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The Virus

blog.samaltman.com

51 pointsrloomba28 comments

If too many people get this simultaneously we will overwhelm the healthcare system and this will switch from tragedy to horror. Everyone please do everything you can to avoid catching and spreading this until we have enough testing to track this and respond effectively.

While simple actions o prevent spread are probably not unreasonable (why aren't we doing these every flu season)? I think the scale of horror is grossly misperceived. For example, It's most likely that the scale of death from covid-19 will be at least one, if not two orders of magnitude lower than annual vehicular deaths in the us.

For everyone else, this is pegging Covid-19 deaths to ~36,000 [0]

(was curious)

[0] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

More like 360-3600 (dnautics said 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than vehicle deaths).

...and there are 3500 recorded deaths so far from COVID-19, so we've very likely already exceeded this estimate as of March 7, 2020.

I think dnautics was just talking about the US, so there are only 19 deaths so far.

Please don't mix national and worldwide numbers: WHO estimates 1,350,000 traffic related death worldwide [1]. That said, every single loss of life is a tragedy by itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

There are only 37,000 motor vehicle fatalities/yr in the US. Care to show your work, because my numbers come out in the millions on our current no-mitigation, pretend-it-will-go-away trajectory.

If your estimate is in the millions... I'm happy to bet you a thousand dollars that in the US deaths don't go more than 50k, ten thousand dollars it doesn't go more than 500k, to be settled at the close of 2020.

I have fairly low confidence in the high end numbers, because there's a chance the US would "wake up." Your low number bet seems like a layup! There is something appalling about "rooting" for death that doesn't sit well with my values though.

All that said, I still mostly want to see your work. This isn't my specialty, and if you have well thought out optimistic numbers they would make me and a lot of people feel better--they would relieve a lot of anxiety.

I'm a scientist by training, so all I'm gonna say is that numbers don't exist in a vacuum. There are lots of undiscussed factors that to my eyes go towards inflating the numerical values being discussed, for example, there being a huge festival with relatively poor sanitation and a high transmissibility likelihood in the city with the primary blast radius and a general difference in hygeine culture between China and the US, and the US being less population dense in general. In my circle, probably about 10% actively self-label as germophobic, and even I as a relatively dirty person have started more meticulously washing hands and self-segregating while feeling under the weather this season.

In the us, we have signs in restaurants reminding employees (and customers) to wash their hands. Now in all honesty probably only 80% do in normal times but certainly more are now, and in any case, it's part of the active day to day thinking (or even better, it's part of letting the monkey drive) in our culture.

If this spreads widely enough and quickly enough the numbers we have point to a death rate that isn't even in the same ballpark as traffic fatalities. There are 7 billion people on this planet and none of them have immunity to this.

> Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to face a global tragedy—hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.

Even if it’s Sam Altman writing this, I wish he were more scientific instead of appealing to an anonymous authority.

I don’t think global traffic will decrease after this. It will keep on increasing after this downturn. To suggest people won’t travel unnecessarily is absurd as saying people won’t go out to restaurants post-covid-19. But restaurants will definitely get rocked by this.

The question is how will supply chains change. Will Apple really stick all their eggs on China again or will they change strategies. It probably depends on how much it costs them, ie its easier to keep everything in China and pay downtime costs when a new virus hits. Luckily Tim Cook is an expert in supply chains so he is perfectly positioned for this. Other companies probably aren’t and a few will make the wrong decision.

> I expect society will shift to a new normal pretty fast. Some of these elements—e.g., much less business travel, much less handshaking, much more handwashing—I expect to just stick. Some others—e.g., people working from home all of the time—I expect to not stick.

Why would people working from home not stick? Of all the enumerated changes, this one seems like the most likely to stick. At least for any worker that has no direct contact with clients needed, going to an office seems to be not that useful and a waste. As a remote worker myself for more than 10 years, I don't really see his point here. Anyone?

> Why would people working from home not stick?

The assumption behind it sticking seems to be that WFH is so obviously better if you just try it you'll be convinced. While I think there's some truth to that (=people objecting to it without actual experience), many companies are going to jump into large-scale WFH badly prepared now, so it could pan out either way. Turning a company remote is a culture shift.

Similar outlook expressed by Naval Ravikant recently as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0bPSseOlMc&feature=youtu.be

A few things to consider:

- What is the chance that we develop an effective vaccine in say 6 months? In 18 months? (I'd love to see this question tackled by the Good Judgement project [1])

- Singapore appears to be doing a good job of controlling the spread of the virus. Perhaps they will soon require all travellers to provide documentation of a negative covid19 test result before entry to Singapore?

- How many fewer flu deaths will result from changes to travel and hygiene?

[1] https://goodjudgment.com/

There are quite a few universal vaccines in the works. The window for a truly horrific pandemic is closing.

https://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/challenge/ending-pandemic-t...

So this is the plausible worst case - unfortunately I see no reason why it should happen differently if we don‘t manage to keep R0 way lower for a while than it currently seems.

It‘s growing exponentially, so one week we‘ll still have a working healthcare system, the next week it will be overwhelmed by the low percentage of people needing O2 or breathing support for a few weeks.

We‘ll improvise and then there will be next week with a double number of cases. And a further diminished number of healthy people working in health care.

Then our healthcare system will just collapse and those people will die that would otherwise have recovered after a few weeks. It‘s a combination of exponential growth of infections and accumulating numbers of people who need treatment for a while.

As I understand this about is the current situation in Iran, it just happened earlier there.

We‘ll try a lot, maybe find a way of better treatment to mitigate this a little. This will happen until mid april, next year we‘ll have a vaccine, maybe.

Oh, and this is what I fear for my country. We have public healthcare without copay, you can’t be layed off for being sick and if you’re sick (or quarantined) you’ll still be payed.

This is going to be a wild, depressing ride and it will come ‚suddenly‘.

Is this a contest for how to convey the least amount of useful information in the space of 1 blog post? Why even waste the time? Just say "it's probably bad" and move on. I'm willing to bet you have little to no idea what cascading effects are impacting treasury yields. It's just a finance news talking point.

Nonsense, classic FUD

How can a investor give advices on impact of a virus that is new?

Classic case of Halo effect

>the tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, brand or product in one area to positively influence one's opinion or feelings in other areas

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

It's not advice. It's an opinion piece.

The piece does contain one bit of advice, "young healthy people should try to avoid getting Covid-19 for as long as possible."

> hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19

I find that a severe underestimate. Barring a miracle medical cure, given the death rates we've seen so far the number of deaths will be in the tens of millions.

It's not hard to estimate the number of deaths with a spreadsheet https://i.imgur.com/e86IcaK.png

A high fatality rate skewed towards the old could end the pension crisis.

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