News: MLS Suspends season due to Coronavirus

"Word on Twitter..."

You really are a glutton for punishment, aren't you?

 

You misspelled China, Japan and Russia, but go ahead believe every thing you read. At this point we can’t ask you to help yourself anymore with the fear mongering.

I’d scrub China off that list. There’s no way their per cap is lower than South Korea. They’ve stopped reporting accurate numbers a month ago, if they ever did in the first place. Affecting worldwide response. People had a false sense of “this will blow over” and as your graph shows, it didn’t. Anyplace but South Korea and Singapore.

Thx,

Jay!

 

A month from now, we'll have plenty of test kits, both for Covid and immunity, we'll have enough PPE, and lots of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. We'll also have a lot more cases.We'll likely have enough ventilators but will be short of doctors and nurses, at least ones who aren't zombified from exhaustion.

This too will pass.

 

Twitter is always right!

 

Lets use a little critical reasoning on this statement. Right now the combined reported death toll from those three countries is approx. 15K. This "Twitter source" is suggesting there are 45K other bodies that have gone unnoticed by the combined media of the USA, France, and Italy, not to mention outside news agencies like the BBC and Reuters. This in a set of three free (relatively speaking) countries where investigative reporting is open and generally seen as a good thing. Not to mention that in the era of social media, it would likely be quite noticeable that there are 10K deaths in this country and not 2.5K.

Now what's more likely, that the death counts are relatively accurate and a "Twitter source" is trying to draw attention or that the three countries are intentionally under-reporting by a factor of 4, none of the Western news agencies or social media has notices, but this "Twitter source" has the inside line on the details?

Occam's Razor applies here.

 

I think everyone is figuring China is not being truthful with their numbers. I read a story from ABC that China had lost some 23 million cell phone users in the last 3 months. Where did they go? Did 23 mil people decide they just didn't want a cell phone anymore? Newsweek just ran a story about Chinese crematoriums have been buying bulk orders of urns every few weeks that outnumber the total reported deaths.

I find it hard to believe that South Korea has as low of deaths as they do considering they got hit quickly when everyone was still trying to figure this virus out.

And it looks like i'm right on Japan. They purposely undertested so they wouldn't lose the Olympics and now they are reporting record numbers a day because now it's out of control.

 

South Korea got hit the exact same day the US did. The difference is, within 2 weeks, they had worked with top scientists to devise a plan and started deploying it. Nothing being hidden there at all.

 

Also, they’ve had outbreaks before and they were closer to the epicenter and they’re essentially an island that could be shut off. Three strikes right away this continent has going against it.

We’re X times the size of SK and only last week created them in terms of per cap cases. However our morbidity rate has been much greater. We were never behind the curve on fatalities.

Thx,

Jay!

 

It took me 30 seconds to realize & about 15 seconds to confirm that "ABC 14" is a fake news site.

The standard of English is diabolical and the suggestion that China has 300 million more cellphones than people is implausible.

 

Well, there does seem to be a more reasonable explanation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...carriers-lose-15-million-users-as-virus-bites

 

It makes me feel better that it's a fake site and the migrant worker explanation could be a reason for the drop. I still stand by the fact they are low balling their numbers though.

 

Both France, Spain, and Italy have admitted that they are only counting people that died in hospitals. So anyone that died at home, or in retirement homes/assisted living, are not being counted. Whether that is 1/4 of the people? Who knows...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...n-official-data-hospitals-chief-idUSKBN21C11A

 

To add further context here, if ~90k die then that would be roughly equivalent per capita to the Vietnam War. To be roughly equivalent to WWII, ~950k deaths would have to happen. Of course, direct US involvement in the Vietnam War lasted almost a decade, and direct US involvement in WWII lasted 5 years. The worst of this pandemic might last one year. So, at 200k deaths that would be roughly equivalent to one year of WWII, and vastly more than Vietnam.

 

Dr. Birx now says that if things are done perfectly the death toll will be in the range of 100k-200k...

 

Given that 543 American women died during WWII (vs. ~417,000 American men) and 67 American women died during the Vietnam Conflict (vs. ~58,000 American men), using per capita comparisons on war vs. disease is not exactly valid because of the massive difference in genders exposed to the mechanisms of death. To make a comparison that is less gender-dependent, you should halve the US populations in 1919 and 2020 or, I suppose, double those from 1945 and 1972.

 

🇺🇸🇨🇦 #MLS still plans to play full 34-game season for 2020: "We have the whole calendar year to reschedule the games we missed" https://t.co/q7BOeH4t0s pic.twitter.com/D0M7V3DKqU

— NBC Sports Soccer (@NBCSportsSoccer) March 30, 2020

Thx,

Jay!

 

Meh.

Correlation, causation, yadda yadda yadda.

Let's not forget that over the last year China has massively ramped up social monitoring of its population. Part of which involves tying a person's cell phone to them directly for tracking and other purposes. China has long had a large amount of internal migrant workers, many of whom historically have carried two cell phones, one tied to where they're from and the other where they're working.

With the new social tracking, some of those duplicate numbers would go away.

Additionally as internal movement has been greatly restricted in response to Covid-19, there's a much reduced impetus to keep paying for a second phone, especially if you're hunkering back home and not a your distant factory job. That will account for some of those drops.

Additionally, China has long had a large number of external migrant workers from neighboring countries who also would need a Chinese phone number while working in China. With many of those people back in their home countries, that's another group of potential discontinued numbers.

In a country of 1.4 billion people, 20 million is close to the margin of error for any large scale counting involving human beings. The folks assuming that these numbers show some large scale malfeasance involves a certain amount of cognitive dissonance or selective reasoning. Where one chooses to believe or not believe different sets of numbers from essentially the same source. If anyone is suggesting that China is hiding some 20 million deaths, I'd like to see their reasoning.

I think it's entirely believable that China has stopped reporting accurate numbers with regards to Covid-19, and - yes - with unstopped spread it doesn't take more than a few weeks to go from 10 thousand to 10 million, but being and autocratic, often repressive regime, China has taken some pretty drastic steps. Steps that, while I do find it hard to believe they've stopped Covid-19 in its tracks, but definitely find it believable that growth in infections and deaths is nowhere on the track of the numbers we're currently seeing in the U.S.

Short version: I think China is definitely underreporting its current numbers, but I don't see any connection to the change in the number of telephone subscribers that has been making the rounds.

 

I really don't understand comparing loss of life due to warfare with those due to a viral pandemic. Other than, you know, numbers. But the country's ability to absorb deaths in, say, Vietnam, has nothing to do with this situation. What am I missing?

 

I may be wrong about the story being sourced from a fake news site, I don't know, but I have a problem with the concept of 1.6 billion cell phone accounts in a country of 1.3 billion people, many of whom are rural and poor.

But still, if that is accurate, I find it difficult to believe that upwards of 23 million people died, without the outside world knowing about it, and their living relatives immediately canceled their cellphone accounts.

 

It looks like the US had 404m mobile subscriptions in 2018.

 

I'm not sure why you would think that. I'm not sure about rural China, but many African communities are connected via cellphone networks and not via landlines. It's less expensive and more profitable for phone companies to set-up a cellphone network in rural/poor communities than it is to run out a landline network.

 

Yeah but a lot of people have one for home use and at least one for work plus 4G tablets.

 

That's basically what I've been hoping for expressed in a better way then I've been able to.

 

OK I'm wrong.

 

The assumption being that the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin combination or some antiviral will work, of course. Right now, the jury is decidedly out because the studies performed thus far have either been with small sample sizes (a Chinese study that found hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to be ineffective) or were done without a control group (a big no-no in science, but the combination was found to be mildly effective in a pair of French studies).