This Tweet Did Not Age Well
Posted on July 2, 2020 Posted by John Scalzi 24 Comments
For those of you missing context. Was Cain at Trump’s Tulsa event? Oh, my, yes he was.
Thoughts and prayers to everyone attending that Mt. Rushmore rally this weekend.
Wear your masks, folks. If you won’t listen to me, then listen to Tom Hanks.
I wouldn’t quite call that Schadenfreude Pie, but the word choices and the italics here do put me in mind of your intro to that ever-golden post.
Not that a bit of Schadenfreude isn’t justified here.
I have only finite reserves of sympathy left, and they’re mostly held for anyone domestic terrorist Herman Cain infected between Tulsa and his admission to the hospital.
The disease is too viscous for me to feel Schandenfreude. AIDs mortality rate after 2006 is 0.114.
The Flu is 0.1%
C-19 is 10% ish of those who get infected. Doctor says, “Good New. Only 10% of the people who have this disease die.”
As a matter of principle, I refuse to get Covid-19 while the POS-POTUS 45 is still in office. This means that I will continue to socially isolate, wear a mask and maintain safe distancing when I AM out in public, and wash my hands and use disinfectant wipes for as long as it takes.
Dear John B,
Uhhh…. NO!
COVID-19 is not 10% fatal. You may be confusing the mortality rate of those requiring hospital admissions with the overall mortality rate. Or confirmed cases vs deaths, ‘cept confirmed cases are 10X less than the total number of cases, because we’re not testing everyone.
0.5-1% of those infected by COVID-19 die. We’re confident of this. That’s still a factor of ten worse than average flu and C-19 is three times as infectious, which is why this is a big problem.
An aside: if you know someone who says that C-19 is “no worse than the flu,” (wrong, but…) remind them that the 1919 pandemic was the flu and the next big one that doctors were expecting would come along was also flu. Even if ‘someone’ was right (and they’re not), that ‘s only like saying this the apocalypse we expected instead of an unexpected one.
“Oh good, it’s zombie cannibals, not vampires! What a relief!”
pax / Ctein
That tweet aged pretty fast, didn’t it? It’s on a par with General John Sedgwick’s “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” .
I live a stones throw from Mt. Rushmore and am posting to say so long. Just in case this turns out to be the apocalyptic disaster I’ve been fearing since 2016. If the hills don’t burn, and we don’t get run over by the Trump bus I expect we’ll all be sick with Covid, or unable to get treatment for whatever ails us because the hospital is full of Trumps victims.
One hates to say anyone is too stupid to live, but if the Godfather’s Pizza fits…Herman Cain had – and beat – STAGE FOUR CANCER. Then he drank the Trump Kool-Aid and chose to risk his life (and possibly others) by going to his dumb@ss rally without a mask. (The reason he “has no idea where he got infected” is, he also flew to Arizona last week, presumably to give the virus a second shot at him!)
What fools these mortals be.
The South Dakota Governor is trying to elbow her way into the De Santis/Ducey/Abbott Hall of Shame, isn’t she? Take a seat, Governor, we’ll get back to you.
I thought Sedgwick got cut off at the “..ance” part. (at least that’s how I remember it from Passage).
The mask might have helped Cain, but mostly, him not wearing it means that other people got gifted with sickness because of his stupidity, consistent with his beliefs (and those of his party) that responsibility is only for other people.
I’m not at all shocked by this development, but I *am struggling (I just failed) to contain the mirth.
I’m tired of the notion that I should be kind to and/or patient with bigots and other evil people.
Infected covidiots are nothing but cautionary tales.
The Manbaby Who Cried Hoax and Little Red Coughing Jerk have clear, easy to grasp messages; those who ignore them get what they ask for.
I wish Cain a long and terrifying recovery.
Said it before and I’ll say it again: covidiots are genocidal sociopaths who should be denied any and all treatment should they come down with the virus.
Same goes for anyone in their household.
These people are going to contract and spread the virus then demand treatment (this will put medical professionals and first responders in harm’s way unnecessarily) for them and theirs when the natural consequences of their stupid, irresponsible behavior fall on their hollow little pinheads.
They should be refused treatment and confined to their houses for the duration.
The appropriate officials can come and collect any dead once the virus has run its course through every member of the household.
Some damage will be done; they’ll have infected countless others before symptoms present, but we can at least keep them from killing others.
The ones who actually believe in the virus might think twice about their behavior when the lives of their loved ones are on the line.
Failing that, I vote we heard them onto spacecrafts and shoot them into the sun; they’re not just political opponents but major threats to national security.
that is “herd”; we should herd all covidiots onto a spacecraft and launch them into the sun.
A friend used this quote from Catherine Aird as her email signature:
Seems like Dr. Cain self-selected for the latter.
My response to the tweet elsewhere – “We’re fed up, all right. We’re fed up with the likes of YOU!”
Trump’s team has to prove they’re on his side by risking infection and hoping they get away with it.
Reminds me of a famous Gary Larsen cartoon:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/dd/ec/f0/ddecf069d781fde498d779b72798b1d5.jpg
And if you won’t listen to Tom Hanks, listen to Trae Crowder:
“Words are hard.”
“conservatives’ favorite pastime is shoving their oppinions in other peoples’ faces.”
Gold!I love it!
Here’s hoping they get the message.
Otherwise, into the sun with the lot of them!
As they flock to Mt. Rushmore, in defiance of good sense, can we call Trump sheep ‘Treeps’?
I like it!
We move, on average, every 7 years for my husband’s work. At the moment, I am staying home, wearing a mask when I go out, sanitizing everything that comes into the house, and washing my hands like crazy because I refuse to die in fucking Oklahoma.
A note regarding debates about the case fatality rate of COVID-19 vs other diseases: The CFR is not the only thing to be concerned about that we do not yet know enough about. Also critical are long term effects in those who have it and whether any immunity is gained from having it. The reason to be exercising caution right now is because we don’t know these things. If COVID-19 causes lasting health effects in survivors then the long term impact of allowing it to run rampant could be extreme. Even more so if little or no immunity is gained by those people who could then contract it again with further damages to their health.
Now none of this may be the case or all of it. The problem is we don’t know yet.
Dear Paul,
Yes!
Any serious illness produces long-term complications. Unfortunately, in this case, we don’t have enough information to know how significant that is. Given the very large number of people who are getting sick enough to need to be hospitalized (million and climbing) the consequences could be collectively very serious.
So far we are not seeing good evidence for long-term immunity. It would be extremely surprising if there were none at all — that’s just not a thing one encounters unless one is dealing with immuno-deficiency infections — but the in vitro tests indicate there could be very wide variability.
It’s also true that we’re not seeing any confirmed level of secondary infections in the wild, but given the low penetration of the virus into the general population so far, that doesn’t tell us anything.
If I were to make a completely wild-assed, semi-educated guess, it will turn out that natural herd immunity is impossible to achieve (striving for it would be a very bad idea from both the humanitarian and economic points of views, anyway) although there will be a substantial degree of individual immunity ranging from months to years.
What we are all keeping our fingers crossed for is either a cheap and effective cure or artificial herd immunity. A.k.a., vaccination.
Absent either of those, we are in for a very long haul. Years.
– pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]
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Death isn’t the only outcome from this disease, so focusing on death is misguided.
Now, someone clear something up for me:
I just looked at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/, and for the USA it says:
2,890,588 cases, and 132,101 deaths.
132,101/2,890,588 = 0.0457, or 4.6%
So, is this not the “case fatality rate”? ABTW, it’s been pretty consistent for the USA.
I keep seeing this “1%” being bandied about, and it seems ‘wayyy too low.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
Dear Eric,
Excellent points, and I’m glad you bought them up. Thank you!
I agree with you — I think hospitalizations is a far more useful metric than deaths. For one thing there are a lot more of them, which means the statistics are a lot better, especially in counties with low populations or incidence rates. The criteria for categorizing hospitalizations has been well-standardized since late April, so it’s easy to make week-to-week comparisons. The numbers might be wrong, but they’ll be wrong in the same way. Think of it as using a cloth tape measure to measure your height from daily. You don’t know if the tape measure is, in fact, accurate, but you can tell whether you’re getting taller or shorter.
So… why don’t I deal in hospitalizations? Until recently, it was a lot harder to get collected information on hospitalizations, because those are reported county by county. Now there are a couple of websites that aggregate the data, but before that the only easy number to get was deaths. Since no one was paying me to do this [smile], that’s what I’ve been tracking since the beginning of April, that and total reported cases.
Important side note: once you find a site whose data you can trust, you should use that one consistently if you’re compiling statistics over time. Different sites will report different numbers (for legitimate reasons). If you go hopping around for your data, it’s like using different tape measures.
On to your main question:
The number you quote from worldometer is the number of REPORTED, CONFIRMED cases, it is not an estimate of the total number people who have been infected I just double-checked that by going to a source that explicitly tabulatea daily confirmed cases and integrated them over the past couple of months.
This is not the total number of cases, it’s only the number we’ve identified so far. So, it’s not something you can use to measure of how lethal the disease is.
I looked at your second source, cebm, and it’s got a really big problem. Their numbers are WRONG! Or at least the number for the US is (no idea about other countries).
Here’s what they say: “The IFR estimates the fatality rate in all those with infection: the detected disease (cases) and those with an undetected disease (asymptomatic and not tested group).”
Except, they aren’t including the non-tested group! The number they’ve given in the table for the US is the number of confirmed cases. This isn’t a matter of interpretation or different data sources, this is flat-out wrong.
So, what is the total number of cases? We have a couple of independent paths to that which I won’t go into here because this is already verging on longissimus, non legi [loquacious grin], but they point to 15-20 million Americans having been infected so far. That’s a probablistic estimate. It could be more, it could be less. But there’s only a couple of percent chance it’s less than 10 million or more than 25 million.
You can kind of estimate this for yourself from general-interest articles. You’ve probably run across news reports that talk about 4-5% of the population in a given area having been already infected, based on antibody studies. Well, multiply that by the population of the United States and you get a number in the above range.
Yes, there have been individual studies in the past that suggested overall mortality rates approaching 10% and others that reported it was down around 0.05%. None of those have held up on close examination, as we got more data.
I hope you found this helpful. If you want to pursue this in more detail, better to email me. I don’t think John wishes this to turn into the Journal of Amateur Epidemiology. I’d be happy to answer your (or anybody else’s) questions within my limited abilities and availability.
Finally, in closing, if you still want to believe that the death rate is up around 5%, I don’t have a problem with that! It means you will be erring on the side of caution, but I don’t see a downside to that. Whereas it would be dangerous if you believed 0.05%.
Stay well!
– pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]
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— Ctein’s Online Gallery. http://ctein.com
— Digital Restorations. http://photo-repair.com
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So it’s becoming apparent that the trump campaign is a super spreader event. Now Kim Guilfoyle has come up positive along with more of the Secret Service and the advance team for Utah. Everywhere he goes he travels with covid.