Dutch scientists contradict scientists on settled science

On Friday, August 7, 2020 at 6:20:31 PM UTC+10, Martin Brown wrote:
> On 06/08/2020 15:50, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: 
> > On Thu, 6 Aug 2020 10:33:43 +0100, Martin Brown 
> > <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote: 
> > 
> >> On 06/08/2020 09:38, Bill Sloman wrote: 

<snip>

> I don't particularly like R because it is not easily derived from 
> measurable data and is subject to ad hoc modelling assumptions. The case 
> doubling time (data smoothed as a 7 day rolling average) is much better. 

It's perfectly well defined if you are doing perfect contact tracing. Each infected person can infect a number of other people, and if you can count the number that person has infected you've got an R value for that particular person in their particular situation, at that particular time.

Real data is rarely that good. There's nothing about looking at doubling times that makes the data any better.

The R-value for the population at a whole is is just the average of all the individual R-values.
 
> Only when we find the herd immunity threshold will we truly have an 
> accurate value for R0. The slop in the UK values is huge right now. 

The herd immunity threshold won't give you an accurate value for R0.  It may give you a value for a particular population at a a particular time, but the population is composed of different individuals, who behave differently, partly because different people always behave differently, and partly because human behavior can be influenced their perceptions of the situation. Even the most fanatically sociable person will put themselves about less in the middle of an epidemic, even if it is mainly because the less fanatically sociable will tend to avoid them.
 
> Curiously they are seeing rising infection rates but much lower hospital 
> admissions (thought to be because most of them are fit young people). 

What's curious about that?

> The same anomaly was observed in Germany when the ski set were infected 
> right at the outset (German efficiency also played a part). 

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Thursday, August 6, 2020 at 7:33:50 PM UTC+10, Martin Brown wrote:
> On 06/08/2020 09:38, Bill Sloman wrote: 
> > On Thursday, August 6, 2020 at 4:22:09 PM UTC+10, Jan Panteltje wrote: 
> >> On a sunny day (Wed, 05 Aug 2020 16:29:52 -0700) it happened John Larkin 
> >> <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in 
> >> <r6gmifhuv5bs9ntdp...@4ax.com>: 
> >>> On Wed, 5 Aug 2020 21:34:41 -0000 (UTC), Jasen Betts 
> >>> <ja...@xnet.co.nz> wrote: 
> >>> 
> >>>> On 2020-08-05, Joerg <ne...@analogconsultants.com> wrote: 
 
<snip> 
 
> > Wrong.You only have to vaccinate enough of the population to reach herd immunity levels. 
> > 
> > That's something like 95% with something seriously infectious, like measles and there are enough lunatic antivaxers around to make this difficult. 
> > 
> > Covid-19 is much less infectious, and 40% should do the job.
> It isn't all *that* much less infectious - estimates of R0 have gone up 
> and herd immunity now will require at least 60% uptake possibly more. 
> 
> https://plus.maths.org/content/maths-minute-r0-and-herd-immunity 

That's simple minded. There a distribution of R-vales from individual to individual, and the more sociable are more likely to infect other people, and get infected themselves.  As the epidemic progresses, they get infected more often and either die or or become immune. This reduces the average R-value over the rest of the community. Plug that into your simulation and you only need to get rid of the most infectious 20% of the population to reach herd immunity.

It is still only a simulation, but the situation is a little more complicated than is easy to fit into a math tutorial.

> I have seen recent credible estimates of R0 at 5.7 which is more than 
> double what they estimated initially form the Chinese Wuhan data. 
> 
> https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2020/04/07/the-covid19-coronavirus-disease-may-be-twice-as-contagious-as-we-thought/#3ea2d9929a6a 

But it is still data about the Chinese population

> That puts herd immunity for Covid up at 80+%  (assuming we can get a fully working vaccine) .

You don't need a working vaccine to get herd immunity - people getting sick and becoming immune after they have recovered (if they recover) is the traditional method. When I got measles as a kid, the epidemic of which I was a part went away because enough of us had got sick and become immune to get the community back up to the herd immunity level. It took a new batch kids of getting out into the schools to take us back below  the herd immunity level to permit a new epidemic.

It kills people. Vaccination doesn't kill anything like as many people.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Tuesday, August 4, 2020 at 4:41:15 PM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
> Am 04.08.20 um 22:10 schrieb John Larkin:
> 
> > 
> > No-lockdown Sweden isn't doing as bad as some nearby countries. We'll
> > really find out in winter.
> 
> Sometimes I wonder what is the color of the sky on your home planet.
> 
> Only 40% more deaths per Meg of inhabitants than even US, or > 12 times
> more than neighboring Norway. Hotels were at 15% capacity, normally 75%
> in June. No wonder, nobody wants to visit the hotspot.
> 
> Sweden's Nordic neighbors have opened the borders amongst each other,
> but not to Sweden.
> 
> Dream on.
> 
> Gerhard

But why only compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors?

This Danish economist compares mortality in 24 European countries
and finds no relation of death rates to lock-down level. Sweden's
death rate is higher than its locked-down neighbors, but lower than
strict lock-down UK, Spain, and Italy, and only slightly higher
than strict lock-down France.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665588

Summarized here (without the need to download the paper)
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/08/did-lockdowns-work-evidence-says-no.php

In the U.S., the places with the strictest lock-downs (New York, New
Jersey) had by far the highest death rates. But now that the virus
has run its course through those states and they've killed a huge
portion of their elderly nursing home population, through no effort
of theirs, their deaths are falling and now California (strictly-
locked-down for nearly five months), has the most new cases.

In short, in the U.S., and Europe, there's precious little evidence
that locking up healthy people reduces SARS-CoV2 spread or mortality.

Cheers,
James Arthur

On Wednesday, August 5, 2020 at 7:49:33 AM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
> Am 05.08.20 um 13:28 schrieb Phil Hobbs:
> 
> > I wear a mask when I'm in the store or someplace like that, but 
> > primarily to be polite to the people who work there.

Same here. I'm not infected, I don't pose any risk to anyone, but
there's no way they can know that. Plus then I don't have to shave. :)

> Me too, but primarily for the same reason I have a 10 dB pad
> on the input of my spectrum analyzer normally.
> 
> > Cheers
> 
> Gerhard
> 
> 
> I should have done that before I shot my SNA-33.  :-(

Only a 10dB pad?  You're a wildman! :-)

Cheers,
James "20dB SA pad" Arthur

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 09:20:22 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

>On 06/08/2020 15:50, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
>> On Thu, 6 Aug 2020 10:33:43 +0100, Martin Brown
>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 06/08/2020 09:38, Bill Sloman wrote:
>
>>>> Covid-19 is much less infectious, and 40% should do the job.
>>>
>>> It isn't all *that* much less infectious - estimates of R0 have gone up
>>> and herd immunity now will require at least 60% uptake possibly more.
>>>
>>> https://plus.maths.org/content/maths-minute-r0-and-herd-immunity
>>>
>>> I have seen recent credible estimates of R0 at 5.7 which is more than
>>> double what they estimated initially form the Chinese Wuhan data.
>>>
>>> https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2020/04/07/the-covid19-coronavirus-disease-may-be-twice-as-contagious-as-we-thought/#3ea2d9929a6a
>>>
>>> That puts herd immunity for Covid up at 80+%
>>> (assuming we can get a fully working vaccine)
>> 
>> Only if everyone is suceptable.
>> 
>> https://reason.com/2020/07/01/covid-19-herd-immunity-is-much-closer-than-antibody-tests-suggest-say-2-new-studies/
>> 
>> What if R is high but only among a fraction of the population?
>
>The fraction of the population that do not get infected appears to be 
>vanishingly small. You forget that hapless US choir that managed to put 
>a bound of 87% on it and so killed some of their members.
>
>The proportion of those infected that are truly asymptomatic has been 
>going down as more symptoms are added to the official list. But you are 
>still infectious without showing symptoms - that is how it escapes.
>
>> This thing seems to peak and fade at low case infection levels, far
>> below 80%.
>
>It only stops rising exponentially when there are strong interventions. 

That creates "The reserve army of the uninfected." That works about as
well as Communism worked.

>Most of Europe is losing control again now with rising summer spikes as 
>young holiday makers and alcohol fuelled antics break social distancing.
>
>UK locked down late and was well into exponential growth because somehow 
>the experts advising the government had not noticed that the doubling 
>time was not the 5 or 6 days of their models but 3 days in reality. A 
>week delay of lockdown made the problem in the UK and resulting 
>fatalities 4x higher than what they could have been.
>
>Even so it was a lockdown that was essential in London but not really 
>needed in most of the rest of the country. UK is incredibly centralised 
>the entire country is run for the benefit of London and the South East.
>
>UK test and trace is predictably a disaster run by dodgy subcontractors 
>who have previous for defrauding the Ministry of Justice! The UK's DIY 
>"world beating" phone app is a steaming heap of dingoes kidneys.
>
>> R is often circular reasoning.
>
>I don't particularly like R because it is not easily derived from 
>measurable data and is subject to ad hoc modelling assumptions. The case 
>doubling time (data smoothed as a 7 day rolling average) is much better.
>
>Only when we find the herd immunity threshold will we truly have an 
>accurate value for R0. The slop in the UK values is huge right now.
>
>Curiously they are seeing rising infection rates but much lower hospital 
>admissions (thought to be because most of them are fit young people). 
>The same anomaly was observed in Germany when the ski set were infected 
>right at the outset (German efficiency also played a part).

Curious and relatively good. The places seeing a secondary bump in new
cases are mostly not showing a corresponding bump in deaths. Far
southern hemisphere might be an exception to that pattern, but all the
data is suspect now.




-- 

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

  Claude Bernard
  

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 06:02:32 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

>On Wednesday, August 5, 2020 at 7:49:33 AM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
>> Am 05.08.20 um 13:28 schrieb Phil Hobbs:
>> 
>> > I wear a mask when I'm in the store or someplace like that, but 
>> > primarily to be polite to the people who work there.
>
>Same here. I'm not infected, I don't pose any risk to anyone, but
>there's no way they can know that. Plus then I don't have to shave. :)

Masks are mandatory in grocery stores here, usually enforced, so I
keep my American Flag mask in my pocket. Problem is, it gets all
tangled with my glasses, and fogs me up, so I take off the glasses and
can't see what I'm buying. It's just a plot to get us to buy more. 

But it's easy to shop now, no more density metering, no lines to get
in. Saturday a bit before noon is great at Safeway; lots of parking,
all stocked up, zero wait to check out. Sunday afternoon is a
nightmare.

I've probably has the virus anyhow.

Half, maybe less, of the people here wear a mask outdoors.


>
>> Me too, but primarily for the same reason I have a 10 dB pad
>> on the input of my spectrum analyzer normally.
>> 
>> > Cheers
>> 
>> Gerhard
>> 
>> 
>> I should have done that before I shot my SNA-33.  :-(
>
>Only a 10dB pad?  You're a wildman! :-)
>
>Cheers,
>James "20dB SA pad" Arthur

20 dB is sensible on a sampling scope, and the math is easier than
10dB. It's a 10:1 probe.






-- 

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

  Claude Bernard
  

On 2020-08-07 10:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 06:02:32 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
> wrote:
> 
>> On Wednesday, August 5, 2020 at 7:49:33 AM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
>>> Am 05.08.20 um 13:28 schrieb Phil Hobbs:
>>>
>>>> I wear a mask when I'm in the store or someplace like that, but
>>>> primarily to be polite to the people who work there.
>>
>> Same here. I'm not infected, I don't pose any risk to anyone, but
>> there's no way they can know that. Plus then I don't have to shave. :)
> 
> Masks are mandatory in grocery stores here, usually enforced, so I
> keep my American Flag mask in my pocket. Problem is, it gets all
> tangled with my glasses, and fogs me up, so I take off the glasses and
> can't see what I'm buying. It's just a plot to get us to buy more.
> 
> But it's easy to shop now, no more density metering, no lines to get
> in. Saturday a bit before noon is great at Safeway; lots of parking,
> all stocked up, zero wait to check out. 
It's like that here too.  We're way past the peak, fortunately.

> 
> I've probably has the virus anyhow.

One of the antibody tests has a low enough false call rate to be useful 
IIRC.

> 
> Half, maybe less, of the people here wear a mask outdoors.
> 
> 
>>
>>> Me too, but primarily for the same reason I have a 10 dB pad
>>> on the input of my spectrum analyzer normally.

>>>
>>> I should have done that before I shot my SNA-33.  :-(
>>
>> Only a 10dB pad?  You're a wildman! :-)
>>
>> Cheers,
>> James "20dB SA pad" Arthur
> 
> 20 dB is sensible on a sampling scope, and the math is easier than
> 10dB. It's a 10:1 probe.

I have enough sampling heads that I treat them as disposables.  Haven't 
blown one up yet.  The 70820A's bridges are built in, so that's another 
story.

Cheers

Phil "The SA has a 10 dB pad built in" Hobbs


-- 
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

Am 07.08.20 um 14:55 schrieb dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com:
> On Tuesday, August 4, 2020 at 4:41:15 PM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
>> Am 04.08.20 um 22:10 schrieb John Larkin:
>>
>>>
>>> No-lockdown Sweden isn't doing as bad as some nearby countries. We'll
>>> really find out in winter.
>>
>> Sometimes I wonder what is the color of the sky on your home planet.
>>
>> Only 40% more deaths per Meg of inhabitants than even US, or > 12 times
>> more than neighboring Norway. Hotels were at 15% capacity, normally 75%
>> in June. No wonder, nobody wants to visit the hotspot.
>>
>> Sweden's Nordic neighbors have opened the borders amongst each other,
>> but not to Sweden.
>>
>> Dream on.
>>
>> Gerhard
> 
> But why only compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors?

Because there is not much difference between Norway and Sweden, same
structure, different implementation. There's a big difference between
Norway and Northern Italy.

> This Danish economist compares mortality in 24 European countries
> and finds no relation of death rates to lock-down level. Sweden's
> death rate is higher than its locked-down neighbors, but lower than
> strict lock-down UK, Spain, and Italy, and only slightly higher
> than strict lock-down France.

Strict lock down followed from the piles of deep frozen dead corpses,
they did not lock down before it was way too late. But even then it
worked, it just took some time to reduce the numbers until they could
follow the infection chains again.

In Germany we did it quite early, no overflows of the hospital system.
We could even import cases from the other side of the french border,
even fly in some Italians who required respiration.
We were able to follow many infection chains and confine them. Mostly
winter tourists, low-wage meat industry workers from the Balkan and
religious people who did suppose wrongly that coming together to
praise the $(GOD) of their choice could not be punished.

(That much praying, i.e organized begging for better than my
pre-planned outcome would really annoy me if I was $(GOD).
And that mostly on Sunday, my day OFF!)


Our GNP dropped by 10%, Sweden dropped 9.5%. Now that's an advantage!
It seems, Sweden was not so shut-down-free after all.
Our newest numbers in .de are nearly back to normal for the inland,
exports have not yet recovered that good.

And now that the restrictions are lifted here, the numbers are
rising again. Tourists. And we'll see the results of last weekend's
Anti-Corona-demonstration next week. 20000 sheeple. Let's make a
chain of humans! Firmly hand-in-hand against that non-existing virus!

> 
> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665588
> 
> Summarized here (without the need to download the paper)
> https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/08/did-lockdowns-work-evidence-says-no.php
> 
> In the U.S., the places with the strictest lock-downs (New York, New
> Jersey) had by far the highest death rates. 

No, they had lock downs because of the highest death rates by far.
And the lock downs were not that strict. As long as you meet
unmasked people in the subway and then leave town to your
healthy habitat, there is a sneak path.

But now that the virus
> has run its course through those states and they've killed a huge
> portion of their elderly nursing home population, through no effort
> of theirs, 

There are enough states left to keep you busy for some months
with this method of locking down when it's really too late.

The Chinese arc-welded the doors of those who protested too much.
No, I don't support that. But they got it fixed.

> 
> Cheers,

Gerhard

On Saturday, August 8, 2020 at 12:51:19 AM UTC+10, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 06:02:32 -0700 (PDT), dagmarg...@yahoo.com 
> wrote:
> >On Wednesday, August 5, 2020 at 7:49:33 AM UTC-4, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote: 
> >> Am 05.08.20 um 13:28 schrieb Phil Hobbs: 

<snip>

> I've probably had the virus anyhow. 

How did you calculate this probability? Granting that you are susceptible to all sorts of idiot claims about people getting the virus and not getting sick - 15+/-3% seems to be the actual proportion of cases that were asymptomatic and got a positive PCR test - it's probably just more of your wishful thinking.

> Half, maybe less, of the people here wear a mask outdoors.

Wearing a mask outdoors doesn't strike me as cost-effective if you aren't part of a crowd.

<snip>

--- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Saturday, August 8, 2020 at 12:39:09 AM UTC+10, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 09:20:22 +0100, Martin Brown
> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote: 
> 
> >On 06/08/2020 15:50, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: 
> >> On Thu, 6 Aug 2020 10:33:43 +0100, Martin Brown 
> >> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote: 
> >> 
> >>> On 06/08/2020 09:38, Bill Sloman wrote: 

> >> This thing seems to peak and fade at low case infection levels, far 
> >> below 80%. 

Only when looked at by John Larkin.

> >It only stops rising exponentially when there are strong interventions.
>
> That creates "The reserve army of the uninfected." 

It doesn't create them. They were there before the epidemic started.

>That works about as  well as Communism worked.

The USSR did well enough in WW2 to beat the Germans.  US capitalism is doing truly rotten job of slowing down the Covid-19 epidemic in the US.

The recent failure in infection control in Australia - in the state of Victoria - seems to have been driven by the choice to use cheap and poorly trained commercial security to enforce quarantine on travellers arriving from over-seas. The private sector may have it virtues, but this illustrated one of it's vices.

 <snip>

> >UK test and trace is predictably a disaster run by dodgy subcontractors 
> >who have previous for defrauding the Ministry of Justice! The UK's DIY 
> >"world beating" phone app is a steaming heap of dingoes kidneys. 

<snip>

> Curious and relatively good. The places seeing a secondary bump in new 
> cases are mostly not showing a corresponding bump in deaths. Far 
> southern hemisphere might be an exception to that pattern, but all the 
> data is suspect now.

The irresponsible idiots who chose to socialise when they should be practicing social distancing are younger than the international travellers who brought the infection into their country in the first place. Being younger, they are less likely to get very sick - though it still happens.

They tend to be pretty good at infecting their elderly relatives, if they chance to socialise with them.

One has to wonder why John Larkin thinks that "all the data is suspect now". I suspect that what he means is that it isn't telling him what he wants to hear, so he's looking for an excuse to ignore the bits he doesn't like, while cherry-picking the bits that he fancies.

There's also the point that deaths are a lagging indicator - typically it takes 18 days from finding out that you are infected to actual death (if the infection happens to kill you. When the US infection rate went up from about 30,000 per day to 60,000 per day, John spent a fortnight reminding us that the death rate wasn't going up

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

It didn't end up going up in proportion to number of new cases (see above), but it definitely went up, it a couple of weeks later.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney