The state of the world being what it is, it’s probably doable to cover up thousands or millions of dead people.
All most people will know, first hand, is the deaths of their immediate circle. The full extent of the calamity can remain a matter of debate.
If there are photos, the government can call them forgeries. If there are anecdotes from health care workers, or in the press, the government can dismiss them as left wing propaganda.
And besides, there are bogeymen on whom one can pin all of one’s own mistakes. Perhaps Soros and Bill Gates developed an electricity-based bio-weapon, and unleashed it, over TCP/IP, to decimate the people of Brazil.
The lockdown itself carries significant public health risks. There’s a Reuter’s article [1] which gives a high level overview, but I’m still looking for a good scientific paper with dollar and lost person-years of lifespan estimates from all the direct and indirect side-effects of the lockdown.
IMO once policy makers start picking and choosing preferred causes which are more worthy than the lockdown, then the lockdown is effectively over.
I am hopeful that we won’t see a large spike in cases in the coming weeks, and perhaps this can serve as a datapoint that we can continue opening up more broadly.
In the meantime we have massive groups in close proximity, often chanting/yelling for long periods of time which the data indicates is a very high risk environment. A homemade mask is not going to provide reliable protection while protesting for hours with thousands of people. Stop once to sip a bottle of water and that barrier is compromised.
If asymptomatic spread of a deadly pathogen leads to the conclusion that we must be social distancing, then mass protests are deadly, and not just to the protestors themselves. Likewise, if it’s OK for people to mass protest, then it’s OK for people to go to church, for example.
Picking and choosing which social or political topics are deemed worthy of mass gatherings to me is unconscionable.
It's not just the US - most of the West has decided over the past week that public gathering bans are over. They were never going to be sustainable forever.
Perhaps public health officials don't like protesting leftists very much. Certainly if they believe the virus is as dangerous as they were saying two or three weeks ago, they mustn't.
Most countries realize they have the hard task of balancing the right to protest, constitutionally protected, versus the need to protect public health.
That's what they were doing a month ago. Government leaders said something along the lines of "you know, you have a right to protest, but protests have severe public health implications so please try to stay home". This week they've been endorsing and often joining the protests; they don't seem to believe public health is a relevant factor anymore.
Not replying to rewoi but asking an open question: you are so many ppl saying this?
Is the consensus really that covid19 is gone? like, really? we are way way below herd immunity and Rt is still around 1.0 in most states, even before the reopening and protests start showing.
Probably because of all of the talk about how the riots/protests are more important than covid19. Please keep social distancing and sheltering in place, unless you are rioting/protesting. You can't have it both ways.
There was always an implicit "if you can't social distance, at least cover your face". This was my biggest gripe with the back-to-work protesters: virtually none of them wearing masks or even covering their faces. They had a point, but it was drowned out by defiance.
Few people think the disease has magically disappeared, but many are beginning to accept the current situation as the status quo, and are increasingly unwilling to accept extreme social costs to make it better. (Which isn't to say people won't accept any costs; I think most people are smart enough to realize that their area isn't immune from a disastrous spike.)
You aren’t missing anything. There has been a concerted effort to move COVID-19 lower on the priority list so that people would open up. But it’s still just as infectious as it was in February and March, and cases are starting to surge in a number of southern and western states where lockdowns ended earliest.
It depends on who you ask. Some people believe it to be a sort of sacrifice i.e. it's worth getting sick and possibly dying for a social cause. That, I think, is the same sentiment represented by the business closure protesters. Just different social causes.
Many people forgot when the news cycle told them to forget.
I think it's important to note that one group of protesters is still taking SARS-CoV-2 more seriously than another group of protesters[0].
I've never heard anyone argue that it's a "sacrifice", and one worth making at that. Are you sure you're not just misrepresenting a view you dislike?
I have heard, and agree wholeheartedly, with a view that this has never been about lives vs. economy, because worsening economic conditions have a predictable cost in human lives. It's actually a tradeoff between lives lost to covid and lives lost to losing health insurance, cancelled medical procedures, suicide, etc. And it is not clear to me at all that either choice will clearly result in fewer deaths.
> I've never heard anyone argue that it's a "sacrifice", and one worth making at that. Are you sure you're not just misrepresenting a view you dislike?
In the case with the Floyd protesters, it's more abstract, but the same sentiment is there. I'd have to go back through my feed to find the specific examples of people explicitly saying they are okay with the possibility of dying from coronavirus.
> "No one reached out to me and said, 'As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?' And if that's the exchange, I'm all in," he said. "And that doesn't make me noble or brave or anything like that.
> "I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me ... that what we all care about and what we all love more than anything are those children," he added. "And I want to, you know, live smart and see through this, but I don't want to see the whole country to be sacrificed, and that's what I see."
Same as him. Our state is doing quite OK. Early quarantine and 1st world measures to stop spreading. Other states, not so much. Brazil is big and different, it's not all the same melting pot.
edit: The president is an ass, though. F* fascist idiot.
Things are looking pretty grim. The president insists on downplaying the disease and keep making appearances on anti-democratic rallies -- against recommendations from his own health ministry, mind you. Many brazillians have somewhat nostalgic feelings towards the military dictatorship and I feel like that has gotten worse. Everything is just highly polarized and the pandemic is discussed mostly in terms of politics. Maybe that's just the bubble I'm in but I can't help the feeling that the worst is yet to come.
> against recommendations from his own health ministry,
Not anymore, now that Bolsonaro has fired two (!) health ministers and put a worthless yes-man in charge.
And we thought it was bad enough when he fired the first health minister to put a yes-man in his place. It turned out that the first yes-man wasn't spineless enough for Bolsonaro so he also got fired.
Gen. Pazuello, who has been in charge since Teich resigned, has now been officially elevated to "interim minister". It isn't supposed to be a permanent position though so it would also be valid to say that the position is still vacant.
I typed about 3 paragraphs trying to explain it a bit but honestly I had to delete it because I don't think here is a safe arena and I am pretty sure would I would get downvoted heavily as I think a good chunk of the HN crowd sometimes lean too much towards denialism about the coronavirus. My gmail address is my username in case anyone is curious about my take on how things are going in Brazil. All I can say now is that winter is approaching and southern Brazil usually has dry flu seasons, so any "pretty good" report is to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.
> a good chunk of the HN crowd sometimes lean too much towards denialism about the coronavirus
I don't think that's true at all, I've never seen anything like that downvoted here. HN seems to be a generally well-educated, scientifically-minded crowd.
I’ve seen it many many times. Considering the wealth gap, there is probably a correlation between MBA-types who are in the startup world in Brazil and know about HN, and being right-leaning.
I was called a denialist on Twitter because I thought my local government did a reasonable job in a serious situation with the information available at the time, and prevented a lot of deaths.
This was shocking to the person who was convinced that the government was secretly trying to kill hundreds of thousands of people by using 5G to beam viruses into people through radio.
So, I guess it all depends on what denialism means these days.
I would even say it is rather the opposite. I have seen a lot of doomers and FUD pushers here, who pretended until very recently that the disease was much worse than the health officials were claiming, that anyone who thought the death rate was well within 1% was a conspiracy theorist, etc. There is a large educated crowd here who will believe CNN or the NYT over infectious disease specialists.
I mean, we have multiple [1] examples [2] of states manipulating the data in order to make a stronger case for reopening. I've seen multiple people here on HN claim that the virus is 'just a flu' and it's not like it's out of our president's MO to manipulate data to make things look better.
There's a large educated crowd here who refuse to believe what the health researchers are saying or what studies have found in favor of partisan nonsense.
I'm going to avoid adjectives so that my comment doesn't get downvoted into oblivion by government fanboys, but let's just say that it is safe to assume that the Brazilian federal government does not believe science should be the main weapon in the fight against Covid.
Brazil is one of the few countries that denies the pandemic[1]. The others are Turkmenistan, Belarus and Nicaragua. Fun fact: neither of those are really democracies (whether Brazil still is a democracy, it is increasingly debatable).
The Brazilian president has scoffed covid as "a little flu"[2].
He is also against social distancing/lockdown measures, claiming they don't work[3]. Needless to say, he doesn't provide any scientific evidence of that -- he knows full well his supporters need nothing more than his word to believe in anything.
State governors are basically on their own since the beginning of the pandemic -- a lot of states implemented lockdowns/social distancing, but with limited effect since Bolsonaro routinely goes on national TV to downplay those measures and basically call them a hoax.
The situation now is that people are fed up with the long, ineffective (because they were always superficial, half-baked) social distancing and lockdowns, and the state governments are beginning to reopen right when the death toll is accelerating.
So basically we're screwed. Deaths will accelerate like crazy now that a lot of places are reopening and the federal government will do anything it can to hold onto its alternate reality where everything is fine.
> Needless to say, he doesn't provide any scientific evidence of that -- he knows full well his supporters need nothing more than his word to believe in anything.
I want to live in a world where this is actually viable everywhere, where we can trust our leaders to confer with experts and change their opinion if the situation changes. (Living in Germany, I do trust Angela Merkel that much, for example. I want that for everyone.)
The other day I read an article (sorry, I lost the link to it) comparing the response to the coronavirus between nations led by men and women and it was not very surprising to me that countries whose president or prime minister was a woman had a better first response and fewer deaths compared to neighbour states. I would love to read a "postmortem" about that when this is all over.
> I want to live in a world where this is actually viable everywhere, where we can trust our leaders to confer with experts and change their opinion if the situation changes.
I want to live in a world where everyone knows to verify things for themselves. Yes, I'd like leaders we can trust, but trust should never mean "don't check". (At the very least, have multiple other sources you trust to cross-check your sources of authority.)
Trust is an essential element of society. Constant individual validation simply doesn't scale, trust is enormously efficient, and low-trust societies are poor and dysfunctional societies.
That's not to say you can simply declare trust (though TOFU / TOFI tit-for-tat is remarkaby reliable), and the question of how to bootstrap trust is a difficult one. Ironically, many nationalist/populist behavioral patterns substitute a sense of tribal trust patterns for epistemic ones.
Ideally, a set of values and institutions which provide robust cross-checking and validation, distributing the trust verification burden, emerge. Any systemic doctrine of power concentration, whether authoritarian government, monopolistic economies, exclusive religions, educational uniformatism, etc., tends to undermine this.
An ensemble model of trust is entirely reasonable: for things that don't require a mountain of evidence, you can mostly trust that the collection of sources you depend on will not all simultaneously gaslight you in a consistent way. But the comment I was replying to suggested that in an ideal world you could trust one source (political leaders). I'm suggesting I'd like a world where everyone consistently applies critical thinking to all sources of information.
I'd like a world where everyone consistently applies critical thinking to all sources of information.
And that specifically Does. Not Scale.[1]
It fails two ways:
1. Individuals suffer information overload, trust breakdown, and validation fatigue.
2. Society finds itself with no common foundation of common shared facts and mechanisms. All points of view are asserted to be equally valid, expertise is entirely dismissed. Tribal beliefs are asserted as true (for Us) and invalid (if Them).
There is, I'll posit, a broad gulf between "verify everything" and "be prepared to question any belief". One varient of the latter is "strong opinions, weakly held" (https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-fram...) I'm not fully convinced this is a valid model, but it seems a good initial approach. It addresses both the need. to act in the moment, based on. partial information, and the realisation that this information and conclusions based on it may be faulty. The problem occurs when making decisions with no recourse --- betting the farm, burning the boats.
Otherwise, I lean strongly on Baconian, Pragmatic principles: our brains, both individually and socially, are sense-making organs, optimising for practical benefit. A challenge is that subject to perception, processing, and model-generation costs, complexity and rigour, though affording greater accuracy and precision, have enormous costs.
A manifestly false assumption of rational markets (and behaviour) theory is that information is free. It's not --- it has extraordinary costs, and model formation and coordination --- getting everyone on the same page --- are among the highest. We're constantly facing a complexity cost constraint (this is the essence of Gresham's law), in which a much simpler model is, under relaxed environmental selection, often more useful, as it permits discarding expensive perception, processing, and model transmission (education of the population). Which works fine until environmental selection mechanisms are increased.
What a trust, not in authority but in expertise, has to offer, suject to sufficient checks, is an efficient distribution of information, processing, and model formation. This is the ultimate aim of Baconian Science, expressed in the motto of the Royal Society: In nullis verba --- on the word of no person. Rather, it is justified trust in experiment, experience, integrity, and institutions, that gets you this.
Mind, the usual problem is that power-serving institutions have a staggering tendency to become self-serving and select not based on truth but on self-interest. Correcting for this tendency is the great problem of polity, commercial, social, justice, and moral systems.
I was aware, when posting my reply, that I was positing a fantasy world. So was the comment I was replying to. But you seem to have imputed a very specific (incorrect) assumed meaning to "apply critical thinking" and then carefully dissected the result.
When I said "apply critical thinking to all sources", that doesn't mean "re-derive everything from scratch and give zero weight to information obtained from others". "be prepared to question any belief" is closer to what I had in mind. Beyond that, there's little harm in trusting a single source for information you are not actually heavily relying on yourself, but that wasn't really the point of this thread. Are you really trying to argue that the world would fall apart if people generally speaking put a little more critical thought into verifying information they're exposed to from a single source before giving it undue weight?
I may have misread you. In which case, consider my response to a not-infrequent assertion that individual responsibility and media literacy alone, absent some general social value of individual and institutional epistemic integrity is sufficient. That really does not seem to work.
And rereading this thread, particularly your response here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23447763), that seems to me close to your argument. If not from scratch and first principles, in large part.
If not, care to restate?
It's less the obligation to validate, and more the licence to bullshit, that concerns me. Brandolini's asymmetry is steep. I've spent more time than I'd have liked around intentionally devceptive persons, and institutions (and machines). The experience is virtually always tremendously umsettling, at best.
There are reasons why social, moral, and legal strictures against deception, fraud, and betrayal of trusts run so deep, with frictions against values of free expression. Dante put bearers of false witness in the penultimate circle of his Hell.
I'm certainly not advocating in favor of continued BSing or deception (from leaders or otherwise); I'm solely advocating that people apply more critical thought so that people don't get away with it as often.
I take your point, but Angela Merkel is a very special case. Angela Merkel is a quantum chemist. I wish every world leader was an actual scientist too, but there aren't many who can wear two hats the way Merkel does.
Many in Chinese leadership have technical degrees in science. While science appears to be the enemy of some authoritarian governments, others see it as their national edge.
We're also severely under-tested. Given our fickle social distancing and isolation, I highly doubt we "only" have 600K infected people. Our flagship universities (USP, UERJ) have already estimated that the real number can be up to 16 times higher.
The population is encouraged to reach out to the health service only when they have the most severe symptoms, since the public health service is at the edge of collapse in many states. The number of people dying at home, and dying from severe respiratory syndrome is abnormally high. It all adds up to an even grimier picture.
About our governors and mayors, I personally think most of them are doing what they possibly can do. They're facing an immense pressure to roll back lock-down measures in order to "save the economy" partly because of the finance minister's catastrophic failure. Businesses had a hard time getting credit, and the people in need were left scrambling for that ridiculous $120/month benefit.
> I'm going to avoid adjectives so that my comment doesn't get downvoted into oblivion by government fanboys, but let's just say that it is safe to assume that the Brazilian federal government does not believe science should be the main weapon in the fight against Covid.
You’d better had used adjectives than writing plain lies. Yes, Bolsonaro had a initial attitude to the pandemic, but it is past by 2 months at least.
Also, the term “small flu” wasn’t coined because he didn’t believe it, he meant to slow the hysteric news that were broadcasting a death toll of 500k in the, then, coming 2 months. Two months past now, and here we are, less than a tenth on that and no health system collapse.
> State governors are basically on their own since the beginning of the pandemic -- a lot of states implemented lockdowns/social distancing, but with limited effect since Bolsonaro routinely goes on national TV to downplay those measures and basically call them a hoax.
Yet another lie. The government gave states a total of more than BRL 300 bi, and is giving a basic income to the poor people in excess of 150 bi. Many campaign hospitals were donated to critical regions, such as Manaus and Fortaleza.
The organizing measures the federal government meant to apply were made short by the Supreme Court, that ruled mayors and states’ governors had the saying on local measures.
I live in one of the hard-hit areas (northeast). It's not good, but also not nearly as bad as portrayed by TV/media. Poorer people are having the toughest time. Once in a while I get in my car and drive around, and things seem pretty normal. Most days look like a saturday in terms of traffic, people outside, etc.
My parent live in one of the capitals in the south and one of them is working directly on the "frontlines". They had one covid-related death in the past 30 days and most of the reserved hospital beds are empty. Their city took stronger measures much earlier and their poverty rate is the lowest in the country. Other than school and some other business, life there is normal.
(throwaway for I try to to avoid identifying information associated with my username/handle)
My wife is Brazilian, and we were in both Manaus (Amazonas) and Minas Gerais in March as lockdowns were being rolled out.
Manaus: the consensus in the general population seemed to be that the city was (1) too remote for COVID to arrive (2) heat and sun would stifle it and (3) their endemic diseases (malaria, dengue etc) were worse anyways so who cares? People seemed to mostly ignore the first lockdown measures.
Now, maybe ~30% of the people we know personally in the city have had COVID. Overall, it seems like there is a lot of death but we stopped following closely because it was too painful.
Minas Gerais: impressive lockdown in March. Small cities in the interior quarantined immediately, screening checkpoints with nurses everywhere. I have no idea how things turned out there but my guess is pretty well.
Return to USA: we bailed out of Brazil as soon as we could due to the lockdowns. The only sign in the Houston airport that COVID existed at that point was a small sign warning travelers from Wuhan to self-quarantine. Embarrassing.
You could add to the list a very different demography than western countries or china. The % of the population over 60 is half what it is in the US. Age being by far the primary driver for the severity of the disease, it is not unereasonable to expect that Brazil will be hit less hard than western countries.
I live in the biggest city in Brazil, São Paulo. On one side, we have a significant number of deaths (8,2k in 36K of all country), but the local government was capable of building campaign hospitals and now we have near 80% of the occupation of hospital beds. So the situation is controlled, I can say.
But the mental toll to deal with this president is very high!
I thought a lot before posting here because this government has a lot of fanboys/fangirls that use war tactics to hide things. The first posts here were of people trying to show that things are ok and numbers are being publicized, what is a lie.
These same people will come back here to downvote any comment that exposes the real situation. They do this in news portals, social media, WhatsApp, etc. It is disgusting and tiring.
An important aspect of the Coronavirus situation in Brazil that commentators haven't highlighted enough is Brazilian federalism. Brazil is a federal republic, although our federalism isn't as solid as the American counterpart (the federal government tends to be much stronger in Brazil). However, with Bolsonaro's weak response to the crisis, the Brazilian Supreme Court officially recognised the power of state and municipal governments to decree quarantines and lockdowns and to organise their COVID-19 strategies independently. As a result, things look very different depending on which state and city you're looking at. Some places have been hit hard, others are doing well.
I live in the interior of Minas Gerais, a state that's comparable to Texas in area and to Florida in population size. The mayor of my town locked down the city relatively early (late March). It didn't last long, with local businesses pressuring for it to reopen and low coronavirus incidence, but I think it helped. A more recent decree has made masks mandatory. So far the numbers look OK - there has been a single COVID-19 death (~80k population).
Other Brazilian states have not been so lucky. I can say with confidence that it would have helped tremendously if the federal government had taken this seriously from the beginning, and organised a nation-wide plan to handle the crisis. It is inconceivable to me that anyone would disagree. We were well aware of the situation in other countries - there was no reason to assume things would have played out differently in Brazil. While Brazil hasn't been as hard hit as other countries if you consider population size, no one has dealt with the problem as irresponsibly as we have. Tens of thousands of deaths could have been avoided. It is a real tragedy.
I have honestly no idea. Haven't left the house in 3 months, except for a week or so where I visited my girlfriend without ever coming in contact with anyone (except for maybe the cab driver). I was pleased when I saw everyone wearing masks, but it seems other than that no one's really doing anything.
I do. They basically stopped updating the database. We were getting 1000+ deaths/day. They say they're going to "recount" because they don't trust the numbers are right. Everyone here knows it's just a political move.
Dude, look at the graph on the given link above. Deaths literally went from 1000+ to 61 yesterday.
Also, in the main panel [1] the gov. quit updating the total death count and does not let you download the .csv like they did before, but still keep the total death count for the day.
This is not true at all. We are not having thousand deaths per day, but thousand confirmations of death by covid per day, meaning that most of those died in past days.
No matter how you cut it, we are getting thousands of deaths per day.
The problem is that the government wants to change the published statistics to only show the people who died of confirmed COVID infection in the same day as the report has come out. Most deaths take a couple of days to be added to the system so this methodology would significantly under report the real number of deaths per day.
"No matterhow you cut it" is an english expression. It means that no matter the choice of statistics the deaths per day in brazil are very high.
One way to report the numbers is say how many deaths were registered into the system each day. This is the "freshest" statistic you can get, but it mixes data from different days. This statistic can't be used to plot a pandemic growth curve but it can be used to keep track of the total number of deaths.
Another way to measure it is so count the number of people that died on each given day, no matter how long it took for the death was registered into the system. This statistic is different from the first one but but it should be in the same order of magnitude (given that the first statistic is approximately a rolling average of the second one)
The key limitation of the second statistic exact number can only be known after at least a week has passed, because of the time it takes for the deaths to be added into the system. This is where the government's dishonesty comes in. They wanted to change the daily reports so that they would only include deaths that were added to the system in the same day where the person died. Any deaths that were not reported in the same day (which is the majority of deaths) would be left out of the statistics entirely.
Thanks for clarifying, but that was exactly my point.
> This is where the government's dishonesty comes in. They wanted to change the daily reports so that they would only include deaths that were added to the system in the same day where the person died. Any deaths that were not reported in the same day (which is the majority of deaths) would be left out of the statistics entirely.
I don't think this will be happening. I am sure they will keep counting daily deaths correctly, adding numbers to past days, and making it publicly available. They just will stop feeding the media trolls.
What we were having in fact was dishonesty from the media, claiming falsely that thousands of people died from covid-19 within 24 hours. They weren't making it clear that those deaths mostly happened in the last 45 days, so to create extreme reaction from its audience.
I don't live in Brazil anymore but all of my family is still there. I want reliable numbers so I know what is happening, right now I'm left in the dark and having to pierce together data from multiple sources to get any kind of picture about daily death rates, velocity of spread, etc.
"Feeding the media trolls" or not should not be into consideration when a pandemic is ongoing and the public and your citizens need the information to have any kind of sense about the situation, I'm left in the dark, scared with two parents fitting perfectly into CoViD-19 risk group.
There is no defence to this behaviour, there is nothing that justifies hiding numbers from your population.
I wouldn't trust the last week of numbers at all. It takes time to notarize the deaths, and time to consolidate the numbers. Also don't trust within week distribution, because the deaths aren't reported at the same day they happen.
Overall, this is a reliable number. It's mostly impossible to hide a death in Brazil, there are way too many different actors watching those. And this is a paragovernamental organization (think about the US FED) that has all interest on not be caught by the public doing a bad job.
Not only that, but the government has also removed data from several sources about Brazil's public health system (SUS). It's not possible, right now, to analyze the underreporting of COVID deaths since the data regarding deaths in the country [1] was zeroed.
Hard to take this article serious, they compare Brazil to other countries in number of deaths like all countries had the same number of people, they talk about the number of infections being not reliable like it's not a widespread problem in almost every nation, etc.
Discussions about COVID are already politicized, and discussions of politics and COVID are obviously even more, so readers have nowhere to run, they have only extremely polarized views and need to try to "average" them out.
Yes, Brazil is very far from being hard hit. We aren’t having colapse in our health system. This death count is mostly inevitable, by the nature of the disease. It is indeed much lower than predicted by March, where some were pointing numbers as high as 500k deaths by May.
However, the military government will start to fudge the numbers even further. They are moving numbers from covid-19 to any other deaths. All other numbers of causes of death are spiking. All this with a brutal underreporting of covid-19 deaths.
I lost another family member yesterday. A young mother of 2 girls.
Meanwhile in Germany ppl are complaining that the government's response is too drastic and that the danger is way overblown.
There other day I was literally told that all the measures that were taken probably don't work because the infections were already getting less days before they came into effect.
I'm sometimes confused how far apart the general opinion on platforms such as hn is compared to people you encounter in real life.
If you do it right the virus and the consequences will be invisible to people. It is very hard to convince people of the possible effects of something they can't feel, see or experience directly.
See the whole climate change inaction. Which is basically a pandemic that we DO have a warning for, years and years in advance.
It's getting even worse now in my country because the media got tired of Covid and switched to BLM. Making the virus feel even more distant and invisible.
and an insane president (both usa and brazil) we have a lit of big problems and no ability to make progress on any because the majority or congress backs the insane president and even the most innocent of ideas becomes political immediately. masks? fascism! insane president has a good idea on accident? liberals hate it to spite him. :(
I never thought that I could ever take that standpoint but I now believe that the most effective weapon against a global pandemic (apart from a vaccine) is fear.
It's visible in most countries I followed, as soon as the fear that is purported by the governments and the media takes root the numbers start to drop earlier than they should given the lockdown measures.
Simply because many of the social distancing measures are adopted by the populace as soon as fear spreads.
I hate to say it, but seems to be some logic to your statements. I come from fearful place, almost completely missed by covid, went to complete lockdown as soon as stuff started happening in western europe, much quicker than any of those countries.
Western european countries which were much slower with initial reaction were having massive spikes, some are just now getting out of the worst (ie UK). US is another example with its 'brilliant' current leadership.
Brazil is actually another one, the president seems since beginning like the worst you can get in democracy, pure corrupt evil (until next one comes I guess).
fear also makes people drink bleach. it's not some unmitigated good.
fear can bring awareness of danger, but then (assuming it's not a literal imminent threat, like a tiger) we need to switch to rational thinking to weigh risks and consider options. we can't stay consumed in fear and expect good things to happen.
The level of medical care available in Germany is drastically different than Brazil. The infant mortality rate in Brazil, for example, is five times higher than in Germany.
Let's skip the top countries like those in Scandinavia, Japan, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland.
Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina are all above USA.
As a famous economist has said, Brazil is like "Belindia": Belgium and India in the same country. Deeply heterogeneous society, unfortunately. If you don't take this into consideration, you risk saying something really apart from reality when it comes to Brazil...
>I'm sometimes confused how far apart the general opinion on platforms such as hn is compared to people you encounter in real life.
Really? If anything I'd think HN of all places should be used to this class of problem, because it's endemic in much of tech particularly IT/devops, and we have arguably one of the more recent biggest and most well known cases of it ever: the Y2K effort. That was a massive industry wide problem that, in a rare case, also got significant media attention. And it was solved thanks to an utterly enormous level of effort. Hundreds of thousands if not millions or more of man years were put into going through decades of by definition crufty-as-hell code that maybe nobody had looked at in ages or had any recent mental model of and hunting for and fixing date issues. Sometimes permanently, sometimes through delay hacks ("let's consider 00-20 to be the 2000s, 30-99 to be the 90s" for example). Then there had to be lots of testing and dry runs leading up to the switch. And it mostly worked! There really were major problems, but they mostly came up in testing. The deadline was hit, it was a huge success. And the public result? It became the butt of jokes and a "cautionary story in overhyping a nothing burger" etc for the next decade at least. The general takeaway for the public seemed to be not "we solved this potential catastrophe thanks for a huge effort" but "we spent a ton of money and time and worry over something that didn't do anything!"
The basic issue of problems where the success scenario is essentially "nothing happens" but the failure scenario is huge costs is definitely hard to square with human psychology. Prediction vs reaction requires expertise in the subject that of course not everyone can possibly have, which in turn means non-experts must be able to identify and trust actual experts and institutions, with all the fuzziness and further issues that can bring. Arguably the ideal for Security, IT, ops, health, and many other areas is that they're mostly like air: noticeable primarily in their absence or degradation. If it's a particularly nice day and environment and the air is extra fresh we might take note of that as we first encounter it, and perhaps reflect at times how we feel more energized and clear headed then normal, but it's human nature to quickly let that fade into the background, and a significant amount of pollution or quality degradation is also something that can become omnipresent and looked over if it's not to the level of actual pain/breathing issues.
I don't know if there is any real formula for that beyond the hard work of institution building, with trust hard to gain and taking long time periods but fairly easily squandered. Even that may not be enough in the face of short term expediency and profit. Experiences like being treated as a cost-center and screaming into the void about security threats that we can see coming down the track from ages away and know have the risk of major costs are probably all too common here :(.
> I'm sometimes confused how far apart the general opinion on platforms such as hn is compared to people you encounter in real life.
This is normal; HN is a technical oriented community of people who know how and where to look for information, then able to dismiss the usual bullshit. It's very unlikely we'll find a Covid-19 negationist or a flat earther over here, for example.
Just nitpicking, I got your point and agree with it.
The vast majority of people out there are not flat earthers. I wouldn't consider this as evidence that people in HN are better than others.
Getting information is not thinking freely. I can get the best information possible, but if I don't know how to think for myself without subconscious external influences, I'm not a free thinker. In my opinion, only someone thinking freely could consider in better shape.
Seeing how many biased and wrong statements are being made only on this thread tells me HN is not a golden pot of free thinkers...
In Peru we have an excess of 10k deaths for the month of May after removing both the official deaths by covid-19 and the average "regular" deaths from the past 3 years for that month. I guess some of those are indirectly caused by covid-19, not getting the medical attention they would usually get, but what about the rest?
> I lost another family member yesterday. A young mother of 2 girls.
I'm deeply sorry for your loss.
> the military government will start to fudge the numbers even further
Just to clarify to those who aren't familiar with the political scene in Brazil, we don't actually have a military government in the sense that the armed forces are not in power. Our democratically elected president Jair Bolsonaro [1] is however a former retired military officer, and his running mate Hamilton Mourão, our VP, a retired Army General [2].
Bolsonaro is a polarizing and controversial politician, his views and comments can be described as far-right and populist in nature and draw both praise and criticism in Brazil. He has several times openly shared his supporting views on the (U.S.–supported) Brazilian military dictatorship.
His popularity has been severely affected by his hanlding of the covid-19 pandemic. But he still enjoys a large and "loyal" support base.
And he fired the guy in the same day, you forgot to mention. Also, that culture minister was set up to that piece by foul assistants, he didn’t knew what the piece was about.
Sure, let's treat that as an isolated incident. New Minister of culture makes nazi propaganda, shocks everyone and gets fired. Fine.
1) Bolsonaro paraphrases nazi slogan "the work sets you free"
2) Bolsonaro drinks a glass of milk in one of his infamous Facebook livestreams a day after Brazil has its first neo nazi "protest" a LA Charlottesville.
3) Minister of education compares Supreme Court investigation against Jair Bolsonaro to the holocaust, going as far as posting "SIEG HEIL" on his Twitter account
4) His slogan, of course, "Brasil acima de todos" which paraphrases the nazi slogan "Deutschland uber alles"
Bonus) Can't be bothered to go dig his Twitter, but a while ago the ministry of education was very open about the fashwave movement, going as far as changing his avatar to the same (frankly ridiculous) aesthetic. Not to mention all the attacks on universities and (what he refers to as) communists.
It's so interesting to me how often his government is caught up in nazi garbage, yet it's never his fault.
> 1) Bolsonaro paraphrases nazi slogan "the work sets you free"
That's merely a case of misinterpretation of his words. By using this method of finding nazis, you would conclude that every one is a nazi because nazis had red blood like all of us.
> 2) Bolsonaro drinks a glass of milk in one of his infamous Facebook livestreams a day after Brazil has its first neo nazi "protest" a LA Charlottesville.
Fact-checked to be false. Revista Forum is a well known fake news site. [1]
> 3) Minister of education compares Supreme Court investigation against Jair Bolsonaro to the holocaust, going as far as posting "SIEG HEIL" on his Twitter account
Can you read portuguese? He was accusing his politicals opponents of treating him like nazis treated jews. And in fact he is from a jewish family that fled from nazi Germany.
> 4) His slogan, of course, "Brasil acima de todos" which paraphrases the nazi slogan "Deutschland uber alles"
Same as point 1. You can't get loose expressions from people, put them in whatever context you would like, and pretend it is true or even a fact.
> Fact-checked to be false. Revista Forum is a well known fake news site. [1]
I read the link and it's not news to anyone that he was actually responding to a real movement of milk producers. The point is it doesn't have to be one or the other.
I'm not going to bother responding to the other points because you seemed to have missed mine entirely. These "incidents", isolated, don't mean anything like you can probably tell. However, isolated incidents is now how situations are analyzed, and doing so is just a way to rationalize not seeing what's very clearly in front of you.
It's quite hard to accept that nazi imagery is going on in his government merely by coincidence. It's happened multiple times in a short 18 months timespan. Even if it's just by complete coincidence it's quite alarming as it either tells: they are ignorante about nazi imagery (which no government official in the modern age should be) or they simply don't care.
Or even worse, they don't care and capitulate on it as it's loyal base encompasses white supremacists (no, not saying his supporters are white supremacists but he attracts them).
For the data-driven folks I highly recommend https://brasil.io/covid19/ as a source for numbers on coronavirus in Brazil as official figures are completely tainted now.
According to Worldometers data [1], Brazil is currently trending, on a global level, 1st in new cases, 1st in new deaths, 2nd in overall deaths and, within a few days from now, 2nd in total deaths. Real estimates are said to be up to 6x official numbers.
I really wish the Youtube videos [2] by Atila Iamarino, a PhD in Virology, were available in English. I couldn't recommend him enough. He's done 21 talks on the situation in Brazil and elsewhere, and often mentions how the official data lies.
While I do not doubt for a minute that there has been and there is a lot of number fudging (both intentional and not), that link is 1.5 months old.
I point it out just to mean that the data is not current and as such can hardly reflect the current situation. This [1] seems to have more current data about excess deaths.
Not source per se but some common sense - worst hit european country, having 1 death yesterday, 1 day before. worldometers doesn't show daily data further back, but its either really exceptional coincidence, or not true.
After following the evolution for a few weeks and seeing a lot of strange movements, I'm probably one of the few people that thinks that the "one step behind" Spanish Kaeshi Waza was smart and beautifully executed. To be fair, France, in a way, deserved it.
For context, Átila Iamarino predicted one million Coronavirus deaths. He became a YouTube celebrity after his alarmist (and completely wrong) predictions.
Citing total number of cases in Brazil is disingenuous in my opinion because the country has one of the largest populations in the world. In terms of deaths/million people, Brazil is currently 20th on the list. Nothing to be proud of, but should provide some perspective.
Given that Brazil has run just a bit less than 1 million tests so far with 675k cases (and counting) testing positive you can be sure that every number is underreported (with death counts probably being the most accurate as it's the hardest to fudge around).
Apart from that the Health Ministry is hiding the numbers for acute respiratory syndrome deaths (which could be seasonally-adjusted and an inference to CoViD-19 deaths be made).
He might be an alarmist but models all around the world are wrong and being updated constantly to keep on track with reality, you can't say that to dismiss all the information he's shared because of a missed prediction/projection.
> Citing total number of cases in Brazil is disingenuous in my opinion because the country has one of the largest populations in the world.
Nothing that involves exponential growth should disregard total numbers, the growth of total numbers is explosive. Total population doesn't matter as it's barely the upper bound limit of total number of cases a given region might get, how the numbers are accruing towards this total is the most important information and the only way to keep track of that is by keeping track of the total cases. It doesn't matter that Brazil has a low ratio of deaths/million if the cases are still growing exponentially as deaths will always lag behind.
Brazil's curve is accelerating, numbers are severely underreported, I heard the same kind of talking points in early March around death rates, etc. and the situation has steadily got worse by the day. Trying to paint a better picture by selecting a ratio-based metric doesn't seem to be the way to analyse Brazil's current situation, it's worsening and measures against the spread are being haphazardly removed or fought against by the Federal Government, it's a brewing disaster.
Countries with higher populations having more deaths is expected, but the population density plays also a big factor. Brazil should be able at least to create islands of isolate population but urban suburbs are very problematic.
Bigger means also more resources to fight against the problem in the case than the government would want to do it and save people. If they really want that, a president taking mass baths proudly showing no protection measures should be asked to stop it, or removed ASAP.
> you can't say that to dismiss all the information he's shared because of a missed prediction/projection
He is a YouTuber who gets views from alarmist predictions. To me that disqualifies him from the debate.
> Nothing that involves exponential growth should disregard total numbers
I have never any said numbers should be disregarded, but the whole picture should be kept in mind.
This is not "trying to paint a better picture", but simply to put things in perspective. For example, by looking only at the current absolute numbers, you ignore that the first cases in Brazil happened at least one month after the ones in Europe. In other words, we are now where Europe was a month ago, i.e. still growing in cases.
> measures against the spread are being haphazardly removed or fought against by the Federal Government
Can you cite one? All control measures in Brazil have been defined by Governors and Mayors, as ruled by the Supreme Court. If they're been lifted, it's definitely not being done by the Federal Government.
> Nothing that involves exponential growth should disregard total numbers
If total deaths grow exponentially then deaths/million also grow exponentially, do they not? So you can disregard total numbers and still pay attention to exponential growth.
It’s almost hopeless to really understand Brazil from the outside.
On the one hand, response to Coronavirus has been really frakked at the top messaging level; if not a full-on denialist, Bolsonaro seems blinded by the existence of a jobs-deaths tradeoff and can’t seem to work with it. He’s not a terribly sharp person.
On the other, there’s a lot riding on making things look worse than they are. And every time you read something bemoaning how un-excellent someone like Orban is, you have to factor who’s rooting for them to fall. There is always a bigger story.
——
Edit: Jesus, dang, why is a perfectly reasonable reply to this comment [dead]?
First time I hear people rooting for orban to fall due to his Corona politics.
I mean, the guy is normally batshit crazy and I expected him to blame Gates and Soros for the virus... but his response so far has been surprisingly good.
that's true. It's true that Bolsonaro isn't being able to deal with the media and normally overreacting and being paranoid. However you have a giant part of the media rooting for them to fail. Worse is better for huge part of the global media, and to see a Political leader which doesn't fit failing, is priority number one of the media today.
Watching the news in Brazil, looks that Brazilian government is doing what they can, but you don't build at least 30 years of missing infrastructure in 6 months. That's for sure not Bolsonaro's fault.
He doesn't fit because he's more incompetent, more corrupt, more egocentric, emptier of any moral values, more oblivious to the interests of his co-citizens, than any other political leader ever was (in Brazil and elsewhere), right?
Let me put this in a more constructive way: why do you think "global media" are rooting for Bolsonaro's failure? And: given the less than ideal infrastructure to face the pandemic, what has been Bolsonaro's policy to counteract this? Can we honestly say that he's been "doing what he can"?
> why do you think "global media" are rooting for Bolsonaro's failure
He was from center-right, old and conservative. Example: First month of his government, Siberia was on fire, Australia was on fire, Amazon was on fire, and the news was "Right extremist Jair Bolsonaro is burning Amazon down, exterminating the indigenous folk".. I mean he is a moron, but no, it wasn't him, but a system built over the years. The world explores the Amazon since 1500, that's why the Portuguese landed there at first place right?
Regarding the COVID-19, I think the government is reacting well, but Lockdown is a luxury in Brazil. You cannot put a Favela in Lockdown, you cannot stop an economy where 60% of the population is "self-employed", asking people to stay home. I mean you can try but, the vast majority in Brazil don't want it.
As I've simulated numerically [1] (which has been discussed elsewhere on HN [2]), there is no tradeoff between saving lives (due to COVID-19) and reducing widespread economic damage. Counterintuitively, the policy frontier (economic vs human damage) is concave and non-monotonic, and has three distinct regions, as you can see in the linked graph.
However, this is a highly technical argument designed for engineering-minded or economics-minded thinkers. If we have leaders who are "not terribly sharp" as you say, I'm not sure what we can do about it.
Great work! I think simulations/models are a great tool.
some feedback:
>there is no tradeoff between saving lives (due to COVID-19) and reducing widespread economic damage
It is easy to show that there is no tradeoff by assuming that economic damage is only dependend on the duration of the lockdown. Why not aim for R=0? This would save even more lives and reduce the duration of the lockdown to what? 3 weeks? It will just stop all economic activity for 3 weeks. More severe policies have a greater impact on economy. And my intuition is that this dependency is non-liniar. Each reduction of R by 0.1 could for example double(?) the damage to economy. I only skimmed your article [1] - so maybe you already addressed this?
>Counterintuitively, the policy frontier (economic vs human damage) is concave and non-monotonic, and has three distinct regions.
Not surprising at all. I think the right hand side negative slope region of the policy curve is the herd immunity strategy (at least I call it so). It was discussed (and rejected) months ago.
There are a few other poor/dense countries that are headed for a bad year too sadly. Also note for every death there are many survivors that will have lifelong heart/lung problems.
I Work in an OTA, when this started i thinked am really fuck, just because: I live here (São Paulo state) the company dependents roughly of the people’s free going to any place, the first resolution of my bosses is stay home, perhaps because the hq is in Rio de Janeiro, the everyone in company started in home office, changes in whole organization to “new life”, after this initially impact the changes, i think what’s our sell, the travel or the dream ? People need assisting now around the world, and people wants the vacation for next year and for Christmas, and well all back to normality. We stays in our home at least this month maybe august. It is hard for the northern and center of Brazil because this states really need the travel now, we really work with tour supply chain to raise money for him to help the chain. But it’s not common in others ota
I've been tracking reported cases and deaths from the ECDC[0] data[1] for some months now. I've added Brazil to the chart ... here is the most recent plot of deaths:
This might work in the short term, but excess mortality will ultimately come out and tell the truth, unless Bolsanaro wants to claim those that died are still living (don't put it past him).
Not to disagree with the premise of the article, but in the previous pandemic at some point we just stopped counting the cases. We settled on the estimate that 10 to 15% of people in the world got it.
Now that we know the death rate of this virus is roughly 0.4% and it's widespread enough, is it time to also stop counting every single case?
164 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadThis is a recipe for turning a natural disaster into political one, potentially a crisis of legitimacy.
All most people will know, first hand, is the deaths of their immediate circle. The full extent of the calamity can remain a matter of debate.
If there are photos, the government can call them forgeries. If there are anecdotes from health care workers, or in the press, the government can dismiss them as left wing propaganda.
And besides, there are bogeymen on whom one can pin all of one’s own mistakes. Perhaps Soros and Bill Gates developed an electricity-based bio-weapon, and unleashed it, over TCP/IP, to decimate the people of Brazil.
IMO once policy makers start picking and choosing preferred causes which are more worthy than the lockdown, then the lockdown is effectively over.
I am hopeful that we won’t see a large spike in cases in the coming weeks, and perhaps this can serve as a datapoint that we can continue opening up more broadly.
In the meantime we have massive groups in close proximity, often chanting/yelling for long periods of time which the data indicates is a very high risk environment. A homemade mask is not going to provide reliable protection while protesting for hours with thousands of people. Stop once to sip a bottle of water and that barrier is compromised.
If asymptomatic spread of a deadly pathogen leads to the conclusion that we must be social distancing, then mass protests are deadly, and not just to the protestors themselves. Likewise, if it’s OK for people to mass protest, then it’s OK for people to go to church, for example.
Picking and choosing which social or political topics are deemed worthy of mass gatherings to me is unconscionable.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-co...
Is the consensus really that covid19 is gone? like, really? we are way way below herd immunity and Rt is still around 1.0 in most states, even before the reopening and protests start showing.
What am I missing?
Many people forgot when the news cycle told them to forget.
I think it's important to note that one group of protesters is still taking SARS-CoV-2 more seriously than another group of protesters[0].
[0]: https://i.imgur.com/isF7i7T.jpg
I have heard, and agree wholeheartedly, with a view that this has never been about lives vs. economy, because worsening economic conditions have a predictable cost in human lives. It's actually a tradeoff between lives lost to covid and lives lost to losing health insurance, cancelled medical procedures, suicide, etc. And it is not clear to me at all that either choice will clearly result in fewer deaths.
In which case?
Floyd protesters: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/health/pandemic-protesters-co...
In the case with the Floyd protesters, it's more abstract, but the same sentiment is there. I'd have to go back through my feed to find the specific examples of people explicitly saying they are okay with the possibility of dying from coronavirus.
Back-to-workers: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/03/23/texas-lt-gov-dan-pat...
> "No one reached out to me and said, 'As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?' And if that's the exchange, I'm all in," he said. "And that doesn't make me noble or brave or anything like that.
> "I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me ... that what we all care about and what we all love more than anything are those children," he added. "And I want to, you know, live smart and see through this, but I don't want to see the whole country to be sacrificed, and that's what I see."
edit: The president is an ass, though. F* fascist idiot.
Not anymore, now that Bolsonaro has fired two (!) health ministers and put a worthless yes-man in charge.
And we thought it was bad enough when he fired the first health minister to put a yes-man in his place. It turned out that the first yes-man wasn't spineless enough for Bolsonaro so he also got fired.
Wait, when did he put somebody in charge? I though the position was empty.
https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2020/06/03/ha-quase-vi...
I don't think that's true at all, I've never seen anything like that downvoted here. HN seems to be a generally well-educated, scientifically-minded crowd.
Please post, por favor!
This was shocking to the person who was convinced that the government was secretly trying to kill hundreds of thousands of people by using 5G to beam viruses into people through radio.
So, I guess it all depends on what denialism means these days.
There's a large educated crowd here who refuse to believe what the health researchers are saying or what studies have found in favor of partisan nonsense.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236613
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/states-manipulate-coronaviru...
This news is not surprising at all.
I'm going to avoid adjectives so that my comment doesn't get downvoted into oblivion by government fanboys, but let's just say that it is safe to assume that the Brazilian federal government does not believe science should be the main weapon in the fight against Covid.
Brazil is one of the few countries that denies the pandemic[1]. The others are Turkmenistan, Belarus and Nicaragua. Fun fact: neither of those are really democracies (whether Brazil still is a democracy, it is increasingly debatable).
The Brazilian president has scoffed covid as "a little flu"[2].
He is also against social distancing/lockdown measures, claiming they don't work[3]. Needless to say, he doesn't provide any scientific evidence of that -- he knows full well his supporters need nothing more than his word to believe in anything.
State governors are basically on their own since the beginning of the pandemic -- a lot of states implemented lockdowns/social distancing, but with limited effect since Bolsonaro routinely goes on national TV to downplay those measures and basically call them a hoax.
The situation now is that people are fed up with the long, ineffective (because they were always superficial, half-baked) social distancing and lockdowns, and the state governments are beginning to reopen right when the death toll is accelerating.
So basically we're screwed. Deaths will accelerate like crazy now that a lot of places are reopening and the federal government will do anything it can to hold onto its alternate reality where everything is fine.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/974dc9d2-77c1-4381-adcd-2f755333a...
[2] https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/06/a-little-flu-brazil-s-bo...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/04/while-bra...
I want to live in a world where this is actually viable everywhere, where we can trust our leaders to confer with experts and change their opinion if the situation changes. (Living in Germany, I do trust Angela Merkel that much, for example. I want that for everyone.)
I want to live in a world where everyone knows to verify things for themselves. Yes, I'd like leaders we can trust, but trust should never mean "don't check". (At the very least, have multiple other sources you trust to cross-check your sources of authority.)
That's not to say you can simply declare trust (though TOFU / TOFI tit-for-tat is remarkaby reliable), and the question of how to bootstrap trust is a difficult one. Ironically, many nationalist/populist behavioral patterns substitute a sense of tribal trust patterns for epistemic ones.
Ideally, a set of values and institutions which provide robust cross-checking and validation, distributing the trust verification burden, emerge. Any systemic doctrine of power concentration, whether authoritarian government, monopolistic economies, exclusive religions, educational uniformatism, etc., tends to undermine this.
And that specifically Does. Not Scale.[1]
It fails two ways:
1. Individuals suffer information overload, trust breakdown, and validation fatigue.
2. Society finds itself with no common foundation of common shared facts and mechanisms. All points of view are asserted to be equally valid, expertise is entirely dismissed. Tribal beliefs are asserted as true (for Us) and invalid (if Them).
There is, I'll posit, a broad gulf between "verify everything" and "be prepared to question any belief". One varient of the latter is "strong opinions, weakly held" (https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-fram...) I'm not fully convinced this is a valid model, but it seems a good initial approach. It addresses both the need. to act in the moment, based on. partial information, and the realisation that this information and conclusions based on it may be faulty. The problem occurs when making decisions with no recourse --- betting the farm, burning the boats.
Otherwise, I lean strongly on Baconian, Pragmatic principles: our brains, both individually and socially, are sense-making organs, optimising for practical benefit. A challenge is that subject to perception, processing, and model-generation costs, complexity and rigour, though affording greater accuracy and precision, have enormous costs.
A manifestly false assumption of rational markets (and behaviour) theory is that information is free. It's not --- it has extraordinary costs, and model formation and coordination --- getting everyone on the same page --- are among the highest. We're constantly facing a complexity cost constraint (this is the essence of Gresham's law), in which a much simpler model is, under relaxed environmental selection, often more useful, as it permits discarding expensive perception, processing, and model transmission (education of the population). Which works fine until environmental selection mechanisms are increased.
What a trust, not in authority but in expertise, has to offer, suject to sufficient checks, is an efficient distribution of information, processing, and model formation. This is the ultimate aim of Baconian Science, expressed in the motto of the Royal Society: In nullis verba --- on the word of no person. Rather, it is justified trust in experiment, experience, integrity, and institutions, that gets you this.
Mind, the usual problem is that power-serving institutions have a staggering tendency to become self-serving and select not based on truth but on self-interest. Correcting for this tendency is the great problem of polity, commercial, social, justice, and moral systems.
________________________________
Notes:
1. As I was composing this reply, another HNer in a different thread makes similar remarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450409
When I said "apply critical thinking to all sources", that doesn't mean "re-derive everything from scratch and give zero weight to information obtained from others". "be prepared to question any belief" is closer to what I had in mind. Beyond that, there's little harm in trusting a single source for information you are not actually heavily relying on yourself, but that wasn't really the point of this thread. Are you really trying to argue that the world would fall apart if people generally speaking put a little more critical thought into verifying information they're exposed to from a single source before giving it undue weight?
And rereading this thread, particularly your response here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23447763), that seems to me close to your argument. If not from scratch and first principles, in large part.
If not, care to restate?
It's less the obligation to validate, and more the licence to bullshit, that concerns me. Brandolini's asymmetry is steep. I've spent more time than I'd have liked around intentionally devceptive persons, and institutions (and machines). The experience is virtually always tremendously umsettling, at best.
There are reasons why social, moral, and legal strictures against deception, fraud, and betrayal of trusts run so deep, with frictions against values of free expression. Dante put bearers of false witness in the penultimate circle of his Hell.
We're also severely under-tested. Given our fickle social distancing and isolation, I highly doubt we "only" have 600K infected people. Our flagship universities (USP, UERJ) have already estimated that the real number can be up to 16 times higher.
The population is encouraged to reach out to the health service only when they have the most severe symptoms, since the public health service is at the edge of collapse in many states. The number of people dying at home, and dying from severe respiratory syndrome is abnormally high. It all adds up to an even grimier picture.
About our governors and mayors, I personally think most of them are doing what they possibly can do. They're facing an immense pressure to roll back lock-down measures in order to "save the economy" partly because of the finance minister's catastrophic failure. Businesses had a hard time getting credit, and the people in need were left scrambling for that ridiculous $120/month benefit.
We're living in a failed state.
You’d better had used adjectives than writing plain lies. Yes, Bolsonaro had a initial attitude to the pandemic, but it is past by 2 months at least.
Also, the term “small flu” wasn’t coined because he didn’t believe it, he meant to slow the hysteric news that were broadcasting a death toll of 500k in the, then, coming 2 months. Two months past now, and here we are, less than a tenth on that and no health system collapse.
> State governors are basically on their own since the beginning of the pandemic -- a lot of states implemented lockdowns/social distancing, but with limited effect since Bolsonaro routinely goes on national TV to downplay those measures and basically call them a hoax.
Yet another lie. The government gave states a total of more than BRL 300 bi, and is giving a basic income to the poor people in excess of 150 bi. Many campaign hospitals were donated to critical regions, such as Manaus and Fortaleza.
The organizing measures the federal government meant to apply were made short by the Supreme Court, that ruled mayors and states’ governors had the saying on local measures.
My parent live in one of the capitals in the south and one of them is working directly on the "frontlines". They had one covid-related death in the past 30 days and most of the reserved hospital beds are empty. Their city took stronger measures much earlier and their poverty rate is the lowest in the country. Other than school and some other business, life there is normal.
(throwaway for I try to to avoid identifying information associated with my username/handle)
Manaus: the consensus in the general population seemed to be that the city was (1) too remote for COVID to arrive (2) heat and sun would stifle it and (3) their endemic diseases (malaria, dengue etc) were worse anyways so who cares? People seemed to mostly ignore the first lockdown measures.
Now, maybe ~30% of the people we know personally in the city have had COVID. Overall, it seems like there is a lot of death but we stopped following closely because it was too painful.
Minas Gerais: impressive lockdown in March. Small cities in the interior quarantined immediately, screening checkpoints with nurses everywhere. I have no idea how things turned out there but my guess is pretty well.
Return to USA: we bailed out of Brazil as soon as we could due to the lockdowns. The only sign in the Houston airport that COVID existed at that point was a small sign warning travelers from Wuhan to self-quarantine. Embarrassing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
But the mental toll to deal with this president is very high!
I thought a lot before posting here because this government has a lot of fanboys/fangirls that use war tactics to hide things. The first posts here were of people trying to show that things are ok and numbers are being publicized, what is a lie.
These same people will come back here to downvote any comment that exposes the real situation. They do this in news portals, social media, WhatsApp, etc. It is disgusting and tiring.
I live in the interior of Minas Gerais, a state that's comparable to Texas in area and to Florida in population size. The mayor of my town locked down the city relatively early (late March). It didn't last long, with local businesses pressuring for it to reopen and low coronavirus incidence, but I think it helped. A more recent decree has made masks mandatory. So far the numbers look OK - there has been a single COVID-19 death (~80k population).
Other Brazilian states have not been so lucky. I can say with confidence that it would have helped tremendously if the federal government had taken this seriously from the beginning, and organised a nation-wide plan to handle the crisis. It is inconceivable to me that anyone would disagree. We were well aware of the situation in other countries - there was no reason to assume things would have played out differently in Brazil. While Brazil hasn't been as hard hit as other countries if you consider population size, no one has dealt with the problem as irresponsibly as we have. Tens of thousands of deaths could have been avoided. It is a real tragedy.
https://transparencia.registrocivil.org.br/especial-covid
And yes, the actual and previous numbers are under investigation by the Federal Police.
[1] https://covid.saude.gov.br/
Here is the CSV:
https://mobileapps.saude.gov.br/esus-vepi/files/unAFkcaNDeXa...
The problem is that the government wants to change the published statistics to only show the people who died of confirmed COVID infection in the same day as the report has come out. Most deaths take a couple of days to be added to the system so this methodology would significantly under report the real number of deaths per day.
One way to report the numbers is say how many deaths were registered into the system each day. This is the "freshest" statistic you can get, but it mixes data from different days. This statistic can't be used to plot a pandemic growth curve but it can be used to keep track of the total number of deaths.
Another way to measure it is so count the number of people that died on each given day, no matter how long it took for the death was registered into the system. This statistic is different from the first one but but it should be in the same order of magnitude (given that the first statistic is approximately a rolling average of the second one)
The key limitation of the second statistic exact number can only be known after at least a week has passed, because of the time it takes for the deaths to be added into the system. This is where the government's dishonesty comes in. They wanted to change the daily reports so that they would only include deaths that were added to the system in the same day where the person died. Any deaths that were not reported in the same day (which is the majority of deaths) would be left out of the statistics entirely.
> This is where the government's dishonesty comes in. They wanted to change the daily reports so that they would only include deaths that were added to the system in the same day where the person died. Any deaths that were not reported in the same day (which is the majority of deaths) would be left out of the statistics entirely.
I don't think this will be happening. I am sure they will keep counting daily deaths correctly, adding numbers to past days, and making it publicly available. They just will stop feeding the media trolls.
What we were having in fact was dishonesty from the media, claiming falsely that thousands of people died from covid-19 within 24 hours. They weren't making it clear that those deaths mostly happened in the last 45 days, so to create extreme reaction from its audience.
What media trolls?
I don't live in Brazil anymore but all of my family is still there. I want reliable numbers so I know what is happening, right now I'm left in the dark and having to pierce together data from multiple sources to get any kind of picture about daily death rates, velocity of spread, etc.
"Feeding the media trolls" or not should not be into consideration when a pandemic is ongoing and the public and your citizens need the information to have any kind of sense about the situation, I'm left in the dark, scared with two parents fitting perfectly into CoViD-19 risk group.
There is no defence to this behaviour, there is nothing that justifies hiding numbers from your population.
I wouldn't trust the last week of numbers at all. It takes time to notarize the deaths, and time to consolidate the numbers. Also don't trust within week distribution, because the deaths aren't reported at the same day they happen.
Overall, this is a reliable number. It's mostly impossible to hide a death in Brazil, there are way too many different actors watching those. And this is a paragovernamental organization (think about the US FED) that has all interest on not be caught by the public doing a bad job.
[1] https://opendatasus.saude.gov.br/group/dados-do-coronavirus
Discussions about COVID are already politicized, and discussions of politics and COVID are obviously even more, so readers have nowhere to run, they have only extremely polarized views and need to try to "average" them out.
However, the military government will start to fudge the numbers even further. They are moving numbers from covid-19 to any other deaths. All other numbers of causes of death are spiking. All this with a brutal underreporting of covid-19 deaths.
I lost another family member yesterday. A young mother of 2 girls.
There other day I was literally told that all the measures that were taken probably don't work because the infections were already getting less days before they came into effect.
I'm sometimes confused how far apart the general opinion on platforms such as hn is compared to people you encounter in real life.
See the whole climate change inaction. Which is basically a pandemic that we DO have a warning for, years and years in advance.
It's getting even worse now in my country because the media got tired of Covid and switched to BLM. Making the virus feel even more distant and invisible.
Not saying BLM protests aren't important exactly, but what happened to climate change, corona virus?
It's visible in most countries I followed, as soon as the fear that is purported by the governments and the media takes root the numbers start to drop earlier than they should given the lockdown measures.
Simply because many of the social distancing measures are adopted by the populace as soon as fear spreads.
Western european countries which were much slower with initial reaction were having massive spikes, some are just now getting out of the worst (ie UK). US is another example with its 'brilliant' current leadership.
Brazil is actually another one, the president seems since beginning like the worst you can get in democracy, pure corrupt evil (until next one comes I guess).
There is an official determination from the State-level government in Brazil to consider all deaths as COVID unless a doctor can prove otherwise.
By the way, they aren't testing all patients against COVID.
fear can bring awareness of danger, but then (assuming it's not a literal imminent threat, like a tiger) we need to switch to rational thinking to weigh risks and consider options. we can't stay consumed in fear and expect good things to happen.
When in fact it's the US that's embarrassingly low on the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...
Let's skip the top countries like those in Scandinavia, Japan, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland. Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina are all above USA.
Really? If anything I'd think HN of all places should be used to this class of problem, because it's endemic in much of tech particularly IT/devops, and we have arguably one of the more recent biggest and most well known cases of it ever: the Y2K effort. That was a massive industry wide problem that, in a rare case, also got significant media attention. And it was solved thanks to an utterly enormous level of effort. Hundreds of thousands if not millions or more of man years were put into going through decades of by definition crufty-as-hell code that maybe nobody had looked at in ages or had any recent mental model of and hunting for and fixing date issues. Sometimes permanently, sometimes through delay hacks ("let's consider 00-20 to be the 2000s, 30-99 to be the 90s" for example). Then there had to be lots of testing and dry runs leading up to the switch. And it mostly worked! There really were major problems, but they mostly came up in testing. The deadline was hit, it was a huge success. And the public result? It became the butt of jokes and a "cautionary story in overhyping a nothing burger" etc for the next decade at least. The general takeaway for the public seemed to be not "we solved this potential catastrophe thanks for a huge effort" but "we spent a ton of money and time and worry over something that didn't do anything!"
The basic issue of problems where the success scenario is essentially "nothing happens" but the failure scenario is huge costs is definitely hard to square with human psychology. Prediction vs reaction requires expertise in the subject that of course not everyone can possibly have, which in turn means non-experts must be able to identify and trust actual experts and institutions, with all the fuzziness and further issues that can bring. Arguably the ideal for Security, IT, ops, health, and many other areas is that they're mostly like air: noticeable primarily in their absence or degradation. If it's a particularly nice day and environment and the air is extra fresh we might take note of that as we first encounter it, and perhaps reflect at times how we feel more energized and clear headed then normal, but it's human nature to quickly let that fade into the background, and a significant amount of pollution or quality degradation is also something that can become omnipresent and looked over if it's not to the level of actual pain/breathing issues.
I don't know if there is any real formula for that beyond the hard work of institution building, with trust hard to gain and taking long time periods but fairly easily squandered. Even that may not be enough in the face of short term expediency and profit. Experiences like being treated as a cost-center and screaming into the void about security threats that we can see coming down the track from ages away and know have the risk of major costs are probably all too common here :(.
This is normal; HN is a technical oriented community of people who know how and where to look for information, then able to dismiss the usual bullshit. It's very unlikely we'll find a Covid-19 negationist or a flat earther over here, for example. Just nitpicking, I got your point and agree with it.
Getting information is not thinking freely. I can get the best information possible, but if I don't know how to think for myself without subconscious external influences, I'm not a free thinker. In my opinion, only someone thinking freely could consider in better shape.
Seeing how many biased and wrong statements are being made only on this thread tells me HN is not a golden pot of free thinkers...
Here's an article showing this is happening everywhere: https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac8...
I'm deeply sorry for your loss.
> the military government will start to fudge the numbers even further
Just to clarify to those who aren't familiar with the political scene in Brazil, we don't actually have a military government in the sense that the armed forces are not in power. Our democratically elected president Jair Bolsonaro [1] is however a former retired military officer, and his running mate Hamilton Mourão, our VP, a retired Army General [2].
Bolsonaro is a polarizing and controversial politician, his views and comments can be described as far-right and populist in nature and draw both praise and criticism in Brazil. He has several times openly shared his supporting views on the (U.S.–supported) Brazilian military dictatorship.
His popularity has been severely affected by his hanlding of the covid-19 pandemic. But he still enjoys a large and "loyal" support base.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jair_Bolsonaro
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Mour%C3%A3o
As just one example, he created a 'culture minister' position and his first choice for the position promptly recorded a speech cribbing Joseph Goebbels (no joke). https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bolsonaro-under-fire-dis...
There's plenty more if you dig. Hard to pick a more awful human being.
1) Bolsonaro paraphrases nazi slogan "the work sets you free"
2) Bolsonaro drinks a glass of milk in one of his infamous Facebook livestreams a day after Brazil has its first neo nazi "protest" a LA Charlottesville.
3) Minister of education compares Supreme Court investigation against Jair Bolsonaro to the holocaust, going as far as posting "SIEG HEIL" on his Twitter account
4) His slogan, of course, "Brasil acima de todos" which paraphrases the nazi slogan "Deutschland uber alles"
Bonus) Can't be bothered to go dig his Twitter, but a while ago the ministry of education was very open about the fashwave movement, going as far as changing his avatar to the same (frankly ridiculous) aesthetic. Not to mention all the attacks on universities and (what he refers to as) communists.
It's so interesting to me how often his government is caught up in nazi garbage, yet it's never his fault.
[1] https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/brazils-bolsonaro-... (obviously biased sources but it presents the facts as they happened)
[2] https://revistaforum.com.br/politica/copo-de-leite-bolsonaro...
[3] https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mundo/2020/05/consul-de-israel...
That's merely a case of misinterpretation of his words. By using this method of finding nazis, you would conclude that every one is a nazi because nazis had red blood like all of us.
> 2) Bolsonaro drinks a glass of milk in one of his infamous Facebook livestreams a day after Brazil has its first neo nazi "protest" a LA Charlottesville.
Fact-checked to be false. Revista Forum is a well known fake news site. [1]
> 3) Minister of education compares Supreme Court investigation against Jair Bolsonaro to the holocaust, going as far as posting "SIEG HEIL" on his Twitter account
Can you read portuguese? He was accusing his politicals opponents of treating him like nazis treated jews. And in fact he is from a jewish family that fled from nazi Germany.
> 4) His slogan, of course, "Brasil acima de todos" which paraphrases the nazi slogan "Deutschland uber alles"
Same as point 1. You can't get loose expressions from people, put them in whatever context you would like, and pretend it is true or even a fact.
--- [1] https://www.boatos.org/politica/bolsonaro-copo-de-leite-brin...
I read the link and it's not news to anyone that he was actually responding to a real movement of milk producers. The point is it doesn't have to be one or the other.
I'm not going to bother responding to the other points because you seemed to have missed mine entirely. These "incidents", isolated, don't mean anything like you can probably tell. However, isolated incidents is now how situations are analyzed, and doing so is just a way to rationalize not seeing what's very clearly in front of you.
Or even worse, they don't care and capitulate on it as it's loyal base encompasses white supremacists (no, not saying his supporters are white supremacists but he attracts them).
No, he did not. The ministry of culture was created in 1985.
I really wish the Youtube videos [2] by Atila Iamarino, a PhD in Virology, were available in English. I couldn't recommend him enough. He's done 21 talks on the situation in Brazil and elsewhere, and often mentions how the official data lies.
1 - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
2 - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSTlOTcyUmzvhQi6F8lFi5w/vid...
I point it out just to mean that the data is not current and as such can hardly reflect the current situation. This [1] seems to have more current data about excess deaths.
[1] https://momo.isciii.es/public/momo/dashboard/momo_dashboard....
Maybe the link has changed since you wrote your comment, but:
"Flawed data casts cloud over Spain’s lockdown strategy
"Erratic numbers create uncertainties for policymakers and the public
"Daniel Dombey in Madrid and John Burn-Murdoch in London JUNE 4 2020"
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1268450736398098433
The paywall is also easily crossed by, for example, archive.is
If you click the country name you can see a graph that displays the amount of deaths per day.
Citing total number of cases in Brazil is disingenuous in my opinion because the country has one of the largest populations in the world. In terms of deaths/million people, Brazil is currently 20th on the list. Nothing to be proud of, but should provide some perspective.
Apart from that the Health Ministry is hiding the numbers for acute respiratory syndrome deaths (which could be seasonally-adjusted and an inference to CoViD-19 deaths be made).
He might be an alarmist but models all around the world are wrong and being updated constantly to keep on track with reality, you can't say that to dismiss all the information he's shared because of a missed prediction/projection.
> Citing total number of cases in Brazil is disingenuous in my opinion because the country has one of the largest populations in the world.
Nothing that involves exponential growth should disregard total numbers, the growth of total numbers is explosive. Total population doesn't matter as it's barely the upper bound limit of total number of cases a given region might get, how the numbers are accruing towards this total is the most important information and the only way to keep track of that is by keeping track of the total cases. It doesn't matter that Brazil has a low ratio of deaths/million if the cases are still growing exponentially as deaths will always lag behind.
Brazil's curve is accelerating, numbers are severely underreported, I heard the same kind of talking points in early March around death rates, etc. and the situation has steadily got worse by the day. Trying to paint a better picture by selecting a ratio-based metric doesn't seem to be the way to analyse Brazil's current situation, it's worsening and measures against the spread are being haphazardly removed or fought against by the Federal Government, it's a brewing disaster.
Bigger means also more resources to fight against the problem in the case than the government would want to do it and save people. If they really want that, a president taking mass baths proudly showing no protection measures should be asked to stop it, or removed ASAP.
I don't think that follows, especially in a country which was just starting to show recovery from the 2014 depression.
He is a YouTuber who gets views from alarmist predictions. To me that disqualifies him from the debate.
> Nothing that involves exponential growth should disregard total numbers
I have never any said numbers should be disregarded, but the whole picture should be kept in mind.
This is not "trying to paint a better picture", but simply to put things in perspective. For example, by looking only at the current absolute numbers, you ignore that the first cases in Brazil happened at least one month after the ones in Europe. In other words, we are now where Europe was a month ago, i.e. still growing in cases.
> measures against the spread are being haphazardly removed or fought against by the Federal Government
Can you cite one? All control measures in Brazil have been defined by Governors and Mayors, as ruled by the Supreme Court. If they're been lifted, it's definitely not being done by the Federal Government.
If total deaths grow exponentially then deaths/million also grow exponentially, do they not? So you can disregard total numbers and still pay attention to exponential growth.
On the one hand, response to Coronavirus has been really frakked at the top messaging level; if not a full-on denialist, Bolsonaro seems blinded by the existence of a jobs-deaths tradeoff and can’t seem to work with it. He’s not a terribly sharp person.
On the other, there’s a lot riding on making things look worse than they are. And every time you read something bemoaning how un-excellent someone like Orban is, you have to factor who’s rooting for them to fall. There is always a bigger story.
——
Edit: Jesus, dang, why is a perfectly reasonable reply to this comment [dead]?
I mean, the guy is normally batshit crazy and I expected him to blame Gates and Soros for the virus... but his response so far has been surprisingly good.
Watching the news in Brazil, looks that Brazilian government is doing what they can, but you don't build at least 30 years of missing infrastructure in 6 months. That's for sure not Bolsonaro's fault.
He doesn't fit because he's more incompetent, more corrupt, more egocentric, emptier of any moral values, more oblivious to the interests of his co-citizens, than any other political leader ever was (in Brazil and elsewhere), right?
He was from center-right, old and conservative. Example: First month of his government, Siberia was on fire, Australia was on fire, Amazon was on fire, and the news was "Right extremist Jair Bolsonaro is burning Amazon down, exterminating the indigenous folk".. I mean he is a moron, but no, it wasn't him, but a system built over the years. The world explores the Amazon since 1500, that's why the Portuguese landed there at first place right?
Regarding the COVID-19, I think the government is reacting well, but Lockdown is a luxury in Brazil. You cannot put a Favela in Lockdown, you cannot stop an economy where 60% of the population is "self-employed", asking people to stay home. I mean you can try but, the vast majority in Brazil don't want it.
However, this is a highly technical argument designed for engineering-minded or economics-minded thinkers. If we have leaders who are "not terribly sharp" as you say, I'm not sure what we can do about it.
[1] https://www.circuitlab.com/blog/2020/05/28/surprising-covid-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23418252
some feedback:
>there is no tradeoff between saving lives (due to COVID-19) and reducing widespread economic damage
It is easy to show that there is no tradeoff by assuming that economic damage is only dependend on the duration of the lockdown. Why not aim for R=0? This would save even more lives and reduce the duration of the lockdown to what? 3 weeks? It will just stop all economic activity for 3 weeks. More severe policies have a greater impact on economy. And my intuition is that this dependency is non-liniar. Each reduction of R by 0.1 could for example double(?) the damage to economy. I only skimmed your article [1] - so maybe you already addressed this?
>Counterintuitively, the policy frontier (economic vs human damage) is concave and non-monotonic, and has three distinct regions.
Not surprising at all. I think the right hand side negative slope region of the policy curve is the herd immunity strategy (at least I call it so). It was discussed (and rejected) months ago.
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=bra&areas=mex&are...
It isn't particularly poor either, but it is very unequal.
https://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/ECDC_DeathsLinear.png
The horizontal axis is in "days since reported deaths exceeded 100"
[0] European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
[1] https://opendata.ecdc.europa.eu/covid19/casedistribution/csv
https://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/Europe_Deaths_linear.png
Now that we know the death rate of this virus is roughly 0.4% and it's widespread enough, is it time to also stop counting every single case?