How many asymptomatic deaths do you suppose were deaths due to Wuhan virus? Any? If someone does not get sick from the virus, do you think that he can die from the virus? Dying with the Wuhan virus is different than dying from it.

However, your quote of what I said added words that completely change the meaning. Are you intentionally misunderstanding what you read, or does this come to you naturally?

“My method assumes death counts are close to correct,”

For New York data, we already know that this is an unreasonable assumption. I have complained about your New York conclusions.

“I like my method because I think it’s a lot less subject to confirmation bias,”

Except that your method still uses known incorrect denominators, therefore the conclusions cannot be correct enough to pay any attention to. Since your conclusions support your basic biased argument (whether or not it is ideologically motivated), using these incorrect and low denominators actually is confirmation bias.

“Which experts? I’ve seen ranges for asymptomatic rates from experts that range from less than 50% to almost 99%,”

Oh, good lord. I cannot believe that you did not understand that we are rearranging your equation and numbers in order to find the asymptomatic number based upon inputs from the experts that you yourself rely upon. Are you pretending to misunderstand just to troll?

I like my method because I think it’s a lot less subject to confirmation bias, and there’s a lot of ideologically motivated people wanting this pandemic to have qualities that would be convenient to their ideology.

You want to poke holes in my method, good for you. As I said; you can poke holes in anyone’s method, the uncertainties are there for everyone to deal with.

New York’s numbers are known to be padded, thus bogus and unusable for any analyses.

Death rates also fail to include asymptomatic members of the population, as few are identified or tested. Not only are New York numbers unreliable for putting in the numerator, the denominator is known to be incorrect, too, so rate figures are known to be wrong. Conclusions based upon them are unreliable, no matter what conditionals are applied to them.

Andrew_W’s assumption that NY is 10% of the way to herd immunity is just that, an assumption. The conclusion of 160,000 NY deaths cannot be taken seriously. It also violates the numbers provided by the experts, who have also proven themselves unreliable.

However, if we used Andrew_W’s logic and the experts’s numbers, we would conclude that NY is far, far more than 10% of the way to herd immunity.

wayne: Go to the link about Diamond Princess here: COVID-19: the unwarranted panic The graph there provides the demographics. A much older population.

Just thought I should mention from what data and reasoning I’m basing that on:
With the Diamond Princess, Iceland (4.3%), South Korea (1.9%), Taiwan (0.75%), Australia (1.6%) and New Zealand (1.4%) we have a ship with near complete data on fatality rates and asymptomatic rates and 5 countries that have used contact tracing to locate individual cases with very little in the way of missing links, in New Zealand out of over 1400 cases diagnosed we have just 4 individuals for which links remain unknown, untraced.
The 5 countries I mention all have very lower positive test rates (in brackets), they are all well past the peak in infections, and the fatality rates (along with that of the Diamond Princess) are all in surprisingly close agreement (0.5%, 1.9%, 1.4%, 1.6%, 1.4%, countries in the same order mentioned).
The relevance of the low positive test rates is that these countries have been using Covid-19 testing not as a diagnostic tool for suspected cases (as with countries swamped in cases) by primarily as a tool to trace the path of infection through their communities, so I don’t think there are many infected people that have been missed, if there had been there would have been unlinked clusters popping up here and there.

We all hope that the fatality rate will wind up being much less, but will you go on the record advocating a course of action if in fact CFR = 1.2%? It is disingenuous to compare the socioeconomic effects of the lockdown with only the current death toll during lockdown. The fair comparison is to the deaths which would occur without lockdown, though that is currently unquantifiable.

I’ll go on record saying that the loss of 1.2% of 2/3 of the population (2.6 million across the US, 62 million worldwide) would, assuming those deaths were rapid and inexorable, be less disruptive that what we will likely put ourselves through in an attempt to avoid them. And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more. But we would pick ourselves up from that acute, shared trauma, and move on. And though we would long talk of the plague of 2020 which doubled that year’s typical annual death rate, it would be a small event when viewed in a greater historical context and against earlier, more serious plagues. However, given the ability to draw it out, I don’t expect modern societies not to do so — from the combined motivation of ever wanting to delay the inevitable at whatever cost and of the hope of salvation in some form like a vaccine delivered well before current expectations. If that salvation arrives, then it might be the best bet. If not, then we will have the destructive combination of the chronic trauma of the drawn out deaths added to the severe socioeconomic disruption of long term lockdown.

I would expect that vaccination, or something similar, will interrupt NYS getting to herd immunity through the natural spread of the virus.

Andrew_W: Heh. Okay. We have it now on record. I will remember.

. . . that there will be 150,000 deaths in New York when that state finally reaches herd immunity?

That’s 150,000 on top of the 17,600. That’s what the numbers say as I interpret them.

That it takes about 2/3’s of the population to get immunity before there’s herd immunity, NYS has about 20 million people, I keep coming back to about 1/4 of cases in NY being diagnosed, and a death rate across all infected of between just under 1% to somewhere around 1.5%, using a 1.2% fatality rate over 20 million people 2/3’s infected = 160,000.

So, yes. Sounds like a lot of people, but a month ago 17,600 would have sounded like an unbelievable figure. You were recently sneering of 61,000 US deaths from Covid-19, I still think that, despite the efforts to slow the spread, we’re going to see that number passed before the end of May.

Andrew_W wrote, “NY has after all already had 17,600 deaths, if they’re 10% of the way to herd immunity that would mean only another 150,000 more to get there.”

I just want there to be no doubt. Are you predicting that, based on the present number of deaths, that there will be 150,000 deaths in New York when that state finally reaches herd immunity?

Sweden’s experience suggests that social distancing without lockdown is the most cost effective method. They aren’t doing much damage to their economy, they are free to live their lives fairly normally, and they do not have overwhelmed hospitals, which is the object of the exercise.

New York, on the other hand, gave their people especially bad advice in the early days of the breakout, directing their people to crowd themselves in an area that was suspected to be have a higher than normal infection rate.

I’m glad that the rest of the world implemented lockdown in a better way, but the U.S. mucked it up, so that we don’t have the healthcare that lockdown was supposed to protect. I complain about the U.S., not the world. The world even handled the Great Depression better than the U.S. did. In both cases, U.S. progressives mucked it all up.

I’m also glad to hear that it required lockdown in NZ in order to save everyone from COVID19, and that you couldn’t have done it with regular social distancing.

Wait. I’m not glad for that last part. I wish that you didn’t have to mess up your lives for a few weeks in order to save your lives.

Yet not one of those five reasons was, “You’re not dead yet.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/dr-phil-the-longer-this-lockdown-goes-on-the-more-vulnerable-people-get

This is the point Mr. Z. is showing through a number of posts!

My thoughts continue to be with you and yours.

My neighbor indicates (his wife is Filipino) the Philippines is locked down and people are starving due to it.

So how many deaths does it take? Consider the number of Americans murdered each year by the drug cartels, both directly and indirectly. Yet Hollywood still want their drugs. Consider the number of babies murdered each year in all countries affected by the corona. Consider the number of traffic deaths. We accept this until it affects us directly.

We have our priorities skewed and maybe corona will wake us up.

But you see, all these other things do not (could not) affect me directly. However, corona does and hence the public opinion uproar! When it is us, we are so self centered we will let millions lose jobs in a feeble attempt to stay alive.

Consider also the millions dead from TB or other infectious diseases in Africa, to which we turn a blind eye! No, I am not happy with the pampered first nations who have zero tolerance for anything that affects them!

Interesting coincidence that the increase is *exactly* 50% — a 1,290 increase, from 2,579 to 3,869. (Well, exactly when rounded to the nearest whole number. I suppose it would be more telling if the increase were 1,289.5!)

The advantage that the flattened curve was supposed to give us was to keep the hospitals available for treating all the other medical problems, too.
And that has indeed happened in most countries, perhaps in your country they’re too disorganized to allow other treatments to continue, if so, that’s an organizational problem, not a failure of the policy of restricting the rate of spread of the disease.