Ehh I attribute it to the rise of wannabe data scientists who want to fit a sigmoid to everything, as well as influencer culture. People would be trying to get their LinkedIn likes no matter what leadership came out with.
Well, if the government was matching a curve to it, on a public website that had updates daily, supported by professionals, then I think there would be less demand for random people to do it.
The problem is that the curves anyone today draws are guaranteed to be wrong. We have almost no idea about how transmissible the virus is, how many people have it, how many people die from it. Even worse, we have a lot of pieces of data that look like information but aren't. For the most obvious example, a lot of people are tempted to divide the count of known deaths by the count of known cases, and they calculate a number which looks like a mortality rate but is multiple times higher than any actual estimate of the mortality rate.
Any curve you see today which claims to outline the progress of COVID-19 (rather than the progress of COVID-19 testing and response) is extremely misleading.
Then have a rolling history of curve predictions, day-over-day, maybe with some commentary about what seems to be driving changes in the curve (increased tests, changes in transmissibility estimates, a sudden outbreak, etc)
Every article I've read reported the WHO's statement using the words "death rate" or "mortality rate". I understand that in the technical sense, the mortality rate is always relative to the total population whether or not they're infected, but I don't think anyone is getting confused by this, and since I'm not myself an expert I'm going to use colloquial terminology over epidemological jargon. Nobody thought the WHO's 3.4% number was saying that 3.4% of the world population is dead.
Yes and I've heard the sigmoid described as "the first half being exponential, the second half being logorithmic" all over the place and it bothers me to no end. The natural log of x goes to infinity... I sure hope that doesn't describe infection rates.
Arguably there has been a leadership vacuum for decades, where expert bureaucrats are lecturing and patronizing the population, while themselves are being proven wrong and clueless more often than not, with no negative consequences, see the 2008 crisis, etc.
Well, you have to say which statements from epidemiologists we should trust, because in my country a month ago they said "nothing to see, carry on", and now they say "the end of the world is near, start digging".
Do you have more than a single instance to point to in which expert bureaucrats are lecturing and patronizing while being wrong?
From my perspective it seems clear that the American public has been in the grips of anti-intellectualism for quite a long time. In 1980 Asimov made the following famous statement:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Here are some examples of dubious advice from experts: the Iraq war, regime changes throughout the middle east, interventionism in general, margarine instead of butter, fat is bad/sugar is good, antidepressants are harmless, medical doctors don't understand Bayes' rule, etc. etc. etc.
For the record, I'm not American, and not anti-intellectual.
Here's a better example of patronizing by experts from the current crisis: "The average person should not wear a mask. Not only it doesn't protect against the virus, but it actually may harm."
What they mean is: it may harm by giving a false sense of certainty. Clearly the average person is too stupid to understand the difference between perfect protection and "not quite perfect, but better than nothing" protection.
I don’t see the lecturing and patronization that you referenced in your original comment with some of the examples you provided. That’s the part of your post that I disagree with.
In your Iraq war example I don’t recall bureaucratic experts being involved in support of it. General Shinseki famously thought Rumsfeld’s predictions were wrong and Hans Blicks (spelling?) was famously skeptical of Bush administration claims.
I’ll certainly agree that we’ve had crappy political leadership in the U.S. but I won’t agree that bureaucrats have let the nation down in matters of science. Experts get it wrong and consensus expert opinion is sometimes wrong. There will continue to be examples of where consensus expert opinion is wrong.
You can find individual experts who are patronizing and lecturing as you put it. It’s been rare in my experience that consensus expert opinions that aren’t motivated by money, greed, power, or fame are condescending or lecturing.
They give eric ding a hard time, but he was sounding the alarm while other epidemiologists were downplaying it. Because of him, I stocked up on groceries over a month ago, decided not to buy a house, and got prepared to work from home and started selling stocks before the market crashed. If I had listened to the ‘real’ experts, I’d have lost twice as much money in the crash and I’d have been scrambling to find food for my family right now.
I took everything with a grain of salt, but I was alarmed enough about worst case scenarios to start preparing.
When you have things like the New York Times publishing articles about how the CDC is publishing misleading information, or the WHO and the South Korean government publish contradictory guidelines, or the federal government announcing one thing one day and the opposite thing the next day, then you really can't just blindly trust an authoritative source any more. It's impossible, because the authoritative sources don't agree with each other! Everyone is forced to do their own amateur analysis. It is no surprise that given the situation, many people are publishing their own amateur analyses.
IMO this is better than the situation in previous similar disasters. Like in the 1918 influenza epidemic, many governments censored information, and there was no social media to circumvent this, so the public understanding of the real situation was quite poor.
I think _everyone's_ understanding of the situation is quite poor, not just the public's. If you read studies of the previous epidemics such as SARS, H1N1 etc, you will see that early in the epidemic cycle everyone tends to exaggerate the impact in all aspects, sometimes by orders of magnitude, in part because it's safer to err on the side of caution rather than not be cautious enough, and in part for selfish reasons ("woo-hoo, I get my 15 minutes of fame after working for peanuts in some godforsaken epidemiology lab for a decade"), but mostly the former. For bird flu, for example, the initial prediction was "up to" 150M deaths worldwide: https://slate.com/technology/2009/05/the-problems-with-the-w.... This estimate, supposedly, came from one of he most "informed" people in the world.
People just hate unknowns, and especially "unknown unknowns" and therefore latch onto the most dramatic damage estimates and act accordingly, often further exacerbating the situation.
Is there any idea on when exactly this might happen? Here in the UK we’re hearing about this a lot in the daily updates, but there is never a concrete time. It could be a gamechanger.
I remember the time I started worrying was when the former leader of CDC sounded the alarm (forgot url). And then confirmed after the House Hearing Feb 5th (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSO8jW_TDCI). This combined with the Chinese situation then together was much more convincing than my bumbling Swedish government.
I've heard government officials say don't trust "rumors you hear on the internet," which his incredibly condescending because the government has lied over and over again about the scope of this crisis, and /r/coronavirus made me aware of exactly what was going to happen, and exactly how to prepare.
So, no thank you. I will continue to take my own safety into my own hands, because they seem more concerned with the safety of business interests.
> “I have a two-hour podcast every week,” he said. “Very few people are listening because it's long and complicated.”
I think this is a good example of an opportunity the population here on HN can exploit, and which many others can't: We can metabolize a deeper-than-average scientific discussion and help convert that into reliable and responsible social discourse. It's just a matter of making the time, of seeking out the expert-level information, and digging in.
This is also more respectable IMO than mainly just being critical of information and influencers. A lot of the so-called influencers are good people who are trying to help out where they can. That's why they're getting attention; the social organism is looking for help right now. The critical viewpoint is not nearly as effective under these circumstances, in part because it shoots down solutions more than it creates or identifies them.
I don't think the commentary I've seen here is that much better than what I see e.g. on reddit. Maybe on average, people here are better at reading primary scientific sources, but that is still a small minority of people that either can or take the time to do so.
I am a scientist, with extensive training in biochemistry and cell and molecular biology, and I can tell you that the commentary here has been abysmal. Factual information with citations (often, multiple) is routinely grayed out due to herd downvoting, while wild speculation and opinion are at the top of threads.
Folks here know about enough science and math to be persuasive when extrapolating, but not enough to truly understand what they're reading, and that's dangerous.
I've been trying to do that, and spent a great deal of time Monday trying to engage such conversation, always very carefully checking my own sources and also ones cited at me. I didn't get nearly as much engagement as speculation (possible cures) and dangerous misinformation.
And yesterday most of the Covid threads here were terrible, full of racism, conspiracies, and so on. Another programmer-based forum I frequent has banned Covid topics altogether.
I don't have good solutions here, other than to try to be very careful in choosing only high quality information sources. Getting the word out will be a key part of the response, and I see serious problems in that.
>We can metabolize a deeper-than-average scientific discussion and help convert that into reliable and responsible social discourse.
I appreciate the sentiment, but no: HN people and related writing is invariably bad. I realize this will raise hackles.
>It's just a matter of making the time, of seeking out the expert-level information, and digging in.
Racaniello has a two-hour podcast comprised of complicated, expert-level information, and it takes talent to winnow that down into lay language and, more importantly, lay time-constraints. Among people who can barely concern themselves with GitHub READMEs and "wait, but what is it?"[1] site pitches, the HN population does not have a good track record at clarifying plain information, let alone translating between skill levels.
This difficulty and need for understandability is where the goofs described in the article find room to exist. "Just come up with something, and something is better than nothing," the charlatan professes. The problem is that the true expertise gets clouded or even left at the wayside. Irrelevant or confounding perspectives included for no good reason, faulty conclusions, and any other kind of "it was hard before, you simplified it, now it's impossible" derivations of the source material.
Of course, don't get me started on two-hour (and longer) podcasts, itself a format that is extremely hostile to a listener's free time.
So for context, last night I made a subreddit for discussing over-the-counter drugs, supplements, and other interventions for coronavirus: https://www.reddit.com/r/covid19stack
I already knew this before I made the subreddit, which I did just because I find this stuff interesting, but honestly right now there is very little appetite from the general public in terms of experimenting with treatments or prophylactic measures that could potentially hurt them. Maybe that will change in a few weeks, but right now there is very little risk of people being harmed by whatever misinformation is currently out there.
As of right now most people don't even believe the virus can hurt them in the first place. It's hard enough just to folks to stay inside.
I feel like this is implying this is a bad thing, which it absolutely is not. Am I the only one who hasn't stumbled onto any conspiracy theories whatsoever?
I've found the internet to be an invaluable source of outstanding information on this virus (dashboards of diagnoses, research on variants, journal articles on origin, updates about potential treatments) and have found most people to relatively reasonable (e.g. frustrated about lack of testing, but nothing resembling conspiracy theories). That said I focus on HN/reddit.
It probably has to do with whom you talk to and what sites you frequent. I've seen lots of conspiracy theories about how this was engineered by China in order to crash Western economies with China getting back on its feet first so it could take advantage of the West while we are down. Seriously. I've heard many people saying that social isolation is going to be permanent going forward. I've heard that the government is going to use this to enforce martial law. I've heard that Trump is going to use this to cancel the upcoming election and invoke something or other to put himself into power permanently, a la Putin. Etc. That's just the tip of the iceburg. There are tons of conspiracy theories. I know people who are starting to stockpile guns and ammunition (and probably TP) in insane amounts. I know people who are pulling all of their money out of the banks. I know others that are buying gold. A lot of gold. In my view, people are verging into extreme unreasonableness.
On the other hand, there is the other side of not being reasonable. Yesterday a friend was at the park with her kids. Another mom was on her phone talking to her doctor about her kid's fever and cough. The same kid that she had brought to the public park!
I know people who are planning trips to Hawaii while the kids are on this extended vacation.
There are a lot of people who are not taking this at all seriously.
The doomer and prepper crowd will twist any news to fit their narrative. You can go back through the last 20 years of blog posts and see these same predictions made about every large news story. If you hear people quoting this stuff remind them that it's the same thing people said about the financial crisis, hurricane katrina, 9/11, and y2k, and none of those things ever happened.
Yeah, but the people I am talking about were never ever doomers and preppers before. They were just ordinary people who never had any interest in that sort of stuff. Why is it different this time? I have no idea.
You must have some really selective curation going on :) At least one of the prominent people I follow on Twitter has been flirting with conspiracy theories, not actively promoting them but saying it's a question that should be asked. And it's way, way worse out there in unfiltered Twitter.
ETA: check elsewhere in this thread, though there's a good chance it'll be quickly downvoted.
This seems like a positive trend. The article quotes a guy saying Twitter is two days ahead of newspapers, but that's severely underselling it; many Twitter sources were saying "watch out, this isn't likely to be localized" in late January and "this will be a problem everywhere, start preparing for a lockdown" in mid-February. If it's possible for people to be a month ahead of the mainstream media, that's not a matter of higher verification standards - there's gotta be some structural obstacle in place that systematically prevents the media from noticing important new things. And if that's true I'm glad to have alternative sources without the obstacle.
Certainly, and I get your point, but none of them were sources I would have considered reliable in the first place. There's always a selection problem, just as listening to reliable traditional media requires you to screen out conspiracy outlets who pretend to be legitimate newspapers.
Your and GP's comments are a perfect illustration of the social media bubble effect. Some people saw an entire news feed telling them it was nothing to worry about, and another group saw a news feed saying it was going to be a global pandemic. It's easy to point the finger after the fact, but you have to understand that people will believe what they perceive as being "common knowledge", and in this day and age that means whatever their twitter and facebook friends say for the majority of people.
There may be some bias in your view. Yes, people were saying these things early on Twitter. But I'm pretty sure people were also saying "it doesn't need a lockdown, it's no big deal" as late as today on Twitter. So...
Twitter is ahead of the newspapers. And it's totally behind the data, with its head in the sand. And everywhere in between. Twitter doesn't give you an answer; it gives you 10,000 answers. Sure, the truth is in there... somewhere. Good luck finding it reliably, though.
I believe it is mostly hindsight. For any outcome you will find someone who predicted it a month ago on Twitter. It does not help you to determine which of the thousand current predictions will be correct.
Twitter also promotes a bunch of stupid and wrong information as well. There is always some “watch out” tweets concerning pretty much anything that happens. Twitter is noisy and unreliable. It’s basically gossip, some that happens to be true, much that happens to be false.
People on social media predict every possible outcome. Of course some will be right. It's not a question of how far ahead they are. It's about being better than that octopus that happened to get the world cup bracket correct. Or at least not telling everyone to get public health information from octopi.
I've been comparing this with the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009.
H1N1 ended up not being as fatal as SARSCoV2, but we didn't know that at the time. People were saying it had a CFR of >1% in Mexico (where the original outbreak was). That number dropped way down as better data came in after the outbreak.
But still, up to 575,000 people may have died from it. That's not nothing.
And... nobody cared? People were calm. It was on the news, but there was no panic.
I think part of it was how social media has changed the way we consume and respond to information. I've seen extreme panic on FB, Reddit, HN, Twitter -- which seems to cause more panic. Everything in the media is turned up to 11 now.
It's interesting to go back further and read this Bird Flu article from 2005, where a UN Health Official warned of 150 million possible deaths, and said things like, "It's like a combination of global warming and HIV/Aids 10 times faster than it's running at the moment." So, the media has always turned things up to 11, but something about the current era has exacerbated the issue.
Keep in mind the original SARS had a death rate of 10%, so obviously there was a tremendous amount of fear that this new related virus would be similarly lethal.
The Chinese example didn't change overnight, the information available about predicted outcomes of different policy approaches in the US and UK did, and that's what drove policy change, including the Trump Administration flipping from claiming it was a hoax cooked up by political opponents to treating it as a serious issue.
I mean, if you're curious about differences in reaction I don't think you need to look any further than the handling and messaging going on. When Ebola was a concern Obama acted quickly to contain the threat and put a lot of resources into addressing the issue immediately - so much so that his administration was strongly criticized for wasting resources on a "non-issue".
This time around the outbreak originated in China that covered up the issue initially and ended up making the issue a lot worse than it could have been. Additionally, once everyone should've been paying attention on a global scale, Mr President down there in the US just tried to downplay the possible effects of a pandemic and it looks, at the moment, like he again just made everything worse.
Usually we can sit safe and confident at home that the government is overreacting to the situation and everything will be fine, this time around the authorities most globally visible (the US and China where the outbreak started) have obviously bungled their response and we're seeing a lot of panic because people don't have faith in the ability for the globe to respond in a unified manner.
Trumpian rhetoric aside, it's really unfair giving the histrionic media a pass on this. The toilet paper outages were stoked by the media. Instead of seeing op-eds with "stop raiding stores for toilet paper," all we saw (and still see) is "this president is incompetent."
Just this morning, CNN was frothing at the mouth at Trump calling it the "China virus" -- I mean, yeah, it's a virus that came from China -- and they have an op-ed on how this term is stoking xenophobia.
Honestly, "China Virus" is just xenophobia and deflection - it wasn't a term adopted by the populace at large - pushing it as a name for the virus has been a right wing effort.
The usage of that term is solely to try and deflect responsibility for anything domestic to China and pass the buck... it also has the potential to cause hate crimes in a time when we really should be unifying as nations.
> Just this morning, CNN was frothing at the mouth at Trump calling it the "China virus" -- I mean, yeah, it's a virus that came from China -- and they have an op-ed on how this term is stoking xenophobia.
That's because it is. There have been many reports of harassment and assaults on Chinese Americans, and this kind of label doesn't go away. The term "Spanish Flu" is still used 100 years later, not because it originated there (it didn't -- it almost certainly originated in midwestern USA) but because the media paid more attention there.
> That's because it is. There have been many reports of harassment and assaults on Chinese Americans
This is an extreme, uncited, and frankly inflammatory extrapolation. There have been only a handful of such attacks -- I believe 5-ish (reported by The New Yorker and CNN). It's just the typical race-baiting we've seen that generates outrage clicks. Calling it the "China Virus" has no more societal impact (which is: minor at best) than the "Spanish Flu."
Really, it just strengthens my point about the nonsense the media is peddling, instead of asking the populace to remain calm, take precautions, and stay safe.
You can avoid stoking the flames and creating scapegoats. Just for reference when the Nazi party initially started to scapegoat Jewish and Romani people they used disease and hygiene concerns as an early way to paint people poorly and it's hellishly effective - blaming "mexicans taking jobs" is a pretty weak (relatively) scapegoating when compared to "mexican rapists" and trying to play to actors that may be causing a more personal harm. Painting the disease as being Chinese/Jewish/Romani is sort of the ultimate scapegoating - people feel personal pain from seeing sickness in their community and have no direct way to see that the attribution of that sickness to a people group is entirely bullsh.
Dogwhistling for racism isn't an innocent action and deserves no understanding, it is hate filled and driven out of self-interest by those doing it.
This is an absolutely insane analogy -- not to mention grossly off-base. No one is scapegoating the Chinese people (or, even less so, Americans that happen to have Asian ancestry). Calling it the "Chinese Virus" simply points to its geographic source, i.e. Wuhan, China.
Yeah, Godwin's Law strikes again. Not everything is literally Hitler.
> This is an extreme, uncited, and frankly inflammatory extrapolation. There have been only a handful of such attacks -- I believe 5-ish (reported by The New Yorker and CNN).[0]
So nobody is doing this? Or have there been incidents that you yourself have previously acknowledged?
I tried civilly engaging in discourse with you earlier[1]. But now it seems like you're arguing with people just to argue, not to actually discuss these topics.
Also, you can correct people who are mistaken about where it originated without saying "Chinese flu". E.g. "actually, the coronavirus originated in China". I remarked on this to another user who said they just wanted to stick to the facts about its origins.[2]
If you're intent on making sure China is regarded as the source and/or culprit, you can emphasize further by adding something like, "and that's why the majority of cases and deaths from [coronavirus/covid-19] were in China. It started there." And that can be said perfectly fine without "Chinese virus".
No disrespect intended, but I don't get in debates with brand new anonymous HN accounts that have solely commented on threads that deal with the topic at hand.
Why are you looking to what you refer to as nonsense peddlers for evidence that there have been attacks? I actively avoid and dislike the media too, but that means I discount everything they say, not just the things I dislike.
How about I provide some personal anecdata instead?
My (Asian) parents -- who prefer Fox over CNN and vote right, in case anyone fears they're under the spell of frothing journalists -- have been more nervous about going about in public. My dad's car's mirror was smashed a couple nights ago.
In a similar way that I'm not as deeply affected by the current economic environment as a low wage worker is, you're not as affected by the cultural perception as people like my family are. With that in mind, I ask that you acknowledge that such acts could very well be more common than the sensationalized ones that liberal media eagerly pounce upon, and thus more common than you personally might be aware of.
Toilet paper? Even if one believes the president to be incompetent, that's not news. (The details of how that incompetence plays out today may be...) But toilet paper, last week, was making an actual difference in actual peoples' lives, right then, in a way that was new.
Some (read: Trump supporters) say we should trust the government (read: the Trump administration) during this crisis, but how can that be possible when we've been lied to and this crisis has been downplayed over and over again?
Imagine if you're about to go skydiving and I'm responsible for packing your chute. As I pack, you notice a cord looks badly frayed. I tell you, "The cord is totally not frayed! They all look like that." Then I tell you, "Don't worry, we'll replace it before you go out." Then you find out we didn't actually replace it, and you look up on the internet that it can easily kill you. Then I say, "I knew it was a problem all along but we have a plan in place to handle that."
Would all of that make you feel less or more afraid of your skydiving experience?
> this crisis has been downplayed over and over again?
This crisis has been overplayed. California governor suggesting schools be closed for 2.5 additional months? This is getting absurd. More people were in Baltimore shootings last week than died in Santa Clara Country from Wuhan virus.
Why is that a dog-whistle? The virus did in fact originate in Wuhan. And I think there is some value in factually pointing that out, and not letting the government of China create some it-was-some-US-soldiers fairy tale.
I agree with you that this needs to not become any kind of a racial thing against Chinese people. But I'm going to stick with the facts, especially when someone is trying to paint a counter-factual lie of a narrative.
The virus also originated from bats - and yet I don't see folks going around calling it the bat flu. The Chinese government absolutely mishandled this flu and the fact that they tried to suppress it will need to be addressed in the future - but calling it the "wuhan flu" and "chinese flu" appears to have begun by a concerted effort to deflect attention from the administration's mishandling.
Please don't propagate this term, I understand your feelings but this term was absolutely intended to divide and using it can cause harm to Asian Americans.
> and yet I don't see folks going around calling it the bat flu.
It's not a flu. But I wouldn't have a problem with people calling it the bat plague or whatever.
> but calling it the "wuhan flu" and "chinese flu" appears to have begun by a concerted effort to deflect attention from the administration's mishandling.
Given the attributed source of the first uses (of which I am aware) of the term "chinese flu", that seems almost certainly true.
> but this term was absolutely intended to divide
No, it was intended to evade. That's different. You said it yourself: "deflect".
Why is placing the place of origin on China (the nation), and the blame on the Chinese government, confused with placing the blame on a race?
(Yes, there are bigots and jerks who are looking for an excuse to go get racist on someone. There are some. I'm not sure that we should change our language just to avoid giving them an excuse, though, in the same way that we didn't go to these extremes for H1N1. There may be some damage to some actual people - and let's be clear, people who don't deserve it - but free speech is also a value that I uphold. I don't think we should let bigots and jerks control which words we're allowed to use.
And I've seen you elsewhere cite the Nazis and their statements about the Jews. Well, by that point, it will be time for measures equivalent to what we're doing for CoronaVirus, because the damage will be severe.)
> I agree with you that this needs to not become any kind of a racial thing against Chinese people.
It already is. My (conservative, right-voting) non-Chinese Asian parents are slightly nervous about being in public in our town, and my dad's car's mirror was smashed a couple nights ago.
> But I'm going to stick with the facts, especially when someone is trying to paint a counter-factual lie of a narrative.
COVID-19 is its scientific name: Coronavirus Disease 2019.
If you say covid-19, you can still disagree that it can be a dogwhistle, you can just say it that way because you want to stick with the scientific facts.
> And I think there is some value in factually pointing that out, and not letting the government of China create some it-was-some-US-soldiers fairy tale.
I agree that there's value in this. Letting Chinese propaganda and digital interests (continue to) run rampant is, from my layman perspective, a mistake. See TikTok and Discord for examples.
I also think it can be done in a way that doesn't catch families like mine in the crossfire: e.g. "that article is wrong, covid-19 actually started in China."
Obama's response to the ebola crisis reminds me of the trolley problem. By making an attributable action to avert a bigger disaster for a smaller one he became accountable for the outcome. As the larger disaster never materialised he never received due credit.
It seems like Western democracies are very ill-equipped to deal with problems of this nature where all future outcomes are bad and the chosen executive has to deliberately choose the least worse. Facing such scenarios it's often the case our leaders choose not to take any political damage and do nothing until we are at the edge of catastrophe or take half-hearted measures that solve nothing. To take any deliberate and effective action would be not seen be seen as prescient aversion, but considered a wasteful diversion. The social, political and media environments, in particular the "news of the day" media, of the West are suited to guiding executives towards quick and decisive actions in the midst of the crisis because they are biased towards describing the here and now rather than the where and when. For most problems a society faces this may be a sufficient means of dealing with those issues. However in pandemics there are two catastrophes happening simultaneously, the one people think is happening in their midst based on the here and now, and the far more severe catastrophe epidemiologists know is happening based on the where and when. At the start of this crisis Western governments reacted to the former in the expected manner, that is with half-hearted measures and a dismissive attitude, what we needed was for them to react to the crisis epidemiology was describing.
There is very little excuse for Western governments during this pandemic. They caught a lucky break with the SARS outbreak in 2003 and became complacent, choosing not to bolster responses to epidemics as Japan, Taiwan and S.Korea have done. Then they wasted the time lag between the virus outbreak in China to it reaching their countries by declining to take effective actions.
Thank you for clarifying, but what I'm thinking is that our CFR denominator is off by a whole lot right now. Could be wrong, of course, I'm still not an epidemiologist.
My, also not epidemiologist estimate, would be that the only way to have any measure on the spread today when comparing countries is the number of deaths per capita compared to the strain of the healthcare system. Add some factor for the mean time from infection to death and you have it.
Everyone who is ill enough to be about to die will end up in a hospital, with the virus already being transmitted in the society the point in testing everyone else is trending towards negligible.
Sure if the measures taken allows the rate becomes low enough again, then contact tracing might become worth doing again.
You can also try to do statistical tests on some cohorts of population and extrapolate from there but if the resources are limited then saving lives counts more.
Yeah, the problem is that diseases have effectively 2 different fatality rates: one for those who get medical attention, and one for those who don't. As a medical system approaches saturation, it becomes harder to get medical attention to those who need it, and the fatality rate rises to the second value. That's why fast-spreading illnesses end up deadlier.
Hopefully we can avoid saturating the medical system in the US.
With quarantines and traffic, activity, consumption slowdown, the air quality is getting much better, did we just discover the solution for global warming indirectly? which is a much more important problem than those human viruses by the way
Hey. 4.6m over the course of a year is not much compare to this. 50-150m lives could be lost in a matter of a few months if this virus get out of control.
SARS doesn't even come close to the infectiousness of COVID-19. China only registered like 8k patients by the end of it, even you times that by 10, that still dwarfed by the COVID-19 on global scale, and it is only the beginning.
The reason COVID-19 get singled out might not be the mortality rate alone (it looks edging close to 10% right now in Italy, which is alarmingly scary), but more on its impact on paralyzing our health care system with a swarm of people requires hospitalization. And it achieves all this in record time.
I don't agree this is a perception problem, the threat is real. Social media can panic, but you can't really tell people it is OK when patients are lying/dying on the floor of hospitals.
I imagine most of the people reading it made that mistake. I've only ever seen it referred to as COVID-19 or Coronavirus. I assumed SARSCov2 was a more specific name for the virus involved in the early 2000s SARS outbreak.
I've been using this[0] page as a reference, which seems to back up those numbers. It currently shows 82,424 recoveries and 8,697 deaths. Can you recommend a better resource I should be looking at?
It’s not this simple. It takes a longer time for people to recover than it does for people to die. Particularly when you consider that people stop having symptoms, so “recover” in the ordinary sense of the word, but still test positive for the virus, so are not marked as recovered.
That would only list those recoveries that have been bad enough to warrant a test in the first place. With health care systems being overwhelmed the world over, almost no country is doing extensive testing of all people who suspect they might have been infected, meaning there will be a huge number of mild cases going unreported. South Korea is perhaps the only exception.
Look at the mortality specifically in places which overtest: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan. There it looks closer to 1%. There are additional factors to consider like population age, but there Italy is the outlier, not South Korea.
South Korea has done the most extensive testing of any country and there death rate is running around 5%. But here we are playing "I’m not an epidemiologist but".
If someone understands this crude metric as "If you catch it and you show symptoms and you test positive, your likelihood of dieing is roughly (deaths divided by confirmed cases)" then that seems reasonable to me.
"Try to avoid catching it." is reasonable advice, as is "Be aware that you could catch it and be asymptomatic while still being infectious." to discourage people from visiting their grandparents this month.
I don't feel like I'm being misinformed if I divide deaths by confirmed cases, I feel like I'm getting a rough worst-case estimate.
It's worth remembering that the "fatality rate" you're quoting accounts only for people who have been tested and then died. We have no idea what the denominator in an accurate fatality rate calculation would be. Many thousands of mildly symptomatic infections aren't recorded.
Nobody is saying that. The data gets harder to interpret for older people because they're very frequently weak and about to die of something. Some part of why stats seem to vary between countries may be due to differences in recorded deaths, which can be somewhat arbitrary when there are multiple conditions. Sort of like how a lot of HIV+ people die of pneumonia but was the cause of death that or the underlying condition of HIV?
He's a medic, epidemiologist and author of "Why most published research results are wrong", probably one of the most influential papers of the last 20 years across all of science. He says:
even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes. In fact, such “mild” coronaviruses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter. These “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, though the vast majority of them are not documented with precise testing.
The whole essay is worth a read. It has more to say about questionable use of data and analysis than SARS-CoV-2 itself but is worth reading regardless.
What really matters is how fast will the serious (but perhaps not fatal if treated) cases completely DDoS your healthcare. After that point, the mortality rises for both the illness and everything else that's more serious than that illness.
20% of cases require hospitalization. Once the hospitals are taken out, the fatality rate skyrockets and we're in the nightmare phrase - 400+ people died in Italy, today.
On top of that - and I think this isn't seriously reported on just yet - you start bleeding doctors and nurses, especially as nobody in the West has enough PPEs to keep them safe. There are only so many of them to go around.
Indeed, yesterday, more people in Lombardy died of COVID19 than on an average day from all causes combined. And they are on a lockdown for 11 days already
No. Nobody knows how what the actual proportion of cases require hospitalisation. That's the point being made in this entire thread.
It's clearly very hard to let go of what looks like data and say "actually, we don't know". That's a driving cause of current events. There's a lot of analysis out there right now quoting things we "know" about SARS-CoV-2 and when you dig in, it's not real knowledge, it's a garbled or misused statistic. We have lots of epidemiology but not enough epistemology.
South Korea does exhaustive and they get a fatality rate of 1%. WHO gives 1% max + 20% needing hospitalization. The various cruise ships also give a good idea.
At the start, the "Many thousands of mildly symptomatic infections aren't recorded" claim had plausibility. Now it needs to die in fire. This stuff has demonstrated it's qualities at scale and we need to get with it.
The Princess Cruise has nearly perfect data as everyone in a controlled population was tested. (This is not true for South Korea, which has tested less than half a percent of their population.)
The fatality rate was 0.8%. The majority of their passengers were over 60 years old, so even this number is too high compared to the global population.
Yes, the Princess Cruise tells 0.8% might be the best case fatality rate with a functioning medical system.
Even that would be catastrophic for if the virus infects a large percentage of the population, as it is rapidly moving to do. Thus we cannot be even in the least bit sanguine on this and need to move with speed against it. This is in no way comparable to 2009 or other recent events (contrary to your ggp).
No, the worst case scenario is not medical system to help the people who become seriously ill, which 20%, according to WHO and multiple other authorities and statistics.
It doesn't matter if 1% is "optimistic" or not. 20% infection + 1% best-case fatality rate is enough to knock the health care system and begin knocking out the whole of society.
Basically, there's enough information currently to tell people who pay attention and consider rationally that we need to spend every possible effort confining infections and quarantining, basically the entire earth. There is no alternative.
> At the start, the "Many thousands of mildly symptomatic infections aren't recorded" claim had plausibility. Now it needs to die in fire.
Do you have an argument against this other than die in a fire? In the UK the government is literally advising people to NOT call the NHS if they suspect they are infected but stay home and self isolate unless they become severely ill and cannot cope. It's pretty reasonable to assume the denominator is much larger from this behaviour.
The UK plan is insane and could result in massive deaths. But hopefully will just be rolled once the deaths begin.
You can read the discussion of the reasons to be pretty certain of the 1%+ fatality rate and how that's catastrophic on the rest of my thread and in more detail elsewhere. As to the UK plan, look here:
"I'm an epidemiologist, when I heard the UK plan, I thought it was satire":
"I'm not an epidemiologist but" that South Korea number is misleading because it's calculated as death/"people that tested positive". That undercounts the death rate because some of the people that tested positive are still sick and might die. The correct formula is death/"closed cases" which takes into account only people that have recovered or died. That number in SK is currently around 5% though trending down as cases are closed. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-kore...
Your link shows the seriously ill among the unclosed cases as 59 people. If those dies, it won't increase the death significantly - maybe bump it to 1.5%.
But an increase to the base death rate doesn't matter. We should know a 1% death rate is going to be catastrophic and take action.
Edit: originally read you as arguing the death rate as too high so different argument. It's probably better to assume a higher death rate regardless anyway so I changed "you are wrong" to "not quite right" too.
Also need to take into account that people will die a long time before the cases close. Also not all cases will be closed because of limited testing. Right now the ratio of deaths to closed cases in the US is about 60:40
I'm looking forward to the day when the dust has settled and I can see deaths/total population. To be useful it has to run its natural course, rather than being stopped by a vaccine.
The only out way is to test everybody in a large random sample. Even South Korea doesn't do that - people volunteer or a pushed to get tested. The end result is all testing to date has been done on the parts of population who are more likely to be feeling the effects of covid-19.
That skews everything. Even "every person infects 2.3 others" becomes suspect if there is a large reservoir of people out there who have it, are infectious but don't know it. Kids in particular, being the little germ bags they are, areseemingly mostly unaffected by it and so could be a huge vector.
Counting the dead after it's over is one way to by-pass that measurement problem. In Australia, a bad flu season kills 0.015% of the population. My gut feeling is we don't as yet have any idea where covid-19 will end up. Italy is currently sitting at 0.0083%, so they aren't up to the flu levels yet. The current overwhelming of the hospitals could be caused by an extraordinarily high infection rate coupled with it being very, very mild for most people, particularly kids. Or it could because it's as horrible as the media paints it. We simply don't know.
For a highly-contagious disease like this, we can safely assume the number are somewhat accurate as long as tests are being performed. Why? If we missed one case, they will continue to infect more people, as such, becoming much more noticeable. We can safely say fatality rate data from China would be an accurate overall estimation where its spread is contained.
Did we ever run out of ventilators during the 2009 pandemic? 5% of untreated cases (e.g: no ventilator) end up being fatal -- if you look at the numbers in Iran.
I am not sure if you can infer from two past epidemics that this one will be the same. Every epidemic is different. This one spreads way faster than H1N1 and is harder to control because of asymptomatic carriers.
Sure, information (and misinformation) travels much faster now, but I am not sure if that is necessarily a bad thing. It might have done more help than harm in this case for all we know. I think that is the case because this one is not as deadly, so sensationalization and fear-mongering is not easy. If the fatality rate was like 50% (as it was for Avian flu, I found recently to my surprise), it could have been way worse with the media.
>>> Can someone spread the virus without being sick?
People are thought to be most contagious when they are most symptomatic (the sickest).
Some spread might be possible before people show symptoms; there have been reports of this occurring with this new coronavirus, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.
Doesn't seem to indicate asymptomatic carriers are a big concern?
There are people getting sick without having been in contact with other people who are sick. How else would that happen?
"Most contagious when symptomatic" is not even remotely the same thing as "not contagious unless symptomatic". We also don't have a good picture of what symptoms look like aside from the most serious cases.
How would you possibly know reliably they were not in contact with anyone sick?, particularly when being in contact means touching any surfaces where the virus landed hours or it seems even days ago
There is a lot of uncertainty, doubt, and imprecision in those statements. "Some spread might...", "might be possible...", "this is not thought...", etc. These really mean: yes, it's possible.
I would say asymptomatic carriers are the biggest concern.
There's a big difference between 'yes, is technically possible' to having proof (and therefore certainty) that this is a big factor and a differentiator from other from other viruses.
Thank you for the links. I found it before as well with some quick googling but I felt the title deceptive after reading the actual studies linked [0] [1].
>>> The sequence of events suggests that the coronavirus may have been transmitted by the asymptomatic carrier.
>>> If the findings in this report of presumed transmission by an asymptomatic carrier are replicated, the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging. The mechanism by which asymptomatic carriers could acquire and transmit the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 requires further study.
>>> Considering the reported similarity in viral loads between asymptomatic and symptomatic patients [14] and that transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic cases may be possible, even though there is no clear evidence as yet of asymptomatic transmission, the relatively high proportion of asymptomatic infections could have public health implications
No clear evidence of asymptomatic transmission. A lot of 'probably', 'suggests' as before. It's certainly a growing possibility, but not I'd not call it proven yet as a big factor.
Honestly, I think GP's post is an example of the danger of amateur punditry.
On the other, I think Tomas Pueyo's medium blog is really important and correct imo as another amateur pundit. The thing about it is, even with people saying useful, what you really need is the CDC and other authorities being with it enough that they command the most credibility and with them failing to achieve that, even good punditry can only do so much.
Schools and businesses weren't shutting down for months during the swine flu pandemic. Experts are treating this as a serious threat and that's not something the media is responsible for.
Well, at least the situation in Italy is not simply a (social) media phenomenon; the health system is overwhelmed for real. Stuff like this has not been the case with the 2009 swine flu pandemic, or has it?
I think a major difference between Swine Flu and SARS-2 is that it did not affect as many countries simultaneously as now, and, we did not see so many people ending up in the ICU. As I understand the numbers being: 10-20% end up in a hospital, 5-10% end up in ICU, half of them die. I don't remember anything similar for the 2009 pandemic.
The actual differences in CFR have non-linear effects on the scariness of the outbreak: COVID-19 has demonstrated an ability to crush the healthcare system of a modern, wealthy G7 nation, and that has (rightly) spooked people.
I know from personal experience social media amplification is making people sick in itself.
2009 h1n1[1] was aggressively pushed by the WHO as having a 60% CFR[2]. Similar issue to corona19, basing everything on literal test results. Meaningless! Presumably why WHO telling the world to test everything.
Fox News probably has more influence. They did a complete change of direction a few days ago. One morning, Trump and Hannity had disappeared from the front page of the Fox News site, and more or less reasonable statements appeared. Within half a day, Trump changed course, and he started appearing on the Fox News site again.
Still the most useful graph: [1] The Financial Times updates that daily. No projections, just actuals. It's striking how consistently the infection rates track a straight line on a log-linear graph. The US is on the same track as Italy, 12 days behind. So is most of Europe. Only a few Asian countries show signs of control.
with the title "Don't Worry About The Coronavirus. Worry About The Flu." They have since scrubbed or edited much of the content of the article, surely not to hide their completely irresponsible behavior.
edit: If anything, the real story here is the absolute, abject failure of both national and international health organizations and traditional media to provide accurate and up-to-date information on this emerging pandemic and how Twitter and Reddit filled that gap.
I have anxiety disorder and have been seeing a therapist for years. I've been freaking out about this disease since January (saw on reddit) and been prepping. My therapist kept saying me this is just the flu, and made me read articles like this. I read this article back when it's title was "Don't Worry About The Coronavirus. Worry About The Flu."
My point is, I don't think this is irresponsible. This is something else. This new pandemic is an unprecedented occurrence. Normally, the rational thing to do for to not be scared of a pandemic like this because all previous instances (avian, swine flues, SARS, MERS etc) ended up being ok. So, it seemed like being scared for this disease was irrational, panicky, anxious etc. I really don't disagree with that. Even many experts back then were arguing this will be like them. Turns out we just overfit to our immediate history of pandemics.
I think that you shouldn't lose sleep over any pandemic (this one included) but any pandemic contains low-probability of high-impact. Novel pathogens will almost always turn out to be nothing, except when they are something.
This has always been a tail risk situation, something which the media is exceptionally bad at evaluating correctly.
2 days ago, UK government was still recommending Ibuprofen. A few days before that, I had aready found some info that NSAIDs should be avoided if you have CoronaVirus, and you should be taking Paracetamol instead.
I’ll take my “influencers” any day, thank you very much!
I've been following this. It was mentioned by Anthony Fauci in his JAMA interview this morning. The WHO is recommending against ibuprofen, but primarily out of caution. There is weak empirical support for the caution, but it doesn't look like a big deal; there are vastly more important things to worry about right now, but this is one of those things that spreads really fast through social media, probably largely because it's easy to understand.
It certainly makes sense as a precaution, but I'm surprised how widely this advice has spread.
As near as I can tell, it's based on a) 4 sicker-than-expected youth who were taking NSAIDs b) a difficult-to-disentangle association and c) a plausible but by no means ironclad mechanism.
There's a difference between a void of evidence because there's little (or no) effect, vs. a void of evidence because the potential causal factor (and observations of it) (in this case: novel coronavirus) hasn't been present long enough to allow more/better evidence.
I don't blame people when you see/hear contradictory things. People look at China, Japan, Taiwan, SK etc. everyone covered in masks and then newspapers like NYT and even the Surgeon General of the US coming out saying don't wear masks. So ordinary people scratching their head that who is right? So this is what happens really. There is none to "look up to"
Mark Handley, UCL is very clear: he doesn't do interviews and he doesn't do analysis 'what does it mean' he just published charts and sticks to his knitting.
Q: You aren't an epidemiologist. Why should I listen to you?
You probably shouldn't. I'm a computer scientist and I've spend decades analysing data, but you should talk to a real epidemiologist if you want to understand the underlying causes. Computer scientists do know a lot about exponential growth though.
Q: I'm a journalist. Will you appear on my TV show?
No. You should have a real epidemiologist on your TV show.
It's pretty easy to descend into numerology this way. The vomiting camel being the most egregious example [1]. It's just not a reliable or informative way to creating information from numbers.
Do you think that applies in this specific instance? Do you wish Mark to stop doing this, rather than in general deprecating data science absent analytics?
I do. These charts don't seem consistent or useful to me, some of the things that they "show" are artefacts, the numbers have not been refounded as data in the sense that the information required to make them genuinely informative is not available, understood or used here. Handley references data collection having been changed in the UK, but cannot quantify the impact. He does not note that testing is being done differently all over the place, some countries are doing drive throughs as an example. I think that some places are doing one test, others are double testing cases. The list of problems goes on. This is part of the noise that is going to confuse and delay effective responses.
This is what happens when you ask celebrities and politicians for their input on critical things for which they have absolutely zero qualifications or expertise. They are not experts, and we should not ask them, or even give one second of airtime to their opinions.
Why we give them any time on the stage is beyond me.
The video of the football manager biting back is perfect[1], and we need to realize this every time a politician or celebrity is asked something of consequence.
You have to cull the herd once in a while. I’m certain a lot of children with parents living expensive, meaningless lives at the local nursing home are hoping nature takes its proper course here.
I think the 'OMG so much disinformation!' storyline is a tempest in a teapot.
I won't speak for the rest of the world but the entire United States has effectively shut down thanks to an invisible threat that almost certainly has not affected anyone you know. Yet people are generally calm, considerate, and taking appropriate measures. There are always outliers who will buck that trend, but they are pretty far and few between. Don't get fooled just because the media has highlighted those exceptions as if they are widespread.
Where I'm at people are staying home, closing their businesses, keeping their distance from others, and expressing genuine concern. But they aren't panicked.
There are a few people I'm connected with on social media that insist the measures being taken are excessive. Some are just natural skeptics. Some of them are desperate for attention. A few others believe there are aliens at Area 51.
And they might even be right that we've overreacted - time will tell. But in the meantime, they are staying home and taking the recommended precautions anyway, despite their rhetoric.
Focus on the attention whoring cranks at your own psychological peril. But my experience suggests the actions and behavior of my fellow citizens and residents have, so far, been worthy of praise.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadI've been loudly talking about what's happening in Italy, because we had time to get ready in the US if we took it seriously.
Any curve you see today which claims to outline the progress of COVID-19 (rather than the progress of COVID-19 testing and response) is extremely misleading.
From my perspective it seems clear that the American public has been in the grips of anti-intellectualism for quite a long time. In 1980 Asimov made the following famous statement:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
For the record, I'm not American, and not anti-intellectual.
Here's a better example of patronizing by experts from the current crisis: "The average person should not wear a mask. Not only it doesn't protect against the virus, but it actually may harm."
What they mean is: it may harm by giving a false sense of certainty. Clearly the average person is too stupid to understand the difference between perfect protection and "not quite perfect, but better than nothing" protection.
In your Iraq war example I don’t recall bureaucratic experts being involved in support of it. General Shinseki famously thought Rumsfeld’s predictions were wrong and Hans Blicks (spelling?) was famously skeptical of Bush administration claims.
I’ll certainly agree that we’ve had crappy political leadership in the U.S. but I won’t agree that bureaucrats have let the nation down in matters of science. Experts get it wrong and consensus expert opinion is sometimes wrong. There will continue to be examples of where consensus expert opinion is wrong.
You can find individual experts who are patronizing and lecturing as you put it. It’s been rare in my experience that consensus expert opinions that aren’t motivated by money, greed, power, or fame are condescending or lecturing.
I took everything with a grain of salt, but I was alarmed enough about worst case scenarios to start preparing.
Where is it this bad, already?
IMO this is better than the situation in previous similar disasters. Like in the 1918 influenza epidemic, many governments censored information, and there was no social media to circumvent this, so the public understanding of the real situation was quite poor.
People just hate unknowns, and especially "unknown unknowns" and therefore latch onto the most dramatic damage estimates and act accordingly, often further exacerbating the situation.
https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/biomerica-begins-s...
https://www.biomedomics.com/products/infectious-disease/covi...
Maybe we need more people on Twitter to start demanding it? (I'm not really being sarcastic, as crazy as that sounds.)
So, no thank you. I will continue to take my own safety into my own hands, because they seem more concerned with the safety of business interests.
I think this is a good example of an opportunity the population here on HN can exploit, and which many others can't: We can metabolize a deeper-than-average scientific discussion and help convert that into reliable and responsible social discourse. It's just a matter of making the time, of seeking out the expert-level information, and digging in.
This is also more respectable IMO than mainly just being critical of information and influencers. A lot of the so-called influencers are good people who are trying to help out where they can. That's why they're getting attention; the social organism is looking for help right now. The critical viewpoint is not nearly as effective under these circumstances, in part because it shoots down solutions more than it creates or identifies them.
Folks here know about enough science and math to be persuasive when extrapolating, but not enough to truly understand what they're reading, and that's dangerous.
And yesterday most of the Covid threads here were terrible, full of racism, conspiracies, and so on. Another programmer-based forum I frequent has banned Covid topics altogether.
I don't have good solutions here, other than to try to be very careful in choosing only high quality information sources. Getting the word out will be a key part of the response, and I see serious problems in that.
I appreciate the sentiment, but no: HN people and related writing is invariably bad. I realize this will raise hackles.
>It's just a matter of making the time, of seeking out the expert-level information, and digging in.
Racaniello has a two-hour podcast comprised of complicated, expert-level information, and it takes talent to winnow that down into lay language and, more importantly, lay time-constraints. Among people who can barely concern themselves with GitHub READMEs and "wait, but what is it?"[1] site pitches, the HN population does not have a good track record at clarifying plain information, let alone translating between skill levels.
This difficulty and need for understandability is where the goofs described in the article find room to exist. "Just come up with something, and something is better than nothing," the charlatan professes. The problem is that the true expertise gets clouded or even left at the wayside. Irrelevant or confounding perspectives included for no good reason, faulty conclusions, and any other kind of "it was hard before, you simplified it, now it's impossible" derivations of the source material.
Of course, don't get me started on two-hour (and longer) podcasts, itself a format that is extremely hostile to a listener's free time.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22593568
I already knew this before I made the subreddit, which I did just because I find this stuff interesting, but honestly right now there is very little appetite from the general public in terms of experimenting with treatments or prophylactic measures that could potentially hurt them. Maybe that will change in a few weeks, but right now there is very little risk of people being harmed by whatever misinformation is currently out there.
As of right now most people don't even believe the virus can hurt them in the first place. It's hard enough just to folks to stay inside.
I've found the internet to be an invaluable source of outstanding information on this virus (dashboards of diagnoses, research on variants, journal articles on origin, updates about potential treatments) and have found most people to relatively reasonable (e.g. frustrated about lack of testing, but nothing resembling conspiracy theories). That said I focus on HN/reddit.
On the other hand, there is the other side of not being reasonable. Yesterday a friend was at the park with her kids. Another mom was on her phone talking to her doctor about her kid's fever and cough. The same kid that she had brought to the public park!
I know people who are planning trips to Hawaii while the kids are on this extended vacation.
There are a lot of people who are not taking this at all seriously.
ETA: check elsewhere in this thread, though there's a good chance it'll be quickly downvoted.
Twitter is ahead of the newspapers. And it's totally behind the data, with its head in the sand. And everywhere in between. Twitter doesn't give you an answer; it gives you 10,000 answers. Sure, the truth is in there... somewhere. Good luck finding it reliably, though.
Remember, for every guy like you there's someone following QAnon and believing in that schizophrenic nonsense.
H1N1 ended up not being as fatal as SARSCoV2, but we didn't know that at the time. People were saying it had a CFR of >1% in Mexico (where the original outbreak was). That number dropped way down as better data came in after the outbreak.
But still, up to 575,000 people may have died from it. That's not nothing.
And... nobody cared? People were calm. It was on the news, but there was no panic.
I think part of it was how social media has changed the way we consume and respond to information. I've seen extreme panic on FB, Reddit, HN, Twitter -- which seems to cause more panic. Everything in the media is turned up to 11 now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
It's interesting to go back further and read this Bird Flu article from 2005, where a UN Health Official warned of 150 million possible deaths, and said things like, "It's like a combination of global warming and HIV/Aids 10 times faster than it's running at the moment." So, the media has always turned things up to 11, but something about the current era has exacerbated the issue.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4292426.stm
Keep in mind the original SARS had a death rate of 10%, so obviously there was a tremendous amount of fear that this new related virus would be similarly lethal.
No, they aren't US policy of suppression was an abrupt policy turn that came with this report: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-rese...
The Chinese example didn't change overnight, the information available about predicted outcomes of different policy approaches in the US and UK did, and that's what drove policy change, including the Trump Administration flipping from claiming it was a hoax cooked up by political opponents to treating it as a serious issue.
This time around the outbreak originated in China that covered up the issue initially and ended up making the issue a lot worse than it could have been. Additionally, once everyone should've been paying attention on a global scale, Mr President down there in the US just tried to downplay the possible effects of a pandemic and it looks, at the moment, like he again just made everything worse.
Usually we can sit safe and confident at home that the government is overreacting to the situation and everything will be fine, this time around the authorities most globally visible (the US and China where the outbreak started) have obviously bungled their response and we're seeing a lot of panic because people don't have faith in the ability for the globe to respond in a unified manner.
Just this morning, CNN was frothing at the mouth at Trump calling it the "China virus" -- I mean, yeah, it's a virus that came from China -- and they have an op-ed on how this term is stoking xenophobia.
The usage of that term is solely to try and deflect responsibility for anything domestic to China and pass the buck... it also has the potential to cause hate crimes in a time when we really should be unifying as nations.
That's because it is. There have been many reports of harassment and assaults on Chinese Americans, and this kind of label doesn't go away. The term "Spanish Flu" is still used 100 years later, not because it originated there (it didn't -- it almost certainly originated in midwestern USA) but because the media paid more attention there.
The terms we use matter.
This is an extreme, uncited, and frankly inflammatory extrapolation. There have been only a handful of such attacks -- I believe 5-ish (reported by The New Yorker and CNN). It's just the typical race-baiting we've seen that generates outrage clicks. Calling it the "China Virus" has no more societal impact (which is: minor at best) than the "Spanish Flu."
Really, it just strengthens my point about the nonsense the media is peddling, instead of asking the populace to remain calm, take precautions, and stay safe.
How many are an acceptable number? Or tolerable number?
Dogwhistling for racism isn't an innocent action and deserves no understanding, it is hate filled and driven out of self-interest by those doing it.
This is an absolutely insane analogy -- not to mention grossly off-base. No one is scapegoating the Chinese people (or, even less so, Americans that happen to have Asian ancestry). Calling it the "Chinese Virus" simply points to its geographic source, i.e. Wuhan, China.
Yeah, Godwin's Law strikes again. Not everything is literally Hitler.
> This is an extreme, uncited, and frankly inflammatory extrapolation. There have been only a handful of such attacks -- I believe 5-ish (reported by The New Yorker and CNN).[0]
So nobody is doing this? Or have there been incidents that you yourself have previously acknowledged?
I tried civilly engaging in discourse with you earlier[1]. But now it seems like you're arguing with people just to argue, not to actually discuss these topics.
Also, you can correct people who are mistaken about where it originated without saying "Chinese flu". E.g. "actually, the coronavirus originated in China". I remarked on this to another user who said they just wanted to stick to the facts about its origins.[2]
If you're intent on making sure China is regarded as the source and/or culprit, you can emphasize further by adding something like, "and that's why the majority of cases and deaths from [coronavirus/covid-19] were in China. It started there." And that can be said perfectly fine without "Chinese virus".
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22621821
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622069
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622774
How about I provide some personal anecdata instead?
My (Asian) parents -- who prefer Fox over CNN and vote right, in case anyone fears they're under the spell of frothing journalists -- have been more nervous about going about in public. My dad's car's mirror was smashed a couple nights ago.
In a similar way that I'm not as deeply affected by the current economic environment as a low wage worker is, you're not as affected by the cultural perception as people like my family are. With that in mind, I ask that you acknowledge that such acts could very well be more common than the sensationalized ones that liberal media eagerly pounce upon, and thus more common than you personally might be aware of.
Well, if one believed that both these things were equally true, which one would be more worthwhile writing about?
I've seen a LOT of stories about the problems of hoarding, pleas to stop hoarding, etc...
I just assume bad cases of confirmation virus when I see claims like this, now.
Imagine if you're about to go skydiving and I'm responsible for packing your chute. As I pack, you notice a cord looks badly frayed. I tell you, "The cord is totally not frayed! They all look like that." Then I tell you, "Don't worry, we'll replace it before you go out." Then you find out we didn't actually replace it, and you look up on the internet that it can easily kill you. Then I say, "I knew it was a problem all along but we have a plan in place to handle that."
Would all of that make you feel less or more afraid of your skydiving experience?
This crisis has been overplayed. California governor suggesting schools be closed for 2.5 additional months? This is getting absurd. More people were in Baltimore shootings last week than died in Santa Clara Country from Wuhan virus.
I agree with you that this needs to not become any kind of a racial thing against Chinese people. But I'm going to stick with the facts, especially when someone is trying to paint a counter-factual lie of a narrative.
Please don't propagate this term, I understand your feelings but this term was absolutely intended to divide and using it can cause harm to Asian Americans.
Is that confirmed, or just hypothesized?
> and yet I don't see folks going around calling it the bat flu.
It's not a flu. But I wouldn't have a problem with people calling it the bat plague or whatever.
> but calling it the "wuhan flu" and "chinese flu" appears to have begun by a concerted effort to deflect attention from the administration's mishandling.
Given the attributed source of the first uses (of which I am aware) of the term "chinese flu", that seems almost certainly true.
> but this term was absolutely intended to divide
No, it was intended to evade. That's different. You said it yourself: "deflect".
Why is placing the place of origin on China (the nation), and the blame on the Chinese government, confused with placing the blame on a race?
(Yes, there are bigots and jerks who are looking for an excuse to go get racist on someone. There are some. I'm not sure that we should change our language just to avoid giving them an excuse, though, in the same way that we didn't go to these extremes for H1N1. There may be some damage to some actual people - and let's be clear, people who don't deserve it - but free speech is also a value that I uphold. I don't think we should let bigots and jerks control which words we're allowed to use.
And I've seen you elsewhere cite the Nazis and their statements about the Jews. Well, by that point, it will be time for measures equivalent to what we're doing for CoronaVirus, because the damage will be severe.)
It already is. My (conservative, right-voting) non-Chinese Asian parents are slightly nervous about being in public in our town, and my dad's car's mirror was smashed a couple nights ago.
> But I'm going to stick with the facts, especially when someone is trying to paint a counter-factual lie of a narrative.
COVID-19 is its scientific name: Coronavirus Disease 2019.
If you say covid-19, you can still disagree that it can be a dogwhistle, you can just say it that way because you want to stick with the scientific facts.
> And I think there is some value in factually pointing that out, and not letting the government of China create some it-was-some-US-soldiers fairy tale.
I agree that there's value in this. Letting Chinese propaganda and digital interests (continue to) run rampant is, from my layman perspective, a mistake. See TikTok and Discord for examples.
I also think it can be done in a way that doesn't catch families like mine in the crossfire: e.g. "that article is wrong, covid-19 actually started in China."
And over again.
It seems like Western democracies are very ill-equipped to deal with problems of this nature where all future outcomes are bad and the chosen executive has to deliberately choose the least worse. Facing such scenarios it's often the case our leaders choose not to take any political damage and do nothing until we are at the edge of catastrophe or take half-hearted measures that solve nothing. To take any deliberate and effective action would be not seen be seen as prescient aversion, but considered a wasteful diversion. The social, political and media environments, in particular the "news of the day" media, of the West are suited to guiding executives towards quick and decisive actions in the midst of the crisis because they are biased towards describing the here and now rather than the where and when. For most problems a society faces this may be a sufficient means of dealing with those issues. However in pandemics there are two catastrophes happening simultaneously, the one people think is happening in their midst based on the here and now, and the far more severe catastrophe epidemiologists know is happening based on the where and when. At the start of this crisis Western governments reacted to the former in the expected manner, that is with half-hearted measures and a dismissive attitude, what we needed was for them to react to the crisis epidemiology was describing.
There is very little excuse for Western governments during this pandemic. They caught a lucky break with the SARS outbreak in 2003 and became complacent, choosing not to bolster responses to epidemics as Japan, Taiwan and S.Korea have done. Then they wasted the time lag between the virus outbreak in China to it reaching their countries by declining to take effective actions.
It's certainly possible that SARSCoV2 will have fewer total deaths than H1N1.
Out of confirmed infections. The fatality rate would only decrease as more people are discovered to have been infected.
Everyone who is ill enough to be about to die will end up in a hospital, with the virus already being transmitted in the society the point in testing everyone else is trending towards negligible.
Sure if the measures taken allows the rate becomes low enough again, then contact tracing might become worth doing again.
You can also try to do statistical tests on some cohorts of population and extrapolate from there but if the resources are limited then saving lives counts more.
Hopefully we can avoid saturating the medical system in the US.
Now, that's some hard facts you have there!
Nobody knows how many people died from H1N1 in 2009. The CDC has only estimates and the range is huge:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-global-estimates...
And that is why I used the words I did.
With quarantines and traffic, activity, consumption slowdown, the air quality is getting much better, did we just discover the solution for global warming indirectly? which is a much more important problem than those human viruses by the way
The reason COVID-19 get singled out might not be the mortality rate alone (it looks edging close to 10% right now in Italy, which is alarmingly scary), but more on its impact on paralyzing our health care system with a swarm of people requires hospitalization. And it achieves all this in record time.
I don't agree this is a perception problem, the threat is real. Social media can panic, but you can't really tell people it is OK when patients are lying/dying on the floor of hospitals.
I suspect that you might have confused SARSCov2 for SARS?
Please stop dividing deaths by confirmed cases and reporting that as mortality rate.
The number of confirmed cases is much, much larger than actual cases, in particular in outbreak zones where testing is very limited.
[0]https://nssac.bii.virginia.edu/covid-19/dashboard/
Current fatality rate is less than 1% of confirmed cases.
Currently experts are giving us data and people are giving us sources.
[1] Countries like Iran literally have mass graves at this point and here you are claiming this is overblown by social media.
You really need to stop.
[1] https://youtu.be/eWUT1V6WrRA?t=12
If someone understands this crude metric as "If you catch it and you show symptoms and you test positive, your likelihood of dieing is roughly (deaths divided by confirmed cases)" then that seems reasonable to me.
"Try to avoid catching it." is reasonable advice, as is "Be aware that you could catch it and be asymptomatic while still being infectious." to discourage people from visiting their grandparents this month.
I don't feel like I'm being misinformed if I divide deaths by confirmed cases, I feel like I'm getting a rough worst-case estimate.
John Ionnadis has been writing about this:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
He's a medic, epidemiologist and author of "Why most published research results are wrong", probably one of the most influential papers of the last 20 years across all of science. He says:
even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes. In fact, such “mild” coronaviruses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter. These “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, though the vast majority of them are not documented with precise testing.
The whole essay is worth a read. It has more to say about questionable use of data and analysis than SARS-CoV-2 itself but is worth reading regardless.
20% of cases require hospitalization. Once the hospitals are taken out, the fatality rate skyrockets and we're in the nightmare phrase - 400+ people died in Italy, today.
It's clearly very hard to let go of what looks like data and say "actually, we don't know". That's a driving cause of current events. There's a lot of analysis out there right now quoting things we "know" about SARS-CoV-2 and when you dig in, it's not real knowledge, it's a garbled or misused statistic. We have lots of epidemiology but not enough epistemology.
At the start, the "Many thousands of mildly symptomatic infections aren't recorded" claim had plausibility. Now it needs to die in fire. This stuff has demonstrated it's qualities at scale and we need to get with it.
This won't be the case for other countries. 1% is way too optimistic at this point.
The fatality rate was 0.8%. The majority of their passengers were over 60 years old, so even this number is too high compared to the global population.
Even that would be catastrophic for if the virus infects a large percentage of the population, as it is rapidly moving to do. Thus we cannot be even in the least bit sanguine on this and need to move with speed against it. This is in no way comparable to 2009 or other recent events (contrary to your ggp).
Basically, there's enough information currently to tell people who pay attention and consider rationally that we need to spend every possible effort confining infections and quarantining, basically the entire earth. There is no alternative.
Do you have an argument against this other than die in a fire? In the UK the government is literally advising people to NOT call the NHS if they suspect they are infected but stay home and self isolate unless they become severely ill and cannot cope. It's pretty reasonable to assume the denominator is much larger from this behaviour.
You can read the discussion of the reasons to be pretty certain of the 1%+ fatality rate and how that's catastrophic on the rest of my thread and in more detail elsewhere. As to the UK plan, look here:
"I'm an epidemiologist, when I heard the UK plan, I thought it was satire":
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/epidem...
Your link shows the seriously ill among the unclosed cases as 59 people. If those dies, it won't increase the death significantly - maybe bump it to 1.5%.
But an increase to the base death rate doesn't matter. We should know a 1% death rate is going to be catastrophic and take action.
Edit: originally read you as arguing the death rate as too high so different argument. It's probably better to assume a higher death rate regardless anyway so I changed "you are wrong" to "not quite right" too.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
The only out way is to test everybody in a large random sample. Even South Korea doesn't do that - people volunteer or a pushed to get tested. The end result is all testing to date has been done on the parts of population who are more likely to be feeling the effects of covid-19.
That skews everything. Even "every person infects 2.3 others" becomes suspect if there is a large reservoir of people out there who have it, are infectious but don't know it. Kids in particular, being the little germ bags they are, areseemingly mostly unaffected by it and so could be a huge vector.
Counting the dead after it's over is one way to by-pass that measurement problem. In Australia, a bad flu season kills 0.015% of the population. My gut feeling is we don't as yet have any idea where covid-19 will end up. Italy is currently sitting at 0.0083%, so they aren't up to the flu levels yet. The current overwhelming of the hospitals could be caused by an extraordinarily high infection rate coupled with it being very, very mild for most people, particularly kids. Or it could because it's as horrible as the media paints it. We simply don't know.
Sure, information (and misinformation) travels much faster now, but I am not sure if that is necessarily a bad thing. It might have done more help than harm in this case for all we know. I think that is the case because this one is not as deadly, so sensationalization and fear-mongering is not easy. If the fatality rate was like 50% (as it was for Avian flu, I found recently to my surprise), it could have been way worse with the media.
From https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi...
>>> Can someone spread the virus without being sick? People are thought to be most contagious when they are most symptomatic (the sickest). Some spread might be possible before people show symptoms; there have been reports of this occurring with this new coronavirus, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.
Doesn't seem to indicate asymptomatic carriers are a big concern?
"Most contagious when symptomatic" is not even remotely the same thing as "not contagious unless symptomatic". We also don't have a good picture of what symptoms look like aside from the most serious cases.
I would say asymptomatic carriers are the biggest concern.
>>> The sequence of events suggests that the coronavirus may have been transmitted by the asymptomatic carrier.
>>> If the findings in this report of presumed transmission by an asymptomatic carrier are replicated, the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging. The mechanism by which asymptomatic carriers could acquire and transmit the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 requires further study.
>>> Considering the reported similarity in viral loads between asymptomatic and symptomatic patients [14] and that transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic cases may be possible, even though there is no clear evidence as yet of asymptomatic transmission, the relatively high proportion of asymptomatic infections could have public health implications
No clear evidence of asymptomatic transmission. A lot of 'probably', 'suggests' as before. It's certainly a growing possibility, but not I'd not call it proven yet as a big factor.
[0] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27620...
On the other, I think Tomas Pueyo's medium blog is really important and correct imo as another amateur pundit. The thing about it is, even with people saying useful, what you really need is the CDC and other authorities being with it enough that they command the most credibility and with them failing to achieve that, even good punditry can only do so much.
Because it wasn’t an election year in the US.
2009 h1n1[1] was aggressively pushed by the WHO as having a 60% CFR[2]. Similar issue to corona19, basing everything on literal test results. Meaningless! Presumably why WHO telling the world to test everything.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8094655.stm [2] https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract [3] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/16/swine-flu-pand...
Still the most useful graph: [1] The Financial Times updates that daily. No projections, just actuals. It's striking how consistently the infection rates track a straight line on a log-linear graph. The US is on the same track as Italy, 12 days behind. So is most of Europe. Only a few Asian countries show signs of control.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...
This medical influencer issue seems to be a much more common thing: from Goop eggs, to anti-vaxers, to corona-influencers.
The solution seems to be the need to increase scientific knowledge.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/coronavirus-...
with the title "Don't Worry About The Coronavirus. Worry About The Flu." They have since scrubbed or edited much of the content of the article, surely not to hide their completely irresponsible behavior.
edit: If anything, the real story here is the absolute, abject failure of both national and international health organizations and traditional media to provide accurate and up-to-date information on this emerging pandemic and how Twitter and Reddit filled that gap.
My point is, I don't think this is irresponsible. This is something else. This new pandemic is an unprecedented occurrence. Normally, the rational thing to do for to not be scared of a pandemic like this because all previous instances (avian, swine flues, SARS, MERS etc) ended up being ok. So, it seemed like being scared for this disease was irrational, panicky, anxious etc. I really don't disagree with that. Even many experts back then were arguing this will be like them. Turns out we just overfit to our immediate history of pandemics.
This has always been a tail risk situation, something which the media is exceptionally bad at evaluating correctly.
Does anyone think there's any possibility that is, in fact, its true origin?
I’ll take my “influencers” any day, thank you very much!
I've seen the short Lancet piece which speculates about co-morbidities and an ACE-related mechanism, but the text is explicitly very speculative.
Good survey I found: https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-report...
But feel free to wait for scientific paper in 18 months!
As near as I can tell, it's based on a) 4 sicker-than-expected youth who were taking NSAIDs b) a difficult-to-disentangle association and c) a plausible but by no means ironclad mechanism.
(And that's assuming the paracetamol thing is even correct.)
At least the NYT is now backtracking but it's too little too late https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...
Wise man.
http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/
Q: You aren't an epidemiologist. Why should I listen to you?
You probably shouldn't. I'm a computer scientist and I've spend decades analysing data, but you should talk to a real epidemiologist if you want to understand the underlying causes. Computer scientists do know a lot about exponential growth though.
Q: I'm a journalist. Will you appear on my TV show?
No. You should have a real epidemiologist on your TV show.
Mark Handley, UCL.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk037xDQF2Ya-Hu4vjdEs...
Btw. This is analytics absent Data Science....
Why we give them any time on the stage is beyond me.
The video of the football manager biting back is perfect[1], and we need to realize this every time a politician or celebrity is asked something of consequence.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/sports/2020/03/05/jurgen-klopp-no...
I won't speak for the rest of the world but the entire United States has effectively shut down thanks to an invisible threat that almost certainly has not affected anyone you know. Yet people are generally calm, considerate, and taking appropriate measures. There are always outliers who will buck that trend, but they are pretty far and few between. Don't get fooled just because the media has highlighted those exceptions as if they are widespread.
Where I'm at people are staying home, closing their businesses, keeping their distance from others, and expressing genuine concern. But they aren't panicked.
There are a few people I'm connected with on social media that insist the measures being taken are excessive. Some are just natural skeptics. Some of them are desperate for attention. A few others believe there are aliens at Area 51.
And they might even be right that we've overreacted - time will tell. But in the meantime, they are staying home and taking the recommended precautions anyway, despite their rhetoric.
Focus on the attention whoring cranks at your own psychological peril. But my experience suggests the actions and behavior of my fellow citizens and residents have, so far, been worthy of praise.
[1] Feel good hit of the summer, Homme, J. et-al (2000)