Elon Musk Downplays Covid-19 Danger in Email to Space-X Employees
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Is he really comparing the absolute number of deaths rather than the mortality rate? Come on Elon, you can do better than this.
Cars are in what … top three or so causes of death alongside heart disease and cancer?
Deaths from COVID-19 is the USA are only going to beat that number if the government truly screws the pooch in terms of testing, treatment and management.
Wash your hands.
Currently COVID-19 response is a finely tuned balance of economic impact to death-toll. React too early and you'll experience an unacceptable economic impact. React too late and you'll experience an unacceptable death-toll.
The reason this situation is so dire is not because of the lethality of the virus. It is because our medical infrastructure is not capable of treating patients in the capacity that this virus can infect them. The goal is not to prevent people from contracting COVID-19. The goal is to slow the spread of COVID-19 so that the number of cases which require hospitalization stays lower than the availability of hospital beds.
If everyone got sick all at once the fatality rate would increase because people would be dying faster than they could be treated. So long as we can treat our ill faster than people become ill we can manage this situation even if 100% of humans eventually become infected. The balancing act comes into play when you also need to consider the impact to the economy.
There is a saturation point that early responding countries will reach where even if they continue to increase their response they will only be increasing their economic impact without significantly decreasing the death-toll. Finding this balance is what governments are trying to do right now.
Seems logical, though, that someone as self-centered and egomaniacal as Musk thinks of individual risk.
Hmm! Maybe we should stop doubling down on automobile oriented infrastructure and rely on something safer instead.
In 3 weeks time, those probabilities might have changed.
My behaviour today should reflect probabilities today, and my behaviour in 3 weeks should reflect probabilities then.
My behaviour today has negligible impact on my chances in 3 weeks too.
Collective behaviour might effect collective probabilities in 3 weeks, but even that is relatively minimal considering the nature of exponentials.
In any case, Elon Musk doesn't speak for individual behavior, he controls a company of thousands of employees. That's already collective behavior.
That’s the thing that makes this analysis nonsensical. You are looking at the first 2 months of an exponential and treating it like a fixed rate. You should treat it as an exponential and extrapolate another 10 months with number of cases doubling every 4-6 days and then use that number as the deaths per year.
I’m honestly blown away that Musk is saying this.
- on 8 Apr US will be just under 1000 deaths. Scary, but that’s almost a month away - on 2 May, deaths will be ~15,000 - on 20 May, deaths will be ~125,000 - on 7 June, deaths will be ~1,000,000 - on 1 July, deaths will be ~16,000,000 - on 19 July, deaths will be ~128,000,000 - by end of 2020, deaths would be over 17,000 trillion if the US population was infinite and mitigating factors such as herd immunity didn’t kick in, but you get the general idea
This is all presuming the existing political/societal response and herd immunity not kicking in (which it won’t in the US until around the 200MM mark). Social distancing will lessen this massively, which is why it’s so important.
With that said, the real comparison is the Flu that had 24,981 deaths in the 2016/17 season.
Plus, one defector company when all the others shut down and stop the spread gets a huge advantage, by passing on externalities to all the rest, so it is a selfish move as well.
Consider that cars are an endemic condition with a vast amount of time and money spent keeping people safe while using them or being near them. If similar resources are deployed to protect people from C19, there will be far fewer deaths from that than cars.
At work the simple precautions are to wash your hands, hold meetings by phone, by email or not at all, and avoid socialising with people you are not directly working with. Wash your hands, wash your work surfaces.
They key here is limiting the spread of the disease while the health system ramps up support. There is no need to go into wild-eyed panic and insist that we shut cities down. Doing so would cause far more problems (and fatalities) than COVID-19 ever will.
US is just 2 weeks from that.
> Someone should ask him if a driver who had a car accident can "infect" people nearby so that they'll have accidents themselves too.
That would be a pileup
Or the one who disagrees with Elon's assessment is the ill informed one. This could be a possibility, too. Logically speaking.
There's a different between a sacrifice in service of a goal, and a sacrifice because you're too stupid to stay safe.
Humankind will not fail to become a multiplanetary species even if SpaceX were to shut down entirely for a year.
Musk downplaying a risk is kind of his thing, so it's plausible, but without the full context this is just Musk-bashing bait.
Calling the hero diver a pedophile, bailing out his cousin's SolarCity company and allowing Autopilot to kill people are just a few of his many ethically questionable actions.
Let's see how the Internet will react this time.
If you literally only count healthy adults, I still probably wouldn't agree with his position, but I could see how it could be argued.
He also shows some striking abilities in focus, synthesis, organization, and what I perceive to be fearlessness. Put together, this all seems familiar to me from my experience with high-function autistics.
I don't think it's quite fair for you to label these "flaws". I think "challenges" is a more useful term. I know these behaviors can be very difficult to deal with, but I've also been amazed at some powerful abilities that seem unique to high-functioning autism, and which possibly go hand-in-hand with the challenges.
We should not confuse them with Elon Musk's character flaws. He is wealthy enough to employ people to catch mistakes. That he does not reveals a character flaw.
Across the world governments spend billions on measures to curb these.
It would be significantly higher if we didn't have speed zones, cameras, police etc.
Maybe in Musk's world view we should cut this spending and not worry about preventible deaths.
In a car you drive safely and wear a seatbelt. The government mandates certain standards for designs including braking capacity and passenger safety.
For diseases you can socially isolate and wash your hands. The government can properly fund disease research and control.
I admire Elon in many ways but I am terrified of his tendencies of psychopathy.
According to Musk, We should use individual cars because there’s a risk to have a serial killer in the metro train but it’s statistically safe to gather with people when a deadly virus is spreading. Cult follower would buy that and amplify the message.
It’s scary stuff, let’s hope the guy doesn’t turn into an anti-vaxxer or something like that(because “we need as spicies to evolve through natural selection so we can live in exoplanets” maybe?).
The anti-public transport is exactly that. He realises public transport is exactly what the world needs, but his audience is car-addicted americans. Instead he proposes a tunnel cars can drive along on sleds... And later people pods, that look not-so-different from subway carriages... And later still suggests that people-pods will happen first before the car-sleds.
He'll still hand pick the people he sends to mars I bet, which in a way is disguised eugenics.
I’m not comfortable with this way of thinking, in muslim countries after every big scientific discovery people advocate that “it’s already written in the koran” since Allah must have known it and if you twist the text enough and ignore contradicting interpretations it can be understood this way.
I don’t like that and don’t believe that this is the case.
If he was all about the benefit of mankind then Tesla would be a non-profit and he wouldn't have a compensation plan where he gets tens of billions.
Coronavirus is not a disaster today, it is a looming disaster. Without human intervention, Coronavirus would be pretty sure to kill millions in the US in a short period of time (1+% fatality * 33+% of the population).
Yes, the chances of you or anyone you know dying today from Coronavirus is practically 0. Coronavirus is not a disaster in the US today. If a vaccine for Coronavirus was scheduled to be given to everyone tomorrow, it would not be a disaster, and we would not stop economic activity for it. But there isn't a vaccine tomorrow, so look at the virus forecast and take precautions.
330m x 0.3 x 0.01 = 1m . If those lower bounds are exceeded, it will be more.
Italy has overloaded its hospitals, and now their doctors are forced to choose who they will save and who they won't.
Haha, so basically, don't drive home?
Despite what ceejayoz might try to tell you, corona viruses do not mutate in the way that influenza does. Influenza mutates in a way that evades the immune system but retains other qualities. This is why new vaccines for the flu are always being developed. Despite the fact that corona virus family viruses are responsible for a very small amount of “common cold,” they do not exhibit this behavior. They do mutate though, which is why we are seeing two “versions” of covid-19. The ultimate meaning of all this is that once a population gains collective immunity, the virus will basically disappear. In layman's terms, the virus will go away probably between 3 to 6 months from now in the United States. If anyone tries to refute this, post actual evidence or expert testimony showing that covid-19 mutates in a similar way to influenza.
Like Elon musk points out, only those with immune system problems are at risk. This includes some people of advanced age, some people with diabetes and various other people.
The virus appears to kill people like many other similar illnesses: if the infection spreads to deeply within the lungs, gas transfer is interrupted and secondary bacterial infection sets in, commonly known as pneumonia. The treatment for which is antibiotics and an oxygen line. This is why you see Italy asking specifically for more oxygen equipment, in my non expert opinion. Both these treatments are widely available and do not require special skill to acquire or administer. Patients who do not benefit from these would require mechanical ventilation.
The fatality rate is massively skewed toward severity because of the lack of testing. If all the benign cases were taken into account, the facility rate would be much smaller although still high enough to take seriously.
Remote administration of oxygen and antibiotics, washing hands, and light self-quarantine, all very easy to do, will blunt the impact on hospitals significantly.
Overall, the threat that this virus poses to most people and society in general has been overblown by the for-profit media.
I would like to apologize for being so impolite in addressing this topic previously.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089684112...
It took 3 weeks to fuck up Italy in a royal way, so "3 to 6 month" does not instill confidence, tbh
No one (serious) disputes this, and the number of cases in China and South Korea is already on the way down. The question is how many people it will kill along the way.
> only those with immune system problems are at risk
1. What immune system problem did Wenliang Li have? (If you want to say "mostly," sure, but "only" is an unsubstantiated claim.)
2. People can become asymptomatic carriers pretty easily. That's a good reason why someone with authority over groups of people that contain some at-risk folks should attempt to prevent or reduce the frequency of such gatherings, at least until we develop collective immunity or a vaccine. (Such people include CEOs, pastors, concert organizers, politicians, etc.) Furthermore, asymptomatic carriers can pass the virus onto other asymptomatic carriers, so until we've started developing some immunity, it's a good idea for even groups of entirely not-at-risk people to limit gatherings, to reduce secondary transmission to at-risk people.
People with immune system problems aren't doomed to die immediately, and it's worth taking steps to prevent them from getting infected, if you can. (Yes, people with immune system problems, older people, etc. have some chance of dying soon anyway. But everyone is going to die at some point. It is a widely-accepted moral principle that this doesn't excuse causing people to die early.)
> secondary bacterial infection sets in, commonly known as pneumonia
This is incorrect - SARS-CoV-2 is unusual in that it's capable of causing pneumonia on its own, without a secondary bacterial infection. Antibiotics won't help. See, for instance, https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2... .
> Overall, the threat that this virus poses to most people and society in general has been overblown by the for-profit media.
What's the profit angle here? What's the benefit to big media from people being unwilling to attend movies and concerts?
Meanwhile, how do you explain the absolute terror in the voices of medical professionals unaffiliated with the media, such as https://twitter.com/tina_nguyen/status/1238879814863519744 or https://left.it/2020/03/13/covid_19-open-letter-from-italy-t... (or, you know, Wenliang Li)?
Spanish flu (second wave) was far more deadly. Mutation is a possibility. Not saying it will happen but I wouldn't rule it out 100% either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Deadly_second_wave
I don't disagree it's a possibility, but influenza A isn't particularly informative on how likely the possibility is.
There is some evidence that prior exposure to other coronavirus (including vaccination) is an additional risk factor for loss of lung function.
So, yes, the influenza A experience is relevant. In that instance, those with a strong immune response had a greater fatality rate.
What immune deficiency did he have? I don’t know. I have tried to make many edits to my post and can’t for some reason, one of which is to addd the word “significant” before “risk.”
The link you provide doesn’t state that the virus can cause pneumonia on its own but I’ll hand it to you anyway. It weakens my point but it’s still true that antibiotics and oxygen could precede going to the icu for more serious treatment.
As for the media, they make money when people are glued to their television sets because it’s better for advertising. This is why they have a tendency to cover things that are shocking and exaggerate, although they don’t always do it. This is a widely held belief and it’s true.
Does he really think cars are more dangerous in Northern Italy right now than COVID? COVID has killed about 1000 people in Lombardy (pop 10 million) in a week. That's twice the number of fatalities Lombardy generally sees from cars in a year and it's getting worse daily, despite the aggressive countermeasures.
I don't see any reason why the rest of the world won't look like Lombardy unless measures are taken.
Italy is an example of the worst case scenario of poor management and susceptible population.