[socialdemocrat]

I think in principle hindering spread is much EASIER in the US than in South Korea.

The US has a huge advantage in its low population density and spread out population. That slows down the spread of disease. Not to mention the advantage of a car centric society. In the US you can travel from A to B without exposing yourself to other people. Americans also mostly live in separate houses further reducing the risk of the spread of disease.

All through human history population density has been a major contributor to pandemics. One can see e.g. how New York is much harder hit than LA. LA is low density housing and almost no public transport.

Europe and Asia in contrast is almost all more like New York. IMHO that makes the success in South Korea more impressive not LESS.

We see the same in Europe. The densely populated countries tend to be harder hit. E.g. Denmark has enacted equally strict measures as Norway sooner yet has twice the number of deaths. Norway has an advantage in being more like the US, having a relatively spread out population.

I don't think the decentralization is the main problem at the moment. Germany is also decentralized. It is a federal republic like the US. However unlike the US, Germany has a cooperation oriented leadership where the central government listens to the leaders of the states and coordinate with them.

In the US it seems to be all postering and blame game. It is very hard to evaluate the US results without taking into account its current disastrous leadership. The US is lead by a reality star. Germany is led by a former scientific researcher with a PhD in quantum chemistry. Should we be surprised why Germany is having the best results in the West, while the US is rapidly approaching the worst results?

What saves the US is that there are numerous governors who are good leaders and to some degree counterweight the absurdity of the federal government.

But seriously in what country does the President encourage riot in provinces of their own country? Looking from abroad the US is looking increasingly like a Banana republic. I how things work out fine for everybody. But I am worried.

[misun78]

I hope you are not including Cuomo — the governer at the epicenter of the worst hit NY — in your “list of good governers”? This was his quote from early March:

"People are reacting like this is the Ebola virus. This is not the Ebola virus. This hysteria that you see, this fear that you see, the panic that you see is unwarranted. We have dealt with worse viruses. This spreads like the flu, but most people will have it and they get on with their lives."

[frosted-flakes]

Yeah, he was wrong. But he's changed his tune, and has done a decently good job managing the situation.

[misun78]

As again with political analysis, I am seeing downright inconsistencies and biases in judging responses to this pandemic, based on what side one is on. Do you apply the same remarks to the POTUS as well?

[frosted-flakes]

Responding to your original post:

> Not to make this too political but can't the same logic be applied to the POTUS too? Changed tone and done a decent job using the fed muscle to beef up on ventilators and testing. What am I missing when I hear contradicting analysis around politicians, presumably based on which "side" one is on. We should be consistent in acknowledging that no one (at least in the US) got the severity of this correct.

The same logic does apply to President Trump. But he has not changed his tune. He's done some of the right things under pressure, but then goes and says that he wants to re-open the country by Easter, etc. I don't follow what he says closely (after all, I don't live in the US), but the picture I've gotten about him is that he's inconsistent and not really trustworthy.

[bkor]

> then goes and says that he wants to re-open the country by Easter

From what I noticed (it's been a while) the reporting on that was a bit weird. The statement was more like "I hope it'll be fine by Easter". That's still a weird thing to say, but less strange than what was reported.

The way statements were made to the public seems to be different per country. E.g. in NL the prime minister said something like "we need to take this very seriously and it will take a long time". They showed a similar presentation from France, were the statement included stuff about "fighting a war". So despite needing to say similar things, the messaging can differ quite a bit per country. In US the statements seem quite strange; dismissing the importance as authority figure seems dangerous and irresponsible.

[closeparen]

Ebola has an average case fatality rate of 50%. This is not Ebola.

[gnusty_gnurc]

He’s pretty much right though. It spreads worse than the flu and Dr. Ioaniddis recently published a serological study showing it seems to have a mortality rate similar to the flu. An overwhelming majority of people who get it will not die. Ioaniddis et. al. suggests the evidence points towards 1~2 out of a thousand mortality rate.

We should not be panicking. We should be mitigating the disease based on the evidence at hand.

[coldtea]

>He’s pretty much right though. It spreads worse than the flu

Err, it spreads much better, several times more than the flu.

>and Dr. Ioaniddis recently published a serological study showing it seems to have a mortality rate similar to the flu

Dr. Ioaniddis study was cherry-picked and bogus, much like the studies he was famous for criticizing...

[beagle3]

[citation needed] about cherry picking. The limits of their scheme was acknowledged and discussed in the paper. What cherry picking are you referring to that wasn’t addressed?

[pps43]

This paper?

"I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error."

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...

[SpicyLemonZest]

I'm skeptical whenever I see a teardown like this which fails to mention that the offical case counts have all the same problems. Maybe we should dismiss this paper - but that means committing ourselves to radical skepticism about the prevalence, not going back and believing the numbers printed in the news.

[beagle3]

While Gelman does point out to issues that may invalidate this paper (test specificity, mostly, and noisy weights, potentially) there does not seem to be any "cherry picking" involved.

[corkmask]

9 days ago Ioaniddis said

If I were to make an informed estimate based on the limited testing data we have, I would say that covid-19 will result in fewer than 40,000 deaths this season in the USA,

[coldtea]

He also predicted about 10,000 deaths in total in his mid-March article -- and he even meant that number without any special measures like social distancing and WFH.

At this point he should stop predicting...

[gnusty_gnurc]

Should Imperial close up shop too?

[coldtea]

No, Imperial gave an estimation of what would happen without measures, but there were measures taken. So in their case, it's natural that the actual number (with measures) would be much less.

Ioannidis' already 4x surpassed prediction was 10K deaths without measures.

Given that we have 4x WITH measures, this means we would be many times more wrong if we followed his advice and didn't take any...

[gnusty_gnurc]

If he's off by 1.5x (IHME model predicts 60k fatalities attributed to COVID-19), surely that's miles better than the what - 50x predicted at the start (I recall seeing 2mil fatalities passed around by Imperial for the US)? 40k deaths is a little less than a week of natural deaths in the US, for scale.

[coldtea]

That's with unprecedented social distancing measures - the 50x prediction was without...

Ioannides in his mid-March article was predicting "10,000" deaths in total in the US, without measures...

[gnusty_gnurc]

It's worth putting his actual statement here, so people can decide whether you're misrepresenting him.

From his article [1]:

> If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.

[1]: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

He ventured a prediction of the CFR. And then just calculates the amount of deaths from a pretty arbitrary infected percentage of the population (there's no mention of the time scale either). Never does he predict that 1% will be infected. He's arbitrarily picking a number to illustrate the amount of deaths we'd see, but that all depends on how the disease spreads. Oddly enough his serology study ends up being somewhat close - instead of 1%, they saw 1.80-3.17% (in Santa Clara).

[corkmask]

at what multiplier would you consider being skeptical about what he says.

your comparison of the 2 mil which was the worst case scenario months ago, and now irrelevant, with 40k which was his prediction from 10 days ago is wrong.

[acdha]

You have to read the study’s details, not just the number in the headline. The IC report’s highest number was looking at what would happen if strong countermeasures were not taken, and they subsequently were — it’s like criticizing the justifications for mandating seatbelts because so many fewer people die in car crashes now.

[cameldrv]

The Ioaniddis survey was a total sham. The true fatality rate will wind up being something like 1-2%, if counted by excess deaths.

A town in Italy, Castiglione d'Adda, had 1.4% of its population die in March. Normally 0.1% dies in a month. That town did a serological survey of blood donors, and 70% came up positive. That exact number won't apply everywhere because there are different age distributions, different comorbibitities, different genes, etc., but that is the ballpark we're looking at.

0.15% of New York City has already died. That should tell you how reliable Ioaniddis' numbers are.