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Comment by labster | Hacker News Reader

Meh, I’ve been warning people about the coronavirus for a couple weeks now. And our prepper contingent has been on it for years. The silver lining is by this time next year, we should have ~20% less throwaway accounts being created for comments like these.

Many years back I read The Coming Plague about epidemiology and the disease cowboys who fight it. There is always a coming plague, known or novel. It was only a matter of time before we got a repeat of the Spanish Flu, or the Black Death. If not this time, then someday. Thinking otherwise is folly.

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The prepper contingent has predicted 250 out of the last 3 global plague events correctly.

But they only need to be right once.

They kinda need to be right every time?

I guess it defines on what you mean by getting it right. If you mean correctly predicting the specific disease that becomes a pandemic, then sure. If you mean being alive at the end of it, then I don't think it's so bad to have a high false positive rate as long as your false negative rate is low given how enormously asymmetric the costs of a false negative are relative to a false positive.

Why are chickens so scared of everything?

It is because if they miss the fox a single time they are dead.

If they run away 999 times without needing to, it's no big deal. Making a lot of noise so other chickens run away too helps the herd.

You can laugh at the chickens, but the chickens you laugh at, are the kind of animals who survives.

The same are true for wolves: they run away from humans because they are too great a risk of injury compared to the size of the meal.

If you aren't willing to run away when not absolutely required, you will miss the one time you really needed to.

Except that humans are much less binary than fight or flight and capable of nuanced reactions so the entire comparison is baloney.

There is a cost to living in a constant state of fear and preparation, the opportunity costs are massive.

In many aspects humans are more capable, but not all.

Humans don't have to look at an animal for a few days to figure out if it's a mouse or a fox.

But for people infected with the Coronavirus we are not more capable: the first 2-14 days a person is infected with the Coronavirus we cannot see it. Only medical tests can, and we can't test everybody around us.

So the smartest might be to run away 100 times to avoid the single person who is infected.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-incuba...

Or just wash your hands ...

Tell that to the person who sat opposite of the Iranian under minister for public health while interviewing him and he was coughing all over the place. Fortunately she sat about 2 meters away from him, but still, I'd be concerned. Washing your hands and not touching your face certainly helps. But elevators, air travel, the subway, the tram, the bus, the train, places of work and events all pretty much guarantee spread of viruses all the time. This virus is no exception, it will spread. The question is how fast it will spread and how much we can do to limit that so that the health care system has time to absorb the impact. Washing hands helps.

> The silver lining is by this time next year, we should have ~20% less throwaway accounts being created for comments like these.

I'm trying to be charitable here...am I reading this correctly?

I think they mean that if a serious outbreak does occur, people will treat it more seriously next time (not that 20% of the population is going to die from Covid-19).

It's gallows humor. It is based on the latest mortality rate I saw, but made the assumption of 100% infection rate among trolls. This is likely not true as they are often found indoors on their computers.

With the 1918 influenza, 1.7% of the world population died, many of them young people. This was still very traumatic to society, despite the fact that Europe had done its level best to kill young men for the previous four years in the trenches.

Right now, influenza has killed more than COVID-19, but people tend not to worry about that. Not new enough. About 300000 people a year die from influenza in a quiet year. Take your flu shots every year, people.

The prepper contingent has been on pretty much every possible end of the world as we know it scenario, so it's kind of hard to say that they were "on this"

Our widespread abuse of antibiotics isn't helping. To think that we can go 100 years without a serious pandemic while also abusing antibiotics at an unprecedented scale betrays a sheer disregard for biology and nature.

This is a virus. Antibiotics are for bacterial diseases

Although apparently some deaths are the result of opportunistic bacterial secondary infections.

I understand that. But I'm not talking about Coronavirus in particular but the threat of a pandemic in the age of antibiotics.

This one might be a virus but past pandemics like the Black Plague were bacterial in nature.

Superbugs in US hospitals escaping due to increased CoronaVirus patients...

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