[smerriman]

pilowsky, on 2020-April-10, 16:42, said:

At most 50 million people died. True. When it is stated that at least 50 million died this statistic is also true.

After all the responses, you still haven't learnt?

[Chas_P]

smerriman, on 2020-April-10, 18:39, said:

After all the responses, you still haven't learnt?

It's almost gotten like the old Abbott and Costello routine, "Who's on first". Comical. But we all need that now. Something to laugh at.

[helene_t]

NZ is not doing badly, and possibly on course to eradicating Covid. And we don't have widespread social irresponsibility and needless politicizing like certain other countries.

But NZ is also a bit over-hyped due to Jacindamania. Plenty of other countries have similar statistics. Australia's numbers look better than NZ's, and they do more testing than we do. And Greenland seems to have gotten rid of it with all known cases recovered and no new cases for a week by now.

[pilowsky]

smerriman, on 2020-April-10, 18:39, said:

After all the responses, you still haven't learnt?

...don't you have anything better to do with your time? the rest of the par reads...." this statistic is also true. BUT the true statistic is 20 to 50 million." In other words, 50 WAS the upper limit and most of that was caused as it seems to be now by the stupidity, moral turpitude and rank incompetence of the administration. Get a grip and stop wasting time on the Forums and do something useful. I am not paying you to make snide remarks about me. I am also endlessly patient. If I make a mistake I'll thank you for it and move on. It's called learning. That's not what is happening here. 20-50 million people died. Now stop farnarkling about and get back to work. You are fortunate to live in NZ a country that is likely to escape relatively unscathed compared to most.

[smerriman]

Sorry, but if you're going to consistently make 100% false statements, you're going to be consistently corrected.

"At least" is a synonym for "greater than or equal to". 20-50 million is not "greater than" 50 million, and it is not "equal" to 50 million [unless there were exactly 50 million deaths].

Either your knowledge of English isn't great, or you are truly trolling everyone.

[pilowsky]

Really. You have nothing better to do with your time?

[y66]

NYT: Restarting America Means People Will Die. So When Do We Do It?

[smerriman]

pilowsky, on 2020-April-10, 22:21, said:

Really. You have nothing better to do with your time?

That depends - do you think 'nothing better' and 'nothing worse' mean the same thing too?

[Stephen Tu]

Unfortunately the CDC has one article stating
"at least 50 million"
https://www.cdc.gov/...demic-h1n1.html
but a different article stating"as many as 50 million"
https://www.cdc.gov/...flupandemic.htm
which imply entirely different things (>= 50,000,000 vs. <= 50,000,000). Scientists sometimes aren't as precise with English as they ought to be.

But the second article also links to
https://science.scie...745/77.abstract
which estimates "20-50 million"

How any of this matters, I don't know. In any case I would never believe anything the current president says without checking with more reputable sources. He obviously wants to claim as horrendous numbers as possible in comparison so that whatever figure we end up with whether 60k, 120k, or 240k, he can declare victory and his awesomeness, even though this would be achieved in spite of his actions rather than because of them.

[thepossum]

barmar, on 2020-April-08, 21:56, said:

It's rare that I side with Chas, but in this case he's correct. "At least 50 million" means that 50 million is the low end of the estimate, and it could have been more.

Its sad you had to explain this Barmar

I must admit I am feeling less concerned about the intellect of any on this site who ever attacked me before, if this is the level of people's understanding of anything

I had been planning to raise some serious issues about this terrible pandemmic which have been concerning me. The conflict between control and freedom. The meaning of life and existence. How this issue is challenging all our values. Where to from here. The state of the world economy during and post pandemic. Is there a chance of a vaccine and if not where to from here. Ethics. Law. Philosophy. Science. The arts. Anything

But at least I now know the level at which to pitch any future posts and threads

[helene_t]

I once overheard a call center agent telling a customer that "there's no maximum order which you must place". I tried, unsuccessfully, to explain to her that the policy she was trying to convey was that there was no minimum order.

But "at least" vs "at most" I would think that nobody older than five years could get confused about.

Maybe it depends on your native language. Expressions like "I couldn't care less" and "You may not do it" might suggest to native English speakers that the language cannot be assumed to be logical, and a lot of seemingly self-explanatory idioms have to be root learned?

[pilowsky]

So, when is a revoke not established 🙂.

[y66]

Tim Culpan at Bloomberg: Taiwan’s Viral Success Makes It Harder to Ignore

Quote

On Jan. 14, the World Health Organization sent a tweet that turned out to be one of the most significant statements in the world’s fight against the virus now known as Covid-19. Based on information from China, the global health agency wrote, the new coronavirus didn’t appear to spread via human-to-human transmission.

Two weeks earlier, health authorities in Taiwan had reached the opposite conclusion. Not only did Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control surmise that people were passing the disease to each other, they notified the WHO of their suspicions through the UN agency’s International Health Regulations reporting window, a platform for sharing information and updates.

“We tried to get clarification from the IHR on what’s going on in Wuhan,” Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told me. “But the response from the WHO was, ‘OK, we’ll take it from here.’” The Taiwanese never heard back.

That incident marked a crucial early moment in the WHO’s failure, in tandem with China, to stop the epidemic. It also reflects what has become an impossible needle for the Geneva-based authority to thread between an increasingly dominant member, Beijing, and one of the only stars in this pandemic, which can’t even walk in the front door. The absurdity hit a public peak when a senior official couldn’t even acknowledge Taiwan’s existence in an interview with a Hong Kong broadcaster.

World Health Organization (WHO) ✔ @WHO said:

Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. 7:18 AM - Jan 14, 2020

Taiwan’s success in controlling Covid-19 has bolstered its global standing even amid a multi-year campaign by Beijing to stifle and isolate the place. Left flat-footed by the WHO, nations are expanding bilateral ties with Taipei to bolster their own Covid-19 responses. A consensus is also starting to emerge in the international community that Taiwan should be given access to the WHO and other multilateral agencies, even as China's opposition grows louder.

Forced to develop its own health vigilance systems, Taiwan, with a population of 23 million, took a separate approach to handling the virus. When the WHO recommended against restrictions on travelers from China, officials in Taiwan implemented bans from the original affected areas and later widened them. As the WHO advised that masks weren’t necessary, Taiwan ramped up production and issued them to citizens.

As the pandemic spreads around the world, Taiwan has recorded just 339 cases and 5 deaths, 1 compared to official figures of more than 82,000 cases in China and more than 10 times that number globally. The vast majority of Taiwan’s cases are of citizens returning from Europe or the Americas.

Being left in the international wilderness is nothing new to Taiwan. It’s recognized as a country by only 15 mostly tiny nations with which it has diplomatic ties. China lays claim to its territory, viewing it as unfinished business from the civil war that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power in 1949. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Hal Brands notes that the WHO has become a tool of China’s foreign policy aimed at isolating Taiwan and its democratic government.

The diplomatic difficulty this causes for Taiwan in dealing with the UN and its agencies is becoming hard to sustain; who shares what, when, how and at what level has been a problem in aviation and other sectors as well as health. The pandemic, however, is making what often seems a local problem more visible and relevant to the wider world.

Over the past week, the WHO has insisted it “works with Taiwanese health experts and authorities.” Taipei responded that information it shares to a WHO database doesn’t get distributed to member states. Taiwan noted that while it and the WHO both participate in a third-party sharing network, its health officials are cut off from the UN agency’s global alert network.

“We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what the WHO is telling the Chinese CDC,” said Huang SongEn, an epidemiologist at Taiwan’s health ministry. “It’s a black hole.”

If there’s any upside, it’s that this emergency has spurred officials in the U.S., Japan and the European Union to quickly expand bilateral ties so that they can learn from Taiwan’s success. Last month, Washington’s representative to Taipei issued a joint statement with Wu announcing increased cooperation including research and development, contact-tracing, and scientific conferences.

“We continue to look to other countries who’ve had longer experience with Covid-19 to share information,” Sarah Bennett, head of the U.S. CDC’s International Task Force for Covid-19, told a teleconference when asked about its relationship with Taiwan. The European Union said it's working with the Taiwan government's Academia Sinica to develop a rapid test.

In the complex diplomacy involving Taiwan, and in fighting the pandemic, this kind of stuff matters. Since the outbreak accelerated in January, Japan, the U.S., U.K., EU and Australia are among those that have joined the call for Taiwan to be given access to the WHO.

Taiwan officials shy away from criticizing the WHO. They want to be a member and get the same recognition and access to multilateral institutions as any other. In speeches and press conferences on Covid-19, President Tsai Ing-wen has repeated a mantra she’s used before to highlight the country’s commitment to global issues like health and the environment: Taiwan Can Help.

Tsai argues that Taiwan’s willingness to offer solid medical and technical assistance in this crisis makes the case for a seat at the global table. The international community is starting to agree.

[kenberg]

Hoping to bring the "at least" versus "at most" to an end:
Do we all agree that:
if 49 million died then "at least 50 million died" is false and "at most 50 million died" is true
while
if 51 million died then "at least 50 million died" is true and "at most 50 million died" is false
?


If we all agree with that, which I hope we all do, then we can, but we do not have to, go on to sources that appear to say there is wide disagreement about how many died. I readily acknowledge I have no idea as to how many died, and the literature suggests that those who have tried hard to get it right are not so certain either.

[pilowsky]

That's why Ken gets the big bucks

[nullve]

pilowsky, on 2020-April-08, 19:48, said:

"At least" is an English phrase meaning less than.

kenberg, on 2020-April-11, 07:24, said:

Hoping to bring the "at least" versus "at most" to an end:
Do we all agree that:
if 49 million died then "at least 50 million died" is false and "at most 50 million died" is true
while
if 51 million died then "at least 50 million died" is true and "at most 50 million died" is false
?


If we all agree with that, which I hope we all do, then we can, but we do not have to, go on to sources that appear to say there is wide disagreement about how many died. I readily acknowledge I have no idea as to how many died, and the literature suggests that those who have tried hard to get it right are not so certain either.

Well, if pilowsky is right about the meaning of "at least" (I doubt it!), then it seems that

if 49 million died then "at least 50 million died" and "at most 50 million died" are both true
while
if 51 million died then "at least 50 million died" and "at most 50 million died" are both false
.

[FelicityR]

y66, on 2020-April-11, 07:15, said:

Tim Culpan at Bloomberg: Taiwan’s Viral Success Makes It Harder to Ignore

Thank you y66 for all the informative and diverse range of news articles that you have posted on this thread. They certainly give a comprehensive overview of what is happening around the world.

[pescetom]

Cyberyeti, on 2020-April-10, 11:41, said:

I've just had a friend (who admittedly has every reason to be very angry about her situation) unfriend me on FB because I dare to question allegedly independent articles, that are all on websites founded by Labour party hacks, and haven't had a verifiable source in any of them. She believes the Tories are trying to kill off all the old and infirm to save money.

The NHS advised us that my very old but basically healthy mother currently in a home will not be taken to hospital if she contacts Covid, let alone be ventilated. I can verify that to you if you really need it.

[johnu]

Cyberyeti, on 2020-April-10, 11:41, said:

I've just had a friend (who admittedly has every reason to be very angry about her situation) unfriend me on FB because I dare to question allegedly independent articles, that are all on websites founded by Labour party hacks, and haven't had a verifiable source in any of them. She believes the Tories are trying to kill off all the old and infirm to save money.

Wow, just as absolutely bonkers and unbelievable as any suggestion the right fringe Republican politicians and demagogues are willing to sacrifice older or more vulnerable members of US society so that the economy can start a recovery. Oh wait, that one is 100% true and happening every day on places like Fox Propaganda Network.

[Cyberyeti]

pescetom, on 2020-April-11, 14:49, said:

The NHS advised us that my very old but basically healthy mother currently in a home will not be taken to hospital if she contacts Covid, let alone be ventilated. I can verify that if you really need it.

I've heard that too, don't need it verifying, although this and similar seems to be geographic, certain trusts are taking a much more extreme interpretation of government guidelines than others.