paper, just reporting on such papers and is simply the first search engine hit I get

Why the lack of strong welfare state institutions, such as public healthcare, housing and money for the poor and infirm, paid sick leave, free education, strong union legal protections, minimum wage and worker and consumer protections, public transportation, is that both dealing with the virus itself as well as the economic consequences of the virus is far harder without these institutions already in place.

A few examples:

1. Without public health care and paid sick leave, people have the habit of simply working sick; this increases the spread of the virus and results in people only seeking care when it becomes an emergency or then just dying at home either actually preferring death to medical debt or then simply fearing it so much as to miscalculate when death is nearly inevitable without care.

2. Without welfare programs that keep the poor and infirm in good conditions, their conditions rapidly deteriorate with a disruption such as the lock-downs. Whatever they were depending on to manage to live is far more tenuous than well funded government institutions providing a better help. It also creates an additional problem to solve of housing homeless people compared to a system where homeless people are already housed.

3. Without strong worker protections and unions, then people simply live far more precarious lives (less wages and more predatory lending and unhealthy products) and are less able to deal with any disruption; and trying to "one-off" such institutional actions with one-time payments is far harder to implement. I.e. people need help sooner but will get it later due to this institutional setup.

4. Lives of students is far less disrupted if education is free and they already get a stipend and housing to live on.

5. Efficient public transport is highly correlated to working one's way out of poverty. Yes, gasoline prices have crashed, but if one can't repair one's car and there's no efficient public transportation option, one is already maxed out on predatory debt, then one is easily in the classed American catch-22 of needing a car to get a job but needing a job to afford to buy / repair one's car. Furthermore, well-kept public infrastructure in general means that faced with a large economic disruption these existing investments continue to payout massive public dividends, whereas a dealing with failing and inefficient public infrastructure becomes an additional problem.

The above is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope gives some insight into why the poster-child case of welfare state institutions, Scandinavia, where I live precisely because of these institutions, people are annoyed by the lock-downs, and it's highly disruptive, but no one is fearing starting to death. People have already got bailout money, including gig economy workers due to a simple tweak in unemployment law.

Of course, not everyone in the world benefits from such an institutional framework and there will be many poor people dying from knock-on economic effects. Where my position differs from yours is that the lesson from the pandemic is to build such institutions wherever they are lacking, without delay, rather than try to "time it right" so as to be sure to start sacrificing people to the virus as soon as their sacrifice will help more wage slaves by getting back to normal and putting all the obvious and enormous examples of market failures behind us, never to speak of them again (like the media managed to do after the 2007-09 crisis).

If I sound callous sometimes, forgive me. I’m simply not inclined to think short term about these things. Such thinking can look like a lack of apathy — I like sushi

Don't be so hard on yourself, I think we're all here willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're extremely apathetic.

For instance, not bothering to read what's already been discussed here and address existing counter arguments to your position. A very time honored apathetic virtue found often in many schools of conservative thought.

The first problem in your analysis is that wage slavery (dying within a few weeks without a job) is not a necessary state of affairs.

The second problem in your analysis is that you're using numbers of deaths based on social distancing and economic shutdowns. If you want to "continue as normal" for the sake of the economy then you need to estimate deaths and casualties in that scenario. You can not take the benefits of social distancing and then compare that number to some number of knock-on deaths of economic shutdown.

An unmitigated spread of the virus in the US, for instance, would result, based on what we know so far, in millions of deaths based on case fatality rate so far and a health system so overwhelmed that essentially no one else can be treated for curable problems.

If your argument is "maybe the virus isn't so bad", which does have a very small but not entirely zero chance, then lock-down is still necessary to establish such a fact, as if it's wrong and current case infection fatality and hospitalization estimates are correct then the result is millions dead, a health system severely damaged and no one else getting adequate care for any other problem for a while.

I think it’s easy not to think about this as it serves us to only take limited responsibility. I’m just saying if an comprehensive analysis is done and turns out that different actions could’ve saved literally millions of lives we can say with false comfort ‘maybe’ because it would cover up the horror of understanding that maybe for every one of ‘our own people’ we saved it led to the deaths of one thousand ‘others’. — I like sushi

A valiant effort to string together a bunch of maybes to get to the conclusion that "we need to sacrifice people for the economy". If the numbers can't be lined up within the US, then maybe some imagined series of facts can make the numbers lined up elsewhere and every American that is sacrificed saves thousands of others in a far off land.

Again, deaths from joblessness in India is a resource allocation problem that can be solved outside the market. Not perfectly, there will be many knock-on economic casualties, but it is far easier to save people's lives by just getting people food by just transferring them money and then try to solve economic problems, than it is to save people's lives in an unmitigated spread of the virus.

The reality of the situation is that non-market-based distribution of resources can simply work, which is why each country where the virus outbreaks we find the leaders within all come to the same conclusion that the consequences of unmitigated spread of the virus has far, far more terrible consequences than trying to solve the economic problems by social collectivist actions. In countries that already have strong social collectivist institutions, these policies are fairly simple and easy to implement.

In countries that don't have such strong institutions, such as the US and the UK, there was much more delay as the conceptual and organizational cost is much higher and the practical results much less efficient, but the logic is inescapable which is why Trump and Boris Johnson have come to the same policies as elsewhere (and the delay and mixed-messages simply caused more damage and costs than was necessary).

However, the conclusion to draw is not that in some alternative fantasy based view of the world that this point of view is only "short term" and there is a more noble "long term" analysis available where saving people's lives now is a selfish thing and just letting the virus take it's course to maintain market based distribution of resources would be the altruistic thing ultimately saving more peoples lives. Rather, the conclusion to draw is that large systemic shocks is 1. just another in a long list of reasons to have institutions that care for all members of society insulating them from death due to market forces, 2. that neo-liberal arguments that free-trade and deregulation (that results in outsourcing critical production and not even stockpiling critical stuff but efficient "just in time" supply chains) is simply analytically wrong, 3. electing a corrupt narcissist with limited analytical abilities who then spent years purging the bureaucracy of people unwilling to lie and grift wherever they interfere with corrupt scheming results in a sub-optimal strategy and execution in the face of a real crisis, 4. electing someone incompetent enough to believe a preventative team, in this case to prevent a pandemic, is a waste of resources as those people can simply be re-hired in the event they are needed and will do just as good a job under such a management paradigm, again, has all the expected consequences.

I expect he'll pull through, but he's sicker than they're admitting. I don't think we'll be seeing much of him for a while. I'd be more concerned about his partner who's pregnant and not responsible for having a dummy of a bf who thought shaking hands with COVID patients was a good idea. — Baden

Yes, I agree its statistically likely he'll survive. Even on a respirator, half of patients survive, and I think UK is democratic enough to be obliged to say the PM can no longer lead; so I don't think it would be at that 50-50 prognosis state at the moment.

However, unless it really was "just some tests" -- maybe a happy photo opp will emerge -- he'd be well over the roughly 1% risk profile of his age group if this is a sign it's getting serious, which would then explain the no recent photo and maybe queen speech. But yes, definitely all only speculation for now.

Definitely feels that way.

Doesn't seem to be a photo from today, which would of course reassure the public if it was just tests.

May also explain why the queen made a appearance on the tele, if there's real worry of Boris's prospects then the queen would be a comforting figure of governing continuity.

It would be a truly bizarre turn of events for UK politics ... we may need to get the brexit thread spinning again to think about it.

A or B? No other options. No buiilding more respirators etc. Assume under Option A we built as many respirators as humanly possible but one man didn't get one. — Hanover

There is no dichotomy here.

No one is claiming the lockdowns won't have lethal knock-on effects that can be statistically quantified.

Furthermore, the social distancing measures take such considerations into account. We could truly lock everyone inside, no leaving at all. Why don't we? Because most people would starve to death. Ok, so we let people go out to get food and the food supply chain run. We could stop there. Why don't we? Because if people can't get a water pipe fixed they might thirst to death or can't flush the toilet leading to dysentery and/or cholera problem etc. So we let plumbers go around fixing problems. And this logic continues until we hit activities that simply don't have a life-saving component that is greater than the life-saving benefit of social distancing to mitigate the virus.

The entire concept of "essential service" already has the resolution of your dichotomy built in.

You are simply refusing to engage with what's going on and why even Trump is now advocating for and trying to organize, as haphazardly as that organization maybe, this basic idea.

I could be wrong (no shit), but don't we end up with the same number eventually infected whether we isolate or not? — Hanover

Total number of eventual infected is not a constant.

As people get the disease and recovered (and immune), many still vulnerable people just end up being surrounded by these immune people and just don't end up getting exposed.

This depends on how easily a disease spreads as well as society's response.

In this particular virus, "letting it burn" in a totally unmitigated way would likely end up infecting 80-90% of the population within a short period of time. The "slow burn" of whatever social distancing maintains a functioning healthcare system, would likely infect less than 50% of the population. It can be much less depending on the policies taken. It also then buys time to understand more and build up equipment capacity to better treat everyone. Outcomes are radically different between an unmitigated spread, an overwhelming due to too slow response in preparing and social distancing, and an optimum strategy.

Though I see @Baden has replied much the same while I drafted this answer.

The better question is whether you want more preventable deaths or not. Would you shut down the economy like we've done to save a single person? Probably not. 1m people? Probably so. Now we just need to figure out the specific number we can let die. It's somewhere between 1 and 1m, but it is a number. Do you acknowledge we agree in principle that there is such a number and our only quibble is what that actual number is? — Hanover

If priority is human life, then the balance is simply where the social distancing measures are doing more harm than good in terms of life saving quantity; such an analysis could also be done in a weighted "quality of life years left".

However, the "real problem" is not simply applying this simple concept of implementing social distancing until it does more harm than good, but rather the value of the economy as an engine of inequality (making the rich richer, mainly through diversified stock increases and dividends) and social control (keeping most people wage slaves who have no time, energy, nor education to make trouble). The pandemic creates a situation where it is obvious the productive capacity of modern society can be used to keep everyone alive without a large group of poor people working for slave-wages.

For societies with a social safety net, such as where I live in Scandinavia, the net simply springs into action on a mass scale. The vast majority of people on the edge economically are already kept alive by the immense productive capacity of society without needing to work. The vast majority of everyone else has enough wealth to wait the 1 month lead time to get some sort of bailout, which are administered through temporary tweaks to existing welfare state institutions. For instance, normally entrepreneurs and business owners cannot "fire themselves" and collect unemployment without first dissolving their business one way or another; this law has been temporarily changed. The pandemic is highly disruptive and causes all sort of short and long term problems, but people here do not really wonder "how am I going to eat" nor "how will I afford healthcare if I get the disease", at least for the vast majority.

In other words, the pandemic has created all sorts of practical problems, but not really any conceptual problems of how society should be organized to begin with. For instance, maintaining the social safety net in a depression is a practical problem, but no one really has a conceptual problem of questioning that goal.

However, in a society where there is no social safety net, such as the United States, this pandemic situation demonstrates most ways that is a terrible idea.

So, it is in this context that the subtextual debate is occurring between people who want to let people die, not in some "life saving" optimization scheme due to knock on effects of the lockdowns, but rather to let them die to preserve an ideal of power relations where there is no safety net; in other-words, let people die to preserve the status quo. Of course, these people say their argument is about "people also need the economy" but what they really mean is that "wage slaves will die in lockdowns, or from unemployment and losing their insurance and homes later anyways ... unless we create a social safety net which we don't wan't to do". So it's more or less the "let them eat cake" moment of the American "fiscal conservative" elite.

Don’t bother. They believe China is a race and the Politburo is a knight in shining armor. Then they’ll spin around and shit on Americans and call for the executions of their leaders. — NOS4A2

Bad timing bro:

Don't see why we can't throw all of them into a firepit.
— StreetlightX

Guillotine would work for me too. Less greenhouse gases. — Nobeernolife

Then you should clarify that.
So, who in the Republican Senate and Congress are you ready to Guillotine?
— boethius
Probably a whole bunch. For starters, everyone who signed off on those, what, 800 pages of pork that they all squeezed into the Corona emergency fund. Anyone who signed off on that atrocity, no matter what party, deserves your bonfire or the French solution. — Nobeernolife

If I could just vent for two seconds here. We hope it's a matter of human will. I don't think we know that yet because we aren't through it. The assumption that our leaders are supposed to be geniuses with time machines has us turning on each other already. If it turns out that nature really does have the upper hand here, the arrogance of assuming that humans were supposed to dominate it and just failed because they're stupid or evil can have potentially ugly consequences like scapegoating. — frank

This makes zero sense.

You even have the premise of why it makes no sense in your previous paragraph.

Yes. Hopefully their next attempts at easing off lockdown will work. If not, that will be worrisome. They will continue trying to discover the answer while knowing that their ability to stay in lockdown is limited. — frank

Obviously, discussing whether easing the lockdown will work or not, presupposes the lockdown is working, and that "man can dominate it".

None of the steps that would have significantly slowed the growth of the pandemic, nor any of the steps taken that would have made better short-term preparation once it was clear containment was failing, nor even the "zeroeth step" of not disbanding the pandemic team, requires being a "genius with a time machine". It's laughable.

I just looked back to page 75 and see nothing (other than the crass ‘China virus’ comment) that warrants this vitriolic attack — I like sushi

What's vitriolic?

Can someone explain to Nobeernolife what a strawman is? I don't feel the ROI potential is there. — Baden

I think you already answered your own question:

Are you incapable of writing a post without a strawman based on an inability to read simple English? Please just go back to Reddit. You can't cut it here, honestly. You just don't have the capacity. — Baden

The premise that having Trump supporters around to represent what their cult is saying at any given time is now just wasting everyone's time now. Nobeernolife's goal is clearly to just demonstrate to other Trump trolls that there is a troll posted here and dilute debate so it loses it's edge and potency, and so no need for any Trump supporter to worry.

These are serious topics, and I would submit it's more important than ever, in a time of crisis, to arrive at a lucid synthesis quickly, without bad faith distractions. The whole point of this forum is to arrive at a higher discursive quality than can be found elsewhere on the internet, which does require quality control. Nobeernolife has tried to use more sophisticated trolling tactics which do provide some entertainment value and, over a short period of time, some value in analyzing such tactics as a sort of living propaganda specimen. But, when bad faith can no longer be plausibly denied, there should be no fear that trolls doth protest too much, in doing the right thing.

Then you should clarify that.

So, who in the Republican Senate and Congress are you ready to Guillotine?

Likewise, anyone in the Democratic party you would not Guillotine?

Guillotine would work for me too. — Nobeernolife

You're ready to Guillotine Trump?

Yes, this came out during a discussion with StreetlightX who seemed to equate the notion of regulating exotic wild animal trade to being racist. — schopenhauer1

Ok, we're on the same page then, but I wasn't sure as your OP doesn't explicitly state the "racist-no-your-racist" origin of this general issue relating to the pandemic.

a) Supporting Trump in any way, and his bungling and ineptitude of this crisis. Nor
b) being in any way racist or being culturally insensitive.

Wanting to shut down wet market wild animal trade has no entailment nor affiliation with a or b. Do you see what prompted this? — schopenhauer1

Yes, it is basically a situation where Trump's, and Trump defenders, criticism is off-the-mark, bad faith, and obviously designed to tap into the racism of his base, which confuddles the media as they don't have the tools to explain both China and Trump are in the wrong on key points ... and just talking trash the rest of the time.

As for the underlying issue, there was a relatively small and powerless movement trying to pressure China into ceasing and desisting from its toleration, and in some cases legal support, for trade in exotic animals that has been going on for decades.

All the reasons doing so is important have been robustly developed, as I'm sure you're aware.

It seems to me that the talking heads in the "research and understanding is not journalism" media, learning about this issue for the first time only as it relates to the pandemic, just sort of auto-generated themselves the false balance point of "cultural sensitivity around the wet markets" to make it seem they have something interesting to say, as if China is some uncontacted tribe without economic, treaty links nor the expectation of science informed policy, and we'd be imposing our morality on these sweet innocent Chinese tribesmen in trying to shutdown the wet-markets (or then put in place safer practices for the small amount of non-endangered wild animals that could still make sense to hunt and trade).

Making this idiotic point of essentially equating China to uncontacted tribes (for which we should note there's no issue as uncontacted tribes by definition can't cause a pandemic with their hunting practices), made a beautiful, the best really, opening for supporters of Trump to defend the obvious.

What the media should have made clear (if they had the capacity to read things) is that "yep, lefty-environmentalists were right about a pandemic being one more 'self interest reason', if neoliberal technocrats are only able to act based on such twisted thinking, to have effectively coerced China into cracking down on the exotic-animal-trade long ago".

In other-words, the whole issue is an example of how the mainstream media fuels the Trump supporters by being themselves pretty dumb and on the same level as Trump in reasoning skills most of the time. It also is an example that the media is right-wing and not left-wing, as cracking down on poaching and endangered species trade is a pretty banal left-wing issue. This has been a big theme throughout the Trump era, of Trump and his supporters attacking the mainstream media from the left: the current global free-trade regime, wanting skilled manufacturing "means of production" jobs, attacking permanent war, calling out corruption, 1000 dollars to everyone!, are all fairly banal lefty ideas. So the idea that there's any real debate in cracking down on exotic animal trade to and within China is another on this list of right-wing media talking-heads unable to deal with Trump and co. taking the common-sense leftist position instead of a false-balance "tiny taste of or mischaracterized common sense but, whatever it is, certainly out of reach in our generation position on one side; and, unhinged and insane position that cannot withstand a modicum of scrutiny on the other side" and leaving it at that, the two and only two views of the matter each with good points and good people who wear suits, that the mainstream media are accustomed to.

That the real enemy of the mainstream media is the left and not Trump is evident with the support of Joe Biden, who will likely lose to Trump even with this catastrophe of a pandemic. It is truly amazing to behold the mainstream media and the DNC do the exact same thing a second time, managing to find an even worse candidate than Hillary. There's a slight chance that they realize the danger to the empire is so great that they really do risk losing everything by choosing "not Bernie no matter who, even Trump", but the chance is slim, very slim.

Not sure why exactly you want me to participate to this topic, but since I'm here now I'll share my thoughts.

Although there's the basic principle of "how are any laws justifiable at all", which am thankful has gone through the trouble of making a basic sketch, this whole issue is a propaganda sideshow.

Trump has clearly failed, and now he knows it (since the stock market crashed and the economy is shutdown).

So, he's trying to blame the Chinese, but not through any coherent argument, either because he simply can't formulate a coherent argument or because he knows that just leads to emphasizing that a lot of time has passed since the Chinese cover-up (so, if he complains about the Chinese actions in December, it's not really a good argument as he did nothing in January and February).

Of course, the Chinese cover up is damnable and there should be serious investigation and the world should review tools available to coerce the Chinese to not do it again.

Likewise, the Chinese tolerance of trade in "exotic" (i.e. endangered) animals is also damnable, and should also be met with policies by the rest of the world who don't like it to coerced compliance. Even before the pandemic there was a problem of "ghost forests" where nearly all wildlife had been harvested for Chinese wild meet and wild pet markets.

Indeed, it was almost that proverbial time of a broken clock being right twice a day with remark:

Stop supporting China financially by stopping to move our production there. Tax the hell out of Chinese exports until the CCP follows basic ethics. In others, de-coupling. Another policy where orangeman is fundamentally correct. — Nobeernolife

It's only "almost" because obviously Trump is not actually trying to decouple production from China and engaged in "taxing the hell out of Chinese exports until the CCP follows basic ethics"; Tump's feud with China has just been a political stunt, to get an easy win by getting a better "deal", which is just small tweaks on the previous deal and changes nothing. Trump sold his base "the idea" of bringing back manufacturing jobs, so feuding with China is part of maintaining that idea (without pointing fingers at his beloved CEO's and wall street traders and financiers, and the Republican party, that started the offshoring to China policy), while also throwing shade on Asians which is coherent with the white power (the "also good people") pillar of Trumps base as well as a small victory in the double racism and envy against Asian American's (who aren't as poor as other minorities so the racist thirst cannot so easily be satiated through abuse in a police state; therefore, feuding with China is a spectacle that satisfies that itch to, at least believe, Asians are suffering economically due to the glorious power and cunning of a white man).

It is the racism that makes this whole "cultural sensitivity" an issue at the moment, as Trump doesn't want to criticize China by telling the story that leads to the followup question "and then you did what about it?" but rather through insisting it's the "Chinese coronavirus". Likewise, Trump's base focusing on the "nasty habits of these Chinese that unleashed the plague" is a sort of "witch burning ritual" that makes them feel better that Trump could do nothing against such reckless filth out there in the world.

Trump know's what plays well to his base and also knows where he can trip up the media. "Chinese coronavirus" makes that an news issue and distracts from the full spectrum incompetence. The "Chinese cultural habits interacting with wildlife" is just distracting subplot interesting to those (during the crisis) who don't want to engage with the much more important questions.

Conservatives live in a world where if they imagine something could potentially make sense, then it definitely does make sense and they have a right to believing it makes sense and other people recognizing it makes sense, even if it doesn't (and if they don't, they're big meany-beanies). So, since potentially a disease can be named after a place it originated from, then it's definitely justified to name it so... even if the medical community has chosen a different name and the motivations for ad libbing a new name is a transparent (and incompetent attempt) to shirk responsibility.

Why the mainstream media gets tripped up by this is also an interesting issue that highlights their corrupt participation in the failing system.

The mainstream media has painstakingly created an amazing system of propaganda where nothing is ever looked at critically, with nuance, or for very long, just constant noise from which the important messages can be imprinted on people's brains (from sponsors and elite centers of power); that Trump is easily able to manipulate to his benefit as the system is optimized to provide a platform for elites (which Trump qualifies as part of the club) and is designed above all to serve the interests of brands, which Trump is. Within this incoherent noise, it's impossible to make simultaneously the points "yes, China committed an international crime by covering up a potential pandemic; yes, Trump committed a treasonous offense in diminishing the US's capacity to meet a pandemic, "defend the fatherland", for corrupt motivations of filling the government with compliant sycophants and also a treasonous offense of ignoring the intelligence once it was available in order to protect a foreign entity, the stock market, from harm (however shortsighted that attempt was); yes, Trump is trying to tap into that frothy fountain of irrational racism to distract his base from looking at Trump's actions and words during this situation; yes, China has been committing international crimes by tolerating trade in endangered species, which may or may not be tied to this pandemic; yes, the leaders of Europe are simply clueless duffusses (who also could have acted when Trump was not acting, and could have invested in pandemic prevention when Trump was cutting, and could have put economic pressure on communist China to not undermine the entire capitalist system ... like, almost as if they want to own all the means of production, outflank shortsighted greedy capitalists pigs and, like, almost hold the world for ransom in some sort of neo-colonialist inversion or something, like, almost as if) when those European bureaucrats aren't corrupt, which is often, but luckily a whole bunch of our European leaders are just spineless idiots and can be corralled into doing something not so stupid every once and a while."

The mainstream media is unable to engage in these topics because they are a corrupt participant in propping up a a rapidly dimming world view.

Maybe current world events are no longer of interest to you, and you are earnestly trying to work out subtle points of ethics for slight improvements to regulatory frameworks over the long term, assuming they are or have been made to be honest and effective in order for such analysis to be meaningful, in which case, my post is for others who are wondering why "cultural sensitivity" is even an issue during the crisis.

He’s arguing he’s willing to take a chance with his own health and survival, and he, like anyone else, can take proactive steps to do just that. This is the spirit of people who aren’t gripped by an incessant need for safety and coddling. — NOS4A2

The logical implication of a large group of people playing Russian roulette, even with a few dozen chambers, is a pile of dead bodies.

You cannot both simultaneously advocate society risk all these people's lives (without a probability of death it is not "taking a chance" as you say) and deny those odds on a large scale won't result in a pile of dead bodies. It is intrinsic to the concept.

You could argue there is no risk and therefore "taking the chance" is not actually taking a chance it's just being strong and not being "gripped by an incessant need for safety and coddling". However, the problem with such an argument is that bodies piling up say otherwise; or, rather, they would say otherwise if their mouths weren't frozen shut lying in the back of a refrigerated truck.

This thread points to some intractable misunderstanding about what's happening. It's the effect of the myth, I think. — frank

Yes, definitely is far gone into myth of American exceptionalism and doesn't understand the situation. I agree with you there.

However, in NOS4A2's defense, it's really difficult to understand the political significance of the virus, that people are unlikely to simply continue as normal as fast as possible. It is the change of psychology, both within the US and how the world views the US during this situation, that is of historic significance.

It is very tempting to have the fallback position of the friendly platitude "we've always had pandemics", which is true, but that is not really a comforting historical parallel, as pandemics have nearly always brought profound social and political change; the very thing the right in America fear most. So it is quite understandable that denial is preferred over inconvenient truths.

That’s just untrue. No one has ever said nor implied such an idea, and such a dangerous straw man is an incitement to violence. — NOS4A2

I backup my assertion with explaining a high-profile argument for the pile of dead bodies.

Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick, and many on the internet and beyond, are exactly arguing for the pile of dead bodies.

“As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?” And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in. — Dan Patrick

Is an argument for "let's have a pile of dead bodies" in no uncertain terms.

But I'm glad you're not taking such a position, I'm sure you'll go ahead and educate yourself on the science of this issue and realize all the governments are doing the same thing for a reason: the deaths from the pandemic are simply way higher than indirect harm to small business and jobs for a significant amount of time. People who lose their business can survive (likely only with government handouts and free retraining and free health-care, yes) but can survive and go on to do something else; relatively few would actually die from the loss of livelihood (when people lose their livelihood due to "technology disruption" or "triple A junk mortgages blowing up the financial system" it's just "creative destruction", nothing to lament, no reason to keep those jobs around because people "bounce back", and those that don't aren't the general rule). One small business bankruptcy or livelihood gone does not equal one death, whereas one death from the virus does equal one death; this is the basic math you are missing; while "affected individuals" are larger in magnitude in the economic category, they are not equal to deaths.

Secondly I don't think that by relaxing the social distancing measures now imposed by most countries, the depth of the recession would be reduced. We don't know yet how far the health crisis will go and as it is an exponential contagion, halting that growth will mitigate the worst effects of the rapid increase in infection. This is the reason why these countries have adopted these measures. Presumably their governments have been advised by specialists as to how bad it could be without action. — Punshhh

There's just 1 missing detail in this, which is that recession won't be less because you end up in the same situation of hospitals (even more) overrun, lot's of bad stories (from health care workers, from people who lose a loved one), and demand from the people that politicians do something.

However, in theory, you could just lift the quarantine and have that "pile of dead bodies in the corner" as Bill Gates says. Notice that he's saying to his follow oligarchs why you "can't" just lift the quarantine, which obviously you can, what's left unsaid is that the mechanism of why you "can't" is because other people care about those dead bodies; he's not telling his fellow oligarchs why you "shouldn't" have a pile of dead bodies, just that, for circumstances out of their control, he's trying to explain why they really can't (broken cookie syndrome vis-a-vis the economy).

I add this precision, because lot's of people arguing for lifting the quarantine are genuinely arguing for the pile of dead bodies and genuinely don't understand why people have a problem with that.

Notice, in Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick now famous interview he addresses what he perceives as the obvious criticism when he says "And I want to live smart and see through this" because the obvious rebuttal in his mind is "you're old, aren't you worried" to which he has a perfectly good answer with "I won't have buyers remorse here, I'll use my wealth to protect myself personally; obviously". He follows this thought immediately with "but I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed" to cut off the other followup question of "you really ready to sacrifice all the other grandparents you're talking about, if you're not actually talking about yourself". For, it's you sacrificing the country, it's you destroying something not him!

At no point in the interview does he address people losing their grandparents unnecessarily, he insists the grandparents themselves are asking to bravely face death. Why? because he's clearly a psychopath: attributing his fearlessness in the face of the virus to every other grandparent (creating a noble "great generation" in the mind), while simultaneously bragging about his ability to use his "smarts" to avoid getting the virus; i.e. he's emotionally manipulating people to want to get the virus while displaying his ability to manipulate his own environment to not get the virus.

The trouble I have with this is that it's not always clear how you would separate out the two opposing views from each other when it comes to making concrete decisions relating to the economy. In case of early Trump and Johnson reactions to the crisis, they probably did have the economy as monetary value for a certain class in mind rather than the interests of the society at large. We know their ideologies.... — ChatteringMonkey

Definitely we agree here.

One might say, that's fine, it's just a bunch of traders, banks and the rich loosing out on making more money, who cares... but wouldn't this also have consequences for the rest of the economy so that in the end it has real consequences for the general public and the poor? And I understand that this is a 'designflaw' in the system to put it euphemistically, and that it could and should be otherwise in a number of ways... but until it is actually otherwise, it doesn't really matter right, because it still will have real consequences that are bad for the general public. — ChatteringMonkey

When people are structurally placed on the brink; i.e. precarious living as a form of social control, then indeed at any given moment it seems people need to live to die, later.

The problem we are witnessing in the United States is that people need to die now to die later. And all the kings men and all the kings horses can't put the propaganda back together again.

The "tension", previous to this crisis, seemed to be between the elites and the masses of poor that might "break free" at any moment, do something "revolutionary" like, oh I don't know, just go and start occupying things or something. Obviously, the problems that arise from poverty are solved by more poverty, at least a little while.

Ultimately a society that weakens itself to keep up an elite and keep down the poor and "the ethnics" is simply not able to withstand a real crisis. Yes, serfs of days past might depend on a corrupt liege to at least keep a fierce enemy with a penchant for genocidal at bay, and reason things just have to be this way, but if that same corrupt liege appoints corrupt and incompetent generals and admirals and taxes the poor into malnutrition, when the enemy is breaching the gates and streaming through the streets, this theoretical interdependence is no longer relevant.

True, this isn't the largest calamity that can be imagined (not a literal nuclear strike or environmentalists seizing power in a surprise Bolshevik-Nazi cultural-Marxist coup and immediately mandating large bonfires of all capital equipment and a "back to the woods, hunter-gathering collectivist suicide pact" to satisfy the most viscous of id's in the most extreme of all identity politics: self reliance) but rather the societies' I am referring to do not break due to facing something truly great, rather a fairly normal tempest sinks faster a ship already sinking. When the keel is rotten, new paint only lasts so long to keep things afloat. When the water pours over, and cold grips the heart, the time to fix the organizational problems that led to the crisis ... well, that boat has sailed.

For, it is not just coronovirus. The world in general, and the post-WWII Breton-Woods pax Americana in particular, has already lot's of problems, and it is within this context that the US has already even more problems.

And it is not simply Trump. Advancing Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton was already a sign that the American elite are no longer able to replace themselves cognitively. Advancing Biden clearly shows the disease is terminal.

The first parallel geopolitical analysts had when it was clear "things would be bad" is that this maybe the US's Chernobyl. A large and costly crisis in itself, yes, but more importantly a fatal blow to the faith that underpins the entire system. The virus pops to many illusion in too short a time. It is a "the invisible hand has no clothes" moment.

Future generations will say the Soviet Union fell due to an insane ideology detached from reality unable to fulfill its self appointed prophesy, and so too the USA.

22 days ago, March 4th (aka 7 to 10 doubling periods yonder):

The virus may survive on surfaces up to 9 days (compared to 2 hours for the flue ... which means you can get this disease in the mail ... which in turn means if you test a Amazon warehouse you may find coronavirus, so you don't as to not make such a massive economic disruption so instead you just keep online the most efficient way to spread the virus exponentially through, perhaps low probability but super high impact, totally random infections that make entirely unexpected and unexplained clusters), — boethius

Today, March 24th:

Amazon on Monday evening had informed employees of the Shepherdsville, Kentucky, warehouse that the facility would be closed for 48 hours for cleaning after it identified three workers sickened by the disease caused by the coronavirus. On Wednesday, hours before the warehouse -- called SDF9 -- was scheduled to reopen, Amazon told workers it would be idled until further notice for more cleaning, the first known case of Amazon shutting a U.S. facility due to the pandemic without a scheduled end date. — Bloomber news

(use noscript with firefox to defeat paywall, only epistemologicaly of course )

Not unless NATO has a bunch of respirators lying around somewhere. The issue is specialised equipment and medical personnel. And what makes it worse is that the neighboring countries cannot afford to help (some token gestures have been made) since they need to husband their resources to avoid the same fate. — Echarmion

Also a big problem that needs to be added to the specialized skills needed to keep someone alive on a respirator, is a large majority of respirator patients have other health conditions which need to be treated too. There are really a lot of limiting factors to trying to scale adequate care when the details start getting looked at.

Of course, that health workers don't even have enough masks is just insane, and that part of the problem could have easily been solved. What I find bizarre is that stocks of masks weren't renewed after SARS-1 even in places that tapped into their mask-stock. The utility of masks seems to be at the top of "what did we learn" lest from the SARS-1 experience.

So you think that in no circumstance when deciding policy, human live can be measured against other values? There was a point to the example. If it can be done in other cases, what's different here? I'm not arguing against lock-down right now, to be clear, I agree that there shouldn't be any doubt. I'm just saying that at some point the question will come... and that could be a question where philosophy could actually be informative. If you don't want to go there, that's fine. — ChatteringMonkey

Many comments previous, I get into this subject when it was clear that containment was being half-asked to protect the stock market, and then containment just abandoned; going to "mitigation". UK was quite explicit about this. Of course, they just didn't really understand what they were doing and they'd just end up like everyone else but with a worse problem.

There are two opposing views about the purpose of the economy that have a an overlapping logic in some sense, but are not the same and give rise to different decisions.

The first view of the purpose of the economy is that its fundamental roll is to keep people alive; it is that which allows us to live. It might have other purposes, but only as a compliment to and not in conflict with this first purpose.

The second view of the purpose of the economy is to give value to owners; it is that which provides dividends to the investor class.

In the first view of the economy, lifting the quarantine is justified because at some point more people really will die than from the virus. Even if we ignore "jobs", which warrants another discussion as could be completely meaningless in this view of the economy in the event those jobs just undermine nature or other social structures we depend on, but self-isolation has mental, physical and educational consequences that in themselves at some point easily compete with a "mild epidemic" -- i.e. one that is not overwhelming the health system. So, if the epidemic is under control, then indeed the argument that further sheltering in place is doing more harm than good can be made, it's what government will say, and everyone will more or less agree. The principle is not really controversial. This is why we don't self-isolate to defeat the flu every year, and we're self-isolating now because this is not the seasonal flu.

However, in the second view of the economy, lifting quarantine measures is not because it will start to save lives, but rather it will get the stock market moving up again. From this point of view, the purpose of self-isolating to slow the spread of the virus was not really sensical to begin with. The virus simply doesn't kill enough people. For instance, if we were all robots working in a factory and a software-virus came through and disabled permanently 1 percent of us, it's really not reason to stop the factor, especially if a cure isn't even guaranteed to work. It would be even more absurd to stop the factory if the virus only permanently disabled obsolete robots in the back. So, viewing people as workers and consumers and something of value insofar as they contribute to the stock market going up -- for the investor class that's on the whole simply diversified into the stock market -- then there would only be alarm if we're talking "real numbers" like 10 - 20 percent, of which the coronavirus is simply an order of magnitude less lethal, and therefore irrelevant, in itself, as a menace to the stock market. So not pursuing the optimum strategy, to just keep factories and everything running as normal and tolerate a few units going offline, is extremely frustrating from this point of view.

As I mention in those previous comments, this second maximize-dividends view of the economy sacrifices peoples lives for increasing stocks all the time. For instance, allowing plenty of toxins in everything, the destruction of the environment, psychologically intolerable work conditions, the debt-to-homeless machine, are all examples of sacrificing people for stock value -- the pushback from trying to reduce pollution or make working conditions compatible with actually enjoying life even at the bottom will create the pushback that it's "bad for X,Y, Z corporations" which really means bad for dividends as that's the purpose of corporations.

The difference with this crisis is that it's on such short a timescale that it's impossible to muddy the water of cause-and-effect with propaganda for enough people to be begging to be abused and exploited and any future for their children corrupted; as per the usual "non-toxic, environmental friendly, psychologically friendly regulations would be bad for the economy, cost jobs, just not work, even if there was evidence of a problem which we flatly deny, and even if there was nothing can be done about it". The logic is exactly the same for the pandemic, and a lot of people swallow it whole, but not enough: there's still too many people that genuinely love their parents, grandparents, in-laws and vulnerable people. The atomization of society is not as complete as necessary for the optimum response in this particular situation.

But, to the position that my criticism of others would have been better received had I acknowledged my hypocrisy and then recited a long long winded self excoriation, I'd just ask that you pretend that happened. — Hanover

Why write an excoriation, why not just acknowledge the hypocrisy and reconsider your world view? Unless your goal is to be a hypocrite: in which case, mission accomplished.

Now that we're working under the assumption I followed your directions, will you now acknowledge that my post was fully correct in substance, or were your above comments just an irrelevant chastisement? My guess is that it's the latter. — Hanover

As I mention in my rebuttal, I see no evidence of the people you think will actually have hurt feelings from @Benkei's analogy. If there is no such person, I don't see what the substance could be. Even if there was such a person, I don't see why I'd accept it is was "hurtful language"; I'd still have to be convinced.

I hate to be repeating myself, but what I described is PRECISELY the approach that every virologist who wants to achieve herd immunity prescribes. — Nobeernolife

No, you are simply wrong and have not bothered to inform yourself of the basic science of what's going on.

The mechanism of protecting the vulnerable is by slowing the spread of the virus to within the medical system's ability to handle it, so that vulnerable people will get adequate care as well as healthy people.

You can try to isolate vulnerable people even more as part of that social distancing policy, but the process of reaching "herd immunity" is going to expose large amounts of vulnerable people to the disease. There's no practical way to isolate them for the entire duration of the pandemic.

Herd immunity is just the end result of everyone getting the disease and recovering or dying, it is not some sort of tactic that can be achieved and then, because there is herd immunity, vulnerable people are now protected.

Now, if you want to change your position to "yes, yes, the heard immunity thing is just social distancing; it's just bad PR to call it a plan to develop herd immunity by people getting the actual disease, rather than just the outcome of people getting the disease, which we obviously want to be a manageable process" then you are on your way to understand why Trump acted too late to have a better path than what is playing out in the US currently.

There is not some sort of bizarre theory and counter intuitive strategy where herd immunity can be "achieved quickly" and that's why actions were late and it's not a problem if even the late actions were completely bungled, like the tests.

Yes, by acting too late and incoherently, Trump put the US on a path to herd immunity sooner rather than later. No, doing so is not clever: the process of that happening quickly and out of control is what many virologists spend their entire lives studying and putting together plans and protocols to avoid happening - advice condensed into various briefings that went ignored.

I think you can, and I think that is what the countries who follow this approach are trying achieve. If there are enough immune people in the herd, the virus will not find enough new targets to spread and fizzle out by itself. The problem is that to keep those who would die from the virus (the sick and elderly) separated, while the virus burns through the herd. — Nobeernolife

No, you're just engaging in fantasy science.

If people are getting the disease they can transmit it to vulnerable people while they have the disease.

Fully isolating the vulnerable, which was sort of pseudo plan for propaganda purposes, is simply not practically possible.

The best that can be done is containing as long as possible, such as stopping flights as I was advocating when I joined this thread, and then slowing the spread so that the medical system is not overwhelmed. This results in many vulnerable people dying, but at least not more than necessary. With an overloaded medical system, lot's of healthy people die as well from lack of care, from the virus and other things.

People developing immunity through getting the disease is how you maximize the chance vulnerable people will also get it
— boethius

Sorry man, I can't deal with you. You make no sense. — frank

This is just basic common sense.

If your strategy of getting herd immunity of a disease is everybody actually getting that disease, you're going to maximize chances of vulnerable people getting that disease.

You can protect vulnerable people either by containing the disease, which doesn't provoke herd immunity, or then creating some artificial way of creating immunity that is not actually getting the disease, and so can't expose vulnerable people to the actual disease because the now immune person didn't actually get the disease.

Herd immunity from getting the actual disease happens in 2 parts:

1. People getting the disease and their immune system learning to deal with it and becoming immune.
2. People getting the disease and dying from it and no longer being part of the herd.

There is no way to have 1 without 2. This is why an epidemiologists thought this idea was satire when he first heard about it.

I’m an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire — William Hanage, epidemiologist

If we accept the pandemic cannot be contained, then herd immunity is just the inevitable result of the pandemic playing out, but the build up herd immunity from people getting the disease does not protect the vulnerable from also getting it, as for the time you have the disease you are able to transmit it to vulnerable people, that how the disease spreads.

I agree. That's pretty much what we're doing. — frank

The argument is the timing. That lot's of policy measures were available before.

It's like you have a bucket of water to put out a camp fire; you're too lazy and don't bother; you cause a forest fire and then go throw the bucket on the forest fire and say "see, I did".

Timing matters. In an a process that grows exponentially, timing matters a lot.

My point was that closing businesses should not be done in excess of what's absolutely necessary to slow the spread. We want it to spread. We need people to get it and recover from it. Until we have either a cure or a vaccine, people developing immunity to it is our only way of protecting the vulnerable.

I know this is a tricky thing to grasp. — frank

This is not tricky, you are simply flat out wrong.

People developing immunity through getting the disease is how you maximize the chance vulnerable people will also get it. If it's too late to contain the virus, then slowing down the spread is the only way to make it manageable for vulnerable people, and healthy people where the disease takes a bad turn, to get medical care. Slowing down also buys more time for health systems to prepare and for treatments to be worked on.

I see just posted the point about the spread needing to be manageable, as I say above, but this is not reaching herd immunity as a way of protecting the vulnerable; herd immunity is just the outcome of any endemic process regardless of how it's managed.

Even if one believes the US response under Trump is inept, the response I'd think should be sympathetic as opposed to ridiculing — Hanover

Isn't an inept response by definition ridiculous, and deserving of ridicule? How is society going to learn without signals such as ridiculing the inept?

I though we wanted to debate what's true and what's false. The important proposition being "is Trump inept or not"; which, if factual, clearly far outweighs in terms of merit for discussion people's feelings about "strong language" that points in the direction of Trump's ineptness.

So, what's with the feelings police?

And, if you want to play feelings police, why aren't you criticizing Trump and his followers for making light of the situation before? Shouldn't you at least preamble your criticism of with "Yes, Trump and a lot of his followers weren't really sympathetic to the idea this pandemic is a problem nor with the people who died 'due to something no worse than the flu', and ridiculing people on the left who were concerned about it, and not simply in the form of words, but taking actions designed to spread the disease faster in order to virtue signal their lack of sympathy for those that disagreed with Trump's message it was a hoax and will go away or is in any case no worse than the flu and plenty of people work through it and get better; and so not only hurt feelings but have and will cause many deaths", then, having recognized this and the hypocrisy of Trump and his followers having "hurt feelings" now with regard to criticism of Trump's inept handling of the crisis (assuming it's inept as you say), go on to make your point that analogies should be carefully selected to not hurt anyone's feelings, and not just actual people with hurt feelings about the analogy but also people who aren't themselves really hurt by it, but can understand the point being made, but nevertheless could imagine someone else, who isn't here, who could maybe be hurt by it, if they were here.

Maybe an exercise in Bayesian statistics? I.e., a concern with false positives? — tim wood

Out of 20,338 people tested in Britain for covid-19 164 people have the disease. The test itself is 97% accurate. You take the test and it comes back positive. What's the chance you actually have it based on this single test?

Apparently the answer is something like 21%? — Michael

Good point. 97% accuracy isn't great. — Baden

These observations are correct on an individual level.

The reason for mass testing is systemic. Even ignoring how to increase the accuracy of the tests (multiple tests etc. which could even be counter productive, see below); having more positives than what's expected from false-positives is going to inform that community transmission is happening in the region, first of all and some policy response is needed (obviously, we'd want to save tests until community spread, and so it's more random sampling than mass testing in this "mode").

Second, some of the positives are going to be true-positives, but even if these are 20% of all positives (true and false positives), you can still just quarantine all positives anyways. Since the course of action of asymptomatics is to just self-isolate until there are symptoms, there's not really much cost to the false-positive (to society).

Furthermore, if society is going into lockdown anyways, then asymptomatic false positives just end up with "more motivation" to lockdown. So it actually makes the situation marginally better with some percentage trying to "super lockdown", thinking they have the virus even if they don't (mind trip, both not harmful to society).

Of course, false-negatives create the exact opposite behaviour, so the above benefits only arise if the chance of false-negatives are significantly lower than false-positives.

So, mass testing can still have a systemic policy effect even if results of positive tests are not used as a basis of diagnosis; diagnosis could be based on symptoms if and when they develop.

By diagnosing based on symptoms rather than serial testing the positives to identify the fasle-positives, this makes more tests available for the mass-testing policy. More mass testing without diagnosis can be more effective use of tests than trying to diagnose (to separate true-positives from false-positives through more testing, which if chances were only 20% for the first test a second test may still be inadequate to be highly confident).

In otherwords, there's the Bayesian statistics for the case of the individual, but also Bayesian statistics for policy. Mass testing will give better information on the sate of the outbreak than no mass testing, even if each individual positive is only marginally more informed. Isolative measures of all positives, both true and false, is going to significantly slow the spread of the virus even without diagnosing anyone until they have symptoms, as well as inform and track the effectiveness of policy measures sooner than the ultimate evidence of deaths.

Indeed, considering all this, the argument can be made that testing symptomatics "who want to know" is less informative (as the outbreak progresses there's less and less chance it's going to be something else) than mass testing to find asymptomatics in a large net that catches both true and false positives.

There is always some time frame in which data fits an exponential growth curve! Or logarithmic. Or linear. Or better yet polynomial — SophistiCat

Yes! You finally get it. If we're interested in a time frame where exponential growth is accurate (or accurate enough for our purposes) it's perfectly valid to say the phenomenon has grown exponentially from A to B points in time.

Such as biologists saying bacteria grow exponentially when there is enough food.

What you don't seem to get is that your criticism of using the term "experiential growth" is the same for all curves (and continuous curves themselves don't "match" any phenomena because all measurement is fundamentally discrete).

If you say "oh, it's not exponential it's logistic" I can say "ahh, it's only logistic until it isn't, what if the virus doesn't behave in a logistic curve due to reinfection, or what if we wait long enough for new generations to be born that aren't immune and the virus re-emerges as a pandemic; see, haha, only logistic until it isn't!! hahaha".

What would your answer be? Logistic is a good curve to approximate infection growth on the time scale we're interested in, of this first wave of infection.

And, by the same logic "exponential" is a good curve to approximate the first phases of an outbreak, as other factors that reduce exponential growth are insignificant on the time scale of the initial outbreak.

Why are we interested in this time-scale? Because that's when the medical system is overwhelmed and governments decide on a policy response to stop the exponential growth that would occur if no action is taken.

Why is exponential a good description? Because the corrective terms and factors on this time scale would make no significant contribution to predicting the initial outbreak, so the equation can just be simplified to an exponential one, and it's useless pedantry to keep terms that simplify to zero.

- it can be made to fit any curve over any time scale. But no scientist in their right mind would propose an exponential growth model just because you can fit an exponential curve to two consecutive points. This is not how scientific modeling works. — SophistiCat

No where did I say we only have two data points, so I don't know where this strawman comes from, but it's not even a correct argument against the strawman you've created!

Scientists fit curves to small amounts of data, even 2 data points, all the time, and then debate which projection is justified based on either the trend in the data (as more data comes in) or proposed mechanisms.

Yes, no scientist would insist it's one projection rather than another without some argument, but fitting different curves to data and then debating what is "overfitting" and what isn't, what is the clear trend in different time frames, what mechanisms might change the trend in different time frames, is basically the second lesson of data analysis (after how to fit curves to data to begin with).

Which is exactly what I'm proposing!

Maybe growth will reduce close to zero soon in Italy, follow such a logistic projection (still not projected "forever" but only a good prediction insofar as quarantine measures are maintained, virus doesn't mutate to be more virulent to defeat quarantine; still only "logistic until it isn't" as you say) where new cases start to approach zero.

Maybe not! Maybe it will follow a projection where growth continues to be some significant percentage of the population, under the previous policy measures, and a exponential curve is a predicts accurately the future states over the time frame we're interested in (corrective terms to the logistic function are insignificant). Maybe the new policy measures, of marshal law, will get it under control ... maybe not!

Now, you can say "oh, well, I still don't like the word exponential here", but I'm just using the terminology epidemiologists and biologists use; you asked for a source, I provided you a citation of such language under the heading "exponential growth" in wikipedia. Why do scientists talk like this? Because the same kind of criticism can be brought in for everything, you could walk into any math class explaining exponential growth in terms of interest payments "gotcha! exponential interest growth is impossible because eventually no ledger could keep track of the numbers, so it's really an exponential added to a step function that reduces growth to zero when the entire accessible universe has been filled up tracking this number; why is this a foolish criticism? Because that time-frame is of no interest to the phenomena being discussed".

Why this is relevant (that we don't know yet what projection will actually be true; and we don't know which policy measure contributed exactly what amount in controlling the virus) is because it informs risk analysis.

A lot of people assumed Wuhan was a "worst case scenario" and that therefore Italy will follow a projection similar to Wuhan ("Italy is X weeks behind Wuhan" is a phrase that would pop up) essentially implying that Wuhan presented a upper-bound on "how bad it can be". However, Italy has now broken with the Wuhan pattern (of leveling off in growth about now). This could be due to the Wuhan scenario being mostly fraudulent numbers by the Chinese, or it could be that Italy didn't do a good enough policy response or, even with a similar policy response, conditions are more favourable to the virus in Italy or it has mutated to be more virulent (lack of adequate protection of health care workers creates the conditions of evolutionary pressure for the virus to become more virulent).

So Italy is now becoming the new worst case scenario.

Other places with an even later or even weaker, or both, response can make an even worse case scenario compared to Italy.

Yeah, the scientific community describes things as growing exponentially for as long as they grow exponentially. — SophistiCat

This is exactly what I explain in the sentence you reference. If in some time frame of interest (such as "until now"), the data fits an exponential growth curve, scientists will say "it is growing exponentially".

You may insist on exponential growth if you think you have a good handle on the causal mechanism, and can account both for the function and for the changing exponent, without having to make retrospective adjustments after each new measurement. — SophistiCat

Did you even bother reading my comments?

I'm not insisting things will continue to grow exponentially in Italy, I'm saying it's not ruled out by the current data.

17% daily growth rate this week could mean 17% growth rate next week and the week after that and the week after that, until 50% of the population is infected and growth rate reduces due to running out of hosts.

Or, it could indeed mean 5% growth rate next week and then approaching 0% growth rate week after that.

Since we don't know which scenario we are in (precisely because we cannot know for sure all the mechanisms of transmission and how many need to be cut to approach 0% growth rate), is why, once this situation is reached the risk management conclusion quickly becomes "maybe what we're doing now is enough ... but we can no longer risk being wrong, so we need to do even more social distancing and enforce compliance with the military".

If it was "certain" that growth rate was decreasing to zero, it's unlikely marshal law would be implemented (it is quite a big step for civilian authorities to take).

I can't really be bothered continuing this. — fdrake

Sorry I missed this. This is good news since you're just being facetious for nothing, in my opinion, but I'm in self isolation so have plenty of time to go into minute detail.

Here's your source though:

The number of microorganisms in a culture will increase exponentially until an essential nutrient is exhausted. Typically the first organism splits into two daughter organisms, who then each split to form four, who split to form eight, and so on.

Because exponential growth indicates constant growth rate, it is frequently assumed that exponentially growing cells are at a steady-state. However, cells can grow exponentially at a constant rate while remodeling their metabolism and gene expression.[1]

A virus (for example SARS, or smallpox) typically will spread exponentially at first, if no artificial immunization is available. Each infected person can infect multiple new people. — Wikipedia - Exponential Growth

Does this satisfy your doubts that the scientific community describes things as growing exponentially if, in some time frame their interested in, the phenomena does grow exponentially?

Or do you want more sources of this language being used.

Do you want me to explain again why your statement:

The growth of coronavirus isn't exponential in Italy. The acceleration of the number of new positive cases has steadily been declining since the quarantines were imposed in Italy, and has now levelled off to around 0. — fdrake

Cannot be assumed to be true (in the sense biologists might use the word "exponential" in the context of organism growth).

The current policies may support more doubling times in the whole of Italy, which is perhaps why we see more measures. Italy is not similar to South Korea nor Wuhan in terms of situation and policy response, and we simply don't know if the strategy there has or will work controlling the virus on a short time scale of a few weeks (i.e. if Marshal law was necessary, and if so we cannot know if Marshal law as currently implemented solves the problem that the civilian authorities could not solve) , which is the policy objective (large cities, basic services that need to run, building designs, compliance, may not be sufficient to have an outcome similar to Wuhan, assuming for the sake of argument, those numbers are correct).

The reason to be concerned about policy failure in Italy, is because it indicates we may likely see policy failure to control the virus all over the globe; that even with the enormously disruptive measures of mass-quarantine, the virus may still easily overload medical systems.

Though I will ask for sources on this use of local exponential trend? Genuinely curious. I can see the appeal of having a model that splits the time trend like that. — fdrake

This is just how scientists talk. I can provide plenty of examples of scientists using implied domain of validity in talking about fitting curves to data or modeling some phenomena.

Epidemiologists and ecologists talk in terms of exponential growth of a population, to explain infestation, invasive species, plagues. They say "bacteria will grow exponentially"; they then explain in the theory that "as long as there's enough food, no toxins and no predation". So, when they observe something growing exponentially they say "this is growing exponentially" like a virus replicating from cell to cell or from person to person.

Nuclear explosions are also described in terms of exponential reactions, yet, again, physicists aren't saying the reaction will grow exponentially until the nuclear bomb weighs more than the universe.

It's a useful estimate of what happens in the next relevant time step and so describes well the reaction in the starting phase.

In the outbreak phase of an epidemic, an exponential function is the best description of what's going to happen next, so they call it "exponential growth". Just like interest payments are exponential as that best describes what happens next, even though it is impossible for any bank to represent numbers that exponential growth will eventually attain.

For the situation in Italy, policy makers want to know if the measures have really gotten (or will get soon) things off an exponential growth curve in the next coming weeks or not; since the policy objective is to get the rate of infection below the health care capacity; due to this context, it doesn't matter to them that the virus would anyways start to burn out as they want to put in place policies that stop exponential growth right now.

So, if the growth rate isn't actually decaying, but still has a sustained doubling period (even 2-3 doubling periods is a significant change to the situation policy makers maybe trying to avoid; maybe even 1 doubling period they are trying to avoid), then policy makers want to put even more social distancing measures.

Of course, the true rate of infection can only be known in hindsight, as there's lag between infection and diagnosis and a sampling bias in who get's diagnosed (unless there's enough testing to have an accurate model overall).

I'm simply making the simple point that going from 3 days doubling time one week to 7 days doubling time, does not necessitate that the next week would be a 2 week doubling time time and soon no doublings at all. At any point in the "slowing down" the infection growth rate could be the new normal (until simply running out of hosts slows the virus, approaching herd immunity, or then even more extreme measures are put in place).

In terms of just empiricism generally, it's completely valid to characterize some data as growing "so far" as "linearly" or "quadratically" or "exponentially" or "sinusoidally". It may simply be true that the data follows such a trend so far and that it's the best function to estimate the next observation. No scientists would understand such a statement to imply the scientist therefore concludes it would continue for ever. Making a better prediction (for instance when it will break with the observed trend) requires a theory and justification. Since data is noisy, there's almost always opportunity to jump on some variation to justify a given model.

Likely, right now in Italy they have a few models of what's happening and don't know what's correct. Since delayed action has proven costly so far they are switching to assuming the worst model: that they are still in an exponential growth regime on a time scale that is intolerable to deal with, so, time to call in the army to maintain a stricter compliance.

There was an uptick in growth today and yesterday in Italy, it doesn't swamp the downward trend in new case number acceleration when averaging. — fdrake

That's what I explain: it maybe going towards linear growth, but right now it's still exponential growth, some percentage of the population is growing each iteration.

We cannot "know" which case it is. I'm not arguing against the hypothesis that it's downward trending.

I'm just presenting the fact that we cannot assume it's downward trending, it could be a new local (in terms of time) equilibrium of a new growth rate.

What has happened: number of new cases per day's rate of increase has been trending toward 0. You simply don't get that behaviour from an exponential function applied to the entire case number trajectory. — fdrake

No, I get it. That's why I peppered my statements with "local in time", and I've explained multiple times that exponential growth in this context is short hand for acceleration phase of a logistics function which itself maybe only part of a bigger function on a longer time scale (such as several mass quarantine, relaxing mass-quarantine and peak phases).

However, insofar as the growth is best described as some percentage of the population, then we are still in the exponential growth regime (locally in time).

The quibble that it will eventually stop growing exponentially and be part of another curve is really ridiculous.

It's like saying orbits are not ellipses because eventually a black whole might come through the solar system and make the planets all go in a different curve. Or saying "exponential interest on loans" isn't a real thing because eventually the computer disk space to represent the loan would be heavier than the universe.

All curves describing some real phenomena have a explicit or implied time domain where the observation is valid and some argument why over-fitting the data with a "better curve" would be worse than the proposed curve.

Exponential growth describes how it's "growing now on a timescale we care about".

If we just want to quibble about terminology, I could say "axxuuually, individual viruses and individual infections are discrete events and not described by any curve at all, and anyone not talking discrete mathematics is misrepresenting the situation!" See, it's true, but no productive because the people with the knowledge to understand a mathematical description of what's going on should have the knowledge to put things in context. No one has ever claimed viruses would outweigh the universe (as Elon Musk has pointed out won't happen, or do you think that's like "totally valid criticism of the talk around epidemiology right now"?).

Maybe it's A. decaying towards zero shortly, but maybe not, it might be just representing B. testing no longer keeping up with the growth rate (that testing cannot scale as fast as infections due to logistics problems), or then C. a new steady growth rate for "a while" that requires more policy measures to reduce during that "while" we care about.

Once this situation is created, it becomes very difficult to know what's actually happening, so eventually policy makers just "do everything" when they realize what a single doubling period actually means to the system. Was it needed to barricade people into neighborhoods in Wuhan? Maybe not, or maybe it's essential to get out of the exponential regime. We don't really know.

date Diagnosed Deaths
2020-03-14-----------21,157(+20%)-----------1,441(+175 +14%)
2020-03-15-----------24,747(+17%)-----------1,809(+368 +26%)
2020-03-16-----------27,980(+13%)-----------2,158(+349 +19%)
2020-03-17-----------31,506(+13%)-----------2,503(+345 +16%)
2020-03-18-----------35,713(+13%)-----------2,978(+475 +19%)
2020-03-19-----------41,035(+15%)-----------3,405(+427 +14%)
2020-03-20-----------47,021(+15%)-----------4,032(+627 +18%)
2020-03-21-----------53,578(+14%)-----------4,825(+793 +20%) — wikipedia - coronavirus pandemic in Italy

Although this week has reduced the growth rate compared to the week previous which was consistently above 20%, this could represent testing decoupling from new infections, or just a new growth rate that would be sustained until the critical 60-70% of the population is infected (and inflection would occur just because the virus is running out of hosts).

Maybe measures are working and we'd be below 10% next week, and then start to get towards linear growth the week after and then decay the week after that.

Or maybe more measures are needed to get it under control, such as marshal law to enforce the quarantine, as happened today.

No one's calling it marshal law, but that's what it is:

Martial law is the imposition of direct military control of normal civilian functions by a government, especially in response to a temporary emergency such as invasion or major disaster, or in an occupied territory. — Wikipedia - Marshal Law

The Italy case is not cause for too much optimism.

Exactly 1 month ago, there were 21 cases diagnosed in Italy. Now there is marshal law.

The growth of coronavirus isn't exponential in Italy. The acceleration of the number of new positive cases has steadily been declining since the quarantines were imposed in Italy, and has now levelled off to around 0. — fdrake

This is still exponential, in a local region of time, just that the doubling time is getting steadily longer according to official diagnosis[/].

Since the system is starting to collapse, the growth of cases could be limited by testing.

Of course, hopefully the exponential growth rate, on a local time scale, is slowing towards inflection in a larger logistics functions (sometime soon).

Although it seems reasonable to assume the measures "are surely working", cause they seem pretty extreme, to get to linear or even exponential-decaying growth rate soon, it is possible the social distancing measures are still maintaining exponential growth, certainly slower than everyone going to restaurants and work and so on, but still exponential.

Effective measures, in a numerical sense, could still mean extending the doubling time, such as to weeks instead of days is still effective. However, doubling the cases in a month rather than 3 days is still pretty effective, numerically speaking; a lot of effort could be needed simply to go from 3 day doubling time to 3 week doubling time, and we don't know if that effort is above or below what Italy has done.

They are having their doubts too, why they have now called in the army to enforce the quarantine better (rather than just help with logistics, such as taking away dead bodies, as they've been doing up until now).

For instance, in China there was observed cases that seem to have spread through pipes. It could spread through vents too, or perhaps even balcony to balcony when the wind is right. There's also just the spread due to movement that is still happening: essential services, going to grocers, etc.

Where exponential growth has been stopped, we saw either earlier measures (such as with South Korea with a classic containment strategy implemented by competent individuals before it was too late to do), or then more extreme (such as China barricading people into neighborhoods and doing a "gate hand-doff" for delivering supplies, and that's assuming their numbers are some basis of what's been going on, which I don't want to just assume because I trust China but experts seem to agree they could not hide continued exponential growth, just hide a lot of the cases and deaths that did happen; such as just letting whoever dies in barricaded neighborhoods and not counting those in the statistics and then passing "no negative opinion about the government" laws to cover it up). Italy was neither early like South Korea nor as extreme as Wuhan, so we cannot conclude Italy measures are "enough" until they actually work.

I definitely hope they are enough, because all of Europe seems passed the "South Korea uses initiative and foresight to get on-top of the problem strategy". Europe has lot's of apartment blocks with old pipes and air ventilation systems. Oh, and still no one's bothered to check if you can get the virus in the mail.

All of this drop in rate of new cases can't be attributed to the quarantine measures; people would have probably isolated themselves regardless. But the effect of cutting off as many transmission vectors as possible should not be underestimated. — fdrake

I don't understand this. For me "quarantine measures" are basically being used to refer to all measures to cut off transmission vectors.

Though technically, quarantine is isolation a potential cases to see if they become cases, whereas all things that cut down transmission vectors is called social distancing. However, in this technical sense, quarantine is the most effective social distancing measure we have.

Are you trying to say something different?

There is a food crisis in the UK today, the PM announced yesterday that all pubs, restaurants, cafes, etc must close Friday night. Also the schools closed the same day, resulting in panic buying. — Punshhh

Literally 5 days ago:

UK will do the same as ssu reports Finland is doing. These "changes in strategy" is simply propaganda to walk from "oh, crap, it is a problem I should have realized will hurt the stock market much more by downplaying it compared to being proactive" to the inevitable position of "all hands on deck! to prevent more spread and get this under control! for queen and country lads!" without admitting to any mistakes and pretending it was "people's loved ones" that were the center most priority all along, just a few understandable course corrections along the way — boethius

Just as predictably, the real world outcome of this "PR delay" is to make the situation that much worse.

Your math is wrong. The spread is exponential, not the death rate. The spread doesn't discriminate. The death rate does, based upon current medical condition. — Hanover

No, your math is wrong.

The spread does discriminate, based on social distancing measures. It's exponential, during the first outbreak phase, if those measures aren't effective or not even tried.

The death rate is some percentage of the infection rate, without discrimination, not detached from it, for one part. Medical conditions, the discriminatory part, get worse as the system overloads, increasing the death rate.

coronavirus update: — frank

We'll see if this update, whatever it's supposed to mean, will stay accurate for long.