Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Here's the percentage of tests that were positive in Italy, going back several Saturdays. Because they're testing far more people now, their decline in cases is likely steeper than you'd gather from their raw case counts. 3/7: 22% 3/14: 30% 3/21: 25% 3/28: 17% 4/4: 13% 4/11: 8% — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Lowest day for net hospitalizations in New York. ICU admissions up, but number of intubations DOWN. https://t.co/PPFatouZjy — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

There's a difference between what the models said and "what the models said" as interpreted by the media, which often emphasized worst-case scenarios rather than the broader range of possibilities they articulated, some of which were conditional on there being no distancing, etc. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen TBH you can spot the people whose jobs involve some element of actually making predictions or something adjacent to it. There's more consideration of uncertainty, a bit less crude projection forward from the status quo, a bit more suspicion of the prevailing narrative/mood. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

US daily numbers via @COVID19Tracking: Newly-reported deaths: Today: 1,932 Yesterday: 1,877 One week ago (4/3): 1,191 Newly-reported cases: T: 33K Y: 34K 4/3: 32K Newly-reported tests: T: 145K Y: 162K 4/3: 132K Share of tests positive: T: 23% Y: 21% 4/3: 24% — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

States, localities and private businesses need to be working on their own plans ASAP, alone or in tandem with one another, assuming the federal government is of little help. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@nhannahjones 💯 — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@nhannahjones Agree but I'm seeing a lot of headlines on coronavirus articles do belie the facts of the article, more so than for other types of stories. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I think people are going to wind up being disappointed if they try to map their priors on "how much do I admire this country / this leader?" to "how well did they do with coronavirus?". For many reasons, that's liable to be a fairly rough correlation. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Read the article, not the headline. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Share of COVID-19 tests that were returned positive: New York City: 49% yesterday vs. 57% one week earlier NYC suburbs: 42% yesterday vs. 53% one week earlier Rest of state: 19% yesterday vs. 22% one week earlier https://t.co/MtU6toy8TO — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Alternatively, it could be that coronavirus cases are less pyramid-shaped and more steeple-shaped, i.e. many cases may not require hospitalization, but if a case is severe enough to warrant hospitalization, it will often be life-threatening. https://t.co/Wm3voBahDN — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Could be a lot of explanations for that. Are people avoiding the hospital and/or getting turned away? — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Cuomo has shown this slide a couple of times now, and I'm curious about it. While the number of *deaths* has been broadly in line with models in NY State that assumed social distancing, there have been fewer hospitalizations than most models assumed. https://t.co/TEuPApBKAU — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Net decline in New York state ICU admissions today. We're not out of the woods yet. But that's encouraging. Overall hospitalizations slightly increasing but leveling off. For many reasons, It's harder to know when deaths might peak. They've been steady for a few days. https://t.co/1tKnIwkNLM — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

By Memorial Day, we should have a meaningfully better idea of the scope of the pandemic, the response to it, and the political reaction to the response. That's roughly my benchmark for "OK, we can pay a *tiny* bit of attention to general elex polls, but still be super careful." — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Ordinarily you could pay a little bit more attention that you might otherwise since we know who the nominees will be and they're both well-known figures. But you'd still need to be very, very careful. And I think the uncertainty from the pandemic outweighs that. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's a little too soon for these polls to be meaningful to begin with. But it's really too soon when we're just getting our hands around the pandemic. And the pandemic is the only news story that really matters right now. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

You might think I'm the sort of person who's interested in what general election polls say right now. And you'd be wrong. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

3) Time is knowledge, to a greater degree than I think people are accounting for. Learning more about how the disease itself behaves could help a lot. So could learning from other countries or how different states are reacting. We can copy what's working and avoid what isn't. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

2) The incentives to safely start back up are decently well aligned. Trump, governors etc may all be staking re-election upon it. In general things that help them will help individual citizens. Also, in general the things that help small (& large?) businesses will help citizens. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

1) The US did better than you might have thought in *shutting things down*. Transformational change within a few weeks. Opening back up is harder in many ways. But that seems like a relevant data point. And we did OK the shutting-down despite a lack of federal leadership. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I don't know what's gonna happen. But I think there is maybe just the teensiest tiniest bit too much pessimism about how/when the US will manage to open society/the economy back up. Like people here are an 9 on pessimism scale when they should be at 6 or 7 or 8. Quick points: — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

In fact, the peak basically happens whenever you implement the new policy, though it may take time to appear in the data. The catch is that many people are still susceptible (you haven't reached herd immunity) so you could have a *new* peak once you relax the restrictions. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

2) Alternatively, "flatten the curve" can just mean "reduce new cases as much as possible" which usually implies more aggressive social distancing/etc. This means getting R *below* 1, if you can, so new cases immediately start to fall. Under this strategy, the peak comes sooner. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

In practice, this means aiming for an R (reproduction number) a little bit *above* 1. Eventually, enough people have gotten it so that many are immune, which knocks R below 1, and new cases start to fall. This could take several months; the peak will take longer to come. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

1) Under one interpretation, you accept it as inevitable that a certain fraction of the population will eventually get COVID-19, until you reach herd immunity. But you want to spread those cases out over a longer period of time. So the disease is still growing but not super fast. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I'm seeing people mean (at least) two different things when they use the phrase "flatten the curve" and they have different (somewhat opposite) implications for when the peak will be and whether it will come sooner or later. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@chrislhayes I don't know that the CFR is a great metric when there are disputes over whether we're undercounting cases by 5x or 10x or instead say 50x or 100x. And evidence suggesting transmissibility is higher would tend to imply that we're undercounting cases by more rather than less. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@chrislhayes I don't know if that's right, FWIW. It looks to me about what the experts expected a few weeks ago. My impression is some of recent the evidence might suggest slightly more transmissible but slightly less deadly but until there are widespread serological tests, it's hard to know. — PolitiTweet.org