Coronavirus hype biggest political hoax in history

[tomstewa + 13]

https://www.foxnews.com/us/colorado-lowers-coronavirus-death-count?fbclid=IwAR0EqB6TMgSx1We5TzNTRgZPPaO7j5HYlQ73O2WaRVJ6Qs8Eg7XVIOeobRc

 

[tomstewa + 13]

Just now, tomstewa said:

https://www.foxnews.com/us/colorado-lowers-coronavirus-death-count?fbclid=IwAR0EqB6TMgSx1We5TzNTRgZPPaO7j5HYlQ73O2WaRVJ6Qs8Eg7XVIOeobRc

 

After a threatened lawsuit here in Colorado, the coronavirus deaths dropped by 20%.  Wow, you can't make this stuff up.

 

[El Nikko + 2,145]

Neil Ferguson's Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time

The boss of a top software firm asks why the Government failed to get a second opinion before accepting Imperial College's Covid modelling

David Richards and Konstantin Boudnik 16 May 2020 • 1:22pm

Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London

In the history of expensive software mistakes, Mariner 1 was probably the most notorious. The unmanned spacecraft was destroyed seconds after launch from Cape Canaveral in 1962 when it veered dangerously off-course due to a line of dodgy code.

But nobody died and the only hits were to Nasa’s budget and pride. Imperial College’s modelling of non-pharmaceutical interventions for Covid-19 which helped persuade the UK and other countries to bring in draconian lockdowns will supersede the failed Venus space probe and could go down in history as the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.

Since publication of Imperial’s microsimulation model, those of us with a professional and personal interest in software development have studied the code on which policymakers based their fateful decision to mothball our multi-trillion pound economy and plunge millions of people into poverty and hardship. And we were profoundly disturbed at what we discovered. The model appears to be totally unreliable and you wouldn’t stake your life on it.

First though, a few words on our credentials. I am David Richards, founder and chief executive of WANdisco, a global leader in Big Data software that is jointly headquartered in Silicon Valley and Sheffield. My co-author is Dr Konstantin ‘Cos’ Boudnik, vice-president of architecture at WANdisco, author of 17 US patents in distributed computing and a veteran developer of the Apache Hadoop framework that allows computers to solve problems using vast amounts of data.

Imperial’s model appears to be based on a programming language called Fortran, which was old news 20 years ago and, guess what, was the code used for Mariner 1. This outdated language contains inherent problems with its grammar and the way it assigns values, which can give way to multiple design flaws and numerical inaccuracies. One file alone in the Imperial model contained 15,000 lines of code.

Try unravelling that tangled, buggy mess, which looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming. Industry best practice would have 500 separate files instead. In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.

The approach ignores widely accepted computer science principles known as "separation of concerns", which date back to the early 70s and are essential to the design and architecture of successful software systems. The principles guard against what developers call CACE: Changing Anything Changes Everything.

Without this separation, it is impossible to carry out rigorous testing of individual parts to ensure full working order of the whole. Testing allows for guarantees. It is what you do on a conveyer belt in a car factory. Each and every component is tested for integrity in order to pass strict quality controls.

Only then is the car deemed safe to go on the road. As a result, Imperial’s model is vulnerable to producing wildly different and conflicting outputs based on the same initial set of parameters. Run it on different computers and you would likely get different results. In other words, it is non-deterministic.

As such, it is fundamentally unreliable. It screams the question as to why our Government did not get a second opinion before swallowing Imperial's prescription.

Ultimately, this is a computer science problem and where are the computer scientists in the room? Our leaders did not have the grounding in computer science to challenge the ideas and so were susceptible to the academics. I suspect the Government saw what was happening in Italy with its overwhelmed hospitals and panicked.

It chose a blunt instrument instead of a scalpel and now there is going to be a huge strain on society. Defenders of the Imperial model argue that because the problem - a global pandemic - is dynamic, then the solution should share the same stochastic, non-deterministic quality.

We disagree. Models must be capable of passing the basic scientific test of producing the same results given the same initial set of parameters. Otherwise, there is simply no way of knowing whether they will be reliable. 

Indeed, many global industries successfully use deterministic models that factor in randomness. No surgeon would put a pacemaker into a cardiac patient knowing it was based on an arguably unpredictable approach for fear of jeopardising the Hippocratic oath. Why on earth would the Government place its trust in the same when the entire wellbeing of our nation is at stake?

David Richards, founder and chief executive of WANdisco and Dr Konstantin Boudnik is the company's vice-president of architecture 

[D Coyne + 305]

17 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

@0R0 has answered these questions more thank satisfactorily and many times, over and over again.  Read the thread from the beginning or see below, again.

Answering who is healthy, for the nest 10 seconds, is useless.  And people who just WANT to get tested need to be educated by their doctors.  For that we need proper guidance compiled and issued to the doctors from the relevant health agencies.  

Disagree, testing and tracing has worked quite well in Taiwan, along with adequate PPE.  New Zealand and South Korea have also done well.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1261752745695961089

 

OpEd: Why is a Social Worker Dictating COVID-19 Policy for the Country’s Largest County?

Los Angeles County is, by a wide margin, the most populous county in the United States. At an estimated 10 million, its population is larger than all but seven states and over a hundred countries. In fact, LA County has nearly the same number of inhabitants as, dare I say it, Sweden.  Yes, that neo-Nazi, baby-killing, fascist, herd immunity gathering, bastion of pure evil Sweden (sarcasm intended).  Not only is LA County full of people, it is also full of money, having nearly the same GDP as Saudi Arabia.

A county with that population and wealth should have an army of world class scientists leading the battle in the fight against COVID-19. Let’s take a look at who is leading this world class team.

Our LA County Public Health Commissioner is Dr. Barbara Ferrer. You can find her bio here.

Impressive, right? Well, look a little closer. She must have graduated from a top-tier medical school, or so one would think…

Now is when I usually get the “OMG” response, even from the most liberal of liberals.

To be clear she is not even a medical doctor. She has a Doctorate in “Social Welfare.”  So essentially, we have a high-powered social worker (albeit one of the most well-known in the country) leading the largest county in the United States in the fight of our lives against this biological threat.

Yes, this is the real-life version of “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.”

Instead of looking at science and data and adapting her public health response to attack what we now know are the strengths and weaknesses of this virus, she is essentially behaving like an elementary school principal (probably because she was one). Exerting her new-found unchallengeable and unelected power over an entire population that she views as children. She tells us what to do, how to do it, and even threatens to take away our few remaining freedoms, if we misbehave. 

To be clear, I am not writing this to disparage Dr. Ferrer. She has had an illustrious career and has worked hard to achieve . The problem is that, in this fight against a novel coronavirus, we need a team of medical doctors and (apolitical) scientists guiding us, not a sociologist. In a place as populous and wealthy as LA County, we should expect to be led by some of the best in the world. We are clearly not.

She, like many of the public health directors across the country, is faced with a problem that a bureaucrat isn’t practiced or proficient enough to be fighting. Throw more common health issues at her, such as HIV prevention, homelessness, or opiate addiction, and I’m sure she could succeed. But, in the face of a brand new biological pandemic, she has no chance, and the numbers show it.  ...

 

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

35 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

Disagree, testing and tracing has worked quite well in Taiwan, along with adequate PPE.  New Zealand and South Korea have also done well.

"Works" to identify infected or not infected, right?  Not a cure?  We are on the same page with that?

Do you agree with this "herd immunity" theory?

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

19 minutes ago, Tom Kirkman said:

https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1261752745695961089

 

OpEd: Why is a Social Worker Dictating COVID-19 Policy for the Country’s Largest County?

os Angeles County is, by a wide margin, the most populous county in the United States. At an estimated 10 million, its population is larger than all but seven states and over a hundred countries. In fact, LA County has nearly the same number of inhabitants as, dare I say it, Sweden.  Yes, that neo-Nazi, baby-killing, fascist, herd immunity gathering, bastion of pure evil Sweden (sarcasm intended).  Not only is LA County full of people, it is also full of money, having nearly the same GDP as Saudi Arabia.

A county with that population and wealth should have an army of world class scientists leading the battle in the fight against COVID-19. Let’s take a look at who is leading this world class team.

Our LA County Public Health Commissioner is Dr. Barbara Ferrer. You can find her bio here.

Impressive, right? Well, look a little closer. She must have graduated from a top-tier medical school, or so one would think…

Now is when I usually get the “OMG” response, even from the most liberal of liberals.

To be clear she is not even a medical doctor. She has a Doctorate in “Social Welfare.”  So essentially, we have a high-powered social worker (albeit one of the most well-known in the country) leading the largest county in the United States in the fight of our lives against this biological threat.

Yes, this is the real-life version of “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.”

Instead of looking at science and data and adapting her public health response to attack what we now know are the strengths and weaknesses of this virus, she is essentially behaving like an elementary school principal (probably because she was one). Exerting her new-found unchallengeable and unelected power over an entire population that she views as children. She tells us what to do, how to do it, and even threatens to take away our few remaining freedoms, if we misbehave. 

To be clear, I am not writing this to disparage Dr. Ferrer. She has had an illustrious career and has worked hard to achieve . The problem is that, in this fight against a novel coronavirus, we need a team of medical doctors and (apolitical) scientists guiding us, not a sociologist. In a place as populous and wealthy as LA County, we should expect to be led by some of the best in the world. We are clearly not.

She, like many of the public health directors across the country, is faced with a problem that a bureaucrat isn’t practiced or proficient enough to be fighting. Throw more common health issues at her, such as HIV prevention, homelessness, or opiate addiction, and I’m sure she could succeed. But, in the face of a brand new biological pandemic, she has no chance, and the numbers show it.  ...

 

Why is it that everything that I ever read or hear about the Left comes with the word "Social" attached to it in some way, shape or form?  I agree with the above, applied to MANY aspects of life.  Is it simply sociological experimentation run amok.

[specinho + 470]

On 5/14/2020 at 4:39 AM, Tom Kirkman said:

 

Chinese death threats for Polish illustrator! Her boss wants to fire her

A Polish illustrator Greta Samuel began receiving death threats from the Chinese after she had published her illustration about the coronavirus and communist China on the popular website Behance.net. 

 

23 hours ago, El Nikko said:

Imperial College’s modelling of non-pharmaceutical interventions for Covid-19 which helped persuade the UK and other countries to bring in draconian lockdowns will supersede the failed Venus space probe and could go down in history as the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.

The model appears to be totally unreliable and you wouldn’t stake your life on it.

Do not worry guys......... Here is why...........

 

[El Nikko + 2,145]

21 hours ago, Tom Kirkman said:

 

Is...is that two Karens?

[Hotone + 412]

On 5/16/2020 at 9:22 PM, Dan Warnick said:

Are you being serious or facetious? 

Jake Tapper recently asked about aggressive testing and Alex Azar, HHS Secretary, said that this is already being carried out

Btw, may I ask where you are residing at the moment? I take it you are not in the States?

Edited May 18, 2020 by Hotone

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

2 hours ago, Hotone said:

Jake Tapper recently asked about aggressive testing and Alex Azar, HHS Secretary, said that this is already being carried out

Btw, may I ask where you are residing at the moment? I take it you are not in the States?

To Jake's point, 10m tests for a population of 328m ain't much.  But I get it, it gives people piece of mind and that's ok.  There are going to be some people who won't budge until they are happy with testing.  I just hope they have a good support system because I'm pretty sure employers are not going to wait.  Meaning companies will open as quickly as they can, and then they will allow "government mandated" time before employees have to come back to work before they can be terminated (Too harsh?), and then they will give the job to someone waiting for it, pleading for it.

I'm in Thailand.

[Hotone + 412]

12 minutes ago, Dan Warnick said:

To Jake's point, 10m tests for a population of 328m ain't much.  But I get it, it gives people piece of mind and that's ok.  There are going to be some people who won't budge until they are happy with testing.  I just hope they have a good support system because I'm pretty sure employers are not going to wait.  Meaning companies will open as quickly as they can, and then they will allow "government mandated" time before employees have to come back to work before they can be terminated (Too harsh?), and then they will give the job to someone waiting for it, pleading for it.

I'm in Thailand.

Here in Malaysia, many employers are not in a hurry to reopen. The reason is that if an employee contracts the virus, then the employer will have to bear the quarantine and/or medical costs. 

It may be easier for companies employing white collar workers, where it is easier to implement social distancing, to reopen.  But not for factories and construction sites where there are a lot of low cost, blue collar and foreign workers.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

26 minutes ago, Dan Warnick said:

To Jake's point, 10m tests for a population of 328m ain't much.  But I get it, it gives people piece of mind and that's ok.  There are going to be some people who won't budge until they are happy with testing.  I just hope they have a good support system because I'm pretty sure employers are not going to wait.  Meaning companies will open as quickly as they can, and then they will allow "government mandated" time before employees have to come back to work before they can be terminated (Too harsh?), and then they will give the job to someone waiting for it, pleading for it.

I'm in Thailand.

Question:

Is it easier to fire someone in the US as opposed to elsewhere?

I was in a heated argument this weekend woth a Scotsman who said catagorically that in these perilous times there were more people getting ‘fired’ in the US as opposed to ‘furloughed’ elsewhere.

Isn’t this simply semantics as by definition, furloughed is forced time off without pay. Being furloughed MAY give the impression that the job is held, but that is not required to meet the definition.

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

31 minutes ago, Hotone said:

Here in Malaysia, many employers are not in a hurry to reopen. The reason is that if an employee contracts the virus, then the employer will have to bear the quarantine and/or medical costs. 

It may be easier for companies employing white collar workers, where it is easier to implement social distancing, to reopen.  But not for factories and construction sites where there are a lot of low cost, blue collar and foreign workers.

Yes, well, Malaysia does have a "different" system in place.  I mean, if I were a worker there, or citizen, I might think twice before, well, anything.

Assuming the government allows for going back to work, then they would do well to issue an edict that all employers are off the hook if an employee gets Covid-19, and the government will pick up the tab.  Just my thoughts, which don't matter at all.

I give this process about 2 weeks, and then the whole world will come around to the folly of following folly.

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

23 minutes ago, Douglas Buckland said:

Question:

Is it easier to fire someone in the US as opposed to elsewhere?

I was in a heated argument this weekend woth a Scotsman who said catagorically that in these perilous times there were more people getting ‘fired’ in the US as opposed to ‘furloughed’ elsewhere.

Isn’t this simply semantics as by definition, furloughed is forced time off without pay. Being furloughed MAY give the impression that the job is held, but that is not required to meet the definition.

I would tend to agree with you, Douglas.  Fired, furloughed: are you going back to work?  Maybe?  Better start looking for another job, how's that for "maybe"?

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

Why do I shudder every time I see that photo?

[Hotone + 412]

37 minutes ago, Dan Warnick said:

Yes, well, Malaysia does have a "different" system in place.  I mean, if I were a worker there, or citizen, I might think twice before, well, anything.

Assuming the government allows for going back to work, then they would do well to issue an edict that all employers are off the hook if an employee gets Covid-19, and the government will pick up the tab.  Just my thoughts, which don't matter at all.

I give this process about 2 weeks, and then the whole world will come around to the folly of following folly.

Thailand is pretty corrupt but it doesn't reach the level of kleptocracy here in Malaysia.  The current government is rather shaky and is more interested in handing out goodies to woo supporters rather than solving the problems of employers.  

It will be interesting to see what happens in 2 weeks, then.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

10 minutes ago, Hotone said:

Thailand is pretty corrupt but it doesn't reach the level of kleptocracy here in Malaysia.  The current government is rather shaky and is more interested in handing out goodies to woo supporters rather than solving the problems of employers.  

It will be interesting to see what happens in 2 weeks, then.

Yep, UMNO DNA back in full effect again.  Sad.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

1 hour ago, Dan Warnick said:

I would tend to agree with you, Douglas.  Fired, furloughed: are you going back to work?  Maybe?  Better start looking for another job, how's that for "maybe"?

Hopefully, whether the company furloughed or fired people, they’ll pick them back up when things get rolling again.

Without a doubt companies will utilize this time to get rid of the ‘dead wood’ though.

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

2 hours ago, Douglas Buckland said:

Hopefully, whether the company furloughed or fired people, they’ll pick them back up when things get rolling again.

Without a doubt companies will utilize this time to get rid of the ‘dead wood’ though.

Yep.  That's not always a bad thing, but it's painful for people and I empathize.

[TooSteep + 142]

Hey this is good news! CD4+ T Cells that recognize the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in 83% of recovered patients:

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/sars-cov-2fighting-t-cells-found-in-recovered-patients-67540

It bodes well for both immunity and vaccination potential for 70-80% of people.

Edited May 18, 2020 by TooSteep

[El Nikko + 2,145]

10 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

Why do I shudder every time I see that photo?

Because it reminds you of this?

 

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

4 hours ago, El Nikko said:

Because it reminds you of this?

 

That may be a part of it.  But, no, it is Ms. Ferrer's pic that gives me the shudders.  She has an almost ghost-like effect on me.  Brr!

In actuality, I felt sad for Ms. Ford, above.  She was a tool of the hard core win-at-all-cost Left, most notably (Surprise!) Nancy Pelosi.  IMHO.

[Radha + 262]

14 hours ago, Hotone said:

Thailand is pretty corrupt but it doesn't reach the level of kleptocracy here in Malaysia.  The current government is rather shaky and is more interested in handing out goodies to woo supporters rather than solving the problems of employers.  

It will be interesting to see what happens in 2 weeks, then.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   My reply: I believe we have seen now how corrupt First World Countries are. Makes corruption in developing countries look like Mickey Mouse.             

[Hotone + 412]

21 minutes ago, Radha said:

15 hours ago, Hotone said:

Thailand is pretty corrupt but it doesn't reach the level of kleptocracy here in Malaysia.  The current government is rather shaky and is more interested in handing out goodies to woo supporters rather than solving the problems of employers.  

It will be interesting to see what happens in 2 weeks, then.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   My reply: I believe we have seen now how corrupt First World Countries are. Makes corruption in developing countries look like Mickey Mouse.             

Yeah, they have legalized corruption in America and better branding. 😂