APPROPRIATE ACTIONS OR EXTREME MEASURES?

[D C]

4 hours ago, phoenix_dream said:

The interesting part of my observations is that 1) I live in an area with a low infection rate, 2) the people in question are not necessarily in my usual 'bubble' - most are acquaintances at best and/or family/friends of family/friends. and 3) being retired I don't interact with nearly the amount of people I did in my working days so my base of exposure is much smaller than 10 years ago. I absolutely get the point you are making, but add all these factors together and it makes the statistics somewhat suspect I believe.

Gotcha.   With you not being 'core' to their social circles, it's hard to say who else they know directly that has been infected.  May very well be clusters of cases, which would be expected given that it takes time in close proximity to receive an inoculating dose. 

 

I don't personally know anyone who has had it.   DW has a co-worker that did, and I've heard stories of people who know people, but couldn't tell you any names.  It's simply not in our social circle right now.  

 

Expand that to a cruise ship and combine it with the fact that we tend to be creatures of habit, often frequenting the same locations at the same times each day, I would expect that spreading events on a ship should be well-contained with even moderate precautions.   

[D C]

25 minutes ago, LGW59 said:

Arm chair scientist....UGH

 

Critic that doesn't think people should be able to independently research topics of interest that they may actually know something about.....UGH

[markeb]

1 hour ago, LGW59 said:

Arm chair scientist....UGH

 

Really? Did you understand anything he said? Because he's spot on with pretty much everything.

 

How do you know he's an armchair scientist?

[markeb]

59 minutes ago, D C said:

 

Critic that doesn't think people should be able to independently research topics of interest that they may actually know something about.....UGH

 

Select and copy user name, go to your profile, open ignored users, paste, select all.

 

Easy...

[TeeRick]

1 hour ago, D C said:

There's a saying about models:
All models are wrong, some models are useful.

One of the big challenges is determining what societal behaviour looks like from a disease transmission perspective.  Unfortunately, many of the models are far more simplistic than you assume, and often do use very basic parameters to represent human interaction.   That's how the presumption of herd immunity was determined (for vaccinations) that says 60% of the population is the magic number.   A study that tries to make better representations of human interactions puts that number far lower.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/846

 

On the modeling side, the last 6 months of data really doesn't help as it's been nothing but abnormal behaviour-wise.  It's an interesting data point for what happens in a lock-down, but it does little to suggest a path out of COVID.  I found this New England Journal of Medicine article interesting in regards to modeling:  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2016822

 

The current situation is like taking shelter in a bad horror movie.  The killer is still out there waiting for you when you start to think the coast is clear and try to leave.  Epidemiologists (Fauci included) have offered nothing in terms of a non-vaccine long-term strategy that gets us past COVID19, and two of the major vaccine trials were paused the last I saw. 

 

Dave I am enjoying some of your colorful quotes (in red) in your post.  And your reasoning too.

Taking shelter in a bad horror movie.  LOL.  Have you seen the current Geico commercial on this very thing?  A bunch of teens have a car ready to leave the horror scene but talk themselves into hiding in the chainsaw shed.  😀

[markeb]

4 hours ago, D C said:

There's a saying about models:
All models are wrong, some models are useful.

 

We could have worked with some of the same people. My favorite saying about models.

 

I had some very smart, young Jedi Knights working around me at my last job who were amazing at working models, including a lot of subpopulation work and different interaction rates. I was a consumer of their work, and the guy who tries to describe what I could use. Definitely not the programmer or modeler! They were brave enough, and proven right, BTW, to challenge an almost religious adherence to a previous modeler when they recognized his work was based largely on fitting the curve of a previous outbreak, and that limited the ability to project onto other outbreaks. And we had the ability to run 5000 or more Monte Carlo simulations...

 

I tend to the easy 1-1/R0 equation, but really, as you suggest, you're really dealing with some summation of 1-1/Rn across different subpopulations. And if goal is to stop transmission, rather than stop disease, you're probably closer to 1-1/R0, but interactions between populations, and their ability to transmit, makes it complicated.

 

A discussion for a different discussion board, I'd think.

[Goodtime Cruizin]

4 hours ago, markeb said:

 

Select and copy user name, go to your profile, open ignored users, paste, select all.

 

Easy...

 

Hmmm. Thank you. About  4or 5 of these arm chairs are history. 

[Spif Barwunkel]

On 9/15/2020 at 1:43 PM, Spif Barwunkel said:

Folks, from the time we set foot in to the cruise terminal until the day we disembark, there should be complete understanding of how things are going to be. If one’s intent is to fake it and once onboard try to circumvent the rules, he/she may be unpleasantly surprised. I am not averse to confinement, fines, being escorted off the ship or even the creation of a no-sail list, on which one will be placed for a minimum of two years. After all, it’s not just about you and me and a few days at sea. The negative effects of stubbornness, ignorance and selfishness extend far beyond my enjoyment and someone else’s pious self-indulgence.

 

If standards are set and expectations are met, we cruisers can help the industry recover. Those who shun the idea of additional rules and regulations, and compliance with same, have no place on a ship and deserve what befalls them.

     

   

 

How have circumstances transpired over the last 15 months? Have we cruisers helped or hindered? Too many unknowns and variables? I will say this, there still seems to be two very divergent ways of thinking out there. Don't know that that will ever cease. Makes you wonder about 15 months from now.