Most humans have a really hard time with exponential processes. They are hard for them to spot and truly understand. So when something goes 1, 2, 4, 8 they see it as linear and when it's doubling with larger numbers they suddenly get it. And then it's too late.
To be fair, people-- even experts (checkout the first 538 survey of experts) and authorities-- have happily pretended covid19's behavior was linear even when the linear fit was many sigma away from the measurements...
I agree that it's worthwhile intuition in many cases, but really not here and even people equipt with both the data and the mathematical expertise to use it there have also made many bad calls on this.
Excellent point Paul! How can we actually do a better job of keeping track of credibility? There are so many talking heads that it is hard to remember who said what and who is or is not credible. You almost would need a Black Mirror style AR credibility score floating in view?
From what I'm reading, I think there are still a significant minority of people who think this isn't an issue. I've had to learn to just walk away from comments on a variety of media where comments such as 'psychosomatic', 'less dangerous than the flu that kills 50,000 each year', 'patented by the illuminati', 'caused by 5G masts', and so on. I ended up deleting my twitter account as I dared try to engage with one UK-based journalist who was saying that 'they' were destroying the economy to serve their own foul needs (everyone under house arrest, total control of society, etc). For me, it's just not worth doing this - it's hard enough being separated from the people I care about, without filling the void with attempts to have a rational discussion with people who seem to be divorced from everyday fact.
You would think this would be the reality check that was needed, but it's not the case for everyone. I guess that is human pyschology writ large, but I'm finding that I just have to watch videos and not even look in the comments as it's just a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and people being just plain wrong in a lot of places.
Of all the conspiracy theories out there, the 'caused by 5G masts' is the one that confuses me the most. I get the possible aversion to 5G, but how does one make the leap from that to it causing COVID?
Conspiracy theorists have long been depicted as just weirdos who think they're smart. They're actually generally people who have experienced trauma and are suffering from paranoia. Conspiracies validate feelings of distrust. More sad than funny.
Yep, this also comes packaged with NWO, there is one country that actively works on spreading this crap on social media, I believe the goal is to weaken Western countries by setting up their citizens against their own government.
The argument all over my facebook feed is that Africa is both the only country with no Coronavirus and the only country with no 5G. But really, these are the same friends arguing for flat earth in a lot of cases.
The number of things wrong with this makes me despair.
1. Africa is a continent, not a country.
2. Some countries in Africa DO have 5G deployments, including my home country of South Africa. In the news recently is a possible link between BCG vaccinations and reduced fatality rates from Covid-19. South Africa has fairly high BCG vaccination rates due to the prevalence of TB
3. Iran has a severe problem with Covid-19, but no 5G deployments.
But as you say, this comes from the same type of crowd that believes in all the other bullshit (flat earth, vaccinations give you autism, etc.) so you can hardly expect an informed response to this.
For every reasoned answer you give them an avalanche of utter bullshit flows forth. This might be one of those rare occasions where the solution to bad speech is not more speech. The mind of the conspiracy believers is just too darned efficient at justifying bad reasoning.
Yes, but to those who are undecided and are on the edge, a good answer might pull them to the right side. I know for a fact that it happened to me multiple times, when I saw a heated argument between two people (mostly on technical topics though, not something like corona).
My aunt sent me a video asking my opinion (yay?), and I've been hearing ominous FUD about "5G" long enough that I wanted to see where it was actually coming from. So I watched it.
The bit I gleaned was the claim that since 60GHz is absorbed by oxygen (haven't checked this, but I'd assume similar to 2.4GHz being absorbed by water), it therefore interferes with your lungs' ability to intake oxygen. (my low-effort analysis: the radio waves won't penetrate your skin by more than a few millimeters, and therefore could in no way act in your lungs)
The whole narrative was much jumping around making connections that would seem plausible if you don't know or try to investigate technical details. For example - a defense contractor worked on 60GHz gear as well as communications for cruise ships -> smoking gun!
I'm sure there was plenty of innuendo that rolled right off my back, but makes an emotional impression. My aunt had gotten the impression that 5G is 50-60 times the power of a microwave oven. I couldn't bring myself to watch the video again to find what could possibly be interpreted this way, but I'm guessing it was talking about the frequency while implying magnitude.
I'll clue you in: While some actually believe in the nutty conspiracy crap, it's mostly being pushed by anti-Chinese racists/nationalists/tribalists. Remember how that 5G tower gear is mostly made by Huawei? This is an excuse to attack them and how to get others to do it for them. You need to understand how plausible deniability is so often used by JAQoff deplorables.
i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance.
The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to it makes it a very peculiar epidemic. And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too worried at all.
As for the number of death, let's not forget the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, and that is with people getting vaccinated. It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea..
Another thing that i haven't read a lot, is that the WHO have been alarming people in the past with previous epidemic (srars, mers, ebola, etc), and nothing "special" happened (i suppose partly because people correctly dealt with it, but also because of the nature of the virus). It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.
Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.
FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with substantial year to year variation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/
Even if you steadfastly refuse to accept the obvious exponential dynamics of contagion in a naive population, perhaps the fact that the figures you are reasoning from are off by a constant factor of 3 to >10 might cause you to reconsider your level of confidence?
> Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.
This. It seems most people are incapable of making decisions purely based on what their mind or the math says. I kind of get it, it didn't "feel real" in the beginning, it was just the mind that went "omg we need to act NOW", not the stomach. I suspect this is why the Silicon Valley Crowd was so far ahead of the curve - they deal with exponential growth more often, and are used to listen to just their brains, for better or worse.
Plus, a lot of the interventions don't really make much sense if you're the only one doing them.
For example, imagine I'm not worried about my own safety, but I am for the safety of others. Staying home and self-isolating will help with this if almost everyone else does it - but if I start a month early, doing it on my own? Negligible benefit.
And of course, much easier to get to work from home at an otherwise-non-WFH company once your boss and their boss are thinking the same way as you, and they've heard Google and Apple are doing the same...
I don't think people feared catching the virus at all. Exponential dynamics doesn't change anything in your response in that situation. I think every winter viruses have exponential dynamics as well, and they're not a big deal. You catch it, and you get over it..
Actually that's why most public communication for staying at home doesn't say "protect yourself", but rather emphasis on protecting "others" (aka : people vulnerable). The virus is extremely dangerous, but only for a (not that small) minority of people. That's a weird one.
It's still making a large portion of the people who aren't dying extremely ill.
I think one of the biggest public health communication disasters of covid19 is the reliance on mortality as the communication endpoint.
It's acceptable for other threats-- like automotive accidents-- to speak in terms of mortality because there isn't a huge population which is much less exposed to dying but still exposed to serious illness. Automotive accidents also seriously injure many more people than they kill, but not in a way that lends itself to a false impression of immunity.
"Death" makes a nice clear warning for the risks of driving, and other very bad but not death outcomes are just some factor of the death outcomes... it isn't like the audience is comparing death rates to population numbers then deciding that the death from driving isn't worth worrying about just because we didn't also include maimed-for-life.
For covid19 we've ended up making many 20 and 30 year olds believe that it doesn't threaten them. It does. They may not be dying in especially large numbers-- especially where either hospitals are not overloaded or where they're engaging in the ethically dubious practice of triaging younger people ahead of others based purely on their age rather than, e.g. response to treatment--, but they are still becoming seriously and painfully ill and ending up with severe immune system damage -- which takes a long time will recover and will result in latent mortality --, and for many likely lifelong injury in the form of extensive lung scaring.
Infections like influenza are much less contagious-- with an R0 of 1.3 vs 2 to 3 (an enormous difference)--, less deadly, face a population which is at least somewhat resistant (in part due to heroic vaccination efforts) and which knows how to rapidly create new and effective vaccines against it. It's not really that comparable.
Curious: what are you basing this on? Do you have some statistical data that shows hospitalization rates of young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona virus?
I myself haven't yet seen any data that would make this virus any worse than the flu (which means it's still dangerous, just maybe not "everybody-hide-under-the-rock" dangerous). Even data from Italy doesn't show mortality any higher than previous years.
Do you have links to data that supports what you wrote?
I agree it is a communication disaster though. If I see another chart with red line, logarithmic scale, not starting from zero or with some approximated (red) curve that doesn't specify the formula... :-/
> hospitalization rates of young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona virus?
What do you think the mechanism is here? Why are people being hospitalised with covid-19, if it's not covid-19 causing the hospitalisation?
People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on ventilators, until covid-19 happens and now the ITUs are full of people with covid-19 having air pumped into their lungs to push the fluid out.
People are counted in the stats produced by hospitals if they have the virus, not if they've been hospitalised because of the virus. Literally if someone breaks their arm and they're tested positive, that goes into the stats for "COVID-19 cases". This is also true if someone dies of anything whilst having the virus; they're recorded as a "COVID-19 death".
The statistics here don't tell us what they sound like they're telling us. We'd see exactly the same pattern if the rules were suddenly changed to require every hospital admission to be tested for the common cold in a regular year - the number of "cases" and "deaths" would increase dramatically every day.
People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on ventilators
That statement is far too vague. People of all ages spend time on ventilators every years, especially during a flu outbreak. This is especially true of young children (under 5) whom COVID-19 doesn't affect at all! And COVID-19 is known to affect very few under 50s; the numbers here are so tiny the media can literally write entire stories about individual cases.
So what does "people" and "much time" mean in this sentence?
You can see some data on deaths from pneumonia by age group here:
Of course deaths isn't the same thing as hospitalisation as the young are more likely to recover than the old. So this data isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it's at least quantifiable.
It's not safe to make a claim about this virus without comparing it to known values from prior years or outbreaks, when comparing the same thing. Every single number we're being presented with is presented without context and it leads to catastrophic mistakes of understanding. Number of positive test increases is shown without the number of negative test increases as well (i.e. an exponential increase in testing looks like an exponential increase in cases), deaths are counted without any investigation to decide what caused that death and so on.
It's very easy to get a totally misleading impression of what's going on. This is likely why in so many parts of the world hospitals are now reporting themselves as empty for weeks, despite the supposed "exponential growth" that should have overwhelmed them by now. In fact in Switzerland hospitals are needing to apply for emergency funding because the huge drop in patient numbers has caused their revenue to dry up.
Your theory is that there is surge of broken hands and unrelated health issues, but all those people also happen to have covid so covid gets blamed? Like, New York and Italia and France have to build make-shift hospitals cause of broken hands epidemic?
There's clearly a virus spreading. It sends some people to hospital. Quite a few viruses do that.
Unlike those, this virus is different in one key way - governments have decreed that any death where the virus is present is counted as a "virus death", and have decreed mass testing to find infections. Consider a virus that is not really dangerous but highly infectious, like any common cold or flu. Then many people will turn up at hospital with it, but in reality their problem is something else. With our current data that would look like hospitals being flooded in a way never seen before, but it'd be a data artifact, not something real.
As for countries having to build makeshift hospitals, two things:
1. Local overloads happen during bad flu seasons too. You can find many reports in the past about wards being converted, tents being constructed to hold patients on the streets from earlier flu pandemics. Arguably making quick hospitals to handle that sort of bad flu season should be a more common practice.
2. No country anywhere is experiencing general overload. Even in Italy, a few days ago a politician was publicly asking why they're sending patients to Germany when in nearby Veneto there are hospitals that are 2/3rds empty.
Projections of mass death requiring everyone to shelter-in-place are based on the belief that everywhere will "go Bergamo" simultaneously at once. That isn't happening, it's not even close to happening.
Go investigate and you can find stories of deserted hospitals all over the world right now. They've been cleared out in anticipation of an imminent surge that isn't appearing. That's why Germany and Switzerland can take in patients from neighbouring countries - not only are there no makeshift hospitals but hospitals need financial bailouts because they've having to pay so many staff who are basically idled, like many other businesses.
Clearly there's a huge mismatch between the global view and a small number of local hotspots, and our understanding of what's happening is heavily coloured by the press.
Thanks for describing exactly what it looks like when preparing for a major outbreak. Its measurable, growing geometrically without breaking stride, and 6X-10X more deadly than anything we can name.
If we succeed at slowing the growth, even stopping it, then thank god those hospitals will remain empty.
It is not growing geometrically (or only with a tiny multiplier if so). If the feared scenario of exponential growth were the case then we'd see the proportion of positive test cases doubling, not just the raw number. Right now what's being seen is that if you increase testing 10x you find 10x more cases, which is consistent with finding something that's at a somewhat steady background level.
It looks like it doubles every few days because of the rapid increase in testing.
Moreover these hospitals are now entering their second week of being idled. They should be very busy by now if the sick were really growing exponentially - they're still mostly empty.
"New York City's Elmhurst hospital - the 'epicenter of the epicenter' - is now receiving fewer patients but they are arriving sicker, doctor warns, as he says some come in with no symptoms other than diarrhea then test positive"
"He said testing was surprising and that some people show up with a fever and cough but test negative. Others who are there for different ailments - like car accident victims - end up testing positive."
New York is supposed to be the epicentre of the outbreak yet the most overloaded hospital is now seeing fewer patients arrive than before. That's not consistent with being at the start of a very long exponential growth phase (it obviously can't grow exponentially forever so this discussion is only about how long it lasts in that phase and where the peak is).
Edit: got throttled, will reply to Joe here
Many sources show only the number of positive cases and deaths. Here's one that shows total tests performed in the USA:
On the 5th April 2020 there were 332,308 positive cases in the USA. So the halving point was between 29th and 30th March (139,061 and 160,530 cases respectively). It took about 5 days to double.
On the 5th April 2020 there were 1.42 million negative cases. On 29th March 2020 there were 692,290 negatives or 48% of the figure today. It took exactly the same amount of time to double.
So we can see that number of tests doubled in that time. Total tests went from 831,351 (47%) to 1,762,032.
The proportion of positive to negative cases is 18% today. On the 29th March it was 16%. A 2% rise, nothing even close to doubling. The graph in the tweet I linked to shows this visually - a fairly smooth and slow increase over time. We think it's spreading exponentially because of misuse of data, but all that's actually growing exponentially is testing. And yes - that's probably why there are now global shortages of reagents and other ingredients for tests. You can't keep globally doubling demand for tests without eventually hitting production limits!
Its geometric growth pretty much any place you look. Now, unless testing were proceeding completely uniformly across the board, its hard to imagine that explains any of this.
> That's not consistent with being at the start of a very long exponential growth phase.
This is an example of how you are making straw man arguments. No-one is arguing that the growth rate will continue to be exponential in the face of effective mitigation.
We're not testing the general population. Its testing of folks coming to a hospital? Folks who aren't having hospitalizing symptoms are not tested at all, and sent home to quarantine.
So if tests doubled that means that folks are feeling bad at an increased rate. Showing up at a hospital with alarming symptoms.
You can finagle the statistics both ways - by ignoring what the 'test sample' is and assuming its uniform for instance.
The stable proportion is seen around the world, including in places like Germany where they are doing tons of testing and certainly far more than just those who turn up to hospital.
You're right that it's not a uniform sample, but the consistency across the world is very suggestive. Not everywhere has test shortages.
> Do you have some statistical data that shows hospitalization rates of young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona virus?
Doesn't that require a study after the fact? So your proposal is to just wait and see?
BTW, how do you explain the unprecedented hospitalization and ICU rates in Northern Italy?
As an example, this report from European Society of Anaesthesiology[1] mentions:
> The number of intensive care beds in Italy continues to change. Initially, there were 500 public intensive care (ICU) beds in Lombardy, and 140 private ICU beds. However, now there are more than 900.
> BTW, how do you explain the unprecedented hospitalization and ICU rates in Northern Italy?
A lot of people aren't tested unless they are severely sick, they're just told to stay at home.
When they arrive in the hospital they're already in a pretty bad condition, and only then tested. Which means that no therapeutic actions are made until patients are admitted, with the exception of self-administration of paracetamol.
> The number of intensive care beds in Italy continues to change. Initially, there were 500 public intensive care (ICU) beds in Lombardy, and 140 private ICU beds. However, now there are more than 900.
But a lot of ICU beds were slashed in the past 10 years due to budget cuts, and we were at 80% capacity when the virus hit. If the testing keeps on like this, and we can't even palliatively treat patients until they start suffering respiratory problems, these problems will continue.
Italy’s death rates are up 20% when comparing this year’s average to a typical year’s whole average. This way of comparing averages may skew the information. In America, we have more average daily deaths in the beginning of the year than in the middle and end until December. The average of January through March will always be higher than the yearly average.
This is the latest data published by the Italian Ministry of Health. Looking at the chart on the second page, try to ignore the lines (we all know there is an infinite amount of ways one can approximate a curve to the dots) and just observe the dots. Does this seem like a bad year to you? Compared to winter 2016/17?
"What the official figures don’t say. They don’t say that in March 2020 more than 5.400 people have died in Bergamo province, 4.500 of which due to coronavirus. Six times more than the previous year."
That’s for week 13. I expect france would be higher now.
Week 13 is march 22-28 if I counted right. Deaths lag cases. French Coronavirus deaths went from 674 on the 22nd, to 2314 on the 28th, to 8078 yesterday april 5th.
Because if no coronavirus this would be rather a good year. The December-February looked better than on average.
The thing you are missing though is that crisis started mid March. It feels like forever (because of shelter at home), but it is a very short time and every few days the number of cases doubles. Most of that doesn't register on graphs that spans multiple years (look at the dates).
> people will continue to ignore an exponential trend
Every cold and flu grow exponentially.
Not sure what the fixation of HN readers is on the work exponential. Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically.
I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators, and the futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown.
If people are doing well, the economy will likely catch up-- weak businesses will fail, new ones will be created. It may hurt, may hurt for a while-- but from a purely economic perspective this might turn out to be a useful reboot. There are going to be a lot of phenomenal opportunities in the coming year.
But the economy cannot do well if the people are not.
For a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that we didn't need to keep delivering food and power and whatnot. It would be possible to simply pause the entire economy-- just like contracts that don't consider weekends business days-- in this fictional world we could freeze all accounts and all debts and whatnot for a year and then do "2020" over again. We can't do this because we need to keep a lot of people working to keep food and medical care flowing-- but I think the crazy idea is a useful illumination that the economy is a shared delusion. Whats going on now is only as devastating as we allow it to be, but the deaths of millions would be devastating (economically and otherwise) regardless of what we otherwise want.
I wish and hope just pausing the economy is as easy as you say. I'm worried though, as the last decades the Economy appears to be this unpredictable daemon that affects everything and everyone but no one knows how to please it.
> Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically.
For many layperson, this is their first experience when it really matters. My mom isn't sitting around thinking about exponential spread when she gets a cold.
> I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators
I agree. Something like 80% of the people who end up on a ventilator die. Of course those other 20% are happy one was available, but by the time ventilators are being discussed it's really too late. Prevention is key.
> futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown
Depends. The economy was going to be hit hard regardless. Even if nothing was ever forced closed, the number of people sick and the number of overwhelmed hospitals would have killed the economy. For example, even before there were any official lockdowns in the US, companies I work with were already stopping all travel (late February timeframe).
We also do take notice when more mundane exponential threats crop up -- for instance, the R0 of measles is something like 12-18 (compared to a "measly" 2-2.5 for the novel coronavirus, or 1.28 for the typical seasonal flu), and when it got out of control in a few cities in the US last year, it was a Big Deal even though most people are vaccinated for it.
> Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically.
The issue of exponential growth is of relevance in response to those saying that the number of deaths (insert the inplicit 'so far' here) is much less than from infuenza (annually.) It is not a 'fixation' to expose the irrelevance of that line of thinking.
More generally, the issue is a combination of the facts that this virus is significantly more dangerous, for all age groups, than at least post- Spanish Flu infuenza; it is very readily transmitted; and there is no (or much less) herd immunity. When you combine these fact with the math of exponential growth, and have establshed the doubling rate, you can do some scientific prediction that goes beyond "so far it has not been as bad as the flu", which is true just so long as it is, and no longer. To do that, however, you have to hold more than one idea at a time in your head.
The idea that viruses always grow exponentially until they reach total saturation of the population comes from mathematical models that have never successfully modelled any real epidemic, ever. It doesn't come from experience of real diseases in nature, many of which were predicted by epidemiologists to grow to enormous proportions and yet - even in the absence of control measures - that isn't what happens.
It seems there are a ton of people right now who are enjoying thinking of themselves as intellectually and even morally superior to people who are just pointing out facts about the statistics gathered so far (which point to flu-like levels of danger and properties). I think the HN community is especially prone to this because it's full of computer programmers who are used to thinking in powers of two; some seem tempted to ascribe near-magical wisdom to this familiarity. But nature isn't a computer and just saying "exponential growth" over and over will eventually make fools of a lot of people, because it isn't there.
If this virus was really spreading exponentially, you'd expect to see the proportion of positive tests going up exponentially as well. But that isn't what is seen. In places that report the total number of tests administered (some places don't), the proportion of positive tests increases sub-exponentially or even hardly at all, coming to rest at about 15%, which is roughly the background level of coronavirus infections in the population during normal times.
It's especially disappointing to see PG fall into the trap of blaming politicians. Politicians have in the blink of an eye ceded power to a tiny cabal of (primarily) epidemiologists. So far they by and large aren't asking questions, instead simply doing whatever they're told even if it makes little sense.
But we really need people to start asking those scientists difficult questions. Citizens can do it but ultimately it only matters when politicians do it. Epidemiologists have a track record of absolute failure. They failed with Zika, they failed with foot and mouth disease, they're failing with CV. Go look at the models they produce and weep; some are invalidated the day they're published!
This guy is doing a good job of pointing out the many errors of modellers:
You can get the numbers and do the math yourself, and prior to effective mitigation, the growth is exponential. There are policies that do have a mitigating effect, and that is the point. The mitigation of an effect does not mean either that it did not exist in the first place, or that it is not relevant.
Nobody is able to test all or even most of their population with tests overwhelmingly concentrated among those either likely to be infected or at least exposed one would expect the proportion of positive tests to be a function of the testing methodology rather than a fiction of its prevalence in the population. If for example a group is only testing those already experiencing severe symptoms and had a 93% positive rate what would it even mean for the proportion of positive tests to increase exponentially?
What we are supposing is instead that the number of people who are presently infected will increase exponentially IF we don't adopt measures to decrease the spread. This is actually what you saw in the initial period and what you would be seeing now if we did nothing extraordinary to decrease the spread. If you look at the 1918 flu epidemic it ultimately infected 1/3 of the population. It is utterly unclear to me why you imagine your understanding is better than that of the experts. It would seem you yourself are guilty of the same sin you ascribe to programmers? From your animus towards the profession are you perhaps a manager of same? If so you seem to have contracted at least one of their faults.
> politicians have in the blink of an eye ceded power to a tiny cabal of (primarily) epidemiologists.
This literally isn't real.
The politicians are indeed at fault for the poor response. We cede to them substantial funds and powers to both prepare for and response to situations just like this. In fact the pentagon prepared a report on literally just this exact crisis in 2017 that called out among other things a lack of supplies. We opted to do nothing of import between now and today. In the crucial early days of this crisis instead of instituting effective measures we were busy first ignoring reports of it and then publicly claiming it is a hoax. If we aren't brave and clear sighted enough to even ascribe blame how are we to do better next time?
with tests overwhelmingly concentrated among those either likely to be infected
Even the highest positive rates I've seen (in the UK where the testing situation is dire) are only 30%. In other countries with more tests it's around 15% and stable over long periods.
If the number of infected were truly growing that fast, then you'd see the proportion of positive tests go up and up until negative tests were hardly happening, but that isn't close to what's seen on the ground.
What we are supposing is instead that the number of people who are presently infected will increase exponentially IF we don't adopt measures to decrease the spread
That's not what policymakers are supposing. If that were true there wouldn't be a global run on ventilators, which assumes enormous growth over case load today.
This literally isn't real.
That's not much of a response. Where are there politicians not saying their decisions are just guided by the science? The only places where politicians even pushed back slightly on epidemiologists are Brazil and - briefly - the USA.
At this time what epidemiologists say should be done, is done, no questions asked. In Denmark they are even restricting speech to stop people criticising the adopted measures, or so it's said. Look at what happened to my post above - even investigating or criticising those currently making the decisions is suddenly penalised.
A tiny number of academics with no track record of accuracy have obtained enormous power now. If they say lock down, countries lock down. If they say close the borders, the borders are closed. If they say open up, countries open up.
It's right and proper that such people be subject to the same scrutiny as normal politicians are.
As for politicians having done nothing, I don't think that's fair. Does the USA not have large stockpiles of ventilators and masks? Perhaps unusable in the end, but that level of detail is not for politicians, only civil servants. As for beds, well, even assuming the modellers are right no healthcare system in the world can have tens of thousands of ICU beds empty, sitting for a once in a century pandemic. Politicians who tried to have such levels of slack would soon be replaced by others who cared more about utilisation. I don't think there's much to say about them at this time; for better or worse they've taken a back seat.
When it is growing exponentially, they close a few schools here and there or stop visits in hospitals. That is enough to stop spread, get the R below 1 and making it not exponential.
It is simply not true that every cold and flu grows exponentially.
No, that's true only if it's brand new. Immunity for a certain strain lasts several years, which means there's a level of herd immunity that constraints infection from even reaching some of the non-immune folks, hence it's hard for it to be exponential.
This is not the case with the 'novel' coronavirus. There is no large scale immunity among the population.
> Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.
Non-math/cs people typically haven't been directly exposed to exponential growth. Which, to be fair, can be an intuitively hard concept until someone sits down and thinks it through. The classic lily pad example is my usual go-to way of explaining exponential growth to someone.
I also think a large part of this problem is societies overall rejection of science, but that's a different discussion.
You can tell that, even today, people (especially the media) still don't understand the nature of exponential growth.
Every day, there's an article describing the new cases or deaths as a "surge". Look for that word: Surge. This word implies that the growth is somehow sudden or unexpected, whereas every day's actual day-to-day growth was predicted pretty accurately months ago. But, if you read the news, every day is described as some surprising "surge". I wish the media would stop calling every day's number a "surge" and start reporting "New coronavirus cases grew at (or above or below) the expected rate, doubling every N days."
Actually, the log scale for infections in pretty much every polity has started bending downwards, about a week and a half after the lockdowns were put in place.
> i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance.
It looks like flu, among other reasons, because popular comparison at the time compared all-ages mortality for flu (e.g. including old and sick) with healthy-young-person mortality of the covid. This very same comparison also ignores asymptomatic covid people and does not ignore asymptomatic people with flu. So it is twisted in all kind of ways.
> the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is already going way way worse than the flu
Fully aware of the types that will come out of the woodwork for simply saying this, however: no, it's currently still not on track for even a mild flu year yet alone a bad one.
A bad year for influenza is about 650,000 deaths worldwide, pneumonia deaths are often an aftereffect of the flu and it kills 2.5 million on average each year.
SARS-COV-2 has killed 60,000 in 5 months despite having no vaccine or known medicinal treatment, mainly due to locally overstretched medical resources more than anything else.
It's not even close to being equivalent to a bad flu year yet, and that's ignoring the secondary deaths.
Maybe about tenth your figure, once you exclude non-flu pneumonia-- which is about where we are now for covid19. Flu death figures are Flu+Pneumonia because they usually don't check. Efforts to separate flu from flu + pneumonia all result in flu being a small fraction of the total ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ ).
The point still holds to compare Covid vs flu+pneumonia then. This is some weird No True Scotsman argument you're making where it's not the "True Flu" if they had pneumonia as well... (likely getting pneumonia because of the flu) I doubt the dead people would be comforted by such a subtle distinction.
The plus operator here is "and/or" not "and", but I presume you must have understood this. The GP's point is that flu+pnumonia = (flu) U (non-flu pneumonia). Nobody is denying that flu with pneumonia is flu.
What's really happening is that some people are trying to compare deaths from Covid-19 to deaths from the typical flu/pneumonia season. Nitpicking about what is or isn't the flu really doesn't matter, what matters (to me at least) is how many more deaths Covid-19 is causing than normal "flu/common cold/pneumonia/whatever" deaths which happen every year.
I had a similar experience but I was ignorant about how rapid infection rates could overwhelm hospitals and lead to much higher mortality rates. In part probably because this stuff has never been explained in so much detail before.
The part of that most people, including you, seen to miss is that this goes way beyond those sick with the virus. The strain this virus is putting on healthcare is unlike anything the flu does in any given year, even during epidemics in the past several decades. That means it will kill people who are sick with something else. Pray you don't have a need for an ICU bed any time soon.
In the US, the flu kills between 12,000 and 61,000 people each year depending on the season. COVID-19 will almost certainly reach the low end of that range in between two and three days. It went from 100 to more than 9,000 deaths in only three weeks.
It's not the flu.
P.S. everyone who can get a flu shot should, every year, regardless of age. Herd immunity assists in protecting the entire population.
That's interesting, it shows how misleading an average can be (the average 8000 dead for the flu that I quoted).
Still, if you focus on Italy, which is the most ahead in Europe, by March 28th (the time that report was updated), the number of deaths was already matching the 2017 peak (and in about 2/3 of the time). Since then the death count went up 70%.
edit: also note the caution about the uncertainty due to delayed registration.
and comparing "estimated contamination cases vs associated death" to "a known-positive cases vs. associated death" is mistake number 3.
CDC data shows 220k known-tested-positive case and 22k associated death. The 36 millions case is pulled out of a hat. As per these number, seasonal flu kills 10% of the known-positive cases.
I probably had covid19 in February(in Asia), only in retrospect I could differentiate it from the flu.
The main difference was it took the superior part of the throat instead of the inferior. Talking with doctors they tell me I had all the symptoms.
The problem with it is that at first it is "benign"(I had high fever for "just" two days) if your body stops it before getting into the lungs. Once it gets there it could be nasty(as it produces cytokine storm syndrome there) very fast.
So it is very easy to get confident.
Even the flu could get very dangerous is you get it combined with something else like a bacteria at the same time.
Do you have a source for corona infecting the inferior part of your throat rather than the inferior part? I know you spoke to doctors, but I find it incredibly difficult to find credible sources other than either
incredibly simplified accessible articles on mainstream health websites, stating that a symptom is "throat pain"
or having to go through 20 pages of medical research which I understand basically nothing of.
>the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health
I'm not so confident yet. What is still worrying me, is that it is not clear about the importance of the initial dose with respect to the severity of the outcome.
The disease having a quite slow progression, may mean that if you let it spread wildly, suddenly there is a large percentage of the population exposed, and this mean that when people gets contaminated they receive a high inoculum which may bring down even healthy individuals.
To a degree we deal with catastrophic threats aptly without having our responses deadened by past fears never having come to fruition regularly. For example we swim knowing that if we stop moving we will sink and drown, we drive knowing that a slip up we could well die.
We are collectively guilty of many errors in judgement but on the whole we show on average not only are we able to mostly behave competently in complex situations individually we are able collectively to make some systemic changes to decrease mortality over the years.
This gives me hope that we take the correct lesson from this terrible experience and adjust our individual and collective behavior to avoid a re occurrence.
> And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too worried at all.
Medical professionals aren't professionals in everything. You may have been asking the equivalent a frontend developer for advice on writing COBOL for z/OS.
The differences with this coronavirus, as I understand it:
1. People are often contagious well before showing symptoms, making it much harder to track and isolate the people who have it.
2. It is about 10x more deadly than the flu. Could be more than that, as it's difficult to extrapolate from the current messy data. But I think it's safe to say it is much more deadly than the seasonal flu.
So far more people getting it, in a very short period of time, and a much higher percentage dying or requiring hospitalization, giving us the results we see. Overwhelmed health care systems, and death counts that will be much higher than seasonal flu without large scale mitigations in place.
>i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe
Have you stopped saying that, or are you still saying it for some reason?
>It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea..
Do you realize, you can, and probably should, get vaccinated for the flu each year? And that these vaccines are only a 'best guess' for that particular year, so you should get on each year?
>It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.
I suppose the alternative is to not warn people about pandemics and just let them all run wild? I'm sorry if people choose to get "desensitized", but these organizations are not interested in the politics of whether or not the general public will be able to appropriately digest their messages, and hence don't ration warnings based on how much we can "handle".
Some humans won’t change their mind regardless of how much soft evidence they’re presented with. This is good because we need variability. Evidence might be wrong, or it could be right, but following it could turn out to be worse a posteriori.
This idea helps me provide a plausible explanation to some behavior I find counterintuitive.
What's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the incompetence of governments across the world, and conclude they'd be capable of any kind of organized conspiracy against the general population.
Yes exactly. Most people don’t know or care about how Governments and Corporations really work. All they see are memes and conspiracy theories and latch on to them.
Like the endless YouTube conspiracy-oriented channels which rant about the vast Illuminati/Jewish/Deep-State/whatever conspiracy that holds our world in thrall and assassinates with impunity, yet somehow can't manage to file a few bogus DMCA claims to get the YouTube channels shutdown.
Of course if one tries pointing this out the response is sometimes "oh, they're so powerful that they like to mock us", but more commonly just to accuse you of being a shill/deep-state-agent/whatever.
Supposing for the sake of argument that the Illuminati were real and you were in charge of it. You know a bunch of weirdos on youtube know the truth and are generally regarded as cranks. Would you bother concerning yourself with them, or would you ignore them since they're pathetic and powerless? I'd ignore them.
To be clear, I don't think the Illuminati are real, but I don't think your reasoning is sound either.
An all-encompassing conspiracy orchestrating events across the globe, sparing no effort or expense to weave us all into an inescable spider's web of connected threads, that then says "eh, probably nobody is even going to listen to those guys, let's not bother with having the intern fire off a few boilerplate take-downs"?
One that isn't totally neurotic, presumably. Just to reiterate, I don't believe such an organization exists. But when trying to understand the plausible actions of even fictional characters or organizations, I try to imagine myself in their shoes. If I were in their fictional shoes, I would ignore the people who say I rule the world if those people are widely mocked and derided as insane by the general public. To do anything other than ignore them would be to risk giving them a sliver of credibility.
Things like wholesale NSA data collection were organized conspiracies against the population. There are plenty of examples, even just considering the US.
Strange that you got downvoted. NSA collection of American data fits any reasonable definition of "conspiracy against the population" that I can think of.
Indeed! Every time someone mentions "them" running whatever conspiracy I'm reminded of the quote "Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"
Yep. Actual conspiracies are comparatively banal, and often more to do with covering up incompetence than establishing new world orders with incredible technological advances. To bring up famous examples from the not too distant past, the same administration supposedly capable of secretly planting demolition charges in busy NYC offices without anyone noticing apparently saw it as too risky to secretly plant chemical weapons needed to be 'discovered' somewhere in an entire country under the control of its military.
Not in order to give credibility to the idea, but I do think it would be easier for a group of conspirators based in the US to pull off secret demolition charges than for them to plant weapons in a foreign country unnoticed.
One theoretical conspiracy involves personnel carrying around large explosive charges and drilling holes in strategically placed beams on every floor of a permanently occupied and secure office building unnoticed by any one of thousands of surviving workers. The other involves a truck in an area the US is known to be conducting military operations unloading stuff at an abandoned remote facility and then calling in non-conspirators to validate their 'find', and accusing any Iraqi who argues the facility had other purposes of lying. Not saying there aren't reasons the second wouldn't go wrong - from getting ambushed or inspected en route to UN weapons inspectors concluding the material is unlikely to be of Iraqi origin - but it's not more difficult to plant stuff in a remote location than secretly prepare for a controlled demolition of a heavily occupied skyscraper.
All theories about what happened on 9/11/2001, including the official 9/11 Commission Report, are conspiracy theories. They disagree on who the conspirators were, but every last theory about it is a conspiracy theory.
People can be capable of organizing conspiracies for their own self-interest and quite poor (or simply disinterested) in coordinating effective action otherwise. This is the story of every corrupt institution in history. You have to think beyond binary frames.
The sorts of incentives for organized conspiracy would naturally be bigger than the incentives for competence in executing ordinary matters of government. However the rareness of uncovering organized conspiracies suggests they are rarely attempted more than it suggests some hypercompetent class of conspirators.
Its because they're not what people want to imagine (hypercompetent ubermenchen who they're outsmarting) but just covering up "mundane" though still devestating crimes.
I wouldn't classify putting LSD in the water supply to be "mundane".
Neither would I classify MK-Ulta that way: "Techniques included the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of torture."
Or the releasing of biological weapons (MK-Naomi): "at least three covert techniques for attacking and poisoning crops that had been examined under field conditions."
Or Operation Notherwoods: "to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets, blaming them on the Cuban government, and using it to justify a war against Cuba."
Or the Tuskegee experiment: "The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis; the African American men in the study were only told they were receiving free health care from the Federal government of the United States."
It's always about benefits. Incompetence doesn't cost government benefits, so nobody cares. However, if there are benefits to be had by organizing a conspiracy against whomever, you can bet your money that this will be done. Nobody cares for "the greater good" or whatever. It's always about personal benefits.
I only wish it was only about benefits, because then it would be rational agent. What (economic) benefit does the Republican party of the US gain by suppressing gay rights or abortion? I can understand wanting to quash unions, prevent minorities from voting, remove environmental controls (in the short run anyway), or cast doubt on opposition media. But who actually gains when e.g. a gay couple can't buy a cake?
>But who actually gains when e.g. a gay couple can't buy a cake?
The Christian baker who did not want to bake them a cake, but who was being compelled by the state to act against his personal religious beliefs?
Who loses when the gay couple can just go to another baker, one who doesn't let his/her religious beliefs get in the way of business? What did they hope to gain by ignoring every other baker in town who was willing to bake their cake, shopping around until they found a baker who refused them? Was it ever about a cake or rather about using gay rights as weapon to attack Christians?
"What's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the incompetence of governments across the world, and conclude they'd be capable of any kind of organized conspiracy against the general population."
You see conspiratorial thinking as some kind of bug in the thinking of insuffciently skeptical and analytical minds; a branch of stupidity. But it's not. It's a self-defense mechanism which, like other things considered antiquated and ineffcient like borders and control over immigration saves people from mass death.
These things don't exist because people are stupid and can't reason. They exist because people aren't stupid and do reason and then believe in their own mind's creations.
No matter how smart or sophisticated or computer-aided your reasoning is, no matter how big your data set becomes, you will only match and elucidate upon, but not beat, instincts which evolved under real Darwinian pressures which make you aware and wary of things which kill en masse.
Technically the government itself is a form of conspiracy against the general population. But people don't know that, even educated people, because political science isn't mandatory in higher education. But labeling something as conspiracy theory is a useful tool to silence discussions about all the evil governments and large organizations do.
Right. Conspiracies happen all the time because there are plans, which if understood by those upon whom the planners wish to enact them, would be rejected by their targets.
That describes most plans people have.
So the planners deceive and dissemble. That is how the world has always worked.
What's more, it's instinctive knowledge that this is happening all the time. Suspicion of those in power is a human instinct which, like all instincts, optimizes our survival chances under the conditions for which it evolved. WRT to political conspiracies, those conditions still hold today.
The way to think about conspiracy theories is the same way you think about inventors and inventions.
Nature produces inventors (conspiracy minded individuals) many of whom produce only harebrained inventions ("conspiracy theories" so called) some more who produce hit and miss inventions and a few which produce inventions which are overwhelming important and matter to survival ("Hitler is going to kills us all, we must flee right now!" - spoken by a Jew in 1933 Munich).
What this mapping between domains, inventions and conspiracies, also implies is that just because someone was wrong about one conspiracy doesn't mean they are wrong about all conspiracies and their credibility should not be automatically bankrupted if they believe one or two false conspiracy theories.
I do read some conspiracy theory sites and like to hear plausible (non-alien/ lizard people) ones because I want my mind to at least entertain the idea. It's like panning for gold. Most of it is nothing. Once in a while, maybe a little taste of something and I retain it dimly awaiting future possible supporting evidence.
For example, the "desperate labor shortage" and "Americans don't like STEM" meme is a clear conspiracy amongst employers and attorneys and their clients to control engineering wages and have more of the profits go to business owners. I used to not know about that "conspiracy theory" then I heard it and wondered if it could be true then over time the evidence for it became incontravertible.
The listed examples are conspiracies by the dictionary definition - "a group of people acting in harmony to a common, illegal end" - but I don't think they're the same thing the parent poster was referring to. Conspiracy theories generally revolve around some secret action by the government or other large organizations, not open slaughter. A better example might be COINTELPRO.
I used to think conspiracy theories are unrealistic, the image of a group of people sitting in a dark room conspiring against others just seems ridiculous.
But the older I get, and the more understanding I have over how large organizations are ran, the more I realize that conspiracies actually do happen, but in much more subtle ways.
What actually happens is that over a long periods of time, people collaborate with and promote those who think like them, with similar biases and incentives. Then when a major decision needs to be made, everyone at the table think the same way and agree on the same solution. This works even across organizations, as people's career are made through networks and relationships transcending organizational boundaries.
It is difficult to get a group of people to understand something when all their salaries depends upon them not understanding it.
True, although the term cronyism and old boys club focus on the exclusivity of those "elite" circles, rather than the impact of their decisions, which looks a lot like conspiracy from outside.
Some people end up coming up with conspiracy theories based on their outsider observations.
I think that a lot of the people who are deniers are afraid of the economical consequences from the lockdown because they will be hit harder than others. So in their mind they choose to underplay the epidemic in order to justify their insecurity.
Meh. I'm extremely dubious, often in politics we often see the public arguing against their own economic self-interest. Why should this be any different?
It's tempting to give ignorance and fear a complicated explanation couched in the suspicion of greedy forces. It's not parsimonious. Plain ignorance and distrust is sufficient.
Maybe you should try to explain why something that kills on average 450k every year is less serious then something that has only ever killed 70k. And not just less serious, but warranting several orders of magnitude fewer resources.
I think that at least US governments have done a poor job explaining the motivation behind the drastic precautionary orders. For a brief period, there was much talk of "flattening the curve" but I doubt that many people understand how that gets us to "deliberately wreck the economy."
This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge of exponential math and how medical services plan and allocate their resources. It is the government's job to explain how this is very different from the flu and they are utterly failing to do so in many cases.
In fact, I suspect that most people believe that the isolation policies are to protect individuals' health, ie. to prevent even young and healthy people from contracting the virus. And based on this false premise, they are right to be annoyed with the lockdowns.
This is important because in a week or two, when the grocery stores start to empty and the lights start to flicker, the rugged individualist-types in the United States are going to start asking "why are we doing this, exactly?" And there is born civil unrest.
It is the role of state and national governments to answer this question and they have not been effective in doing so. We are doing this because there are O(10^6) preventable deaths in our future. Not because of the danger to any one young healthy person.
To slow down the spread and ultimately reduce the number of people that will get to go in ICUs, go on a ventilator and/or die.
Because those _are_ preventable, if they don't get infected.
That, in turn, buys time to medical research & practice to mitigate and cure the disease, so that, later, when someone vulnerable is infected, we'll know better how to take care of them.
Flu doesn't spread as well, because large number of people take a vaccine.
The reason for lockdown is to slow things down, so we don't get to the point where doctors have to decide who to help or who not. Also a lot of people can't connect in their mind that when hospitals are full, it also affects people who didn't even get the virus.
> The reason for lockdown is to slow things down, so we don't get to the point where doctors have to decide who to help or who not.
But one must think that this can't go on indefinitely or for very long time frames. It buys time to reduce the number of "active" cases, but only to ensure that once lockdown is lifted one is able to do tracing and isolation for new cases.
Realistically, we'll have to live with this virus (and the associated risk) for quite a while. The time frames for a "cure" if it is found vary from months for drugs (if those in current trials prove to be useful) to years for a vaccine (which like the drugs may not be effective).
You can keep people holed up for a few months at best. You won't be able to do so for one or more years, unless you want to face severe consequences (and I'm not talking about the economy, I'm talking of long-term psychological effects).
> This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge
This is very condescending. There are still a lot of unknowns, and there are smart people (for instance [1]) out there who think the cure may be worth than the disease. We urgently need more data.
Reasonable people can certainly disagree about whether the cure is worse than the disease.
That said, the world's governments have made a decision to react in a certain way, and I maintain that my intuition tells me that most people don't understand the real reason for the lockdowns.
They think it is to prevent them personally from getting sick. That's not really true. The point is to prevent the medical infrastructure from becoming overwhelmed so that if and when people do become sick, they can be given their best shot at recovery.
> The point is to prevent the medical infrastructure from becoming overwhelmed
I think this is clear for most people. I'm not American but I've watched Trump recent talk and they explained this clearly in a way everybody could understand.
What they didn't explain though is the post-lockdown strategy.
Most likely, in a few weeks, only a small fraction of the US population will be immune, and the problem won't be solved anymore than it was before the lockdown (except that the country is stalled). The virus will still be there, and there won't be any vaccine. I'd like them to think a few steps ahead and tell us what will be their plan.
The people who are currently sick will either recover or die. Lock down can make the effective R0 below 1. When it is below 1 the disease will die on its own. Of course we would have to be locked for a very long time, but even if we won't wait that long the active infection curve will go down and buy us some time.
my hot take: this is all because we are engineers designing social networks.
think about it. email, twitter, etc. it all works like any network protocol meant for machines. it is cheap to spam. there is no middle ground between anonymity and spam. each node must handle their own peers. etc.
what if it was designed by actual sociologists or people that actually deal with human, instead of engineer. one would hope in such world tweeter would reduce exposition to all those accounts, because people around me that I trust do not engage with or outright block them. also I could have means to benefit of all that network without rendering all my information to the service. etc.
What's different, I suppose, is that certain types of people have a huge platform in the US via Fox News and the like.
In my country, The Netherlands, for the most part people didn't really seem to take things seriously, even when our PM told us to. All the same kinds of talking points (similar to flu, lots of people die from car accidents, etc.).
And so in the first weekend, with some restrictions already in place and Italy being in deep trouble, we all went to sit in parks and socialize like nothing was wrong.
It was only the week after that things changed. The government didn't suddenly enforce a full-on lockdown, but rather it was a combination of 1) our PM imploring everyone to change their behavior, 2) partial social distancing measures that were noticeable (events cancelled, restaurants closed for anything but take-out/pick-up), and perhaps 3) a sinking-in of how bad things were going elsewhere.
I've been 'immersing' myself in how the media reports things, the political debates and press conferences, and the way my social circles and people on the streets respond, and so far my impression is that there are two crucial factors that have resulted in 'proper' behaviour around here, despite the great weather: First, as it becomes clear that actual things change (limited no. of people in a supermarket, restaurants closed, specific public spaces closed when necessary), people realize it's not just abstract, and 2) while we are an individualist, recalcitrant bunch, we do ultimately have a lot of trust in the expertise of our government (whether justified or not).
I'm very interested to see how things develop in the US, and quite concerned in particular when it comes to 2.
EDIT: I'll add that personally I think at least initially our government was way too laissez-faire about this, and probably more so than many other countries in Europe other than the UK (and Sweden?). Our PM was/is perhaps too torn between taking things seriously and keeping the economy going. Which I suppose is exactly what he should be doing as a center-right politician.
You need to walk away from these people entirely. Get rid of the conspiracy theorists in your life.
The Twitterverse that generates fake news feeds on the controversy generated by stupid opinions. It ascribes value to the clicks and responses intentionally stupid content, shouted loudly, acquire.
When stupid people only talked to other stupid people IRL, the blast radius was limited. When I had a taxi driver spouting conspiracy theories, I didn't then take him with me to a party, and make all my friends listen to what he said.
Boris Johnson has quite a lot of skin in the game now; he boasted about shaking hands with coronavirus patients a few weeks ago and is now in the hospital.
How do you come to that conclusion? He literally said he would _continue_ to shake hands, so why is it unlikely that he contained it from shaking hands?
The point is also that if you continue to shake hands it doesn't make sense to be careful regarding other ways of getting it either. His attitude towards the whole thing would make him a prime candidate to the Darwin award if he ends up dying.
Musk is still actively downplaying the severity of the situation. Recently he's been signal boosting the idea that many more people are infected than we think and therefore the alarmism is unwarranted
So what exactly are you saying? 1) he is evil, 2) he is wrong?
For 1), it's up to you to judge him based on your perceptions (I'd disagree), for 2) you'd need a little more than your gut feeling to call him wrong. Germany is testing extensively and resulting current estimates are around 1% mortality (WHO estimate: 3,4%).
More people being asymptomatic is not a cause for reacting less strictly, which is the view being promoted. If more people are asymptomatic, that's great news, but it does not impact how severely you should lockdown society as the DDOS'ing of the health sector is still clearly a problem to avoid looking at france, spain and italy. It only means that you'll be able to end the lockdown sooner than expected
We'll see how Sweden fares in the end. I'm not promoting their methods of dealing with the pandemic, but I believe the different health systems affect the outcome more. Italy has around 1/3 to 1/4 the hospital beds per capita of Austria, Germany, South Korea but more than Sweden and the USA.
Comparing Denmark vs Sweden, it looks like we're beginning to see the difference in outcome on the death toll and hospitalization rates. Denmarks death toll is stabilizing (or at the very least only growing linearly) and the amount of people in hospitals with covid-19 has been stable for a week [0] (and no not because the hospitals are packed)
While Sweden is seemingly continuing the exponential trend in both over the past 4-5 days
It may be a bit early to say. Social distancing delays the infections. It's possible that it kills the virus, but unlikely, so people will be infected and possibly die later if they aren't immune already. Sweden is not able to stop infections at all, their health system is guaranteed to be overwhelmed, but survivors will most likely be immune and it will be over quickly, one way or another, when everyone has been exposed to the virus.
Do you think they’ll have the stomach to continue with the plan once their hospitals are overwhelmed? I’m extremely skeptical they won’t eventually have to lock down harder than Denmark
I am not sure - there's still a chance that we won't reach the claimed 50-70% infections for some unknown reason, like the weather or some people being more resistant. Our (Austrian) chancellor said recently (~2 weeks ago) that he expects all health systems in the EU to become overwhelmed, though currently the outlook seems much better (even Italy has been sounding more optimistic lately). I don't know what to conclude from this other than that the worst possible outcome might not be as dramatic as previously thought, so Sweden might just pull through with it.
Considering the amount of testing that is actually being done, no one has much ideas of the real number of cases. With any luck he will be right but no one really knows.
> With any luck he will be right but no one really knows.
Even he doesn't know if he's right, but apparently that doesn't stop him from using his influence to push his hot take.
At this point, the only thing that can be claimed with confidence is our global ignorance of this pandemic, and how much more we have to learn about it.
Disappointingly politicians and their supporters pushed the narrative into blaming X or Y.
I would politely ask HNers who were in the is just the flu camp to reflect (please don't comment, just reflect) why I was wrong, what bias or whatever flaw my thinking had and avoid blaming X or Y for your mistake. Btw I am not accusing people here, I also was not anticipating things to go like this.
The Oxford study is based on blatantly, and easily demonstrably, bad data. For example it relies on only 1 out of every 1000 infections needing hospitalisation. This is not supported by any current evidence.
Conversely, the lead on the Imperial Study was also in charge of modelling for the UK foot and mouth epidemic which was found not fit for purpose and resulted in lots of livestock being slaughtered unnecessarily. And this is the one the UK and other governments seem to be basing their approach on.
"He was behind disputed research that sparked the mass culling of farm animals during the 2001 epidemic of foot and mouth disease, a crisis which cost the country billions of pounds.
And separately he also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or ‘mad cow disease’) and its equivalent in sheep if it made the leap to humans. To date there have been fewer than 200 deaths from the human form of BSE and none resulting from sheep to human transmission."
To call the Oxford study "utter rubbish" is foolish.
Your "example" of bad data is the only quoted data in that article and it doesn't even mean anything since the implicit assumption of the Gupta model is that we do not know how many asymptomatic cases of COVID exist (even WIRED concede this point). Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this. 1 in 1000 infections requiring hospitalisation could be a realistic number if a high percentage of infections are asymptomatic.
> we just won’t know the true proportion of people who have contracted the disease without showing any symptoms, but it is likely a much lower number than the Oxford study assumes.
Epidemiology is not done by "it is likely much lower than the study assumes" since that is pure guess work without the tests.
What the Oxford study offers is a strong argument that antibody testing is vitally important and nobody is doing it.
As I say this is a very long way from utter rubbish.
1/1000 was not realistic when the preprint was published, let alone now. It showed that one could fit a bunch of curves onto 14 days of data on deaths. Which is true, but also utterly unintersting. The reason that sorry excuse of a model got so much attention is that the authors did not stop there.
They also made the totally unsupported assumption that one of the lower end curves matched reality. (That's right. They actually made exactly the kind of assumptions you're accusing others of, rather than just argue for antibody testing).
The problem is that when the study was made, there was a lot more data available than just that 14 days of deaths from two countries. And a ton of it was totally incompatible with their modeling.
> Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this.
It's not about "testing in Italy":
"In Lombardy – despite the region being under lockdown since March 9 – more than one in every 1,000 of the entire population have already been hospitalised due to coronavirus."
But we don't know the actual amount of people which were infected in Italy, because some of these (a sizable percentage) only reported fevers, and perhaps didn't even think about having SARS-CoV-2 in their bodies.
An acquaintance's partner suspects having got it, because after two days (two days, not weeks) of very mild fever (~37.5C) he was hit by anosmia. An ex-coworker also mentioned "a horribly strong fever" with respiratory difficulties which lasted just a few days. Yes, anecdata, but shows that you can easily miss a large part of the infected cases if you only test those hospitalized.
We do not know the Lombardy hospitalisation rate because we do not have an accurate count of how many people have been infected in Lombardy.
To get such a count we would need 100% serological testing which has not been done. We know how many were infected at the time of testing but the whole point of the Oxford model is that we do not know how many have been infected, not shown symptoms, and recovered.
Once again, the core point of the Oxford model was to emphasise the need for serological testing.
WHO was saying almost until the point that China locked down that there was no evidence of human to human transmission, even though Taiwan has warned them that had strong evidence of this on December 31st 2019.
That could be a mistake or maybe they considered the prior evidence unreliable. "Lying" implies means conscious intent to deceive. Why would the WHO intentionally lie?
Yep. But I think the same happen with all kind of crisises. The past history shows, that lying or being incredibly wrong does not have any negative impact on a pundit or or politician or whole classes of commentary journalist.
It seem to be more of systematic issue then just individual.
Mass media doesn't emphasize credentials of journalists or any credibility for that matter, in other words it is never credible. It's better understood in terms of propaganda, like your link is an example of manufactured consent.
But both sides are irrationally being confident. The doomsdayers at least as much as the "flu-bros". I think it's fair to challenge the massive interventions being taken and the economic damage.
Yes, we also need to get used to dealing with uncertainty in assessments, predictions, computer models. Media are far too prone to blowing unlikely extreme possibilities out of proportion, when we need to see the whole range of possible outcomes clearly.
That would be ignoring the extent of the economic/societal damage that is caused by the disease itself, would there not be any intervention to try to control the spread and its consequences on the medical infrastructure as well as all the other ones.
The problem with this kind of situation is that, unless you take action when it feels too early, all you will have at the end are your tears and saying "it was too late".
> But both sides are irrationally being confident.
Being "doomsdayer" does not necessarily mean confidence in the situation. It's more about accepting that overreacting is much more desirable than underreacting when facing something exponential where you're constantly 2 weeks behind knowing what the reality is
> accepting that overreacting is much more desirable
I wish that were true but it is not. It is entirely possible to take actions that make a bad situation worse. The consequences of an economic shutdown, for example, are unknown. The worst case of global depression and supply chain disruption is just as bad as the virus itself, if not more so. I do not know how one makes good decisions in a situation of highly uncertain knowledge and severe consequences.
I think we are in "less bad" territory, i.e. how do we balance multiple considerations such that while not leading to any outcome that could be considered "good", is at least not catastrophic. I don't envy those who have to make such decisions.
When you're in a situation where the severity of the outcome doubles every 4 days and you do not have clear information about where the curve will break, underreacting will result in extremely bad outcomes much much much more often than overreacting
For a simplified example just compare the cost of taking actions that make you break the curve 4 days too early with the situation where you break the curve 4 days too late
> When you're in a situation where the severity of the outcome doubles every 4 days and you do not have clear information about where the curve will break, underreacting will result in extremely bad outcomes much much much more often than overreacting
> For a simplified example just compare the cost of taking actions that make you break the curve 4 days too early with the situation where you break the curve 4 days too late
But does it seem that implausible that cooler heads might find a solution that doesn't cost at least $20 trillion?
It seems obvious that the US could have handled it so much better and cheaper if they had not kept ignoring the situation in China and then Italy (which made Europe wake up)
But even in the situation the US is now, doing something, anything, now. Might still be a lot better than the alternative
The problem with much of the challenges to the massive interventions is that they might not have been necessary if countries like the US had a competent and urgent response when the crisis first emerged. But they didn’t, and you can’t go back in time, so the choices are lockdown or let masses on masses of people dies and overwhelm several vital services.
I think the issue is that Faucci, Imperial College in the UK, are (as they should) optimising for a single function - to minimise deaths. However, if we followed this approach for road traffic, no car would be allowed to travel further than 10 miles per hour.
Someone needs to take an economic look at the Corona minimisation strategies. We do this already for other policy areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life). Does the economic impact divided by the Value of Life look in line with other areas?
Does pg never watch the news? Or did he just forget that "no worse than the flu" was the general tone until late February in pretty much all 'western' media and even MDs?
Are you joking? She says a heck of a lot more than that. Her tone is extremely cautious and she's extremely clear that we know very little about this virus, she's describing the current situation of who is dying rather than making baseless predictions about who will die in the future, and all she's saying in that one sentence is that for the current situation, "you have to put it into context". Meanwhile you have snarky Fox News folks spewing "the media mob is telling you the sky is falling down" and "at worst this is like the flu" and "this is the best time to fly" etc. And she even literally tells you "this one is scary..." and tries to explain what about it is scary. Are these glaring difference not obvious or do you just ignore everything except the 1 sentence you can cherry-pick out of context?
You should look at the video again. Her tone is calming and reassuring and she is saying it's scary because it is NEW. Are you deliberately trying to misinterpret it?
No, I'm trying to point out everything you're ignoring, which fundamentally affects the meaning of the message coming across. Like right now when you just ignored the rest of my comment. I'm not gonna put more effort into this though, since it's clear you're not going to see what you don't intend to see.
I'm only ignoring the fact that you're more obsessed with Fox News' well-known snarkiness and presentation than with the fact that at the time, considering Coronavirus relatively harmless was not a lie or even uncommon opinion among most media, all along the spectrum.
This video was published on January 23rd. At that point, China had less than 1k confirmed cases and less than 30 deaths. I agree with the sibling commenter, this was a very reasoned and factual video, especially considering the information that was public at the time.
That is from Jan 23, 2020... when everyone was clueless as to the consequences so she didn’t predict those.
Everything else is spot on, and it is still mostly older people with underlying conditions dying. She says the death rate is 2%: no pretending that it would be like a normal flu season.
I just can’t see how you can cherry-pick a single thing out of that reporting to criticise, even given it was done on January 23rd!
There's a difference between health writers writing in nuanced tones about the unknowns back in February (and sure, they got some things wrong, but they were going on the best information at the time), and talking heads on TV going on nothing but their own self-confidence and prior political beliefs telling people they'd be fine.
When WHO relayed the Chinese belief/hope of "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" (Jan 14) there were only 40 identified cases, mostly with plausible links to the presumed origin at the market. It should be read as "widespread action not yet justified" rather than "no need to worry at all, ever"
If it was not Paul Graham this would never has made it to HN front page, but ok...
One of his point is that people should not talk about things they don't know about. So maybe he should start applying that to himself first (and maybe this to myself right now).
The question is, how do you define the threshold of expertise require before you start talking about a subject?
The concepts of truth, credibility, ethics, deontology that he vaguely puts the finger onto. Those are complex topics, still being studied and will be forever.
Blaming journalist and politics, why not, I guess some of them deserve it, but my neighbour could have done the same analysis after couple of pints at the pub.
No, his point was people shouldn't talk with _absolute confidence_ about things they don't know about.
Usually in everyday life we hint at our confidence level with the language we use: 'might', 'probably', etc. These people have trained themselves not to do that, which they previously have gotten away with.
As an immigrant, and I'm sure many foreigners would agree, this is extremely American.
People, gentile people, who use "might" and "probably" are weak intellectuals by American standards. They are cast aside, especially in media, because they cannot give definite answers. This is science and science doesn't sell.
Politicians and media types are sales-people.
This really depends on the family and milieu you grew up around and are engaged with generally in life.
This is actually career advice I was given as a kid by an engineer at a nuclear power plant: “don’t give the impression that you’re uncertain during discussions even if you are.” I remember thinking “isn’t it literally your job to be uncertain?” That really bothered me and I’m reasonably sure I wasn’t wrong to be bothered.
What needs to be noted clearly here I think is that he says it's something more than Dunning Kruger overconfidence but rather an absolute con-man level gamble they are taking as they don't seem to have a downside on this bet. And I guess we have a perfect moment to start providing that downside.
> Blaming journalist and politics, why not, I guess some of them deserve it, but my neighbour could have done the same analysis after couple of pints at the pub.
They absolutely deserve the blame more than your neighbor, because they have a power of influence ~10e6 times greater than your neighbor at the pub. They chose to use that influence to back a narrative to support their political inclinations amid an emergency. The responsible thing to have said is: "We don't know what the severity of this will be, but we'll report things as we find out from authorities."
More worringly, this epidemic is also destroying the layer of benevolent hypocrisy that kept globalisation together among young people worldwide: the Chinese virus, the Italian siesta, the Northern stinginess, the British take it on the chin, the American insurance or die, and so on are the latent prejudices now rubbing salt into wounds and adding insults to injuries. It will be extremely difficult to have that utopian, dreamy benevolence back soon.
While this does seem like an attack on those who claim Covid-19 is not going to be as bad as the prevailing sentiment and the prevailing media view, let's not forget that the prevailing sentiment 1-2 months ago was that Covid-19 would not be a big deal (in the West). I'm seeing many of the same people who pronounced Covid-19 would not be a big deal, doing a full 180 and attacking those who are pronouncing Covid-19 to be less dangerous than expected.
> What struck me about it was not just how mistaken they seemed, but how daring.
Really paul? You are struck by how wrong journalists and politicians are? They exist to lie and push an agenda. You've written in the past about the shady aspects of the news industry. And I seriously doubt you harbored any positive views of politicians.
> These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said.
They make false predictions and get away with it because their agenda and the agenda of their fans/supporters line up. This is true of the fox side and the cnn/msnbc side. Have you forgotten about the predictions of yellowcake? The predictions of a short war in iraq? Remember mission accomplished? What about the predictions of a Hillary victory? What about all the predictions about trump/russia collusion? What about all the predictions that trump would be tossed from office/resign/jailed/etc?
> And the tide has just gone out like never before.
No paul. They've all been shamelessly naked sun bathing on the beach for everyone to see. It's not like they are hiding their bias.
> Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw,
I doubt it. Just like people seem to have forgotten what a hack trevor noah is. In just the last few years, if people cared about being lied to, everything from Rolling Stones, NYTimes, WaPo, Fox news, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, etc would be out of business.
Brian Williams lied at NBC and then got a job at MSNBC. Isn't that nice?
I hate to say it but your post seemed more like an attempt to win political points rather than expressing disappointment in the news industry since you were already fairly skeptical of the news industry to begin with.
I agree with the sentiment, however I think the apparent problems with Trump and politicians in general around this will not be that they got caught talking bullshit, it's that voters don't care because we've started supporting sides like they are football teams rather than being thoroughly critical of their actions. I'm not even sure a million people dying would lead to disorganised, slow and stupid government being at fault according to the people and in fact the higher the toll I'd guess the less likely accountability is to happen.
Hardly anyone at this point is arguing that there actually is an issue. After all, flu is still a dangerous illness, esp. for certain groups of people, so even plainly calling this COVID thing "just a flu" is not equivalent to saying that it's not an issue. It's your framing of the phrase "just a flu", that makes it look like some kind of heresy or insult.
And, most importantly, why do you call out only journalists and politicians, while there are many perferctly credible people, - first of all, medical experts, - who keep saying, that the scale of panic is dumb? How about doing some reading and fact-checking before crying wolf?
"just the flu" to me implies that we can treat it like the flu, i.e. go about life as usual and stay home if we catch it. It seems beyond obvious at this point that that's not the case. (Hopefully soon there will be a vaccine and it will become the case.)
But it literally is a strain of flu. And staying at home, sleeping and drinking a lot of water is exactly what the majority of people who contracted COVID are doing at the moment. Or do you believe that there are 1.3 million people in hospitals or cemeteries right now?
I'm not in the position to make such statements, but there is quite a number of medical professionals, who say exactly this: massive lockdowns of general population aren't necessary.
As for me, I personally believe that the medicine is worse than the disease in this case. We can be quite certain at this point that there will be lots of casualties from the economical disruption, and whether the unconstrained virus could have caused more suffering is a question to be answered.
I just don't think you are seriously asking for information, because there is shitload on the Web already, but rather mocking me (judging by your one-worded response, which is rude). But in case I'm wrong, here's a nice collection of links to begin with, updated daily: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ Scroll to the bottom for most recent updates.
No, it literally is not. The flu is caused by influenza. Covid19 is caused by sars-cov-2, a relative of SARS-CoV which caused SARS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... ). It is also a (more distant) relative of HCoV-OC43 which is one of the many viruses that cause the cold.
The problems that influenza and sars-cov-2 cause for us are pretty different: Influenza mutates fairly quickly so we're not able to stop it completely with our otherwise highly effective vaccines, while even though they mutate comparatively much slower we don't have any effective drug treatments for coronaviruses: Some are not dangerous enough to have been economically interesting to develop treatments for while others were stopped by non-drug interventions (like the sick people dying too quickly and the detection of fever before the virus was highly communicable).
You see, only a few months ago for the majority of people the word "flu" was a perferctly fine umbrella term for all of these viruses, including multiple coronaviruses. Now everyone is an expert virusologist with rigorous fervor for miniscule details. This is silly and drives us into the wrong direction, because the actual illness is not very different (it's a fact), but the amount of attention payed to it leads to huge overreaction. Oh, it's a relative of SARS, god forbid, oh my god, we're all going to die! Bullshit.
No, it isn’t. The flu doesn’t require hospitalisation in 15-20% of the cases and doesn’t have a mortality rate of 1% in the best case. Please stop spreading misinformation.
What I have to comment?
We know what is the death rate in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, South Korea. 1500 cases is ridiculously low to take any conclusion, they are far behind the curve.
Who is "we"? Actual scientists say the opposite: most numbers are meaningless and misleading, because we don't know, how wide the virus has spread. Are you that lazy-minded to not even try to check the links that I have provided?
Then why you post utterly meaningless numbers based on 1500 reported cases far behind the curve and ask for my comment? And please stop insulting me, you have gone too far.
Dr Ioannidis, for one example, thinks that Iceland's numbers are actually representative in contrast to US, Spain, Italy, etc. He's an expert, what reasons do you have to not at least consider his opinion (and many others') as viable?
And it's not my fault that you're so touchy to be insulted by opinions that challenge the ones you hold. There's hardly any valour in throwing downvotes left and right on every post by the person you disagree with either.
Interestingly there's a variant that attacks dogs that's a bit more severe and people have actually developed a vaccine for that variant. Well, it might also be that it's a lot easier, regulations wise, to develop a vaccine for dogs than for humans. It works great but your dog has to have a booster every year or two to keep full immunity.
A vaccine has already been developed for cats. It turned out vaccinated cats suffer greater from the nCov due to increased reaction from the immune system.
I was using the word "flu" in the broader sense. People commonly refer to virus-caused colds as simply flu. So what I was trying to say was that this is yet another virus that causes "flu".
It’s an insult. Covid-19 is in the best case 30 times as deadly as the flu while being twice as contagious. Calling it just a flu and downplaying it is actively causing thousands of deaths.
You seem to be mentally unstable. There is nothing insulting about being skeptical. I have facts to back my statements, can you say the same for yourself?
You didn’t post any fact. Only a meaningless link to Iceland numbers. Thanks for insinuating that I’m mentally unstable by the way. That is certainly a very stable and mature behaviour.
You post fear-inducing bullshit with a straight face, get insulted by something that challenges your beliefs and carpet-bomb all my comments in the thread. That's the definition of a crank.
A collection of fact-checked links to public statements and critical research about COVID-19, updated DAILY (scroll to bottom for the most recent additions):
I've had this idea for some time already where if you post something news-like, you should attach a link to your sources, like "citation needed" for non-Wikipedia text. I know that sounds bland and like basic journalistic practice - but it is not, nor should be followed by professional/accredited journalists who of course need to be able to protect their sources and publish on their own site; it's intended for social media only. The idea is to get people used to look for a badge or some such at the bottom of a text that, when absent, immediately should ring a bell and put people on alert. Basically, it adds a "who said this" or cui bono dimension to every published text on aggregator sites unless it appears on a dedicated site.
Maybe we could have a competition for graphic artists and award a prize for the best icon or visual idiom for this?
How is that different from what happens now with links being added?
Also, journalists (or let's call them news media agencies) often abuse this by reporting of "claims by this" on the topic rather than the topic and in that way refusing any iota of responsibility for what they put on the spotlight.
I guess technically it's not different, but if used in a visually consistent way and followed widely, it could help critical thinking and add awareness to the fact that there are interested parties and spinsters behind most published material, rather than invite a habit of passive consumption/believing text just because it appears on shiny digital or printed media.
> They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions.
Is there any danger for them? PG seems to have very idealistic view of politics.
As far as I know, any amount of fact checking in politics don't change political views.
Will Fox News lose any viewers over this? Politicians may lose jobs because bad economy, but will they lose votes because they were wrong and ignorant?
H. L. Mencken wrote:
> No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
I think there is great Mencken experiment going on. Always underestimate public and see how far you can go.
Actually, I think what they're saying is that voters will die, and therefore reduce the number of available votes.
Edit: and, of course, that this effect will dispropotionately affect political tribes whose propagandists under-, rather than over-, estimated the dangers of covid-19.
Too few members in the crowd, and the probability for one to understand and explain to others remains too low.
Too many of them and the Big Chiefs control the media, and also live so high in the Sky nobody seems credible when it comes to criticize, moreover all non-official messages are diluted into other ones to the point of many being not even emitted because the ones understanding the situation know that they will not be heard.
>any amount of fact checking in politics don't change political views.
That is what I was thinking.
Paul is writing as if credibility stems from reality. When in reality, the reverse its true. Fox news is credible, its viewers believe that, and whatever those credible people say, is reality. As long as people keep tuned in only to Fox News, that reality wont shatter. Their credibility exists because of their reach, its strength in numbers, its entertainment factor. Calling Fox News news and not entertainment is quite a leap. Most of what they have to say exists to keep people hooked, not to educate them into being more capable of performing civic duties. Fox News wants people to vote in a way that benefits Fox News, not the voter, and the same principal applies to all their coverage of everything. Coronavirus skeptic was a contrarian position to take, it divided their people from other people. Now that they are divided, they can switch sides and still maintain the artificial divide, and keep their viewers isolated from "alternate" realities.
This was a really good article by Kara Swisher of ReCode, who at the end finally convinces her mom to heed medical warnings about being out and about, cant convince her to turn off Fox.
There is the sad irony too, that the demographic who watches Fox news is already the most likely to be at risk (age, faith over evidence, distrusting of established medicine and government) denial not withstanding. Add denial to the mix, and youve got a real bad stew.
This is a deliberately built political philosophy, one of the results of Karl Rove's "reality-based community" [1] idea, from over 15 years ago. Whether or not the label was actually coined by Rove is debated, but essentially this idea is that some people lived in a world that was "reality-based" and that others were not limited by reality and thus were better/stronger politicians. In practice, what this means is the Bush administration did not have to believe in and be bound by this thing called reality, they created reality when they acted.
President Trump is just continuing this idea through today. Unlike GWB and cronies, Trump and team don't even have to act to "create reality", they merely talk and reality instantly changes for their followers. It's a powerful tool and like him or hate him, his administration is using it skillfully.
to an outsider, americas left vs right hostility and mutual disrespect are becoming painful to watch. lets make a counter example to they one you provided, does the nyt "create reality" for their readers? they did publish their fare share of dangerously incorrect material about the virus, pandemic, the countermeasures,you name it.
I’m not sure that’s true. Some objective “truth” exists in the world whether it’s noticed and reported correctly or not (the tree falling in the woods), and some news outlets (NYT) report this truth more accurately than others (Fox News). It’s misleading to insist on “both siding” to make a mountain of untruths from one outlet seem to be the same size as a molehill of untruths from the other.
the two outlets are absolutely equal when it comes to making half of the americans view the other half as raging lunatics. it is basically this https://youtu.be/aFQFB5YpDZE
Obama killed civilians overseas and presided over massive NSA surveillance of US citizens. Trump also kills civilians overseas and presides over massive NSA surveillance of US citizens, but that doesn't make it any better that Obama did it.
"Obama carried out the duties of being President" - yes he did, one of those duties is killing people. You'd have to go out of your way, almost to the point of ignoring and not acting on threats, to not kill anyone as POTUS.
Nice straw man, the above has nothing to do with my statement.
You could show this comment to anybody from either of the general left/right tribes, and they’d think it was true. Whether you’d use this reasoning to deride Fox News, or CNN (or pretty much any other ‘news’ organisation), would boil down entirely to your tribal affiliation. When I was younger, having “critical thinker” or “anti-establishment” views would generally lead to the conclusion that politicians and mass-media tend to lie/mislead to promote whatever their agenda is. Now, those same views seem to lead to the conclusion that “the politicians and mass-media of the other side tend to lie/mislead to promote their agenda, but the politicians and mass-media of my side are generally pretty good”. I think that’s pretty sad. But perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps things have always been this way, and my perspective has simply changed. That said, I don’t remember any counter-culture icons coming out to endorse career politicians who’d accepted millions of dollars from big business interests when I was a kid.
The downvotes on your post demonstrate the left-leaning nature of this site. It's discouraging frankly. The thousands of conversations that occur daily on this site, without emotion or incident; but insult "the other side"'s politicians or news outlets as being biased? Downvote hell
Yes, CNN and the like are just as bad as Fox news. The sooner you folks recognize that, the sooner we can have decent conversations about emotional issues. Both sides are bad. Neither is better. No, they aren't. Stop it. Blame them BOTH for getting us to this point so that we can leave them in the dark past, and we all over here can talk like adults while they sit over there and bicker, mutually accusing each other of racism and Nazism or whatever today's 5 minute hate happens to be.
WE DO NOT NEED THEM! Either of them! There is a whole universe of conversation that is not occurring because BOTH SIDES are refusing to engage in it, because if you did, you would realize -- tada -- you don't need them. And they can't have that. Viewership and income would drop.
Neither is incentivized with your best interest. And the sooner we collectively start to see it the better.
> The downvotes on your post demonstrate the left-leaning nature of this site.
Not really. If you post something that certain people dislike for whatever reason, but which is unremarkable to others, the votes will never break even; you will not get enough upvotes from the latter group to make up for the former. (Even given the fact that not everyone can downvote.)
Whichever group's buttons you push then makes it seem like the site is overrun with that group. E.g. an atheistic comment might enrage theists, but to atheists it might just be "meh". Gee, what's with the downvotes? Boy, this site is just a haven for religious zealots!
I can't even begin to speculate about the grandparent comment. Maybe some users simply found it insubstantial? Shrug.
Criticizing the impact of political tribalism (as I have done above) is likely to irritate anybody with politically tribal views. When it comes to things like Fox News vs CNN (or MSNBC, or whoever else...), I’d consider them all to be on approximately even footing in regards to journalistic integrity (as in, a rather low footing). It’s easy to see how an opinion like that would trigger anybody who had strong tribal affiliation with any of those organisations (whether they viewed it as tribalism or not, people don’t tend to scrutinize their own views in that way, as far as I can tell).
That said, you can just read the thread and come up with a rather decent guess as to which side of that paradigm I likely upset.
Logically speaking what you say is true and is worth recognizing. My comment is based more on trends I have observed over the years (and HN is no more immune to the moving window than any other social media site, it's just slower here).
The "both sides bad" mantra is really just lazy. The false equivalence between the validity of whatever DJT says and what critics say have let even basic decency be thrown out the window, let alone facts.
You must have a reasonably short memory, because people said exactly the same sort of sensational things about Obama, and Bush Jr, and Clinton, and Bush Sr, and Reagan... There’s not really any truth or insight in what you just said. It’s simply an impassioned judgement about a politician you don’t like/disagree with/don’t trust/whatever...
The truth is that most politicians are corrupt on some level, most politicians are unduly influenced by lobbyists, few politicians truly care about their constituents, mass media doesn’t care about the truth, even though some of their employees might, they just care about revenue, for any political perspective you can think of, you’ll find a media outlet willing to pander to it.
I don’t think any of that is particularly controversial (or even insightful for that matter). I’d wager that most people would agree with that sentiment on some level. But they’ll tend to lose sight of reason when you suggest that “yes, that includes the politicians you like, and the media outlets that share your opinions”.
Any public figure of any significance is going to attract a tribe of impassioned haters. They tend to have no greater connection with the truth than that same persons tribe of fervent fans will.
But DJT lies a lot more than any of his predecessors, and hires a lot more incompetents, and fires a lot more competents, than any of his predecessors.
You must have a reasonably short memory, because people said exactly the same sort of sensational things about Obama, and Bush Jr, and Clinton, and Bush Sr, and Reagan...
In general, I’m quite fond of being incredibly sceptical of the government and all of its agents. They should be scrutinized thoroughly. But this isn’t honest or productive scrutiny. The truth is all of those politicians lied, and all of them exaggerated details, and misrepresented facts (though trying to measure how much would be reasonably subjective). They also all did good work (again open to some subjective interpretation). But your commentary boils down to an incredibly black and white view, which ignores the sins of one group, and exaggerates the sins of another. It almost exclusively reflects your own biases over the actual conduct of any president.
> The "both sides bad" mantra is really just lazy.
"Fox News is TEH EVILZZ AND CNN/CBS/NBC/MY HOLY LOVE ARE TEH ANGELZZ" is really lazy. Refusing to recognize how the other news outlets aren't bastions of honorable reporting is really lazy. Refusing to recognize that none of them -- any of them, not one -- have the public's (e.g. YOUR) best interest in mind, is really lazy.
Somewhere deep down you know that but there's some emotional need you're trying to satisfy that prevents you from recognizing it. You NEED something like Fox to be evil so that your views feel justified.
So a few days ago CBS trumpeted this crying nurse from NYC complaining about lack of masks and people dying and blah blah blah. Turns out? Never happened.
The hilarious part? I despise Fox News. I just equally despise all the others. They're all complicit in fascism and the march toward corporatist dictatorship.
> "Fox News is TEH EVILZZ AND CNN/CBS/NBC/MY HOLY LOVE ARE TEH ANGELZZ" is really lazy.
Now you are being downright dishonest. Nobody said either of these things but it's demonstrably true that Fox News often publishes unverified propaganda while CNN routinely has scientists and solid source surveys to support their points.
It's interesting how you refuse to answer anything I'm saying. You're simply proving my point.
And you know full well what it is. You don't need any of them. They're all dishonest. We'd be better off having honest conversations with each other rather than tribally organizing behind ANY mainstream media (colloquially called news, but they aren't).
And yet the only thing you can focus on is attacking your perceived enemy, ignoring the enemy you choose not to see.
Yes it is, and that's exactly the problem I have with defending any news outlets. None of them have those complex conversations, and they prevent us from doing so. It's important we have them. Until that massive blinder is removed, they will be overjoyed for us to bicker about which news outlet is best, because it means we aren't looking square at them and everything we miss because they never talk about it.
You want complex conversations? Try listening to Ezra Klein's podcasts, Kara Swisher's podcasts, Lawfare's podcasts, PopeHat's podcasts, and there are many more.
The founder of Vox, the editor of a Vox subsidiary, and two law blogs that have become devoted almost entirely to trying to impeach Trump. That sure is a diverse group of perspectives you’re exposing yourself to. You can be glad you don’t exist in some sort of echo chamber.
I think the factor you missed in relating anything prior to the Trump era is the fact that Trump is an obvious, completely symptomatic Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
When he is back out of politics, watch for the other appointees to not just be replaced due to the change of president, but actively canned because they are all cronies appointed as a personality cult, and/or as favors to his worshipers.
And yes, I'm morbidly curious to imagine what the Trump presidential library might wind up containing. I snarkily predict that nothing will be approved except autobiographies.
When I heard it first I thought Trump had clinched the presidency. People publicly rail against this kind of talk but emotionally look up to people who can not just talk but behave like that. I distinctly noticed women talking more positively about him after it came out.
The problem is that the channel is named "fox news", but they have both news shows (which are actually not bad), and opinion programming, which is pretty terrible. I suspect most people don't really make a distinction between the two.
Right, but this might change as people they know start dying. It is easy to lie about things happening that don’t directly affect the people being lied to, but if you personally know multiple people killed by the virus, it will be hard to lie about it.
Fox news dumped Laura Ingraham and Trish Regan. Both were at the forefront of claiming it was all a hoax. Dr. Drew has gone on a reputation rehabilitation tour apologizing for his prior claims.
But those dismissals are a canary in a coal mine. They demonstrate that even Fox News has limits.
It is outrageous that anyone -- outside of scam prosperity preachers -- advertise on Fox News.
Dr. Drew has apparently also gone on a copyright claim kick trying to remove the evidence [1]. He has a now-deleted Tweet [2] about people infringing on copyright.
So, I am thinking his rehabilitation tour is perhaps not as forthright as it could be.
Why are you picking on Fox News? CNN, MSNBC, and others were chastising Trump over the China travel ban. They were saying he was creating hysteria over nothing. They were dismissing the virus at that point.
This is the sort of false equivalency that leads to claims that they all lie, so it's okay if Fox egregiously lies. We see this on HN all the time where someone stomps their feet and cries about a news headline that they think doesn't convey just the right slant that they want, ergo it's the same as the guy inventing bullshit conspiracy theories on his blog.
No, they weren't "chastising" Trump over the China travel ban because there was no China travel ban. There was a Wuhan restriction only applicable to foreigners. Thousands of Americans were going and coming with no restrictions whatsoever. Fly into Wuhan, lick the toilet seats, fly back home. Do it the next day.
There was zero screening. Zero containment. Zero listening to the pandemic experts.
No, they aren't the same. This revisionist "they were dismissing the virus" nonsense is utter horseshit of the worst kind. It is a lie of profound ignorance and gullibility, or an intentional lie, and both are just as obnoxious.
The equivalency being drawn by the parent may be wrong, but mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely downplayed the seriousness of the virus and helped push the "it's not a big deal" perception that we are all now rowing against.
but mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely downplayed the seriousness of the virus and helped push the "it's not a big deal" perception that we are all now rowing against.
Yet many, including right here on HN, were claiming exactly the opposite: That they were fear mongering, inciting panic, etc. It can't be both.
Zero "downplaying". I recall being quite concerned, seeing the argument that is was overblown and just a flu, etc, and discounting that as nonsense.
Can you find an article on the NYTimes, MSNBC or something that compares it to the flu or the like? Absolutely. Those mediums have varied voices with different perspectives, quite unlike Fox where the entire organization is given marching orders and a narrative they must push. The overall perspective among the non-Fox mainstream media was very concerned.
When the sea level rises and floods lower Manhattan, I'm sure there'll be people saying "Why didn't the media warn us? They downplayed the risk!"
> but mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely downplayed the seriousness of the virus
That's true, I guess, if you consider OANN to have reached the status of “mainstream” with the boost they've gotten with their attachment to the current US administration.
You can look on Youtube yourself and see countless examples o MSNBC and CNN criticizing the travel ban on China because the virus wasn't any more dangerous than the flu.
I actually followed the coverage the first time, and where the ban was criticized it was almost entirely for being too late for that response to be useful, not unwarranted by the severity of the disease. Of course, if there really are “countless” examples supporting your characterization, it will be easy for you to cite some.
EDIT: the mental gymnastics below is real, I'll add more examples as I find them, you can choose how wrong they got it and if Fox is worse, or when or how each individual should apologize... P.S. you guys are nuts, everyone was saying "it's less than 2%!!!"
But yeah, us conservatives and the only conservative mainstream news channel and our conservative President are the source of all of your problems. /s
No it's a tacky political attack in the middle of a crisis. Real classy.
Wait, wasn't your "but orange man bad" classic twitter response good enough? Why'd you edit it?
"When it was risky for him to do so."
Trump just got a get out of jail free card and absolute impunity and immunity to do anything he wanted. Since he's fired a number of people in the most brazen display of corruption in US history. Risky? There was zero risk.
Yes, orange man is bad. He's historically bad. He is a thin-skinned grifter who is positively the worst possible person to be in this position.
Oh but look he did an easy, lazy partial, regional restriction that accomplished positively nothing. What a savior.
What travel ban ? 400k people traveled from China after the ban. Trump said as of 2 weeks back that everything will be open by Easter. Everyday he downplays the virus and peddle misinformation. How anyone can define a completely unhinged and unethical person, whose direct actions is resulting in thousands of deaths is beyond me
Obama didn’t replenish the stockpile of medical supplies used after H1N1 do you blame him too? How far are we going to be under projected death counts for Covid? A factor of 1000? Either what this administration did worked or it was a hoax you pick. You might want to look into mental help early in anticipation for Trump carrying 48 states in November. Maybe actually move to Canada this time?
"How far are we going to be under projected death counts for Covid? A factor of 1000?"
What do you think the projection was?
The US has tragically seen 12,242 deaths (which is an undercount, but it's the authoritative number right now). There are over a thousand deaths a day adding onto that.
Did someone predict 12 million deaths? No, they didn't.
The absolute worst-case projection was 2 million deaths if there were zero reduction steps taken. Maybe you haven't noticed, but society is basically shut down. The spread has dramatically slowed. With extreme social distancing the US is on target for 100,000-200,000 deaths. This is a good thing relative to much more dire outcomes possible. Note that this happened at the state level with zero federal leadership. Quite contrary, with constant federal pushback.
Not sure where your "factor of 1000" nonsense comes from. I assume from the echo chambers where you're fed your pablum.
We have already seen 13k deaths in 2 weeks, with unprecedented lockdowns. According to president genius we should have been at zero cases and shouldn't be shutting down the economy. If we treated this like a regular flu, I won't be surprised if we saw numbers at the high end of the projection. And lol, 48 states ? He won barely by 70k votes and lost by what 3mn in 2016 against the most hated candidate, with Russian help, and with FBI meddling 7 days before the election. Look how we lost what 400 seats in 2018. If indeed America elects this incompetent and malicious imbecile, who trades American lives based on which states have sucked up to him, thinks his ratings are more important than 1000s of people dying, then we truly are lost. But I will not be moving to Canada, but fighting everyday to keep our democracy which is threatened everyday by this man in office
If you would have actually read those articles, you would see that the WaPo opinion piece does not actually downplay the coronavirus threat at all; it discusses the psychology of social panic. The NYT piece discusses how fear of coronavirus spread faster than the virus itself without any comment on the seriousness of the disease.
The CNBC article does compare the flu to the coronavirus and does note the flu has already killed more across the US on an absolute basis, but also notes that the coronavirus is significantly deadlier than the flu on a relative basis. Lenny Bernstein, the opinionist behind the second WaPo opinion piece you linked, apologized for his cavalier dismissal of the coronavirus in a followup opinion piece.
To date, only one person in the entire Fox News organization has apologized for getting it wrong on coronavirus. Every single other talking head has doubled down on downplaying coranavirus, and Fox and Friends is still implying that it's all just a second impeachment effort.
I'm sure you read all the articles in 5 minutes but either way the mental gymnastics you are going through to get around the headlines reading "How our brains make coronavirus seem scarier than it is" etc is truly impressive.
> The CNBC article does compare the flu to the coronavirus and does note the flu has already killed more across the US on an absolute basis, but also notes that the coronavirus is significantly deadlier than the flu on a relative basis.
The flu has already killed 10,000 across US as world frets over coronavirus
The flu remains a higher threat to U.S. public health than the new coronavirus.
This very clearly downplaying. One example was asked for, at least one was provided. Now we have examples of the downplaying being downplayed, because the "right guys" did it.
I'm ideologically opposed to political conservativism, but I sympathize with you. Regarding ideological bias, CNN is worse than Fox, but in left leaning communities Fox is demonized while CNN gets a pass. Hivemind mentalities are frustrating regardless of which group engages in it.
> Regarding ideological bias, CNN is worse than Fox,
No, it's not, though it's pretty bad.
> in left leaning communities Fox is demonized while CNN gets a pass.
No, CNN’s (and most of the institutional media that isn't hard right) center-right pro-corporate bias is nearly as frequently pointed to by left-leaning folks as Fox’s hard-right bias.
You may be confusing the pro-corporate center-right wing of the Democratic Party with the left, though, which would make this statement understandable.
You claimed that there were countless videos of "MSNBC and CNN criticizing the travel ban on China because the virus wasn't any more dangerous than the flu." Which of course isn't accurate.
You seek your redemption in some guy[1] listing a tiny selection of articles, having nothing to do with the partial travel restriction, arguing about the social effects. He links either contrarian articles, or articles talking about the psychology/sociology.
That you think this proves the case is astonishing. I am going to say again that you are either so profoundly partisan that the truth doesn't matter, or you are logically broken.
It's the classic deflection, and it's absolutely amazing. Fox was literally at war with what they saw as the "mainstream media hoax" (in lockstep with Trump, of course, because they are his state media), claiming that they were fear-mongering about the virus. Oh but now, the mainstream media actually wasn't at all. They were understating it. The cognitive deficiency to seriously argue this...
[1] That guy whose post history is littered with claims that the response to SARS-CoV-2 is "fear-mongering", and who a month ago seriously said that the US response was and is the best, of anyone. Their single example being that Trump limited air travel from a single region...for non-Americans...long after the horse was out of the barn.
Then again, your history has continual COVID denial, such as your claim that no hospitals are over capacity. You guys are really trying to argue everything simultaneously and it must be exhausting.
Did the news about the death counts flattening and missing projections by a lot today bum you out? I can’t imagine having my identity so wrapped in Trump losing the election that I would be hoping for hundreds of thousand dead and the failure of the American health care system. Enjoy the next 4 years of the Trump administration.
"I can’t imagine having my identity so wrapped in Trump losing the election that I would be hoping for hundreds of thousand dead and the failure of the American health care system"
No one celebrates the extraordinary and unending failures of this administration. We protest it. We argue against it. We see a horrendous rise of idiocracy as people celebrate their own incredible ignorance and hate.
That it's bad for you doesn't make it "good" for us.
If a miracle cure was discovered today and not a single extra person died, that will never undo the raw criminality, and total, complete incompetence of the Trump administration.
That Jared Kushner has a role greater than mail room is a fucking travesty. Hey, but what about her emails, right?
"Did the news about the death counts flattening and missing projections by a lot today bum you out?"
Social distancing works. This surprises positively no one. Your orange buffoon, however, wants to stop social distancing. Maybe there's some miracle snake oil he can pitch and everything will be great again.
Go back to Twitter. Go back to your insular echo chamber. Your trolling, copy-paste noise just makes you look like a clown here.
Completely disagree. The Fox news and related contingent and their response was drastically different than the other side. For example, SF declared an emergency in February and everyone was working from home since early March. While Florida had no such order till last week
Bear in mind it's not just Fox News which got this pandemic wrong. "It's no worse than the flu," "this won't be a global pandemic," "you don't need to wear a mask unless you are symptomatic or caring for someone who is," and other 100% wrong takes were also pushed by Vox, NYT, WaPo, and even WHO & CDC long past when they should have been.
Which is one of the reasons why I wish we, collectively as a society, would stop blaming the blame game in this crisis. Almost everyone got this wrong.
When and why people got things wrong is also important. People who underestimated COVID-19 in January because evidence of its lethality and r0 were scant are somewhat different from people who downplayed the virus in March because it aligned them with a particular political figure. Similarly, it's a lot easier to sympathise with the epidemiologists who will turn out to have massively overestimated casualties because we took unprecedented action to shut down society to avoid them than the people still organising mass events or the people who have concluded that the disease is best stopped by attacking 5G masts.
I look at it a bit differently. If someone's pushing the line "just listen to the experts," then it should be acknowledged that experts do get it wrong and have massively dropped the ball on COVID-19. The signs of how lethal and contagious the virus is were there in China for anyone to read by early January.
Of course, "experts (in particular our experts) don't know what they're doing" is different from "... and therefore you should listen to any yahoo who says it's 5G."
In hindsight, it is obvious that COVID19 was worse than SARS or MERS.
But at the time, especially given China's clampdown on information outflow, it didn't appear to be significantly different from SARS, which didn't effect the West much, or MERS, which had almost no impact outside of the Middle East.
But as another commenter noted, the timing matters a lot.
Everyone except Fox News thought back in January that COVID19 was going to be big, but based on prior coronaviruses not something that would significantly impact the West. They've all done 180s and are pulling out the stops to fix their earlier error.
Fox News is still saying that today (i.e., April 6). One of their talking heads just said that COVID19 is overblown just a few minutes ago.
I'm sorry, its not even in hindsight. All you needed to do is look at what China was doing. It became very apparent that there was a major viral outbreak on-going in china around Luna New Year
> but based on prior coronaviruses not something that would significantly impact the West.
If we talk about a lot of media, they simply had the priority of making Chinese look bad in any possible way, including blaming them for "misinterpreting numbers" and ridiculing them for implementing lockdowns or wearing masks.
Which just shows how stupid some global agendas are. Media don't do that in vaccuum, but they are the reflection of the power of the interest groups that want to push the agenda.
If we talk about a lot of media, they simply had the priority of making Chinese look bad in any possible way, including blaming them for "misinterpreting numbers" and ridiculing them for implementing lockdowns or wearing masks.
Amazing how apparently all of the media around the world was united in a conspiracy to make China look bad, especially when much of the reporting was commenting on how much worse the situation must actually be compared to what was being reported by China, given the severity of China's response.
> all of the media around the world was united in a conspiracy to make China look bad
It's like 'memes': very little journalists today do their own research. I can see that whatever Trump says today then follows the "echo" of "media around world" (those that have U.S. sources) that last weeks.
It's a total disaster of false information, and a lot could be traced directly to Trump or the U.S. in general (there are other "sources" that are establishment but produce falsehoods, it's not that he's alone).
But enough people remain confused believing it is true, including people very close to me.
"especially given China's clampdown on information outflow"
Come on. By late December, China's response was so drastic (including when measured against all previous coronavirus outbreaks) that the question of "suppressing" information about it was completely moot.
The CDC completely dropped the ball on this. Yes, in part because Trump slashed their pandemic response budget, but they did a piss-poor job even for the resources at their disposal.
Fox News and Trump being a source of constant disinformation and incompetence is, to me, kind of a constant of the universe. The same ought not to be true of the rest of our institutions, and yet it seems that it is.
On Dec 31, China informed WHO about a mysterious cluster of respiratory ailments clustered around a seafood market in Wuhan. China didn't even close the seafood restaurant until 2020. The first confirmed death wasn't reported until January 11. China didn't begin a lockdown of Wuhan until January 23.
Yes, the CDC dropped the ball, but evidence coming out in March indicates that China knew about COVID19 in early December and didn't bother to tell the rest of the world about it for another month, and even then downplayed the seriousness of the virus until the end of January.
To this day China is still blocking the release of information about the severity of COVID19. WaPo reported last week that there may have been more than 40,000 COVID19 fatalities in Wuhan alone (based on manually counting the number of urns distributed by morticians) which is at more than 13x the official number of deaths reported for the entire country.
But they should not have got any of this wrong! Check out the TED talk by Bill Gates in 2015. How could any journalist worth anything not have had that video in their research before publishing articles. Look at how Asian countries wear masks. Did the people working in the WHO think that was for fashion? The people in spokesperson positions have been caught out big time. It's a issue with how people are promoted to these positions and an example of how society favouring extroverts over introverts is a bad idea.
Fox News is the only organization that continue to let their opinion anchors downplay and politicize the virus well after it was clear it was deadly and inevitable.
I think you misread the passage that you quote as supporting idealism. The full passage is:
"The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."
Making a false prediction on the premise that you can bluster your way out of it doesn't indicate that they think the false prediction doesn't have consequences - it indicates that they think the false prediction doesn't have consequences for them. That they can get away with it. It's "I can say what I want, because nothing bad will happen to me personally for lying."
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 387 ms ] threadm.o. = modus operandi
You need more sample points, larger multipliers, or prior expectation of seeing an exponential curve to see that as exponential growth.
What? The former is exponential and the latter is linear. They are the definition of different.
The 30th number in the first series is 536870912.
The 30th number in the second series is 59.
You can't say just from 4 data points. Real data is noisy. Imagine each number is ±1.
I agree that it's worthwhile intuition in many cases, but really not here and even people equipt with both the data and the mathematical expertise to use it there have also made many bad calls on this.
You would think this would be the reality check that was needed, but it's not the case for everyone. I guess that is human pyschology writ large, but I'm finding that I just have to watch videos and not even look in the comments as it's just a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and people being just plain wrong in a lot of places.
- 5G occurred at the same time as corona - This is therefore “too much of a coincidence”
- 5G kills off things that naturally kill coronavirus
- 5G makes our immune systems weaker
All of which are unfounded of course. But it’s important not to just reject people’s ideas out-of-hand, or to suppress them.
1. Africa is a continent, not a country. 2. Some countries in Africa DO have 5G deployments, including my home country of South Africa. In the news recently is a possible link between BCG vaccinations and reduced fatality rates from Covid-19. South Africa has fairly high BCG vaccination rates due to the prevalence of TB 3. Iran has a severe problem with Covid-19, but no 5G deployments.
But as you say, this comes from the same type of crowd that believes in all the other bullshit (flat earth, vaccinations give you autism, etc.) so you can hardly expect an informed response to this.
The bit I gleaned was the claim that since 60GHz is absorbed by oxygen (haven't checked this, but I'd assume similar to 2.4GHz being absorbed by water), it therefore interferes with your lungs' ability to intake oxygen. (my low-effort analysis: the radio waves won't penetrate your skin by more than a few millimeters, and therefore could in no way act in your lungs)
The whole narrative was much jumping around making connections that would seem plausible if you don't know or try to investigate technical details. For example - a defense contractor worked on 60GHz gear as well as communications for cruise ships -> smoking gun!
I'm sure there was plenty of innuendo that rolled right off my back, but makes an emotional impression. My aunt had gotten the impression that 5G is 50-60 times the power of a microwave oven. I couldn't bring myself to watch the video again to find what could possibly be interpreted this way, but I'm guessing it was talking about the frequency while implying magnitude.
REALLY JUST A COINCIDENCE!? /s
The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to it makes it a very peculiar epidemic. And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too worried at all.
As for the number of death, let's not forget the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, and that is with people getting vaccinated. It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea..
Another thing that i haven't read a lot, is that the WHO have been alarming people in the past with previous epidemic (srars, mers, ebola, etc), and nothing "special" happened (i suppose partly because people correctly dealt with it, but also because of the nature of the virus). It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.
FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with substantial year to year variation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/
Even if you steadfastly refuse to accept the obvious exponential dynamics of contagion in a naive population, perhaps the fact that the figures you are reasoning from are off by a constant factor of 3 to >10 might cause you to reconsider your level of confidence?
This. It seems most people are incapable of making decisions purely based on what their mind or the math says. I kind of get it, it didn't "feel real" in the beginning, it was just the mind that went "omg we need to act NOW", not the stomach. I suspect this is why the Silicon Valley Crowd was so far ahead of the curve - they deal with exponential growth more often, and are used to listen to just their brains, for better or worse.
Plus, a lot of the interventions don't really make much sense if you're the only one doing them.
For example, imagine I'm not worried about my own safety, but I am for the safety of others. Staying home and self-isolating will help with this if almost everyone else does it - but if I start a month early, doing it on my own? Negligible benefit.
And of course, much easier to get to work from home at an otherwise-non-WFH company once your boss and their boss are thinking the same way as you, and they've heard Google and Apple are doing the same...
Actually that's why most public communication for staying at home doesn't say "protect yourself", but rather emphasis on protecting "others" (aka : people vulnerable). The virus is extremely dangerous, but only for a (not that small) minority of people. That's a weird one.
I think one of the biggest public health communication disasters of covid19 is the reliance on mortality as the communication endpoint.
It's acceptable for other threats-- like automotive accidents-- to speak in terms of mortality because there isn't a huge population which is much less exposed to dying but still exposed to serious illness. Automotive accidents also seriously injure many more people than they kill, but not in a way that lends itself to a false impression of immunity.
"Death" makes a nice clear warning for the risks of driving, and other very bad but not death outcomes are just some factor of the death outcomes... it isn't like the audience is comparing death rates to population numbers then deciding that the death from driving isn't worth worrying about just because we didn't also include maimed-for-life.
For covid19 we've ended up making many 20 and 30 year olds believe that it doesn't threaten them. It does. They may not be dying in especially large numbers-- especially where either hospitals are not overloaded or where they're engaging in the ethically dubious practice of triaging younger people ahead of others based purely on their age rather than, e.g. response to treatment--, but they are still becoming seriously and painfully ill and ending up with severe immune system damage -- which takes a long time will recover and will result in latent mortality --, and for many likely lifelong injury in the form of extensive lung scaring.
Infections like influenza are much less contagious-- with an R0 of 1.3 vs 2 to 3 (an enormous difference)--, less deadly, face a population which is at least somewhat resistant (in part due to heroic vaccination efforts) and which knows how to rapidly create new and effective vaccines against it. It's not really that comparable.
I myself haven't yet seen any data that would make this virus any worse than the flu (which means it's still dangerous, just maybe not "everybody-hide-under-the-rock" dangerous). Even data from Italy doesn't show mortality any higher than previous years.
Do you have links to data that supports what you wrote?
I agree it is a communication disaster though. If I see another chart with red line, logarithmic scale, not starting from zero or with some approximated (red) curve that doesn't specify the formula... :-/
What do you think the mechanism is here? Why are people being hospitalised with covid-19, if it's not covid-19 causing the hospitalisation?
People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on ventilators, until covid-19 happens and now the ITUs are full of people with covid-19 having air pumped into their lungs to push the fluid out.
What's causing that if not covid-19?
People are counted in the stats produced by hospitals if they have the virus, not if they've been hospitalised because of the virus. Literally if someone breaks their arm and they're tested positive, that goes into the stats for "COVID-19 cases". This is also true if someone dies of anything whilst having the virus; they're recorded as a "COVID-19 death".
The statistics here don't tell us what they sound like they're telling us. We'd see exactly the same pattern if the rules were suddenly changed to require every hospital admission to be tested for the common cold in a regular year - the number of "cases" and "deaths" would increase dramatically every day.
People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on ventilators
That statement is far too vague. People of all ages spend time on ventilators every years, especially during a flu outbreak. This is especially true of young children (under 5) whom COVID-19 doesn't affect at all! And COVID-19 is known to affect very few under 50s; the numbers here are so tiny the media can literally write entire stories about individual cases.
So what does "people" and "much time" mean in this sentence?
You can see some data on deaths from pneumonia by age group here:
https://ourworldindata.org/pneumonia#pneumonia-mortality-rat...
Of course deaths isn't the same thing as hospitalisation as the young are more likely to recover than the old. So this data isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it's at least quantifiable.
It's not safe to make a claim about this virus without comparing it to known values from prior years or outbreaks, when comparing the same thing. Every single number we're being presented with is presented without context and it leads to catastrophic mistakes of understanding. Number of positive test increases is shown without the number of negative test increases as well (i.e. an exponential increase in testing looks like an exponential increase in cases), deaths are counted without any investigation to decide what caused that death and so on.
It's very easy to get a totally misleading impression of what's going on. This is likely why in so many parts of the world hospitals are now reporting themselves as empty for weeks, despite the supposed "exponential growth" that should have overwhelmed them by now. In fact in Switzerland hospitals are needing to apply for emergency funding because the huge drop in patient numbers has caused their revenue to dry up.
There's clearly a virus spreading. It sends some people to hospital. Quite a few viruses do that.
Unlike those, this virus is different in one key way - governments have decreed that any death where the virus is present is counted as a "virus death", and have decreed mass testing to find infections. Consider a virus that is not really dangerous but highly infectious, like any common cold or flu. Then many people will turn up at hospital with it, but in reality their problem is something else. With our current data that would look like hospitals being flooded in a way never seen before, but it'd be a data artifact, not something real.
As for countries having to build makeshift hospitals, two things:
1. Local overloads happen during bad flu seasons too. You can find many reports in the past about wards being converted, tents being constructed to hold patients on the streets from earlier flu pandemics. Arguably making quick hospitals to handle that sort of bad flu season should be a more common practice.
2. No country anywhere is experiencing general overload. Even in Italy, a few days ago a politician was publicly asking why they're sending patients to Germany when in nearby Veneto there are hospitals that are 2/3rds empty.
Projections of mass death requiring everyone to shelter-in-place are based on the belief that everywhere will "go Bergamo" simultaneously at once. That isn't happening, it's not even close to happening.
Go investigate and you can find stories of deserted hospitals all over the world right now. They've been cleared out in anticipation of an imminent surge that isn't appearing. That's why Germany and Switzerland can take in patients from neighbouring countries - not only are there no makeshift hospitals but hospitals need financial bailouts because they've having to pay so many staff who are basically idled, like many other businesses.
Clearly there's a huge mismatch between the global view and a small number of local hotspots, and our understanding of what's happening is heavily coloured by the press.
If we succeed at slowing the growth, even stopping it, then thank god those hospitals will remain empty.
e.g. here's German data:
https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/infizierte-pro-tes...
and US data:
https://twitter.com/FScholkmann/status/1246122535793680386
It looks like it doubles every few days because of the rapid increase in testing.
Moreover these hospitals are now entering their second week of being idled. They should be very busy by now if the sick were really growing exponentially - they're still mostly empty.
Even in New York you see this:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8173563/Elmhurst-ta...
"New York City's Elmhurst hospital - the 'epicenter of the epicenter' - is now receiving fewer patients but they are arriving sicker, doctor warns, as he says some come in with no symptoms other than diarrhea then test positive"
"He said testing was surprising and that some people show up with a fever and cough but test negative. Others who are there for different ailments - like car accident victims - end up testing positive."
New York is supposed to be the epicentre of the outbreak yet the most overloaded hospital is now seeing fewer patients arrive than before. That's not consistent with being at the start of a very long exponential growth phase (it obviously can't grow exponentially forever so this discussion is only about how long it lasts in that phase and where the peak is).
Edit: got throttled, will reply to Joe here
Many sources show only the number of positive cases and deaths. Here's one that shows total tests performed in the USA:
https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily
On the 5th April 2020 there were 332,308 positive cases in the USA. So the halving point was between 29th and 30th March (139,061 and 160,530 cases respectively). It took about 5 days to double.
On the 5th April 2020 there were 1.42 million negative cases. On 29th March 2020 there were 692,290 negatives or 48% of the figure today. It took exactly the same amount of time to double.
So we can see that number of tests doubled in that time. Total tests went from 831,351 (47%) to 1,762,032.
The proportion of positive to negative cases is 18% today. On the 29th March it was 16%. A 2% rise, nothing even close to doubling. The graph in the tweet I linked to shows this visually - a fairly smooth and slow increase over time. We think it's spreading exponentially because of misuse of data, but all that's actually growing exponentially is testing. And yes - that's probably why there are now global shortages of reagents and other ingredients for tests. You can't keep globally doubling demand for tests without eventually hitting production limits!
Look at the worldwide data, then at the data for pretty much every country: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
Its geometric growth pretty much any place you look. Now, unless testing were proceeding completely uniformly across the board, its hard to imagine that explains any of this.
This is an example of how you are making straw man arguments. No-one is arguing that the growth rate will continue to be exponential in the face of effective mitigation.
We're not testing the general population. Its testing of folks coming to a hospital? Folks who aren't having hospitalizing symptoms are not tested at all, and sent home to quarantine.
So if tests doubled that means that folks are feeling bad at an increased rate. Showing up at a hospital with alarming symptoms.
You can finagle the statistics both ways - by ignoring what the 'test sample' is and assuming its uniform for instance.
You're right that it's not a uniform sample, but the consistency across the world is very suggestive. Not everywhere has test shortages.
It links to a document from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre.
The evidence from actual covid treatment doesn't support the "they die with, not of, covid" argument.
Doesn't that require a study after the fact? So your proposal is to just wait and see?
BTW, how do you explain the unprecedented hospitalization and ICU rates in Northern Italy?
As an example, this report from European Society of Anaesthesiology[1] mentions:
> The number of intensive care beds in Italy continues to change. Initially, there were 500 public intensive care (ICU) beds in Lombardy, and 140 private ICU beds. However, now there are more than 900.
[1]: https://www.esahq.org/esa-news/analysis-of-covid-19-data-on-...
A lot of people aren't tested unless they are severely sick, they're just told to stay at home.
When they arrive in the hospital they're already in a pretty bad condition, and only then tested. Which means that no therapeutic actions are made until patients are admitted, with the exception of self-administration of paracetamol.
> The number of intensive care beds in Italy continues to change. Initially, there were 500 public intensive care (ICU) beds in Lombardy, and 140 private ICU beds. However, now there are more than 900.
But a lot of ICU beds were slashed in the past 10 years due to budget cuts, and we were at 80% capacity when the virus hit. If the testing keeps on like this, and we can't even palliatively treat patients until they start suffering respiratory problems, these problems will continue.
That's just like Covid though - they are counting everyone who dies with the virus even though most have other conditions.
This is the latest data published by the Italian Ministry of Health. Looking at the chart on the second page, try to ignore the lines (we all know there is an infinite amount of ways one can approximate a curve to the dots) and just observe the dots. Does this seem like a bad year to you? Compared to winter 2016/17?
http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/caldo/SISMG_sintesi_ULTIMO....
Also note that all the charts are misleading since they don't start with 0 (the effect is exaggerated).
https://www.ecodibergamo.it/stories/bergamo-citta/coronaviru...
Doesn't that seem like a bad year to you?
Overall mortality for Europe is lower than during most flu seasons:
https://www.euromomo.eu/
Week 13 is march 22-28 if I counted right. Deaths lag cases. French Coronavirus deaths went from 674 on the 22nd, to 2314 on the 28th, to 8078 yesterday april 5th.
I would say your comment is premature.
The thing you are missing though is that crisis started mid March. It feels like forever (because of shelter at home), but it is a very short time and every few days the number of cases doubles. Most of that doesn't register on graphs that spans multiple years (look at the dates).
Every cold and flu grow exponentially.
Not sure what the fixation of HN readers is on the work exponential. Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically.
I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators, and the futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown.
If people are doing well, the economy will likely catch up-- weak businesses will fail, new ones will be created. It may hurt, may hurt for a while-- but from a purely economic perspective this might turn out to be a useful reboot. There are going to be a lot of phenomenal opportunities in the coming year.
But the economy cannot do well if the people are not.
For a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that we didn't need to keep delivering food and power and whatnot. It would be possible to simply pause the entire economy-- just like contracts that don't consider weekends business days-- in this fictional world we could freeze all accounts and all debts and whatnot for a year and then do "2020" over again. We can't do this because we need to keep a lot of people working to keep food and medical care flowing-- but I think the crazy idea is a useful illumination that the economy is a shared delusion. Whats going on now is only as devastating as we allow it to be, but the deaths of millions would be devastating (economically and otherwise) regardless of what we otherwise want.
For many layperson, this is their first experience when it really matters. My mom isn't sitting around thinking about exponential spread when she gets a cold.
> I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators
I agree. Something like 80% of the people who end up on a ventilator die. Of course those other 20% are happy one was available, but by the time ventilators are being discussed it's really too late. Prevention is key.
> futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown
Depends. The economy was going to be hit hard regardless. Even if nothing was ever forced closed, the number of people sick and the number of overwhelmed hospitals would have killed the economy. For example, even before there were any official lockdowns in the US, companies I work with were already stopping all travel (late February timeframe).
The issue of exponential growth is of relevance in response to those saying that the number of deaths (insert the inplicit 'so far' here) is much less than from infuenza (annually.) It is not a 'fixation' to expose the irrelevance of that line of thinking.
More generally, the issue is a combination of the facts that this virus is significantly more dangerous, for all age groups, than at least post- Spanish Flu infuenza; it is very readily transmitted; and there is no (or much less) herd immunity. When you combine these fact with the math of exponential growth, and have establshed the doubling rate, you can do some scientific prediction that goes beyond "so far it has not been as bad as the flu", which is true just so long as it is, and no longer. To do that, however, you have to hold more than one idea at a time in your head.
It seems there are a ton of people right now who are enjoying thinking of themselves as intellectually and even morally superior to people who are just pointing out facts about the statistics gathered so far (which point to flu-like levels of danger and properties). I think the HN community is especially prone to this because it's full of computer programmers who are used to thinking in powers of two; some seem tempted to ascribe near-magical wisdom to this familiarity. But nature isn't a computer and just saying "exponential growth" over and over will eventually make fools of a lot of people, because it isn't there.
If this virus was really spreading exponentially, you'd expect to see the proportion of positive tests going up exponentially as well. But that isn't what is seen. In places that report the total number of tests administered (some places don't), the proportion of positive tests increases sub-exponentially or even hardly at all, coming to rest at about 15%, which is roughly the background level of coronavirus infections in the population during normal times.
It's especially disappointing to see PG fall into the trap of blaming politicians. Politicians have in the blink of an eye ceded power to a tiny cabal of (primarily) epidemiologists. So far they by and large aren't asking questions, instead simply doing whatever they're told even if it makes little sense.
But we really need people to start asking those scientists difficult questions. Citizens can do it but ultimately it only matters when politicians do it. Epidemiologists have a track record of absolute failure. They failed with Zika, they failed with foot and mouth disease, they're failing with CV. Go look at the models they produce and weep; some are invalidated the day they're published!
This guy is doing a good job of pointing out the many errors of modellers:
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson
There's also some background here:
https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569
What we are supposing is instead that the number of people who are presently infected will increase exponentially IF we don't adopt measures to decrease the spread. This is actually what you saw in the initial period and what you would be seeing now if we did nothing extraordinary to decrease the spread. If you look at the 1918 flu epidemic it ultimately infected 1/3 of the population. It is utterly unclear to me why you imagine your understanding is better than that of the experts. It would seem you yourself are guilty of the same sin you ascribe to programmers? From your animus towards the profession are you perhaps a manager of same? If so you seem to have contracted at least one of their faults.
> politicians have in the blink of an eye ceded power to a tiny cabal of (primarily) epidemiologists.
This literally isn't real.
The politicians are indeed at fault for the poor response. We cede to them substantial funds and powers to both prepare for and response to situations just like this. In fact the pentagon prepared a report on literally just this exact crisis in 2017 that called out among other things a lack of supplies. We opted to do nothing of import between now and today. In the crucial early days of this crisis instead of instituting effective measures we were busy first ignoring reports of it and then publicly claiming it is a hoax. If we aren't brave and clear sighted enough to even ascribe blame how are we to do better next time?
Even the highest positive rates I've seen (in the UK where the testing situation is dire) are only 30%. In other countries with more tests it's around 15% and stable over long periods.
If the number of infected were truly growing that fast, then you'd see the proportion of positive tests go up and up until negative tests were hardly happening, but that isn't close to what's seen on the ground.
What we are supposing is instead that the number of people who are presently infected will increase exponentially IF we don't adopt measures to decrease the spread
That's not what policymakers are supposing. If that were true there wouldn't be a global run on ventilators, which assumes enormous growth over case load today.
This literally isn't real.
That's not much of a response. Where are there politicians not saying their decisions are just guided by the science? The only places where politicians even pushed back slightly on epidemiologists are Brazil and - briefly - the USA.
At this time what epidemiologists say should be done, is done, no questions asked. In Denmark they are even restricting speech to stop people criticising the adopted measures, or so it's said. Look at what happened to my post above - even investigating or criticising those currently making the decisions is suddenly penalised.
A tiny number of academics with no track record of accuracy have obtained enormous power now. If they say lock down, countries lock down. If they say close the borders, the borders are closed. If they say open up, countries open up.
It's right and proper that such people be subject to the same scrutiny as normal politicians are.
As for politicians having done nothing, I don't think that's fair. Does the USA not have large stockpiles of ventilators and masks? Perhaps unusable in the end, but that level of detail is not for politicians, only civil servants. As for beds, well, even assuming the modellers are right no healthcare system in the world can have tens of thousands of ICU beds empty, sitting for a once in a century pandemic. Politicians who tried to have such levels of slack would soon be replaced by others who cared more about utilisation. I don't think there's much to say about them at this time; for better or worse they've taken a back seat.
When it is growing exponentially, they close a few schools here and there or stop visits in hospitals. That is enough to stop spread, get the R below 1 and making it not exponential.
It is simply not true that every cold and flu grows exponentially.
No, that's true only if it's brand new. Immunity for a certain strain lasts several years, which means there's a level of herd immunity that constraints infection from even reaching some of the non-immune folks, hence it's hard for it to be exponential.
This is not the case with the 'novel' coronavirus. There is no large scale immunity among the population.
Non-math/cs people typically haven't been directly exposed to exponential growth. Which, to be fair, can be an intuitively hard concept until someone sits down and thinks it through. The classic lily pad example is my usual go-to way of explaining exponential growth to someone.
I also think a large part of this problem is societies overall rejection of science, but that's a different discussion.
Every day, there's an article describing the new cases or deaths as a "surge". Look for that word: Surge. This word implies that the growth is somehow sudden or unexpected, whereas every day's actual day-to-day growth was predicted pretty accurately months ago. But, if you read the news, every day is described as some surprising "surge". I wish the media would stop calling every day's number a "surge" and start reporting "New coronavirus cases grew at (or above or below) the expected rate, doubling every N days."
It looks like flu, among other reasons, because popular comparison at the time compared all-ages mortality for flu (e.g. including old and sick) with healthy-young-person mortality of the covid. This very same comparison also ignores asymptomatic covid people and does not ignore asymptomatic people with flu. So it is twisted in all kind of ways.
And the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is already going way way worse than the flu.
I just wanted to explain my initial reaction, based on what happened in china and by reading various medical people give their opinion.
2018: Flu stomps the nation, overwhelming ERs and leaving 20 children dead: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/flu-surveillance-cdc/i...
2013: Flu Outbreak Overwhelms Hospitals: https://fox8.com/news/flu-outbreak-overwhelms-area-hospitals...
2017: Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
I still have yet to hear from the medical and nursing schools about increasing the number of students for the future.
The flu is still terrible, btw. And I hope this situation will increase the vaccination rates for the flu
Fully aware of the types that will come out of the woodwork for simply saying this, however: no, it's currently still not on track for even a mild flu year yet alone a bad one.
A bad year for influenza is about 650,000 deaths worldwide, pneumonia deaths are often an aftereffect of the flu and it kills 2.5 million on average each year.
SARS-COV-2 has killed 60,000 in 5 months despite having no vaccine or known medicinal treatment, mainly due to locally overstretched medical resources more than anything else.
It's not even close to being equivalent to a bad flu year yet, and that's ignoring the secondary deaths.
Maybe about tenth your figure, once you exclude non-flu pneumonia-- which is about where we are now for covid19. Flu death figures are Flu+Pneumonia because they usually don't check. Efforts to separate flu from flu + pneumonia all result in flu being a small fraction of the total ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ ).
In the US, the flu kills between 12,000 and 61,000 people each year depending on the season. COVID-19 will almost certainly reach the low end of that range in between two and three days. It went from 100 to more than 9,000 deaths in only three weeks.
It's not the flu.
P.S. everyone who can get a flu shot should, every year, regardless of age. Herd immunity assists in protecting the entire population.
January 2017 was much worse overall in Europe, it's not even comparable.
Still, if you focus on Italy, which is the most ahead in Europe, by March 28th (the time that report was updated), the number of deaths was already matching the 2017 peak (and in about 2/3 of the time). Since then the death count went up 70%.
edit: also note the caution about the uncertainty due to delayed registration.
The data is still lagging by a few days, but it seems that the numbers are starting to trend down.
Comparing a number that is static from year to year to one that is growing exponentially is mistake number 2.
CDC data shows 220k known-tested-positive case and 22k associated death. The 36 millions case is pulled out of a hat. As per these number, seasonal flu kills 10% of the known-positive cases.
The main difference was it took the superior part of the throat instead of the inferior. Talking with doctors they tell me I had all the symptoms.
The problem with it is that at first it is "benign"(I had high fever for "just" two days) if your body stops it before getting into the lungs. Once it gets there it could be nasty(as it produces cytokine storm syndrome there) very fast.
So it is very easy to get confident.
Even the flu could get very dangerous is you get it combined with something else like a bacteria at the same time.
incredibly simplified accessible articles on mainstream health websites, stating that a symptom is "throat pain"
or having to go through 20 pages of medical research which I understand basically nothing of.
I'm not so confident yet. What is still worrying me, is that it is not clear about the importance of the initial dose with respect to the severity of the outcome.
The disease having a quite slow progression, may mean that if you let it spread wildly, suddenly there is a large percentage of the population exposed, and this mean that when people gets contaminated they receive a high inoculum which may bring down even healthy individuals.
We are collectively guilty of many errors in judgement but on the whole we show on average not only are we able to mostly behave competently in complex situations individually we are able collectively to make some systemic changes to decrease mortality over the years.
This gives me hope that we take the correct lesson from this terrible experience and adjust our individual and collective behavior to avoid a re occurrence.
Medical professionals aren't professionals in everything. You may have been asking the equivalent a frontend developer for advice on writing COBOL for z/OS.
1. People are often contagious well before showing symptoms, making it much harder to track and isolate the people who have it.
2. It is about 10x more deadly than the flu. Could be more than that, as it's difficult to extrapolate from the current messy data. But I think it's safe to say it is much more deadly than the seasonal flu.
So far more people getting it, in a very short period of time, and a much higher percentage dying or requiring hospitalization, giving us the results we see. Overwhelmed health care systems, and death counts that will be much higher than seasonal flu without large scale mitigations in place.
Have you stopped saying that, or are you still saying it for some reason?
>It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea..
Do you realize, you can, and probably should, get vaccinated for the flu each year? And that these vaccines are only a 'best guess' for that particular year, so you should get on each year?
>It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.
I suppose the alternative is to not warn people about pandemics and just let them all run wild? I'm sorry if people choose to get "desensitized", but these organizations are not interested in the politics of whether or not the general public will be able to appropriately digest their messages, and hence don't ration warnings based on how much we can "handle".
This idea helps me provide a plausible explanation to some behavior I find counterintuitive.
Of course if one tries pointing this out the response is sometimes "oh, they're so powerful that they like to mock us", but more commonly just to accuse you of being a shill/deep-state-agent/whatever.
To be clear, I don't think the Illuminati are real, but I don't think your reasoning is sound either.
Looks like it's already centuries old even, from 1600s Sweden: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna#Quotation
Neither would I classify MK-Ulta that way: "Techniques included the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of torture."
Or the releasing of biological weapons (MK-Naomi): "at least three covert techniques for attacking and poisoning crops that had been examined under field conditions."
Or Operation Notherwoods: "to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets, blaming them on the Cuban government, and using it to justify a war against Cuba."
Or the Tuskegee experiment: "The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis; the African American men in the study were only told they were receiving free health care from the Federal government of the United States."
The list goes on and on and on and on.
The Christian baker who did not want to bake them a cake, but who was being compelled by the state to act against his personal religious beliefs?
Who loses when the gay couple can just go to another baker, one who doesn't let his/her religious beliefs get in the way of business? What did they hope to gain by ignoring every other baker in town who was willing to bake their cake, shopping around until they found a baker who refused them? Was it ever about a cake or rather about using gay rights as weapon to attack Christians?
Tell that to the Jews in Deutchland circa 1931...
Tell that to the Kulaks in the Ukraine in 1930 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor,
Tell that to the educated classes in China under Mao;https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/mao-murd...
You see conspiratorial thinking as some kind of bug in the thinking of insuffciently skeptical and analytical minds; a branch of stupidity. But it's not. It's a self-defense mechanism which, like other things considered antiquated and ineffcient like borders and control over immigration saves people from mass death.
These things don't exist because people are stupid and can't reason. They exist because people aren't stupid and do reason and then believe in their own mind's creations.
No matter how smart or sophisticated or computer-aided your reasoning is, no matter how big your data set becomes, you will only match and elucidate upon, but not beat, instincts which evolved under real Darwinian pressures which make you aware and wary of things which kill en masse.
That describes most plans people have.
So the planners deceive and dissemble. That is how the world has always worked.
What's more, it's instinctive knowledge that this is happening all the time. Suspicion of those in power is a human instinct which, like all instincts, optimizes our survival chances under the conditions for which it evolved. WRT to political conspiracies, those conditions still hold today.
The way to think about conspiracy theories is the same way you think about inventors and inventions.
Nature produces inventors (conspiracy minded individuals) many of whom produce only harebrained inventions ("conspiracy theories" so called) some more who produce hit and miss inventions and a few which produce inventions which are overwhelming important and matter to survival ("Hitler is going to kills us all, we must flee right now!" - spoken by a Jew in 1933 Munich).
What this mapping between domains, inventions and conspiracies, also implies is that just because someone was wrong about one conspiracy doesn't mean they are wrong about all conspiracies and their credibility should not be automatically bankrupted if they believe one or two false conspiracy theories.
I do read some conspiracy theory sites and like to hear plausible (non-alien/ lizard people) ones because I want my mind to at least entertain the idea. It's like panning for gold. Most of it is nothing. Once in a while, maybe a little taste of something and I retain it dimly awaiting future possible supporting evidence.
For example, the "desperate labor shortage" and "Americans don't like STEM" meme is a clear conspiracy amongst employers and attorneys and their clients to control engineering wages and have more of the profits go to business owners. I used to not know about that "conspiracy theory" then I heard it and wondered if it could be true then over time the evidence for it became incontravertible.
Just to give one example.
"Technically" in which sense? Which political science course taught you that? Or are you referring to some specific government?
But the older I get, and the more understanding I have over how large organizations are ran, the more I realize that conspiracies actually do happen, but in much more subtle ways.
What actually happens is that over a long periods of time, people collaborate with and promote those who think like them, with similar biases and incentives. Then when a major decision needs to be made, everyone at the table think the same way and agree on the same solution. This works even across organizations, as people's career are made through networks and relationships transcending organizational boundaries.
It is difficult to get a group of people to understand something when all their salaries depends upon them not understanding it.
Some people end up coming up with conspiracy theories based on their outsider observations.
It's tempting to give ignorance and fear a complicated explanation couched in the suspicion of greedy forces. It's not parsimonious. Plain ignorance and distrust is sufficient.
It's you who need a reality check.
This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge of exponential math and how medical services plan and allocate their resources. It is the government's job to explain how this is very different from the flu and they are utterly failing to do so in many cases.
In fact, I suspect that most people believe that the isolation policies are to protect individuals' health, ie. to prevent even young and healthy people from contracting the virus. And based on this false premise, they are right to be annoyed with the lockdowns.
This is important because in a week or two, when the grocery stores start to empty and the lights start to flicker, the rugged individualist-types in the United States are going to start asking "why are we doing this, exactly?" And there is born civil unrest.
It is the role of state and national governments to answer this question and they have not been effective in doing so. We are doing this because there are O(10^6) preventable deaths in our future. Not because of the danger to any one young healthy person.
That doesn't appear to be true. Almost everybody who goes on a ventilator dies. Corona virus will infect as many people as any other flu or cold.
So it's a valid question - why do we still have a lockdown?
Because those _are_ preventable, if they don't get infected.
That, in turn, buys time to medical research & practice to mitigate and cure the disease, so that, later, when someone vulnerable is infected, we'll know better how to take care of them.
That wouldn't be a problem if so, to be honest. The problem is that a patient usually survives, but it takes 3 weeks in the ICU to do so.
The reason for lockdown is to slow things down, so we don't get to the point where doctors have to decide who to help or who not. Also a lot of people can't connect in their mind that when hospitals are full, it also affects people who didn't even get the virus.
But one must think that this can't go on indefinitely or for very long time frames. It buys time to reduce the number of "active" cases, but only to ensure that once lockdown is lifted one is able to do tracing and isolation for new cases.
Realistically, we'll have to live with this virus (and the associated risk) for quite a while. The time frames for a "cure" if it is found vary from months for drugs (if those in current trials prove to be useful) to years for a vaccine (which like the drugs may not be effective).
You can keep people holed up for a few months at best. You won't be able to do so for one or more years, unless you want to face severe consequences (and I'm not talking about the economy, I'm talking of long-term psychological effects).
This is very condescending. There are still a lot of unknowns, and there are smart people (for instance [1]) out there who think the cure may be worth than the disease. We urgently need more data.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUvWaxuurzQ
That said, the world's governments have made a decision to react in a certain way, and I maintain that my intuition tells me that most people don't understand the real reason for the lockdowns.
They think it is to prevent them personally from getting sick. That's not really true. The point is to prevent the medical infrastructure from becoming overwhelmed so that if and when people do become sick, they can be given their best shot at recovery.
I think this is clear for most people. I'm not American but I've watched Trump recent talk and they explained this clearly in a way everybody could understand.
What they didn't explain though is the post-lockdown strategy.
Most likely, in a few weeks, only a small fraction of the US population will be immune, and the problem won't be solved anymore than it was before the lockdown (except that the country is stalled). The virus will still be there, and there won't be any vaccine. I'd like them to think a few steps ahead and tell us what will be their plan.
If the answer is that we are waiting for nothing, perhaps we shouldn't.
If the answer is that we are waiting in lock-down 1-2 years for a vaccine and vaccinations, maybe we shouldn't.
think about it. email, twitter, etc. it all works like any network protocol meant for machines. it is cheap to spam. there is no middle ground between anonymity and spam. each node must handle their own peers. etc.
what if it was designed by actual sociologists or people that actually deal with human, instead of engineer. one would hope in such world tweeter would reduce exposition to all those accounts, because people around me that I trust do not engage with or outright block them. also I could have means to benefit of all that network without rendering all my information to the service. etc.
in summary, we are to blame for most of it.
In my country, The Netherlands, for the most part people didn't really seem to take things seriously, even when our PM told us to. All the same kinds of talking points (similar to flu, lots of people die from car accidents, etc.).
And so in the first weekend, with some restrictions already in place and Italy being in deep trouble, we all went to sit in parks and socialize like nothing was wrong.
It was only the week after that things changed. The government didn't suddenly enforce a full-on lockdown, but rather it was a combination of 1) our PM imploring everyone to change their behavior, 2) partial social distancing measures that were noticeable (events cancelled, restaurants closed for anything but take-out/pick-up), and perhaps 3) a sinking-in of how bad things were going elsewhere.
I've been 'immersing' myself in how the media reports things, the political debates and press conferences, and the way my social circles and people on the streets respond, and so far my impression is that there are two crucial factors that have resulted in 'proper' behaviour around here, despite the great weather: First, as it becomes clear that actual things change (limited no. of people in a supermarket, restaurants closed, specific public spaces closed when necessary), people realize it's not just abstract, and 2) while we are an individualist, recalcitrant bunch, we do ultimately have a lot of trust in the expertise of our government (whether justified or not).
I'm very interested to see how things develop in the US, and quite concerned in particular when it comes to 2.
EDIT: I'll add that personally I think at least initially our government was way too laissez-faire about this, and probably more so than many other countries in Europe other than the UK (and Sweden?). Our PM was/is perhaps too torn between taking things seriously and keeping the economy going. Which I suppose is exactly what he should be doing as a center-right politician.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKlJlQadZtE
The Twitterverse that generates fake news feeds on the controversy generated by stupid opinions. It ascribes value to the clicks and responses intentionally stupid content, shouted loudly, acquire.
When stupid people only talked to other stupid people IRL, the blast radius was limited. When I had a taxi driver spouting conspiracy theories, I didn't then take him with me to a party, and make all my friends listen to what he said.
Heads should be rolling after a large failure like this (not necessarily literal heads).
Don't tell me what you think, show me your portfolio.
The point is also that if you continue to shake hands it doesn't make sense to be careful regarding other ways of getting it either. His attitude towards the whole thing would make him a prime candidate to the Darwin award if he ends up dying.
For 1), it's up to you to judge him based on your perceptions (I'd disagree), for 2) you'd need a little more than your gut feeling to call him wrong. Germany is testing extensively and resulting current estimates are around 1% mortality (WHO estimate: 3,4%).
More people being asymptomatic is not a cause for reacting less strictly, which is the view being promoted. If more people are asymptomatic, that's great news, but it does not impact how severely you should lockdown society as the DDOS'ing of the health sector is still clearly a problem to avoid looking at france, spain and italy. It only means that you'll be able to end the lockdown sooner than expected
While Sweden is seemingly continuing the exponential trend in both over the past 4-5 days
[0] https://www.sst.dk/da/corona/tal-og-overvaagning the chart say "Indlagte patienter med bekræftet COVID-19 pr. dag "
Even he doesn't know if he's right, but apparently that doesn't stop him from using his influence to push his hot take.
At this point, the only thing that can be claimed with confidence is our global ignorance of this pandemic, and how much more we have to learn about it.
But I’m working on a similar concept: https://verifact.io which will be launching soon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravda
https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-has-played-an-extremely-dange...
I would politely ask HNers who were in the is just the flu camp to reflect (please don't comment, just reflect) why I was wrong, what bias or whatever flaw my thinking had and avoid blaming X or Y for your mistake. Btw I am not accusing people here, I also was not anticipating things to go like this.
Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner is a good starting point if you want to learn this power.
My current theory is that we are seeing denial on a mass scale as a coping mechanism.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-infections-oxfor...
"He was behind disputed research that sparked the mass culling of farm animals during the 2001 epidemic of foot and mouth disease, a crisis which cost the country billions of pounds.
And separately he also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or ‘mad cow disease’) and its equivalent in sheep if it made the leap to humans. To date there have been fewer than 200 deaths from the human form of BSE and none resulting from sheep to human transmission."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/neil-ferguson-sc...
Your "example" of bad data is the only quoted data in that article and it doesn't even mean anything since the implicit assumption of the Gupta model is that we do not know how many asymptomatic cases of COVID exist (even WIRED concede this point). Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this. 1 in 1000 infections requiring hospitalisation could be a realistic number if a high percentage of infections are asymptomatic.
> we just won’t know the true proportion of people who have contracted the disease without showing any symptoms, but it is likely a much lower number than the Oxford study assumes.
Epidemiology is not done by "it is likely much lower than the study assumes" since that is pure guess work without the tests.
What the Oxford study offers is a strong argument that antibody testing is vitally important and nobody is doing it.
As I say this is a very long way from utter rubbish.
They also made the totally unsupported assumption that one of the lower end curves matched reality. (That's right. They actually made exactly the kind of assumptions you're accusing others of, rather than just argue for antibody testing).
The problem is that when the study was made, there was a lot more data available than just that 14 days of deaths from two countries. And a ton of it was totally incompatible with their modeling.
Here's some of the conflicting data points as of ten days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22698584
It's not about "testing in Italy":
"In Lombardy – despite the region being under lockdown since March 9 – more than one in every 1,000 of the entire population have already been hospitalised due to coronavirus."
An acquaintance's partner suspects having got it, because after two days (two days, not weeks) of very mild fever (~37.5C) he was hit by anosmia. An ex-coworker also mentioned "a horribly strong fever" with respiratory difficulties which lasted just a few days. Yes, anecdata, but shows that you can easily miss a large part of the infected cases if you only test those hospitalized.
To get such a count we would need 100% serological testing which has not been done. We know how many were infected at the time of testing but the whole point of the Oxford model is that we do not know how many have been infected, not shown symptoms, and recovered.
Once again, the core point of the Oxford model was to emphasise the need for serological testing.
We definitely know it’s higher than 1 in 1000.
Unless you all think that the number of people infected may be higher than the number of people.
Now we are in a stage where there's no good information source (except HN comments, though even there we must be selective).
It seem to be more of systematic issue then just individual.
The problem with this kind of situation is that, unless you take action when it feels too early, all you will have at the end are your tears and saying "it was too late".
Being "doomsdayer" does not necessarily mean confidence in the situation. It's more about accepting that overreacting is much more desirable than underreacting when facing something exponential where you're constantly 2 weeks behind knowing what the reality is
I wish that were true but it is not. It is entirely possible to take actions that make a bad situation worse. The consequences of an economic shutdown, for example, are unknown. The worst case of global depression and supply chain disruption is just as bad as the virus itself, if not more so. I do not know how one makes good decisions in a situation of highly uncertain knowledge and severe consequences.
I think we are in "less bad" territory, i.e. how do we balance multiple considerations such that while not leading to any outcome that could be considered "good", is at least not catastrophic. I don't envy those who have to make such decisions.
For a simplified example just compare the cost of taking actions that make you break the curve 4 days too early with the situation where you break the curve 4 days too late
> For a simplified example just compare the cost of taking actions that make you break the curve 4 days too early with the situation where you break the curve 4 days too late
But does it seem that implausible that cooler heads might find a solution that doesn't cost at least $20 trillion?
But even in the situation the US is now, doing something, anything, now. Might still be a lot better than the alternative
Someone needs to take an economic look at the Corona minimisation strategies. We do this already for other policy areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life). Does the economic impact divided by the Value of Life look in line with other areas?
E.g.
https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronav...
https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/the-fear-of-the-corona-vi... (kudos for correcting/updating later...)
Seems a bit one-sided to get so excited about wrong predictions by the Fox/alt-right/MAGA bubble on account of one viral video.
... just older people with underlying conditions dying ... etc.
Everything else is spot on, and it is still mostly older people with underlying conditions dying. She says the death rate is 2%: no pretending that it would be like a normal flu season.
I just can’t see how you can cherry-pick a single thing out of that reporting to criticise, even given it was done on January 23rd!
The WHO has been warning about the coronavirus for ages.
(literally saying in the title it's not more dangerous than the flu)
Also, the WHO posted this on Twitter in January, draw your own conclusions: https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
The concepts of truth, credibility, ethics, deontology that he vaguely puts the finger onto. Those are complex topics, still being studied and will be forever.
Blaming journalist and politics, why not, I guess some of them deserve it, but my neighbour could have done the same analysis after couple of pints at the pub.
Usually in everyday life we hint at our confidence level with the language we use: 'might', 'probably', etc. These people have trained themselves not to do that, which they previously have gotten away with.
People, gentile people, who use "might" and "probably" are weak intellectuals by American standards. They are cast aside, especially in media, because they cannot give definite answers. This is science and science doesn't sell.
Politicians and media types are sales-people.
This really depends on the family and milieu you grew up around and are engaged with generally in life.
They absolutely deserve the blame more than your neighbor, because they have a power of influence ~10e6 times greater than your neighbor at the pub. They chose to use that influence to back a narrative to support their political inclinations amid an emergency. The responsible thing to have said is: "We don't know what the severity of this will be, but we'll report things as we find out from authorities."
Also, where did the free thinking go? Not ostracising everyone that has a different view than the current world narrative.
There are dozens of sme in virus-related fields that are voicing the opposite of what govs and msm are saying. This is a great lesson for us all.
Let’s see it dismantle our current “ways of living”. Time for something new!
Really paul? You are struck by how wrong journalists and politicians are? They exist to lie and push an agenda. You've written in the past about the shady aspects of the news industry. And I seriously doubt you harbored any positive views of politicians.
> These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said.
They make false predictions and get away with it because their agenda and the agenda of their fans/supporters line up. This is true of the fox side and the cnn/msnbc side. Have you forgotten about the predictions of yellowcake? The predictions of a short war in iraq? Remember mission accomplished? What about the predictions of a Hillary victory? What about all the predictions about trump/russia collusion? What about all the predictions that trump would be tossed from office/resign/jailed/etc?
> And the tide has just gone out like never before.
No paul. They've all been shamelessly naked sun bathing on the beach for everyone to see. It's not like they are hiding their bias.
> Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw,
I doubt it. Just like people seem to have forgotten what a hack trevor noah is. In just the last few years, if people cared about being lied to, everything from Rolling Stones, NYTimes, WaPo, Fox news, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, etc would be out of business.
Brian Williams lied at NBC and then got a job at MSNBC. Isn't that nice?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Williams#Controversies
I hate to say it but your post seemed more like an attempt to win political points rather than expressing disappointment in the news industry since you were already fairly skeptical of the news industry to begin with.
http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Hardly anyone at this point is arguing that there actually is an issue. After all, flu is still a dangerous illness, esp. for certain groups of people, so even plainly calling this COVID thing "just a flu" is not equivalent to saying that it's not an issue. It's your framing of the phrase "just a flu", that makes it look like some kind of heresy or insult.
And, most importantly, why do you call out only journalists and politicians, while there are many perferctly credible people, - first of all, medical experts, - who keep saying, that the scale of panic is dumb? How about doing some reading and fact-checking before crying wolf?
No, but I believe that in contrast to the flu, there are millions of healthy people (rightly) staying home right now.
Are you saying that the lockdowns are unwarranted?
As for me, I personally believe that the medicine is worse than the disease in this case. We can be quite certain at this point that there will be lots of casualties from the economical disruption, and whether the unconstrained virus could have caused more suffering is a question to be answered.
Who?
No, it literally is not. The flu is caused by influenza. Covid19 is caused by sars-cov-2, a relative of SARS-CoV which caused SARS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... ). It is also a (more distant) relative of HCoV-OC43 which is one of the many viruses that cause the cold.
The problems that influenza and sars-cov-2 cause for us are pretty different: Influenza mutates fairly quickly so we're not able to stop it completely with our otherwise highly effective vaccines, while even though they mutate comparatively much slower we don't have any effective drug treatments for coronaviruses: Some are not dangerous enough to have been economically interesting to develop treatments for while others were stopped by non-drug interventions (like the sick people dying too quickly and the detection of fever before the virus was highly communicable).
27,000 samples
1,500 confirmed
37 hospitalized (2%)
460 recovered
Here's the official stats from Iceland. How would you comment these numbers?
And it's not my fault that you're so touchy to be insulted by opinions that challenge the ones you hold. There's hardly any valour in throwing downvotes left and right on every post by the person you disagree with either.
Eh? No, it is not. Who told you this? Whoever it was, stop listening to them. Bloody hell.
Yes, I’ve got a touch of the bubonic plague today. Oh, I’m using ‘bubonic plague’ in the broader sense; I stubbed my toe.
John Ioannidis MD of Stanford University:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw
Knut Wittkowski, for twenty years head of The Rockefeller University's Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGC5sGdz4kg
A collection of fact-checked links to public statements and critical research about COVID-19, updated DAILY (scroll to bottom for the most recent additions):
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
Maybe we could have a competition for graphic artists and award a prize for the best icon or visual idiom for this?
Also, journalists (or let's call them news media agencies) often abuse this by reporting of "claims by this" on the topic rather than the topic and in that way refusing any iota of responsibility for what they put on the spotlight.
Is there any danger for them? PG seems to have very idealistic view of politics.
As far as I know, any amount of fact checking in politics don't change political views.
Will Fox News lose any viewers over this? Politicians may lose jobs because bad economy, but will they lose votes because they were wrong and ignorant?
H. L. Mencken wrote:
> No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
I think there is great Mencken experiment going on. Always underestimate public and see how far you can go.
Edit: and, of course, that this effect will dispropotionately affect political tribes whose propagandists under-, rather than over-, estimated the dangers of covid-19.
Too few members in the crowd, and the probability for one to understand and explain to others remains too low.
Too many of them and the Big Chiefs control the media, and also live so high in the Sky nobody seems credible when it comes to criticize, moreover all non-official messages are diluted into other ones to the point of many being not even emitted because the ones understanding the situation know that they will not be heard.
That is what I was thinking.
Paul is writing as if credibility stems from reality. When in reality, the reverse its true. Fox news is credible, its viewers believe that, and whatever those credible people say, is reality. As long as people keep tuned in only to Fox News, that reality wont shatter. Their credibility exists because of their reach, its strength in numbers, its entertainment factor. Calling Fox News news and not entertainment is quite a leap. Most of what they have to say exists to keep people hooked, not to educate them into being more capable of performing civic duties. Fox News wants people to vote in a way that benefits Fox News, not the voter, and the same principal applies to all their coverage of everything. Coronavirus skeptic was a contrarian position to take, it divided their people from other people. Now that they are divided, they can switch sides and still maintain the artificial divide, and keep their viewers isolated from "alternate" realities.
This was a really good article by Kara Swisher of ReCode, who at the end finally convinces her mom to heed medical warnings about being out and about, cant convince her to turn off Fox.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/opinion/coronavirus-fox-n...
They can flip a 180 overnight, and the viewers will see it as people with "updated information" and continue to cheer them on.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-stars-sean-hannity-an...
There is the sad irony too, that the demographic who watches Fox news is already the most likely to be at risk (age, faith over evidence, distrusting of established medicine and government) denial not withstanding. Add denial to the mix, and youve got a real bad stew.
President Trump is just continuing this idea through today. Unlike GWB and cronies, Trump and team don't even have to act to "create reality", they merely talk and reality instantly changes for their followers. It's a powerful tool and like him or hate him, his administration is using it skillfully.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-...
When you have to seek to find bad examples from other side, and it's the every day modus operandi the other side there is no comparison.
There's a difference.
Nice straw man, the above has nothing to do with my statement.
Yes, CNN and the like are just as bad as Fox news. The sooner you folks recognize that, the sooner we can have decent conversations about emotional issues. Both sides are bad. Neither is better. No, they aren't. Stop it. Blame them BOTH for getting us to this point so that we can leave them in the dark past, and we all over here can talk like adults while they sit over there and bicker, mutually accusing each other of racism and Nazism or whatever today's 5 minute hate happens to be.
WE DO NOT NEED THEM! Either of them! There is a whole universe of conversation that is not occurring because BOTH SIDES are refusing to engage in it, because if you did, you would realize -- tada -- you don't need them. And they can't have that. Viewership and income would drop.
Neither is incentivized with your best interest. And the sooner we collectively start to see it the better.
Not really. If you post something that certain people dislike for whatever reason, but which is unremarkable to others, the votes will never break even; you will not get enough upvotes from the latter group to make up for the former. (Even given the fact that not everyone can downvote.)
Whichever group's buttons you push then makes it seem like the site is overrun with that group. E.g. an atheistic comment might enrage theists, but to atheists it might just be "meh". Gee, what's with the downvotes? Boy, this site is just a haven for religious zealots!
I can't even begin to speculate about the grandparent comment. Maybe some users simply found it insubstantial? Shrug.
That said, you can just read the thread and come up with a rather decent guess as to which side of that paradigm I likely upset.
The truth is that most politicians are corrupt on some level, most politicians are unduly influenced by lobbyists, few politicians truly care about their constituents, mass media doesn’t care about the truth, even though some of their employees might, they just care about revenue, for any political perspective you can think of, you’ll find a media outlet willing to pander to it.
I don’t think any of that is particularly controversial (or even insightful for that matter). I’d wager that most people would agree with that sentiment on some level. But they’ll tend to lose sight of reason when you suggest that “yes, that includes the politicians you like, and the media outlets that share your opinions”.
Any public figure of any significance is going to attract a tribe of impassioned haters. They tend to have no greater connection with the truth than that same persons tribe of fervent fans will.
In general, I’m quite fond of being incredibly sceptical of the government and all of its agents. They should be scrutinized thoroughly. But this isn’t honest or productive scrutiny. The truth is all of those politicians lied, and all of them exaggerated details, and misrepresented facts (though trying to measure how much would be reasonably subjective). They also all did good work (again open to some subjective interpretation). But your commentary boils down to an incredibly black and white view, which ignores the sins of one group, and exaggerates the sins of another. It almost exclusively reflects your own biases over the actual conduct of any president.
"Fox News is TEH EVILZZ AND CNN/CBS/NBC/MY HOLY LOVE ARE TEH ANGELZZ" is really lazy. Refusing to recognize how the other news outlets aren't bastions of honorable reporting is really lazy. Refusing to recognize that none of them -- any of them, not one -- have the public's (e.g. YOUR) best interest in mind, is really lazy.
Somewhere deep down you know that but there's some emotional need you're trying to satisfy that prevents you from recognizing it. You NEED something like Fox to be evil so that your views feel justified.
So a few days ago CBS trumpeted this crying nurse from NYC complaining about lack of masks and people dying and blah blah blah. Turns out? Never happened.
The hilarious part? I despise Fox News. I just equally despise all the others. They're all complicit in fascism and the march toward corporatist dictatorship.
Now you are being downright dishonest. Nobody said either of these things but it's demonstrably true that Fox News often publishes unverified propaganda while CNN routinely has scientists and solid source surveys to support their points.
And you know full well what it is. You don't need any of them. They're all dishonest. We'd be better off having honest conversations with each other rather than tribally organizing behind ANY mainstream media (colloquially called news, but they aren't).
And yet the only thing you can focus on is attacking your perceived enemy, ignoring the enemy you choose not to see.
We are better than the world they've given us.
When he is back out of politics, watch for the other appointees to not just be replaced due to the change of president, but actively canned because they are all cronies appointed as a personality cult, and/or as favors to his worshipers.
And yes, I'm morbidly curious to imagine what the Trump presidential library might wind up containing. I snarkily predict that nothing will be approved except autobiographies.
I couldn't agree more.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-havin...
Not many people could survive this, then become president.
Fox news dumped Laura Ingraham and Trish Regan. Both were at the forefront of claiming it was all a hoax. Dr. Drew has gone on a reputation rehabilitation tour apologizing for his prior claims.
But those dismissals are a canary in a coal mine. They demonstrate that even Fox News has limits.
It is outrageous that anyone -- outside of scam prosperity preachers -- advertise on Fox News.
So, I am thinking his rehabilitation tour is perhaps not as forthright as it could be.
1: https://reclaimthenet.org/dr-drew-apologizes-coronavirus-dmc...
2: https://i.imgur.com/R8wxtot.jpg
No, they weren't "chastising" Trump over the China travel ban because there was no China travel ban. There was a Wuhan restriction only applicable to foreigners. Thousands of Americans were going and coming with no restrictions whatsoever. Fly into Wuhan, lick the toilet seats, fly back home. Do it the next day.
There was zero screening. Zero containment. Zero listening to the pandemic experts.
No, they aren't the same. This revisionist "they were dismissing the virus" nonsense is utter horseshit of the worst kind. It is a lie of profound ignorance and gullibility, or an intentional lie, and both are just as obnoxious.
Yet many, including right here on HN, were claiming exactly the opposite: That they were fear mongering, inciting panic, etc. It can't be both.
Here's the NYT from February 2nd - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/02/health/coronavirus-pandem...
Feb 9th - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/09/world/asia/china-coronavi...
Zero "downplaying". I recall being quite concerned, seeing the argument that is was overblown and just a flu, etc, and discounting that as nonsense.
Can you find an article on the NYTimes, MSNBC or something that compares it to the flu or the like? Absolutely. Those mediums have varied voices with different perspectives, quite unlike Fox where the entire organization is given marching orders and a narrative they must push. The overall perspective among the non-Fox mainstream media was very concerned.
When the sea level rises and floods lower Manhattan, I'm sure there'll be people saying "Why didn't the media warn us? They downplayed the risk!"
Honestly that seems more like the NYTimes or something. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/new-york-times-m...
Do you have proof Fox is like this and other media organizations aren't? I'd honestly would like to see it.
We all have access to wikileaks so we should all know which organizations were in bed with the DNC (thanks dkim!).
Edit: as well as different people within the organization.
That's true, I guess, if you consider OANN to have reached the status of “mainstream” with the boost they've gotten with their attachment to the current US administration.
But, otherwise, show me some specific examples.
The WHO didn't confirm human transmission until Jan 25th...
Some of many examples of the media in Jan and Feb:
https://twitter.com/LizRNC/status/1245478539018805251?s=20
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/31/how-our-br...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/world/europe/coronavirus-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/the-flu-has-already-killed-1...
https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/1225937322694381568
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/122367623706063667...
https://i.imgur.com/43n4HWK.png
EDIT: the mental gymnastics below is real, I'll add more examples as I find them, you can choose how wrong they got it and if Fox is worse, or when or how each individual should apologize... P.S. you guys are nuts, everyone was saying "it's less than 2%!!!"
But yeah, us conservatives and the only conservative mainstream news channel and our conservative President are the source of all of your problems. /s
No it's a tacky political attack in the middle of a crisis. Real classy.
edit: None of this matters though because orange man bad.
"When it was risky for him to do so."
Trump just got a get out of jail free card and absolute impunity and immunity to do anything he wanted. Since he's fired a number of people in the most brazen display of corruption in US history. Risky? There was zero risk.
Yes, orange man is bad. He's historically bad. He is a thin-skinned grifter who is positively the worst possible person to be in this position.
Oh but look he did an easy, lazy partial, regional restriction that accomplished positively nothing. What a savior.
What do you think the projection was?
The US has tragically seen 12,242 deaths (which is an undercount, but it's the authoritative number right now). There are over a thousand deaths a day adding onto that.
Did someone predict 12 million deaths? No, they didn't.
The absolute worst-case projection was 2 million deaths if there were zero reduction steps taken. Maybe you haven't noticed, but society is basically shut down. The spread has dramatically slowed. With extreme social distancing the US is on target for 100,000-200,000 deaths. This is a good thing relative to much more dire outcomes possible. Note that this happened at the state level with zero federal leadership. Quite contrary, with constant federal pushback.
Not sure where your "factor of 1000" nonsense comes from. I assume from the echo chambers where you're fed your pablum.
The CNBC article does compare the flu to the coronavirus and does note the flu has already killed more across the US on an absolute basis, but also notes that the coronavirus is significantly deadlier than the flu on a relative basis. Lenny Bernstein, the opinionist behind the second WaPo opinion piece you linked, apologized for his cavalier dismissal of the coronavirus in a followup opinion piece.
To date, only one person in the entire Fox News organization has apologized for getting it wrong on coronavirus. Every single other talking head has doubled down on downplaying coranavirus, and Fox and Friends is still implying that it's all just a second impeachment effort.
The flu has already killed 10,000 across US as world frets over coronavirus
The flu remains a higher threat to U.S. public health than the new coronavirus.
This very clearly downplaying. One example was asked for, at least one was provided. Now we have examples of the downplaying being downplayed, because the "right guys" did it.
No, it's not, though it's pretty bad.
> in left leaning communities Fox is demonized while CNN gets a pass.
No, CNN’s (and most of the institutional media that isn't hard right) center-right pro-corporate bias is nearly as frequently pointed to by left-leaning folks as Fox’s hard-right bias.
You may be confusing the pro-corporate center-right wing of the Democratic Party with the left, though, which would make this statement understandable.
You seek your redemption in some guy[1] listing a tiny selection of articles, having nothing to do with the partial travel restriction, arguing about the social effects. He links either contrarian articles, or articles talking about the psychology/sociology.
That you think this proves the case is astonishing. I am going to say again that you are either so profoundly partisan that the truth doesn't matter, or you are logically broken.
It's the classic deflection, and it's absolutely amazing. Fox was literally at war with what they saw as the "mainstream media hoax" (in lockstep with Trump, of course, because they are his state media), claiming that they were fear-mongering about the virus. Oh but now, the mainstream media actually wasn't at all. They were understating it. The cognitive deficiency to seriously argue this...
[1] That guy whose post history is littered with claims that the response to SARS-CoV-2 is "fear-mongering", and who a month ago seriously said that the US response was and is the best, of anyone. Their single example being that Trump limited air travel from a single region...for non-Americans...long after the horse was out of the barn.
Then again, your history has continual COVID denial, such as your claim that no hospitals are over capacity. You guys are really trying to argue everything simultaneously and it must be exhausting.
No one celebrates the extraordinary and unending failures of this administration. We protest it. We argue against it. We see a horrendous rise of idiocracy as people celebrate their own incredible ignorance and hate.
That it's bad for you doesn't make it "good" for us.
If a miracle cure was discovered today and not a single extra person died, that will never undo the raw criminality, and total, complete incompetence of the Trump administration.
That Jared Kushner has a role greater than mail room is a fucking travesty. Hey, but what about her emails, right?
"Did the news about the death counts flattening and missing projections by a lot today bum you out?"
Social distancing works. This surprises positively no one. Your orange buffoon, however, wants to stop social distancing. Maybe there's some miracle snake oil he can pitch and everything will be great again.
Go back to Twitter. Go back to your insular echo chamber. Your trolling, copy-paste noise just makes you look like a clown here.
Of course, "experts (in particular our experts) don't know what they're doing" is different from "... and therefore you should listen to any yahoo who says it's 5G."
But at the time, especially given China's clampdown on information outflow, it didn't appear to be significantly different from SARS, which didn't effect the West much, or MERS, which had almost no impact outside of the Middle East.
But as another commenter noted, the timing matters a lot.
Everyone except Fox News thought back in January that COVID19 was going to be big, but based on prior coronaviruses not something that would significantly impact the West. They've all done 180s and are pulling out the stops to fix their earlier error.
Fox News is still saying that today (i.e., April 6). One of their talking heads just said that COVID19 is overblown just a few minutes ago.
If we talk about a lot of media, they simply had the priority of making Chinese look bad in any possible way, including blaming them for "misinterpreting numbers" and ridiculing them for implementing lockdowns or wearing masks.
Which just shows how stupid some global agendas are. Media don't do that in vaccuum, but they are the reflection of the power of the interest groups that want to push the agenda.
Amazing how apparently all of the media around the world was united in a conspiracy to make China look bad, especially when much of the reporting was commenting on how much worse the situation must actually be compared to what was being reported by China, given the severity of China's response.
It's like 'memes': very little journalists today do their own research. I can see that whatever Trump says today then follows the "echo" of "media around world" (those that have U.S. sources) that last weeks.
It's a total disaster of false information, and a lot could be traced directly to Trump or the U.S. in general (there are other "sources" that are establishment but produce falsehoods, it's not that he's alone).
But enough people remain confused believing it is true, including people very close to me.
Come on. By late December, China's response was so drastic (including when measured against all previous coronavirus outbreaks) that the question of "suppressing" information about it was completely moot.
The CDC completely dropped the ball on this. Yes, in part because Trump slashed their pandemic response budget, but they did a piss-poor job even for the resources at their disposal.
Fox News and Trump being a source of constant disinformation and incompetence is, to me, kind of a constant of the universe. The same ought not to be true of the rest of our institutions, and yet it seems that it is.
On Dec 31, China informed WHO about a mysterious cluster of respiratory ailments clustered around a seafood market in Wuhan. China didn't even close the seafood restaurant until 2020. The first confirmed death wasn't reported until January 11. China didn't begin a lockdown of Wuhan until January 23.
Yes, the CDC dropped the ball, but evidence coming out in March indicates that China knew about COVID19 in early December and didn't bother to tell the rest of the world about it for another month, and even then downplayed the seriousness of the virus until the end of January.
To this day China is still blocking the release of information about the severity of COVID19. WaPo reported last week that there may have been more than 40,000 COVID19 fatalities in Wuhan alone (based on manually counting the number of urns distributed by morticians) which is at more than 13x the official number of deaths reported for the entire country.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pandemic-timelin...
"The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."
Making a false prediction on the premise that you can bluster your way out of it doesn't indicate that they think the false prediction doesn't have consequences - it indicates that they think the false prediction doesn't have consequences for them. That they can get away with it. It's "I can say what I want, because nothing bad will happen to me personally for lying."
I wouldn't call that idealism.