We’re a year removed from the 2019 draft and the results are in. As expected the Edmonton Oilers left a lot of offense on the board when choosing Philip Broberg in the first round, but found a good scorer in Raphael Lavoie in the second round. How do things look after the days gone down?
THE ATHLETIC!
The Athletic Edmonton features a fabulous cluster of stories (some linked below, some on the site). Great perspective from a ridiculous group of writers and analysts. Proud to be part of The Athletic, check it out here.
- New Lowetide: Should Oilers prospect Philip Broberg play in North America next year?
- Lowetide: Which Oilers veterans are in roster peril?
- Jonathan Willis: How good is Anton Slepyshev and what will an NHL return mean for the Oilers?
- Jonathan Willis: Peter Chiarelli wants to be a GM again. Has he learned from his Oilers mistakes?
- New Lowetide: Oilers’ challenge could be finding relief with a low cap ceiling
- Lowetide: Projecting Oilers prospects Raphael Lavoie and Kirill Maksimov
- Lowetide: What does Jesse Puljujarvi’s Liiga season tell us about his future?
- Daniel Nugent-Bowman: How Oilers plan to help arena workers unclear with games postponed
- Lowetide: NHL season on hold might impact Oilers evaluations, summer plans
- Daniel Nugent-Bowman and Jonathan Willis: Key questions surround Oilers in wake of NHL’s coronavirus suspension
- Daniel Nugent-Bowman: Q&A: GM Ken Holland on Oilers’ playoff push, offseason plans and Hart thoughts
- Jonathan Willis: Evan Bouchard, Tyler Benson and more: 20 observations on the Bakersfield Condors
- Lowetide: Caleb Jones represents Oilers template for development success
- Daniel Nugent-Bowman: Determining Connor McDavid’s linemates remains a pressing and perplexing problem
- Jonathan Willis: Which players pose the biggest threat to Leon Draisaitl winning the Hart Trophy?
- Lowetide: Is the OHL still the Oilers’ primary resource at the draft?
2019 TOP 20 NHLE
The big offensive seasons from forwards who were still on the board when Edmonton chose Broberg were Zegras, Newhook and Krebs. Interesting to note the gap between Broberg and Soderstrom offensively comes almost exclusively from power play minutes. In passing on Zegras, Newhook and Krebs for Broberg, did Holland and Co. recover in the second round?
2019 21-40 NHLE
Connor McMichael, Arthur Kaliyev and Philip Tomasino have all delivered exceptional season. Edmonton’s selection (Raphael Lavoie) also had a solid year, his NHLE is in the range with Trevor Zegras. We need more seasons but most of these kids are on track. It was a good draft year.
LAVOIE
I always look for things that make a player unique in his draft plus one season. For Broberg it’s speed. Lavoie? Shots on goal. He finished third in the QMJHL this season with 310, a truly impressive total. Ideally he lands in Bakersfield this fall and plays a feature role.
ADDITIONS
Edmonton’s AHL team needs to be populated by players over the next few months. The college signing season is well underway but crickets so far from the Oilers. Defense is a definite area of need. Here’s a guess at what the Condors might look like on opening night in 2020-21.
Goalies (3): Stuart Skinner, Dylan Wells, Olivier Rodrigue. My guess is Skinner is the starter but Rodrigue had a quality final season in junior (.918 SP was No. 2 in the QMJHL this season).
Left Defense (3): William Lagesson, Dmitri Samorukov, Philip Broberg. Lagesson is RFA and waiver eligible, Broberg is signed but not certain to come over. Markus Niemelainen may get a contract, he has developed as a defensive defenseman in the last year or so.
Right Defense (2): Evan Bouchard, Logan Day. There’s a good chance Bouchard makes Edmonton’s roster, and Day is RFA. Filip Berglund needs to be signed and has earned a contract with a strong SHL season.
Center (3): Cooper Marody, Colby Cave, Ryan McLeod. This position is fairly strong if the team signs RFA Cave. You want to see a strong comeback season from Marody and more development from McLeod.
Left Wing (3): Tyler Benson, Joe Gambardella, Ryan Kuffner. Benson could make the big team, but if he’s in Bakersfield the depth chart looks just “okay” at this point. If Benson makes the Oilers, help will be needed.
Right Wing (2): Kirill Maksimov, Ostap Safin. Lavoie needs to be signed but should move to the top (or near) of the depth chart. Oilers are doing it right on RW, there should be three prospects getting the at-bats next season.
Those bell curves in the Medium article (showing China and Korea) is a good place to start. Those curves didn’t happen because the virus petered out on its own. Those are the result of severe governmental actions like those the West is taking now.
v4ance,
You keep using “dead” in your argument. What facts do you have that this approach is saving a million lives. Just to keep repeating that it is saving all these lives doesn’t necessarily make it so.
We hope there is never proof that a million lives were saved in US or anywhere else. So far no country with the means has done the experiment of not reacting to the upward curve. Some have reacted earlier and more effectively and are still earlier on the curve with more time to do even better. Others had to react more severely than us and are on the far side with time to create a new normal and build up capacity to manage better. But it’s like the old Fram commercial. You pay now or you pay later but no one seems to have the stomach not to react. We need to do a lot more to get ready to ease up successfully in a few months.
Thanks for posting that thread. The above is how I was left feeling when reading the article too, unfortunately.
Max Kennerly @MaxKennerly
That stupid Medium post is going mainstream. Okay, fine, let’s go through some data. Why listen to me? Two weeks ago I was at Johns Hopkins for a deposition of one of their bio-statisticians. Critically reviewing medical research data and communicating it is part of what I do. /1
How bad is COVID-19? Here are the raw numbers, by country, for deaths per case. In America, about 1.5% of people confirmed to have it have died. That’s in line with the latest analysis of Wuhan (1.4% of symptomatic cases died).
It’s deadly, but it spreads like a common cold. /2
How many people in America have SARS-CoV-2? A team at Notre Dame estimated ~22,876 (7,451-53,044) as of March 12. A team at UMass estimated ~54,100 (5,600-125,300).
That was 9 days ago. It has likely doubled since then. Or doubled twice since then. Maybe even three times. /3
The Medium post wrongly claims the CDC says 12% of COVID-19 cases require hospitalization.
The CDC really said 20.7-31.4% hospitalized, 4.9-11.5% in the ICU. UK estimates are similar.
For a virus that spreads as rapidly as a common cold.
Want to see what that looks like? /4
It looks like this, a hospital completely filled with people on one form of oxygen or another, with beds spilling into the hallways, with healthcare workers exhausted at best and themselves infected at worst. We don’t have the capacity for this virus. /5
The Medium post claims coronavirus will “burn off in the summer.” Yeah, maybe, there’s some preliminary data saying it’ll wane in warmer temperatures…
… and then it comes right back in the fall, and still overwhelms our entire healthcare system. /6
And if it’s not entirely obvious: if the whole healthcare system is overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases, then it will do a worse job at everything else. Car crashes. Heart attacks. Births. Cancer treatment. Everything and more will be devoted to the killer cold. /7
The answer of course isn’t “panic” or “be hysterical.”
But, yes, this is just as bad as you’re hearing it is, and indeed it’s probably worse than you’re hearing. Our way of life is going to be different for quite some time until we can contain this. /end
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1241557612409360385.html
***
Matthew Gertz @MattGertz
Unnervingly likely that Medium tech dude is going to be on Fox News telling millions of people that coronavirus is overblown and he has been silenced within the next 48 hours.
Where we are as a country: There is a pressing need for Dr. Fauci to publicly debunk a bad Medium post before Fox News starts pumping its conclusions out to a credulous audience of millions that includes the president of the United States.
Re: the now withdrawn Medium article:
Carl T. Bergstrom@CT_Bergstrom
1. I hate to invest precious time on taking apart the atrocious @aginnt
article pictured below, but it is getting too much traction here and even in traditional media.
This thread could be far longer than it is, but I’m doing my best to only discuss the most glaring flaws.
2. The introduction should be blaring red warning to any thinking person.
The author begins by disputing that *context matters*. Without the background to put information in context, all the data in the world are not defense against misinterpretation.
3. You can give me all the stock market data in the world; I don’t have the background to make the best use of it because I fundamentally do not understand how the market works or how to take advantage of that understanding.
Infectious disease epidemiology is no different.
4. *Information gets lost in translation.* The author claims to be an expert in making products go viral. I suppose that field has borrowed some ideas from epidemiology. Now he’s trying to back-infer how epi works from what he knows about that area. It doesn’t work that way.
5. Imagine Shakespeare run through google translate into Japanese, then translated back to English by someone who’d never heard of Shakespeare. So much depth would be missing.
Same here. We end up with loose neologisms like “virality” instead of a solid theoretical framework.
6. The author discusses the apparent decline in daily growth rate irrespective of control measures. He begins with some truism about small numbers being easy to move; this is irrelevant in the face of the exponential growth that he stresses in literally the previous sentence.
7. He fails to see that this drop in apparent growth rates is heavily driven by left censoring and shifts in testing strategy. Testing started at different times in different countries, was influenced by case density, and early-on, tests individuals in all stages of disease.
8. Next, inferences about “virality” and “viral capacity”. I suppose he means “transmissibility”. If so, we’ve spent 20 years developing sophisticated statistical methods to detect changes in transmissibility. With noisy, aggregate data this back-of-envelope stuff doesn’t cut it.
9. Disaggregating data is essential to provide context, especially for transmission processes. That the virus can cross national boundaries does nothing to negate the importance of spatial structure and within-country analysis. Aggregating data obscures critical patterns.
10. I hate to ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, but using this lie to sweep away the disaggregated data is such utter nonsense that I wonder how a silicon valley guy could make this claim by mistake.
11. Then there’s the bell curve business. If Hernstein and Murray gave the term a bad name, Ginn says “hold my beer”.
Most things in nature follow a bell curve, so viruses do too? Not science exactly. And do most things? What about log-normals? Exponentials? Etc etc etc.
12. But that’s not the worst part. We have literally over a century’s history of mathematical modeling epidemic progression. Some look somewhat bell-like. Others don’t. It depends on the circumstances, details of the virus, behavior of the population, interventions, etc.
14. This is unsubstantiated bullshit. IF the bell-curve were a “law of nature”, it shouldn’t necessarily apply to the vast range of human responses that people take to stop epidemics. Yet this assertion is supported with data from places where interventions slowed things down.
15. Wait, are already breaking the data down by country? We were cautioned against that as being misleading just a few paragraphs ago!
16. Ah, Farr’s law. I don’t know how the author could have more effectively discredited himself to the epidemiology community with any two other words. It’s an old rule-of-thumb that suggests epidemics take a bell-curve shape.
BUT….
17. When I teach ID epidemiology OR data science, I tend to have my students read this 1990 paper as a cautionary tail against non-mechanistic modeling. http://documents.aidswiki.net/PHDDC/BREG.PDF
It uses Farr’s law to predict the size of the HIV epidemic.
18. The authors conclude that the HIV epidemic will encompass roughly 200,000 cases before fading away in the mid 1990s. This graph is from the original paper. You can’t make this shit up.
19. Next up a very, very basic fallacy about the effect of flattening the curve. Almost *any* reasonable epidemiological model you use, from SIR to all sorts of fancy spatial PDE or agent-based approaches, will show that decreasing transmission rate decreases total epidemic size.
20. This is common sense, as well as first-chapter-of-the-epidemiology-textbook stuff.
It was also sadly predictable. See my note about severe #DKE19 strains, a day before
@aginnt’s medium post:
21. This claim needs citation. I am unaware of CDC plans that involve allowing the majority of the country to be infected. Because the author may be cherry-picking here, I won’t call it an outright lie. But it’s not the position of the organization that we allow this to happen.
22. Next the author claims that COVID19 will “burn off” in the summer, and quotes a paper from Beijing economists, posted to social science preprint server.
Science is not a like a high school English essay, where you get to cherry-pick the quotes that support your point.
23. There’s a big literature on the seasonality of respiratory disease, and consensus is that we have little grounds for optimism regarding #COVID19.
@mlipsitch, an leading expert who advanced our understanding of flu seasonality, is admirably concise: https://ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/will-covid-19-go-away-on-its-own-in-warmer-weather/
24. This is just misleading. Being tested is not the same as thinking you are positive. Did your doctor ever order a rapid flu test or strep culture or a chest x-ray for pneumonia? When you did, did you think YOU were positive? Same deal with COVID19, esp in places like S. Korea.
25. This single piece of bait-and-switch should be more than enough to discredit the entire article.
@Aginnt claims that only 1% of cases are severe, and then shows a data graphic suggesting that 19% are severe or worse (critical).
How on earth does he draw that conclusion?
26. He says “cases” in the headline, but “everyone who is tested” in the text. These are very different denominators, given the low positive rate he was just trumpeting about in the previous section.
If a mistake rather than deliberate bullshit, it’s amazingly sloppy.
27. Oh, and in the study that provided these numbers, “mild” cases included pneumonia short of hospitalization in a setting where hospitals are already overcrowded.
Mild doesn’t mean your ordinary cold.
30. [Deep breath]
It looks like this piece has now been taken down by Medium. I’m going to stop now, even though I’m only about half way thought. If it comes back to haunt us, I’ll continue the thread.
Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there.
31. So the piece has moved on to another right wing conspiracy-sphere website recently banned from Twitter for unfounded personal attacks on a scientist.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1241522140559503360.html
***
So that thing where I inferred this was a Fox leaning piece … I think we can replace inferred with “definitely a piece of Fox right wing nut job conspiracy thinkpiece to muddy the waters”
https://www.propublica.org/article/a-medical-worker-describes–terrifying-lung-failure-from-covid19-even-in-his-young-patients-1
“Reading about it in the news, I knew it was going to be bad, but we deal with the flu every year so I was thinking: Well, it’s probably not that much worse than the flu. But seeing patients with COVID-19 completely changed my perspective, and it’s a lot more frightening.”
“I have patients in their early 40s and, yeah, I was kind of shocked. I’m seeing people who look relatively healthy with a minimal health history, and they are completely wiped out, like they’ve been hit by a truck. This is knocking out what should be perfectly fit, healthy people. Patients will be on minimal support, on a little bit of oxygen, and then all of a sudden, they go into complete respiratory arrest, shut down and can’t breathe at all.
***
It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube and out of his mouth. The ventilator should have been doing the work of breathing but he was still gasping for air, moving his mouth, moving his body, struggling. We had to restrain him. With all the coronavirus patients, we’ve had to restrain them. They really hyperventilate, really struggle to breathe. When you’re in that mindstate of struggling to breathe and delirious with fever, you don’t know when someone is trying to help you, so you’ll try to rip the breathing tube out because you feel it is choking you, but you are drowning.”
There is very little elegance for anyone to relate to these days. Not after the ongoing attack on civilization; particularly since the rise of the “baby boom generation” who history will judge harshly.
Munny,
I couldn’t have defeated the FT paywall for the final time at a better juncture than in January
Sounds like an interesting story.
I find FT is largely not worth it. I agree with very little they push.
I think that for someone who disagrees with them they’re actually indispensable
Nuwan I. Senaratna Thinking face @nuuuwan
#CoViD19 seemed to flatten in #Singapore, #Taiwan and #HongKong. But looks like the curve is steeping up again.
Any 1st wave that is controlled will be followed by 2nd and more waves. Constant vigilance is needed. We can’t be complacent.
https://twitter.com/nuuuwan/status/1241616096806850561?s=20
Financial Times is saying that researchers on multiple continents are reporting a unique symptom of coronavirus…
The loss of the sense of smell.
No idea if it is universal or applies to those experiencing weak symptoms. but it is interesting.
Infographic on social distancing
https://twitter.com/NatlSecCnslrs/status/1241547835759374336?s=20
Andy Slavitt @ASlavitt
A strange argument begins to dominate (it’s already started). That treating COVID-19 is actually worse than not. That the economic consequences aren’t worth it. That 60k people die from the flu every year & we can’t shut everything down.
As a matter of fact…
People in the WH say right now the Larry Kudlow crowd is driving this argument in the White House. I’ve heard the health people are pretty frustrated. Because the immediate issue is the crush n the hospital system.
That argument will die inside of a week just like last week’s it just the flu. The Overton window has nothing on exponentials. When it ends without millions dead on the US because everyone goes to ground everyone can say they were right. The ultimate in non falsifiable prediction. Predicting we’d all be better off if we do hold onto the hot iron longer.
Kind of like Y2K
Y2K was small fries. At core it was an immense number of man years remediating software and hardware at a fractional cost of the value of that infrastructure. Aside from the hype it was cheaper to remediate than pay for the business outages on the fly.
But yes same phenom where everyone is right. Likewise for hurricane tracks missing WITHIN forecast ranges
I was thinking of the pundits that afterwards said, “see, there was no real crisis, totally overblown”
meanwhile disregarding… an immense number of man years.
N64,
You know, it’s one thing to be a Libertarian, but it is quite another thing to expect a Libertarian response in a non-Libertarian world. So I personally do not. Might I pine for that Libertarian World believing we’d better off to handle this mess? Sure, but what good would that do given our present reality? That shit can be hashed out in the post mortem (which should be a real doozy, btw).
When it comes to reality I am first and foremost a pragmatist. And while governments have been both practical and impractical through this crisis, I have a lot of sympathy for what they’re doing and attempting.
I can understand the attraction of articles like the one on Medium today, because they remind me of an Upton Sinclair quote:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it
Livelihoods are at stake and those not experiencing the health crisis are experiencing a direct economic threat. So I can understand the attraction for any reasoning that says the crisis is overblown and we should all go back to work.
But, in the case of present reality, that reasoning would be wrong.
Munny,
First of all I wish even half of that GINNed up viral article was true.
Every gov’t has flirted with some of the same wishes. Wuhan gov’t until movemient and economy had to stop. Italy ordered Milan to stop overtesting because of damage to Italy’s reputation until reality overtook.. UK looked hard at interesting idea to isolate most vulnerable until they realized it was too late to implement. US Gov’t hoped it could be managed until it couldn’t. But somehow they all failed to see they were counting the wrong cherries.
Obviously there is viral audience even a nostalgia to hear that this shelter in place policies closest to the edge are wrong. Imagine your leader telling you one week it’s impact is like seasonal flu one week and the next it’s an all out war. Now that this has been deleted and rehosted elsewhere no doubt it will provide comfort to some until the next weeks realities overtake it.
Being an expert on viral marketing and this is a viral article surprise surprise makes this guy as much an expert on epidemiology than e.g. our NID.
The nice thing about a carefully built wall of numbers is that you might as well argue about an inkblot. People see what they want to see. Respond point by point by point and where the desire to believe is strong even a single line in the response not understood PROVES the original.
If I see a reasonably thorough response debunking the worst of it in an accessible manner happy to post it in.
In the meantime anyone reading it should assess each point with a stop watch. Is the point referring to something that is being done elsewhere and could have been down here earlier? Or Is he referring to something that worked after a month of shelter in place elsewhere and could work here in May? Because not seeing anything he’s saying that stayed true for Wuhan or Italy or France or Spain when they were within10 days of where NY and CA or WA are. How many Wihans can the US afford? China could only afford one
Well we certainly don’t need more poultry or water fowl around here. We tend to sacrifice them, especially when they play in Anaheim. ?
I think one thing that needs to be said is that we here, especially in the West, are LEARNING.
We’ve haven’t had to deal with a crisis like this in a century. We haven’t had a war within our borders in even more than a century.
We have a consumption-based highly-financialized society that eats away disposable income, and disincentivizes saving for a rainy day at every level from individuals to the biggest governments.
We don’t do societal crisis because we’ve never really had to. And we’re encouraged to live as if they won’t happen.
Hopefully we learn a lot of lessons from this.
In the meantime it behooves governments to err on the side of caution. Once there is confidence in the ability of health care systems to handle case loads, and there is enough testing available to keep caseloads manageable, people will be slowly returned to work.
While the recovery will be somewhat V-shaped, don’t expect it to be sharp or symmetrical.
Travel and Tourism will be depressed sectors for years.
Purchases of big ticket items like houses and cars will be impacted by the present loss of income and cash drain for quite some time.
And then of course, Alberta itself will be in an ongoing recession regardless, due to the Oil Wars.
We may see some attitudes and behaviours change drastically at a macro level. Maybe families choose to eat out less at the local BP. No one knows.
But one thing I do hope, is that everyone… from individual to businesses to the biggest government learns to save and otherwise prepare for the rainy days.
I also hope that the business world realizes the importance of a well-funded and well-run healthcare system to a functioning economy.
And finally I hope that people learn to stay home when they’re sick, that companies stop pressuring sick employees to work and that people stop going to Emerg for cold/flus.
Bravo. I’ve been reluctant to say anything about what was wrong before this happened because I dislike anything that sounds like turning any crisis towards a pet cause.
You’ve said it far better and more respectfully than I could have.
If the stock market is very lucky maybe this is just another multi year bear. But beyond the market every crisis is very different where people live. No idea how this one plays out. Travel only for essential work and essential consumption even for a few months is one hell of a scalpel and even financing a few months of that going to be very interesting to see that play out to a vaccine in 2021 and beyond.
We talked about that Mother Jones article and how different the ecomomic context is a century later. But the interesting point there was how will this shape us given how much that shaped them and their children that raised the boomers.
One thing to remember on the far side is that every economy includes things that some value and others can barely distinguish from the broken window fallacy. Will be interesting to see what people do with whatever we are dealt as always.
No one’s going to like this but…
I think we need to remember what the word “economy” means.
I think we need to re-learn to… act with economy.
In Chess the masters call it “elegance”. But really what they mean is “not a move wasted”. An economy of motion.
This connotation seems to have all but disappeared.
I’m glad you posted, wanted someone to follow up and frame it as you did here. I am NOT in favor of anyone being sacrificed, and honestly I’m vulnerable so am REALLY not in favor of anyone being sacrificed.
That said, part of a functioning society includes having the population being able to earn a living. That should never come at the risk of health.
We are here.
Unfortunately we are.
Maybe we’ll catch a break and this thing dissipates quickly (as seasons change), or something else unforeseen.
Regardless we’ll get through this.
Alright. So I only got about half way through since what I was reading prompted checking many of the links/facts. The “32 minute read” turned into a couple of hours, and I only got half done.
I guess it being taken down says much of what I was going to say, and others have covered some of it too. I will say that the author has clearly done a lot of work in compiling information and shaping it into an argument.
The facts being cited are facts, but in virtually every paragraph I felt the interpretations were a little off base, or the (negative) conclusions were minimized. Well beyond what was reasonable (IMO). I did learn some about Covid-19 from reading it, but not by taking what was said at face value.
I appreciate that the economic impacts of governmental actions on Covid-19 are tremendous (and being taken by pretty much the entire developed world, I might add). As LT put it very nicely – these are conversations worth having. However I do not think the medium article gives anything resembling a fair or accurate view of the threat Covid-19 poses.
Quite frankly, if the virus were left unchecked, the economic impact of 10s to 100s of millions of people dying worldwide would be much worse than shutting things down today (correct me if I’m wrong). Business isn’t going to continue as usual if if gets that bad.
Clearly many don’t believe those numbers are accurate (we still have people claiming the swine flu, which killed 12,000 Americans over 2 years, is worse than Covid-19 after all), but I truly believe that’s the probable reality without any action. That would be ~500k-1.5M Americans dead.
Honestly, reading the article made me question who was writing it and why.
jp,
As you know my default position in life is pro-Capitalism, laissez-faire, and Libertarian… and even I thought the article was disingenuous.
I found that article very picky and choosy over what facts to present and what ones to ignore. And what aspects of the facts to emphasize and what ones to disregard.
It painted some national responses with a broad brush when in fact they differed in important ways. Also it disregards differing societal responses above and beyond what the governments do.
Glad we agree on this, despite our differing viewpoints in other areas.
Ditto.
I don’t really care what other people’s politics are as long as they’re expressed with respect.
And you’ve always been quality in that regard. Keep on keeping on.
Thanks. It was an “interesting” couple of days.
David Lat@DavidLat
Folks, this #CoronavirusOutbreak is no joke. I’ll give you occasional updates, tweeting from “Above the Hospital Bed,” about how serious #COVID19 aka #coronavirus can be. Think of this as #LatsCovid19Journal, my thoughts on #LivingWithCovid. [Thread]
A bit about me: I’m a generally healthy, 44-year-old male, 153 lbs. (surely less now), 5’7”, no drugs , rarely drink, no health conditions other than exercise-induced asthma, which I manage with an inhaler.
I completed the NYC Marathon twice – not the greatest times, but I did – and even now that I can’t run much (knees post-40), each week I still walk 25 miles and go to at least 3 high-intensity interval training classes at the gym.
In my current state, #LivingWithCovid, I am constantly weak and winded. I’m hooked up to oxygen 24/7. Even with oxygen, the simplest tasks are extremely difficult.
This morning, this ex-marathoner could barely walk the five feet from the bed to the toilet – and I had to pee as quickly as possible, chest heaving with the labor of breathing, because I was going to collapse if I stood too long.
I’m usually a fast eater (bad habit, I know). Today it took my 90 minutes to eat my lunch – because I kept getting winded. Who DOES that? I’m so weak, the fork wobbled each time I lifted it to my mouth.
To be sure, #COVID19 hits different people differently #ymmv. I gave it to my husband, and for him it was a low-level flu that seems to have almost run its course after about a week.
But for those who get severe cases, like me, it’s been hell. I’ve had 10 days & counting, with no real improvement, of fever, fatigue, joint aches, chills, cough, respiratory difficulty. I have never been this sick in my entire life.
To paraphrase @Beyonce, #COVID19 did not come to play with us hoes; it came to slay. Please keep me – and my very anxious family – in your thoughts and prayers. Thank you.
(Mar 17th)
****
His mother reports that he has been intubated and is on a ventilator now.
Just watching the 1980 all star game on NHL classics.
Gordie Howe was a freak of nature. I believe he was 50 years old and was still skating better than half the players in that game. Fascinating to watch the way he held his stick when he didn’t have the puck. He would hold it in one hand, with his right hand on top. He carried it one handed like a left handed shooter would. Never seen anything like it.
The first cases of Covid in Italy weren’t from Chinese workers but a Chinese couple who were travelling the countryside as tourists, landing in Milan, travelling to Verona, Parma and finally Rome. They did not experience any symptoms until they had made it to Rome.
That first case was in the hospital Jan 28 and was tested for Covid. On Jan 31 travel to and from China was suspended. Italy was the quickest European nation in that regard.
The Lombardy outbreak occurred because an Italian citizen was misdiagnosed when he went to the hospital. Because he had no China travel history, they did not test. Subsequently there was an outbreak from the waiting room patients, the hospital’s health care workers and his own close friends and contacts.
It is now believed that he was asymptomatic for three weeks, leading an active social life the entire time. It is also believed that he caught it from another Italian man, who had recently returned from a China trip.
Additional N. Italian cases have been linked to a car manufacturer’s meeting in Munich, when employees of the company returned to their Italian offices from the internal conference.
Thank you! That is very useful information and I did not know it.
A couple of points:
The world’s Jenga economy was destined to crash soon, even without the virus.
The Fed reversed normalization of interest rates over a year ago, and began cutting them. Just last September, two month before the Wuhan outbreak in December, it took over the repo market, and began “not-QE” QE, rapidly expanding its balance sheet again.
The purpose of this was to bailout a handful of favoured hedge funds who were got offside on a heavily levered trade arbitrage on US Treasury bonds via derivative futures on those bonds. A miniscule arbitrade leveraged to the hundreds of billions.
Like a handful of Long-Term-Capital-Managements being bailed out.
The next to last Jenga piece had been removed.
A conspiracy theorist would argue that the virus was released to provide a distraction or an obfuscation of the real cause of our economic misfortune.
Russia and Saudi Arabia have been preparing to launch this counterattack to the American oil war launched against them during the Obama Administration.
The virus makes the collapse an order of magnitude worse, but it absolves the powers-that-be of blame. Never let a crisis go to waste.
This is a $100 trillion to $1 quadrillion dollar economic collapse…i.e. the cost the get to the other side to the new normal.
Upwards of $5 trillion have already been spent bailing out the banksters and the 0.1% plutocratic class.
But this crisis is bad enough, that a few trillion of free money with have to be helicoptered down to the people also…on a relative basis, still “pennies”.
The economy has been a phony economy for a long time. A generation ago, a dollar of debt would buy you a dollar of GDP growth. Recently, it has been taking nearly $10 dollars of debt to get a dollar of GDP growth.
The “real” economy was financialized. A financialized economy is a parasitic beast progressively preying and devouring more and more of the real economy until it there is nothing real left to devour.
I had hoped to survive the economic crash, and come out relatively whole. The virus, since I am older, makes it a game of Russian roulette with a 10-chambered revolver.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-19/before-fed-acted-leverage-burned-hedge-funds-in-treasury-trade
The [hedge funds] use borrowed money from the repurchase market for the popular basis trade, which exploits price differences between cash Treasuries and futures. Though individual firms’ borrowing is a closely guarded metric, people familiar with the transactions said some of them levered up as much as 50 times their own wagers. Leveraged funds’ exposure to the basis strategy could be as much as $650 billion, JPMorgan Chase & Co. strategists said.
https://youtu.be/8Xjr2hnOHiM?t=99
The Mayans might have only been off by 8 years. Not bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvEWez59fbI&feature=emb_rel_pause
Off topic… but do any of y’all follow Dustin Penner on Instagram?
What’s up with him… he’s pretty “out there” it seems…. like makes Bryzgalov seem normal.
Glad you made it back safe and sound,
Man he hammered that flush.
We’ve totally dominated this OT. It’d suck so bad if we lost this in extra time!
KLEF!!!
*sigh*
*Ping* And Klefbom scores!
v4ance,
You honor me greatly … but I am afraid I cannot lay claim to being that DSF. Be assured I am sincerely happy that your family made it through those difficult times, but many families did not. And many more will not make it to the other end this time either. Divorce rates will rise, child abuse rates will rise, violent crime will rise, substance abuse will rise, suicide rates will rise. You’re right, it’s not all about the dollars.
Saturday night in downtown Calgary looks like a ghost town.
Rondo,
Yes, riddled with confirmation bias and perhaps outright distortion in the graphics selected.
Check this out:
Population pyramids of every state
There’s a control to filter by ethnicity, which applies to all graphs on the page (even thought at first it looks to only control the national numbers).
As soon as you take out the Hispanic population, America’s population pyramid is no different that Italy’s (except we had a small extra baby boom among people who are now in young adulthood).
Basically: Italy won’t happen in America, because we have WAY more Mexicans! And since we work them to the bone, barely any of them are over the age of forty, when athletes also retire.
America has been surging up the charts over the past two days, as their testing efforts finally begin to report.
———
Many of these charts are useful in some way, but stupidly no-one has drawn the actual chart we need, with days since 10 confirmed-cases-per-million on the x-axis.
America’s recent track would look hideous on such a plot.
From Our World in Data right now:
The number of total confirmed cases in United States has increased 2.1-times in the last 2 days.
9,415 cases on March 19
19,624 cases on March 21
Right now, America is at 82 total cases per million (with barely any resolved).
———
Social distancing measures will soon bend that rate down, but not until after their horrific testing lag plays out.
If that doesn’t bend down immediately, America is only three days behind where France and the Netherlands are now. Another additional day at that pace, America reels in Germany, as it is now. Then another two days reel in Spain as it is now. Then another day reels in Italy as it is now.
Seven whole days at the current growth rate to the present Italian number.
82*sqrt(2)^7 = 927
Italy is presently at 886 total cases per million.
Fortunately for America, their testing lag is probably somewhat less than seven days. Unfortunately, the urgency of their social distancing measures have not exactly been uniform across various states.
Watching these number evolve is like watching a 4 on 3 powerplay in overtime, where the zebra is behaving like an MLS official who hasn’t disclosed the length of the penalty. When do you get your guy back? Two minutes? Four minutes? Five minutes? Ten minutes? Nobody knows.
———
When to relax a tiny bit?
When America’s growth rate slows down to doubling once every five days, at which point you can safely look away from the TV long enough to shake up a refreshing Americano.
This article shared by Rondo is being shared widely amongst Fox viewers.
Not totally disproving any conclusions but it gives you an idea of some of the biases baked into the analysis.
Wow. Wins the thread for hypocrisy, among other distasteful things.
I went to send the link to my brother and discovered that Medium has suspended the article for investigation of its controversial nature.
But I’m glad I got a look at it before it went away.
It was like assessing whether Hurricane Irma was a threatening or not by debating whether it would landfall harder on Miami or Tampa.
Well, in the end Irma slid barely to the outside of the Tampa goalpost—but even so, if you didn’t have your 6×4 plywood nailed in place while you tracked the inbound puck, you were a faffing idiot.
I’ve now spent pretty much the whole week surveying what’s known about this, and there’s a surprise lurking in every box. It makes my head spin. I still can’t confidently interpret any of the European data, because there are so many unknown latencies buried in the data series.
Today I read that BC has a five-day testing backlog, inferred because positive results were trickling back to doctors five days after the test kits were submitted. And we were pretty much a golden child of thorough testing until we burned our test kit inventory in the early firefight.
But I was already so far out in front of the media cycle, I had already seen the vast majority of everything that Medium article had cherry picked, and much of it more recently.
There are different formulations of Pascal’s wager. One of these is that you should believe in God, because not believing in God if there is a God has an infinitely negative payoff, which make any positive at all pale by comparison (even taking a peek at Lowetide’s mythical balance photo by declaring your undying atheist allegiance would be small peanuts by comparison).
Here’s a different one, the Roger Ailes’ wager: it can never be wrong to profess that believing that the whole of life is a giant nothing-burger, because it either kills you (avoiding any responsibility/shame), or it doesn’t kill you, in which case you can gloat like a banshee.
Thanks for this.
Someday down the road you and Lowetide should compile everything you post here into a book.
Or a few of them.
For a long time, I fired all my words into the Sun, because I regarded it as practice for getting my mind straight. But then after about a million words, I decided to maybe keep my own copy of something I’d written now and again.
I’m a big believer in not confusing the practice zone with the performance zone. Which is why I never suffer from writer’s block. Or the other kind of soft impediment—when you try to will yourself into the performance zone under the wrong conditions.
How to get better at the things you care about — 2016
I don’t recall how compelling that is, but it does not have 3.6 million views, so it can’t be entirely made of out iceberg lettuce. He’s big on the practice and performance zones.
I wrote a lot. Once or twice I made myself laugh in the process.
Of course, I could always publish an 800-page book titled You Had to Be There—filled with 800 blank-pages to prove my point.
Anybody else watching the 2017 game 5 against San Jose on sports net?
Nice to see Eberle playing for the oilers
Klefbom should be tying it up to force overtime in about 10 minutes
With respect death really isn’t preventable.
If Covid is turning out to be less than thought a return to normal is crucial.
The economic damage will cost them as well. Plunging economies will cause governments to cut services in the long run.
Already in Canada we have massive layoffs. Small businesses are being ruined, children are missing school and development is being missed.
I have multiple family members at risk, but if this is not what it was in the hot spots immediately start returning to normal. They can isolate to help themselves and the rest can study and work to provide the taxes to support our elderly.
Italy and Iran had until very recently massive numbers of Chinese workers moving back and forth. I think that their populations were widely infected before they had to shut down and their numbers reflect it.
That is not the case in NA.
USA went from 2k to 30k in a week.
We’re ten days behind them.
Math.
Also, testing. The USA has not been widely testing. So the numbers are way off. This is simple stuff.
The operative section say’s that the slide will NOT apply if the player turns 20 between Sept 16 and December 31.
Its the same thing with McLeod and why his contract didn’t slide this year – he turned 20 on September 21 of the year he signed.
That’s why McLeod and Lavoie didn’t sign earlier and waited until the calendar turned.
I *think* we’re on the same page now.
Section 9.2 reads to me that anyone who turns 20 between Jan 1 and Sept 15 will be considered to have an “age” of 20. Regardless of when during the year they may have signed their deal.
The exception indicates that even if you turned 20 after Sept 15 you are still considered to have an “age/signing age” of 20 in that year.
So it sounds like my 2nd statement/guess above is actually correct? That if a player turns 20 at any time during the year 2020 (using the current example) they will be considered to have a signing age of 20, regardless when during the year they signed the deal.
Anyway, thanks for the info/clarification.
No, if he turned 20 on September 14, he’d have a signing age of 19.
The exception if for those that turn 20 between September 16 and December 31.
In the event that an 18 year old or 19 year old Player signs an SPC with a
Club but does not play at least ten (10) NHL Games in the first season
under that SPC, the term of his SPC and his number of years in the Entry
Level System shall be extended for a period of one (1) year, except that
this automatic extension will not apply to a Player who is 19 according to
Section 9.2 by virtue of turning 20 between September 16 and December
9.2 Age of Players. As used in this Article, “age,” including “First SPC Signing Age,” means
a Player’s age on September 15 of the calendar year in which he signs an SPC, regardless of his
actual age on the date he signs such SPC. 1 in the year in which he first signs an SPC.
I was one who commented about a quick turnaround with things, I now think next season is in jeopardy.
Our neighbours have made some egregious errors. Canada will likely be ready, the US very unlikely.
Unless it’s all played in Canada.
The Canadian arenas should be packed next year after six months of $5 a barrel for Canadian oil.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/21/1929798/-Kentucky-vs-Tennessee-on-coronavirus-may-be-the-best-example-of-elections-matter-in-decades#read-more
Tenessee and Kentucky will be great side by side comparisons as go we forward. Proactive measures by one state versus reactive or delayed measures by a neighbouring state.
That sounds a lot like “any player who is 19 when he signs will have a ‘signing age’ of 20”, no?
Though I have a vague memory of ‘year’ being calendar year. So any player who signs after Jan 1st at age 19 is considered to have a signing age of 20?
Its essentially the age of the player on Sept 15 of the year he signs with one exception – a player that turns 20 after September 15 during the year he signs will be essentially have a signing age of 20 and not be subject to slide.
That’s an interesting post as my post implied nothing of the sort.
I want to throw this out there. Should the draft not be adjusted? Possibly a full lottery, like Crosby’s year? If there is no playoffs or a modified one, I think its only fair.
If there is no benefit of playoffs, every team should have a crack at number 1.
Yes, I do.
I think there is a legit player there but I don’t think he was given the opportunity this year to show enough that a team would target him in early October given the swarth of players available at that time.
Recall this past September/October, there were some legit names available.
Remember, if claimed, he needs to be on the acquiring team’s NHL roster – if the want to send him down, he needs to go back on waivers (and the Oilers would get first chance to re-claim).
That was me being subtle concerning my power of prescience. 😉
I’m saying there is a decent chance Berglund plays NHL games next year – he has been playing in a solid pro league for a few years now and has had a great year. He may be NHL ready right now for all we know but likely could use some North American development time in the lower league.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he is competing with Bouchard – totally different types of players with different skills and different potential but, as far as NHL aspirations for the 2020/21 season, I think they are in a similar tier.
Thanks. I am also of the opinion Berglund is going to surprise a lot of people. His progress may give the Oilers the required depth to move Larsson depending on how Bouchard shows by the halfway point of next season.
Check that, as per PuckPedia he’s got some games played bonuses in the first two years:
Yr 1: $700K Base, $92.5K Signing Bonus, $132.5K GP Bonus
Yr 2: 700K Base, 92.5K SB, 32.5K GP Bonuses
Yr 3: 700K Base, 92.5K SB
Shouldn’t be hitting a games played bonus next year but hopefully in yr 2.
Of note, doesn’t seem to be any performance bonuses included in Lavoie’s ELC.
I’m excited to see how he does in the Bake next year – I think he’ll start with some more offensive opportunities than Maksi (and McLeod) did.
Somebody asked the other day when Lavoie will sign and I said within a few days of the Q season bebing finished or cancelled.
Boom, ELC today.
No, he’s got a signing age of 20 and it will not slide next year even though he’ll be in the AHL all year.
Good news. And yes he should start higher in the lineup than McLeod and Maksimov did.
On his signing age, he turns 20 this Sept 25th. Is that a “signing age” of 20?
Fantastic. Maksimov is my favorite forward in the Bake right now, but I would very much like it if Lavoie forces me to change my opinion.
I wonder if the author was in Itlay, Spain or France if they would see it different? Remember, the USA cases are just beginning …… perhaps after 3 more weeks, the stance *could* be different …
I don’t believe in Hysteria at all …and certainly the media loves a story … But there are real people getting sick and real people dying from Covid-19. And in certain hotspots, their Health Care Systems are under enormous strain …that is not up for debate.
So whether this is more or less serious than other Viruses and whether this could have been handled differently (which probably everyone, with hindsight, believes) it still doesn’t diminish the fact people are dying in every country.
He’s not saying that no one is dying. People are dying every day from many things including Covid, the seasonal flu, etc ,etc. What he is discussing is how it is being handled and whether or not a more effective, less hysterical approach may be more appropriate. Because the virus is dangerous doesn’t mean that the current response is the best. The damage that is being done to people’s lives by this approach is very serious and we have no idea of the long term affects of these “measures”
There’s a tipping point for sure, people have to be able to provide for their families whether it be stock market, selling houses or retail. Complicated issue and I do think it’s worth having the conversation.
The question becomes how much is society willing to risk? I don’t have that answer.
Definition: Libertarians seek to maximize political freedom and autonomy, emphasizing freedom of choice, voluntary association and individual judgement. Libertarians share a skepticism of authority and state power, but they diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems.
I read that article and felt there was a strong streak of Libertarianism bleeding through.
The handling of this crisis by most Western governments is the antithesis of libertarian ideals. State power exercised via mass quarantines, suspension of travel, cheques to workers, etc. The author feels the state is overblowning the spread of the virus in a shameless and unnecessary grab for power when less onerous measures could be used instead.
Every country’s response to this can be different because every state will have differing levels of healthcare, testing and freedom of movement. Using the response of South Korea to show that USA and other western countries are doing it wrong is too much of a simplification.
The basic differences are that South Korea (ROK) (and Hong Kong) was prepared because they learned from SARS and put mass testing at the forefront of their response. With enough testing, the ROK could pinpoint the quarantines to surgically halt or slow the spread. Also, the social distancing practices and the use of surgical masks was a standard practice form many asians for many many years.
Most western governments barely registered more than a 3 month blip from SARS so the lessons were not ingrained in our responses to this situation. We are behind the curve on testing so as a population, we don’t know the fullest picture on the spread. Our response fighting the disease will then be about mitigation and fighting a delaying action.
If I think of the responses using military analogies, ROK has excellent scouting so they could pin down the enemy and then target them precisely.
USA and most western countries had few or no scouts so the tactic is to bunker down in place, see where the enemy attacks and then react to contain and reinforce areas under attack. Some areas within the US aren’t convinced they’re under attack so the enemy is infiltrating within the general population and will stage an even more devastating opening salvo and then hammer them with more effective attacks on the weakened defences.
Chernobyl played on HBO last season and I was watching the companion podcast after every episode on youtube. There’s a line Craig Mazin referenced that the Soviets were using.
Counting lives. How many people they had to sacrifice sending to their near certain deaths to solve the problems versus how many people were being put at risk if they did nothing. The miners, the plant workers, the liquidators, the soldiers. Literally the entire resources of the Soviet state were thrown to stop a massive technological and ecological disaster. Gorbachev is quoted as saying that Chernobyl was one of the factors in the dissolution of the USSR.
The author of the paper makes compelling arguments that we may be overreacting and that the economic damage is worse than the prevention of the spread of Covid19. If these preventative measures succeed, the death toll MIGHT only be 10000 in the U.S. IF we do less or nothing at all, the death toll will be closer to over 1 million souls as the disease runs it’s natural course.
What price tag will you put on the loss of those extra million people?
The numbers being thrown around to mitigate the economic disaster in the US are north of several trillion dollars. Let’s assume 1 trillion. Further assuming as you did that 1 million lives can be saved if we continue on the current path, then that works out to be 1 million dollars per person. And remember that most of these individuals that would be spared are in the 70+ age group. No, I think I’ll pass. And I’m a Boomer … the Millennials and Gen-Xers must be furious, as they should be.
Totally agree. My grandparents are assholes.
DSF, I don’t agree but I do truly appreciate the honest take.
What’s ‘right’ I don’t know, but policy makers do need to make these types of difficult calculations. It’s a reality.
One story I came across was they sent 400 miners to dig a tunnel under Reactor 4. They would use the entire supply of liquid nitrogen in the USSR to cool the concrete pad and prevent a meltdown. The meltdown was initially projected to reach the Pripriat River which fed the Dnieper. The water supply and the farmland of the majority of the 30 million civilians in the Ukraine would have been poisoned for tens of thousands of years.
Afterwards, they determined that the core wasn’t hot enough to melt through the entirety of the pad. The initial safety measures would have held and they didn’t need to sacrifice those miners.
Of those 400 miners, roughly 25% died within five years. But the government was willing to sacrifice all 400 and more to save 30 million.
We’re all suffering financial pain right now. I’ll put up with it because I value the lives of my neighbours more than the numbers in my bank statement.
I wonder if you will feel the same if you end up losing your home or business over this. If your business fails, I wonder if your former employees who may lose their homes are on board with this. It’s about to get real very soon if this lasts more than 30 days. We’re not talking losses to your brokerage account here, we’re talking about destroying peoples lives.
Destroying peoples’ lives?
You can come back from bankruptcy. My dad did it with four kids and a wife. We lost our home and our business when the NEP devastated the oil markets in 1980.
You can’t undo dead.
Showing more concern for the pocketbook than for real lives… Showing your true colors Harper
I don’t think you’re seeing the big picture.
Short term pain long term gain vs short term gain long term pain.
If we shut this down and limit its spread it passes faster people go back to work faster.
If we can shut down travel earlier and practiced real social distancing earlier this would have beeuch less severe.
Hopefully lesson learned.
I doubt this is the last time we go through this.
Where do you get your million death number from. Aside from injecting your opinion into the article that it is about libertarianism you are missing the point which is what are the facts of the numbers vs the hysteria. There isn’t any more supporting facts for your assertion that a million would die than Godot’s projection of 100 million.
The point is not about Libertarian thought it is about looking factually at the numbers and taking all factors into consideration. The philosophy that “it’s most important to be fast than right” comes with dangers. Ignoring the dangers to follow the hysteria comes with perils
Northern Italy had direct flights to Wuhan because of the 50,000 + Chinese workers at the Chinese owned leather and textile factories.
Here’s an old Guardian link. Odd that the connection didn’t attract more attention when Italy was being hit hard. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/02/italys-biggest-chinese-community-clashes-with-police-near-florence
We need facts and challenges to all the assumptions. I found the article on Medium did a good job of making me question my own reactions.
This is a math blog, we can handle it.
Medium tells me this is a 32 minute read and my 3 year old will be waking from her nap shortly. Unfortunately I won’t be able to read this as carefully as I’d like to.
I did scan it as best I could and notice some of the later section headings include:
18. Open schools
19. Open up public spaces
20. Support business and productivity
I assume the author’s views are nicely summarized by this quote from the article: “The data shows that the overwhelming majority of the working population will not be personally impacted, both individually or their children.”
What I didn’t see was predictions about how many (potentially preventable) deaths would occur if schools and public spaces were re-opened, and if business were allowed to continue unaffected.
Do you have a specific number of preventable deaths that you’d be comfortable allowing, so that coronavirus could be less disruptive (short term at least) to the economy and our daily lives?
I really think that’s an important question that anyone who’s opposed to the current covid response should think about.
Take the time to read the article It really is worth your time if you think it through carefully
I’ll try to read it in full when I have a chance (likely this evening).
I did already read a decent amount of it. While the author has clearly done his research and presents a ton of data, I’ve already seen a number of instances where I disagree with his conclusions/interpretations.
As with many things Oilers I’d truly love to be wrong (in this case about the seriousness of covid-19), but I don’t think I am.