It's entirely possible. I mean, I'm definitely putting off things in a way I wish I wasn't, although I've at least managed to go to the dentist and get an annual and whatnot. Of course, I tend to assume that letting the virus run rampant won't make this problem better.

And here's their other Japan study. Also from clinics! That is about the opposite of random. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7370565/ I really want a paper by someone who is not trying to make the IFR seem smaller. The author of this paper has been working on that project for quite a while. I'm not actually willing to look through every single paper on this list, but I would have to have a compilation of results from tests where there was reasonably random sampling, the test sensitivity was known (and preferably yielded a result of above 10%, or the false positive

Like, take this study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.26.20079822v2.article-info This is ridiculously flawed. It's not a random sample (they are sampling from people who visited outpatient clinics!) We have no idea about the actual specificity of the antibody test they used. Their estimates of prevalence in the actual population is 100s of times greater than by PCR test. I mean... MAYBE. But there are many red flags here.

Ugh. This is like 61 studies. I can't discuss 61 studies at once, because these estimates are really dependent on how they sampled and lots of other things. And I'm suspicious of the author of this thing. I'm trying to find some good recent studies out of reputable places now.

California is an interesting one... lots of economic impact, and still a fair number of deaths. Not obviously a successful experiment there.

Same percent of jobs lost, though, right?

Well, it's more like one has to think about what to scale positivity by to figure out the rate of spread, and the scaling factor has grown. So, positivity had dipped to 2.6%, and that was probably artificial. But if testing is currently not changing modes, then an increase is meaningful. So the fact that it's rising to 5% is meaningful and would suggest a double of cases, which is consistent with hospitalizations. From what we've observed on the other thread, hospitalizations track much less well with deaths than positivity, though. So it still seems like positivity is the best predictor

Maybe that's it. Now that I've messed with the scale, I'm actually seeing a pretty serious increase in positivity in the last few weeks, which seems like it tracks well... but as we noted in the other thread, the trend of testing lots of asymptomatic students means that positivities have gotten diluted and the scaling factor has grown. Interesting.

Oh, that's interesting. Positivity in Ohio IS going up, but not as much as hospitalizations are showing. So it looks like positivity isn't a great measure in Ohio for some reason. I wonder how the testing is being done?

It seems very political, unfortunately. I would guess the chance one is happy with one's state is very related to whether you're aligned politically with your governor. Until you actually know someone who gets sick, anyway.

By the way, if anyone's interested, here's something I found about how states are doing economically: https://carsey.unh.edu/COVID-19-Economic-Impact-By-State

Well, it's definitely not just the PPE that's deciding it. I can imagine someone who's working indoors being quite worried about their safety. Although I have no idea if doubling up masks does much or not.

Ah. Yeah, Shanghai and Tokyo seem reasonable enough, given the rates there (as far as I know.) Florida opening it seems... not obviously a good idea, with the rate of community spread. But then I don't know how that's going.

Remind me of what state you're in, if you don't mind? (I'm sure I've asked you before; sorry!)

Which ones?