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No need to apologize. They deserve it.

It's a she, btw. She does all that in the paper. What she doesn't do is model out different strategies to contain infection. She looks at different infection rates, but mitigation strategies aren't varied. I haven't read the paper through so I'm not sure how to answer all your questions. What I...

Since economic decline (coming, no matter what) and "re-opening" the economy (sorta) have been a subject here, how about a paper that looks at the data and models the consequences of different re-opening scenarios? See...

You and bwelbo seem to have convinced yourselves that people are going to behave irrationally in this. As the crisis continues, the federal government will provide more money. It really is that simple. The Fed just pumped another $2.3 trillion into economy yesterday. Congress will follow suit...

Uh, they can already do that, you know. The only restriction is that you can't do it as part of a criminal investigation. But if you are that worried, throw the sim chip in your phone away, buy a burner every week (they're dirt cheap), and go your merry way.

Hope you're right. But … this is a brand new virus and extremely contagious. Remember that the initial estimates of total deaths were based on not doing what we are doing now. Personally, I think that, even with the present measures and better treatments, we will still top better then 100K...

See: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ And look at your favorite metric, in this case tests per million population. There you will see at once that the US, while giving a large number of tests, is not - repeat not - among the world leaders in the kind of surveillance that will be...

I think this article is a fine example of what we should avoid taking seriously. The doctor in question gave Macron "… a new study 1061 patients showing a 91% success rate." How was the study conducted? <Crickets chirping> Who were the 1061 patients and what was their clinical condition...

Another good post from The Incidental Economist. See: https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/how-will-we-know-when-its-time-to-reopen-the-nation/ This has 4 basic criteria for when we might open a particular state or locality for at least some business. A quick look will show why I doubt...

We ought to get the mods to put this at the beginning of this thread with a 64 red font saying "Read this, then write". It's great to have a real MD or two commenting here.

It's the old political/media adage: never let a good crisis go to waste. My guess is that Fauci has wanted everybody to stop shaking hands for years, largely because they won't wash their hands regularly enough to stop disease transmission. But trying to get people to discard literally millennia...

This is for FredJacket. I'm sorry. I replied to your post in haste late at night and didn't consider what you were actually saying. I try not to do that to anybody, but this time I screwed up royally. Part of the reason for my kneejerk reaction is that I occasionally run into that kind of...

Nah. That's not it. They really do want to know what actually works, without, you know, making their patients worse off. Doctors have SOPs for the same reasons everyone else does (or should); they allow us to do things efficiently and with as much benefit and as little loss as possible. With...

If only it was this easy to distinguish between solid and specious evidence! It isn't, of course; that's why doing rigorous research takes so long and why replication is a necessary step, especially in the health sciences. There are legitimate critics - mostly from the humanities - that think...

To second YJ, I re-post this: Remember the old Harvard Med School story: A famous surgeon is addressing a meeting of new students and describing a new surgical technique that he says saves lives. Student in the back: “What were your controls?” Famous Surgeon: “You mean did I use the...

Just ran across this. This is the squadron symbol for Colonel Fereydoun Mazandrani, the most celebrated Iranian ace of the Iran-Iraq War: The US Navy obviously had a greater influence on Iran's F-14 pilots then just teaching them how to fly.

What you are describing is a government without a plan in place. And one that cast the entire business as a state and locality problem. Not to put too fine a point on it, the reason we created a federal government in the first place was to do national level planning about possible risks and to...

The toilet paper dilemma revealed! See: https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0 So, no, it isn't about how much TP people are buying, it's where they are using it. The market for TP is divided into commercial and home markets that...

They knew it was coming, but nobody paid attention. See: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dr-fauci-has-been-dreading-a-pandemic-like-covid-19-for-years/ Describes COVID-19 exactly, doesn't it? And this was before the disease emerged. But it is hard to get a democracy take the things like...

What may be lurking under the surface, part 2. See: https://gothamist.com/news/surge-number-new-yorkers-dying-home-officials-suspect-undercount-covid-19-related-deaths Short article: the shortage of tests means that only hospitalized patients in New York are being tested for COVID-19. Problem...