COVID-19 Megathread 4: Grandma Got Run Over by the Dow Jones

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/Stintzi/status/1249335823117451267?s=20

Why is literally everything a conspiracy theory to the Red Avatars?

Seems like some of them demanded elections be cancelled because people might stand too close and now claim that its actually the other side trying to cancel elections because something something Postal pensions?

Do you know the difference between cancelling an election and postponing it?

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Today's death toll and new cases are going to be lower than last Sunday's totals on this trajectory.

Dawg it's Easter. Today has the biggest potential for irregular reporting and sampling out of any day during the first wave of the epidemic.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

In the vast majority of cases where DNA or RNA mutates, it is a debilitating mutation.

I thought most mutations basically have no effect.

Beet is right but there are mutations of no effect that occur when the DNA sequence changes but the protein-bits that it produces is the same (because some amino acids can be produced by multiple highly-similar sequences of DNA/RNA).

Mutations tend to be bad because if you make a random change to DNA, the results are likely to have large changes on proteins (which often make them non-functional), but sometimes a random change will have no effect, or will produce a protein that is very similar.

Here is a good reading on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonymous_substitution

e: this is important because it means a large proportion of the mutations will be so bad that they'll be effectively lethal (for the virus) and won't show up in the viral pool; mutations that are not lethal tend to be mutations of very small effect like the ones above. So you are correct in that mutations in extant viruses that anyone is likely to encounter tend to be effectively neutral.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Visualized unexpected deaths in NYC.

So that seems to imply that there are a number of corona deaths not currently counted as corona deaths, no? Or is there a gap between when a death happens and when it can be confirmed to be caused by covid?

The other possibility is deaths related to the mental health toll of the shutdowns, which is probably not a negligible number.

Since the shutdowns are caused by the virus, these would also be indirectly caused by the virus.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

First confirmed fatality in Wyoming.

https://twitter.com/GovernorGordon/status/1249762175897534466

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Why was Nevada left out of the West Coast compact? It's a D trifecta that's pretty typically progressive aside from Sisolak. Is it because Sisolak was sluggish in getting started with emergency responses?

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/revrrlewis/status/1250395628305362944

Absolutely incredible how frequently people in this administration are able to use blatant untruths to rally people around their flag without being laughed out of public life.

I know this is a trope at this point but nobody in the Obama administration (and nobody in a hypothetical Biden administration) would ever say something this idiotic.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Re: confederate flags in Michigan, there was a mass migration into Michigan from Appalachia and the upper south after WWII as people left the south for auto work. The Great Migration is thought of as only an African American thing but it happened with poor whites as well.

Also if you're surprised that Michiganders would embrace symbols of White Supremacy then you should read about Detroit's history of race riots.

Is this really necessary?  NYS has already peaked in terms of deaths/new infections, and the added benefit of masks is extremely marginal at best.

We peaked because of social distancing, not because the virus had infected too many people already to keep its momentum up. Now we want to end the social distancing, but there's plenty of fuel still available for it to restart the exponential growth. All it takes is one untracked individual to spark another outbreak. Masks will help prevent this.

Yeah I'll add to this that even if NY is "past peak" they're still adding thousands of new cases per day. Passing "peak" isn't like flipping a switch after which everything is fine; we're looking at potential for a long tail of infections and mortality like Italy.

The claim that benefits will be "marginal at best" is really dumb, for lack of a better term.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Re: confederate flags in Michigan, there was a mass migration into Michigan from Appalachia and the upper south after WWII as people left the south for auto work. The Great Migration is thought of as only an African American thing but it happened with poor whites as well.

Also if you're surprised that Michiganders would embrace symbols of White Supremacy then you should read about Detroit's history of race riots.

Is this really necessary?  NYS has already peaked in terms of deaths/new infections, and the added benefit of masks is extremely marginal at best.

We peaked because of social distancing, not because the virus had infected too many people already to keep its momentum up. Now we want to end the social distancing, but there's plenty of fuel still available for it to restart the exponential growth. All it takes is one untracked individual to spark another outbreak. Masks will help prevent this.

Yeah I'll add to this that even if NY is "past peak" they're still adding thousands of new cases per day. Passing "peak" isn't like flipping a switch after which everything is fine; we're looking at potential for a long tail of infections and mortality like Italy.

The claim that benefits will be "marginal at best" is really dumb, for lack of a better term.

No no, you know I don't read anything that isn't about TEXAS history -- the finest, bestest, biggest history of anywhere!

You jest but in my experience people in Michigan don't know any history south of the Toledo strip. I once had a Michigander ask me what the Appalachian mountains were.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Anyone know why new cases in New York went up by so much today? Outside of New York, new cases in the U.S. dropped.

New York added a bunch of "probable" deaths/cases backdating all the way back to March 11.  Extremely questionable stuff.  We don't even attempt to count deaths from other respiratory diseases with such a level of precision.  

From the article you quoted:

People whose death certificates don’t mention the virus still are not counted. From March 11 through April 13, 8,184 city residents died of causes not classified as confirmed or probable coronavirus.

Do you have any methodological basis for questioning these results or is this more of your wishful thinking/motivated skepticism?

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Anyone know why new cases in New York went up by so much today? Outside of New York, new cases in the U.S. dropped.

New York added a bunch of "probable" deaths/cases backdating all the way back to March 11.  Extremely questionable stuff.  We don't even attempt to count deaths from other respiratory diseases with such a level of precision.  

From the article you quoted:

People whose death certificates don’t mention the virus still are not counted. From March 11 through April 13, 8,184 city residents died of causes not classified as confirmed or probable coronavirus.

I think that's a factual misrepresentation on the part of Poltico (wouldn't be the first time).  From the press release from NYC Department of Health:

A death is classified as probable if the decedent was a New York City resident (NYC resident or residency pending) who had no known positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) but the death certificate lists as a cause of death “COVID-19” or an equivalent.

Key phrase being "or an equivalent".  What's an equivalent?  Are all pneumonia deaths from March 11 forward now being counting as COVID-19?  No answer from NYC Health there.  

Do you have any methodological basis for questioning these results or is this more of your wishful thinking/motivated skepticism?

Anytime you have a disease that primarily effects older people with severe comorbidities, its more difficult to determine a singular cause of death.  If an 87-year old with CHF develops rapid-onset pneumonia and dies in the hospital, should it get counted as COVID-19?  Different countries have varying (yet reasonable) standards for who gets counted and who doesn't, which is one reason why death counts in a country like Germany are so low.    

In what universe is a person with an underlying condition that is exacerbated by contracting COVID-19 not a death attributable to COVID? Trying to determine a singular cause of death is needlessly narrow and no serious public health expert thinks this way. Good lord are you tying yourself into knots to downplay this.

Even still, it's pretty obvious that since mid-March there's a large spike of otherwise-unattributed respiratory deaths, particularly in NYC, relative to March in other years. That's undeniable. The reason we don't have the ability to confirm they are related to COVID is due to testing shortages, not due to any contrary evidence. Probabalistically, with such a high frequency of confirmed COVID deaths, the vast majority of unexplained deaths is going to be due to this COVID. We obviously have no way of knowing the exact number with a shortage of tests but it's likely much more accurate to include these numbers than to ignore them.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Anyone know why new cases in New York went up by so much today? Outside of New York, new cases in the U.S. dropped.

New York added a bunch of "probable" deaths/cases backdating all the way back to March 11.  Extremely questionable stuff.  We don't even attempt to count deaths from other respiratory diseases with such a level of precision.  

From the article you quoted:

People whose death certificates don’t mention the virus still are not counted. From March 11 through April 13, 8,184 city residents died of causes not classified as confirmed or probable coronavirus.

I think that's a factual misrepresentation on the part of Poltico (wouldn't be the first time).  From the press release from NYC Department of Health:

A death is classified as probable if the decedent was a New York City resident (NYC resident or residency pending) who had no known positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) but the death certificate lists as a cause of death “COVID-19” or an equivalent.

Key phrase being "or an equivalent".  What's an equivalent?  Are all pneumonia deaths from March 11 forward now being counting as COVID-19?  No answer from NYC Health there.  

Do you have any methodological basis for questioning these results or is this more of your wishful thinking/motivated skepticism?

Anytime you have a disease that primarily effects older people with severe comorbidities, its more difficult to determine a singular cause of death.  If an 87-year old with CHF develops rapid-onset pneumonia and dies in the hospital, should it get counted as COVID-19?  Different countries have varying (yet reasonable) standards for who gets counted and who doesn't, which is one reason why death counts in a country like Germany are so low.    

Individual causes of death may be difficult to precisely and accurately identify. But looking at overall statistics, large spikes in number of deaths are pretty obvious, and you can get close to the deaths causes by the pandemic by taking total actual deaths and subtracting expected deaths (based on prior years' statistics).

100% agree.  At some point in the future, the all-cause mortality figures will allow us to model COVID-19 deaths as accurately as possible.  Until then, attributing all respiratory deaths to COVID-19 (like NYC looks like they might be doing) is going to produce a very imprecise measurement.    

The measurement is already imprecise because there are thousands of people who have died and not been tested!

In New York State in the entire year of 2017 there were 7250 lower respiratory deaths and 4000 pneumonia and flu deaths. New York City found an excess of 3000 respiratory deaths with COVID-like symptoms in the last month and that's not even counting the number of confirmed deaths.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/newyork/newyork.htm

The estimate is going to be much less accurate if you don't account for the unattributable and untested deaths. I'm not even sure why precision of the estimates is being invoked here.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/ChangePolls/status/1250901670206242818

Lol, white people privilege

lol libs using a pandemic to further inflame racial tensions

Liberals: Look at these racial disparities that hurt Americans of racial minorities! We should do something!
Hacks: wHY aRe yoU trYiNG to sTOkE rACIal TEnsIon!!11!!111!!!

Do you think everyone is not being hurt right now?

homie the tweet you are responding to is a poll literally demonstrating that some people are being hurt more than others

(it's hard to actually draw inference without any sort of error measurements but those differences between groups are quite large either way)

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Yeah if people were truly feeling economic insecurity then they'd be demanding or demonstrating for more direct government assistance.

If you're feeling economically insecure but you're choosing "liberating Wisconsin" or whatever over more cash assistance then you're using economic need arguments as a false pretense.

OK, thread derailing won't be tolerated.

Also, not responding to trolls would be most helpful.

Could you and your fellow moderators please do a better job deleting comments that are clearly trolling, and punishing those responsible? I'm disgusted by the commentary downplaying or making a joke out of the fact that tens of thousands of people have died. If I had lost to someone from COVID, I'd be absolutely enraged to see such foolishness being posted on this forum with impunity. I've reported multiple posts and yet nothing seems to change.

"Downplaying" aka disagreeing with an opinion is not a TOS violation.

IDK man I've definitely had posts deleted on this site for "downplaying" your intelligence.