For all the stupid motherfuckers out there arguing that (and I quote this figure from some stupid motherfucker arguing with me) 99.97% of people will be fine.
First of all: your math is wrong. The 10:1 assumption on symptomatic to asymptomatic cases is just that: an assumption. Maybe true in NY and NJ, likely not elsewhere ... yet.
Second, just sticking to cases, and not stopping tom punch holes in the "a quarter of Americans have had it, so HERD IMMUNITY, YAY!!!" complete and utter horse shit you're peddling, we we had 143K new cases yesterday, and that's *without* the Thanksgiving surge in 5-7 days hence.
Let's be really generous and unrealistic and say that 2% of COVID *cases* end up in the ICU.
We currently have about 65K COVID cases hospitalized and 17K of those are in the ICU.
Confidence intervals of median ICU stay in the best studies we have are 5 - 19 days. One study showed 25% of patients needing over 30 days.
At the unrealistic 2% number, we are currently adding 3000 future ICU patients per *day* and discharging about that many per week to two weeks.
At the more realistic 5% number, we're adding 7500 ICU patients per day.
The Thanksgiving surge is going to push us well over 200K cases / day. That is somewhere between 4000 and 10,000 future ICU cases *per day* from the 4 days this holiday.
We will have ~25,000 of our ICU beds filled, already. Probably more. There are ~85,000 ICU beds in the US. We can surge maybe another 50% - but, and I can not stress this enough, an ICU bed is FUCKING USELESS WITHOUT STAFF.
The more cases we have, the more staff will get sick.
So, now, instead of holding steady at ~150K cases per day and 3K-7.5K future ICU cases, we are going to surge to over 200K cases per day, yielding 4K - 10K ICU admissions, for the next 2 weeks because people just had to fucking kill grandma.
I mean *see* grandma.
Yeah.
The baseline was bad enough. But now we are going to add, let's use the middle figure of 7K cases per day for 2 weeks, most of whom won't be out of the hospital for over 2 weeks, with 25% of the ICU *already* taken by COVID patients.
That puts us at 98K cases. Plus my (low) estimate of 25K already in there: 123K cases.
And 150% of 85K available beds is... ~127K.
Not even getting into the fact I'm assuming uniform case distribution, and we all *know* this shit clusters...
This is just back-of-the-envelope, simple arithmetic available to all the fucking mouth-breathers arguing with people like me. It doesn't involve Bayesian stats or differential equations (though it wouldn't hurt if you knew DE, this is a salt tank problem...).
So just from the Thanksgiving surge, at the *bare* fucking minimum, we are going to saturate our ICU capacity with COVID.
And if you have some other condition requiring the ICU, too fucking bad. We had COVID fatigue, you see.
Take one for the team, dude.
(Broken thread, rejoining): That puts us at 98K cases. Plus my (low) estimate of 25K already in there: 123K cases.
And 150% of 85K available beds is... ~127K.
Not even getting into the fact I'm assuming uniform case distribution, and we all *know* this shit clusters...
This is just back-of-the-envelope, simple arithmetic available to all the fucking mouth-breathers arguing with people like me. It doesn't involve Bayesian stats or differential equations (though it wouldn't hurt if you knew DE, this is a salt tank problem...).
So just from the Thanksgiving surge, at the *bare* fucking minimum, we are going to saturate our ICU capacity with COVID.
And if you have some other condition requiring the ICU, too fucking bad. We had COVID fatigue, you see.
Take one for the team, dude.
I am SO goddamned sick of people cherry picking, misrepresenting and plain old making up statistics.
It's part of a pattern in modern American life that is alienating scientists like me from the general population.
We are looking at y'all in fucking horror at the best of times.
But now? Now when you're telling health care workers to their (Twitter) faces that they are lying to you? Telling experts like me we are over-blowing simple, inexorable arithmetic you can do, yourselves?
This isn't Flat Eartherism or Creationism. Lives are at stake.
I'm not sure I want to live on the same planet as most of you.
I'm fucking done being understanding and polite in "debates".
There is no fucking debate if you think doctors and nurses are lying to you to get a non-existent COVID payment.
You are idiots.
Shut up and listen to people who have put their whole lives into helping other people and / or figuring out how to make the world a little less red in tooth and claw for people like YOU, you ungrateful bastards.
/end rant
Aaaaaaaaand just like clockwork, one of the stupid motherfuckers I was talking about who exhibit the Dunning-Kruger addled behavior that is at the root of all that is wrong with America, today pops up in this thread:
I understand why @C_Stroop has an anaphylactic reaction to calling the kinds of Evangelicals who wholly support Trump "fake Christians", but I was just reminded of why it's always a temptation for me.
The Evangelicals and Fundies have this expression "committed Christian" for themselves.
There is the not-so-subtle implication that everyone who doesn't believe what they do, or pepper every single phrase with God-bothering nonsense is not as committed to their faith.
So it's reeeeeeally tempting to return the favor by calling them fake Christians when they exhibit their typical exclusionary and mean-spirited behaviors.
I get it. I do. I was in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. I remember the panicked stampede at Grand Central when some idiot yelled something about a bomb.
I remember walking down Third towards Chinatown and seeing the ghostly figures trudging north in shock, covered in gray dust.
I remember diving across the 59th St. bridge on Sept. 12, when they reopened the arteries across the rivers.
On my way there, the silence was eerie. 2nd Ave. was deserted. There was a solitary lady walking her dog at 7:30 AM. It was like I was in a post-apocalyptic horror film.
Those images and those feelings will be with me forever.
But this national, public indulgence is ... not productive.
It's been 18 years. This public orgy of remembrance feeds the desire for, or at least the indifference to, continuing the Forever War.
I think @JohnCendpts did a great job in laying out some of the hype behind the @washingtonpost story on Enbrel and Alzheimer's. If you don't subscribe to Endpoints and have any interest in the life sciences at all, do so.
John's expose of the bad Academic behavior of the guy behind the 'whistleblowing" is great. It's a shame the post ran with this story without checking out the full background. Make no mistake, the post story is just *bad* science journalism.
It's not like the Academic world doesn't have legitimate beefs along this line with Pfizer: ask any transplant surgeon about Xeljanz, and you are likely to get an earful.
But the Enbrel /Alzheimer's story is not, IMO, a case of Pharma abandoning a potentially beneficial therapy.