a) I'm smarter than everyone else, regardless of specialty or level of education.
b) Virologists are the people you want to ask about treating viruses or preventing the spread. Modeling the trajectory of the pandemic isn't virology, it's almost entirely statistics.
Also, everyone single person will have it wrong because it’s an ongoing situation.
It's still worth trying. Don't be a defeatist.
We will NEVER have a true account of all the dead. Even in 20 years. You’re going to have to get used to that. There is no way we can. And getting annoyed at people for fiximg a mistake in their methodology is actually ridiculous. You cannot predict how this will go and we need to change based on the evidence, not on what methodology you had before. Yes, it make it harder to generate trends but using inaccurate information will give you the wrong trend anyway.
You are correct about not having a true account. That only makes it less reasonable to be trying to refine the data collection mid-pandemic. I'm not asking for inaccurate information. I'm asking for an accurate account of the same thing over time. If your method of measurement consistent captures half the cases, it's not just an inaccurate count of all cases, it's also an accurate count of half the cases. Consistent methods should measure a relatively consistent percent of cases, which will have the same upward and downward trends as the real number. We can't know with confidence the exact real numbers of cases and deaths, but we can accurately assess the direction things are headed. It's really, really dumb to screw up the useful relative statistics in pursuit of absolute numbers you won't even be sure of 20 years later.
It’s why caution is important right now. If you’ve seen Sweden, keeping everything open didn’t help their economy. It tanked like everyone else’s. If you cannot provide a safe place to shop or work, people will not turn up.The quarantine was never about curing the virus. It was about workers, employers and governments finding out ways to live and work under the virus. If you want to open, find a way to make it safe... Denis ‘it’s not my job to look after my employees’ Praeger. Because apparently someone had to prove they’re a moustache twirling Capitalists given everyone else a bad name
The whole global economy dropped, no country is immune to that. Sweden will be in a good place if in the fall when we get back to cold and flu season, they have minimal impact because it's already spread around. The harsher the quarantine, the slower the spread. The slower the spread, the longer you need the quarantine. The goal is to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed, because overwhelmed health systems leads to many unnecessary deaths. An overly strict quarantine ALSO leads to many unnecessary deaths. The policy goal is to aim for a balance between the suffering and death caused by the virus and the suffering and death caused by the quarantine. If Sweden can retain a sense of normalcy without a huge bump in people dying to the virus, they'll probably end up better off overall without even taking the economics into consideration.
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