If you read the BBC article, you'll see that they didn't just rely on local sources, but interviewed experts from around the world.

Yeah, I read that. Some of the worst statistical proofs I've seen have been written by economists who know something about statistics but don't understand epidemiology, and are advocates trying to win an argument. This guy, a biostatistician, can explain the problems with Wyner better than I can:

https://liorpachter.wordpress....
Bits of DNA
A note on âoeHow the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbersâ
March 8, 2024
by Lior Pachter

In a Tablet Magazine article titled âoeHow the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbersâ posted on March 6, 2024, Professor of Statistics and Data Science Abraham Wyner from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania argues that statistical analysis of the casualty numbers reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health is âoehighly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbersâ....

The BBC did a good job of fact-checking and talking to experts about the Hamas and Israel death statistics. The people who study and collect wartime casualty statistics thought that their numbers were pretty accurate, although probably understated.

BBC, Checking Israel's claim to have killed 10,000 Hamas fighters, 29 February 2024
https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
Israel claimed to have killed 10,000 Hamas fighters, but has no way to distinguish between Hamas fighters and ordinary civilians. Also, according to Haaretz and +972, whose reporters are in regular contact with IDF soldiers and commanders, the IDF counts all male deaths as Hamas fighters. On the ground, the IDF has free-fire zones, or "Death Zones," in which they assume that everyone in the zone is a terrorist, and can kill them -- men, women, and children. That includes 6-year-olds like Hind Rajab.

BBC, How the dead are counted in Gaza.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

Germany seems to be dong pretty well.

https://91-divoc.com/pages/cov...
COVID-19 Cases by Country

Active cases, and new cases per day, have been declining since 6 April.

Here's an authoritative report on Germany.

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/tw...
TWiV 601: Das coronavirus with Christian Drosten
April 14, 2020
Coronavirus expert Christian Drosten joins Vincent to provide a view from Germany on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2.

Here's a video from a Youtube channel called Real Engineering, produced by Brian McManus, a biomedical and aerospace engineer in Galway, Ireland, who worked for Medtronic. Good explanation of ventilator design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A Guide To Designing Low-Cost Ventilators for COVID-19
Real Engineering
Apr 4, 2020

He's critiquing the cheap ventilators that people are proposing, including this MIT design. https://scitechdaily.com/mit-p...

(This is my understanding of what he's saying. People with more expertise and time than I have are welcome to add corrections.)

The problems with the MIT design are that (1) it doesn't have a cycle that responds to the patient's attempts to breathe (2) it doesn't have positive end expiratory pressure (PEEP). This is what those advanced computerized controls are for.

(1) The patient breathes in a normal cycle. If the ventilator ignores that cycle, the patient with try to fight it, and it will be very uncomfortable. To overcome this, they have to sedate the patient, which has anesthesia risks of its own, and after a week of sedation, it can be difficult to get the patient's breathing cycle back again. Some people never come off the ventilator. To prevent this, commercial ventilators can sense when the patient is trying to breathe, and synchronize their cycle to assist the patient's own breathing cycle, rather than fight against it.

(2) The windpipe divides repeatedly like a tree, until it ends in alveoli, the little sacs that transfer oxygen to the blood. In covid-19 pneumonia, the virus infects these sacs, they become inflamed, fill with fluid, and can't function. If, on the exhale cycle, the pressure on the alveoli goes too low, the healthy alveloi will collapse. To prevent this, the ventilator must maintain enough pressure (PEEP) at the end of the cycle to prevent the alveoli from collapsing.

The MIT article (an MIT press release) says, "it is crucial for such a system to not damage the bag." Well, it's even more crucial that the system not damage the alveoli.

Once a patient goes on artificial ventilation, their prospects aren't too good. (The grim reality about covid-19 is that once a patient develops pneumonia, their chances of survival even with a ventilator are around 30-50% https://www.npr.org/sections/h...)

That SciTech Daily article cites a paper, Design and Prototyping of a Low-cost Portable Mechanical Ventilator https://www.researchgate.net/p... from 2010. Ten years is a long time in respiratory therapy. They've done a lot of studies to improve survival since then; for example, they found that patients in a prone position had higher survival than patients in a supine position (70% rather than 50% in one paper, as I recall).

The MIT paper says in their abstract, "Future iterations of the device will include a controllable inspiration to expiration time ratio, a pressure relief valve, PEEP capabilities and an LCD screen." So they don't have PEEP.

McManus said at the end that there was an Indian design that avoided these problems, and was run by an android phone. Because of the shortage of ventilators, the Indian government doesn't allow them to be exported, but the Indian designer wants to license them out.

From an MD perspective, here's a video with a good explanation of pneumonia, particularly covid-19, and how it's treated. Nice explanations of x-rays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
3 COVID-19 Cases As Described By Doctors In China
Feb 23, 2020
Chubbyemu

Particularly good collection of articles about artificial ventilation in the references:

Ventilation with Lower Tidal Volumes as Compared with Traditional Tidal Volumes for Acute Lung Injury and the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. N Engl J Med 2000; 342:1301-1308

Neuromuscular Blockers in Early Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. N Engl J Med 2010; 363:1107-1116

Prone Positioning in Severe Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. N Engl J Med 2013; 368:2159-2168

First Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus in the United States. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2001191

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...

It's a pretty short story, not one of those leaders the WSJ was famous for. I don't understand how this could require 5 reporters.

It doesn't answer the question that most of the people who follow this (like Terry Gross) are asking:

Who exactly made the decision not to use the WHO/German test after they had trouble with their own test?

Was it Azar?

Were these decisions made by the civil service staff, or by the Trump appointees?

Beautiful video of the Roche cobas 6800/8800 Systems.

https://diagnostics.roche.com/...

DNA testing kits have 2 parts. (1) First you get a nose or throat sample with a Q-tip and put it in a tube. (2) Then you extract the DNA and see whether it contains the sequence you're looking for.

The cobas 6800/8800 Systems is the second part.

The press release is here.

https://www.roche.com/media/re...

They've really automated that stuff since I did it in a biology lab.

They should rate these machines by the number of biology graduate students they can replace, like horsepower. "This machine can do the work of 1,000 graduate students."

You know that Roche is a Swiss company, right?

Here's an article with a graph that explains it -- "flattening the curve" -- better than I can in words:

https://healthblog.uofmhealth....

The big problem is that this coronavirus sometimes progresses to pneumonia.

If everybody got coronavirus at once, maybe 1-3% of them would have pneumonia and require hospitalization. They can't breathe effectively. Giving them oxygen often helps. If the pneumonia gets worse, they have to be put on ventilators for artificial respiration. Ventilators are a big deal. The patient has to be given drugs to make them unconscious, and they have to be monitored by nurses, respiratory technicians, and pulmonologists (MDs) for several days until they recover.

To simplify slightly for purposes of explanation, suppose 3% of coronavirus patients are sick enough to need ventilators.

Suppose at the peak 2.5 million people get coronavirus all at once. 75,000 of them would need to go on ventilators. The US has about 75,000 ventilators. We could handle that.

But suppose 25 million people get coronavirus all at once. We'd need 750,000 ventilators (which we don't have). We couldn't handle them. We'd have, say, 675,000 patients die.

The goal is to spread the peak of infection out over time. We can do that by implementing all these precautions. Testing helps because

(1) It tells epidemiologists what the pattern of spread is. They might find a cluster of cases in Amoy Gardens. It might turn out that handling cash is a big risk. Or not a big risk. If I knew that people in my building had coronavirus, I'd follow all the precautions and wear gloves and a face mask in the elevators. If I knew that nobody had coronavirus, I'd adjust the precautions accordingly.

(2) If someone gets tested and knows he's positive, he can and should stay home for a couple of weeks until the test and the x-rays are negative. That would also slow down the infection, and spread out the peak.

The same number of people could get infected, and hospitalized, but it's a lot easier to treat them if they get infected over 2 years than over 6 months.

I thought they were hospitalizing the worst cases and sending everyone else home.

They use different definitions for different purposes. Some cases are asymptomatic (at first). Some people are asymptomatic but positive on RNA testing, and in Wuhan Youtube videos, they send those people home to self-quarantine.

A clinical definition is generic flu symptoms plus pneumonia in a susceptible geographic region. Positive RNA test confirms it.

The main risk of COV-19 is pneumonia, confirmed on CT scan. The clinical indication for hospital admission is blood oxygen below a certain level. In other words, if you can't breath, they admit you. They seem to take any spots of pneumonia seriously enough to admit them to the hospital.

First they treat them non-invasively with simple oxygen masks, but if that doesn't work, they have to intubate them and put them on mechanical ventilation, which requires paralyzing the lung muscles and heavy sedation.

In my understanding, once it's serious enough for intubation, the mortality rate is pretty high. I don't know what the COV intubation mortality rates are, but for other conditions, it's around 50%, with great variations.

As one doctor explained it, pneumonia is an inflammation of a segment of the lung. When the inflammation involves the whole lung, that's sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which has even higher priority. SARS occurs when the immune system is fighting a pathogen and losing, so it goes into overdrive and ramps up the inflammatory response to the whole lung.

The reliability of this information is: This is a summary off the top of my head of the articles and videos I've been reading since the outbreak. If your goal is accuracy, read the peer-reviewed journals.

When I followed the link on the dashboard to the Lancet article, and to the footnote, I got the reporting form

https://www.who.int/docs/defau...

The form has a check box for whether the patient was admitted to the hospital.

I thought there were 79,553 cases, not hospitalizations, and 2,628 deaths. That's a fatality rate of >3% of all cases.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis...

Don't have the link, but one expert said that it was transmitted like yearly influenza and 20 times more fatal. Last year, influenza infected 20-50 million in the US, and had 25-50,000 deaths (it's hard to calculate those numbers above the background deaths).

So if it came to the US, that would be 500,000-1 million deaths.

And there's no reason to think it won't come to the US.

I'd feel much better if someone could prove me wrong.

Here's a clip by Briahna Joy Gray, Bernie Sanders' press secretary, which gives a short history (at the beginning) of how America turned right in the 1970s after the Powell Memo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The Powell Memo set the strategy for corporations to move to the far right, farther right than Eisenhower, by pumping money into the Republican Party. Democrats like Bill Clinton realized that they could get tons of money too if they moved to the corporate far right, and abandoned the working class.

That's pretty much been the strategy of the Democratic Party establishment. You can represent the interests of your working class voters, or you can sell out to the corporate right, and retire with $10 million or so in the bank, like the Clintons did.

The average income for middle-class and working Americans remained steady since 1980, and they've been hurting. They started to realize that centrist Democrats didn't care about them.

When you say Obama ran left and governed right, my best example was health care. I talked to people who believed he supported single payer (and I think there was video to support it), but when he was elected, the first thing he did was to hold a "White House Health Care Summit" to which progressives like Conyers, the black caucus, and the progressive caucus were pointedly not admitted. Obama adopted the Heritage Foundation health plan, which gave government subsidies to the insurance industry to sell unaffordable private insurance. Robert Reich said that in government, when you name something, you call it the opposite of what it does, which is why Obama called it the "Affordable Care Act." It wasn't a compromise, it was a capitulation. And the right still wasn't satisfied.

When progressives tried to gain support for a public option, Rahm Emanuel dismissed them as "fucking retards." That's when I said, "If I'm a fucking retard, I'll fucking vote for a third party." I think the Democrats began to see that threat, which is why they gave in to letting Bernie Sanders run on the ticket (although they never thought he'd do so well).

Hillary lost to Trump, I think, because the middle class workers had 8 years of Obama calling them fucking retards and serving his corporate masters at the expense of his voters. Hillary had as much sympathy for the working class as Marie Antoinette.

The DNC required the Iowa Democratic Party to use the app.

Some of the Iowa people wanted to continue with the manual, phone-in system.

Here's some background on Shadow.

Yes, it was founded and run by people from the 2016 Clinton presidential campaign, who are well-connected to the Democratic Party establishment. Are these the same guys who told Podesta that his suspicious email telling him to log into Google again with his password actually was legitimate?

It looks like the Democratic National Committee hired a firm based on their political connections (rather than their competence) and forced them upon the Iowa Democratic Party. They insisted on switching from a manual system that had been working well for years, to a computer system without adequate testing, because, computers! As Isaac Asimov said, "Need a doorstop? Find a robot with a big foot."

I don't know too much about political consultants -- because they operate in the shadows, duh -- but there's a whole industry in which political candidates hire contractors to run everything about their campaign. You bring the money ($200,000 retainer) and we provide the campaign. When they win a big election, everybody gets staff jobs. They sometimes cut ethical corners. Look, you want to win, don't you? Politico and The Hill cover this industry. I often meet these people in a Manhattan bar where they network for jobs on the next campaign, like drunken sailors looking for the next ship.

https://www.latimes.com/busine...
Tech firm started by Clinton campaign veterans is linked to Iowa caucus debacle
Los Angeles Times
By Jeff Bercovici, Melanie Mason
Feb. 4, 2020

An app created by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clintonâ(TM)s 2016 presidential campaign is taking heat for the unprecedented delay in reporting Democratic caucus results from Iowa.

Results from Mondayâ(TM)s caucuses could not be transmitted to Iowa party headquarters, and state Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price blamed the problem on a coding error. âoeWhile our plan is to release results as soon as possible today, our ultimate goal is to ensure that the integrity and accuracy of the process continues to be upheld,â he said in a statement Tuesday morning.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/02...

A voting app by Shadow Inc. takes center stage at chaotic Iowa caucuses
Brian Heater@bheater
Tech Crunch
February 4, 2020

https://www.alternet.org/2020/...
Democratic app built by secretive tech firm Shadow Inc. comes under scrutiny after epic ânightmareâ(TM) in Iowa
Alternet
Jake Johnson / Common Dreams
February 4, 2020

The app, according to several news reports, was developed by the secretive for-profit tech firm Shadow Inc., which has ties to and receives funding from ACRONYM, a Democratic digital non-profit organization. Shadowâ(TM)s CEO is Gerard Niemira, who worked on Hillary Clintonâ(TM)s 2016 presidential campaign.

The New York Times, citing anonymous people who were briefed on the app by Iowa Democratic Party officials, reported that the app was hastily constructed in just two months and âoenot properly tested at a statewide scale.â

âoeThe party decided to use the app only after another proposal for reporting votesâ"which entailed having caucus participants call in their votes over the phoneâ"was abandoned, on the advice of Democratic National Committee officials,â the Times reported.

âoeThe secrecy around the app this year came from the Iowa Democratic Party, which asked that even its name be withheld from the public,â according to the Times. âoeThere were concerns that the app would malfunction in areas with poor connectivity, or because of high bandwidth use, such as when many people tried to use it at the same time.â

https://twitter.com/kgosztola/...

Because sometimes two consenting adults will have good jobs that neither of them wants to leave, and they want to have a mutually satisfactory relationship.

For example, it used to be common in small law firms for a lawyer to start dating and marry his secretary. There are lots of happy marriages like that. What is the lawyer supposed to do -- fire his secretary once they feel a mutual attraction for each other?

Or sometimes may not be possible for one worker to find a new job as good as the one they left, or any new job at all.

It sounds to me that these rules were made not for the benefit of the two workers involved, but for the benefit of the employer, whose lawyers are trying to avoid hypothetical legal scenarios in which they would be held liable for sex harassment or something.

I think the present laws on workplace sex harassment are a mess (and the academic Title IX regulations are worst of all). They're not the result of reasoned negotiations to make things fair; they're the result of political lobbying by different interest groups that stand to benefit by getting certain legal rules that make it easy for their side to win in court.

For example, in some states, having sex with a girl under 17 is automatically considered rape, and the woman is presumed to have no ability to consent. In other states it's 16. In some states, the woman can claim that, after a poorly-defined amount of alcohol, the woman had no ability to consent. I've seen lawsuits for hundreds of thousands of dollars for what used to be called normal teenage sex.

If you want to proscribe other people's sexual behavior, I think you have the burden of proof of clearly demonstrating that you have a right to do so. I don't think my employer has a right to control my sexual behavior.

It sounds like alpha males and alpha females controlling reproduction in a chimpanzee troupe.