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Elon Musk: "The coronavirus panic is dumb"

14 points by madarco ↗ HN
Elon Musk: "The coronavirus panic is dumb"

https://twitter.com/FxzzOnTheBeat/status/1236556448810831872

"Virality of C19 is overstated due to conflating diagnosis date with contraction date & over-extrapolating exponential growth, which is never what happens in reality. Keep extrapolating & virus will exceed mass of known universe!"

"Fatality rate also greatly overstated. Because there are so few test kits, those who die with respiratory symptoms are tested for C19, but those with minor symptoms are usually not. Prevalence of coronaviruses & other colds in general population is very high!"

25 comments

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nostrademons
Both of his objections are true but don't really change the "you should probably panic" conclusion.

True fatality rate is likely close to what South Korea is registering, because they test everybody regardless of whether they're sick or not. It's about 0.7% there.

Exponential growth won't continue forever, but it doesn't have to. If exponential growth continues until COVID-19 has infected 30-60% of the world's population (as typical flu pandemics do), that's 2-4B infected and 15-30M dead. Those are huge numbers.

Deaths will be overwhelming concentrated among older folks (death rates are about 0.2% for < 40, up to 15% for > 80), but that basically amounts to "Would you play Russian roulette with your mother?" I certainly wouldn't.

WaltPurvis
I see little reason to think this virus will infect 30-60% of the world's population.

It has infected <0.1% of South Korea's population and the number of new cases per day has been going down for several days in a row now. Today they reported less than a hundred new cases.

It sure doesn't seem to be sweeping through the South Korea population like wildfire. It doesn't appear they will even reach 1% infected, let alone 30-60%.

It also doesn't look to be on a path to infecting 30-60% of China's population. New infections in China have dwindled to almost nothing, and the total number of cases there is less than 1/10,000th of their population. (Even if one is skeptical about China's official count, it's preposterous to think they've undercounted by tens or hundreds of millions.)

chefkoch
And we should trust you instead of the epidemiologist because?
WaltPurvis
I never said you should trust me. I said my observation is that the virus has not spread like wildfire through the population in China and appears to not be spreading like wildfire through South Korea either, having infected significantly less than 0.1% in both countries, with new infections apparently diminishing (and definitely not exploding), so based on what has actually been happening so far, in the country where the virus has been the longest and in a nearby country that has been dealing with it longer than most, there doesn't seem to be much empirical support for the idea that this is the kind of virus that will inexorably move through the entire world infecting 30-60% the entire global population. By all means, appeal to whatever authority you want, and certainly don't trust me.
nostrademons
Both of them have enacted extremely rigorous (some would say "draconian") quarantine procedures. They can't keep these procedures up forever without severely damaging their economy.

The problem is that coronavirus escaped and is now circulating worldwide. So as soon as they drop the quarantines, they're likely to end up reinfected from some other country. Most of the infections in the U.S. are now coming from Italy and Iran, not China. All it takes is one asymptomatic carrier (and evidence from South Korea and the Diamond Princess indicates that close to half of cases are asymptomatic) to start a local outbreak. The Washington State and Italian outbreaks were both started from a single undetected index case, for example (Washington State was the original index case from Wuhan in Seattle, Italy was traced back to the German car manufacture that had a local outbreak in early January).

You can't really stop a highly-infectious airborne disease with no natural immunity in the population. The best you can do is buy time to develop treatments or a vaccine, or hope that it mutates into something less virulent.

buboard
also consider cultural habits. eastern asians are more likely to wear a mask or distance socially, while italians and other southern europeans are much more touchy feely , and less likely to keep distances
Someone
”Deaths will be overwhelming concentrated among older folks (death rates are about 0.2% for < 40, up to 15% for > 80)”

You can’t use relative risks to say something about absolute numbers; you also have to take group sizes into account.

Given the hugely varying population pyramids between countries there will be a lot of variation between countries, but with about 2% of the world’s population over 80, and about a third under 40, that factor of 75 goes down to around a factor of 5, globally. Still a large difference, but maybe not quite overwhelming.

pdpi
I'm getting pretty damn fed up with Musk, and even more so with with the cult of personality around him.

The panic is "dumb", sure, but panic is people reacting emotionally. Of course it's dumb. It's also understandable. Posting about how dumb it is is not constructive, it's just chest thumping about how intellectually superior you are.

Also, I'm not taking medical advice from Musk, and you shouldn't either. He's not an epidemiologist, an infectious diseases expert, or any sort of medical doctor for that matter. He's just a techie who got lucky and has the loudest megaphone in the world.

SamReidHughes
There isn’t even any panic. When’s the last time people panicked?
cafard
Bought any N-95 masks lately?
zimpenfish
Having just been to the supermarket[1] across the road and seen stripped-bare aisles for pasta, rice, etc., yeah, there's some kind of panic.

[1] UK

SamReidHughes
That's preparedness. Buyers won't have to go out and get food when the pandemic hits its peak.
chippy
That is "panic buying" but its done not by panicking people. If you camp out in the supermarket you may notice that people appear as they always do, even if they are buying stuff because other people are buying stuff.
muzani
Honestly, I think the reason he does this is because it raises awareness of him, which in turn raises stock prices, application rates, media coverage, and funding for his projects.

If people want him to stop saying dumb things, they should just ignore him. Same for other Twitter-friendly people like Trump and McAfee.

hef19898
Very true, if you ask me. He is not alone, so. the sheer amount of Corona-related clickbait,from everyone from Musk to guys at the MIT (they are close to spaming my LinkedIn feed with "CORVID-19 will kill Supply Chain, join our webinar to learn how t save yours!"-lie content). I became gulty as well with a blog post covering steps to make supply chain recovery as easy as possible. Won't do it again. But never ever would I interpret numbers or comment on the epidemic itself.
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easytiger
Counteracting hystrionics is not without value IMHO
pdpi
Absolutely. But saying “the coronavirus panic is dumb” does no such thing. If you want to combat the panic you need to reach out to the people who are panicking and convince them to calm down. Dunno about you, but I’ve never met a person who becomes calmer by being told they’re dumb.

The audience for this tweet isn’t the people who are panicking, it’s the people who are not. Its only effect is striking the egos of people who feel they are too smart to panic about this.

easytiger
He's not calling people dumb, but the natural cycles of media boosted self reinforcing hystrionics
hef19898
Ah, so Elon studied virology over the week-end?