ScottishFox
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Posts posted by ScottishFox
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South Dakota is very sparsely populated AND did not shut down at all.
Cases: 2313
Deaths: 11
Mortality Rate of Confirmed Cases: 0.48%
Overall Mortality Rate: 0.0012%
Case Trajectory:
I wonder if more of the so-called fly-over states couldn't have gone this way without significant economic damage. I would NOT have recommended this for big population centers.
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38 minutes ago, unclevlad said:
The travel industry is also going to take it on the chin, in the gut, and in the groin for a long time.
One concern I have is that Hawaii is going to economically death spiral really hard off this for a couple years.
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One of first Fantasy HERO combats I did for the table I converted from D&D 5e was a practice sword fight (using great swords) between the estate guard captain and the party's Witcher character.
Once they realized they could have a proper sword fight (attack, block, counterstrike, block, attack, etc.) instead of just trading shots to the face D&D style they were really excited.
The players quickly adapted to HERO (minus power creation) and holding phases and Aborting for defensive maneuvers became very common.
I remember even back in the 90s my players when faced with a truly damaging opponent (like a frost giant say) would all hold their turns and then the character attacked would dodge/block and the others would attack like a pack of wild dogs.
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22 hours ago, assault said:
The population of Australia is only slightly smaller than that of Texas.
We have what is probably a more intensive lockdown than Texas.
Our current number of deaths: 83.
Glad your country's numbers are so low. Your mortality rate per confirmed case is also very low (1.0 - 1.5%).
Your response had me looking up some articles on why Australia is doing so well. The Guardian had a great article. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/have-australia-new-zealand-stopped-covid-19-in-its-tracks-coronavirus)
"Australia has inherent advantages. If a country were to be designed to withstand a viral pandemic such as Covid-19, it would look very much like Australia: geographically distant, a large island nation with borders than can be locked down, inhabited by a comparatively small population that lives, in the main, in low-density cities."
Even in the USA we're seeing substantial regional differences. Part of New York City's problem - besides being where so many travelers arrive - might be the high population density.
New York City has a 10.9% mortality rate for confirmed cases compared to 3.3% for Suffolk County which is immediately adjacent.
Texas will be partially re-opening non-essential businesses at 25% capacity this Friday and soon after (May 18th) at 50% if there isn't an upward spike in cases.
Our current two-week trend:
Currently our number of deaths is about 1/4th of a bad flu season so the shut down seems to have really helped though I wonder if we're also benefiting from the population being spread out and the warmer temperatures.
Wish us luck!
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Recent testing in New York has suggested that over 20% of the people already have Covid-19 antibodies. Statewide the rate is around 13.9%.
Cuomo said if the 13.9% statewide infection rate holds true, that would suggest a total amount of infections of around 2.7 million statewide, with a 0.5% death rate.
Full Article: https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/04/23/coronavirus-survey-reveals-13-9-percent-in-new-york-have-covid-19-antibodies-cuomo-says/ (100% NewsGuard rating).
Currently in Texas we're looking at 651 deaths and we'd have to reach 20,155 deaths to match New York's numbers (assuming 13.9% infection rate and 0.5% mortality rate).
Sweden, which is intentionally going for herd immunity, would have to reach 7,110 deaths using the same rates. They are currently at 2,274.
My suspicion that we were doing more harm than good with the lock downs is growing.
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32 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:
I keep reading/hearing, "people/Americans are ____," like current trends and attitudes are universal and constant. Americans can profoundly change their thinking, because they have.
America-bashing is a time-honored sport. Frequently favored by those who diminish the problems of their own country.
America is no utopia, but it has gotten better and in a pretty short time frame relative to many countries.
I've had multiple friends from foreign countries over the years and the one consistent feature is that they're shocked how different we are from our horrible international reputations.
Except for the fat part, because that is largely true.
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6 minutes ago, tkdguy said:
First Wimbledon was cancelled; now Oktoberfest has been cancelled in Germany.
This is the 8th and hidden sign of the Apocalypse.
We. Are. Doomed.
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43 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:
"The number of cases in Sweden is almost double that in neighboring Denmark (it has 8,108 cases and has reported 370 deaths) and Finland (with just over 4,000 cases and 141 deaths) that imposed strict lockdown measures. Since their populations are each about 5 million — half of Sweden’s — the rates are about the same, although the comparison could be skewed by testing numbers in each country. Still, Sweden’s 1,937 death toll is far higher than its neighbors."
We're seeing somewhat of a similar effect in New York City despite the lockdown. Results of a test were quoted by Cuomo on Thursday involving 3000 public tests. Among New York City residents 21% already had antibodies and in the population outside the city it was 13%.
New York Cities mortality rate is substantially higher than most other areas as well. Not sure how much of that is testing methodology and how much could be attributed to higher viral loads, but so far the mortality rate in New York is roughly 4x higher than where I live in DFW.
If this plague comes around for a second pass or worse - is here to stay - Sweden's approach to biting the bullet early may indeed turn out to be the best choice in the long run.
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22 hours ago, Ragitsu said:
Edit #2: I think a touch of hypocrisy might add some much-needed color. Perhaps this steward of nature favors something only civilization produces?
Just from the picture above it seems almost all elements are man-made and dressed up to look Naturey.
Metal Cauldron, glass bottles everywhere, scrolls, cloth wrapped around his druid stick with the magic stone added. He's wearing cloth and stitched leather. The leather and the cloth are both embellished with Celtic themed art.
The only elements that look like genuine nature are the background (perhaps a home inside a tree?).
Maybe he likes the technology of civilization just a little too much.
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3 hours ago, TrickstaPriest said:
My thought is that other historical pandemics might have had something like a 5% mortality rate instead of the high numbers we give them, if they had the possibility of asymptomatic carriers as well.
Ventilators and modern medicine probably would play a large factor in those mortality rates as well.
When I compare the mortality rate of New York to Collin County, TX (plano, frisco, etc.) there is a stark difference (roughly 10% vs. 2.5%). Is that due to the level of stress on the medical system or some other factor, because being 4x more likely to die would incline me to live somewhere else.
The few areas I've dove down into the numbers tell me there are probably radically different approaches to collecting the numbers and the volumes of people being tested. The illness being 4x more deadly in NY compared to TX which is 10x more lethal than Singapore... Something doesn't add up here.
Also, I miss going to the movies and working full time.
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4 minutes ago, Ragitsu said:
How the eff does a massage therapist obey the precept of physical distancing while performing their task? Do they use The Force?
2020 is a low magic campaign. Pretty sure that's not allowed. 😄
I hope the lady that cuts my hair can use the same excuse because I'm two weeks away from looking like Grizzly Adams.
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From Volume 6E2 Pages 115+ on Knockback:
A character with Flight may declare that he’s
using part of his Flight to root himself to a single
spot (or to remain at a specific location in mid-air,
if he’s already flying). For every 2m of Flight used
to stabilize him, he takes -2m of Knockback. He
must declare which direction he’s bracing against.
If he’s hit from an unexpected direction, he takes
normal Knockback.Also, Resisting Knockback is a move that you can Abort to use.
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And for tonight's finale. Bringing to remembrance the only Mark Twain quote I know - the one about statistics.
I saw that on the per 100k charts that Belgium is having the absolute highest rate of death and not by just a little bit.
Why? Well, a recent Politico article points out that they've chosen a very... interesting?... way of counting the Coronavirus deaths.
They are counting all nursing home deaths - even when there's no confirmation of Coronavirus infection. Just count all the dead people from the last place people go before they die.
One guy in the article points out that they're probably getting twice the real number. /ugh
“Whoever wants to compare our number with other countries has to divide it by two," Steven Van Gucht, who chairs the government's scientific committee for coronavirus, told POLITICO.
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3 minutes ago, Michael Hopcroft said:
So do her kids. Especially now.
I feel like they needed it somewhere between birth and when their birth-giver got herself arrested - on purpose - without any thought about what would happen to them.
Notice it's the bystander who is concerned for the kids and not their own mother. Jesus, that's upsetting.
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2 minutes ago, Sociotard said:
My state, represent!
That is a truly magical level of reasoning skills on display. Get yourself arrested - on purpose - while you have your kids with you.
She needs help.
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17 minutes ago, Old Man said:
I'm trying to keep this on topic, and not veer off into something that belongs in the Political Thread. But you are absolutely right here. While it's true that recessions have casualties, they do not have exponentially growing casualties. And while there is nothing that can be done about the virus directly, government stimulus can protect most people from a recession. There's no longer a valid argument that the government can't afford it, when the government has already spent $6T to keep Wall Street afloat and clearly intends to spend more.
Again, the current lockdown environment has barely managed to drive R0 down to 1. Any relaxation will result in a more exponential spread and a higher death toll. It's beyond ridiculous that these people can cherry pick one extremely noisy statistic from one state and pretend that it's safe to go back to normal.
Here's an example of what I'm concerned about.
We could lose hundreds of thousands of children to this mess and the number of children dying directly to Coronavirus is extremely low. Certainly much lower than this by orders of magnitude.
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15 minutes ago, Pattern Ghost said:
Very not safe for work rant:
Put a Witcher 3 beard on that guy and I would make him my spirit animal.
Better not tell him he owes $6,000 plus interest on that sweet $1,200 he got. Is it even skimming when 80% of the payout goes somewhere else? It's like we the people skimmed off the 2 trillion dollar insider slush fund.
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2 hours ago, Lawnmower Boy said:
i) The United States has already seen 813,000 COVID-19 cases and 45,000 deaths. A reasonable extrapolation takes this forward to deaths in the six figure range, but only if social distancing measures remain in place. So far, no jurisdiction has been so bold as to end social distancing prematurely --and, make no mistake, it would be premature to do this in the United States right now-- but Italy, which implemented its lock down too late, has seen 60,000 deaths. By simple extrapolation, that would correspond to 350,000 dead Americans. I hope that we can all agree that that is completely unacceptable.
* It's a lot more than we want - to be sure - but it assumes the same age demographics, comorbidity levels and quality of healthcare. At least in the realm of health care quality - the USA has a substantial advantage.
* Multiple states are opening back up - in stages - to see how it goes. They're trying to balance economic need and health risk.
ii) Comparisons with the East Asian countries, which had institutional experience, cultural adaptation, favourable geography, and a timely response, is idle fantasy. Even had the United States had those advantages, the moment when this could have been Singapore, even assuming that Singapore's late spike is contained, is long gone.
* I'll agree that America as a whole does not have the same discipline level as say South Korea, but we can certainly make improvements to our current processes.
iii) Texas, today, is reporting 20,200 cases and 517 deaths in the familiar pattern of exponential growth beginning to damp off after two weeks of lockdown. The distribution of cases is statewide. This is uncontrolled community spread. The only reason that the death totals seem reasonable is that this is comparatively early in the pandemic. Many more of those 20,200 will die, and more will catch the disease, and more will die. Tracking and monitoring is impossible in this situation. The only way that a jurisdiction can move to a managed reopening is by first getting new cases down to the point where each one can be identified and the contacts traced. That is not possible here, and won't be possible for several weeks, at least. Any scaling back of the lockdown will just throw away the gains already made. Again, the Italian case shows what can happen. You don't need complex models to understand what is going to happen to any jurisdiction so foolish as to try to ride out a COVID19 pandemic on the scale of Italy's. You just say to yourself, "Like Italy, but worse."
* The numbers above reflect our running total. That is certainly not what we've seen today. In fact our daily trend is on the verge of declining.
* Texas Chart:
iv) When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbour, the result was, in the short term, massive unemployment. This ended as labour shifted to war work. But it also shifted because a full 10% of the American population was drafted, and was essentially paid to do nothing productive for five years. All of this was paid for by the familiar mechanics of war finance, and the United States came of the experience the stronger for it.
* This is an incredibly complicated scenario and I don't think any of us would say that intentionally causing mass unemployment lead to prosperity.
* I don't have a degree in economics, but I'd hardly consider soldiers fighting Nazi's as doing nothing productive. There was also a massive influx of labor to make all the bits required for war and that industrialization was a big contributing factor. If I recall correctly we kind of woke up during that war and realized, "Hey, women can be super productive, even in factories, too!".
Also, I keep seeing this false dichotomy of choosing economics or lives. They are very much related. There have been multiple studies on the link between unemployment and increased rates of suicide and death from lack of food, medicine, shelter, etc.
I'd like to think that most people who are concerned with the severity of the shut down are worried that we'll do more damage than good - in terms of total lives lost - and are not just thinking about $$.
The fact that the initial IMHE estimates of 500k dead in the UK if they do nothing and 250k dead if they take action being reduced to 20k makes me seriously concerned that the lethality of this bug was grossly over-estimated and we'll end up losing more lives to the economic and social ruin (mental health, increased rates of domestic abuse/homicide, drug addiction, etc.).
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In my old 90s Fantasy HERO campaign we ran with most of the gritty rules on (Hit Locations, Bleeding, Impairing Wounds, Disabling Wounds, etc.) and characters had a tendency to die a little more than I liked due to bad dice rolls (Crit to the eyes? Sorry Bucknard, but that's the Golden Gates for you.).
Can't recall where I picked it up, but we allowed characters to buy HERO Points for 4 cp. They were a one-use reverse fate expenditure. Some fluke of luck that would save their lives. The enemy bowstring snaps turning the crit into a non-attack. The berserker's axe catches in the door frame eliminating the hit and tying his weapon up for a couple of phases.
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10 hours ago, Cancer said:
The pros know this, and this aggravating uncertainty is one reason why different peoples' projections and models vary.
One of my concerns is that the original IMHE model was more than 20x higher than current projections and that the planet as a whole may have overreacted something fierce to something that is going to be far less deadly than expected.
I think we're on track for 35-40 million unemployed (if not more) now and that will have a body count of its own.
I know mileage varies considerably by location, but in Texas we're currently under 25% of what a bad flu season would do. Obviously it would be worse without the shutdown, but ... bad enough to justify the tens of millions of unemployed and people losing their businesses forever?
I have a sense of growing dread that, with the best of intentions, made the situation worse.
Here's a good NPR article on how South Korea and Singapore shut down the virus early without the full bore shutdown that many countries (like the USA) have done.
The other thing that South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore have in common is that they've been able to keep most factories, shopping malls and restaurants open. Singapore has even kept its schools open at a time when nations around the world are shutting down classrooms.
Here's South Koreas daily case count:
For a country with 51 million people they are kicking ass. Low case count - very low death count.
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I work with a theater chain and I can say that our ticket sales are down around 100% since Mid-March.
Some industries are getting hit harder than others.
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1 hour ago, death tribble said:
You are wrong !
New Texas !
For the Win !
I'd be so down for this. I live there now. Just need to make the Lone Star the only star.
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I wonder how long before this thing is literally everywhere and we can resume normal operations.
Some Stanford researchers found that 40x to 80x the number of people have the virus than previously thought. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/antibody-study-suggests-coronavirus-is-far-more-widespread-than-previously-thought )
At the time of the study, Santa Clara county had 1,094 confirmed cases of Covid-19, resulting in 50 deaths. But based on the rate of people who have antibodies, it is likely that between 48,000 and 81,000 people had been infected in Santa Clara county by early April – a number approximately 50 to 80 times higher.
That also means coronavirus is potentially much less deadly to the overall population than initially thought. As of Tuesday, the US’s coronavirus death rate was 4.1% and Stanford researchers said their findings show a death rate of just 0.12% to 0.2%.
Here in Texas it looks like we'll open up very soon and go mostly back to normal although schools will remain physically closed for the rest of the school year.
Not sure why this makes me think of Strikeforce Morituri.
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54 minutes ago, Mightybec said:
Interesting article related to Stanford's Study on the virus.
https://spectator.us/stanford-study-suggests-coronavirus-more-widespread-realized/
I've seen another article along these lines from, I believe, the Jewish Journal which suggested that the virus is already massively more widespread than we've previously suspected and that the quarantine efforts are no longer going to be effective.
Among other things they looked at the 8 week taper off point of countries that shut down vs. countries that did not and they're roughly the same pattern. Suggesting that the lock downs aren't working because this stuff is so stupidly contagious it can't be contained well.
Which is good news in a sense - while just awful this disease is NOT 3-10% lethal. It's going to end up being well below 1%.
I'd like to return to full time and AND not die. Hopefully that's going to turn out to be a very real possibility in the near future.
Coronavirus
in Non-Gaming Discussion
Posted
I wonder how they're determining that because some states have seen a very large drop in daily cases and since the recovery time is around 14 days for mild cases (which is most of them).
I find this hard to believe. Unless maybe they're applying the 4-6 week range for severe and critical cases to all confirmed cases and ignoring the unreported cases.
For Example: Louisiana - The red arrow is at two weeks ago.