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Now, hold it. Since when do your rights, however construed, include the actions that can and do cause harm to others? That has always been the limit: your rights extend only as far as the harm they can cause to others. If you choose to expose yourself to a virus that can cause both serious...

Trim it yourself or go all 60s and let it stop by itself. I'm going the second route myself. Like:

Well, yes to a lot of this. It is true that news shows are pretty polarizing these days, but, shoot, Walter Cronkite was polarizing in his day. There's a basic catechism on this: journalists prefer conflict to cooperation, decay to progress, and people to policy. They always have and every...

Eggsackley.

One reply. If the governor hasn't made the "limitations on the business re-openings" clear by now, why do you think he ever will? Since when is it the responsibility of journalists to publicize government requirements? And why has this happened in the first place? I hesitate to say this, but my...

Too many to check and see if the requirements are actually being put into force, of course. We could always depend on strict compliance across the board by all the businesses in question, but I sure wouldn't bet my health on that. Here's the scenario that I'm afraid of and, imho, that is almost...

I wouldn't pull South Carolina into anything. Good to know about the restrictions. Problem = there are too many businesses being opened at once. And "should" is not the auxiliary verb I'd like to see used under these conditions. "Must" would be more like it.

I thought something like this would happen. The "guidelines" are fraught with what the economists call "moral hazard". In this case, what that means is that a party has an incentive to take unusual risks in order to avoid losing gains as a result of action. In both the Georgia and South...

You like Lardner? Me too. "Alibi Ike" is one of the best sports stories ever written. And, yes, Collins does sound a lot like Ike after every game. My favorite Lardner story: A fellow journalist come over to his desk one Monday and says, "Hey, Ring. Let's go have a couple of drinks tonight!"...

FIFY. In fact, we probably had thousands of cases by then, especially since we let 40K people back from China after we "stopped travel". The initial big outbreak in Washington State was community spread. Not, mind, that we had much choice about letting US citizens back into the country or...

I can tell you for sure that until there's a vaccine for COVID-19, I'm not going to a Tech game. Or to a movie or live theater or restaurant or swimming pool or any group meetings or (God alone knows) take an airplane flight. We have to get a lot more done with the disease before we can even...

Depends on the data. One thing national stats services have gotten a lot better at is whole population time series data. We've had to come up with whole new fields ("data science") to come up with ways to handle that.

No argument there. We haven't really started the process of collecting the data we'll need to get the actual scope of the virus. When the house is on fire, all you are interested in is putting out the fire; you can find out if it was arson later. And, no doubt, many people can't keep their...

Yes. The whole point of statistical manipulation is to try to get to precise estimations of error in estimations of parameters. If you have a universe of data, then there's no point in trying to sample; you already have the actual parameters, at least for the population of interest. That's why...

Ok, I keep hearing cries for solid data on COVID-19 incidence here. Here you go: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1.full.pdf Short study: this looks at incidence of the disease in Santa Clara and estimates there are between 48K and 81K cases in the county, anywhere...

Random samples do reduce sampling bias, but that's it. Let's say you had figures for the entire population of the US; there are plenty of studies that have just that these days. Would you prefer a random sample to that? Not likely, though you might check the population figures against a...

There's nothing sacred about random samples; they can be misleading as well, but, at least, you can estimate how likely that is. With the virus, however, you are right. One thing we need to do Real Soon Now is start random samples of the population to estimate real infection rates with antibody...

And here's another take on the states and their relative position on COVID-19. See: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/04/what-is-the-real-prevalence-of-coronavirus-across-states.html#more This has a useful set of graphs about the states at the top. You'll have to use your screen adjust to...

The present situation is strange. I read somewhere (can't find it) that when we have a usual economic downturn it is institutional; i.e. 100% of all business are down (say) 50%. This one is a natural disaster: 50% of businesses are down 100%. Half the country (roughly) is still at work, like...

I think in general it is better to think of the US as Europe. You are right; there is a lot of variation between states and within them. I'm not sure about the idea that it would be easier to control the virus if 80% of the cases were spread out, however. It is bad that so many cases are...