Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Bozman said:
There are significantly more than the reported 25 million cases...

I agree. There's definitely a factor of X in play in regards to actual cases compared to recorded cases. But it's a variable that's hard to rely on because it's so unknown.

I will be the first to tell you it is a WAG.

But for my own analysis, I am using a 70% undercount figure. Remember the reason I am following this is for risk management purposes, so I like to assume the situation is worse than it really is. That said, the prevalence study that Ohio State did back in July came up with numbers that were remarkably close to my estimates with the 70% undercount at the time. I suspect part of the big spike in November might have been testing catching a lot of cases that otherwise wouldn't have been counted, although I don't think that's the whole story because hospitalizations and deaths also peaked at that time, and those figures don't care whether you've been tested or not.

For me, the headline number is 1.1416%. Yesterday (Ohio hasn't updated the data file today for some reason) I estimate there were 53,817 known contagious people in the State of Ohio, which means potentially as many as 179,390 total. Which means your odds of meeting a contagious Ohioan are somewhere between 0.4892% and 1.1416%*. This does not take into account the reduced size of the pool of available hosts. I wonder how I could do that... (up to 179,390 out of 10.1 million available hosts in a population of 11 million...)

The subhead is that based on infections alone, immunity in Ohio is now somewhere between 8.0338% and 26.7793%. That does not take into account vaccinations or any possible natural immunity.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

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* Yes, the math should work out to 1.6308%. But I am also making the (dangerous?) assumption that the 53,817 people who know they are sick have probably removed themselves from society for the moment, making it unlikely you will meet one of them, and leaving only 125,573 people who are contagious and don't know they are sick...1.1416%.

--DCAjr

Jeff said:

There's no evidence that it has anything to do with immunity, not when 3% of the population has been vaccinated and x% has been infected. But yeah, it's largely the expected curve of people doing what they should be doing after the holidays.

Where are you getting the 3%? 25M+ have been administered at this point. 330M Americans (7.5%), 209M adult Americans (12%). I understand it's a 2 shot vaccination for total protection ..... plus the (pick a number) 75M or so American's who have had Covid, that's a lot of the population that have some level of immunity against this virus.

Midwest is at its lowest point of cases since mid-October when this late fall/early winter explosion started. Variants are concerning, though from what I have read the vaccines are effective against all of the variants except South Africa one I believe? I think Biden summed it up well either yesterday or today when he said we're basically in a vaccination race right now against the variants.

The numbers you're referring to are first-shot only. The number of folks who've had both were only 3% as of a few days ago.

Lord Gonchar said:

If there's any consistency at all in the ongoing discussion over the past year, it's that a certain segment is always at the ready with a "Yeah, but..." for everything.

You get pretty hung up on that, implying it's a character flaw. A "certain segment" seemed convinced we'd be over this by last fall, too, so a little skepticism seems pretty well warranted to me. My first lesson in management is to set expectations low so people are excited when you exceed them. When I can get on a cruise ship again and visit a theme park without a mask, I'll be happy to agree that everything is peachy. Our outcomes could have been better with less death and economic damage if we would have gotten our **** together sooner.

Jeff said:

A "certain segment" seemed convinced we'd be over this by last fall, too...

Fair.

But those people were frustrating too.

(and, in further fairness, if we just did nothing and let 3,000,000 people die, we would probably be over it by now)

You get pretty hung up on that...

Oh, more than a little.

My fear is that you can "Yeah, but..." your way to eternity. At some point we have to say, "This is good enough. This is an acceptable place to move forward from."

I fear the "Yeah, but..." crowd may never get there...or at least impede our progress or reach or acceptance or whatever to getting there.

Like I said in my last post, I think we need to be sure we don't "Yeah, but..." this thing so it drags on for years and years.

When I can get on a cruise ship again and visit a theme park without a mask, I'll be happy to agree that everything is peachy.

Yeah, but...can we agree on when that is? (See what I did there?)

That's exactly what I'm saying. I can assure you that my conditions and your conditions for this to be the case likely differ.

Do you have any idea what the economic impact (to say nothing of the psychological impact) of 3 million people dying would be? It's costing healthcare in excess of $50 billion a month in the US, driving up insurance rates, and the estimated cost to the global economy in 2020 was $2 trillion. There's a significant cost for the majority of people who don't die, too.

Yeah, but...can we agree on when that is?

Luckily the Coasterbuzz forums isn't responsible for making the decisions.

Jeff said:

Do you have any idea what the economic impact (to say nothing of the psychological impact) of 3 million people dying would be? It's costing healthcare in excess of $50 billion a month in the US, driving up insurance rates, and the estimated cost to the global economy in 2020 was $2 trillion. There's a significant cost for the majority of people who don't die, too.

You know I’ve often wondered about exactly that. The economic impact is debated again and again, but I often wonder how much impact there would really be. As far as economics I think we have reached a point where just about every single one of us is replaceable in the workplace and the global economy. If three million people died it might seem bad in the short term, but long run it might just barely be a blip on the radar. The US has nearly 30 trillion in debt, yet it just doesn’t seem to be of any real concern.

As far as psychological, everyone has their own outlooks on that and it affects everyone in a different way. Couldn’t see the effects until it happened.

I'm not even talking about the place of humans filling jobs, I'm talking about the healthcare cost itself. The US spends on average an absurd $12k per person on healthcare every year under normal circumstances, with 500k extra dead people per year, and likely millions more surviving and being treated, the cost is astronomical. That in turn causes individuals to go bankrupt en masse. Small businesses see their health insurance rates skyrocket. That's why this debate is generally uninformed... it assumes death costs less than mitigating infection, and it's just not the case.

There is also no reason to assume that if we allowed 10x the number of deaths, the economy would be just fine. At some point, restrictions or no, large numbers of people would stop traveling, going to restaurants, movies, bowling alleys, etc.* if they saw people dropping dead at high rates. Not to the same degree as when enforced by the government, but possibly to a degree where those businesses could not survive nevertheless. And in the absence of a mandated shutdown, I would assume government aid would have been smaller and slower, making the problem worse.

*Biological imperatives being what they are, dry humping would doubtless continue. Not clear how much that contributes to the economy however.

eightdotthree said:
Luckily the Coasterbuzz forums isn't responsible for making the decisions.

We've yeah-butted (can we just make that verb already?) those people too.

There are costs of not preventing illness/death. And costs of preventing both as well. Just identifying what all of those costs are (not quantifying them just figuring out what they are) is staggering. Then you have to quantify them. And in the process estimate them because it isn't often the case of you do x and $y of economic consequences will result. And many costs are challenging to quantify such as lack of in-person school (particularly for young kids).

There are people who do those types of things for a living. And they are very good at it. But still its often ranges that result from the analysis. Not sure how many of those people we have here posting on regular basis.

We don't need a range to predict that. It's precisely zero. 💯

Kids have been gone long enough since the holidays that I can share third person, anecdotal stories again.

Word from Paris is that compliance is far worse than what she saw here. Like ridiculously nonchalant. 6pm-6am curfew has been in place, but that just makes things super-busy the 12 hours they're open. Talks of doing another confinement to slow things down. Vaccinations don't even seem to be on the radar.

News out of The U is that they plan to start vaccinating the student population in February. Depending on how that falls and what Ohio does next, my kid might actually get vaccinated quicker in Miami than he would have here.

France has a very significant anti-vax problem. Last numbers I saw didn't show high vaccine rates in Germany either and they were talking about shortages until April.

ApolloAndy said:

There's a standard way to express that and whether or not "it feels right" to common English parlance (i.e. it could be that it's 95% effective at preventing any infection but 90% effective at preventing severe infection) is, to me, a matter of explaining and not a matter of changing terminology.

Ok, but here's something that I had sticking with me and when I saw a tweet today (I'll get to it in a minute) I decided to revisit.

Wouldn't all of this also mean it's 100% effective at preventing death?

I never went there though, then today I came across this tweet from Prof. Akiko Iwasaki which included this graphic about the J&J trial:

You can see how it put my mind back in the space of the discussion we were having.

So is it fair to say there's 100% prevention of death? (and I think I know the reply is going to be that if no one died in either group then, no, because dividing by zero)

And as I'm sitting here typing this, I don't want to kick the dead horse, but it still bugs me that we're not treating 'severe' infection as a subset of infection.

The way you're presenting it makes it seem like three separate things: No infection, infection, severe infection. (in theory, death should be a fourth option there)

Why don't we look at it as binary on the top line? Infections or no. And then among infections how many become severe or become death? Your infection can't be severe if you're not infected in the first place. (I'm very stuck on this) It should be flowchart-y, not side-by-side. Severe infection isnt a separate condition, but a further degree of initial infection.

This makes a ton more sense to me. It goes back to my joking remark from above. In the Pfizer study, the placebo group had 162 infections, of which 9 were severe (5.6%). The BNT162b2 group had 8 infections, of which 1 was severe (12.5%). Which would mean it had no (or a negative!) effect on the number of infections that become severe.

It's comparing the percentage of infections that become severe among those that get infected - which you have to be before your infection can be severe. You can't be one of the 9 without being one of the 162. Why is it "wrong" to compare and explain in that way?

It reduced infections by 95%, but among those still infected there was no reduction in the percentage that eventually became severe cases...there was actually an increase.

(Hoping this stays in "discussion" territory because I'm not wanting an argument, I'm looking to understand)

The J&J vaccine definitely makes things interesting, because no one was really expecting a vaccine that had lower efficacy in infection rates but that did reduce severity of illness and death. Fauci said in an interview that they have to work hard on the messaging so people aren't letting this vaccine sit on the shelf. Get the one that's available.

And about France, yeah, a former coworker is there and says mitigation compliance is not good, and their infection rates show it.

We often get hung up on the US and thinking we are the only ones resisting mitigation measures, but it isn’t just us, I’m sure there are more countries that are just over all of this and are lacking on their resolve.

Yeah, half of Europe is no better. Much of East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, however, are doing much better.

The former director of the CDC said that, in the US, 25% of people are still wearing masks under their noses. Good grief. He did say that was like fixing 3 of the 5 screen windows in your submarine...which was a pretty good line.