Lockdowns Unnecesary! What Else is New?

[PhantomOnTour]

Originally Posted by PaceAdvantage

ME! ME! ME!

I read it!

But I hadn't yet posted in this thread, so I think I'm disqualified? :-(

Lolol

My point was that this 'study' was conducted only on people over 51yrs old and 96% of them already had comorbidities....ninety six percent, hello!
Also, this study was done over a whopping THREE DAYS.
Wow, that's deep...

What can we really deduce from this? They 'studied' a portion of the population that was most vulnerable and 96% of them already had serious medical issues.
What did y'all think they would 'find' ?
Good Lord what a joke

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by classhandicapper

IMO, this is a misleading story.

The reason more people catch it at home is because there are generally multiple people living inside a house that come into close contact with each other. So if one person in the house catches it, they will pass it on to other family members even if those others are totally locked down.

If you reduce the number of homes that have it circulating you will reduce the number of cases.

You reduce the number of positive homes by making sure no one inside the house gets it by going out and behaving irresponsibly and then passing it on to 2-3 others inside the same house.

It's coming into those homes somehow and it's not through an open window.

Over and above that, it's probably a good idea to get out, get some exercise, get some vitamin D3 from the sun etc.. if done carefully.

Seems to me, buddy, you just made the case stronger for being in the great outdoors.

Maybe the safe space idea with this virus ain't such a good idea.

Heck...there were five RED states that never shut down and life went on normally for everyone for the most part. Haven't heard about all the covid-19 deaths in those states either.

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by PhantomOnTour

Lolol

My point was that this 'study' was conducted only on people over 51yrs old and 96% of them already had comorbidities....ninety six percent, hello!
Also, this study was done over a whopping THREE DAYS.
Wow, that's deep...

What can we really deduce from this? They 'studied' a portion of the population that was most vulnerable and 96% of them already had serious medical issues.
What did y'all think they would 'find' ?
Good Lord what a joke

A heck of a lot deeper than pie-in-the-sky projections from models!

[PhantomOnTour]

Originally Posted by boxcar

A heck of a lot deeper than pie-in-the-sky projections from models!

Yyyyyeah, but, nnnnnnnno.
This is a useless study that you rolled out as some revelation, and it's far from it.
If you put that same study group in ANY environment the stats would be the same.
You got duped, admit it...it should be easy for you, it happens all the time.

[Rutgers]

Originally Posted by PhantomOnTour

Lolol

My point was that this 'study' was conducted only on people over 51yrs old and 96% of them already had comorbidities....ninety six percent, hello!
Also, this study was done over a whopping THREE DAYS.
Wow, that's deep...

What can we really deduce from this? They 'studied' a portion of the population that was most vulnerable and 96% of them already had serious medical issues.
What did y'all think they would 'find' ?
Good Lord what a joke

Granted it wasn't the most scientific survey conducted, but it was a poorly written article.

The survey was based on about 1,269 hospital admissions over a 3 day period in NY State. The criteria was a COVID-19 admittance to a public hospital in NY.

It was not just a survey of those 51 and over. That group (which was broken out in smaller groups) was only approximately 73% of respondents. The article makes it appear as if only people 51 and older were surveyed, which is not true.

And while most of the survey responses were what you expect, older patients, people with pre-existing conditions, people from various minority groups, what may be surprising to some is there were not many working people who interact with large numbers of people or who used the mass transit system.

It is one possible piece of evidence that social distancing may not be effective, or is no longer effective and/or is actually harmful to the population.

[Valuist]

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/co...out-be-shtcode

[PaceAdvantage]

Originally Posted by Valuist

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/co...out-be-shtcode

Don't worry...the epidemiologists and eggheads who came up with the wildly suspect model that ended up changing the world (not in a good way)...will still be hailed as conquering heroes when this is all over...complete with patents to sell the latest and greatest vaccine and pharmas to a scared out of their mind public...

So all will be well...

And hey...they got to shut Trump up but good - for some added icing on the cake...imagine that?

MICROSOFT had to go in and MASSAGE the code before it was released to the PUBLIC? Oh, I'm sure that's Bill Gates kosher as hell...

And the people who yell and scream at me all day about not knowing anything and being wrong all the time will find ZERO wrong with the above...or they'll try and minimize the article based on the source...blah blah blah blah blah

But hey...at least we saved some lives...I think?

[Jeff P]

Originally Posted by Valuist

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/co...out-be-shtcode

Link to the full code review that the ZeroHedge write up (above in post #21) is based on --

Code Review of Ferguson’s Model:
https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-re...rgusons-model/

Code Review of Ferguson’s Model

by Sue Denim (not the author’s real name)

Imperial finally released a derivative of Ferguson’s code. I figured I’d do a review of it and send you some of the things I noticed. I don’t know your background so apologies if some of this is pitched at the wrong level.

My background. I wrote software for 30 years. I worked at Google between 2006 and 2014, where I was a senior software engineer working on Maps, Gmail and account security. I spent the last five years at a US/UK firm where I designed the company’s database product, amongst other jobs and projects. I was also an independent consultant for a couple of years. Obviously I’m giving only my own professional opinion and not speaking for my current employer.

The code. It isn’t the code Ferguson ran to produce his famous Report 9. What’s been released on GitHub is a heavily modified derivative of it, after having been upgraded for over a month by a team from Microsoft and others. This revised codebase is split into multiple files for legibility and written in C++, whereas the original program was “a single 15,000 line file that had been worked on for a decade” (this is considered extremely poor practice). A request for the original code was made 8 days ago but ignored, and it will probably take some kind of legal compulsion to make them release it. Clearly, Imperial are too embarrassed by the state of it ever to release it of their own free will, which is unacceptable given that it was paid for by the taxpayer and belongs to them.

The model. What it’s doing is best described as “SimCity without the graphics”. It attempts to simulate households, schools, offices, people and their movements, etc. I won’t go further into the underlying assumptions, since that’s well explored elsewhere.

Non-deterministic outputs. Due to bugs, the code can produce very different results given identical inputs. They routinely act as if this is unimportant.

This problem makes the code unusable for scientific purposes, given that a key part of the scientific method is the ability to replicate results. Without replication, the findings might not be real at all – as the field of psychology has been finding out to its cost. Even if their original code was released, it’s apparent that the same numbers as in Report 9 might not come out of it.

Non-deterministic outputs may take some explanation, as it’s not something anyone previously floated as a possibility.

The documentation says:

The model is stochastic. Multiple runs with different seeds should be undertaken to see average behaviour.

“Stochastic” is just a scientific-sounding word for “random”. That’s not a problem if the randomness is intentional pseudo-randomness, i.e. the randomness is derived from a starting “seed” which is iterated to produce the random numbers. Such randomness is often used in Monte Carlo techniques. It’s safe because the seed can be recorded and the same (pseudo-)random numbers produced from it in future. Any kid who’s played Minecraft is familiar with pseudo-randomness because Minecraft gives you the seeds it uses to generate the random worlds, so by sharing seeds you can share worlds.

Clearly, the documentation wants us to think that, given a starting seed, the model will always produce the same results.

Investigation reveals the truth: the code produces critically different results, even for identical starting seeds and parameters.

I’ll illustrate with a few bugs. In issue 116 a UK “red team” at Edinburgh University reports that they tried to use a mode that stores data tables in a more efficient format for faster loading, and discovered – to their surprise – that the resulting predictions varied by around 80,000 deaths after 80 days...

And:

...That mode doesn’t change anything about the world being simulated, so this was obviously a bug.

The Imperial team’s response is that it doesn’t matter: they are “aware of some small non-determinisms”, but “this has historically been considered acceptable because of the general stochastic nature of the model”. Note the phrasing here: Imperial know their code has such bugs, but act as if it’s some inherent randomness of the universe, rather than a result of amateur coding. Apparently, in epidemiology, a difference of 80,000 deaths is “a small non-determinism”.

Imperial advised Edinburgh that the problem goes away if you run the model in single-threaded mode, like they do. This means they suggest using only a single CPU core rather than the many cores that any video game would successfully use. For a simulation of a country, using only a single CPU core is obviously a dire problem – as far from supercomputing as you can get. Nonetheless, that’s how Imperial use the code: they know it breaks when they try to run it faster. It’s clear from reading the code that in 2014 Imperial tried to make the code use multiple CPUs to speed it up, but never made it work reliably. This sort of programming is known to be difficult and usually requires senior, experienced engineers to get good results. Results that randomly change from run to run are a common consequence of thread-safety bugs. More colloquially, these are known as “Heisenbugs“.

But Edinburgh came back and reported that – even in single-threaded mode – they still see the problem. So Imperial’s understanding of the issue is wrong. Finally, Imperial admit there’s a bug by referencing a code change they’ve made that fixes it. The explanation given is “It looks like historically the second pair of seeds had been used at this point, to make the runs identical regardless of how the network was made, but that this had been changed when seed-resetting was implemented”. In other words, in the process of changing the model they made it non-replicable and never noticed.

Why didn’t they notice? Because their code is so deeply riddled with similar bugs and they struggled so much to fix them that they got into the habit of simply averaging the results of multiple runs to cover it up… and eventually this behaviour became normalised within the team.

And yet governments all over the world rushed to lockdown their counties based on Ferguson's code.


-jp

.

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by PhantomOnTour

Yyyyyeah, but, nnnnnnnno.
This is a useless study that you rolled out as some revelation, and it's far from it.
If you put that same study group in ANY environment the stats would be the same.
You got duped, admit it...it should be easy for you, it happens all the time.

It's a far more meaningful study than the fact-free, useless models that have been rolled out designed to scare us to death!

The fact remains that twice as many self-quarantined people contracted the virus than those who go to work everyday in the real world. And if your little pea brain has a tough time understanding that, see if you can comprehend this: Only half as many workers contracted the virus in the group compared to those who self-isolated.

So, why such a disparity between the stay-at-homes and the workers!?

Even the moron Cuomo gets it, and you don't! I didn't think there was anyone around who could make that yo-yo look smart...but leave it to you.

[46zilzal]

Originally Posted by Stevecsd2

I just read a quick post about the 1918 flu epidemic. The gist of it was that hospital patients recovered quicker when they took them outside for a few hours a day. Can't cite the details, but it makes sense.

Completely different bug

[woodtoo]

Originally Posted by 46zilzal

Completely different bug

With the same result. Are YOU denying science? WHY?

[clicknow]

Originally Posted by classhandicapper

You reduce the number of positive homes by making sure no one inside the house gets it by going out and behaving irresponsibly and then passing it on to 2-3 others inside the same house.

It's coming into those homes somehow and it's not through an open window.

You have way too much common sense.



I was reading an article about elderly who have no family members, or family members who do not have the training to supply all the needs that their loved ones require. So they might have 2-3 DIFFERENT CNAs and nurses coming into their homes in any given week ......all those people have families at home, go grocery shopping, etc. And none are being tested weekly (like the West Wing is, for instance.......that's the only way to stay on top of things).

Once it comes into the home, then all bets are off.


Quite frankly, I still do not understand why more people can't get tested. I called around, I know every requirement to get tested where I am, and basically, if I don't have an elephant sitting on my chest, I can't get tested.

Lets say you want to go visit one of your elderly parents and stay with them for 30 days. How can you do that IF you don't know if you're a carrier?

So, why are we this many months into this and so many people still can't get tested?

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by clicknow

You have way too much common sense.



I was reading an article about elderly who have no family members, or family members who do not have the training to supply all the needs that their loved ones require. So they might have 2-3 DIFFERENT CNAs and nurses coming into their homes in any given week ......all those people have families at home, go grocery shopping, etc. And none are being tested weekly (like the West Wing is, for instance.......that's the only way to stay on top of things).

Once it comes into the home, then all bets are off.


Quite frankly, I still do not understand why more people can't get tested. I called around, I know every requirement to get tested where I am, and basically, if I don't have an elephant sitting on my chest, I can't get tested.

Lets say you want to go visit one of your elderly parents and stay with them for 30 days. How can you do that IF you don't know if you're a carrier?

So, why are we this many months into this and so many people still can't get tested?

So, explain to us why the workers didn't bring the virus into their homes!

Also, once someone is tested and tests negative for how long is that result valid? 24 hours? 48 hours? A week? 30 days?

[clicknow]

Originally Posted by boxcar

So, explain to us why the workers didn't bring the virus into their homes!

Why would I try to explain a premise that isn't true?

Originally Posted by boxcar

Also, once someone is tested and tests negative for how long is that result valid? 24 hours? 48 hours? A week? 30 days?

We don't know that yet. In my example it wouldn't matter. Somebody wants to visit and stay with their elderly parent for 30 days, they get tested, then they decrease their exposure to zero outside influences.........and they CAN visit their parent.


Meanwhile, still wondering why we can't get tested.


If it's difficult to get tested, the result is that the number of infected is at best a guess, and likely to remain so for some time.

Maybe that is by design.

[clicknow]

Originally Posted by boxcar

So, explain to us why the workers didn't bring the virus into their homes!

Also, once someone is tested and tests negative for how long is that result valid? 24 hours? 48 hours? A week? 30 days?

And, none of that has anything to do with the question I did ask. Avoiding my question with more questions doesn't work for me.

Why can't we get tested? That is my question.

(I live in a red state if that makes any difference, but it shouldn't.)