Corona Virus

[dave54]

I just read on facebook the virus was intentionally being sprayed from the chemtrail planes ...

But why bother with chemtrail planes when the virus is clearly caused by 5-G wireless signals
... at least, according to the nutjobs currently torching cellular towers in the U.K.

edit:
oops - sorry, dave54 - the way I quoted you, it misses the point that you were ridiculing the “chem trail” nonsense. Apologies.

No doubt they are loading the chemtrail planes in the secret complex beneath Denver Airport. After the virus is made in the Bermuda Triangle secret base and transported via the tunnel network to Area51, Dulce, Mt Shasta, etc.

[TahoeJeff]

Well for now at least we know the guy who frequents a global outdoor site with a 300 page long Corona Virus thread is yawning and is going to vote for the Invisible Man.

[franklin411]

You'd be wrong. They recognized the selection bias, but said it was unimportant since it couldn't be quantified. Researchers will defend their research. It's a rare person that will say, well all that money and time we spent was wasted. That's why we have peer review.

Who am I to believe? A bunch of know-nothing PhDs, or some guy on the internet?

[franklin411]

It's almost as if some want the worst to happen.

It's human nature. People want to believe three things:

1. They want to believe that what they already believe is true, because it's less psychological and intellectual work than changing your mind

2. They want to believe that what they're doing is having a positive impact, because the alternative is that what you've been doing has been pointless or even counterproductive

3. They want to believe that they have even the slightest bit of power to control their own destiny. The alternative is too frightening: you're at the mercy of enormous natural forces that far exceed your ability to control anything.

[balzaccom]

I think there is another element of human nature that says that people, when confronted with a complex issue, will either attempt to simplify it ad absurdum and then make their decision (which by definition will be absurd) or simply throw up their hands and refuse to make any decision at all. This is a well-known react in marketing (of which I am well-versed) and it is abundantly clear in many of our politicians.

[SirBC]

You'd be wrong. They recognized the selection bias, but said it was unimportant since it couldn't be quantified. Researchers will defend their research. It's a rare person that will say, well all that money and time we spent was wasted. That's why we have peer review.

Who am I to believe? A bunch of know-nothing PhDs, or some guy on the internet?

Some further discussion on the study:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/ ... n-apology/

[balzaccom]

Heck, I've only taken a basic class on market research, but even I know that if you allow the participants to self-select, you get a wildly different answer than if you intentionally randomize the respondents...which is one of the things those "angry statisticians" point out in the news article...

And no, there is no way to "adjust for that" without using some kind of randomized sample as a control, which they did not.

[rayfound]

The preliminary results are in for the Stanford study. Coronavirus has likely been spreading for months, and the number of actual infections is between 50 and 80 times higher than the reported number. So the number of confirmed cases in the county was 1200. The actual number was probably 50,000 - 80,000.

The number of deaths in the county stands at 69. That's a death rate of 0.14%. Approximately in line with the common flu.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 20062463v1

There are at least 2 problems with that study. First the statistical problem. The 95% confidence interval for that test is 1.7%. Only 1.5% of the participants tested positive, less than the uncertainty in the test. They can not say with 95% confidence that even one of those 50 positives was actually positive. They may have all been false positives (a greater than 5% chance of that).
Second, the participants were recruited through Facebook. These were not randomly selected individuals. People with no symptoms are less likely to have answered the Facebook ad to take the test than those who had Covid-19 symptoms, raising the chances of infected people signing up for the test. Further those who thought they had Covid-19 would also be likely to recruit other people they had contact with.
This study provides no useful information.

The hint that the study is deeply flawed is right in the underlined part. If you analysis sends you in the direction of a 1/1000 fatality rate, it is time to re-evaluate your methods. And how can I be so sure you ask? Simple math:


New York County has a Total Population of 8,400,000 people. They have recorded 14,773 COVID19 Deaths as of this writing (https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en). That is 0.17% of the ENTIRE POPULATION.

Now I am not a math genius, but a pretty simple deduction here is that you can't have more than 100% of your population contract the disease. So we should consider 0.17% an absolute lower bound of IFR (infection fatality rate)... since it would require >100% infected.

[franklin411]

I think there is another element of human nature that says that people, when confronted with a complex issue, will either attempt to simplify it ad absurdum and then make their decision (which by definition will be absurd)

We agree, then. Social distancing is a farce!

[rayfound]

I think there is another element of human nature that says that people, when confronted with a complex issue, will either attempt to simplify it ad absurdum and then make their decision (which by definition will be absurd)

We agree, then. Social distancing is a farce!

Pretty weird take. It isn't at all surprising that halting interaction with other people prevents us from effectively transmitting disease to them.