I Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah

@SW-User Woooo! Look at all those big numbers!
That's enough to scare everybody!

But the real news is in the little numbers!
Unless your old and/or have other certain health issues,
the chances of covid taking you down are infinitesimally SMALL!

@Budwick no the answer is excess deaths. We're seeing tens of thousands excess deaths that shows the damage that covid is doing.

@SW-User
Excess deaths?
This is a new one.
Is the left making some deaths more significant than others some how?

@Budwick go read David Spiegelhalter's writing on risk and covid. Of youre under 30 yes hardly any noticeable risk. But the risk doubles (remember that risk / probability is essentially a logrhythmic scale) every 10 years of age so once your over 40 you should be concerned and once over 60 very concerned over 70 extremely concerned.

@Budwick excess deaths is a known measure epidemiologists use to measure impact of epidemics and new illnesses or to show health improvements in societies.

Look it up

@Budwick some reading material

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/potentially_excess_deaths.htm

http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/

@SW-User David Spiegelhalter? A statistician?
He's writing on covid?

You ever heard that saying?
'Figures lie and liars figure'

Tell you what Nunos - YOU look at the real world.
The common, every day people have it figured out.
Covid is bad, but can be easily be avoided.
Maybe not 100%, but it's a risk worth taking to maintain
a quality of life.

@SW-User CDC - And they always get it right!
Well, sometimes.

@Budwick I love how you dismiss the experts who have spent decades learning and studying something and determine you know better.

🤷‍♂️

I generally find if I want to know something the best people to listen to are the experts.

So you quote risk but decline to listen to one of the world leading authorities on statistical risk.

My final word. I know two icu nurses. They are working up to 15 hour shifts saving lives. When they tell me the lockdown should continue I think they know far more than me.

@SW-User
Well Sparky, the 'experts' have been wrong repeatedly,
And their only solution is to destroy society to accommodate a virus.

The experts are of no use any longer.

@Budwick I'm wasting my time but this is an as yet unreviewed paper of USA data

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.02.20051532v3.full.pdf+html

Experts learn to refine their theories based on experience (or experiment). The fact they aren't 100% correct at the beginning of a pandemic is hardly unexpected.

@SW-User
First thing you got right today!

@SW-User

Tell it to the Swedish government. I'm sure they have their own expert epidemiologists and statisticians.

The Swedes have not  gone on shutdown, presumably on the calculation that the total number of Covid deaths will be roughly the same, whether spread out over a few months, or over a year or two. They seem to have concluded that the former approach, which at least partially avoids the economic consequences, is better, as long as the healthcare system is not overwhelmed.

@Thinkerbell
UK has 5% nationally and 17% in London with our lockdown and we still have the highest outright European death total.

How does an elected government go back to the people to be reelected when you've stats like that? Well I'd never vote them in again.

@SW-User


Maybe (political rarity of rarities) they are doing what they think is best in the long run? And, as I said before, I'm sure they have their own experts.

Never...? Perhaps you would, if after a couple of years their approach turned out to have minimized the overall damage.

@Thinkerbell 🤔
We'll see. Be surprised though. Never have we encountered a human transmission coronavirus which provides long term immunity once infected. Average immunity about 6 months. So can they sustain highest per capita death rate for years to come?

@SW-User

We will indeed see. And if Covid-19 stays around indefinitely (whatever happened to SARS and MERS?), what's the alternative? To have most small businesses go bankrupt? How long can that  be sustained?

@Thinkerbell sars and MERS haven't gone away

@SW-User


And neither have bubonic plague and ebola, but no one is making a fuss about them anymore.

Repeat: What's the alternative? To have most small businesses go bankrupt? How long can that be sustained?

@Thinkerbell
I want some of THEIR experts! Ours wear lab coats, likely took the Hippocratic oath - they're not allowed to care about anything else.