Coronavirus and homemade tools

[Jon]

I've moved two posts from this thread into the Site Suggestions and Help forum, where anyone is welcome to discuss them there.

[Jon]

Machined mask mold, by Abo_91, a machinist in Italy. This is a good contrast to the Pringles can mask above. Click each one to play.







Also, I'm liking these memes that remind us how our culture is changing, with clever modifications to culturally iconic images.

[neilbourjaily]

If I may, "Advocating treatments such as this - which our best data tell us are very close to or equal to placebo in almost all situations - is harmful to people, because, even if the treatments have no effect, promoting them convinces people to prevent or delay the application of evidence-based treatment. This is especially true for Pauling's proposal to treat cancer with mega-dosing of vitamins. If you're interested in the complexities of the placebo effect, Harvard's Program in Placebo Studies is a good place to start." Jon
A good book for many here to read is Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos. He spends a significant amount of time discussing probability and its application in uncovering quackery.
You may choose to move this post. My concern here is the innumeracy of some commenters. Probability is important.

[Big Sexy]

If I understand what you are saying, I am thinking it is because it has already mutated at least twice and maybe more. I also will add, I think there is a load of information being withheld from the civilians all around the world. I can’t help but wonder about genetic predisposition with this. Because it makes no logical sense I can find about who it affects the worse. There has been very healthy and physically fit people die from it, but some very elderly it barely affects if they even contract it. The only thing I can think of that makes any sense is some sort of genetic cause and effect. Also seen that China has released info about some of the autopsy’s they have done that show up to 20% cardiac damage in patients that had no history of cardiac problems.
Now I am a bit of a conspiracy theorist for the simple fact that I do not trust any government agency or federally level politician and high level state politicians. So with that said, it seems quite possible that information is being kept from us for some reason. If they can develop test that can determine if you are infected in minutes instead of days over the course of a few months, they have to know much more about the workings of this virus and are not sharing it.

[Jon]

Innumeracy looks interesting; added to my list, thanks neilbourjaily.

Yes, that's how I understand it too; that we have multiple different strains of corona circulating. Check out this tool: https://nextstrain.org/ncov . Scroll down to "Transmissions", and click the green play button, and you can see a genomic animation of the spread. I don't know enough to know how much a strain difference matters, but that tool is fascinating.

Regarding government messaging; they have their goals, individuals have theirs. Western governments have already expended significant political capital pushing a masks-don't-work message. I understand that they have to preserve masks for healthcare workers, but they had to sacrifice public trust to make that move. That may have been a foolish move, or it may actually have been perfectly reasonable.

Let's talk numbers, especially in light of neilbourjaily's position about mathematical literacy. Note the now-famous Johns Hopkins covid map: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html . Let's examine the closed case fatality rate. That means everyone who either recovered or died. So, all closed cases go in the denominator. As I'm looking at it now, that's total deaths + total recovered: 37,649 + 165,370 = 203,019. And of course the numerator is total deaths: 37,649.

37,649 / 203,019 = 18.5%. That's the current global closed case fatality rate. In US, Italy, Spain, it's much worse. Public messaging says that there are many cases out there that aren't making it into the numbers, and I agree. This includes asymptomatic cases (no symptoms), and people who got covid, got sick, and the sickness resolved on its own, without those people being reported as covid positives. This group: asymptomatics + quietly resolved cases, will have to be very large to push that closed case fatality rate down to, say, below 2%. For example, if you have 10 times the number of closed cases, and zero additional deaths, that closed case fatality rate comes down to 1.85%:

37,649 / 2,030,190 = 1.85%

Fatality rates of emerging infectious disease are notoriously inaccurate, and it's reasonable to believe that the closed case fatality rate will come down, but nobody knows by how much.

[Christophe Mineau]

Yes Jon I agree with the public policy about masks, and about mortality, here in France they say that figures take mainly into account the number of hospitalized cases. There is on one end a rate of mortality in the elderly hospices not really taken into account, but on the other end, there is a great number of cases treated at home, and fortunately people recover but the cases are not taken into account at the denominator.
But we must not, for now, as individuals, take too much focus on the deaths figures, we will have enough to discuss this after the crisis, and the concern for now is to avoid anxiety and stress. So personally, I tend to listen more music and close my radio very soon after breakfast.
The only message is to keep people at home, keep safe behaviors, mainly to protect the medical staff.
This is everyone's responsibility.

[TheElderBrother]

China may have reported those numbers but you should also see this: https://www.ccn.com/coronavirus-deat...fected-bodies/

And this:

Now, there's no telling how reliable that reporting is, but if you were the CCP, would you be totally straight with the world, or would you lie to cover your culpability in foisting off a pandemic on the planet?

Occam's razor. Is it a miracle that they Chinese are so lightly affected, or are they lying?

It's a much simpler and much more likely explanation that the authorities in China are lying to you. The US is not the most affected country on earth. We're just reported to be.

[DIYSwede]

CCN explaining their Search Engine Optimization Writing methods, tips and tricks here:
https://www.ccn.com/seo-optimized-wr...r-journalists/

AFAIK, ony time will perhaps tell whoever's right.
Personally, I avoid click-bait sites, but then that's just me thinking many of them are merely revenue-generating "weapons of mass distraction".


Caveat: Occam's Razor could also be used as a conclusion-jumping pole in a complex world of seemingly paradoxical facts.

Just my two cents.
Johan

PS: "All solutions and no clues. That's what the dumbheads want...
That’s the bloody Novel: He said - she said - and descriptions of the sky.
I'd rather it was the other way around. All clues. No solutions.
That's the way things are. Plenty of clues. No solutions." 22:38 into:

Philip Marlow in "The Singing Detective" TV series

[TheElderBrother]

Disregard whatever you like. It's got nothing to do with the headlines and who posted them. It has to do with the likelihoods of which explanation makes the best sense.

By the way, Tim Pool, who posted the video, is one of the most trusted people in journalism, so dig in and find a rationale so you can dismiss him too, but you aren't convincing anyone of anything worth believing by pointing to old television and reciting vague generalizations.

But just for kicks, here's the Pollyanna's national anthem, in case you need to feel good about something completely irrelevant to the point:

[DIYSwede]

Disregard whatever you like. It's got nothing to do with the headlines and who posted them.
It has to do with the likelihoods of which explanation makes the best sense.

By the way, Tim Pool, who posted the video, is one of the most trusted people in journalism,[Citation needed] so dig in and find a rationale so you can dismiss him too, but you aren't convincing anyone of anything worth believing by pointing to old television and reciting vague generalizations.

But just for kicks, here's the Pollyanna's national anthem, in case you need to feel good about something completely irrelevant to the point:

Thanks, and pardon me for using an old vid for driving an epistemological query of confirmation bias & jumping conclusions.
I'm not trying to convince anybody - my point is simply put: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_criticism.
Your concerns and explanations for my methods, dismissals and feelings are truly irrelevant to the point.
Have a nice day!