now, this....

is this permanent?

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/canada-post-warns-of-delays-as-it-handles-christmas-level-volume-of-parcels-1.4908484

might they consider extending the school year to make up the lost time?

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/gradual-return-to-school-isn-t-just-welcome-it-s-necessary-quebec-pediatricians-association-says-1.4908988

i posted this two weeks ago, and we seem to be falling more in the middle range in new york city (which is past it's peak), whereas the other three cities are very far behind new york on the curve and can't really be analyzed the same way.

if detroit got an easter spike, it would indicate it has a long way to go, still.

and, my official analysis is that montreal & toronto are both still on the very low end of the curve, and essentially recording background deaths. i wouldn't expect either city to peak until mid-may at the earliest.

the low range was .1%, the middle range was .3% and the high range was .5%.

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/04/so-it-looks-like-some-places-are.html

michigan might be getting an easter spike, indicating there's still a lot of uninfected people.

new york doesn't seem to be seeing that. but, it's too early to rule it out.

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/michigan/2020/04/22/coronavirus-in-michigan-heres-where-we-stand-as-of-tuesday-night/

i did finish the long vlog update this morning before crashing, in three installments. it's roughly an hour.

i don't know when i'll upload it...it could be years....

i have one more to do, and let's hope it doesn't take several days. then, i'm finally over this brutal hump and back to work...

listen, i told you i was an anarchist.

don't feign shock and surprise, here.

maybe you didn't listen, but i've been absolutely transparent.

productive sobriety is the key to happiness, it really is.

now, if we could just all stop wasting our lives at work...

moderation.

it's key to longevity.

"you smoked 60 joints in 10 days and then just quit?"

i had to sleep it off a little - and probably the nicotine, mostly.

but, marijuana isn't addictive.

your rights end where mine start.

and, i think that you're overstepping your bounds, right now.

i've been inside for a solid week.

i intend to be inside for two more.

i don't want to have to deal with second-hand smoke while i'm in here.

at all.

again: you don't get an early sentence from a pandemic for good behaviour. the more you comply, the worse off you are.

it's the areas that ignored social distancing that are going to be back to normal sooner, not the ones that did what they were told.

well?

stop interpreting yourself as a child.

and stop interpreting the state as your parents.

when i was smoking last week, i went to the park to smoke. every single time, which was 60 some odd joints off the quarter.

i don't want it near the house. at all.

and, if i figure out that somebody is smoking inside, there's going to be hell to pay for it.

just don't do it. go for a walk....

i want to reverse a misperception i'm seeing show up, though.

as talk of reopening is increasing, there's this implication in the media coverage over the last couple of days, never stated explicitly but always easily inferred from the writing, that you want to open the areas with the lowest infection rates first, and the highest infection rates last.

this is perfectly representative of the ignorance in the media around the topic.

it's the areas with the lowest infection rates that are the most vulnerable to a higher level of spread, and the areas with the highest infection rates that are least vulnerable.

it would follow that you want to open the areas with the highest infection rates first - and the areas that are the least infected last.

i know this is counter-intuitive, if you're a calvinist. but, you'd think the media would have a higher level of scientific literacy, and it's increasingly clear that they just don't.

you know, i could tolerate a little bit of second-hand smoke on 4/20, but the problem seems to be getting worse, again, after having largely lifted over the last few days.

again: can you get this disgusting pig out of here, please?

it's not my responsibility to stay inside so you don't get sick.

it's your responsibility to stay inside so you don't get sick.

yes - i would support aid packages to keep people inside, when it's unsafe for them to venture out.

but, at the end of the day, we all need to take responsibility for our own health, and any decisions we do or don't make to further it.

i want to see the experiment done.

but, i want to be clear on a point: there's little reason to expect that georgia has the kind of widespread immunity appearing in new york. that means that opening the economy needs to be done in a way that protects the vulnerable, as the virus is going to spread through the state very quickly, once it opens.

but, the fact is that the mortality rate of this disease is very low.

i think this can be done safely without locking everybody up for the whole summer, if there is a proper focus on keeping the disease out of long-term care homes and people with high co-morbidity are cognizant that they are at higher risk, and take steps to protect themselves.

there are lots of ifs, there.

but, somebody has to take the risk, and i actually applaud the georgian governor for having the courage to be the one to do it.

and, i think that shifting the responsibility to those that are at risk to protect themselves, rather than collectivizing the responsibility indefinitely, is actually the correct moral decision, as well.

there's only one way to find out what's going to happen.

but, i would call on the state of georgia to take particular care to protect those that require it.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/23/doug-collins-slams-georgia-brian-kemp-state-reopening-203389

Though surveying shoppers at grocery stores may be more randomized than recruiting through social media ads

no, it's the opposite - you'd get a more random sample over the internet, given the reality of widespread quarantine.

so, if we have an upper bound around 25% from the actual data, and i suggest the sick are being undersampled due to being in quarantine, how high can you guesstimate it is actually?

35%? 45%?

and, could we get herd immunity with numbers around or less than 40%?

if the reproductive number is low, perhaps.

but, that would contradict the basic deduction that it's actually higher than expected.

again: the key takeaway is that it is currently more widespread than previously modeled. more precise bounds are forthcoming.

my guess is that it is much higher in new york city, specifically.

see, given that the epidemic has burned itself out and new york city seems to be approaching herd immunity, i'd guess that it seems far too low.

the media has made real idiots of themselves out of this, and has a lot of face-saving to do. you're probably not going to get a full mea culpa from anybody - nobody is going to go on tv and say "we were wrong.". these people rely on their perceived credibility, which should and hopefully will take a major drubbing. likewise, you're likely to get a lot of obfuscation from governments, and social media will just amplify the ignorance.

the data is preliminary, and while i can point to problems in the study that suggest that it undersampled sick people in quarantine, i can't make numbers up. the upper bound right now from these numbers is 25%. other studies suggest it may be higher, but we'll need to wait for more data to come out of new york to corroborate them.

i would expect that the incidence level will be revised upwards as more data is released, not be revised downwards.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/what-we-can-can-t-take-away-new-york-s-n1191106

i don't want to fit in.

i want to be correct.

that's an asset in coming to the right answers, in context.

i've been clear for years that i'm a self-identified nerd; i've never suggested otherwise, and i don't have any desire to identify otherwise.

rather, i'm more likely to viciously attack anything that is popular, trendy or mainstream. so, that's my own bias - if something is trending or seen as 'cool', i'm more likely to stand up against it than go along with it.

but, that doesn't change the reality that we should have waited for better data before making all of these mistakes.

so far, as i've gone through the divisional court process, i've come face-to-face with an administrator that has falsified documents and have had to launch a complaint with the judicial council against the chief justice of the superior court.

i just hope it gets better as i pull the process up the ladder, on my way to the supreme court.

nononono.

i realized what was happening, that the court-appointed legal people were working closely with the prosecution, and got up and yelled over them.

if i had not done that, the collusion would have resulted in the obvious outcome.

if you're ever in the situation of being arrested on bullshit charges, don't delude yourself - they don't work for you, and they don't care about you. 

then, they tried to set me up with legal aid.

lol.

no thanks...

yes: i had to shout down my own lawyer, who probably went for drinks with the prosecutor at the end of the day.

and i fully realized the reality of the scenario, and who duty counsel was actually working for.

if you haven't been following this space, i was arrested and charged with harassment for repeatedly applying for an apartment. the charges were eventually dropped. i have since launched a human rights complaint against the property owner for discrimination, which i expect to win. and, i'm suing the police for arresting me without a warrant, a process currently in divisional court.

what did i do differently than joe?

i actually stood up and yelled over my court-appointed lawyer as she was speaking. i could have been cited for contempt, but i didn't really have another choice.

if i had not done that, the situation could have very well ended rather differently.

i'm not brilliant.

you're retarded.

you think this is fantasy?

it feels startlingly similar to what i'm going through right now.

so, i got an email out.

based solely on the population, 1300 people sampled in a population of nine million should create a margin of error of 2-4%, depending on the preferred confidence interval, if the sampling is truly random. so, if they pull 21% out of the numbers then the upper bound is around 25%.

but, i'm making a lot of assumptions that would be clarified in a typical report.

and, don't ask noam. or, ask him, but with great caution.

he's 90+ years old and out in nowhere, arizona - he gets his news from msnbc nowadays, like everybody else. and, you can tell.

remember: the value of an educated opinion is not in the educated authority of the opiner, but in the ability of the educated individual to present a detailed argument. you don't want to reduce educated opinion to the fallacy of an appeal to authority. that would be very unfortunate.

so, i want to refer you to my own posts in this space to clarify that i'm not trying to argue against the science. my point here has never been to impugn or attack anybody working in the field. at all. rather, what i've been trying to do is to point out that these government bodies are often not following the evidence, but rather caving into public pressure (as sometimes articulated by social media) or "common sense" fallacies, and this is being reinforced by the media, which is generally not capable of producing an educated analysis, in a cyclical process of mutual reinforcement. so, you end up with these three sources of ignorance - media, government, the public (as articulated through social media) - feeding off of each other to produce popular but irrational policy.

so, i'm not playing the role of a copernicus or a newton (or a lord monckton.) here, in trying to overturn the established wisdom. rather, i'm playing the role of a joe bauers here in trying to draw attention to what the established wisdom and developing science actually is in the face of staggering mass ignorance from every direction. no, we're obviously not actually that far gone. but, the future is going to look back and laugh at us - if it doesn't end up in worse shape than we're in, or doesn't end up flooded by melting polar ice caps.

if the educated opinion that you're relying on can't present a convincing argument to you, then you should question it, not obey it. as chomsky is famous for stating in his arguments against post-modernism, and i paraphrase, if you have a cogent point and understand it properly and are convinced that it's valid then the best way to prove as much is to condense it into language that a child is capable of understanding. if you can't do that, then you don't have a valid point, or you don't understand it, or it isn't cogent.

ok.

so....i guess the data was published at the briefing?

these are very specific numbers with no error bars. generally a study with 1300 people would have a margin of error of a couple of points, at least.

i'm going to send them an email.

but, if that's all there is, i don't have much further analysis, other than to remind you to mentally draw the error bars in.

the headlines should say something like "20% of asymptomatic new yorkers have antibodies", or "20% of new yorkers that didn't think they got sick actually did".

what did i say to end the last several posts?

sorry.

that's hundreds of thousands in state-ordered quarantines due to having tested positive. these people should all be inside.

....plus hundreds of thousands or potentially millions more in self-imposed quarantine because they're experiencing mild symptoms.

so, setting up at a grocery store among people that feel well enough to not quarantine is excluding all of the people that are quarantining.

i'm more awake now, let me see if i can find the actual study.

stop.

there's hundreds of thousands of new yorkers in quarantine right now.

they've been ordered to stay inside.

if there's a bias...

but, this debate just demonstrates the importance of ensuring random sampling.

a quick, dirty test gets the point across, and i'm glad they did it.

so, there's preliminary results from new york.

media reports are...i want to see the studies, and i'm kind of sleepy right now. soon.

for now, i just want to point out that the very high numbers i was throwing around had to do with the city itself, where the media reports suggest the number is higher. i wouldn't have expected those numbers to hold upstate. so, the media suggests around a 20% infection rate in the city, with a mortality rate around 1%, give or take. that's spanish flu territory, still much stronger than a seasonal flu - and 10x higher than my own bounds.

sampling at a grocery store is not truly random. you can present arguments about bias in either direction - maybe people that went to the store are more likely to come into contact with the virus because they're out, and people that stay in are less likely to come into contact. or, maybe people that stay in are in because they're sick, and the bias is the other way, in the waning stages of the pandemic. these are hypotheses, and they are useful as caveats before you take the information as truth. but, you need to do random sampling to really know.

the value of a test like this to guide public policy is to help political leaders understand where we are, and the conclusion to draw is that the virus is indeed quite widespread.....in new york city.

does that mean that 20% of people in toronto have it? the precision of the numbers and the efficacy of social distancing aside, toronto is weeks behind new york. whatever the true value is in new york, you should expect lower values in toronto, at this time.

i'll look at the actual data and provide further analysis when i'm more alert.

(Pavel) Bure was usually seen by North Americans as a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma, a brilliantly talented athlete who, in the course of his career, seemingly became less of a team player and more focused on contracts than scoring goals.

maybe this is a particularly canadian application of the churchill quote, but it's how i first interacted with it.

i'm sure you can google this all night if you insist.

when i was a kid, my dad used to drag me to hockey pools with him, and i'd end up reading through the draft magazines, because it was the only thing around to read.

and, there was this phrase that was often reserved for highly talented but under-performing russian prodigies, who had a margin of error in projection of roughly 50 points per year:

a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma.

that's donald trump, for you.

and, the smart analysts should not forget that, as i did.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ARiddleWrappedInAMysteryInsideAnEnigma

"use of aspirin is strongly associated with headaches."

you get the point.

and, my point is about honesty in media.

here's an article that repeats what i said using words that you probably don't understand.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7161506/

we all knew this, right - trump can rarely be taken at face value. he has no interest in truth; he will routinely lie his face off as a means to an end, whatever that end actually is. you consequently can't believe anything he says, and you're insane to think otherwise.

but, it's easy to forget that he's just a front, too - that there's an entire bureaucracy writing his lies for him, and there are subtle and complex motives underlying the dishonesty.

i initially couldn't figure it out. was he invested in this drug? what the fuck?

but, i dug around a little (something journalists are supposed to do.) and figured it out, and realized that there was some kind of method underlying this particular madness. it didn't have much to do with what he said, but he had reasons to secure a supply of this drug, nonetheless.

i still don't understand why he wasn't forthright.

but, it's a reminder that this president is very complicated.

lupus is a disease that causes cytokine storms.

cytokine storms lead to organ failure.

hydroxycholoroquine is a drug that reduces those cytokine storms. for that reason, it is given to lupus patients to try to prevent organ failure.

covid-19 can also cause cytokine storms, in it's final stages before death - of organ failure.

the hope has been that hydroxycholoroquine may therefore be useful in stopping cytokine storms in covid-19 patients in the same way that it does in lupus patients.

this is still experimental. and, it may be the case that other immunosuppressants may be better suited for the task.

again: i don't know why trump did what he did. it certainly wasn't the most rational way to secure a supply of the drug. and, as the drug is an immunosuppressant, it is a bad idea to take it as a prophylactic.

but, there is a valid use of this drug as a last resort, for people that are already on the brink of dying of organ failure, as a complication of the disease caused by the novel virus - and articles or media reports citing studies correlating use of the drug with organ failure as a reason to avoid it's use are misunderstanding what it's use is, and consequently losing the plot.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/could-curbing-runaway-immune-responses-treat-covid-19--67450

i'm not interested in defending the use of hydroxycholoroquine as a prophylactic (i've been pretty critical of that.), and i don't imagine that the associated antibiotic would be useful at all, except perhaps to fight off infections picked up in the hospital, but i do have to comment on the results of some tests, which are being rather badly reported. the focus of this space is to act as a fact-checker and ensure honesty in media, so i need to be consistent on the point, even if i backtrack or contradict myself.

i'm not going to embarrass anybody directly on this, because the misreporting is total, and this is a subject that is beyond the (limited) intellectual capabilities of most journalists, let alone most readers.

as mentioned previously, this drug is an immunosuppressant, which means it should only be prescribed to patients that are going through the complication of sepsis. as sepsis is pretty much game over when it clicks in, it should also only be being prescribed as an absolute last resort. two things follow from this:

1) if the drug is being prescribed properly (and, despite unreliable media reports to the contrary, i'd have to assume that it actually is.), you would expect higher than average mortality rates to be associated with it's use, because it's essentially a last resort.
2) the end result of sepsis is organ failure, including heart failure. as most cases of the disease do not lead to organ failure, you would also expect use of the drug to be highly correlated with organ failure in a way that separates from non-use rather clearly.

stated simply, you wouldn't prescribe this drug unless you were concerned that the patient was going to die of heart failure in the first place. as such, even a very low success rate would be better than nothing.

so, a statement like "trials of the drug were correlated with higher levels of organ failure" is starkly misleading. the old cliche here is exceedingly relevant - correlation and causation are not the same thing.

it would be sort of like saying "80% of patients treated with ventilators end up dying". while a true statement, if used to imply that ventilators were the cause of these deaths, that would be deeply unfortunate, as 100% of the patients put on ventilators were in extremely bad shape. the ventilators were their last chance. such is also true of hydroxycholoroquine.

i don't fully understand why trump did what he did. was it some kind of performance art? was he trying to justify buying up so much for use in patients that are experiencing sepsis, as a last stage of the disease? or was he just trying to one-up boris johnson?

but, the gotcha journalists should pick a different target, because they sound absurdly ignorant in keying on this one.

you shouldn't take the drug unless you're exceedingly sick, and a doctor gives it to you as an absolute last resort. but, if a doctor does give it to you, you should realize what it's being used for, which is to stop your immune system from attacking itself.

these are my notes for the long vlog update.

i'm going to eat, first, before i do it.

====

- 11th - first response

- sent email requesting denial of consent

- received consent over the 12th

- on 13th, was told coordinator is not available

(spent weekend ranting and sleeping, got pizza & watched debate on sunday)

- checked email on 16th, got pdf with second judicial response

- file complaint against judge

- tried to file consent motion at night, realized i can't. asked instead to file without notice.

- early on 17th, asked respondents for consent to file reference to s. 38.0.6 in writing

- slept until around noon

- left messages in afternoon

- went out on evening of 17th for pills, came back and realized door was unlocked

- it seemed like somebody was going through my stuff

- was missing court documents, some vodka

- decided that enough was enough (after weird stains on sheet, etc)

- sent email to landlord, who claimed to check camera

- landlord said he didn't see anything; clearly lying

- more evidence that landlord is a cop and i have to stay inside as much as possible to prevent further entry

- court shut down for three weeks on the 17th, when i was focusing on other things

- notice indicated court would continue filing documents and timelines are being respected,

- got response back on morning of 18th indicating that i can file reply factum when court reopens

- also got back response from oiprd indicating it wouldn't allow me to file a reference request without a consent motion

- after back and forth, sent request to acknowledge disability on afternoon of 19th

- received response on morning of 20th indicating they insist on a formal motion request

- sent motion request early on 21st.

- after reimaging several times, spent weekend cleaning up february blog posts up to debussy show on the 16th

- debussy review late on the 22nd & early on the 23rd

(so, the week was spent on court stuff & ranting about the virus while cleaning up the blog)

- realize internet usage spike early on the 23rd. 1000% usage increase.

- noticed electrical spike on morning of 13th when i was in detroit.

- turned computer off all day

- response from court early on the 23rd indicating everything is shut down indefinitely, even filing

- i responded in the evening informing them that the directive from the court indicated filing was continuing
- finished blog clean-up until the man or astroman show on feb 24th

- turned modem & all computers off all day on the 24th

- they responded on the 24th that the directive was written on the 15th, and that filing ended on the 17th. nobody is in the office.

- turned modem back on early on the 25th and found 9 gb of traffic on a day with modem physically unplugged

- sent email to landlord, who claimed he has a fibre optic connection (i know this is false because i've received his cable bills in my box). more evidence that he's a cop...

- spent 25th reimaging laptop and looking for backdoors, then lost it all due to an error that forced an unwanted reboot. decided that this image was unworkable, moving forward.

- realized early on 26th that some extra traffic was going through router - dropped packets were 50% of total traffic.

- tried to move to 90s laptop to try to hack into router to get logs

- contacted teksavvy about new ip address. had to argue with them to take it seriously, they insisted it was a virus despite no logic, and won't send tech due to covid-19.

- turned modem off around 14:00 on 26th, didn't turn it back on until 13:00 on the 27th. finally got new ip address in afternoon. 

- traffic logging still wrong on morning of 28th. slept most of the day.

- tried to move to 90s laptop on 29th, decided it was too slow to be workable

- found workaround instead

- teksavvy tried to sell me a modem, had to push back against it

(so, week was spent fighting with unknown internet traffic while slowly cleaning blog at end)

- finished reviews for man or astroman & grunge shows on morning of 30th

- awake late on 30th, check local traffic stats early on 31st and conclude that my network is compromised. 

- completely disable network, get ready for grocery shopping

next segment is next.

the most important lesson here is not to listen to me - i'll be the first to tell you to be skeptical of what i tell you.

the most important lesson is to never, ever, ever listen to evan solomon ever again.

can i point something out, though?

the president might come off as kind of a moron sometimes. most of the time. ok, all of the time.

but, i promise you that he has better intelligence reports than you do, even if he has lower than average actual intelligence.

maybe the numbers he was citing early on were better informed than he let on?