2020-08-23

COVID-19 notes:

Coronavirus pandemic now driven by younger adults: WHO

False Negative Tests for SARS-CoV-2 Infection — Challenges and Implications

There is broad consensus that widespread SARS-CoV-2 testing is essential to safely reopening the United States. A big concern has been test availability, but test accuracy may prove a larger long-term problem.

While debate has focused on the accuracy of antibody tests, which identify prior infection, diagnostic testing, which identifies current infection, has received less attention. But inaccurate diagnostic tests undermine efforts at containment of the pandemic.

Diagnostic tests (typically involving a nasopharyngeal swab) can be inaccurate in two ways. A false positive result erroneously labels a person infected, with consequences including unnecessary quarantine and contact tracing. False negative results are more consequential, because infected persons — who might be asymptomatic — may not be isolated and can infect others.

 

Yaneer Bar-Yam: PCR tests are 30% false negative, so 1/3 people who are sick test negative. Experience, science align: Schools and universities cannot open safely using testing

Regular Related Fare:

US Housing Starts, Permits Explode Higher In July With Builder Sentiment At Record

 

WTO: Goods barometer confirms steep drop in trade but hints at nascent recovery

Regular Fare:

Steve Keen: The Mathematical Model of Modern Monetary Theory

  

Bubble Fare:

Other Fare:

Chainsaws, Conspiracies, and Cops: Inside an Anti-Mask Dance Party

A weekly anti-mask rave held on a small beach in Toronto was thrust into the headlines when two men threatened the crowd with chainsaws after last week's party.

Ed Curtin: Send in the Clowns for the Circus Is in Town

Don’t bother, they’re here, already performing in the center ring under the big top owned and operated by The Umbrella People.

Trump, Biden, Pence, Harris, and their clownish sidekicks, Pompeo, Michelle Obama, et al., are performing daily under the umbrella’s shadowy protection. For The Umbrella People run a three-ring circus, and although their clowns pop out of separate tiny cars and, acting like enemies, squirt each other with water hoses to the audience’s delight, raucous laughter, and serious attentiveness, they are all part of the same show, working for the same bosses. Sadly, many people think this circus is the real world and that the clowns are not allied pimps serving the interests of their masters, but are real enemies.

The Umbrella People are the moguls who own the showtime studios – some call them the secret government, the deep-state, or the power elite. They run a protection racket, so I like to use a term that emphasizes their method of making sure the sunlight of truth never gets to those huddled under their umbrella. They produce and direct the daily circus that is the American Spectacle, the movie that is meant to entertain and distract the audience from the side show that continues outside the big top, the place where millions of vulnerable people are abused and killed. And although the sideshow is the real main event, few pay attention since their eyes are fixed on the center ring were the spotlight directs their focus.

The French writer Guy Debord called this The Society of the Spectacle. ...

(not just) for the ESG crowd:

The Transition to a Sustainable Prosperity: A Stock-Flow-Consistent Ecological Macroeconomic Model for Canada. Tim Jackson & Peter Victor.

This paper presents a stock-flow consistent macroeconomic simulation model for Canada. We use the model to generate three very different stories about the future of the Canadian economy, covering the half century from 2017 to 2067: a Base Case Scenario in which current trends and relationships are projected into the future, a Carbon Reduction Scenario in which measures are introduced specifically designed to reduce Canada’s carbon emissions, and a Sustainable Prosperity Scenario which incorporates additional measures to improve environmental, social and financial conditions across society. The performance of the economy is tracked using two composite indicators constructed especially for this study: an environmental burden index (EBI) which describes the environmental performance of the model; and a composite sustainable prosperity index (SPI) which is based on a weighted average of seven economic, social and environmental performance indicators.

Quotes of the Week:

James Crotty: Why would an academic profession sanction the use of theories based on crassly unrealistic assumptions? It is not an intuitively attractive idea. One suspects that the underlying reason is: economists are, in the main, committed to the defense of propositions that cannot be generated by models based on realistic assumptions. For example, a long string of unrealistic assumptions are necessary to generate the desired conclusion that unregulated financial markets perform optimally …  Milton Friedman was not only an economist; he was an energetic conservative political activist as well. His positivist methodology made it possible for conservative economists to use an absurd set of assumptions that no one would accept as a reasonable description of real- world capitalism to generate wide-spread acceptance of the proposition that unregulated capitalism is an ideal system

Johnstone: Bombs should not exist. Explosives designed to blow fire and shrapnel through human bodies should not be a thing. In a sane world, there wouldn’t be bombs, and if some mentally unbalanced person ever made and used one it would be a major international news story.

Instead, bombs are cranked out like iPhones at enormous profit, and nearly all bombings are ignored. Many bombs are being dropped per day by the US and its allies, with a massive civilian death toll, and almost none of those bombings receive any international attention. The only time they do is generally when a bombing occurs that was not authorized by the US-centralized empire.

This is one of those absolutely freakish things about our society that has become normalized through careful narrative management, and we really shouldn’t allow it to be. The fact that explosives designed to rip apart human anatomy are dropped from the sky many times per day for no other reason than to exert control over foreign countries should horrify us all.

… The violence that is being inflicted overseas in our name by the US-centralized empire is more horrific than any manifestation of racism we’re ever likely to encounter at home.

… Like many other forms of bigotry, this one has been engineered and promulgated by powerful people who benefit from it. If the mainstream news media were what it purports to be, namely an institution dedicated to creating an informed populace about what’s truthfully going on in the world, we would see the bombings in foreign nations given the same type of coverage that a bombing in Paris or London receives.