[ExI] Virus testing

[Darin Sunley]

On the subject of COVID-19 stats, I'm basically nihilistic at this point.

The stats are garbage. Everyone's stats are garbage. Moreover, they're all
garbage in different ways. And they have been since the beginning of this.

When you don't know what the local coroner's office is categorizing as a
COVID death, you can't even meaningfully compare states, let alone
countries.

And when they combine different tests into the same number, you have no
idea what the status of the population is.

And when the tests aren't distributed randomly throughout the population,
the number tested doesn't mean anything anyways.

On top of all that, there are reports coming out that some places had it
earlier months earlier than others, that have somehow not achieved herd
immunity or even case numbers. Which means the models are bad. Really,
really bad. All of them.

Months from now, we might get some meaningful information out of "excess
deaths over historical average" in a given area, but probably not, because
the deaths in a given month statistic, year over year, is enormously
variant even under normal circumstances. And you can't make policy on data
you don't have yet anyways.

In here and a few other forums populated by smart people who are not yet
completely politicized, for the last two months, I've been watching the
smartest people on the internet try to construct a coherent model of
reality based on these published numbers. and they can't. Because there is
no "there" there. This is just powerless people whose primary coping
mechanism is analysis and comprehension, desperately grabbing at numbers
like drowning men grabbing at slivers of driftwood, and pretending that
that gives them some kind of control over their lives. And it doesn't.

We have just witnessed nothing less than the most public failure possible
of the basic concept of the technocratic state public health apparatus. And
them throwing nonsensical meaningless number after nonsensical meaningless
number at us is just a desperate attempt to get us to not notice this.

On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 9:40 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *John Clark via extropy-chat
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Virus testing
>
>
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> On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 10:27 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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> > *we have taken a very liberal approach: counting anyone who dies with
> the virus and dying of the virus. *
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> Almost certainly we are seriously underreporting the number of people who
> have died of COVID-19. Even if you subtract out the numbers that have
> officially died of COVID-19 the number of Americans who have died in late
> March April and early May is still nearly 50% greater than the number of
> Americans who died last year during the same months.
>
>
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> U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Is Far Higher Than Reported, C.D.C. Data
> Suggests
> <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronavirus-death-toll-total.html>
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> John K Clark
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> That approach mixes those who died by some consequence of the lockdown,
> which is indirectly related to the virus, failing to differentiate from
> those who died of the virus.  An example would be those who perish because
> they could not or did not get medical care for another condition.
>
>
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> Here is a letter signed by several hundred doctors (ironically addressed
> to someone who does not have the authority to open individual states,
> counties or cities) which seems pretty convincing to me:
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> https://disrn.com/news/mass-casualty-incident-600-doctors-sign-letter-to-trump-calling-for-end-to-coronavirus-lockdowns
>
>
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> spike
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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