is social distancing actually a cult?

i'm for real eating, now.

think about it.

i have no earned income. therefore, i've experienced no loss in income.

what's the worst thing that can happen if i apply?

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/04/20/ontario-to-allow-people-on-social-assistance-to-keep-part-of-emergency-benefits.html

you are not a child, and the government is not your guardian. you will not be rewarded for good behaviour, and if that's what you're thinking then you need to snap out of it.

if social distancing is working, it means that the more you comply, the longer you will need to comply for.

you won't get a reduced sentence for good behaviour, here; it's the opposite - if we all comply perfectly, we'll be stuck with this for the next two years.

if you want to speed this up, you should be supporting policies that increase social interaction, not those that reduce it.

do you understand that?

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/03/30/should-governments-give-an-end-date-for-social-distancing-covid-19-study-says-theres-a-catch.html

i don't suffer idiots very well. you might have noticed that.

but, we'd better at least learn from this, because if you think i'm being intolerant now....

ok.

it would be impossible to find stats on deaths due to the "common cold" because there's no such thing as the common cold - that's a term we use to describe dozens of disparate viruses that create similar symptoms.

but, any of these viruses might kill you if you're 110 years old, or if you have aids.

the comparison is not that bad, actually. but, nobody thinks the numbers are that low. or, not yet, anyways.

we don't have flu-like coronaviruses, though; coronaviruses are the common cold, and that's the best comparison we have to this one, as well, even if it's in it's beginning stages. a number that low might be realistic in a few years, once it's really run it's course.

for now, the correct answer is "no".

to be clear...

if what we've done is working after all, then the intent of the policy was to push the peak forward along the axes of the graph, meaning we'll need to wait even longer to peak.

so, i'm suggesting that toronto will peak at the end of may, because i don't think these policies are working. but, if they are working then that means that we'll be pushing the peak to a later point in time - july or perhaps august.

does those make sense to you?

do you understand?

do you understand why what the premier said today is complete rubbish?

if toronto were actually at a peak - and they are not. - then the proper conclusion would be that social distancing had no effect at all, and the virus has a mortality rate that's drastically lower than 0.1%,.

we can calculate that.

if we're at peak, that means we're at herd immunity. no, that's what the peak is - there's no other way to peak.

if we have 600 deaths with .666 infection, what is the mortality rate?

let x be the mortality rate.

15 million*.666*x = 600 <----> x= 600/(.666*15 million) <---> x= 0.00006006006

so, if we're at a peak than the mortality rate is .0006%.

that's comparable to what? the common cold?

we're not at peak, and the mortality rate is not that low. the premier is just an ignorant buffoon.

what the ford government is claiming is that social distancing rules had the effect of accelerating the peak.

this is perhaps the single most ignorant statement i've yet to hear in regards to the situation.

i'll repeat my own position, which i think is the consensus position - community spread in ontario doesn't appear to have started until march, weeks after italy or new york. if we are ~6 weeks behind new york, we shouldn't expect to see death tolls in toronto that are comparable to the peak in new york, which happened at the beginning of april, until the middle of may or the beginning of june.

you should expect toronto to peak at the end of may or the start of june.

but, what if social distancing is working? would you expect it to accelerate the peak?

no. the purpose of social distancing was to slow down the peak, in order to protect health care resources.

if you wanted to accelerate the peak, you should have increased transmission rates.

it's just a constant stream of anti-science bullshit from queen's park. and, this man needs to go. now.

i'm going to want to split the update into topics, though.

- court case updates
- illegal entry updates
- computing updates
- covid-19 updates

etc

i said one more update, but i'm going to need to do two, i think, on second thought.

i was hoping to find some kind of shortcut in reviewing this chunk of time from the 13th to the 31st of march, and i'm giving up - i'm going to have to do it the long way.

so, i'm for real stopping to eat, first.

it's very strange what we're seeing happening, here, even if we've had forewarning with russiagate and a few other things.

across the country, it's the democrats that are giving into fear mongering and ignoring the science, and republicans that are following the data.

i'd like to pretend i'm baffled, but it's really a continuation of an existing trend - republicans are becoming more science-oriented; democrats, less so.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-u-s-floridamorons-trends-after-people-flock-to-reopened-florida-beaches

i'd like to call for doug ford's immediate resignation.

he's not intellectually capable of dealing with this, and should realize it and step away.

i got some sleep today, which is necessary sometimes.

i'm almost done the vlogging update. one more.

i'm going to eat first.

so, how will we know if this is done before we get a vaccine?

we're getting decent bounds on the mortality rate, now. 

we'll need to calculate herd immunity based on mortality - that's how we'll know it's done.

and, we'll measure the body count in ontario by thousands, not hundreds, when it is.

unless you want to live like this until we get a vaccine, that is.

the initial modelling had a death rate around 1% of those infected. we know now that that's about ten to twenty times too high.

it also had r-not values around 1 or 2. we know now that that's 2-3 times too low.

those are the sources of error in the models, and we can fix that to come up with better projections.

but, the focus of these policies was never to burn the virus out, it was only to slow it down.

we were never going to save anybody, we were only going to prolong their death by weeks or months.

why did we do this?

was it to reduce the total death count?

no. that's wrong....

the reason we did this was to slow down the hospitalization rate. you've forgotten already, haven't you?

remember all those charts you saw on twitter?

remember?

no?

"we can't stay locked down until we get a vaccine."

you're right, we can't.

that's what i told you in the fucking first place.

we should not be talking about peaking in ontario until we get a minimum of 5000 deaths.

and, i'm sorry if the government confused you, but maybe they were right to talk down to you, at least.

"but, social distancing is working."

even if it was working, that wouldn't suggest a lower total death count, in the end, unless we stay locked down until (if.) we get a vaccine.

remember, there's only two ways to stop this: mass vaccination or herd immunity.

and, there's no way to get to herd immunity without experiencing a lot of death, because it's going to work via trial and error.

so, even if social distancing was working, that wouldn't imply that you could cut the death rate to a tenth of what it would be, otherwise. it would just mean you could slow it down....

how many dead people should you expect in ontario when this is done?

well, there's about 15 million people here.

15000000*.666*.001 = 9990.

that's an exceedingly crude calculation, but i'd argue it's better than the ones the state is producing.

we're a long ways from getting there.

it's the perfect example of what happens when you elect a fucking moron.

if this is too much, just remember this: what's about to happen in ontario is not a "second wave".

the epidemic hasn't started yet.

if they were to run the models with a case count that was derived from the death toll, which is going to be a better metric than the testing anyways, then they'd get very different results.

guessing parameters is messy, and nobody is going to nail this. you need to expect large amounts of error.

but, this is certain: if you feed the model bad data by suppressing the testing, you're going to get the same garbage out that you put in.

and, it will not be the models that will be wrong. it will be the government that botched the response...

the ford government has refused to test, thereby limiting the number of known cases to a few thousand.

but, we've had almost 600 deaths, here. the observed mortality rate in ontario is over 5%, which is nowhere close to reality.

we know, now, that the actual mortality rate is under .1%.

that would suggest that there are more than 600,000 cases in ontario, already. but, that's not the end - that's just the start.

so, the ford government's focus has been to distort the numbers by refusing to test. it seems to be afraid that it's going to face bad media if too many cases are uncovered. then, they argue that the deficit of observed cases implies the epidemic has passed, when the truth is that they just haven't tested for it.

then, they put the bad data into the model, and conclude it's not happening.

no, you fucking idiots. you're not testing...

doug ford is alpha idiot.

he's the counterexample.

and, ontario is going to come out of this as the perfect demonstration of how to do everything completely wrong.

let's hope it buries him.

ok, i'll bring out my crystal ball.

abracadabra! oopa loompa!

what's going to happen here is that they're going to reopen before the epidemic even starts. then, when the epidemic starts here on time, we'll blame it on reopening too early - when the reality is that we shut down too early, and then reopened before it even hit.

i don't think we should have shut anything down at all - i think we should have put the vulnerable in lockdown camps until it passed. but, if we were going to shut down, we should have shut down starting now, not starting last month.

it's a confusing mess, i get it. so, what should we do? we should reopen, yes. but, not only have we not peaked, we haven't even started. so, when we reopen, we should not get jittery about it.

but, we will.

hey, if their attempt to suppress the data just makes idiots out of them, i guess there's an upside of that.

but, it hasn't peaked. it hasn't started....

the response in ontario has been bungled on purpose.

first, they don't do enough testing to pull out anything meaningful from the data. then, they put that fragmented data into the models, which just produces garbage results. then, they base their policies on the garbage they got out, by putting garbage in.

sadly, the sitting ontario government is so stupid that it seems to think the primary issue in front of it is limiting the number of cases that are reported, in order to skew the reporting - because they think you're too stupid to figure it out. and, if you voted for these fucking idiots, then maybe you are.

the data on cases is of limited value much of anywhere; it's absolutely worthless in a jurisdiction that refuses to do enough testing. if you can't see it, it's not there, right doug? you fucking idiot...

that said, given that the infectiousness of the disease was dramatically underestimated, and that it's mortality rate was dramatically overestimated, i don't think that shutting down society is helping minimize the spread of the disease at all. so, i don't oppose reopening.

but, has the data peaked?

the initial response from the federal government was the correct one, which limited spread in the community by encouraging openness. community spread does not appear to have sunk in here until they brought in counterproductive authoritarian measures to stop it. as such, we are months behind the curve in the united states.

in ontario, i don't think the epidemic has even started yet - all we've seen is background. those numbers are likely set to ramp up in a week or two.

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-begins-working-on-plan-to-reopen-as-modelling-data-suggests-cases-have-peaked-1.4904027

again: don't be surprised if you see a small uptick in cases in new york tomorrow, because there's a pattern of underreporting on sundays. we haven't reached the social pinnacle of full secularism in this society, just yet.

and, we still need to wait for the effects of easter to show up in the data.

but, yes - these new numbers are in line with my projections.