I think we should apply your logic to building levees. Rather than considering the tail distribution and picking an appropriately safe quantile, we just build the levee big enough to cope with the average predicted rainstorm :rolleyes:

Paradoxically, in the majority of situations where it's appropriate to build a backup hospital, the backup hospital won't be used. This is because it makes sense to build a backup hospital even if you think there's only a X% chance of things going so badly that you need it, where people can set X to be what they are comfortable with (reasonable values might be 1-10%). And if X is small, than (1-X)% of the time, the hospital was appropriately built even though it's not used. (OK, this is a simplistic analysis obviously since it assumes a uniform distribution of predicted X's... you can put your own prior in and adjust, I'm not sure the conclusions change strongly).

Some people might set X at 100 to avoid never having to build a backup hospital that's not used, but I think most people would agree that's not a good idea.

Wow this is moving faster than the CE thread.....get yourselves over there!
Continuing life on the city question..... 8/10 times places are requiring a mask so I keep one in my vehicle.

Idk...we just got to stop living in chronic fear and begin to adapt to living with it. I had non-stop anxiety and nightmares for the first 6 weeks living in fear of the virus, to the point where I was looking at strangers like they were the enemy. I had panic attacks going out. And as of late, I've just learned to let this go...I cannot over-control a pretty hopeless situation anymore. I am not going to leave FedEx boxes in the sun for 6 hours before taking inside, handle my groceries in gloves or lysol my clothes upcon coming home. It's just too stressful. I'm leaving it in fates hands and am praying once or if I get it, I don't require hospitalization.

Look - a vaccine isn't coming any time soon. Low infection rate =/= ZOMG VIRUS IS DISAPPEARING!!!11 People keep on getting confused with this. In my opinion, we need to let infections slowly simmer vs boil over (aka hospitals get overwhelmed), so that we can slowly get people exposed to this virus. Shielding us all from it does what? Prolongs it, and causes more harm all around in the long run. As long as someone on the planet has the virus and it's as contagious as it is, we're fucked.

So with that said, I'm going to do the following:
- Socialize in small amounts and infrequently. But I need to see my friends for my mental health at least a couple of times a month. I simply cannot be all alone at home, anymore. It's a risk I've accepted.
- Will dine out at establishments because, well, I fucking can, I love it, and we should support our local businesses and I'm not going to hear anybody telling me that's a crime. I will however only patron places that are doing it smart and taking precautions - I want to see masks on staff, I want to see tables spaced out, etc.
- Avoid seeing my elders or anybody who is immunocompromised.
- Will try to live as normal as I can, but sanitize constantly (when I'm out, I probably wash my hands or use sanitizer every 5 min), and wear my mask publically at all times.

I'm not trying to lose out on the best time of my life here (30s). I'm SO over everybody policing each other and getting all up in one another's business.

That's the rational attitude. Take reasonable precaution but otherwise carry on. My awakening was about a week into it and then my spidey senses were off the charts. I felt like we were completely being manipulated. Maybe some of that was fear of the unknown. You should boot up media coverage of swine flu back in 2009. It's the exact same scare mongering format. Reuters is the only large media outlet I trust these days.

This may depend on how badly your community was impacted. I think knowing people who were infected (or killed) by it will disabuse you of the idea that it is a manufactured controversy. Throughout April in NYC there was also a constant rhythm of ambulance sirens that put the human toll on it. Today there are absolutely far fewer ambulance sirens today than there were a month ago.

The goal is for way fewer people to be infected at all. Not just to delay, though that's important too.

I’m taking a similar approach. Although being a little more cautious (waiting to socialize or dine out for a while longer). The way this whole thing has affected my view of American society may be irrevocable, however. I/we always new there was a certain undercurrent of anti-science/anti-decency folks out there, but I’m absolutely disgusted by the selfishness, the stupidity, and the callousness. The way this has been politicized is revolting. I would truly consider leaving the country to live near my sister and her family in Europe if I could convince my girlfriend to join me. Our country’s zero-sum approach to living in a society has reached its tipping point in my eyes.

I don't think it's made up. We know two people who got it righthere in Portland. One girl is still recovering. You bring up my exact point though. Sensationalism drove the narrative. What happened in NYC or Italy is tragic but understandable if you calmly decipher their causes. But what happened in NYC was front page news every single day for two months has very little in common with this diseases progression in the other 90 percent of the country. I don't know. Part of me thinks we vastly overreacted and part of thinks we acted with prudence. I'm still wrestling with that opinion. Lockdown NYC? Yes, definitely. Lockdown Marquette, MI? No probably not. We lucked out though. If something truly virulent does manage to come along, we'll know what to do.

But, at one point, it was an Italy problem in the minds of New Yorkers. And, before that, it was a China problem in the minds of Italians. When we realized it was here and we had no way to track the spread, locking everything down was the right call.

CNN and other news sources have been making note of the 100,00 death toll in the US being the highest in the world. Whether we have to account for proportions in populations or not, it seems once again that we’re #1 in something so worthless in my opinion. There’s a good chance that we’ll have to deal with this virus for the rest of the year, maybe even to the next.

I think when faced with a totally new threat the country was not prepared for (oddly, since the last two presidential administrations specially prepared for it...) governors around the country had to act fast with limited information and resources. We still don’t know everything about how it spreads, all the risk factors, the actual death rate; so I commend any leaders that took swift action with great political risk. I don’t understand those segments of our society convinced this is some political conspiracy, as no politician is going to be eager to shut down economies and risk their political lives if they don’t feel 100% compelled to do so. The politically motivated thing is to ignore the human factor of the disease and pretend it doesn’t exist, and use whatever media tools available to spin/ignore any deaths.

Unfortunately the leaders who did their duty as public servants may very well lose their jobs for it, while those who use political mechanisms to try and spin it away have a good chance of being rewarded.

A politician is supposed to be a leader, and listen to the smartest people on any given subject.

Some led, some didn't and haven't.

Politically, who knows, but there's no major backlash in my state save some wingnuts.

Rebuilding America: Asheville area tourism comeback might take years but upswing begins immediately
By John Boyle

Source.

Since so many here are obsessed with the inflated number of 100K. We reached a new milestone. 40M unemployed.


https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/...navirus-may-23

Over 2.1M Americans filed for unemployment last week, pushing total job losses to 40M from coronavirus lockdown

Fox Business ^ | May 28 2020| Megan Henney



More than 2.1 million laid-off workers applied for unemployment last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday, as the coronavirus pandemic, and the ensuing economic lockdown, continued to wreak havoc on the jobs market.

...

The new report, which covers the week ending May 23, pushes the 10-week total of losses since states directed residents to stay at home and forced nonessential businesses to close to 40 million, a rate of unemployment unseen since the Great Depression.

...

Do you ever wonder what the unemployment level might become if, after opening everything back up like before, the death toll reaches 1 million or more? Would there be economic losses from this death toll? Would there still be (perhaps many more) millions of people avoiding stores and restricting social interactions as much as possible?

Panic...if we hadn't gotten the numbers under some control, people would be panicking and staying home, and a lot of companies would be doing their own shutdowns.

The private sector is what set everything in motion. Not a single state had announced a stay-at-home order before the NBA suspended its season. Tech companies in Seattle and San Francisco started closing their offices even before that.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bos...=hp_lead_pos10

And don't forget that employers these days are sometimes checking out employee social media, so if you post a picture of yourself in a crowd at a pool party, for example . . . . .

Apology accepted. Thank you.

Aaron (Glowrock)