Tell me some good news

[WC8KCY]

The sun was shining today, and since I haven't left the house since my workplace shut down on the 16th, I went for a spin.

The A&W in Frankfurt, MI has its drive-in OPEN(!). I should've stopped and grabbed a Papa Burger and onion rings.

The last time I've actually been to the drive-in part of an A&W was back around 1995, at the Harvey, MI location--which is still going. My home town had an A&W drive-in well into the 2000s. Back in the '70s, A&W was everywhere around Michigan's Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin.

[vespa50sp]

I brought my dad over some homemade meals and got him set up with Google Hangouts on his iPad, so that we can communicate via video if needed.

My wife and I make good Colvid-19 buddies, the yard is fenced for the dogs and we watch Emma on demand last night. There is still almost a case of wine under the stairs.

Plus my order of music wire arrived from Granger, so I can continue my quest of making new springs for the rotary. My last batch were good initially, but I left them to temper to long at to high a heat, so they got soft.

[bort]

Crud or not, it's still early spring in Minnesota. Which means the first sunny and non-freezing days of the year.

We packed up a picnic lunch, headed to a lake 20 miles away, and walked some trails around the lake with the kids. It was great for everyone.

Plenty of people out and about, but nowhere near crowded. Everyone was in a good mood and eager to say hi. From a distance.

I'm grateful to live in a city/metro area with a really nice public trail system. I don't use it as much as I could, but it's nice that it's there and waiting for me when I'm ready for it!

[marking]

I finally installed nylon valve guides on my 19-teens Martin Eb. Greatly reduced the "clackiness". I found a supplier that could sell me #2-56 unslotted screws without having to get a hundred of them. I didn't take long to trim them to fit , so if they don't last long, it will be easy to re-do.

[Dave Hayami]

Wanted to share

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eXT60rbBVk" target="_blank" target="_blank

dave"trying to stay safe at home,but honey do list is growing" hayami

[proam]

Out of curiosity, on what day does she celebrate her birthday? My grandfather was born on February 29, but he celebrated it on February 28 (as do most, I suspect) - I always thought this wasn't accurate, because in non-leap years, March 1 would be in the actual place where Feb 29 would have occured........?

Sorry but I missed this question earlier.

Like you say, March 1st makes more sense because if it hadn’t been a leap year that’s the date you would have been born. But we have a nephew with a March 1 birthday so that day has been claimed for 30 yrs now. Generally we pick a weekend after February 28 on non-leap years but there is no hard and fast rule.

Exactly 12 midnight on February 28/March 1? A point in time with no duration?

To a leap-year-born person, non leap years are of lesser concern.

[Wu299]

Have we run out of good news in just 4 pages of replies?

The virus actually made my life much easier here in the Czech republic – my lifestyle is now officially everyone's lifestyle, I am comfortably working from home and cleaning up several parts of my house in the spare time. Most of my colleagues appear to be happy about spending more time with their families rather than commuting and being whole day with random strangers, as well.

Aaaand... I play my new (to me) Willson rotary F I bought two months ago! Now that I'm thinking about it, perhaps I might start a separate thread with pictures, etc., as I haven't seen many of these on tubenet.

[Three Valves]

Gas is under $2/gallon for regular everywhere.

All the WAWAs are open.

This is like being retired, only without the planning or potential income one may have otherwise expected!!

[bort]

I talked to someone on the phone today.

Aah, telephones... The original social distancer!

[bort]

Have we run out of good news in just 4 pages of replies?

The virus actually made my life much easier here in the Czech republic – my lifestyle is now officially everyone's lifestyle, I am comfortably working from home and cleaning up several parts of my house in the spare time. Most of my colleagues appear to be happy about spending more time with their families rather than commuting and being whole day with random strangers, as well.

Aaaand... I play my new (to me) Willson rotary F I bought two months ago! Now that I'm thinking about it, perhaps I might start a separate thread with pictures, etc., as I haven't seen many of these on tubenet.

Ooh, yes please!

And tell me what you think of the rotax valves. I liked the valves on my old Willson rotary CC just okay.... But they we're kind of slow and heavy. I popped then out and sent them to Martin Wilk, who expertly cut them down to make them into regular rotary valves. That helped the action and response of the tuba quite a bit. The ergonomics were never great for me, but otherwise, it was a great tuba. If only Willson could have figured out the rotary valves a little better.

If all is well on the rotary F though... I bet it's a sweet tuba!

[Three Valves]

If they would finally take the booze out of our gas and make sanitizer out of it, this whole megillah could wind up with a positive spin on it!!

[Three Valves]

http://www.wees.org" target="_blank

Commercial and “news” free stream community radio out of OCMD.

Piano music for the dinner hour now. A return to 50s/Pops/Hit Parade even a little Classic Country now and then coming at 8pm.

[bort]

remarkably well...as is my memory...including recalling days in a couple of statistics courses - which demonstrated how statistics can be used, as well as how they can be abused.

"If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything"

My problem is this -- there are many cases out there confirmed, and people keep saying how many more people must be infected and not know it, infected and untested (wait... Don't they say to just stay home?!), and people who may have already had it and recovered and just never knew.

All of this is just "more people", making a larger denominator... With the numerator being the number of deaths (which is a more absolute and accurate count... Deaths are always recorded). So the same number of deaths, with a much larger denominator... Lower fatality rate. And yes Joe, if you remove the people who were already very sick with other things, then it goes down more.

I'm not saying that the deaths and sick people aren't real. It's real and it's sad. But the numbers don't add up they way they try to report them.

To say it another way:
100% of people who died from COVID-19 had COVID-19. That's about all you know for sure, and it doesn't say much. Real useful statistics about contagion and death rates needs a valid sampling method to draw inferences for the whole population. Testing already-sick people... Not really helpful for statistics. Helpful for containment and quarantine... But not these kids of statistics.

Also, the total number of infected people is modeled by a logistic curve, not exponential... right? There are a finite number of people on Earth; logistic curves have an upper bound... Hopefully far less than the total earth population!

[hup_d_dup]

THIS is why I would like to see a statistic for ONLY the CV deaths with NO underlying health conditions.

You need to run it through the Bloke filter to see if it is a statistic or a "statistic."

I tend to be suspicious of any "statistics" put forth by rulers' lackeys (as rulers' lackeys' jobs are to control the serf class' thoughts and actions), whether someone's else rulers' lackeys, or my own rulers' lackeys.

Hup

[Donn]

Real useful statistics about contagion and death rates needs a valid sampling method to draw inferences for the whole population.

It's a shame that this thread is located in "Tell me some good news".

Here's a statistical analysis from a group at our university, that's simply based on deaths, more or less for the reason you mention.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

For Minnesota, you'll see that they expect at peak in late April, assuming current practices, you'll have about half the ICU beds needed. In my state, we'll have about 3/4 the ICU beds we need.

What I can't explain is the colored areas around the curves. I assume they represent some range of uncertainty, could hardly be anything else but I don't see that explained in any more detail. I'd be particularly interested to know why the interval is so much larger for some states than others.

[Rick Denney]

THIS is why I would like to see a statistic for ONLY the CV deaths with NO underlying health conditions.

There is a lag between the infection totals (however much those are undercounted) and outcome statistics, because the disease takes several weeks to reach an outcome and that is an eternity in an exponential growth.

But deaths have been growing exponentially just like infections (outside of China), increasing by an order of magnitude every 15 days or so. So, if we divide those who died by the total infection rate, we are missing about three or four weeks of infection growth in the calculation. That makes the percentage low (just as an undercount of the infections makes it high).

One website looks only at the cases that reached a conclusion--deaths versus recoveries. But while death has a finite determination, recoveries are being very conservatively assessed as being no trace of virus in consecutive tests. So the lag goes in the other direction, making the percentage high.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Generally, we don't know what the rates are until after the pandemic has resolved and we can consider all of the statistics. That was true for SARS and MERS, which are also coronaviruses, and also for influenza pandemics, such as H1N1 (2009). We don't know between 50 and 100 million deaths the true outcome of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920.

The problem with statistics is that like lots of quantitative data, they present a pastiche of precision, while the underlying accuracy is subject to large errors.

But deaths among those with no underlying conditions seems to be a little under 1%. Still about ten times higher than influenza.

Rick "who has more than a smattering of statistical training" Denney

[bort]

Real useful statistics about contagion and death rates needs a valid sampling method to draw inferences for the whole population.

It's a shame that this thread is located in "Tell me some good news".

Here's a statistical analysis from a group at our university, that's simply based on deaths, more or less for the reason you mention.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

For Minnesota, you'll see that they expect at peak in late April, assuming current practices, you'll have about half the ICU beds needed. In my state, we'll have about 3/4 the ICU beds we need.

What I can't explain is the colored areas around the curves. I assume they represent some range of uncertainty, could hardly be anything else but I don't see that explained in any more detail. I'd be particularly interested to know why the interval is so much larger for some states than others.

Never miss a good opportunity for data visualization!

The colored areas around the curves are for standard error. Deaths per day seems pretty stable for the standard error (it's just one guess that's used for the duration). For the total deaths, the farther out you go (time-wise), the more uncertainty there is, and the bigger the shaded parts -- the errors compound over time -- you're making guesses from guesses, and things just get a lot less reliable. For example, total deaths by the end of July could be from 38,000 to 162,000. That's a huge range, and I'm not really sure it's helpful except that it's "more than right now." These totals don't just stop, they gradually level off.

Why are the intervals wider for some states than others? My guess is that there is just so much variation between states about case loads, testing (<-- again, reporting is really wacky here, and inconsistent), and then just differences in states to begin with. Alaska and California, for example, are tremendously different states (CA has over 40x the population, lots of cities, lots of population density, etc...), and the kinds of data collected in California are just a lot different than what you'd ever get in Alaska.

The cool thing about plots like this is that as you add more data, you can re-run the models and get more accurate (realistic) projections. It's basically like watching the hurricane landfall projection maps. As time goes on and as the storm gets closer, you know better and better where it's going to make landfall. At some point, it becomes clear enough (and early enough) that it's time to evacuate that area. There's still uncertainty about where it will hit, exactly... but if you waited for an exact hit, it would be too late. Here, it's the same thing. About when do we expect things to be the "most bad", and let's plan around the badness and see what we can do to make it less bad.

[Donn]

OK, I see that the range specifically portrays a 95% Uncertainty Interval. I think you'll see that this is not just a factor applied to the base curve. For example the curve at the bottom of the range peaks on a different day. They're likely modeling different spread rates.

As for the data differences - they're simply using deaths, which are reported fairly consistently. It looks to me like the conspicuous difference in uncertainty intervals is about whether they think your state may be able to get it under control early, based on measures that are being taken. If there's a possible but not guaranteed early peak, then the uncertainty over that is compounded over time.

[cjk]

BREAKING (good) NEWS: Bort likes his new tuba and thinks that he has found the one.

[Three Valves]

bloke "yeah...I'm pretty oily right now, but my skin is 'baby soft'...and - hopefully - the oily coating in my lungs will protect me from CV."

It’s rumers like this that will be responsible for a run on oil based stain...