And yet when I use simple terms for emphasis you call it misleading and try to pull rank— but still have provided no information to support your point.
It didn’t take deep analytics to prove the Twitter interpretation of the R plot of lag corrected mortality data out of Sweden was a crock, but you still have your name signed to “liking” that post. That doesn’t bolster your analytic credentials here.
I started simple and succinct for a broad audience and specifically in response to someone who believes what they read on Twitter, but I’m happy to dive in deeper if there’s something to learn. If you need deep analytics to make the point you want to make, there are certainly people here who would enjoy the intelectual stimulation.
You’ve shared none of the evidence you claim (let alone evidence that is more statistically significant than what you’ve dismissed from others) and you’re again drawing hard conclusions on what’s effective without applying your analytical superpowers.
I’m not arguing with either of your points here. I’d take it a step further though and say I don’t see convincing evidence that Sweden’s approach works in Sweden.
Wait, why? Why can’t you say social distancing saved lives? There’s room to debate the exact numbers, sure, and we can debate opinions about how many lives we should trade for ”freedom” until the cows come home, but to say we shouldn’t credit it with saving lives because we only had projections seems extreme. And why do you talk as though there is only one model?
Ceteris paribus, social distancing saved lives.
Numbers are misleading?! You “do analytics” and want to say we shouldn’t use numbers but should instead focus on broad statements of nothingburgers and what might be true and unbacked assertions of what’s indisputable?
There’s nothing misleading to say that 3 is 50% bigger than 2. It is no more misleading than saying 3x10^23 is 50% bigger than 2x10^23.
What you are trying to say is that you want to focus on something different.
There’s this thing about the germ theory of disease— it states that disease transmits among people. People aren’t staying home just to protect themselves, they’re doing it to protect others.
- As one example, we’ve seen that all it takes is a small leak into a nursing home and the results are swift and tragic.
- The employees have to shop for food like the rest of us, but then they have to report to work at that nursing home. If they get infected in the grocery store, the people in their care can die.
- To minimize the risk of infection in the grocery store, we want to minimize the infected people in the grocery stores.
- To minimize the number of infected people in grocery stores we want to minimize the number of people in the store and we want to minimize the infection rate.
- To minimize the infection rate, we need to minimize how many people are exposed to infected individuals, even to infected healthy individuals who have almost no chance of death themselves.
- Since we aren’t able to test everyone effectively yet, and we likely don’t know people are infected until well after they show symptoms, and healthy people with almost no chance of death have only minor or no symptoms at all, we are all minimizing our contact with one another to avoid setting off this whole chain reaction.
So we
aren’t hiding in our homes, we’re staying home out of
concern for others.
I don’t think anyone believes one size fits all is the right place to end up, and I don’t think doctors are making policy anywhere. Policy is made by politicians. Doctors have outsized input, as they should in a healthcare crisis. Economists have outsized input, as they should in an economic crisis. The rest of us also have input. I presume you’re writing to your government officials and sharing the views you’ve been sharing with us?