OT Coronavirus: America in chaos, News and Updates. One million Americans dead and counting (2 Viewers)

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barfo said:
Not sure your premise is true - that other countries aren't outliers. Someone has already pointed out Brazil, which has similar leadership issues as us, and a similarly bad result.

But even if we are the only bad apple in the bunch, the reason might be, as you suggest, bad data of some sort. Or it might be that we are indeed 'special'.

barfo
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From briefly looking at the data I don't think there is any country that's as exceptionally an outlier statistically as the US seems to be at this point with the data we have. I did not say there arent other outliers though.
I'm not sure what the reasons are for that, but I think it's important to figure out why we are such outliers, whether it's just "leadership" or compounding issues, bad data, whatever it is. My entire point was something is obviously off with what our current "numbers" show. I know that it's easy / popular to just say, "Trump" did it, but I don't personally think that's a completely fair assessment of the whole picture and certainly not a very scientific one. I'm not discounting at all how he and his decisions and the political leaders in the US made decisions that were detrimental or could have been for us because I personally think that most of them do things detrimental to us on a regular basis.
 
TorturedBlazerFan said:
From briefly looking at the data I don't think there is any country that's as exceptionally an outlier statistically as the US seems to be at this point with the data we have. I did not say there arent other outliers though.
I'm not sure what the reasons are for that, but I think it's important to figure out why we are such outliers, whether it's just "leadership" or compounding issues, bad data, whatever it is. My entire point was something is obviously off with what our current "numbers" show. I know that it's easy / popular to just say, "Trump" did it, but I don't personally think that's a completely fair assessment of the whole picture and certainly not a very scientific one. I'm not discounting at all how he and his decisions and the political leaders in the US made decisions that were detrimental or could have been for us because I personally think that most of them do things detrimental to us on a regular basis.
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If you just mean by the bolded that our numbers are notably different from the rest of the world, I think we all agree on that.

My personal answer as to why that is, subject to revision as we learn more, is that it is a series of unforced errors, some by Trump and some by others, combined with a 'I have the right to do whatever I please' culture, a conspiracy-theory and distrust of experts culture, and a worship of the almighty dollar culture.

barfo
 
barfo said:
If you just mean by the bolded that our numbers are notably different from the rest of the world, I think we all agree on that.

My personal answer as to why that is, subject to revision as we learn more, is that it is a series of unforced errors, some by Trump and some by others, combined with a 'I have the right to do whatever I please' culture, a conspiracy-theory and distrust of experts culture, and a worship of the almighty dollar culture.

barfo
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And all those are fair game IMO, but I absolutely wonder what history will show us if we make it far enough to look at it with a clearer picture and more data. Cause it's strange enough to me that if I was looking at the worlds data, I don't know how much stock I'd put in the United States' numbers from a statistics POV.
 
TorturedBlazerFan said:
And all those are fair game IMO, but I absolutely wonder what history will show us if we make it far enough to look at it with a clearer picture and more data. Cause it's strange enough to me that if I was looking at the worlds data, I don't know how much stock I'd put in the United States' numbers from a statistics POV.
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Why do you think that somehow the US numbers need to fall in line with the rest of the world to be true?

Outliers don't have to be the result of data artifacts. Sometimes outliers are real.

barfo
 
barfo said:
Why do you think that somehow the US numbers need to fall in line with the rest of the world to be true?

Outliers don't have to be the result of data artifacts. Sometimes outliers are real.

barfo
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Cause in data science extreme outliers are often not used, not because they aren't "real", but because they usually reflect variables that were drastically outside the norm, and the outliers should be studied separately. Least that's how it's always been taught to me.
 
barfo said:
Why do you think that somehow the US numbers need to fall in line with the rest of the world to be true?

Outliers don't have to be the result of data artifacts. Sometimes outliers are real.

barfo
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Think of it this way. If you have a data outlier that doesn't mean it's "fake", or that it "needs" to fall in line with other data. Just that it is usually handled independently or in some cases tossed aside for whatever reason. There are a number of algorithms for finding outliers for a reason, such as Boxplotting, IQR, univariate, multivariate, etc. Because isolating them is an important part of understanding how to use data. I haven't actually done any analysis on the data, but looking at charts and such the US does seem to be on an extreme, and I guess to me the question is why, and as you and @andalusian have pointed out your theories for why, I'm not arguing that those are all false. Just that I will be really interested in what the picture looks like when we look back on it. I think it's actually very important to figure those out with math and science rather than our theories and feelings so we can handle things better in the future. It could just be, "Trump" did it, which is a roundabout way of saying it was a series of bad decisions by Trump, but it could very well be a lot of things and I'm sure there are people looking at it already, but we probably won't know for a few years, and even then since you can't really test hypotheticals with 100% accuracy it'll be theories but we can still learn from them.
 
I honestly do not think that the US is an outlier when you convert it to a logarithmic scale. You can see the countries that did not have strong leadership / regulations (USA, Brazil), a country like Italy that was hit hard but when they figured it out - their cases go down, Germany which was not as quick to regulate but did it successfully, and a country that was very quick with regulation and had a lot of success, but was mistaken to ease regulations too early because of their early success (Israel).
 

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andalusian said:
I honestly do not think that the US is an outlier when you convert it to a logarithmic scale. You can see the countries that did not have strong leadership / regulations (USA, Brazil), a country like Italy that was hit hard but when they figured it out - their cases go down, Germany which was not as quick to regulate but did it successfully, and a country that was very quick with regulation and had a lot of success, but was mistaken to ease regulations too early because of their early success (Israel).
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The numbers posted earlier and I found in other places sure looked like outliers. Obviously that's only 5 countries, but if the rest of the world looks like Israel / Germany / Italy. Wouldn't that just mean there are two outliers? We can say it's leadership/culture/regulations if you'd like.
 
TorturedBlazerFan said:
I think some of this is "fair", but some kinda isn't. Fair may not be the right word, but many countries even in the EU were late to react, not every country in the EU has a mask mandate (I think we're at about 50 countries WW at this point). I'm not really sure if they were quicker to detect it or not, that's probably hit and miss, the EU, and the US are very large geographically and population-wise, some countries and states inside the borders did better jobs than others. I think those "stimulus" bills a bunch of people had their hands in that it wasn't just Trump, they used that to fund pet projects. If you want to count "leadership" as a whole, yes I think that plays into it some, but in 25 years or so I think it'll be fascinating to see what "history" has to say about all this and what numbers come out as data has time to be played out.

Edit: Which is kinda my point every country has handled this in different ways, and in "large" countries or continents within the borders different areas have handled it quite differently too. So it could just be compound interest of "leadership" or lack thereof, but I think you and I could both admit, that may not be verifiable through data and may just be confirmation bias speaking.

Just thinking when I look at the "world" numbers, I constantly think something about the US's numbers seems drastically off from the rest of the world, and IMO it seems like many other countries some small, some big, had similar issues as the US did, which is why I don't think it's 100% leadership since it's not like we're unique in having bad leaders, go to just about any place in the world and you'll find people who think their leadership sucks...
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Denmark did the best job in Europe of containing the virus...So far Denmark, Taiwan and New Zealand are the leading examples....the biggest reason is they were quick to shut down and instantly tested and did backtracing for all infected ….Italy and France have the worst record in the beginning...
 
TorturedBlazerFan said:
Think of it this way. If you have a data outlier that doesn't mean it's "fake", or that it "needs" to fall in line with other data. Just that it is usually handled independently or in some cases tossed aside for whatever reason. There are a number of algorithms for finding outliers for a reason, such as Boxplotting, IQR, univariate, multivariate, etc. Because isolating them is an important part of understanding how to use data.
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Yes, but since we are (mostly) in the US, we are already focused on what's going on in the outlier. We mostly aren't focused on solving the world crisis, we are focused on solving the US crisis. We mostly aren't doing statistical analysis of the world data. So it's not clear to me what's gained by identifying the US as an outlier. It's us, we can't ignore our own data point.

I will note that Europe is proceeding to isolate the US, as you suggest.

barfo
 
andalusian said:
I honestly do not think that the US is an outlier when you convert it to a logarithmic scale. You can see the countries that did not have strong leadership / regulations (USA, Brazil), a country like Italy that was hit hard but when they figured it out - their cases go down, Germany which was not as quick to regulate but did it successfully, and a country that was very quick with regulation and had a lot of success, but was mistaken to ease regulations too early because of their early success (Israel).
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There are for example other outliers too. Indonesia, 4th highest population in the world. Tests per 1m under 3k? There numbers could be artificially low right? It's not just the US that is an outlier in certain areas.
 
barfo said:
Yes, but since we are (mostly) in the US, we are already focused on what's going on in the outlier. We mostly aren't focused on solving the world crisis, we are focused on solving the US crisis. We mostly aren't doing statistical analysis of the world data. So it's not clear to me what's gained by identifying the US as an outlier. It's us, we can't ignore our own data point.

I will note that Europe is proceeding to isolate the US, as you suggest.

barfo
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Ok, so then I guess we can stop posting how the "US" is doing against other countries then? Because it's irrelevant in your view. My initial response was literally talking about how the US is doing compared to the world in population vs cases. If it doesn't matter because we're already focused on just the US then really US cases vs the world cases isn't a significant data point right? The thing is it is a significant data point and that's what makes it interesting, what's gained by identifying the US is an outlier is that we can figure out why and make educated responses to it. If you don't know your an outlier to begin with you'll just keep doing it, and in this case whatever, "it" is seems to not be working.
 
TorturedBlazerFan said:
The numbers posted earlier and I found in other places sure looked like outliers. Obviously that's only 5 countries, but if the rest of the world looks like Israel / Germany / Italy. Wouldn't that just mean there are two outliers? We can say it's leadership/culture/regulations if you'd like.
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Well, the US is an anomaly by being a very big, highly populated, technologically advanced, freedom based entity with many sub-entities with their own flavor within it. The only other entity that shares these characteristics is either Europe or the EU - I have decided it would be more fair to the US to compare it to Europe at large, but if we compare it to the EU only the US will look even worse.

So, the alternative is to check it against other countries and I certainly chose to look at the regulations and provisions done to combat the pandemic and thus wanted to look at 2 countries where leadership by default went against science and just assumed it would let it go, 1 that was pretty vigilant the entire way (Germany, but I could have chosen South Korea or New Zealand instead) and one that started slow but became active later (Italy) vs. one that started fast but became lax later (Israel). So, these (which were selected systematically because they were ones that allowed me to check my assumption that it was government action that determined the pandemic spread) certainly correlate with the theory.

Is it the right theory? I am sure that it is not even close to it as this is a much more complicated issue and I am but a humble keyboard warrior that need some time off from concentrating on the problem I am really trying to fix today, but following occam's razor given what I have read about the pandemic does not throw any wrench into this assumption. I would say that it looks more likely than not - that the Trump's administration series of misguided mistakes is what has caused us to be that outlier that we see when we look at the raw numbers.

If I were appointed emperor tomorrow - first thing I would do is go against the Trump doctrine of dealing with the pandemic and try to emulate the countries that had the equivalent of a rigorous federal response.
 
TorturedBlazerFan said:
There are for example other outliers too. Indonesia, 4th highest population in the world. Tests per 1m under 3k? There numbers could be artificially low right? It's not just the US that is an outlier in certain areas.
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Sure, that's why I like to see what modern, rich, technology capable countries do and compare against them. I am not sure that we can really learn that much at this point from a country where the GDP per capita is 1/20 of the USA. Makes a lot more to look compared to Germany where the GDP per capita is 3/4 of the USA, even Brazil has about 5 times the GDP per capita of Indonesia
 
andalusian said:
Well, the US is an anomaly by being a very big, highly populated, technologically advanced, freedom based entity with many sub-entities with their own flavor within it. The only other entity that shares these characteristics is either Europe or the EU - I have decided it would be more fair to the US to compare it to Europe at large, but if we compare it to the EU only the US will look even worse.

So, the alternative is to check it against other countries and I certainly chose to look at the regulations and provisions done to combat the pandemic and thus wanted to look at 2 countries where leadership by default went against science and just assumed it would let it go, 1 that was pretty vigilant the entire way (Germany, but I could have chosen South Korea or New Zealand instead) and one that started slow but became active later (Italy) vs. one that started fast but became lax later (Israel). So, these (which were selected systematically because they were ones that allowed me to check my assumption that it was government action that determined the pandemic spread) certainly correlate with the theory.

Is it the right theory? I am sure that it is not even close to it as this is a much more complicated issue and I am but a humble keyboard warrior that need some time off from concentrating on the problem I am really trying to fix today, but following occam's razor given what I have read about the pandemic does not throw any wrench into this assumption. I would say that it looks more likely than not - that the Trump's administration series of misguided mistakes is what has caused us to be that outlier that we see when we look at the raw numbers.

If I were appointed emperor tomorrow - first thing I would do is go against the Trump doctrine of dealing with the pandemic and try to emulate the countries that had the equivalent of a rigorous federal response.
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One Emperor to another, what could go wrong? heh
 
TorturedBlazerFan said:
Ok, so then I guess we can stop posting how the "US" is doing against other countries then? Because it's irrelevant in your view.
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It's not irrelevant in my view. I think comparing with other countries to understand why we are so "special" is completely valid and necessary.

Side comment, why is "US" in quotes?

Someone in, say, Nepal, might want to exclude the US from analysis of how they are doing relative to the rest of the world, though. That would be a valid use of your outlier observation.

My initial response was literally talking about how the US is doing compared to the world in population vs cases. If it doesn't matter because we're already focused on just the US then really US cases vs the world cases isn't a significant data point right? The thing is it is a significant data point and that's what makes it interesting, what's gained by identifying the US is an outlier is that we can figure out why and make educated responses to it. If you don't know your an outlier to begin with you'll just keep doing it, and in this case whatever, "it" is seems to not be working.
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Then I guess we agree, and we can keep talking about why we are an outlier?

I've listed some reasons why I think we are - what are your ideas?

barfo
 
TorturedBlazerFan said:
From briefly looking at the data I don't think there is any country that's as exceptionally an outlier statistically as the US seems to be at this point with the data we have. I did not say there arent other outliers though.
I'm not sure what the reasons are for that, but I think it's important to figure out why we are such outliers, whether it's just "leadership" or compounding issues, bad data, whatever it is. My entire point was something is obviously off with what our current "numbers" show. I know that it's easy / popular to just say, "Trump" did it, but I don't personally think that's a completely fair assessment of the whole picture and certainly not a very scientific one. I'm not discounting at all how he and his decisions and the political leaders in the US made decisions that were detrimental or could have been for us because I personally think that most of them do things detrimental to us on a regular basis.
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How can anyone think the US being an outlier is unusual? Look at our people and our (non)leadership. Nothing is less surprising than being in the position we are in. Look at our beaches weeks and weeks ago. Look at the bars. Look at our protests. Look at our leadership refusing to wear masks and making fun of people who do wear masks. This is exactly where we should be and the graphs depicting our situation seem completely on brand for America 2020.
 
barfo said:
It's not irrelevant in my view. I think comparing with other countries to understand why we are so "special" is completely valid and necessary.

Side comment, why is "US" in quotes?

Someone in, say, Nepal, might want to exclude the US from analysis of how they are doing relative to the rest of the world, though. That would be a valid use of your outlier observation.



Then I guess we agree, and we can keep talking about why we are an outlier?

I've listed some reasons why I think we are - what are your ideas?

barfo
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I put stuff in quotes way too often because of string concatenation and I'm just used to doing it. Programming is really bad for proper grammar sometimes.
Well, I've already said some things I think it could be.
Bad data - Politicization of the virus in America there are those who want it to be high because it helps with an election, and on the flip side it could be lower in some places because it helps with an election.
Bad Tests - Faulty tests
Culture - I think we've spoke on that.
Large Protests - Huge gatherings of protestors literally right as many states were opening up.
Leadership - Local and national
It was caught way too late and in the US earlier than anyone knew - which I don't know if you can absolutely blame a political leader for, that seems like it could happen to politicians.
Genetics - It was a month ago or so I'd have to go find it - but I saw a researcher theorizing that genetics played a large role in how susceptible different people were to the virus.
Counting - how counting has been handled in the US and in other countries seems to vary greatly from the reading I've done it's not universal.

What do I personally think? probably a mix of all of those things, but I really don't have any strong feelings about what I'd weigh more than others. Except that in the early stages Feb / March I thought leadership not just Trump but on a state level was pretty universally unclear, unprepared, confusing, seemed to have no idea what they were talking about, they jumped to playing politics with it, literally within DAYS of it becoming a real issue in the US. I think how quickly it turned political has been a huge issue. You can't talk about COVID19 without a politician's name being thrown around, whether it's pelosi, trump, coumo, awesome, McConnell, etc., etc.
edit: I love the autocorrect made newsom awesome.
 
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EL PRESIDENTE said:
It was an observation based on your comment.
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Yes, and again, it was a complete dodge to my "simple and direct question". Would you like me to re-pose the question?

If you don't want to answer just say so...I can certainly understand why you wouldn't want to.
 
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TorturedBlazerFan said:
I think how quickly it turned political has been a huge issue. You can't talk about COVID19 without a politician's name being thrown around, whether it's pelosi, trump, coumo, awesome, McConnell, etc., etc.
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It's no different than any other national issue - war, economy, food, health etc... When there is a need for a national response, elected government officials (politicians) are by definition the ones that are supposed to determined the way forward - they were elected to handle this and it is to be expected that they should be the center of attention about their decisions. I am not really sure why any of this is a surprise. It is what is expected will happen. The Doctor Fauci's of the world do not have authority over policy that goes out of their specific domain and in cases where it clearly goes out of the realm of their domain - it is up to government to deal with it and with power and authority comes discussion and oversight and being held responsible.
 
yankeesince59 said:
Yes, and again, it was a complete dodge to my "simple and direct question". Would you like me to re-pose the question?

If you don't want to answer just say so...it certainly won't be the first time.
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Sure, go ahead.
 
andalusian said:
It's no different than any other national issue - war, economy, food, health etc... When there is a need for a national response, elected government officials (politicians) are by definition the ones that are supposed to determined the way forward - they were elected to handle this and it is to be expected that they should be the center of attention about their decisions. I am not really sure why any of this is a surprise. It is what is expected will happen. The Doctor Fauci's of the world do not have authority over policy that goes out of their specific domain and in cases where it clearly goes out of the realm of their domain - it is up to government to deal with it and with power and authority comes discussion and oversight and being held responsible.
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Did I say I was surprised? Still, the fact of the matter is our political landscape is extremely maybe more than just about any other country in the world 'split', and so turning this political so fast meant that everyone put there fences up and said well this is the side I'm on so I'm doing this. It's why it's so dangerous for a country to be split as much as ours is. Say Trump wanted the 'herd immunity' method (I'm not supporting that), but if only half the people decide to do it, it doesn't matter what method he comes up with it won't work. Similarly, if Obama or Biden are in office and something like this happens and only half the people do it, because they've chosen sides it will not work.

Even on the flipside if his response was a hard everything's shut down for the rest of the year no one can go outside. If only his base does that, it doesn't work then either.
 
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