Coronavirus and Credibility
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Here's one showing the mistakes of left-leaning media I found in 2 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=36&v=wVDPVBZF2Xg
It's just as easy to find supercuts of Pelosi, DeBlasio, and other prominent Democrats telling people that they didn't need to start social distancing or that the virus wasn't airborne contagious.
Bad judgement is a human failing that cuts across party lines. To think that this is a long-term credibility problem for only some people shows a lack of a healthy diversity of news sources. At the end of this, everyone will go back to their teams' dugouts and prepare for the next political battle. Nothing will have been learned about credibility.
One guy's being wrong becomes another guy's "not that big of a deal".
By what metric will you measure "being wrong" for this COVID-19 pandemic? A super cut of video clips showing a reluctance to believe uncertain information coming out of China? Death rate compared to other OECD countries? Whether or not the great Hydroxychloroquine efficacy debate goes one way or another? Whether or not the ban of flights to/from China were effective?
it's an ideal, not a metaphysical necessity. But we need to enforce the ideal because otherwise the powerful use their power to their interest and against their detractors. It is absolutely essential to hold them responsible for their decision making process if we value life in a liberal democracy or a classical republic. They cannot get every decision right, but they must at least get them wrong for a fair reason.
Otherwise it's just "personal responsibility for the many, riches and fiefdoms for the few"
The POTUS was still publicly pushing the coronavirus = flu comparison in early March even after we saw what happened in Iran and Italy. Remember, he said on February 28 that being worried about the coronavirus was “their new hoax” from the media and his political opponents, so he himself recognized his political opponents were pointing out the severity by late February.
Edit: i don’t want to get too deep in the politics with this, I do agree with your ultimate point that most won’t learn from this and will simply return to their team’s side regardless of who got this one more right.
Now you're splitting hairs. You know who the first politician in the USA who was banging the drums in alarm about Wuhan and the coronavirus? Tom Cotton. Republican Senator. Do you support him now? Does his early conviction of the severity of this event put you behind him and everyone who echoed his concerns? Are you likewise now opposed to the people who were ridiculing him as a conspiracy theorist and fear-monger?
I think that’s great, I don’t agree with all their politics but they didn’t let themselves be blinded by optimism and looked at what was actually going on here. And the theory that the virus may have accidentally escaped from the lab where they were studying bat coronaviruses always seemed credible to me (Reminder, the 1977 flu likely escaped from a Russian or Chinese lab but this was never admitted either).
The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought (Hannity, etc.) Edit: again, he was calling it “their new hoax” so you really can’t deny that he was behind on this one :-)
How did you come to that conclusion? What about the Democrats in New York, which is the epicenter of the virus outbreak right now (certainly the US and probably the world)? I remember hearing someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close.
This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school. Without those programs, many students have little to eat at home. It's a little disingenuous to represent it in another light. If anything, it highlights yet another weakness in our society.
But did people die because of that decision? Probably. Maybe a lot.
Tough calls. It comes down to who made those tough calls earlier. And that's not a partisan thing, or a smart/dumb thing.
Plenty of bad decisions to go around, but we probably shouldn't lay the blame to thick anywhere. Because it's chaos and people are adapting and changing in real time.
Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people and he has to shut down the state to slow down the virus. I guarantee he's going to be a different person in 12 months.
“The next minute” is off by something more than 6 orders of magnitude.
You kind of skipped over ~4.2 million minutes he spent as Lieutenant Governor between those jobs.
California schools pretty much immediately set up daily meal pickup when they closed (often, for anyone under 18 at any school site.) And this was already happening when they said that.
Now WaPo seems to be admitting that we should at least consider the possibility that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://archive.vn/UP6dx#selection-1801.148-1801.176
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-...
(To be clear, Tom Cotton himself says the bio-weapon thing was just a hypothesis[1].)
[1] https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126
On the other hand the fact that they were researching bat coronaviruses in the lab in the city where the outbreak began certainly is suggestive of a possible lab accident. I doubt we’ll ever find certainty of this though just like the 1977 outbreak of H1N1. Not impossible it’s just a coincidence either (after all SARS and MERS jumped to humans without any help).
However, I will note that a colleague of mine saw the virology institute's location change on Google Maps around this time. Free software legend Eric S Raymond mentioned this on his blog as well [4].
I'm pretty sure the Google Maps thing is a sign that the Chinese leadership heard these bioweapon rumors, and figured the best way to combat them was to require Google to lie about the institute's reported location.
There are plenty of ridiculous rumors on the Internet, why would the Chinese government react so strongly to this particular one?
It could be because the Chinese leadership has something they're trying to hide. But in China things are often censored all over the place with little rhyme or reason as well. "We know this rumor's false and ridiculous, any serious scientist knows it came from some country bumpkin eating an improperly cooked bat, but this rumor could potentially be destabilizing, so let's force Google to tell this lie for us" is certainly a way the Chinese government might think.
Is it created in a lab?
The Google maps thing is pretty weak evidence. It could be explained by the "oh crap people are catching on, we'd better make Google help with the coverup" hypothesis, but it's equally well explained by the "we know it's false, but we'll censor things willy-nilly because we're China and that's what we do" hypothesis.
I don't know enough about mol bio to really understand the genetic sequences.
To summarize: The evidence seems to be inconclusive, but certainly consistent with the possibility the virus is a Chinese bio-weapon. "Coronavirus is a Chinese bio-weapon that somehow accidentally escaped" is a possibly true hypothesis. There's not nearly enough evidence to say for sure. But it's a reasonable possibility, not tin-foil hat territory.
Suggesting it was let out on purpose probably does get pretty close to tin-foil hat territory; it seems hard to figure out a sane and reasonable motive for unleashing this on the world, without also requiring some much bigger, more complex conspiracy (which greatly weakens the prior probability of the hypothesis).
If it is lab-created, it probably escaped by a mistake, or someone not following the rules (e.g. the janitor who's supposed to burn the dead infected research bats sold them to a market instead to make an extra buck).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146446
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22147320
They react to all kinds of irrelevant bullshit strongly all the time. It's a gigantic unimaginative bureaucracy. It could very well be some peon 18 levels down doing something done 200 times prior, in response to some news article some other peon has classified as western propaganda.
Are they going to come out and admit that?
The epicenter in the United States in in New York.
This is what was happening in NY.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uNKatrJgw&feature=emb_logo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyNXZ8v8sY&feature=emb_logo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFCzoXhNM6c
Also, we should be careful about how much we eviscerate people on both sides politically during this time. If our leaders are too afraid of repercussions to make difficult decisions, they may make bad decisions instead.
I'm calling for moratorium on partisan finger-pointing. I think we're all in this together, and that's the only way we're getting out of it.
The other part, is that we shouldn't expect consensus in something like this. Why? Because data is evolving and changing. This is in contrast to something like Climate Change where we have a large amount of post hoc data/analysis. Here the analysis is being done in situ and that is much more difficult. It should be unsurprising that opinions change as information changes.
Bill Gates, for example, is held up as someone who saw this coming. However, if you read what he wrote at the end of February about what needs to be done to stop the Coronavirus, you'll he didn't raise any issues about the way it was being handled within the United States, and viewed the main problem being the difficulties that poor countries would have handling it. Even a few days ago there were almost no leaders calling for mass use of face coverings. And there still seem to be very few (if any) calling for an implementation of measures like those that are successfully combating the virus in South Korea.
This is approximately the time that the first patient tested positive in the U.S. The video that OP references goes into February and March, so I don't think these are equivalent.
At least that's been my observation, but I don't watch TV news; I just read about what's on it. I've been getting my news from WaPo and WSJ, both of which took the virus seriously from the beginning.
George W Bush laid out a major pandemic strategy, for instance: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/homeland/pandemi...
Too bad it fell apart in subsequent administrations.
I wonder what it was that convinced him when many of the people he deals with day-to-day were of the complete opposite view?
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlsons-monologue-prom...
Here a similar one from Begamo, Italy https://youtu.be/lcK2mzuO6MU
And now, where is the truth? I would like not to be infected. I try to avoid being infected by flu as well. But maybe we really are overreacting. We don't have immune system trained for this - that is problematic. Elderly people and people with health conditions should be isolated. But that's probably it. Once the population has enough people with trained immune system, it will be "like a flu" or won't it? Who to trust?
It's also true that both sides presume the worst intentions when they say the other side was wrong.
I can't get over the fact, however, that only one side was (and still is) in a position to do something about it. Moreover that one side had access to better intelligence about the severity of the situation, and that one side sowed the seeds of their awful response over the past three years with the various cuts they made.
Is there any danger for them? PG seems to have very idealistic view of politics.
As far as I know, any amount of fact checking in politics don't change political views.
Will Fox News lose any viewers over this? Politicians may lose jobs because bad economy, but will they lose votes because they were wrong and ignorant?
H. L. Mencken wrote:
> No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
I think there is great Mencken experiment going on. Always underestimate public and see how far you can go.
Edit: and, of course, that this effect will dispropotionately affect political tribes whose propagandists under-, rather than over-, estimated the dangers of covid-19.
Too few members in the crowd, and the probability for one to understand and explain to others remains too low.
Too many of them and the Big Chiefs control the media, and also live so high in the Sky nobody seems credible when it comes to criticize, moreover all non-official messages are diluted into other ones to the point of many being not even emitted because the ones understanding the situation know that they will not be heard.
That is what I was thinking.
Paul is writing as if credibility stems from reality. When in reality, the reverse its true. Fox news is credible, its viewers believe that, and whatever those credible people say, is reality. As long as people keep tuned in only to Fox News, that reality wont shatter. Their credibility exists because of their reach, its strength in numbers, its entertainment factor. Calling Fox News news and not entertainment is quite a leap. Most of what they have to say exists to keep people hooked, not to educate them into being more capable of performing civic duties. Fox News wants people to vote in a way that benefits Fox News, not the voter, and the same principal applies to all their coverage of everything. Coronavirus skeptic was a contrarian position to take, it divided their people from other people. Now that they are divided, they can switch sides and still maintain the artificial divide, and keep their viewers isolated from "alternate" realities.
This was a really good article by Kara Swisher of ReCode, who at the end finally convinces her mom to heed medical warnings about being out and about, cant convince her to turn off Fox.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/opinion/coronavirus-fox-n...
They can flip a 180 overnight, and the viewers will see it as people with "updated information" and continue to cheer them on.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-stars-sean-hannity-an...
There is the sad irony too, that the demographic who watches Fox news is already the most likely to be at risk (age, faith over evidence, distrusting of established medicine and government) denial not withstanding. Add denial to the mix, and youve got a real bad stew.
President Trump is just continuing this idea through today. Unlike GWB and cronies, Trump and team don't even have to act to "create reality", they merely talk and reality instantly changes for their followers. It's a powerful tool and like him or hate him, his administration is using it skillfully.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-...
When you have to seek to find bad examples from other side, and it's the every day modus operandi the other side there is no comparison.
There's a difference.
Nice straw man, the above has nothing to do with my statement.
Yes, CNN and the like are just as bad as Fox news. The sooner you folks recognize that, the sooner we can have decent conversations about emotional issues. Both sides are bad. Neither is better. No, they aren't. Stop it. Blame them BOTH for getting us to this point so that we can leave them in the dark past, and we all over here can talk like adults while they sit over there and bicker, mutually accusing each other of racism and Nazism or whatever today's 5 minute hate happens to be.
WE DO NOT NEED THEM! Either of them! There is a whole universe of conversation that is not occurring because BOTH SIDES are refusing to engage in it, because if you did, you would realize -- tada -- you don't need them. And they can't have that. Viewership and income would drop.
Neither is incentivized with your best interest. And the sooner we collectively start to see it the better.
Not really. If you post something that certain people dislike for whatever reason, but which is unremarkable to others, the votes will never break even; you will not get enough upvotes from the latter group to make up for the former. (Even given the fact that not everyone can downvote.)
Whichever group's buttons you push then makes it seem like the site is overrun with that group. E.g. an atheistic comment might enrage theists, but to atheists it might just be "meh". Gee, what's with the downvotes? Boy, this site is just a haven for religious zealots!
I can't even begin to speculate about the grandparent comment. Maybe some users simply found it insubstantial? Shrug.
That said, you can just read the thread and come up with a rather decent guess as to which side of that paradigm I likely upset.
The truth is that most politicians are corrupt on some level, most politicians are unduly influenced by lobbyists, few politicians truly care about their constituents, mass media doesn’t care about the truth, even though some of their employees might, they just care about revenue, for any political perspective you can think of, you’ll find a media outlet willing to pander to it.
I don’t think any of that is particularly controversial (or even insightful for that matter). I’d wager that most people would agree with that sentiment on some level. But they’ll tend to lose sight of reason when you suggest that “yes, that includes the politicians you like, and the media outlets that share your opinions”.
Any public figure of any significance is going to attract a tribe of impassioned haters. They tend to have no greater connection with the truth than that same persons tribe of fervent fans will.
In general, I’m quite fond of being incredibly sceptical of the government and all of its agents. They should be scrutinized thoroughly. But this isn’t honest or productive scrutiny. The truth is all of those politicians lied, and all of them exaggerated details, and misrepresented facts (though trying to measure how much would be reasonably subjective). They also all did good work (again open to some subjective interpretation). But your commentary boils down to an incredibly black and white view, which ignores the sins of one group, and exaggerates the sins of another. It almost exclusively reflects your own biases over the actual conduct of any president.
"Fox News is TEH EVILZZ AND CNN/CBS/NBC/MY HOLY LOVE ARE TEH ANGELZZ" is really lazy. Refusing to recognize how the other news outlets aren't bastions of honorable reporting is really lazy. Refusing to recognize that none of them -- any of them, not one -- have the public's (e.g. YOUR) best interest in mind, is really lazy.
Somewhere deep down you know that but there's some emotional need you're trying to satisfy that prevents you from recognizing it. You NEED something like Fox to be evil so that your views feel justified.
So a few days ago CBS trumpeted this crying nurse from NYC complaining about lack of masks and people dying and blah blah blah. Turns out? Never happened.
The hilarious part? I despise Fox News. I just equally despise all the others. They're all complicit in fascism and the march toward corporatist dictatorship.
Now you are being downright dishonest. Nobody said either of these things but it's demonstrably true that Fox News often publishes unverified propaganda while CNN routinely has scientists and solid source surveys to support their points.
And you know full well what it is. You don't need any of them. They're all dishonest. We'd be better off having honest conversations with each other rather than tribally organizing behind ANY mainstream media (colloquially called news, but they aren't).
And yet the only thing you can focus on is attacking your perceived enemy, ignoring the enemy you choose not to see.
We are better than the world they've given us.
When he is back out of politics, watch for the other appointees to not just be replaced due to the change of president, but actively canned because they are all cronies appointed as a personality cult, and/or as favors to his worshipers.
And yes, I'm morbidly curious to imagine what the Trump presidential library might wind up containing. I snarkily predict that nothing will be approved except autobiographies.
I couldn't agree more.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-havin...
Not many people could survive this, then become president.
No, they weren't "chastising" Trump over the China travel ban because there was no China travel ban. There was a Wuhan restriction only applicable to foreigners. Thousands of Americans were going and coming with no restrictions whatsoever. Fly into Wuhan, lick the toilet seats, fly back home. Do it the next day.
There was zero screening. Zero containment. Zero listening to the pandemic experts.
No, they aren't the same. This revisionist "they were dismissing the virus" nonsense is utter horseshit of the worst kind. It is a lie of profound ignorance and gullibility, or an intentional lie, and both are just as obnoxious.
That's true, I guess, if you consider OANN to have reached the status of “mainstream” with the boost they've gotten with their attachment to the current US administration.
But, otherwise, show me some specific examples.
You seek your redemption in some guy[1] listing a tiny selection of articles, having nothing to do with the partial travel restriction, arguing about the social effects. He links either contrarian articles, or articles talking about the psychology/sociology.
That you think this proves the case is astonishing. I am going to say again that you are either so profoundly partisan that the truth doesn't matter, or you are logically broken.
It's the classic deflection, and it's absolutely amazing. Fox was literally at war with what they saw as the "mainstream media hoax" (in lockstep with Trump, of course, because they are his state media), claiming that they were fear-mongering about the virus. Oh but now, the mainstream media actually wasn't at all. They were understating it. The cognitive deficiency to seriously argue this...
[1] That guy whose post history is littered with claims that the response to SARS-CoV-2 is "fear-mongering", and who a month ago seriously said that the US response was and is the best, of anyone. Their single example being that Trump limited air travel from a single region...for non-Americans...long after the horse was out of the barn.
Then again, your history has continual COVID denial, such as your claim that no hospitals are over capacity. You guys are really trying to argue everything simultaneously and it must be exhausting.
No one celebrates the extraordinary and unending failures of this administration. We protest it. We argue against it. We see a horrendous rise of idiocracy as people celebrate their own incredible ignorance and hate.
That it's bad for you doesn't make it "good" for us.
If a miracle cure was discovered today and not a single extra person died, that will never undo the raw criminality, and total, complete incompetence of the Trump administration.
That Jared Kushner has a role greater than mail room is a fucking travesty. Hey, but what about her emails, right?
"Did the news about the death counts flattening and missing projections by a lot today bum you out?"
Social distancing works. This surprises positively no one. Your orange buffoon, however, wants to stop social distancing. Maybe there's some miracle snake oil he can pitch and everything will be great again.
Go back to Twitter. Go back to your insular echo chamber. Your trolling, copy-paste noise just makes you look like a clown here.
Of course, "experts (in particular our experts) don't know what they're doing" is different from "... and therefore you should listen to any yahoo who says it's 5G."
But at the time, especially given China's clampdown on information outflow, it didn't appear to be significantly different from SARS, which didn't effect the West much, or MERS, which had almost no impact outside of the Middle East.
But as another commenter noted, the timing matters a lot.
Everyone except Fox News thought back in January that COVID19 was going to be big, but based on prior coronaviruses not something that would significantly impact the West. They've all done 180s and are pulling out the stops to fix their earlier error.
Fox News is still saying that today (i.e., April 6). One of their talking heads just said that COVID19 is overblown just a few minutes ago.
If we talk about a lot of media, they simply had the priority of making Chinese look bad in any possible way, including blaming them for "misinterpreting numbers" and ridiculing them for implementing lockdowns or wearing masks.
Which just shows how stupid some global agendas are. Media don't do that in vaccuum, but they are the reflection of the power of the interest groups that want to push the agenda.
Amazing how apparently all of the media around the world was united in a conspiracy to make China look bad, especially when much of the reporting was commenting on how much worse the situation must actually be compared to what was being reported by China, given the severity of China's response.
It's like 'memes': very little journalists today do their own research. I can see that whatever Trump says today then follows the "echo" of "media around world" (those that have U.S. sources) that last weeks.
It's a total disaster of false information, and a lot could be traced directly to Trump or the U.S. in general (there are other "sources" that are establishment but produce falsehoods, it's not that he's alone).
But enough people remain confused believing it is true, including people very close to me.
Come on. By late December, China's response was so drastic (including when measured against all previous coronavirus outbreaks) that the question of "suppressing" information about it was completely moot.
The CDC completely dropped the ball on this. Yes, in part because Trump slashed their pandemic response budget, but they did a piss-poor job even for the resources at their disposal.
Fox News and Trump being a source of constant disinformation and incompetence is, to me, kind of a constant of the universe. The same ought not to be true of the rest of our institutions, and yet it seems that it is.
On Dec 31, China informed WHO about a mysterious cluster of respiratory ailments clustered around a seafood market in Wuhan. China didn't even close the seafood restaurant until 2020. The first confirmed death wasn't reported until January 11. China didn't begin a lockdown of Wuhan until January 23.
Yes, the CDC dropped the ball, but evidence coming out in March indicates that China knew about COVID19 in early December and didn't bother to tell the rest of the world about it for another month, and even then downplayed the seriousness of the virus until the end of January.
To this day China is still blocking the release of information about the severity of COVID19. WaPo reported last week that there may have been more than 40,000 COVID19 fatalities in Wuhan alone (based on manually counting the number of urns distributed by morticians) which is at more than 13x the official number of deaths reported for the entire country.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pandemic-timelin...
"The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."
Making a false prediction on the premise that you can bluster your way out of it doesn't indicate that they think the false prediction doesn't have consequences - it indicates that they think the false prediction doesn't have consequences for them. That they can get away with it. It's "I can say what I want, because nothing bad will happen to me personally for lying."
I wouldn't call that idealism.
It explains that we naturally trust people who sound smart, well-informed, and CONFIDENT. We don't want to hear uncertainty, probabilities, or the other signs of someone who thinks in a careful quantitative way. We want to accept a cognitively simple answer, then move on. This is what we find comfortable.
However this is a good way to select people who are terrible at making actual predictions. They appear to predict, but often with sufficient weasel words that it is hard afterwards to say whether it was violated. (The book gives real examples.) But if you put them in a setting where they can be tested, they perform worse than uninformed monkeys. And the part of the future that they are worst at predicting is exactly what they were supposed to be experts at!
The book Superforecasting walks through how this was demonstrated, and the discovery that there are people you will never see on CNN or Fox news who are really good at forecasting. A fact that is extremely interesting to various TLA agencies (one of whom paid for the research in question).
The long and short of it? Bayes' Theorem actually works in the real world. The revolution that started with quants on wall street, analytics in baseball and Nate Silver in politics is still ongoing.
When you are done with the book and have processed it, hopefully you will understand why the author said in response to an audience question after a talk, Here’s my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.
Hopefully the contempt that some of us have for how talking heads in January and February of 2020 dismissed Coronavirus is a step on the path to that future.
A good Bayesian should be able to make confident decisions based on information available at the moment, while acknowledging that lack of information is leading to suboptimal decisions.
For example, a leader can be absolutely confident that shelter-in-place is the best decision based on the available information, while acknowledging that there is missing information that would drastically change this assessment.
https://www.gwern.net/Research-criticism#beliefs-are-for-act...
A recent example: people have been talking about clinical trials for coronavirus vaccine candidates. In those you want to minimize the bad things that happen to the people in the study, and also get a working vaccine rolled out to the world as quickly as possible. Therefore you might want to accept unusually low levels of certainty that the vaccine is safe, or ramp up trial size faster than usual, because the world is on fire and every day of delay is terrible. For other vaccines with smaller expected benefits, slow-and-cautious might be the way to go. In both cases it's a matter of balancing expected risks with rewards as your probability estimates change over time.
The purposes of sampling are to find out how deadly the disease is, and to find out if herd immunity exists. But we have good evidence that it is likely to be deadly enough to justify stay-at-home orders while community spread exists. And have strong circumstantial evidence that only a small fraction of the population has had it.
Therefore breaking quarantine for a random subset of the population is unlikely to change actionable decisions. But it will be likely to spread the disease. I would love to know the answer to the question raised. But it isn't worth human lives to answer it sooner than it will otherwise be answered.
I don't think we agree on that and it's relative. Not all people agree on stay-at-home/confinement orders. I personally see them as an authoritarian measure and I think everyone should judge for himself whether he wants to expose himself to COVID-19 risks or not.
As to the point of determining if COVID-19 is deadly enough or not, I don't see how we can do that without sampling the society. It's not clear, right now, if the only cases are the ones that are diagnosed or 50% of society.
It is in the nature of public health that "everyone should judge for himself" guarantees epidemics. Because like it or not, the choices that you make for yourself affect me. You may decide that you'll survive so you don't alter your behavior. But that spreads the disease and makes it more likely that my immunocompromised sister dies.
The result is that public health provides the most clear-cut cases where we have to choose between individual rights and the public good. But we are loathe to make that choice. Therefore it presents us with a series of easily debated moral quandaries.
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2267241/ for some of the relevant history.
As to the point of determining if COVID-19 is deadly enough or not, I don't see how we can do that without sampling the society. It's not clear, right now, if the only cases are the ones that are diagnosed or 50% of society.
Both extreme statements are exceedingly unlikely.
I had based my comment on published articles estimating an infection fatality rate of 0.4%-1.4% with a best estimate around 0.66%. But the full story is complicated. Work your way through https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-... to understand the current data, estimates, limitations of various research and so on. It is..messy.
No.
A good Bayesian should be able to come to decisions like, "I am 70% confident that Osama bin Laden is in that compound." While the Bayesian next says, "I am only 50% confident that Osama bin Laden is in that compound." With both knowing that there is a difference of opinion, but no disagreement on basic facts or reasoning method.
It is very rare for a good Bayesian to be absolutely confident of any prediction. And if you are often so confident, you're probably not thinking very well. I mean that quite literally - the process of analyzing probabilities well requires being able to make the case both for what you think will happen, and what you think won't. Because only then can you start putting probabilities on the key assumptions.
For example, a leader can be absolutely confident that shelter-in-place is the best decision based on the available information, while acknowledging that there is missing information that would drastically change this assessment.
Really?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750790 is a discussion that I was in recently about whether on a cost benefit analysis it is better to crash the economy by shutting things down, or to keep things open and let lots of people die.
The decision wasn't nearly as clear in the end as I would have expected it to be. (That all options are horrible was clear. But we knew that.)
That's not a decision though. That's an assessment, what I would put in the same category as predictions. A decision would be whether or not to bomb the compound.
Your post seems to miss my point, that predictions and decisions are very different and one can be uncertain about predictions while being certain about decisions. For example, I completely agree with this:
> It is very rare for a good Bayesian to be absolutely confident of any prediction.
Here's a simple example to think through the difference. You have a sophisticated weather model that predicts 40% chance of rain today. You hate getting wet, so you take your umbrella. In fact, you would take your umbrella even if the chance were only 10%.
So you are really uncertain about whether it's going to rain (your forecast), but absolutely certain that taking your umbrella is the optimal decision given the information at hand.
I see no particular reason why Bayesians should be better at being decisive. They should make better judgments given the available information. But they are not necessarily any better at making decisions and moving on.
So a good Bayesian can inform a good decision maker, but the Bayesian is not necessarily a good decision maker.
Similarly in the book, one of the superforecasters made the point that listening to well-informed experts who might be bad at making decisions was very useful. Because the expert really did have a good grasp of the current situation and could explain it clearly, which was a great starting place for the Bayesian who lacked background. Preparing background and making predictions are both required, but the combination of skills need not start in the same brain.
If you had a prediction of how things would get hit w/ virus, there was so much money to be made. I watched but my timing was a bit off and I did not commit the majority of my wealth. That's a pity and speaks to my true estimate of the danger whereas a friend of mine pulled out completely of all long-term holdings in mid Feb so we know he believed.
Almost any interview with Robert Shiller is a striking counter example to these smart confident sounding people who aren’t actually good at making predictions. When speaking Shiller does not sound very confident at all and you need to know his background and history and remind yourself to pay attention to what he’s saying.
This is also why credibility in media is at all time lows. Most people are politically moderate and they're waking up to the inescapable spin. This behavior is also dangerous because it provides some justification for the infamous "enemy of the people" quote. But I think partisan reporting has become so commonplace in the industry that most journalists don't realise what they're doing - either that or they believe the end justifies the means. But when the means back away at the credibility that reporting must be based on, you are destroying your institution and possibly taking society with you.
The only alternative I've found (I'm open to helpful suggestions) is to ignore that noise and read actual briefings and original sources.
But, that defeats the point of news being an honest and straight forward source of a summary. And it takes a lot of time. And doesn't always end in rewarding information (lies/bias in original sources exist too - eg: watching hours upon hours of live impeachment hearings was full of lies/half-truths/obfuscation coming from all sides).
Just specifically for COVID-19, this led me to:
- Pay closer attention to the pandemic in China and request testing for my daughter when she had flu symptoms in late January while traveling (the CDC had no tests, of course)
- Begin using masks and gloves while going to groceries and other stores long before it was in common use and the value of masks had been acknowledged
- Mentally and materially prepare my family for an extended quarantine period long ahead of when the necessity was broadly acknowledged
The way I use twitter, it serves the same purpose as hacker news, but with a much broader scope.
My feeling has been there are nuggets of really good and really up-to-date information there, and there are some threads that are extremely informative, but signal-to-noise ratio is in general extremely close to zero and the hostility of the surrounding environment is unbelievably terrible.
In the past I've had a hard time finding people to follow with a high enough signal to noise ratio (or who don't flood my feed with a new tweet about their cat every 5 mins). Do you have any tips for picking sources? Or choosing when to fill them? And how do you stay on top of the flood of information?
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1239639611694911489
All the people on it are serious experts. I've also left out some people who are worth listening to, but have a political bias or express a lot of emotion (it's hard not to be angry).
I spend way too much time getting up to speed, but (a) there's a lot of stuff I find interesting (I studied molecular and cell bio a bit during my Masters), and (b) would rather err on the side of over-learning than being misinformed.
If you want secondary sources rather than primary, try STAT news. They've been excellent.
The quality of discussion in other fora (including HN) has been quite disappointing.
Indeed, what’s being provided is infotainment / soft news. [0]
I kinda miss the ability to make my own comment thread. My social media was much more efficient back then.
It adds a nice grain of salt for when I read "my team's" news.
1) the american TV news industry has slowly blurred, then obliterated, the line between straight news and editorial opinion. they're now often intermixed, with slanted analysis weaved throughout reporting. things like those news panel shows are particularly bad about this.
many people don't like to admit it because it challenges their centrist pretensions, but in the modern era, fox news started it and the remaining TV news outlets followed suit over the years.
2) but more fundamentally, there is probably no such thing as truly unbiased straight news reporting. the choosing of which facts to present is itself still an editorial process subject to human prejudice.
I don’t think news that tries to push a narrative is useless. You just have to understand the viewpoint that they’re providing. By reading several different conflicting sources, and trying to understand each viewpoint and why they disagree, you can become informed on the issue.
The problem is, many people would rather take the easy route and treat every issue as if it were black and white. This opinion is right, that opinion is wrong. This news outlet is right, this news outlet is wrong.
Or stopped fact-checking--you know, doing your homework. Real journalists used to interview one person at a time, ask them direct questions, call them on their bullshit, and fact check them in real-time. Nowadays what passes as journalism is to put two people from different "sides" on at the same time and watch them fling crap at each other. Or put two people from the same "side" on to have them take turns ripping someone else to shreds.
Frankly, it's disgusting. I have literally felt myself close to vomiting while watching TV these days. The fact the people on TV new wears suits and business attire is the worst irony; all they do is fling mudwrestling now. Just another one of the present debasement of all things past good and wholesome.
Sir Richard Wharton: “In stage one, we say nothing is going to happen.”
Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Stage two, we say something may be about to happen,
but we should do nothing about it.”
Sir Richard Wharton: “In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it,
but there’s nothing we can do.”
Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done,
but it’s too late now.”
> Remember that Yes Minister is a manual for politicians, not a comedy.
It seems like the deep state was (more) right on this one and the politicians are/were the ones trying to downplay the danger and generally mislead.
It's funny how that has become the new explanation/softer excuse. I remember when "Deep State" was used to describe groups like the Koch Brothers and similar power brokers well before it was adopted by the right-leaning popular media to describe the puppet masters of the 'establishment' on the other side. Now it's spun as an attack on simple 'civil servants'...
I guess it means whatever people want it to mean, depending on the context of your ideology or position on the matter.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/cor...
You would think this would be the reality check that was needed, but it's not the case for everyone. I guess that is human pyschology writ large, but I'm finding that I just have to watch videos and not even look in the comments as it's just a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and people being just plain wrong in a lot of places.
- 5G occurred at the same time as corona - This is therefore “too much of a coincidence”
- 5G kills off things that naturally kill coronavirus
- 5G makes our immune systems weaker
All of which are unfounded of course. But it’s important not to just reject people’s ideas out-of-hand, or to suppress them.
1. Africa is a continent, not a country. 2. Some countries in Africa DO have 5G deployments, including my home country of South Africa. In the news recently is a possible link between BCG vaccinations and reduced fatality rates from Covid-19. South Africa has fairly high BCG vaccination rates due to the prevalence of TB 3. Iran has a severe problem with Covid-19, but no 5G deployments.
But as you say, this comes from the same type of crowd that believes in all the other bullshit (flat earth, vaccinations give you autism, etc.) so you can hardly expect an informed response to this.
The bit I gleaned was the claim that since 60GHz is absorbed by oxygen (haven't checked this, but I'd assume similar to 2.4GHz being absorbed by water), it therefore interferes with your lungs' ability to intake oxygen. (my low-effort analysis: the radio waves won't penetrate your skin by more than a few millimeters, and therefore could in no way act in your lungs)
The whole narrative was much jumping around making connections that would seem plausible if you don't know or try to investigate technical details. For example - a defense contractor worked on 60GHz gear as well as communications for cruise ships -> smoking gun!
I'm sure there was plenty of innuendo that rolled right off my back, but makes an emotional impression. My aunt had gotten the impression that 5G is 50-60 times the power of a microwave oven. I couldn't bring myself to watch the video again to find what could possibly be interpreted this way, but I'm guessing it was talking about the frequency while implying magnitude.
REALLY JUST A COINCIDENCE!? /s
The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to it makes it a very peculiar epidemic. And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too worried at all.
As for the number of death, let's not forget the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, and that is with people getting vaccinated. It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea..
Another thing that i haven't read a lot, is that the WHO have been alarming people in the past with previous epidemic (srars, mers, ebola, etc), and nothing "special" happened (i suppose partly because people correctly dealt with it, but also because of the nature of the virus). It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.
FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with substantial year to year variation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/
Even if you steadfastly refuse to accept the obvious exponential dynamics of contagion in a naive population, perhaps the fact that the figures you are reasoning from are off by a constant factor of 3 to >10 might cause you to reconsider your level of confidence?
This. It seems most people are incapable of making decisions purely based on what their mind or the math says. I kind of get it, it didn't "feel real" in the beginning, it was just the mind that went "omg we need to act NOW", not the stomach. I suspect this is why the Silicon Valley Crowd was so far ahead of the curve - they deal with exponential growth more often, and are used to listen to just their brains, for better or worse.
Plus, a lot of the interventions don't really make much sense if you're the only one doing them.
For example, imagine I'm not worried about my own safety, but I am for the safety of others. Staying home and self-isolating will help with this if almost everyone else does it - but if I start a month early, doing it on my own? Negligible benefit.
And of course, much easier to get to work from home at an otherwise-non-WFH company once your boss and their boss are thinking the same way as you, and they've heard Google and Apple are doing the same...
Actually that's why most public communication for staying at home doesn't say "protect yourself", but rather emphasis on protecting "others" (aka : people vulnerable). The virus is extremely dangerous, but only for a (not that small) minority of people. That's a weird one.
I think one of the biggest public health communication disasters of covid19 is the reliance on mortality as the communication endpoint.
It's acceptable for other threats-- like automotive accidents-- to speak in terms of mortality because there isn't a huge population which is much less exposed to dying but still exposed to serious illness. Automotive accidents also seriously injure many more people than they kill, but not in a way that lends itself to a false impression of immunity.
"Death" makes a nice clear warning for the risks of driving, and other very bad but not death outcomes are just some factor of the death outcomes... it isn't like the audience is comparing death rates to population numbers then deciding that the death from driving isn't worth worrying about just because we didn't also include maimed-for-life.
For covid19 we've ended up making many 20 and 30 year olds believe that it doesn't threaten them. It does. They may not be dying in especially large numbers-- especially where either hospitals are not overloaded or where they're engaging in the ethically dubious practice of triaging younger people ahead of others based purely on their age rather than, e.g. response to treatment--, but they are still becoming seriously and painfully ill and ending up with severe immune system damage -- which takes a long time will recover and will result in latent mortality --, and for many likely lifelong injury in the form of extensive lung scaring.
Infections like influenza are much less contagious-- with an R0 of 1.3 vs 2 to 3 (an enormous difference)--, less deadly, face a population which is at least somewhat resistant (in part due to heroic vaccination efforts) and which knows how to rapidly create new and effective vaccines against it. It's not really that comparable.
I myself haven't yet seen any data that would make this virus any worse than the flu (which means it's still dangerous, just maybe not "everybody-hide-under-the-rock" dangerous). Even data from Italy doesn't show mortality any higher than previous years.
Do you have links to data that supports what you wrote?
I agree it is a communication disaster though. If I see another chart with red line, logarithmic scale, not starting from zero or with some approximated (red) curve that doesn't specify the formula... :-/
What do you think the mechanism is here? Why are people being hospitalised with covid-19, if it's not covid-19 causing the hospitalisation?
People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on ventilators, until covid-19 happens and now the ITUs are full of people with covid-19 having air pumped into their lungs to push the fluid out.
What's causing that if not covid-19?
People are counted in the stats produced by hospitals if they have the virus, not if they've been hospitalised because of the virus. Literally if someone breaks their arm and they're tested positive, that goes into the stats for "COVID-19 cases". This is also true if someone dies of anything whilst having the virus; they're recorded as a "COVID-19 death".
The statistics here don't tell us what they sound like they're telling us. We'd see exactly the same pattern if the rules were suddenly changed to require every hospital admission to be tested for the common cold in a regular year - the number of "cases" and "deaths" would increase dramatically every day.
People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on ventilators
That statement is far too vague. People of all ages spend time on ventilators every years, especially during a flu outbreak. This is especially true of young children (under 5) whom COVID-19 doesn't affect at all! And COVID-19 is known to affect very few under 50s; the numbers here are so tiny the media can literally write entire stories about individual cases.
So what does "people" and "much time" mean in this sentence?
You can see some data on deaths from pneumonia by age group here:
https://ourworldindata.org/pneumonia#pneumonia-mortality-rat...
Of course deaths isn't the same thing as hospitalisation as the young are more likely to recover than the old. So this data isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it's at least quantifiable.
It's not safe to make a claim about this virus without comparing it to known values from prior years or outbreaks, when comparing the same thing. Every single number we're being presented with is presented without context and it leads to catastrophic mistakes of understanding. Number of positive test increases is shown without the number of negative test increases as well (i.e. an exponential increase in testing looks like an exponential increase in cases), deaths are counted without any investigation to decide what caused that death and so on.
It's very easy to get a totally misleading impression of what's going on. This is likely why in so many parts of the world hospitals are now reporting themselves as empty for weeks, despite the supposed "exponential growth" that should have overwhelmed them by now. In fact in Switzerland hospitals are needing to apply for emergency funding because the huge drop in patient numbers has caused their revenue to dry up.
There's clearly a virus spreading. It sends some people to hospital. Quite a few viruses do that.
Unlike those, this virus is different in one key way - governments have decreed that any death where the virus is present is counted as a "virus death", and have decreed mass testing to find infections. Consider a virus that is not really dangerous but highly infectious, like any common cold or flu. Then many people will turn up at hospital with it, but in reality their problem is something else. With our current data that would look like hospitals being flooded in a way never seen before, but it'd be a data artifact, not something real.
As for countries having to build makeshift hospitals, two things:
1. Local overloads happen during bad flu seasons too. You can find many reports in the past about wards being converted, tents being constructed to hold patients on the streets from earlier flu pandemics. Arguably making quick hospitals to handle that sort of bad flu season should be a more common practice.
2. No country anywhere is experiencing general overload. Even in Italy, a few days ago a politician was publicly asking why they're sending patients to Germany when in nearby Veneto there are hospitals that are 2/3rds empty.
Projections of mass death requiring everyone to shelter-in-place are based on the belief that everywhere will "go Bergamo" simultaneously at once. That isn't happening, it's not even close to happening.
Go investigate and you can find stories of deserted hospitals all over the world right now. They've been cleared out in anticipation of an imminent surge that isn't appearing. That's why Germany and Switzerland can take in patients from neighbouring countries - not only are there no makeshift hospitals but hospitals need financial bailouts because they've having to pay so many staff who are basically idled, like many other businesses.
Clearly there's a huge mismatch between the global view and a small number of local hotspots, and our understanding of what's happening is heavily coloured by the press.
If we succeed at slowing the growth, even stopping it, then thank god those hospitals will remain empty.
e.g. here's German data:
https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/infizierte-pro-tes...
and US data:
https://twitter.com/FScholkmann/status/1246122535793680386
It looks like it doubles every few days because of the rapid increase in testing.
Moreover these hospitals are now entering their second week of being idled. They should be very busy by now if the sick were really growing exponentially - they're still mostly empty.
Even in New York you see this:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8173563/Elmhurst-ta...
"New York City's Elmhurst hospital - the 'epicenter of the epicenter' - is now receiving fewer patients but they are arriving sicker, doctor warns, as he says some come in with no symptoms other than diarrhea then test positive"
"He said testing was surprising and that some people show up with a fever and cough but test negative. Others who are there for different ailments - like car accident victims - end up testing positive."
New York is supposed to be the epicentre of the outbreak yet the most overloaded hospital is now seeing fewer patients arrive than before. That's not consistent with being at the start of a very long exponential growth phase (it obviously can't grow exponentially forever so this discussion is only about how long it lasts in that phase and where the peak is).
Edit: got throttled, will reply to Joe here
Many sources show only the number of positive cases and deaths. Here's one that shows total tests performed in the USA:
https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily
On the 5th April 2020 there were 332,308 positive cases in the USA. So the halving point was between 29th and 30th March (139,061 and 160,530 cases respectively). It took about 5 days to double.
On the 5th April 2020 there were 1.42 million negative cases. On 29th March 2020 there were 692,290 negatives or 48% of the figure today. It took exactly the same amount of time to double.
So we can see that number of tests doubled in that time. Total tests went from 831,351 (47%) to 1,762,032.
The proportion of positive to negative cases is 18% today. On the 29th March it was 16%. A 2% rise, nothing even close to doubling. The graph in the tweet I linked to shows this visually - a fairly smooth and slow increase over time. We think it's spreading exponentially because of misuse of data, but all that's actually growing exponentially is testing. And yes - that's probably why there are now global shortages of reagents and other ingredients for tests. You can't keep globally doubling demand for tests without eventually hitting production limits!
Look at the worldwide data, then at the data for pretty much every country: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
Its geometric growth pretty much any place you look. Now, unless testing were proceeding completely uniformly across the board, its hard to imagine that explains any of this.
This is an example of how you are making straw man arguments. No-one is arguing that the growth rate will continue to be exponential in the face of effective mitigation.
We're not testing the general population. Its testing of folks coming to a hospital? Folks who aren't having hospitalizing symptoms are not tested at all, and sent home to quarantine.
So if tests doubled that means that folks are feeling bad at an increased rate. Showing up at a hospital with alarming symptoms.
You can finagle the statistics both ways - by ignoring what the 'test sample' is and assuming its uniform for instance.
You're right that it's not a uniform sample, but the consistency across the world is very suggestive. Not everywhere has test shortages.
It links to a document from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre.
The evidence from actual covid treatment doesn't support the "they die with, not of, covid" argument.
Doesn't that require a study after the fact? So your proposal is to just wait and see?
BTW, how do you explain the unprecedented hospitalization and ICU rates in Northern Italy?
As an example, this report from European Society of Anaesthesiology[1] mentions:
> The number of intensive care beds in Italy continues to change. Initially, there were 500 public intensive care (ICU) beds in Lombardy, and 140 private ICU beds. However, now there are more than 900.
[1]: https://www.esahq.org/esa-news/analysis-of-covid-19-data-on-...
A lot of people aren't tested unless they are severely sick, they're just told to stay at home.
When they arrive in the hospital they're already in a pretty bad condition, and only then tested. Which means that no therapeutic actions are made until patients are admitted, with the exception of self-administration of paracetamol.
> The number of intensive care beds in Italy continues to change. Initially, there were 500 public intensive care (ICU) beds in Lombardy, and 140 private ICU beds. However, now there are more than 900.
But a lot of ICU beds were slashed in the past 10 years due to budget cuts, and we were at 80% capacity when the virus hit. If the testing keeps on like this, and we can't even palliatively treat patients until they start suffering respiratory problems, these problems will continue.
That's just like Covid though - they are counting everyone who dies with the virus even though most have other conditions.
This is the latest data published by the Italian Ministry of Health. Looking at the chart on the second page, try to ignore the lines (we all know there is an infinite amount of ways one can approximate a curve to the dots) and just observe the dots. Does this seem like a bad year to you? Compared to winter 2016/17?
http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/caldo/SISMG_sintesi_ULTIMO....
Also note that all the charts are misleading since they don't start with 0 (the effect is exaggerated).
https://www.ecodibergamo.it/stories/bergamo-citta/coronaviru...
Doesn't that seem like a bad year to you?
Overall mortality for Europe is lower than during most flu seasons:
Week 13 is march 22-28 if I counted right. Deaths lag cases. French Coronavirus deaths went from 674 on the 22nd, to 2314 on the 28th, to 8078 yesterday april 5th.
I would say your comment is premature.
The thing you are missing though is that crisis started mid March. It feels like forever (because of shelter at home), but it is a very short time and every few days the number of cases doubles. Most of that doesn't register on graphs that spans multiple years (look at the dates).
Every cold and flu grow exponentially.
Not sure what the fixation of HN readers is on the work exponential. Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically.
I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators, and the futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown.
If people are doing well, the economy will likely catch up-- weak businesses will fail, new ones will be created. It may hurt, may hurt for a while-- but from a purely economic perspective this might turn out to be a useful reboot. There are going to be a lot of phenomenal opportunities in the coming year.
But the economy cannot do well if the people are not.
For a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that we didn't need to keep delivering food and power and whatnot. It would be possible to simply pause the entire economy-- just like contracts that don't consider weekends business days-- in this fictional world we could freeze all accounts and all debts and whatnot for a year and then do "2020" over again. We can't do this because we need to keep a lot of people working to keep food and medical care flowing-- but I think the crazy idea is a useful illumination that the economy is a shared delusion. Whats going on now is only as devastating as we allow it to be, but the deaths of millions would be devastating (economically and otherwise) regardless of what we otherwise want.
For many layperson, this is their first experience when it really matters. My mom isn't sitting around thinking about exponential spread when she gets a cold.
> I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators
I agree. Something like 80% of the people who end up on a ventilator die. Of course those other 20% are happy one was available, but by the time ventilators are being discussed it's really too late. Prevention is key.
> futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown
Depends. The economy was going to be hit hard regardless. Even if nothing was ever forced closed, the number of people sick and the number of overwhelmed hospitals would have killed the economy. For example, even before there were any official lockdowns in the US, companies I work with were already stopping all travel (late February timeframe).
The issue of exponential growth is of relevance in response to those saying that the number of deaths (insert the inplicit 'so far' here) is much less than from infuenza (annually.) It is not a 'fixation' to expose the irrelevance of that line of thinking.
More generally, the issue is a combination of the facts that this virus is significantly more dangerous, for all age groups, than at least post- Spanish Flu infuenza; it is very readily transmitted; and there is no (or much less) herd immunity. When you combine these fact with the math of exponential growth, and have establshed the doubling rate, you can do some scientific prediction that goes beyond "so far it has not been as bad as the flu", which is true just so long as it is, and no longer. To do that, however, you have to hold more than one idea at a time in your head.
It seems there are a ton of people right now who are enjoying thinking of themselves as intellectually and even morally superior to people who are just pointing out facts about the statistics gathered so far (which point to flu-like levels of danger and properties). I think the HN community is especially prone to this because it's full of computer programmers who are used to thinking in powers of two; some seem tempted to ascribe near-magical wisdom to this familiarity. But nature isn't a computer and just saying "exponential growth" over and over will eventually make fools of a lot of people, because it isn't there.
If this virus was really spreading exponentially, you'd expect to see the proportion of positive tests going up exponentially as well. But that isn't what is seen. In places that report the total number of tests administered (some places don't), the proportion of positive tests increases sub-exponentially or even hardly at all, coming to rest at about 15%, which is roughly the background level of coronavirus infections in the population during normal times.
It's especially disappointing to see PG fall into the trap of blaming politicians. Politicians have in the blink of an eye ceded power to a tiny cabal of (primarily) epidemiologists. So far they by and large aren't asking questions, instead simply doing whatever they're told even if it makes little sense.
But we really need people to start asking those scientists difficult questions. Citizens can do it but ultimately it only matters when politicians do it. Epidemiologists have a track record of absolute failure. They failed with Zika, they failed with foot and mouth disease, they're failing with CV. Go look at the models they produce and weep; some are invalidated the day they're published!
This guy is doing a good job of pointing out the many errors of modellers:
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson
There's also some background here:
What we are supposing is instead that the number of people who are presently infected will increase exponentially IF we don't adopt measures to decrease the spread. This is actually what you saw in the initial period and what you would be seeing now if we did nothing extraordinary to decrease the spread. If you look at the 1918 flu epidemic it ultimately infected 1/3 of the population. It is utterly unclear to me why you imagine your understanding is better than that of the experts. It would seem you yourself are guilty of the same sin you ascribe to programmers? From your animus towards the profession are you perhaps a manager of same? If so you seem to have contracted at least one of their faults.
> politicians have in the blink of an eye ceded power to a tiny cabal of (primarily) epidemiologists.
This literally isn't real.
The politicians are indeed at fault for the poor response. We cede to them substantial funds and powers to both prepare for and response to situations just like this. In fact the pentagon prepared a report on literally just this exact crisis in 2017 that called out among other things a lack of supplies. We opted to do nothing of import between now and today. In the crucial early days of this crisis instead of instituting effective measures we were busy first ignoring reports of it and then publicly claiming it is a hoax. If we aren't brave and clear sighted enough to even ascribe blame how are we to do better next time?
Even the highest positive rates I've seen (in the UK where the testing situation is dire) are only 30%. In other countries with more tests it's around 15% and stable over long periods.
If the number of infected were truly growing that fast, then you'd see the proportion of positive tests go up and up until negative tests were hardly happening, but that isn't close to what's seen on the ground.
What we are supposing is instead that the number of people who are presently infected will increase exponentially IF we don't adopt measures to decrease the spread
That's not what policymakers are supposing. If that were true there wouldn't be a global run on ventilators, which assumes enormous growth over case load today.
This literally isn't real.
That's not much of a response. Where are there politicians not saying their decisions are just guided by the science? The only places where politicians even pushed back slightly on epidemiologists are Brazil and - briefly - the USA.
At this time what epidemiologists say should be done, is done, no questions asked. In Denmark they are even restricting speech to stop people criticising the adopted measures, or so it's said. Look at what happened to my post above - even investigating or criticising those currently making the decisions is suddenly penalised.
A tiny number of academics with no track record of accuracy have obtained enormous power now. If they say lock down, countries lock down. If they say close the borders, the borders are closed. If they say open up, countries open up.
It's right and proper that such people be subject to the same scrutiny as normal politicians are.
As for politicians having done nothing, I don't think that's fair. Does the USA not have large stockpiles of ventilators and masks? Perhaps unusable in the end, but that level of detail is not for politicians, only civil servants. As for beds, well, even assuming the modellers are right no healthcare system in the world can have tens of thousands of ICU beds empty, sitting for a once in a century pandemic. Politicians who tried to have such levels of slack would soon be replaced by others who cared more about utilisation. I don't think there's much to say about them at this time; for better or worse they've taken a back seat.
When it is growing exponentially, they close a few schools here and there or stop visits in hospitals. That is enough to stop spread, get the R below 1 and making it not exponential.
It is simply not true that every cold and flu grows exponentially.
No, that's true only if it's brand new. Immunity for a certain strain lasts several years, which means there's a level of herd immunity that constraints infection from even reaching some of the non-immune folks, hence it's hard for it to be exponential.
This is not the case with the 'novel' coronavirus. There is no large scale immunity among the population.
Non-math/cs people typically haven't been directly exposed to exponential growth. Which, to be fair, can be an intuitively hard concept until someone sits down and thinks it through. The classic lily pad example is my usual go-to way of explaining exponential growth to someone.
I also think a large part of this problem is societies overall rejection of science, but that's a different discussion.
Every day, there's an article describing the new cases or deaths as a "surge". Look for that word: Surge. This word implies that the growth is somehow sudden or unexpected, whereas every day's actual day-to-day growth was predicted pretty accurately months ago. But, if you read the news, every day is described as some surprising "surge". I wish the media would stop calling every day's number a "surge" and start reporting "New coronavirus cases grew at (or above or below) the expected rate, doubling every N days."
It looks like flu, among other reasons, because popular comparison at the time compared all-ages mortality for flu (e.g. including old and sick) with healthy-young-person mortality of the covid. This very same comparison also ignores asymptomatic covid people and does not ignore asymptomatic people with flu. So it is twisted in all kind of ways.
And the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is already going way way worse than the flu.
I just wanted to explain my initial reaction, based on what happened in china and by reading various medical people give their opinion.
2018: Flu stomps the nation, overwhelming ERs and leaving 20 children dead: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/flu-surveillance-cdc/i...
2013: Flu Outbreak Overwhelms Hospitals: https://fox8.com/news/flu-outbreak-overwhelms-area-hospitals...
2017: Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
I still have yet to hear from the medical and nursing schools about increasing the number of students for the future.
The flu is still terrible, btw. And I hope this situation will increase the vaccination rates for the flu
Fully aware of the types that will come out of the woodwork for simply saying this, however: no, it's currently still not on track for even a mild flu year yet alone a bad one.
A bad year for influenza is about 650,000 deaths worldwide, pneumonia deaths are often an aftereffect of the flu and it kills 2.5 million on average each year.
SARS-COV-2 has killed 60,000 in 5 months despite having no vaccine or known medicinal treatment, mainly due to locally overstretched medical resources more than anything else.
It's not even close to being equivalent to a bad flu year yet, and that's ignoring the secondary deaths.
Maybe about tenth your figure, once you exclude non-flu pneumonia-- which is about where we are now for covid19. Flu death figures are Flu+Pneumonia because they usually don't check. Efforts to separate flu from flu + pneumonia all result in flu being a small fraction of the total ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ ).
In the US, the flu kills between 12,000 and 61,000 people each year depending on the season. COVID-19 will almost certainly reach the low end of that range in between two and three days. It went from 100 to more than 9,000 deaths in only three weeks.
It's not the flu.
P.S. everyone who can get a flu shot should, every year, regardless of age. Herd immunity assists in protecting the entire population.
January 2017 was much worse overall in Europe, it's not even comparable.
Still, if you focus on Italy, which is the most ahead in Europe, by March 28th (the time that report was updated), the number of deaths was already matching the 2017 peak (and in about 2/3 of the time). Since then the death count went up 70%.
edit: also note the caution about the uncertainty due to delayed registration.
The data is still lagging by a few days, but it seems that the numbers are starting to trend down.
Comparing a number that is static from year to year to one that is growing exponentially is mistake number 2.
CDC data shows 220k known-tested-positive case and 22k associated death. The 36 millions case is pulled out of a hat. As per these number, seasonal flu kills 10% of the known-positive cases.
The main difference was it took the superior part of the throat instead of the inferior. Talking with doctors they tell me I had all the symptoms.
The problem with it is that at first it is "benign"(I had high fever for "just" two days) if your body stops it before getting into the lungs. Once it gets there it could be nasty(as it produces cytokine storm syndrome there) very fast.
So it is very easy to get confident.
Even the flu could get very dangerous is you get it combined with something else like a bacteria at the same time.
incredibly simplified accessible articles on mainstream health websites, stating that a symptom is "throat pain"
or having to go through 20 pages of medical research which I understand basically nothing of.
I'm not so confident yet. What is still worrying me, is that it is not clear about the importance of the initial dose with respect to the severity of the outcome.
The disease having a quite slow progression, may mean that if you let it spread wildly, suddenly there is a large percentage of the population exposed, and this mean that when people gets contaminated they receive a high inoculum which may bring down even healthy individuals.
We are collectively guilty of many errors in judgement but on the whole we show on average not only are we able to mostly behave competently in complex situations individually we are able collectively to make some systemic changes to decrease mortality over the years.
This gives me hope that we take the correct lesson from this terrible experience and adjust our individual and collective behavior to avoid a re occurrence.
Medical professionals aren't professionals in everything. You may have been asking the equivalent a frontend developer for advice on writing COBOL for z/OS.
1. People are often contagious well before showing symptoms, making it much harder to track and isolate the people who have it.
2. It is about 10x more deadly than the flu. Could be more than that, as it's difficult to extrapolate from the current messy data. But I think it's safe to say it is much more deadly than the seasonal flu.
So far more people getting it, in a very short period of time, and a much higher percentage dying or requiring hospitalization, giving us the results we see. Overwhelmed health care systems, and death counts that will be much higher than seasonal flu without large scale mitigations in place.
Have you stopped saying that, or are you still saying it for some reason?
>It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea..
Do you realize, you can, and probably should, get vaccinated for the flu each year? And that these vaccines are only a 'best guess' for that particular year, so you should get on each year?
>It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.
I suppose the alternative is to not warn people about pandemics and just let them all run wild? I'm sorry if people choose to get "desensitized", but these organizations are not interested in the politics of whether or not the general public will be able to appropriately digest their messages, and hence don't ration warnings based on how much we can "handle".
This idea helps me provide a plausible explanation to some behavior I find counterintuitive.
Of course if one tries pointing this out the response is sometimes "oh, they're so powerful that they like to mock us", but more commonly just to accuse you of being a shill/deep-state-agent/whatever.
To be clear, I don't think the Illuminati are real, but I don't think your reasoning is sound either.
Looks like it's already centuries old even, from 1600s Sweden: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna#Quotation
Neither would I classify MK-Ulta that way: "Techniques included the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of torture."
Or the releasing of biological weapons (MK-Naomi): "at least three covert techniques for attacking and poisoning crops that had been examined under field conditions."
Or Operation Notherwoods: "to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets, blaming them on the Cuban government, and using it to justify a war against Cuba."
Or the Tuskegee experiment: "The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis; the African American men in the study were only told they were receiving free health care from the Federal government of the United States."
The list goes on and on and on and on.
Tell that to the Jews in Deutchland circa 1931...
Tell that to the Kulaks in the Ukraine in 1930 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor,
Tell that to the educated classes in China under Mao;https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/mao-murd...
You see conspiratorial thinking as some kind of bug in the thinking of insuffciently skeptical and analytical minds; a branch of stupidity. But it's not. It's a self-defense mechanism which, like other things considered antiquated and ineffcient like borders and control over immigration saves people from mass death.
These things don't exist because people are stupid and can't reason. They exist because people aren't stupid and do reason and then believe in their own mind's creations.
No matter how smart or sophisticated or computer-aided your reasoning is, no matter how big your data set becomes, you will only match and elucidate upon, but not beat, instincts which evolved under real Darwinian pressures which make you aware and wary of things which kill en masse.
That describes most plans people have.
So the planners deceive and dissemble. That is how the world has always worked.
What's more, it's instinctive knowledge that this is happening all the time. Suspicion of those in power is a human instinct which, like all instincts, optimizes our survival chances under the conditions for which it evolved. WRT to political conspiracies, those conditions still hold today.
The way to think about conspiracy theories is the same way you think about inventors and inventions.
Nature produces inventors (conspiracy minded individuals) many of whom produce only harebrained inventions ("conspiracy theories" so called) some more who produce hit and miss inventions and a few which produce inventions which are overwhelming important and matter to survival ("Hitler is going to kills us all, we must flee right now!" - spoken by a Jew in 1933 Munich).
What this mapping between domains, inventions and conspiracies, also implies is that just because someone was wrong about one conspiracy doesn't mean they are wrong about all conspiracies and their credibility should not be automatically bankrupted if they believe one or two false conspiracy theories.
I do read some conspiracy theory sites and like to hear plausible (non-alien/ lizard people) ones because I want my mind to at least entertain the idea. It's like panning for gold. Most of it is nothing. Once in a while, maybe a little taste of something and I retain it dimly awaiting future possible supporting evidence.
For example, the "desperate labor shortage" and "Americans don't like STEM" meme is a clear conspiracy amongst employers and attorneys and their clients to control engineering wages and have more of the profits go to business owners. I used to not know about that "conspiracy theory" then I heard it and wondered if it could be true then over time the evidence for it became incontravertible.
Just to give one example.
"Technically" in which sense? Which political science course taught you that? Or are you referring to some specific government?
But the older I get, and the more understanding I have over how large organizations are ran, the more I realize that conspiracies actually do happen, but in much more subtle ways.
What actually happens is that over a long periods of time, people collaborate with and promote those who think like them, with similar biases and incentives. Then when a major decision needs to be made, everyone at the table think the same way and agree on the same solution. This works even across organizations, as people's career are made through networks and relationships transcending organizational boundaries.
It is difficult to get a group of people to understand something when all their salaries depends upon them not understanding it.
Some people end up coming up with conspiracy theories based on their outsider observations.
It's tempting to give ignorance and fear a complicated explanation couched in the suspicion of greedy forces. It's not parsimonious. Plain ignorance and distrust is sufficient.
It's you who need a reality check.
This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge of exponential math and how medical services plan and allocate their resources. It is the government's job to explain how this is very different from the flu and they are utterly failing to do so in many cases.
In fact, I suspect that most people believe that the isolation policies are to protect individuals' health, ie. to prevent even young and healthy people from contracting the virus. And based on this false premise, they are right to be annoyed with the lockdowns.
This is important because in a week or two, when the grocery stores start to empty and the lights start to flicker, the rugged individualist-types in the United States are going to start asking "why are we doing this, exactly?" And there is born civil unrest.
It is the role of state and national governments to answer this question and they have not been effective in doing so. We are doing this because there are O(10^6) preventable deaths in our future. Not because of the danger to any one young healthy person.
That doesn't appear to be true. Almost everybody who goes on a ventilator dies. Corona virus will infect as many people as any other flu or cold.
So it's a valid question - why do we still have a lockdown?
Because those _are_ preventable, if they don't get infected.
That, in turn, buys time to medical research & practice to mitigate and cure the disease, so that, later, when someone vulnerable is infected, we'll know better how to take care of them.
That wouldn't be a problem if so, to be honest. The problem is that a patient usually survives, but it takes 3 weeks in the ICU to do so.
The reason for lockdown is to slow things down, so we don't get to the point where doctors have to decide who to help or who not. Also a lot of people can't connect in their mind that when hospitals are full, it also affects people who didn't even get the virus.
But one must think that this can't go on indefinitely or for very long time frames. It buys time to reduce the number of "active" cases, but only to ensure that once lockdown is lifted one is able to do tracing and isolation for new cases.
Realistically, we'll have to live with this virus (and the associated risk) for quite a while. The time frames for a "cure" if it is found vary from months for drugs (if those in current trials prove to be useful) to years for a vaccine (which like the drugs may not be effective).
You can keep people holed up for a few months at best. You won't be able to do so for one or more years, unless you want to face severe consequences (and I'm not talking about the economy, I'm talking of long-term psychological effects).
This is very condescending. There are still a lot of unknowns, and there are smart people (for instance [1]) out there who think the cure may be worth than the disease. We urgently need more data.
That said, the world's governments have made a decision to react in a certain way, and I maintain that my intuition tells me that most people don't understand the real reason for the lockdowns.
They think it is to prevent them personally from getting sick. That's not really true. The point is to prevent the medical infrastructure from becoming overwhelmed so that if and when people do become sick, they can be given their best shot at recovery.
I think this is clear for most people. I'm not American but I've watched Trump recent talk and they explained this clearly in a way everybody could understand.
What they didn't explain though is the post-lockdown strategy.
Most likely, in a few weeks, only a small fraction of the US population will be immune, and the problem won't be solved anymore than it was before the lockdown (except that the country is stalled). The virus will still be there, and there won't be any vaccine. I'd like them to think a few steps ahead and tell us what will be their plan.
If the answer is that we are waiting for nothing, perhaps we shouldn't.
If the answer is that we are waiting in lock-down 1-2 years for a vaccine and vaccinations, maybe we shouldn't.
think about it. email, twitter, etc. it all works like any network protocol meant for machines. it is cheap to spam. there is no middle ground between anonymity and spam. each node must handle their own peers. etc.
what if it was designed by actual sociologists or people that actually deal with human, instead of engineer. one would hope in such world tweeter would reduce exposition to all those accounts, because people around me that I trust do not engage with or outright block them. also I could have means to benefit of all that network without rendering all my information to the service. etc.
in summary, we are to blame for most of it.
In my country, The Netherlands, for the most part people didn't really seem to take things seriously, even when our PM told us to. All the same kinds of talking points (similar to flu, lots of people die from car accidents, etc.).
And so in the first weekend, with some restrictions already in place and Italy being in deep trouble, we all went to sit in parks and socialize like nothing was wrong.
It was only the week after that things changed. The government didn't suddenly enforce a full-on lockdown, but rather it was a combination of 1) our PM imploring everyone to change their behavior, 2) partial social distancing measures that were noticeable (events cancelled, restaurants closed for anything but take-out/pick-up), and perhaps 3) a sinking-in of how bad things were going elsewhere.
I've been 'immersing' myself in how the media reports things, the political debates and press conferences, and the way my social circles and people on the streets respond, and so far my impression is that there are two crucial factors that have resulted in 'proper' behaviour around here, despite the great weather: First, as it becomes clear that actual things change (limited no. of people in a supermarket, restaurants closed, specific public spaces closed when necessary), people realize it's not just abstract, and 2) while we are an individualist, recalcitrant bunch, we do ultimately have a lot of trust in the expertise of our government (whether justified or not).
I'm very interested to see how things develop in the US, and quite concerned in particular when it comes to 2.
EDIT: I'll add that personally I think at least initially our government was way too laissez-faire about this, and probably more so than many other countries in Europe other than the UK (and Sweden?). Our PM was/is perhaps too torn between taking things seriously and keeping the economy going. Which I suppose is exactly what he should be doing as a center-right politician.
The Twitterverse that generates fake news feeds on the controversy generated by stupid opinions. It ascribes value to the clicks and responses intentionally stupid content, shouted loudly, acquire.
When stupid people only talked to other stupid people IRL, the blast radius was limited. When I had a taxi driver spouting conspiracy theories, I didn't then take him with me to a party, and make all my friends listen to what he said.
He did not. If you read it in some news article, please do yourself a favor and do not use this news source anymore. If somebody of your friends told you that, please keep loving them as friends but accept anything they say with a grain of salt as they may be more gullible than you thought.
What Trump actually said is that his opponents suggestion that he doesn't do enough to counter the epidemic is the next hoax (previous one obviously being, in his opinion, the impeachment proceedings). This is somewhat unusual application of word "hoax", as "hoax" usually refers to false statement of fact, and whether Trump is doing a good job is not a fact but an opinion, which you can disagree with but it can't be "hoax". What he obviously meant is that his opponents unjustifiedly accuse him of doing poor job, and he expressed it in the usual Trumpian manner, sacrificing precision for expressiveness. What he didn't ever say is that the epidemic itself is a "hoax" and everybody that told you he did, unfortunately, lied to you, either knowingly (because they hate Trump and think it's ok to sacrifice the truth for the noble goal of getting rid of Trump, somehow thinking when they do it, as opposed to Trump doing it, it's ok) or unknowingly (being deceived by the former kind).
This is one of the examples of how tribal things are. All Trump says is available in transcripts. Not many - especially from the opposing tribe - bother to read them and actually know what he says before forming (or, rather, confirming the pre-existing) opinion on the matter.
You can get the words e.g. here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-rally-re... - I choose a source that is not in Trump's tribe so that there was no doubt their conclusion that Trump didn't say coronavirus is a hoax is not tribally motivated.
> Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No they can’t. They can’t count their votes.
> One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people [cases of coronavirus infection] in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.
Here is what you extracted from the quote: - "What Trump actually said is that his opponents suggestion that he doesn't do enough to counter the epidemic is the next hoax"
But you condition this statement on a novel understanding of the word "hoax"
"This is somewhat unusual application of word "hoax", as "hoax" usually refers to false statement of fact, and whether Trump is doing a good job is not a fact but an opinion, which you can disagree with but it can't be "hoax"."
Of course, you spotted right away that he was "sacrificing precision for expressiveness."
To steelman the other side: given the unreliability of natural language, there is a tendency to construct your own interpretation and then work backwards, which I think you did there. in the quotation, he uses "hoax" to describe another event:
>They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation.
versus
> And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.
Given the structural similarity and proximity of these two quotes, it seems clear what Trump is trying to do is to compare to these two instances and the similarity of the response from the Dems. In both, he very clearly says that his conversation with the Ukrainian President and the Coronavirus situation are both similarly germane. At the very least, it should be beyond question that Trump is downplaying the severity of the coronavirus in the last few sentences. It follows that the "hoax" is referring to the opposition party making a mountain out of molehill.
But I digress. The most important thing is that you have strong opinions on tribal politics and an apparent distrust of media. Which is fine and good! But it is also important to recognize that your interpretation could be different from someone else's, and that doesn't mean that they lied "because they hate Trump and think it's ok to sacrifice the truth for the noble goal of getting rid of Trump, somehow thinking when they do it, as opposed to Trump doing it, it's ok". You cannot assume all statements contrary to your own are made in bad faith.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/17/instagram-...
"The video makes it seem like Trump is calling the disease itself a hoax, which he hasn’t done. The words are Trump’s, but the editing is Biden’s."
"Trump’s comments feed into a conspiracy theory that claims Democrats and the media are fabricating the threat of COVID-19 to hurt the economy and, by extension, the president’s re-election chances. And the president appeared to downplay the threat of the virus at several points in recent weeks.
But the Biden campaign’s ad is misleading. It’s an example of what the Washington Post calls "splicing," or "editing together disparate videos" that "fundamentally alters the story that is being told."
He may have downplayed the severity, but it's light years away from claiming it's a "hoax". One can reasonably debate whether he did the former, but the latter is flat out lie. It's not ok to lie, even about Trump. There's a huge difference between choosing how to react to coronavirus (a lot of people were unsure initially how severe it is) and flatly denying it is happening. It's OK to argue that Trump was wrong on his chosen reaction, but it's not ok to lie that he called it a "hoax".
> It follows that the "hoax" is referring to the opposition party making a mountain out of molehill.
The "hoax" was about the claim that he did poor job handling the coronavirus. He thinks he did great job and his opponents are wrong. Not about that coronavirus epidemics doesn't exist.
> Which is fine and good!
What is not fine and not good is that people are ok with lying as long as it hurts the other tribe and helps theirs. Not ok at all. It's not a matter of "interpretation", it's a matter of twisting facts to the point where it becomes outright falsity.
And just to be clear: I'm not very biased person to either sides, and I think it's amusing to see Americans get so riled by their opposing political side. I treat all of the US media to be biased in some direction, and never to reach the level of objectivity I myself would enjoy. It would be nice though that they would, I agree, but this is the reality of the current world I guess. If I could decide, I would just break apart the whole two-party system and give people actual options in voting. Perhaps then at least those who can think for themselves could vote for a candidate they believed in, instead of just voting the "least-worst" candidate.
He either said it's a hoax or he didn't. In this case, he didn't. If you don't care what he rambles about, that's fine, but then don't say he said something he didn't as a proof to some point, as if it were a well-known fact.
> He might as well have said it and nothing would change
But he did not. So don't say he did. It's a lie. It's not ok for Trump to lie, why it's ok for somebody else to lie about Trump?
> But it's quite hard to adhere to a high level of truthfulness when the other side clearly has no regard for it.
So far the side that says the facts don't actually matter and whether he said what you claim he said or not is immaterial seems to be you. I think allowing yourself to disregard the truth because "the other side is doing it anyway" is not a right way to do things.
Oh please, you are fighting windmills here. How I was phrasing myself in my opinion was vague enough to let the reader know, that I was not really sharing scientifically exact information. I expected somebody to write a short reply to correct me had I been wrong, not get so worked up on this.
Eg "If somebody of your friends told you that, please keep loving them as friends but accept anything they say with a grain of salt as they may be more gullible than you thought." What? I think you have overdosed on political zealousness as that's not something I would really care about. But perhaps as a European it's impossible for me to understand. And if I did care enough to correct them, I could just tell them and they wouldn't get upset. Unless you do it a like a nit-picking asshole that is.
It's nice you are trying the right the wrong, but seriously a less passive-aggressive reply would have been enough. Bless your heart.
You were not sharing scientific information. The problem is not that your information was unscientific, it's that it was a lie. And instead of saying "well, sorry, my bad, I goofed up, should have checked my sources better, will do better in the future" you still are trying to prove it's somehow OK to tell untruth and I was unreasonable ("a nit-picking asshole") for calling you out on telling a falsity, and somehow now me "getting worked up" (you must be really psychic knowing that via the internet! maybe you should make billions betting on stocks instead?) is the problem, not telling false things. I don't think this has much to do with being a European. I myself have been born in Europe, and I have many European friends, and I know in Europe truth means the same as everywhere else in the world.
E.g.
https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronav...
https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/the-fear-of-the-corona-vi... (kudos for correcting/updating later...)
Seems a bit one-sided to get so excited about wrong predictions by the Fox/alt-right/MAGA bubble on account of one viral video.
... just older people with underlying conditions dying ... etc.
Everything else is spot on, and it is still mostly older people with underlying conditions dying. She says the death rate is 2%: no pretending that it would be like a normal flu season.
I just can’t see how you can cherry-pick a single thing out of that reporting to criticise, even given it was done on January 23rd!
The WHO has been warning about the coronavirus for ages.
(literally saying in the title it's not more dangerous than the flu)
Also, the WHO posted this on Twitter in January, draw your own conclusions: https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
"Bally Jerry...pranged his kite right in the how's yer father...hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper's and caught his can in the Bertie."
"The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said.
An epidemic is different. It falsifies your predictions rapidly and unequivocally."
Paul believes that this is all about the quality of the predictions, and about the perps getting caught. That's nonsense. Nobody, and I really mean that, nobody has been held accountable for the longest time about the quality of their predictions. Or even the quality of their work. Mushy, exact or otherwise. These people have absolutely nothing to fear from the quality of their work product, and their hand in that, being held accountable. It just won't happen.
We have 100's of miles of video tape by now documenting falsehoods spoken by officials. The consequences: nil. Nothing. Zip, Nada, etc.
And as long as that is the case, as long as there are no consequences this shit will continue.
In NL a minister resigned because he got caught in a lie. Imagine that. It wasn't even a big one, it is just that that is unacceptable here. I'm sure they lie all the time, it is just that getting caught is enough to do you in. So not a perfect system by a long shot but it does the job.
"An event like this is thus a uniquely powerful way of taking people's measure."
and
"Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have. I hope."
We can record this one and likely it won't make any difference either. It's just whose team you are on now, not about whether there is anything truthful being said.
If you study history, you realize thats been a thing for much more than just 3 years...
The concepts of truth, credibility, ethics, deontology that he vaguely puts the finger onto. Those are complex topics, still being studied and will be forever.
Blaming journalist and politics, why not, I guess some of them deserve it, but my neighbour could have done the same analysis after couple of pints at the pub.
Usually in everyday life we hint at our confidence level with the language we use: 'might', 'probably', etc. These people have trained themselves not to do that, which they previously have gotten away with.
People, gentile people, who use "might" and "probably" are weak intellectuals by American standards. They are cast aside, especially in media, because they cannot give definite answers. This is science and science doesn't sell.
Politicians and media types are sales-people.
This really depends on the family and milieu you grew up around and are engaged with generally in life.
They absolutely deserve the blame more than your neighbor, because they have a power of influence ~10e6 times greater than your neighbor at the pub. They chose to use that influence to back a narrative to support their political inclinations amid an emergency. The responsible thing to have said is: "We don't know what the severity of this will be, but we'll report things as we find out from authorities."
There has been confidence all around from seemingly credible sources - acting on too early and thin data about what measures were effective or non-effective, many of which have been reversed in the last couple of weeks. A lot of this can be attributed to all sorts of news organizations (across the spectrum) and their push to get both positive and negative coverage out as fast as possible at the right time.
If, in a fast moving situation, someone tells you something based on the best information available at the time coming from leading experts, which later turns out to be wrong, that's unfortunate.
If someone ignores the leadings experts and the best information available at the time and instead tells you what they want you to believe for their own political advantage, that's despicable.
Drawing those as equivalent just doesn't make sense. No one is perfect anywhere on the spectrum, and you can find people who are wrong, stupid, or disingenuous everywhere. But on one side we have most organizations generally trying to get it right for the most part, and on the other, we have organizations trying their best to con people, regardless of the consequences.
It's the worst take because it defeats the ability to find a solution in the future, if nothing can be trusted nothing can be implemented.
You're holding them up to unreasonably high standards.
It's simply unfair to compare news organizations like CNN which are at least trying to present accurate information (to the best of their knowledge) vs channels like Fox News that are active and avowed political propaganda engines that have admitted to deliberately deceiving their audience for views and political gain.
That's what I kept seeing from the experts.
Of course it doesn’t make sense to tell people not to buy a box of masks if they aren’t sick because then how do you get a mask when you wake up coughing without going into the pharmacy and spreading it? And all the while through February and March evidence was growing that people might be infectious for a week or more before they got a cough.
There's a difference between getting into 2nd degree minutiae like the effectiveness of masks, seasonality, and other factors, and then there's plain and outright denial of established facts about the class of virus this was as the news of the situation in Wuhan began to circulate.
The most effective measures we have taken - social distancing, washing hands, closing schools, WFH - are the ones that were know to be effective over two decades ago, to the surprise of no one who kept tabs on the topic.
Mask wearing is, as of now, still a hotly disputed topic.
It isn't disputed in many countries in Asia.
This is true. In late February/early March there was a medical doctor who appeared in several local news segments here in Seattle. This doctor quoted a very misleading statistic about your chance of catching it ("you have a 0.5% chance of catching the virus").
I was intrigued by this obvious falsehood, and saw that it was also featured in a memo from one of our local hospital systems. Where did they get it from? A CDC study.
That CDC study looked at the first handful of patients to have confirmed COVID-19 in the US (all travel related) and traced their confirmed contacts. Sure enough - 0.5% of the contacts traced within this group acquired the virus.
Extrapolating this study to suggest that one's chance of catching the virus in the community, 6 weeks after the study was 0.5% was just a monstrous abdication of responsible communication.
Heads should be rolling after a large failure like this (not necessarily literal heads).
Don't tell me what you think, show me your portfolio.
The point is also that if you continue to shake hands it doesn't make sense to be careful regarding other ways of getting it either. His attitude towards the whole thing would make him a prime candidate to the Darwin award if he ends up dying.
My current theory is that we are seeing denial on a mass scale as a coping mechanism.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-infections-oxfor...
"He was behind disputed research that sparked the mass culling of farm animals during the 2001 epidemic of foot and mouth disease, a crisis which cost the country billions of pounds.
And separately he also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or ‘mad cow disease’) and its equivalent in sheep if it made the leap to humans. To date there have been fewer than 200 deaths from the human form of BSE and none resulting from sheep to human transmission."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/neil-ferguson-sc...
Your "example" of bad data is the only quoted data in that article and it doesn't even mean anything since the implicit assumption of the Gupta model is that we do not know how many asymptomatic cases of COVID exist (even WIRED concede this point). Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this. 1 in 1000 infections requiring hospitalisation could be a realistic number if a high percentage of infections are asymptomatic.
> we just won’t know the true proportion of people who have contracted the disease without showing any symptoms, but it is likely a much lower number than the Oxford study assumes.
Epidemiology is not done by "it is likely much lower than the study assumes" since that is pure guess work without the tests.
What the Oxford study offers is a strong argument that antibody testing is vitally important and nobody is doing it.
As I say this is a very long way from utter rubbish.
They also made the totally unsupported assumption that one of the lower end curves matched reality. (That's right. They actually made exactly the kind of assumptions you're accusing others of, rather than just argue for antibody testing).
The problem is that when the study was made, there was a lot more data available than just that 14 days of deaths from two countries. And a ton of it was totally incompatible with their modeling.
Here's some of the conflicting data points as of ten days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22698584
It's not about "testing in Italy":
"In Lombardy – despite the region being under lockdown since March 9 – more than one in every 1,000 of the entire population have already been hospitalised due to coronavirus."
An acquaintance's partner suspects having got it, because after two days (two days, not weeks) of very mild fever (~37.5C) he was hit by anosmia. An ex-coworker also mentioned "a horribly strong fever" with respiratory difficulties which lasted just a few days. Yes, anecdata, but shows that you can easily miss a large part of the infected cases if you only test those hospitalized.
To get such a count we would need 100% serological testing which has not been done. We know how many were infected at the time of testing but the whole point of the Oxford model is that we do not know how many have been infected, not shown symptoms, and recovered.
Once again, the core point of the Oxford model was to emphasise the need for serological testing.
We definitely know it’s higher than 1 in 1000.
Unless you all think that the number of people infected may be higher than the number of people.
Now we are in a stage where there's no good information source (except HN comments, though even there we must be selective).
We just passed 10k from covid-19. Only last week a "low" estimation of covid deaths this year was 200k. So it seems the expectation is there will be many, many more, and we're just at the start of all this.
On the other hand, it also seems this week like the infamous curve is beginning to flatten, and the epidemic is slowing down. Does this contradict the "low" 200k number? Or does the 200k number factor this in, and indicates that the "long tail" of the disease will be very long and damaging indeed?
Some of the clips show in the video referenced in the article actually seem pretty "sane" to me - the one guy saying "I'm not worried about getting this illness", another saying for most people it will seem just like the flu. Those two statements, as far as we know, are not that outlandish, right? I'm certainly not worried about myself, and for many people it does seem to be mild or asymptomatic?
I don't want to have an "opinion" on this matter, I want to interpret the data and understand the truth, Fauci-style.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
The current estimate is that 300k people are infected in the US. If the number of people infected by Covid-19 doubles every week, then in 10 weeks there will be 300 million infected in the US. Assuming 1% mortality puts you at 3 million dead.
That is not acceptable, either, given the fatality rate and the strain it would put on hospitals... but I think it is important we try to be accurate.
Forcing the doubling rate to decrease short of hitting that point requires something else to happen. South Korea clearly did something other than running itself out of cannon fodder.
That is what you would call "herd immunity" and no, current numbers of recovered patients are not even close to have it. It doesn't happen like magic like some politician wants to make people believe, and current estimations for COVID _herd immunity threshold_ are 29%-74% of the community [1]. Make a count of that on the US population.
I am not saying that is ok, or that we should just let it run its course... just that saying we will hit 90% infection is unrealistic.
So when people say things like:
> "I'm not worried about getting this illness"
They are likely not considering that even the younger are taking as much as a 1% risk of their life, which is incredibly high. Depending on factors like the load on the medical community at the time and others, it can get as high as 5% or more quite easily as we have seen around the world. Currently using only napkin math from the numbers here[1], the death rate is currently at just under 4% over all age groups in the US.
Additionally, it is not considering the danger they are putting others in by getting it. With the flu at a death rate of 0.2% or lower, causing deaths by infecting people is a very small risk. Passing it to one person here significantly ups the chances of you causing someone else to die.
Finally, flu deaths almost exclusively happen in the immunocompromised and elderly, while COVID-19 affects younger people a LOT more.[2]
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...
[2] https://i.insider.com/5e81f6460c2a6261b1771b05?width=600&for...
I know the numbers are still super fuzzy and it depends on who you ask, but at least according to Wikipedia, the US fatality rate for ages 20-44 is 0.1-0.2%, not near 1% (though certainly at-risk individuals would be higher than the average...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Progn...
As mentioned, the flu death rate of 0.1% is overall as well - for younger people it is also significantly lower, so the increased risk still holds for younger folks. Source [2] shows that well.
Those are pretty high numbers. Using a Lancet study (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...), IFR is just under 0.1% for a 30 something year old. Hospitalization rates are at 3.5% (2-7% confidence), so a death rate (for 30 year olds) even under a collapsing medical systems for younger people is highly unlikely to get close to 5%.
All said, a 0.1% death rate is still pretty dangerous and catching the disease is something like raising your risk of death by 50% in a given year. Lockdowns are still justified under those numbers.
> Finally, flu deaths almost exclusively happen in the immunocompromised and elderly, while COVID-19 affects younger people a LOT more.
Well, and old people even more. Are the relative risk ratios actually different for covid vs. flu - or are we just seeing the effect of a disease that is 7xish a really bad flu season?
(For young children actually, I believe covid outcomes are better than flu.)
And what if the effects of an extended lockdown is a tanked ecomony with a 3x increase in suicides for the next decade? Is it still justified? Lockdowns are only justified if the only variable you are optimizing for is "number of covid-19 deaths". Yet there are hundreds of other variables that we are ignoring in our quest to minimize that one variable. Impossible to tell now, but tanking the economy to flatten the curve may end up indirectly killing even more people in the long run.
0.1% of the rest of my life is ~3 weeks. The lockdown has already cost me more of my life than a confirmed case of COVID-19 would (on average).
And the math doesn't get much better the older you get, an 85 year old has the same chance of dying of natural causes during a 12 month lockdown as he has from actually contracting COVID-19.
How can you even claim an "average death rate" when you don't even know how many people were infected, had mild symptoms, and recovered without reporting it to anyone?
Of course the numbers will look scary when you only count hospitalized people as infected.
We can either throw our hands up and give up or we can do the best with what we have. So, what percentage of cases do you think are unconfirmed? You can adjust my math with that and see what those rates are. Those numbers still stay scary unless you assume a 90% unconfirmed rate, at which it equalizes for young people compared to the flu but is still 10x or more for some age groups. The point being, even accounting for underreporting this is still much more deadly and allowing it to spread like the flu would result in many more deaths.
I haven't seen any reliable numbers given about the underreporting rate, so if you have seen any that would be interesting!
Looks like Spain had 6 million infections but only 140 thousand cases. So the actual uncomfirmed rate could be 97%.
It’s rushed and woefully incomplete data enabling media companies to write apocalyptic headlines without exposing themselves to any legal liability. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, so that’s what they’re doing.
I think to most people with a background in statistics it’s very easy to tell how bad the data is at a glance. It’s downright blatant. They don’t have a platform though, because in this media climate your platform is only as big as your level of sensationalism and hysteria.
There are multiple factors skewing the data toward coronavirus appearing more deadly than it actually is. It’s new and sudden, so there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure in place for testing. It’s causing a rush on hospitals. Combine those and you have one massive shortage of testing. You obviously want to care for the most critically ill first, so globally, only the most sick get tested, and only the cases most likely to be fatal are even represented in these numbers everyone is seeing.
Then they take wildly differing medical, economic and political environments all over the world, and merge all the data as if it’s equal. In many cases, in addition to the inadequate testing, that data is only as accurate as their governing bodies want it to be.
Do we really believe there are 5x as many cases in the US as in China?
Do we really believe there were only 5,000 cases in India?
Do we really believe the virus is 10x as likely to be fatal in Italy as compared to Germany?
Take the “confirmed cases” number and just add a zero, and you might be closer to the reality of what’s going on out there.
People are simply blind to the difference between “confirmed cases” and “cases”.
It’s very unfortunate that this nomenclature has a natural tendency to make “confirmed cases” feel like it must be more accurate, and also unfortunate that the term “cases” could only ever be an approximation. But those labels were chosen carefully and for a good reason, and they represent very, very different things.
The flu season is 6 months for ~ 40k deaths.
We are at 10k deaths of covid in the USA. Depending on how you measure the 'season' it could be as little as a month in. If we keep with these numbers it will surely pass the flu death toll for the same time period.
Now also consider that unlike flu, we have no vaccine and the virus kills people in the prime of their life just as much as the elderly. We also have no idea on the way this virus works. We are making assumptions that it will work like a normal flu virus. There is anecdotal evidence it resides in people even after they have 'recovered', which isn't the same as a normal flu or cold. It is certainly something to be concerned with.
Not with the same rates. This should be kept into account, because when lockdowns will be lifted (you will have to at some point, even if it's just to prevent people from becoming insane), you won't have a risk of 0, so letting the lowest-risk population out first is a goood bet.
> Now also consider that unlike flu, we have no vaccine
But there are drugs in development and in trial. None will work miracles, some will not work at all, some will have marginal impact, some will have a little more impact. Those are the best bets at this point in time.
Waiting out for a vaccine, like many governments are hoping for, is irrational IMO, because there's no guarantee that a working one will be found - and you can't lock up your population for 18 months, even if you don't factor the economy in, because people will be destroyed psychologically.
I'm not sure any of those assumptions are warranted.
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality."
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Before making such a confident statement, I would recommend re-reading this particular statement in pg's essay...
"These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."
...and consider how it applies to all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.
It is happening now. It's happening in line with predictions by IPCC. It gets pretty bad. I can't help what people have said that has been wrong, but the world is measurably and visibly warming and that itself was denied for a long time. Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's happening, have agreed for quite a while, and think the impact will be dire and potentially irreversible in the timeframe of human lifetimes. It feels like the zoonotic coronavirus situation played out over 50 years, rather than the 15 or so since SARS. Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half this would happen, but here we are. A large group of experts in another field is telling us a similar thing with similar urgency. That's my only point.
>>consider how it applies to all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.
Maybe this is in conflict with what science should be. But it's also definitely what science is now.
None of these "experts" have a track record of correct predictions that justifies taking their current predictions seriously. Remember we are not talking about the fact that the climate changes: yes, it does, it always has, and it always will (unless at some point in the distant future we learn how to control it accurately). We are talking about the dire predictions of catastrophe that have been made to try to justify spending many trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. Those predictions have never come true.
> Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half this would happen, but here we are.
To know whether these were useful predictions, we would need to know more details. Did they predict when it would happen? Did they predict how it would spread? A prediction that "this will happen, some time in the future" is not very useful. AFAIK no epidemiologists were making predictions much more precise than that.
Looking at the actual frequency of epidemics of various sizes in the past, we might very roughly estimate that we will have one serious enough to involve a significant portion of health care resources once every decade or so. But you don't have to be an epidemiologist to do that; you just have to do the simplest possible extrapolation of the data. We had H1N1 about 10 years ago, and SARS about 18 years ago. That's still not a very strong prediction, but it would seem to be as good a basis for public policy discussion (which is to say, a fairly weak one but not negligible) as anything more complicated that has come from epidemiologists.
Yes it is, if taken seriously.
If the prediction is "we can expect a serious epidemic once every 10 years", then we have something definite that we can plan for, or at least discuss the costs of planning for. There's no way to discuss the costs of planning for "this will happen, some time in the future" without more detail.
Which has largely happened in a lot of areas...
except for the people who think the correct response is to ignore any prediction that isn't perfectly specific?
That would be nice, yes.
> except for the people who think the correct response is to ignore any prediction that isn't perfectly specific?
If a prediction isn't giving you any useful, actionable information, you can't act on it.
That doesn't necessarily mean you do nothing. If our public policy decision is "well, we don't really know how often epidemics like this will occur, but just to ballpark, let's plan on one every 10 years and see what we would need to do to prepare", that's fine. Just don't say we need to do that because the experts made a prediction. It's just a best judgment call based on very incomplete information.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Report
There have certainly been very dramatic (all overly well reported) warnings representing a minority of researchers which have not been accurate. These should not invalidate the whole lot of predictions.
Those minimal predictions don't justify spending trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. They basically say "the climate is going to change, so be ready to deal with it".
Switching to low- and zero-carbon fuels, achieving greater efficiencies and so on, is expensive, but still a lot cheaper than e.g. moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding, dealing with huge numbers of migrants, dealing with massive changes in agriculture, worse natural disasters, and so on.
Plus even if you deal with the effects for decades, your problem has not gone away. The situation is worse, and the planet is still heating.
Studies based on climate models that are overpredicting warming, plus economic and sociological models that have even less predictive power.
> moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding
If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it. How is that all of a sudden a climate emergency?
> your problem has not gone away
I've already said climate change is something we're always going to have to deal with, just as humans have had to deal with it during all of human history. The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous.
Models in general haven't overpredicted warming, as several people in this discussion have tried to educate you.
> If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it.
I'm not at all clear what your point is here. It looks like you're arguing that because something is changing over the course of several decades it's not as much as a problem. Surely that can't be it though, because that makes no logical sense. From an economic sense it's just as expensive.
> The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous.
A strawman argument. That is not what I wrote.
The climate is changing faster by far than it has in all human history, and probably in the history of our planet.
Dealing with the effects is also much more difficult now compared to most of human history. When you have 7 or 8 billion people living on the planet, largely in huge cities, it's far more challenging.
It's just a lot easier and cheaper to avoid breaking something in the first place than it is to try to fix it afterwards.
Yes, they have. We're obviously not going to agree on this point.
> It looks like you're arguing that because something is changing over the course of several decades it's not as much as a problem.
No, I'm arguing that the problem is not new, and it's not a climate problem. It's a problem of misgovernment and has been around for quite a while. But that doesn't stop cities and countries to try to get the rest of us to pay for fixing it by trying to claim that it's a cimate problem.
> The climate is changing faster by far than it has in all human history, and probably in the history of our planet.
This is ludicrous. Nobody has the data to back this up, and there is plenty of data contradicting it.
> When you have 7 or 8 billion people living on the planet, largely in huge cities, it's far more challenging.
When the "problem" you're talking about is a degree of so of temperature rise and a foot or two of sea level rise over the course of a century, to call dealing with it "challenging" is an egregious misuse of language. This is simply not that big a deal compared to all the other things we humans have to deal with. And the things we will need to do anyway to deal with those far more challenging problems--like how to bring billions of people out of poverty and how to make our infrastructure more robust--will end up adapting us to the change anyway. If we're going to spend trillions of dollars on something, let's at least spend it on something that benefits everybody regardless of what happens with the climate, instead of on a huge CO2 mitigation boondoggle that will transfer a lot of money from your and my pockets to the pockets of politicians and "green" business executives, but won't actually help much of anything.
The data on this are so clear I don't really know where to start if you don't believe it. I feel your opposition on this issue is ideological, and there's no data that will change your mind.
> If we're going to spend trillions of dollars on something, let's at least spend it on something that benefits everybody
Given I think there's no arguing data with you, I'll try some arguments that might be more in line with what I guess your beliefs are.
Switching from fossil fuels brings huge benefits. Solar, wind, hydro, small nuclear plants etc. are much better for society.
Energy security increases if energy is produced locally. Democracies have less pressure to prop up dictatorships. Smaller countries are less at risk of getting bullied by larger countries.
Decentralisation of energy production makes the world more stable, less fragile. Energy policy can be set locally rather than centrally. Regions, communities, even individuals, can decide for themselves how to source their power. You can do that with e.g. solar power, but you can't do that with huge gas- or oil-powered plants.
Renewables are actually getting more cost-effective to use than fossil fuels. Government subsidies, direct and indirect, are distorting the market. End government support for fossil fuels and let the market free. There are huge opportunities for private enterprise in switching society to use the better technologies.
Air pollution is a huge killer. A study I saw yesterday showed dramatic increases in death from COVID-19 where air pollution was worse. Even in normal times, life expectancy and health quality is adversely affected by air pollution.
A switch to electric transport improves air pollution massively. There are also technical advantages to electric vehicles, such as improved reliability.
No, they're not. The data are a mess. Temperature records have been "adjusted" and the original raw data thrown away all over the place. I understand you don't believe this; I'm simply stating what I believe for the record. As I said, we're clearly not going to agree.
> I feel your opposition on this issue is ideological, and there's no data that will change your mind.
I have spent two decades now closely following the global warming/climate change alarmism issue. What I'm basing my statements on here is not ideological opposition to anything: it's the result of two decades of watching a long con in operation. And note carefully that this does not mean that I don't think the climate is changing or that I don't think we will need to do things to deal with climate change. It simply means that I do not trust the people or the institutions that are clamoring about catastrophe if we don't spend trillions of dollars to stop CO2 emissions now. Those people and institutions have no credibility with me after what I've seen them do for the past two decades, and what I've gone back and found out about what they did further back than that.
> Switching from fossil fuels brings huge benefits.
Agreed. But we don't have to spend trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation to do that. We just have to, you know, switch. Spending money on CO2 mitigation (unless by "CO2 mitigation" you just mean "build more non-CO2 emitting power plants") hinders that, it doesn't help it.
I mostly agree with your points on energy security, decentralization, removing government distortions of the market (I think this is a good idea in every sphere, not just energy), and air pollution. Kudos to you for including small nuclear plants, btw; most people don't. The only caveats I would make are:
Decentralized power from solar or wind won't provide reliable base load power in many places, at least not without a solution to the energy storage problem that currently doesn't exist except for very small loads. You need small nuclear plants. Hydro by itself can't really be decentralized, since there are only a limited number of good locations for it and basically all of them are already developed. (Hydro in the form of pumped storage powered by solar or wind is a different matter; for many small scale needs that might be a viable solution to the energy storage problem.)
Electric transport is great, except for one mode: airplanes. I just don't see a viable alternative to liquid chemical fuels for airplanes any time soon. But that can be dealt with by using other energy sources to make liquid fuels, either by directly powering chemical reactions or by using living organisms like algae.
Which overpredicted the warming that has occurred from 1990 to now (though its predictions overall were certainly much milder than the catastrophic ones that are being trumpeted as reasons to spend trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation).
Not to mention that there have been four more assessment reports since then (and the sixth is in the works now), and the more alarmist ones (in particular the third and fourth) are the ones that climate change alarmists are basing their predictions of catastrophe on. (Even though the fifth report actually backed off in some respects, particularly in admitting--though as obliquely as possible--that the climate model predictions were not matching the data.)
No, they're lower than the low end of the predicted range. Plus, the low end of the predicted range was based on assumed CO2 emissions that were significantly lower than what has actually occurred since then. So we have more CO2 than predicted and less warming than predicted even from the lower than actual CO2.
> even the low estimates still predict a 3C temperature rise by the end of the century
That's not 3C rise from where we are now. It's not even 3C rise from where we were in 1990. It's 3C rise from the "pre-industrial" temperature, i.e., the mid to late 1700s, i.e., in the middle of the Little Ice Age. Temperatures have already risen (largely due simply to coming out of the Little Ice Age) by about 1.6C since then, so that low estimate is about 1.4C rise from now to 2100. And, as noted, actual temperature rise is running below the low end estimate. We're looking at roughly a degree C rise in a century. The idea that humans cannot adapt to that so we have to spend trillions of dollars to stop emitting CO2 right now is laughable.
> Just because some of the 6 or 7C predictions (high end of range) don't appear to be coming true we should just ignore the rest of the models?
We should not be using the models to drive public policy decisions with multi-trillion dollar costs. They're simply not good enough for that.
> In light of the above we can now return to our main questions: is there clear and reliable evidence that climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory factor in the onset of the country's civil war?; and, if and where yes, was it as significant a contributory factor as is claimed in the existing academic and expert literature? On each step of the claimed causal chain, our answers are no. We find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in northeast Syria's 2006/07–2008/09 drought; we find that, while the 2006/07–2008/09 drought in northeast Syria will have contributed to migration, this migration was not on the scale claimed in the existing literature, and was, in all probability, more caused by economic liberalisation than drought; and we find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that drought-related migration was a contributory factor in civil war onset. In our assessment, there is thus no good evidence to conclude that global climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory causal factor in the country's civil war.
We don’t vote on scientific proof. Yes evidence leads us to believe climate change is happening, but why and predicting it’s trajectory and effect should be met with scientific standards not scaremongering and “CLIMATE DENIER” hyperbole.
If the pursuit of scientific rigour and fact has taught us anything over our history it’s that skepticism and challenging the status quo is necessary and should be welcomed. In today’s climate debate it it’s nothing but derided.
Further, people are wise to be skeptical or even dismissive of climate denialist claims because there is a long history of politically motivated people making deliberately but subtly specious arguments for it. Given both the overwhelming consensus and the glut of misinformation, it makes sense to filter it with a very high bar.
The benefit of science (reproducibility, falsifiability) has been hacked by commercial interests. This isn't even in dispute (Heartland, IER, many others). Groups that dispute climate change are all funded by CO2 emitters and the results are coordinated by enormous lobbying and donation campaigns.
Flat earth proponents are not operating within a scientific framework of doubt and proof, and neither are climate change deniers.
Yes, and those measurements tell us that without a large amount of positive feedback, the effect of greenhouse gases alone is too small to worry about.
> and then correlated it to measured climate change that normalized for various known climate cycles
Nope, this has not been done. The climate models cannot reproduce the data at all with just the measured greenhouse effect of the various greenhouse gases. They have to dial in a large amount of positive feedback, and even then the only period of time for which they reproduce the data tolerably well is the latter half of the 20th century. The model outputs don't match the early 20th century warming, they don't match the mid 20th century cooling, and they don't match the early 21st century pause.
The correct, honest scientific conclusion from all of this is that the models are simply not good enough at this point, i.e., we don't understand how the climate works well enough at this point, to support multi-trillion dollar policy decisions.
First there’s the “almost 100%” of scientists agree argument again. Sorry, that’s not a valid argument for saying something is true!
Second. Models aren’t proof. They’re models. Yes we can measure gas quantities and determine correlations. But we haven’t scientifically proven it. We’re dealing with chaotic systems. Until we can, we need to remain skeptical and open to other ideas. That’s my point. Not that it isn’t happening.
Third. Then you bring politics into it. Oh the 1% are funded by Big Oil. Oh and the 99% aren’t funded by politically motivated players either? See point (1), scientific fact isn’t determined by who agrees with it or not. Until it’s proven, it may be unproven.
And fourth. Flat earth, again, the relationship to climate deniers...you don’t need scientists to agree the world isn’t flat. It’s proven. Scientifically. See the difference?
Thanks for eloquently providing examples to exactly what I was saying
The main reason global warming isn't taken more seriously is because of the way it is discussed.
[0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2010/10/goosey-goosey-gander.ht...
"So the climate will continue to change, even if we make maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide. Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people, will disappear - practically all of the glaciers could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . . . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic disasters would occur continually."
The original conversation was regarding all public statements, not scientists. This is more about journalists than scientists.
>...and consider how it applies to all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.
Investigating geological or ecological truth is one thing, investigating causes and consequences for widespread ignorance and bad policy decisions is another. You and I are approaching this from different angles. Unfortunately, journalists have power to shape our society. I would argue that as a group, they have more power than scientists.
I think you may be suggesting that there have been journalists who push climate denialism at the behest of the oil industry? My apologies if I misunderstood, but I would agree emphatically.
There are also other jouranlists who push climate alarmism because alarmism sells.
That's a nice "No True Scotsman" right there. Unless, of course, you can give me a non-arbitrary reason why Dr. David Barber of the University of Manitoba speaking in 2008 is a "pre-modern" climate scientist, whereas Dr. James Hansen of NASA writing in 2009 is a "modern" climate scientist.
>actual modern climate scientist
With this rhetorical technique, it could be impossible to provide evidence. Who gets to decide what makes a climate scientist 'modern'? Disregarding alleged 'non-modern' climate scientists is the last thing we should do when discussing prior decades of alarmism.
"Sources?"
Then you do the job of googling for them. Retrieve a few relevant sources.
And they proceed to shoot them down, even moving goalposts if necessary. They might come back with their own confirmation biased sources.
This instance is even more egregious. There is a growing mountain of evidence for climate change. Multiple books, across multiple disciplines, can and have been written. Numerous peer reviewed papers.
What's more infuriating is that you don't need climate scientists to corroborate climate change. Because it's not a prediction anymore, climate has been changing already. Disciplines as diverse as geology and biology can detect the effects. If you want to do projections, sure, biologists may not be able to help. But if you want to see the effects today, they certainly can.
With such an enormous pile of data, I can't believe this is a legitimate discussion.
Much like flat earthers, climate deniers seem to have attached their identity to this claim rather than viewing the data with any objectivity.
The objection here is that we live in a media environment which continually emphasizes one end of that error bar. So long as we live in that sort of environment claims of catastrophic consequences are going to be taken with a degree of skepticism.
If the media present bold predictions intended to reflect the views of scientific bodies, and those predictions fail to come to pass, then we have reason to doubt at least one node in the flow of information. It could be that the media incorrectly portrayed scientific results, or it could be that the scientific model upon which the prediction was based was flawed.
For instance, when the NYT says in 1978:
> An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.
Clearly the statement has been proven false. But why was this false statement made? Is the problem with the NYT, or the international team of specialists?
That's the problem with the media environment, because it's not always clear (certainly not to the lay person) when the media is representing their sources faithfully.
> The claims of catastrophic consequences are coming straight from the literature.
There are a few things one needs to sort out:
1. What are the actual expected range of consequences stated in the literature?
2. What is the confidence with which the literature expects these consequences?
3. What are the necessary interventions to prevent these consequences (if they can be prevented)?
4. How do the costs of the interventions compare with the consequences?
It's actually quite hard for a lay-person to sort out. The IPCC reports are a good place to start, but still very dense for most people. Also, every seemingly erudite critic of those reports is viciously attacked as a bad faith actor.
> A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
...
> The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.
Since that article was published, atmospheric CO2 has gone from 355ppm to 410ppm (a 15% increase). Global surface temperature has risen 0.6°C since 1989 (1.1°F). Sea level has risen by 8 centimeters.
I realize the UN official wasn't a scientist or an expert, but neither are many of the people quoted in articles about climate change today. Global warming is a bad thing, but it's not as bad as a lot of media & activists are portraying it. It's not an existential risk.
In fact it appears highly misleading, since they directly contrast (a) data from 1970-2017, with (b) a model written in 1973 predicting out to 2016, and (c) a model written in 2013 that can be compared to the data up until 2017.
So for this "pretty consistently on the mark" model, it only encompasses predictions for the years 2014-2017, based on observations from 2013. Many ARMA-type regression models do that well, since on average each year is mostly similar to the previous one.
In short, this doesn't support the credibility of this body of work.
We have enormous amounts of mathematical modelling and a vast history of information about our atmospheric history. Using this, we can make inferences about what is likely to happen due to climate change.
If I were to just make a rando statement about what will happen when climate change comes, that's different.
Learning to separate the two is an important tool.
PG warns against 2), the hacks, and points out that here we can see how utterly wrong they are, because the time frame is so short.
Now, GP points out that something similar happens regarding climate change, with 1') climate scientists and 2') climate change denial, and you take PG's warning against facile hacks (ie 2') and apply it to 1'), the climate scientists and experts? That's quite some nerve.
> all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.
You can't deny that most of the people speaking publicly, and by far the loudest people, are not experts, they are politicians, journalists, and filmmakers. (And tech entrepreneurs...) Many of those have predicted disasters that never happened.
But judging by the downvotes, I guess that's an inconvenient truth.
The actual report is far more balanced. Yes, they are predicting some negative consequences, alongside potential benefits and measures for adapation and mitigation.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm...
And the IPCC Summary for Policymakers itself misrepresents what the actual science says. All of the caveats, disclaimers, hedges, and so forth in the scientific working group reports (and even more so the caveats, disclaimers, hedges, etc. in the actual peer-reviewed papers on which the working group reports are based) are ignored in the Summary for Policymakers. The policy recommendations are already determined and published before the scientific working group reports are released.
So there are actually three levels of misrepresentation involved: first the IPCC WG reports misrepresent the actual primary sources; then the IPCC SPM misrepresents the WG reports; then journalists and politicians misrepresent the IPCC SPM. At each stage the predictions get more alarmist and the recommendations get more draconian.
Of course the IPCC doesn't predict the world is going to end in 12 years. That's a strawman - I'm sure you can find someone who has predicted the world will end in 12 years, but that isn't the disaster people are concerned about.
Instead, they collect five key "reasons for concern" by "using the following specific criteria: large magnitude, high probability, or irreversibility of impacts; timing of impacts; persistent vulnerability or exposure contributing to risks; or limited potential to reduce risks through adaptation or mitigation." [2]
Some of the risks associated with these include:
Risk of death, injury, ill-health, or disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states and other smallislands, due to storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea level rise.
...
Risk of food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes,particularly for poorer populations in urban and rural settings.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ (click "Assessment Reports")
[2] Pg 12, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm...
"The world is going to end in 12 years..." is a recent famous quote by a prominent Democrat. I'm surprised you haven't heard it.
Personally, I bought into the climate alarmism about 30 years ago, and my skepticism is based on seeing so many things I've heard and read (even from scientists) turn out to be exaggerated.
This isn't true, and you should probably cut whatever source told it to you out of your life. The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years, which is the gist of what the IPCC report says.
It doesn't matter.
"The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years" is also false, and not at all what the IPCC report says. When O'Rourke said something similar, the AP fact checked the claim:[2]
> THE FACTS: There is no scientific consensus, much less unanimity, that the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem.
> “This has been a persistent source of confusion,” agreed Kristie L. Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The report never said we only have 12 years left.”
And no, I'm not going to cut the AP and PBS out of my life just because some alarmists are delusional.
1: https://apnews.com/1c663bcb294c1752573f45fc5bf5e0f9/
2: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-fact-check-orourke-...
No, they haven't. The IPCC reports are political documents, not scientific documents. One key fact that shows this: the Summary for Policymakers is written and published before any of the Working Group reports, and the Working Group reports then have to be edited and massaged to be consistent with what the Summary for Policymakers says. A true scientific report with scientific predictions would be the other way around: first you would write, review, and publish the scientific analysis and predictions, and then you would write, review, and publish the policy recommendations.
However, directionally speaking, they have an excellent point that people who predict the future are very common in the climate lobby; and within that group people who correctly predict the future are going to be rare. It is not a lobby made up of scientists because there aren't that many.
I think you are conflating two different possible meanings of the term "threat".
Climate change is likely to be much more of a "threat" than COVID-19 in the sense that we are likely going to have to be dealing with it for a much longer time. But humanity has already been dealing with climate change through all of human history, so having to deal with it for the indefinite future is nothing new. It's only more of a "threat" in the sense of it being a long-term thing we need to factor into our planning, as opposed to COVID-19 being (hopefully) a short-term crisis that we weather and then move on.
Climate change is not more of a "threat" than COVID-19 in the sense of causing more disruption to our society; COVID-19 has already caused far more disruption in a few months than climate change has caused over decades, if not centuries, and also far more than climate change is likely to cause in the future. Time frames matter. Having to restructure the global economy over a century is one thing; that's already been done multiple times in the past, and happens as a natural result of people gradually changing the way they live and work in response to other changes. Having to restructure it in a few months is a very, very different (and much, much more difficult) problem. In that sense COVID-19 is a far worse threat than climate change.
Most obvious is the definition of "deal with." During the ice age transitions "deal with" more or less meant "survive - barely."
If you're happy for humanity to "survive - barely" for the next couple of centuries, then perhaps you have a point.
But our definition of humanity is much richer and more interesting than it was at the end of the Younger Dryas some 14,000 years ago.
Now a reasonable definition of "deal with" is "survive without losing significant acquired knowledge or skill."
That's a much bigger ask when survival-critical choke points are all on the line, which include food production, water supply, and the loss of key living and working space on the coastlines are all on the line. And that's not even considering the general inhabitability of inland areas that will become increasingly prone to storms, floods, forest fires, tornadoes, and so on.
We can already see this happening. Denying it is a form of delusion, in very stark and literal terms.
In fact the political problem we're dealing with is a cult-like mindset that considers "the economy" more real than the physical environment it exists in.
The bottom line is that "the economy" is a quasi-religious political construct, while the real world is... the real world. The economy needs to change, because otherwise reality will kick its ass whether it likes it or not.
The change can be planned and strategised intelligently as an immediate priority, or it can be suicidally chaotic, with huge unplanned loss of acquired knowledge and future potential.
Those are the two extremes on offer. There are no others.
COVID-19 is a handy dry run. We'll see how we do.
That's how humans have lived for almost all of human history; only in the last couple of centuries have a significant number of humans been able to have a standard of living much above bare subsistence.
> The economy needs to change
The economy is always changing, just like the climate. We certainly need people to be inventing new technologies and creating wealth; that's how the economy changes in response to changing conditions and changing needs.
What we do not need is a bunch of draconian centrally controlled policies that will do more harm than good, based on invalid alarmist predictions.
> The change can be planned and strategised intelligently
Nobody knows how to do that on a global scale. No such planning and strategizing has succeeded in the past. To use your phrase, reality has always kicked the ass of such planning and strategizing.
Fortunately, we do not need a central authority planning and strategizing everything. What we need is to do common sense things to make our society and economy more robust, and give people the tools they need to adapt to change in whatever way seems best to them given the unique conditions of their own lives, instead of having policies dictated to them from the top down.
There's a story that a Soviet minister of something or other was visiting London and asked some UK government official who was in charge of the daily supply of bread to the city. He was utterly unable to fathom the answer, which was "nobody". Central planners just can't get it through their heads that central planning doesn't work.
To the extent your 1) and 2) are reasonable categories, I don't see PG giving any examples of 1). I see him giving examples of 2) trying to pass themselves off as 1). Which is what I see happening with claims of catastrophe related to climate change.
Support for the war among his peer moderate Democrats in the senate was near unanimous: Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry all voted in favor. It's not unfair to assume he would have as well. https://progressive.org/op-eds/clinton-s-iraq-war-vote-still...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2013/09/...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-bi...
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/joe-lieberman-iraq-war
His withdrawal of forces from Iraq for which many give him credit was on the schedule of the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush Administration before he took office. It would likely have happened the same under a McCain administration.
He bears 100% of the responsibility for the shit-show that happened in Libya.
The US policies that prolonged and worsened the Syrian civil war were birthed under his watch as well. The "we're fighting ISIS" while simultaneously arming anti-government Al-Qaeda-aligned groups was a recipe for disaster.
Obama "surged" to double US troop levels in Afghanistan shortly after taking office. Also from this era: The drone assassination program. Lots of extra killing, to no lasting effect.
https://www.wired.com/2012/09/surge-report-card/
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/oba...
Let's not pretend that Obama was in any way but rhetorically anti-war.
I do agree that Obama’s position helped him in 2008 re: clinton. But politicians are judged on deeds as well as written opinion. But in the media sphere, most of the prominently wrong got promoted.
If something has changed about either the science or the media reporting of scientific results, what evidence do lay folk have that this is the case?
[0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2010/10/goosey-goosey-gander.ht...
The question still stands as to why, even if the problem lay with journalists/media rather than scientists, is why did they get it so wrong?
Also, if I as lay person am going to be getting my information from sources like NYT and National Geographic instead of IPCC reports directly, have they fixed the problems that led to the erroneous reporting?
Again, my root question is "why have there been so many prominent predictions of climate disaster that have failed to materialize?"
The sources for these predictions have largely been the media, but the sources are generally respected institutions or individuals, and the articles have claimed the backing of scientific authority. To what extent have these failed predictions stemmed from the media, and to what extent have they stemmed from the scientific authorities themselves?
A good part of the blame certainly rests with media. The media is motivated by what is advertiser friendly, and fear sells. However, I do not think the scientific establishment is without fault here.
No doubt part of the problem is the sheer complexity of the system they are studying, and perhaps premature confidence in the methodology of using computer models in the study of complex systems. But it also seems that a bias towards certain policy measures has led some scientists to overstate the confidence, severity, or urgency of predictions.
I do not mean to imply some sort of conspiracy theory here. I simply think that, psychologically, scientists tend to be a of a sort more attuned to "far problems". This tendency allows scientists to sometimes correctly anticipate threats, such as those from a global pandemic, but can also lead to a false equivalence between future uncertain costs and present certain ones.
I am not ignoring experts, nor am I claiming that they are completely wrong about global warming. I would more consider myself in the company of folks such as economist David Friedman or climatologist Judith Curry (neither of whom are in the employ of Big Oil) who both express doubts about the degree of consensus[0] and the severity and certainty of the warming and the value of drastic action in the present[1].
[0]https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falseh... [1]https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/curry-testimony-...
If you'd like to have better understanding of any topic you have to learn to improve your critical thinking capabilities. The media simply print different "opinions" and "statements" and even mark them as such. You have to learn that the media never reflect the truth, the way they are used to cover almost any topic. They are simply the reflections of the power of those who do the influence. Big corporations (or organizations having immense funding) have big influence even when it is not obvious to the "lay person".
From the media side, how it typically work is that the "debate" and the "controversy" sell (more ads, more readers, more viewers). So very often they would give as much attention to one person representing the conclusion 95% of all world scientist as to another person representing a set of fringe "contrarians" financed by some NGO's which are actually financed by some corporations whose interest is to promote that view:
https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Ob...
There are some who might be in the climate skeptics/deniers camp who were concerned about coronavirus[0]
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-...
On the subject of predictions and credibility, when the question "what's your brilliant startup idea" comes up, one of my half-joking responses: an ESPN site for CNBC and other cable news sites where talking heads spend all data talking about the prediction performance of other talking heads and making predictions about future prediction performance of those talking heads.
NYT reported that "200,000 to 1.7 million" people could die on March 13th [1]. Most of those calculations had to do with the fact that the hospital system would get overwhelmed at some point, compounding the deaths.
None of that is "scare statistics". It's useful modeling.
I think what you consider to be "scare statistics" is more lack of education. Similar to how people saw the Trump win as meaning "The media/polls were wrong! They had Clinton winning at 85%! They can't be trusted!". When in reality, flipping a coin and getting 3 heads in a row is all it takes for Trump to win. Or rolling a standard 6-sided die and correctly guessing the number once. It suddenly doesn't sound outlandish.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-est...
Edit: The downvotes are concerning. If you have a problem with my argument, please respond.
With the media, I think it's sometimes intentional and not ignorance, as a ploy to get clicks.
With the anti-media, anti-expert crowd, I have to believe it's usually simple ignorance.
It clearly says that the estimates they're about to talk about are worst-case and estimates.
1. They have a good, responsible title.
2. They bury the 1.7 million number a bit so you're forced to at least understand some of it.
3. They talk about how and why the estimates will change over time:
>“When people change their behavior," said Lauren Gardner, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering who models epidemics, “those model parameters are no longer applicable,” so short-term forecasts are likely to be more accurate. “There is a lot of room for improvement if we act appropriately.”
I see no reason why this article shouldn't have been posted in its current form.
Of course, as you get further away from good sources of news, you're going to get less responsible reporting. NYT is an example of very high quality reporting.
CNN at the time probably had a breaking news line item on TV of "1.7 million could die". This would be irresponsible.
Fox News at the time probably had a breaking news line item on TV of "It's just the flu". This would be irresponsible.
And that's certainly a problem.
That said, Italy is at the top of their curve (hopefully, apparently) with 16,000 deaths. However, their excess deaths this past month (compared to baseline for March) are extremely high, and equal almost as many deaths as the official Covid-19 death toll. According to at least some Italian demographers and epidemiologists, it's likely most of those deaths are due to Covid-19 and were uncounted. But let's say that only half of those deaths were Covid-19, and that the curve turns out to be relatively balanced, as with most epidemics that don't come in waves. If that's the case, Italy will see around 50,000 deaths from Covid-19. Spain will likely see around the same proportion of Covid deaths.
If the US were to experience a similar proportion of deaths, we'd be at around 500,000 deaths. I don't think we'll see nearly so many deaths from Covid-19 now but in early March, it just wasn't clear. It's not 2 million, but my point here is that this was a model that likely turned out high, but it was within the same order of magnitude. And again, I'm using the actual deaths that have occurred in Italy at the top of the curve to make that estimate. It's possible that both the curve will suddenly drop precipitously, and that most of those excess deaths were caused by some other phenomenon, but it's highly unlikely based on behavior of past respiratory pandemics.
Many more models people have discussed have predicted anywhere from 48,000 to (most commonly) around 200,000 deaths in the US from Covid-19. I think we'll probably end up around the 50,000 death figure, and that's with us shutting down our economy. I think it could have easily been much, much more (although probably nowhere near 2 million) if we had carried on business as usual (and could still end up like that if we're not careful).
So complain that the media latched on to the most dire model, that's OK. I agree the media sensationalizes. "If it bleeds, it leads".
But don't complain about the model itself. Those papers are always very clear about the degree of uncertainty.
I don't know of any serious scientist who is predicting global collapse by 2030 from global warming. Do you have someone specific in mind?
No, global warming has a very different dynamic. With a virus, if you do the right thing and protect yourself, you’re more likely to survive. With global warming, if you get a lot of people to emit less CO2, you might just end up making CO2 emissions cheaper for everyone else.
Make non-compliance painful enough, and the defectors will fall in line.
Maybe they don't, or maybe in the end that's all too little too late, which is why I'd suggest adding adaptation initiatives to your list.
It will never happen, because collectively we don't believe the cost of climate change is greater than the cost of leveling the landscape of incentives to reduce emissions + reducing emissions. The US could unilaterally leverage its remaining military lead to enact global change.
Saudi Arabia, Russia, Canada, China, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Iran, Kuwait
"including high polluters such as China, the US, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Indonesia and Mexico, which generate more than half the world's greenhouse gas emissions, will somehow drive down their carbon pollution voluntarily and assiduously without any binding enforcement mechanism"
What is the binding enforcement mechanism?
That is fascinating to me. We know the Paris accord cannot work without enforcement. It is economically disadvantageous to go first. As I said, it will never happen. We don't take the threat seriously, we don't believe it is an existential threat.
But yes, Global Warming has the bad quality that it is completely not obvious how to solve it. There is an entirely different dynamic at the side that accepts it for settling on a solution... and what is more disturbing, R&D and science are mostly neglected there too, even by the academics so prone on applying science to predict the problem.
There is an incredible lack of actual social and political scientists discussing those policies, and the few economists that are there seem focused on hitting known bad policies (what is easy to understand, since politicians keep pushing them).
On the long term, it's even worse, nobody seems to have any idea what to do. But we are doing the opposite than we are doing with Global Warming, we are heavily funding the kinds of research that may solve the problem. All of those kinds.
Most people have a vanishingly low probability of dying in the next 12 months. They shouldn’t care much if they get it or not, unless they’re worried about the welfare of others.
This seems very similar to CO2 to me, except that global warming affects younger people more, and coronavirus primarily affects older people.
It saddens me that our leaders won’t act to prevent a planetary disaster that will that affect their children and all future generations, but are willing many more times the resources on a comparatively minor crisis that will last at most a year.
what do you mean by this?
Oh, please, enough already!
Global warming is nowhere near to what a virus can do. This thing could have killed half the population of this planet in weeks had nobody done a thing about it.
The comparison is nonsensical on many fronts. Perhaps the most significant of them is the reality of climate change: We cannot do a thing about it. Period. We cannot change it. We cannot reverse it. We cannot magically fix it in fifty years.
This is already well understand by the scientific community. Researchers don't get out there and expose it because they would instantly destroy their careers, lose grants and generally ruin their lives. It's a truly dishonest and damaging feedback loop driven by ideology, money and politics.
All you need to do in order to understand this reality is analyze ice core atmospheric sample data. That's it. It's that simple. Calculate the rate of change with CO2 increasing and decreasing. Write down those numbers.
Then realize this is what would happen if humanity left earth next Monday. It would take somewhere around 50,000 years for CO2 to decrease by 100 ppm.
We cannot accelerate this rate of change by 1000x without likely killing all life on earth. We can't. It would require such vast amounts of energy and resources that it might even be beyond what's available on this planet.
In other words, everyone is lying: Climate change deniers are nuts and those who claim we can fix it within even a few generations and just as crazy. The entire thing has become politicized beyond all comprehension. Science has left the building.
So, no. Let's focus on pandemics, they are far more likely to wipe us out than the entire "save the planet" fantasy.
What? No, there's not a single credible model that predicts that this virus could have wiped out half the population, even with 0 mitigation efforts. Such a virus is a possibility, but it certainly wasn't this one.
EDIT 1: Even if my statement is off and the number is 10% to 25% --pick a number, any number-- it is still more serious than the fantasies we have been choosing to focus on.
The calculation must also include the massive mortality rate that would result from the collapse of all supply chains, medical systems, transportation, etc. People with "minor" medical conditions would die on the streets everywhere. The virus would kill indirectly by destroying society. Think it through. If the world did nothing the loss of life would be massive.
EDIT 2: Imagine a world without hospitals (at scale), doctors, nurses, transportation, factories, food, water, medicine, power, gas, petroleum.
You are focusing on direct mortality from the virus while ignoring that, without any mitigation at all, it would absolutely destroy society.
Look at what happened in Italy. Now shut down all hospitals and remove all mitigation. Get the picture? Now, go do the math on that scenario. A scenario where people die from strokes, heart attacks, infections from cuts, appendicitis, diabetes (no drugs), hypertension, tooth infections, etc.
Car accidents last year almost certainly cost way more QALYs* than COVID-19 will this year (particularly if Imperial College in their 13th report is right about how badly undercounted the case numbers are).
* Car accidents affect most ages and health levels relatively equally, while COVID-19 mostly kills the old and infirm who are unhealthy, with poor quality of life and have few years left.
In contrast, COVID-19 has a fatality rate that looks roughly like the normal yearly death rate for the UK (so you'd expect as many people to die at least partially of COVID-19 as of every other cause combined this year)... Making it around 50 million people killed if everyone got it (many won't) and if the world age distribution matched the UK.
But the average person killed by COVID-19 is a lot closer to death. Even if you just go by age the actuarial tables put for remaining life years, those killed will average a fifth as many years as those killed by car accidents.
Hmm
Ok, maybe COVID-19 WILL cause more QALY loss after all. But it's certainly not entirely clearcut.
Particularly if Imperial is right about >15% of Spain having already been infected (which would imply a MUCH lower death rate than that commonly reported given that Spain has only recorded 13 thousand deaths and has already passed their peak), in which case cars last year might still "win".
The future is bright. The 1918 Spanish Flu was followed by the roaring 20s!
At worst, without all the anxiety you’re opposing, too many people catch it at the same time and the death rate rises to match the hospitalisation rate. When that happens you’re not talking 75 million dead, you’re talking 375 million to 2.25 billion dead depending on which of the enormous range of hospitalisation estimates I look at.
Yeah, that's bollocks.
At least 80% of people don't even notice they have it (so the BBC has told me today).
Only 5% of cases require ICU, let alone 5% of infections (and if Imperial modelling is right that number is far lower). ICU saves at most half of the people who go in based on CDC numbers.
I have not seen any modelling by any source of even the slightest repute suggesting a 2 billion dead number is even possible. This alarmism makes people roll their eyes at all things COVID-19 and violate lockdowns, stick to the facts, they're bad enough.
"""Mississippi currently has the highest COVID-19 hospitalization rate in the nation, at 31 percent, according to states’ health department data gathered by The COVID Tracking Project. """ - https://mississippitoday.org/2020/04/01/mississippi-has-nati...
Even NYC is doing just fine. Number of beds needed was overestimated, Cuomo himself said they have enough respirators, and the hospital ship has a handful of patients on it.
The unnecessary panic diverts attention away from real problems like lack of PPE. We ordered GM to make respirators when what we really need, even in NYC, is PPE.
For example here in NJ we have about 40000 confirmed and tested cases and 1000 deaths. The mortality rate for our state is about 2%.
But if 80% of cases have no symptoms and are not tested, then the denominator should be 5x higher.
The real mortality rate is .4%
The same as a bad flu, but less than many flu seasons.
But about global climate change, it's crucial to keep in mind that it's just one aspect of human population growth and "economic development". Another huge impact is increasingly intensive and extensive land use, plus pollution with excess nutrients and toxic chemicals, which leads to loss of biodiversity and species extinctions.
Indeed, it's possible that COVID-19 and other zoonotic diseases, such as HIV and ebola virus disease (EVD), are also consequences of increasingly intensive and extensive land use. That might seem ironic, but it's just how ecosystems work.
Nobody likes to be wrong, and people always try to rewrite history so they were right all along. Rush Limbaugh made hay by hanging democrats with clips of their previous statements, and Jon Stewart made hay by doing the same thing to republicans.
Yes they did, because most of the people we're talking about had real time examples going on while they were denying there was a problem. In Italy, they could have looked at what happened in China, but chose not to. You could perhaps forgive that, possibly they thought that population density, smoking rates or other demographics made a huge difference. But Spain has no excuse at all because they literally had an example of an (for all intents an purposes) identical country right on their doorstep and still chose to ignore it. My wife is Spanish so I followed a lot of the reactions there and they were flat out ridiculous. Similarly with the e.g. the US - did they really think the virus was going to act differently there than in other parts of the world?
If it was all so obvious, the stock market would have dumped weeks before it did.
Did you sell in early February? Did you take out shorts on the market? Why not?
But my point still stands - if it was obvious to people, the market would have dumped earlier than mid-Feb.
But that is only useful if credibility is highly valued.
Neither are true of our society today. People both forget what someone said yesterday, or if they remember then they decide it didn't matter that much they were wrong.
“Under these conditions, there does not seem to be a significant difference between the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries and that of common coronaviruses (χ2 test, P=0.11). Of course, the major flaw in this study is that the percentage of deaths attributable to the virus is not determined, but this is the case for all studies reporting respiratory virus infections, including SARS-CoV-2.”
“Under these conditions, and all other things being equal, SARS-CoV-2 infection cannot be described as being statistically more severe than infection with other coronaviruses in common circulation.”
“Finally, in OECD countries, SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to be deadlier than other circulating viruses.”
We need to tell our HN moderator what CSS rules need to be changed to get this to work on all devices. Plus when adding a comment the syntax for the markdown should be given.
Otherwise, I agree with your suggestion [of providing more guidance on the reply screen] Until a better solution is implemented, would you help spread the word when you see code quotes used this way?
Edit: I'm not sure that modifying the presentation of code quotes fully solves the problem, as we still benefit from having two types of quotes, wrap and nowrap.
Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)
> “Under these conditions, and all other things being equal, SARS-CoV-2 infection cannot be described as being statistically more severe than infection with other coronaviruses in common circulation.”
> “Finally, in OECD countries, SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to be deadlier than other circulating viruses.”
This paper does simple math: attributed deaths / "confirmed cases" in "OECD" countries (not China) from January 1 to March 2. It includes such happy data points a "Spain: 123 confirmed cases, 0 deaths", which is horrifically, horrifically misleading. Johns Hopkins has Spain as 136,675 cases and 13,341 deaths at the time I write this.
For the sake of the poster's soul I hope this is a bot gone unintentionally awry and not a real person posting this.
Unfortunately, most people don't have the means (technical knowledge, time) to appropriately asses the real danger of this situation, so they have two options:
- Believe the liars.
- Don't believe the liars.
It turns out, the liars weren't lying this time.
That's only part of the problem. The real problem is that they don't want to do due diligence. It feels much better to believe/disbelieve things based on whether they want them too be true or not, rather than actually finding out they are true or not.
Because in most health scares historically this has been correct. That the danger had been wildly overestimated.
And even now, it is not clear that "we" have a correct estimation of the danger.
Recently I read an estimate that 50% of the infected have no symptons. I even read another estimate that 90% have no symptons. Should the latter be correct then we are overestimating the danger and wildly overreacting.
China’s case fatality rate is over 4% which is likely inflated. Dimond Princess tested everyone and has a 12/712 or 1.7% case fatality rate with many still in critical condition and the majority of positive results showing symptoms and a high percentage needing hospitalization.
A wildly optimistic estimate of 1 death per 200 cases x 70% infections is over 1 million dead Americans. And that’s assuming we could provide care for millions of people in critical condition.
The 50% of cases being asymptomatic is what makes it spread so easily and overwhelm our healthcare system. It is good news with regards to mortality, but the asymptomatic cases were predicted to be there by scientists already when it was in China only. If you read the reports, the models suggested the asymptomatic cases must be there long time ago.
Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner is a good starting point if you want to learn this power.
It seem to be more of systematic issue then just individual.
Almost all the talking heads are late Feb/early March. While it was clear something was happening "over there", and the fear was growing, it wasn't unreasonable at that point to not expect the unprecedented situation we are now in - and these people are not paid to offer nuance.
I'm not sure this easy soapbox judgement is much more constructive than the hacks it pillories.
You should update your Bayesian priors about the credibility and judgement of those people on topics such as this. And that IS constructive.
Doesn't mean that those people are useless, but unless you've seen a mea culpa from them, you should look warily on future such predictions. You should note to yourself "this person may be prone to downplaying some risks and interpreting things over-optimistically, with some amount of wishful thinking."
- People saying things with confidence that they didn't know to be true
- This happens all the time but with Coronavirus, the facts came to light within days of them saying this
I get what Paul Graham is saying here.
I'd be more impressed if he proposed a workable mechanism for actually holding them to account.
For 1), it's up to you to judge him based on your perceptions (I'd disagree), for 2) you'd need a little more than your gut feeling to call him wrong. Germany is testing extensively and resulting current estimates are around 1% mortality (WHO estimate: 3,4%).
More people being asymptomatic is not a cause for reacting less strictly, which is the view being promoted. If more people are asymptomatic, that's great news, but it does not impact how severely you should lockdown society as the DDOS'ing of the health sector is still clearly a problem to avoid looking at france, spain and italy. It only means that you'll be able to end the lockdown sooner than expected
While Sweden is seemingly continuing the exponential trend in both over the past 4-5 days
[0] https://www.sst.dk/da/corona/tal-og-overvaagning the chart say "Indlagte patienter med bekræftet COVID-19 pr. dag "
Even he doesn't know if he's right, but apparently that doesn't stop him from using his influence to push his hot take.
At this point, the only thing that can be claimed with confidence is our global ignorance of this pandemic, and how much more we have to learn about it.
But I’m working on a similar concept: https://verifact.io which will be launching soon
https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-has-played-an-extremely-dange...
We could be more tolerant if said "predictions" were in late December or early January. Persisting mid March? That's a threat to national security, endangering the health and economy of a nation. This should be up there considering the scale of the misinformation encouraging people to be a danger.
Terrorism is the use of violence to instore a climate of fear, sap morale, and win especially when inferior in number and means.
This is symmetrical: the use of words to instore a climate of confidence, boost morale and conduct to imprudence by using vastly superior media means to shape the behavior of people.
Someone should count all the damage this has done in terms of lives, of livelihoods, of GDP, of wasted resources, and make them pay. People get to pull this shit because there are no consequences for a catch phrase on Fox news, and all the braggadocio and tough guy talk must be accounted for.
One of the cases where being or feigning to be an idiot shouldn't save someone.
If they say everything is fine, then either 1) things are, in which case they look good after the fact for remaining calm or 2) things go south and they can deflect and point to other countries that are in the same boat.
If on the other hand they warn of incoming disaster and lock things down, still one of two things happen. 1) everything is indeed fine and they get destroyed for crashing the economy. or 2) the economy gets locked down and the pandemic isn't so severe. But the damage to the economy is still there and there will be no higher death count that could've happened to compare against. In this case they probably won't get much credit either.
So it seems to them then start acting early brings no benefits and only downsides.
https://news.yahoo.com/fox-news-reportedly-fears-early-11453...
Fox News also pointed out several things that the left media wrong.
1. Washingtonpost telling in early Feb that public should be wary of government asking for a shutdown. The video showed that Bill Maher wanted the pandemic so that Trump gets ousted.
2. Fox News also pointed inaccuracies in npr’s article.
Looks like each side is blaming the other.
How do you tell which side aid correct. The left too wants to destroy Trump’s reputation. Left is a hateful group which wants to bury the right.
Even under the best possible conditions, humans are famously bad at predicting the future. Why then, when faced with a situation that is riddled with known unknowns, are so many people so eager to declare they know the future? And how do these fabricated declarations help us in any way? They only serve to obscure how truly in the dark we are about our current predicament.
For example, don't tell me that you think Microsoft is a good or bad company. Tell me how many shares of Microsoft you own or how you're shorting Microsoft.
Now, every time he talks about something political, I make it clear his opinions are not welcome in this family and that until he can stop spreading disinformation he's sitting at the intellectual kids table.
The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. If he can't get this basic scientific fact correct then he's almost certainly wrong about everything else. At best everything he argues should be held with a massive red flag.
If you're scientifically illiterate you don't get to participate in society.
You see... This shows care about the rating, and keep us informed. In times like this, when people are watching the news 24/7 they must find people who can talk and give their opinion. In many cases, the information appear to be wrong.
Maybe we could have a competition for graphic artists and award a prize for the best icon or visual idiom for this?
Also, journalists (or let's call them news media agencies) often abuse this by reporting of "claims by this" on the topic rather than the topic and in that way refusing any iota of responsibility for what they put on the spotlight.
People don't have the time to deeply engage in subjects themselves to understand what is true. So we take a shortcut of uncritically adopting ideas from elsewhere. I see this usually play out as the most repeated ideas coming from any direction are the ones taken as correct. There is some amount of ranking of sources: the New York Times or in some cases a professional network is given a higher ranking. But normally none of the sources are experts.
https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/124681200696072601...
Not sure if Paul is looking at this kind of thing, but from this essay I'm not sure he really grasps how fractured the media consumption landscape is at the moment. The tide hasn't come out from under many, if any, of these people. Their position is as strong as ever. They have their own moons, their own oceans and their own tides.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Mar 2nd.
https://twitter.com/germanrlopez/status/1247210000155643904/...
San Francisco Mayor London Breed on Mar 2nd.
https://twitter.com/germanrlopez/status/1247210000155643904/...
(Were those supposed to be two different links?)
I feel some of the difference might be due to California's experience with fires and earthquakes. The politicians have a habit of listening and acting on what public safety officials tell them. And the public tends understand. For instance last year they started shutting off the power during high wind events. They aren't happy with PGE but no ones been calling for the politicians heads over it.
I should be clear, I have no love for windbags like Hannity and Limbaugh but when you want to talk about credibility, you should have at least a modicum of self-awareness of your tribal alignment.
Ideally it would be available via a decentralized source.
AND ideally a crowd-sourced platform so anyone can contribute.
Also we need the government to define different TYPES of news. Opinion-based and fact-based. Fact-based obviously will be held to extremely high standards, but the hope would be they would be rewarded for it in the market.
You need more sample points, larger multipliers, or prior expectation of seeing an exponential curve to see that as exponential growth.
What? The former is exponential and the latter is linear. They are the definition of different.
The 30th number in the first series is 536870912.
The 30th number in the second series is 59.
You can't say just from 4 data points. Real data is noisy. Imagine each number is ±1.
I agree that it's worthwhile intuition in many cases, but really not here and even people equipt with both the data and the mathematical expertise to use it there have also made many bad calls on this.
I try to record predictions I find in the news. Most statements by politicians and journalists are too vague though. You need to get from "more people will die from COVID-19" to "more than 1.000.000 people will die from COVID-19 before May according to worldometers.info".
For me the homework is not only on the political side but also to the medical side to present the right statistics - even if it might be ethically borderline. Because only when the threat is defined to economy, healthcare system and danger for specific groups then you can do a clear data-driven decision.
Sean Hannity (Fox News)
Rush Limbaugh (independent, right wing)
Pete Hegdeth (Fox News)
Lou Dobbs (Fox Business)
Tomi Lahren (Fox News)
Jeanine Pirro (Fox News)
Dr. Marc Siegel (Fox News)
Geraldo Rivera (Fox News)
Laura Ingraham (Fox News)
Jesse Waters (Fox News)
Matt Schlapp (shown on Fox News)
Dr Drew Pinsky (shown on Fox News)
Ed Henry (Fox News)
Ainsley Earhardt (Fox News)
I think it's misleading to call this "a video of TV journalists and politicians." It's a video of Fox News journalists and Rush Limbaugh and right wing politicians.
I doubt it. Getting one random prediction right doesn't confer credibility. Getting several right becomes more interesting.
"The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."
I was in the "it's just a flu" camp through early February, and then changed my mind pretty dramatically a few weeks before the U.S. (or Hacker News, for that matter) consensus shifted. It wasn't that I held an insincere belief beforehand; it's that the data initially supports two possible interpretations, and that as more data becomes available, "it's just a flu" becomes less likely and "this is a serious pandemic that will result in lots of life" becomes more likely.
For me, the critical pieces of information were details about what the Chinese definitions of "mild", "severe", and "critical" cases meant. I'd seen the death rates by age, which had a death rate of under 0.2% for people under 50 and it going up to 6-11% for > 70. I'd also seen case breakdowns where illnesses were described as 80% "mild", 15% "severe", 5% "critical", and 2% "death".
A logical conclusion to draw from that is that for 80% of cases, it really will be just a flu, an additional 15% would be a really sucky flu (pneumonia not requiring hospitalization), and 5% of mostly elderly patients require hospitalization.
The information that changed my mind was the clarification that 80% mild was broken down into 40% mild (cold symptoms) and 40% moderate (walking pneumonia), the 15% of severe cases all required hospitalization, and that hospitalization rates were not that different (factor of 2x, rather than factor of 30x) between young and old people. That and some math about how many hospitalizations that is vs. hospital beds available in the U.S, and the reports coming out of Italy that made it clear that the high death rate was not because of China's air pollution or smoking rates (both of which were reasonable hypotheses with the data available, particularly the increased male mortality and preponderance of smoking among Chinese men).
On a systemic level, it's entirely possible that the decision makers simply have not updated their mental models with this new information. There are a bunch of cognitive biases why they wouldn't: normalcy bias, unwillingness to look at unpleasant facts, and commitment bias (once they've publicly stated that it's just a flu it's hard to walk that back without looking like a fool). There's no need to assume that they're willfully spouting bullshit because they know they won't get caught. It's entirely possible that they're spouting bullshit because they believe it.
> Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have.
I have very little hope here. Collective memory does not seem to last more than a year. The cynic in me believes that once toilet paper is available in pre-corona quantities again, we'll forget about the harmful mis-predictions.
And if recent history is an accurate indicator, then I'm afraid folks are still going to get away with lies and false predictions (not to even speak of harmful actions.)
PG obviously has better things to do than watch as much current affairs punditry as me, because people verifiably fail such credibility tests all the time, there just aren't enough of us keeping a tally, and the interviewers don't go out out their way to pick the pundits up on it because they're all part of the same circus.
Interestingly, Tetlock's 'superforecasters' predict a 30% chance of more than 350,000 coronavirus deaths in the US: https://goodjudgment.io/covid/dashboard/
This is up from 17% on March 21
There was no danger to them, and a lot of the same old hay to be made from the faithful in the meantime. The problem is that the "meantime" didn't last long enough, and now many of their faithful are instead fearful.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/covid-19-and-swedis...
Read a real source instead of this nazi garbage
It has been my experience that as I learned more, my statements became more and more equivocal until these days I tend to think more about various probabilities of what might be correct. I miss the surety of youthful opinion.
No, this is a terrible test of credibility. Journalists and politicians often go the other way, amplifying the danger, or outrage, or worry. Taking the outside view, it's overwhelmingly likely that any forecasted pandemic or disaster doesn't happen; we almost always get sky-is-falling predictions and then nothing really seems to happen from the perspective of most viewers or readers. Swine flu, bird flu, ebola, zika, on and on: these have previously in media-market memory been hyped as global catastrophes in the making, and then they turn into localized awfulness. This time, there were many more people than previously who seemed willing to espouse the outside view that this would probably blow over, and it seems incredibly ironic that this time, it didn't go away, and now those same categories of people who have been previously criticized for fear mongering are being lambasted for not fear mongering enough...
...because WHO and those local regions spend considerable time and effort preventing catastrophe.
I go to NY Times or Fox news and it's seems like so much fear based reporting.
I go to NPR or BBC and it seems much more level headed.
Would love to have an objective measurement of fear based sentiment analysis of news sources.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUvf_SmUUAEMRiR?format=jpg&name=...
Neither of which applies this time.
Here's a project for someone who works in the video space. Start with a Trump speech. As soon as he says something demonstrably false, the image freezes and a loud buzzer sounds. The picture of Trump shrinks and moves to a corner of the screen. Then the correct information appears, possibly including a contradictory clip from Trump. After that, the main video resumes.
Advanced version: do this in real time with machine learning.
Now that would get you hits on Youtube.
[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf
[2] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/i_changed_my_mi.htm...
I would politely ask HNers who were in the is just the flu camp to reflect (please don't comment, just reflect) why I was wrong, what bias or whatever flaw my thinking had and avoid blaming X or Y for your mistake. Btw I am not accusing people here, I also was not anticipating things to go like this.
m.o. = modus operandi
Oh, the irony!
I don't think linking a partisan outlet singling out a partisan outlet from the opposite side of the isle is a good way to treat this issue. PG apparently doesn't either, and didn't name names.
Source: https://i.imgur.com/Tn0UtWT.png
If the news media blankly reports what is happening, and avoided adding layers of interpretation on top of it, their reputations would be in better shape right now.
What the stance of opinion pieces. ppl seem to say opinion articles cannot be judged because they are opinions by definition. I find that infuriating but i have to bite by lip and agree.
If anything, it's the rampant bias that has produced so many blindspots.
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/on-fox-news-s...
how do you know hes only referring to right wing websites?
As we gear up to celebrate the #LunarNewYear in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the city because of #coronavirus.
And then again in March (https://twitter.com/NYCHealthCommr/status/123429834432909312...):
Despite this development, New Yorkers remain at low risk for contracting #COVID19. As we confront this emerging outbreak, we need to separate facts from fear, and guard against stigma and panic.
Or the NYC Chair of New York City Council Health Committee tweeting (https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1226566648729133056):
In powerful show of defiance of #coronavirus scare, huge crowds gathering in NYC's Chinatown for ceremony ahead of annual #LunarNewYear parade. Chants of "be strong Wuhan!"
If you are staying away, you are missing out
Or Bill de Blasio tweeting (https://twitter.com/BilldeBlasio/status/1234648718714036229):
Since I’m encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus, I thought I would offer some suggestions. Here’s the first: thru Thurs 3/5 go see “The Traitor” @FilmLinc . If “The Wire” was a true story + set in Italy, it would be this film.
Or does it only count when its Fox News?
What do you think about it?
It looks like California and Texas are making better choices than NY or Florida. Trump was too slow to act on testing, but was criticized for acting too quickly with the travel bans. The most credible and forward-thinking leaders on pandemics include George W Bush[1] and Arnold Schwarzenegger[2]; and their best-laid plans crumbled under later Democratic administrations.
Credibility is a funny thing. For some things, people are very credible but still drop the ball in big ways. Honestly it's just hard to know how someone is going to act in a major disaster. I would have guessed that if anyone were to overreact on a Chinese virus pandemic, it would be Trump. And people that are highly competent during normal situations might start behaving strangely and lose credibility quickly during more interesting times (like lying about masks not helping ordinary people).
There isn't a magic team of scientists that has all the answers. There is a science to pandemics, but there's a fair amount of guesswork, as well, especially when China was hiding so much information. Politicians need to make decisions based on incomplete information. So do doctors, for that matter.
So let's have some humility and realize that a lot of formerly-credible people are also in the process of screwing this up. It's not just the shoot-from-the-hip politicians.
[1] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/homeland/pandemi... [2] https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/31/...
Or the media rarely report any information because it's Chinese? Search for covid-19 papers published in Jan, Feb most of them were from China. Some of the data directly contradicts with Chinese CDC numbers.
(My own pet interpretation is that political news reporting is a circus, reality-adjacent at best, and most journalists leave you worse-informed for having listened to them regardless of their party affiliation.)
Sure, Trump is bad and his sycophants in the media are bad. But they are symptoms. The disease is the people who put them there and have been keeping them there, by not holding them to account: Red America.
At times I've believed that this virus was an absolutely terrible virus, and at other times I've believed that things were overblown.
I've read and seen interviews of more calm and rational experts and think that perhaps the original claims were more correct, or at least the response by governments are more damaging than the virus itself.
In the end this virus' run may end up not being worse or not much worse than a flu season of a certain level of severity as initially thought, but the future consequences on our rights and liberties by media induced panic and state authoritarian measures might be long lasting.
I really don't want to see certain people calling others fascists, nazis and communists in the future after seeing what they've supported during our current times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pcQFTzck_c&feature=emb_logo
Fox News is deeply wrong, but we should all look inward to our own behavior and if we’ve been unkind or unrespectful, we should take responsibility for creating this situation. Do you really think that yelling at, shaming, or embarrassing people will get them to change? I don’t think research supports that position.
I somewhat agree but I would argue that it's the Democratic and Republican parties that are religions, not the philosophies themselves. They both are fine on their own just like religious philosophies.
It's the people who basically form a cult, give it a name, and interpret the philosophies that are the problem. It becomes all about growing your cult to be bigger than the other cults so you have more power. To get people interested you attack the other side instead of having intelligent debates. They operate within there own echo chambers.
Most media companies pick a side and then attack the other side. People like watching other people get very emotional so that leads to more viewers. It's why there are so many "reality" shows.
The problem with this kind of situation is that, unless you take action when it feels too early, all you will have at the end are your tears and saying "it was too late".
Being "doomsdayer" does not necessarily mean confidence in the situation. It's more about accepting that overreacting is much more desirable than underreacting when facing something exponential where you're constantly 2 weeks behind knowing what the reality is
I wish that were true but it is not. It is entirely possible to take actions that make a bad situation worse. The consequences of an economic shutdown, for example, are unknown. The worst case of global depression and supply chain disruption is just as bad as the virus itself, if not more so. I do not know how one makes good decisions in a situation of highly uncertain knowledge and severe consequences.
I think we are in "less bad" territory, i.e. how do we balance multiple considerations such that while not leading to any outcome that could be considered "good", is at least not catastrophic. I don't envy those who have to make such decisions.
For a simplified example just compare the cost of taking actions that make you break the curve 4 days too early with the situation where you break the curve 4 days too late
> For a simplified example just compare the cost of taking actions that make you break the curve 4 days too early with the situation where you break the curve 4 days too late
But does it seem that implausible that cooler heads might find a solution that doesn't cost at least $20 trillion?
But even in the situation the US is now, doing something, anything, now. Might still be a lot better than the alternative
Someone needs to take an economic look at the Corona minimisation strategies. We do this already for other policy areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life). Does the economic impact divided by the Value of Life look in line with other areas?
Thing is, there are credible voices taking a counter perspective, and they should be heard and given blame (and praise) for their accuracy in prediction.
Media: tis but a cough.
Really paul? You are struck by how wrong journalists and politicians are? They exist to lie and push an agenda. You've written in the past about the shady aspects of the news industry. And I seriously doubt you harbored any positive views of politicians.
> These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said.
They make false predictions and get away with it because their agenda and the agenda of their fans/supporters line up. This is true of the fox side and the cnn/msnbc side. Have you forgotten about the predictions of yellowcake? The predictions of a short war in iraq? Remember mission accomplished? What about the predictions of a Hillary victory? What about all the predictions about trump/russia collusion? What about all the predictions that trump would be tossed from office/resign/jailed/etc?
> And the tide has just gone out like never before.
No paul. They've all been shamelessly naked sun bathing on the beach for everyone to see. It's not like they are hiding their bias.
> Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw,
I doubt it. Just like people seem to have forgotten what a hack trevor noah is. In just the last few years, if people cared about being lied to, everything from Rolling Stones, NYTimes, WaPo, Fox news, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, etc would be out of business.
Brian Williams lied at NBC and then got a job at MSNBC. Isn't that nice?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Williams#Controversies
I hate to say it but your post seemed more like an attempt to win political points rather than expressing disappointment in the news industry since you were already fairly skeptical of the news industry to begin with.
The video linked in that article is a tour-de-force of out of context snippets. Anyone could splice together a video just like that one with material from any TV news network or politician, from the tip of South America to the extremes of Siberia and everything in between.
In many ways, and sadly, PG reveals (perhaps proudly) his own bias on this front. This is very much a hit job on Fox News and the right. One can't claim intellectual superiority and do this at the same time. Sorry.
This isn't to say that Fox News isn't without fault. They are. Everyone is. NOBODY understood this well enough to say anything intelligent about it. NOBODY, from politicians to doctors and, yes, newscasters and celebrities.
What we can say is that nearly everything that was said or predicted during the early phases of this thing by almost everyone has now been proven wrong by this cruel virus and its behavior. That isn't an indication of nefarious intent. Ignorance? Yes. Malicious intent? I doubt it. Political battle? Yes, likely, sadly...because nobody really understood this thing was going to get ugly.
Faulting anyone, from Trump to local officials is, from my perspective, intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. This is where I have a problem with the media. I am sure the founders did not pen the first amendment with the intent of providing protection for extreme political alignment in the media. We have, somehow, allowed this to happen, and, what is worse, we have not come up with a way to curtail it.
Watching US coverage and press conferences is a display of just how politically aligned the media has become. Their focus is, 24/7, to attack the political party they are not aligned with. In order to accomplish this they are more than willing to take things out of context, distort reality, fabricate narratives and disseminate lies. As someone who works hard to remain as neutral as possible, a registered independent who has equal disdain for both major parties, this is truly revolting to watch. Sometimes I feel like a visitor from another planet watching from an orbiting spacecraft while the people below play stupid games to destroy each other rather than unite for the benefit of all. Unbelievable.
While I agree with most of the observations in this article I wish PG had taken the time to find real examples of ignorance without resorting to a left-wing hit piece on the right wing by using an array of out of context pieces cut together.
While I can't be on a spacecraft orbiting above the US, I can take a look at what our approach to COVID-19 looked from other parts of the world. For example, SkyNews Australia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKLx5MhTpk
Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health herself, was, for some incomprehensible reason, telling New Yorkers to just go out, gather, use subways and change nothing other than wash their hands and stay home if they were sick:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2DetEolgOg
And, before someone says "you took that out of context" (I did not edit the video so...), here's a full press briefing where she goes into clear detail about "no need to do any special anything...":
https://youtu.be/NEhLOp7UGNM?t=1659
I mean, this is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health!!!!
I cued-up the video to her statement so you can see and hear it from the horses mouth and confirm what I present above. If interested, I urge you to rewind to the start and watch the entire press briefing. If you do, you'll hear a bunch of good things and a bunch of incomprehensibly bad things, among which are:
- Just like the normal flu
- We should relax
- We don't think it's going to be as bad as it is in other placesThe video linked in that article is a tour-de-force of out of context snippets. Anyone could splice together a video just like that one with material from any TV news network or politician, from the tip of South America to the extremes of Siberia and everything in between.
In many ways, and sadly, PG reveals (perhaps proudly) his own bias on this front. This is very much a hit job on Fox News and the right. One can't claim intellectual superiority and do this at the same time. Sorry.
This isn't to say that Fox News isn't without fault. They are. Everyone is. NOBODY understood this well enough to say anything intelligent about it. NOBODY, from politicians to doctors and, yes, newscasters and celebrities.
What we can say is that nearly everything that was said or predicted during the early phases of this thing by almost everyone has now been proven wrong by this cruel virus and its behavior. That isn't an indication of nefarious intent. Ignorance? Yes. Malicious intent? I doubt it. Political battle? Yes, likely, sadly...because nobody really understood this thing was going to get ugly.
Faulting anyone, from Trump to local officials is, from my perspective, intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. This is where I have a problem with the media. I am sure the founders did not pen the first amendment with the intent of providing protection for extreme political alignment in the media. We have, somehow, allowed this to happen, and, what is worse, we have not come up with a way to curtail it.
Watching US coverage and press conferences is a display of just how politically aligned the media has become. Their focus is, 24/7, to attack the political party they are not aligned with. In order to accomplish this they are more than willing to take things out of context, distort reality, fabricate narratives and disseminate lies. As someone who works hard to remain as neutral as possible, a registered independent who has equal disdain for both major parties, this is truly revolting to watch. Sometimes I feel like a visitor from another planet watching from an orbiting spacecraft while the people below play stupid games to destroy each other rather than unite for the benefit of all. Unbelievable.
While I agree with most of the observations in this article I wish PG had taken the time to find real examples of ignorance without resorting to a left-wing hit piece on the right wing by using an array of out of context pieces cut together.
While I can't be on a spacecraft orbiting above the US, I can take a look at what our approach to COVID-19 looked from other parts of the world. For example, SkyNews Australia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKLx5MhTpk
Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health herself, was, for some incomprehensible reason, telling New Yorkers to just go out, gather, use subways and change nothing other than wash their hands and stay home if they were sick:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2DetEolgOg
And, before someone says "you took that out of context" (I did not edit the video so...), here's a full press briefing where she goes into clear detail about "no need to do any special anything...":
https://youtu.be/NEhLOp7UGNM?t=1659
I mean, this is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health!!!!
I cued-up the video to her statement so you can see and hear it from the horses mouth and confirm what I present above. If interested, I urge you to rewind to the start and watch the entire press briefing. If you do, you'll hear a bunch of good things and a bunch of incomprehensibly bad things, among which are:
- Just like the normal flu
- We should relax
- We don't think it's going to be as bad as it is in other places
- We have been ahead of this from day one
- Go about your lives
- Go about your business
- There has to be prolonged exposure
- Just wash your hands
- There is no need to do anything special anything in the community,
we want New Yorkers to go about their daily lives, ride the subway,
ride the bus, go see your neighbors
- We have the equipment
- It's not like we are dealing with something we haven't dealt with before
- We have the ability to address this
- We have the capacity to keep this contained
- Like the normal flu
This is the real reason for which places like New York and Louisiana are in such trouble. Their leadership failed the people. They failed miserably. They were ignorant, political and just plain wrong. And they got everyone infected. It's one thing to start with a handful of cases. It's quite another to tell people to pile into subways, festivals, restaurants and other high-traffic public environments and effectively help the virus replicate. You then start your odyssey with thousands of cases, not a handful, which can't end well.
Either we dismiss this as collective ignorance and excuse it as such, or we don't. Yet, other states took it very seriously. People took it seriously. The trigger for most was when Trump shut down travel from China. That was on January 31st. Love him or hate him, an neutral observer would instantly understand this was a seriously out of band move and one that could not have been taken lightly or unilaterally. That was a very strong signal that something was seriously wrong.
For me, that event, added to the R0 data that was coming in, told me this was serious and it high likelihood of going way beyond China. During the first week of February I bought three months of supplies for our family. Various states around the nation started to take measures as well. Places like NY and Louisiana, instead, decided closing the doors to China was racist and, as if the virus cared about political defiance, actually promoted mass gatherings and helped the virus spread and infect large numbers of people.
Yes, I agree with the general message issued by PG. However, I strongly suggest the article needs to be edited in order to remove the intellectually dishonest and politically one-sided focus. It simply isn't true and it is wrong. There's a very direct and well documented link in the video and Twitter record of who in the US is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of people getting infected and likely tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people dying.
This isn't a joke. People are losing partners, mothers, fathers, siblings, sons and daughters. Let's not lie or distort the truth due to political alignment and effectively join the very group we are accusing of being dishonest.
Those of us with I.T. managers have been putting up with this forever:
Hardly anyone at this point is arguing that there actually is an issue. After all, flu is still a dangerous illness, esp. for certain groups of people, so even plainly calling this COVID thing "just a flu" is not equivalent to saying that it's not an issue. It's your framing of the phrase "just a flu", that makes it look like some kind of heresy or insult.
And, most importantly, why do you call out only journalists and politicians, while there are many perferctly credible people, - first of all, medical experts, - who keep saying, that the scale of panic is dumb? How about doing some reading and fact-checking before crying wolf?
No, but I believe that in contrast to the flu, there are millions of healthy people (rightly) staying home right now.
Are you saying that the lockdowns are unwarranted?
As for me, I personally believe that the medicine is worse than the disease in this case. We can be quite certain at this point that there will be lots of casualties from the economical disruption, and whether the unconstrained virus could have caused more suffering is a question to be answered.
Who?
No, it literally is not. The flu is caused by influenza. Covid19 is caused by sars-cov-2, a relative of SARS-CoV which caused SARS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... ). It is also a (more distant) relative of HCoV-OC43 which is one of the many viruses that cause the cold.
The problems that influenza and sars-cov-2 cause for us are pretty different: Influenza mutates fairly quickly so we're not able to stop it completely with our otherwise highly effective vaccines, while even though they mutate comparatively much slower we don't have any effective drug treatments for coronaviruses: Some are not dangerous enough to have been economically interesting to develop treatments for while others were stopped by non-drug interventions (like the sick people dying too quickly and the detection of fever before the virus was highly communicable).
Eh? No, it is not. Who told you this? Whoever it was, stop listening to them. Bloody hell.
Yes, I’ve got a touch of the bubonic plague today. Oh, I’m using ‘bubonic plague’ in the broader sense; I stubbed my toe.
John Ioannidis MD of Stanford University:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw
Knut Wittkowski, for twenty years head of The Rockefeller University's Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGC5sGdz4kg
A collection of fact-checked links to public statements and critical research about COVID-19, updated DAILY (scroll to bottom for the most recent additions):
Hold them into account.
We've been conditioned over the last 100+ years that life - especially life of white people, but never mind that bit - is precious. So now, when white people's lives are in danger you suddenly want to go all super rational and equate lives with paying out unemployment? Good luck with that.
So this utilitarian argument you are making is going to be a very difficult one to put across and if you feel otherwise about it then it is up to you to stick your neck out, I want no part of it, and neither do most people. The argument that the handicapped, aging and ill should be disposed of has been made before, it didn't end well.
And continue to make insightful predictions:
https://medium.com/@andrewt3000/covid-19-and-hypoxemia-697bc...
Also, where did the free thinking go? Not ostracising everyone that has a different view than the current world narrative.
There are dozens of sme in virus-related fields that are voicing the opposite of what govs and msm are saying. This is a great lesson for us all.
Let’s see it dismantle our current “ways of living”. Time for something new!
But you also write: "These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."
I'm not so sure about that. These politicians and journalists have consciously a/b tested their audiences into tribes of absolute uncritical loyalty. They feed on anti-intellectualism and cheap gut reactions.
At a certain level of responsibility, incompetence becomes malice. These people are far beyond that threshold. They will soon have the blood of thousands on their hands.
I'm not sure the people of the US will be able to keep them to account, but I certainly hope so.
We have 70k dead as of 3/6/2020 and it's already slowing. The flu kills between 290,000 and 650,000 worldwide yearly, according to the WHO.
The actual "damage" this virus has "caused", which the flu doesn't, is the economic shock of everyone being forced at once to not go out and spend. We have rightly done this to save the weaker among us, at the great expense of the masses' financial future.
The difference is the flu is much less deadly than coronavirus when you catch it. The only reason flu deaths are higher for the year at the moment is because the flu is already spread worldwide starting every year in flu season, which begins around September/October in the northern hemisphere, whereas Coronavirus didn’t even emerge in humans till late November/December, was highly localized to one region of China and transmission out of china was slowed by a dramatic lockdown of 750 million chinese citizens and travel restrictions placed by external countries in January.
The video Paul Graham references includes many examples of people saying they aren’t worried about the disease and that even if they catch it there’s no reason to be worried, in reality we are seeing plenty of relatively healthy people who would not have been killed by flu dying from the disease.
Not sure when it last happened, 1918?
What's different about this virus is in just a span of a few months it has claimed 70k deaths. At the rate people are dying, if we just let it run its course without any social distancing (like flu runs its course), we could have millions of deaths.
COVID-19 is ~10X deadlier than flu looking at the current numbers.
If we just let the economy go as is, with our healthcare overwhelmed and >1% of our population dying, that would be terrible. I don't know if I want to live in such a heartless world. Remember even young people are dying albeit at a lower rate.
One of my friends who did get COVID-19 explained that its not like a regular flu. The feeling of having a brick on your chest and not being able to breath is real. It really tires you and brings your worst fears to life. The worst 2 weeks of his life.
That is not a description of regular flu ^
This isn't to say COVID-19 isn't bad, or doesn't have the potential to become worse. Instead it's saying that i'm shocked we don't take a preventable disease like annual flu more seriously, and that we've internalized the cost of all those deaths.
(I know people get really riled up when I say the above. If it makes you angry, please take the time to write a cogent, reasoned response based on data, not anecdotes or emotions. We know that people's anecdotal experience has a strong effect on their personal feelings, and that this is an emotionally charged time.)
But in the meantime, we're stuck with a pandemic that is not baked in, so while it may be "less bad" in some ways than the flu, it is catastrophically worse because no healthcare systems are prepared to deal with it.
That's the difference between biology and medicine.
It's unclear at this team what purpose super-intensive hospitalization for covid serves. That's something we're only going to understand in time.
(note, I did my training at a hospital medical center and my biology work was health-oriented).
Your question is circular. It assumes that the severity and death rate of flu is the same as with COVID19. There's no reason to believe that's true at this point.
> or perhaps covid shouldn't have such a high rate?
The hospitalization rate is what it is. People aren't going to the hospital with COVID19 for the fun of it. They're terribly sick.
OF course there are a few ICU's with high occupancy rates due to the nature of the disease and the intensity with which it hits high population areas with older populations.
However, overall on a MACRO level WORLD wide it's no worse than a season of the flu.
The rational data is: under 60 with no pre-existing conditions..you're basically immune.
This whole thing appears to be a massive fear campaign.
But if you bring up ANYTHING counter to the prevailing narrative, you're viciously attacked by people. VICIOUSLY. Like you're some sort of murdering child killer.
No one is interested in discussion or thinking about this. They just repeat the narrative.
The people I've discussed this with... it's all mantric repetitions of 'flatten the curve' of 'social distancing saves lives' and people have not looked at the data or anything to back this up!
I feel like the average person could be told to wear a dog cone to 'stop covid' and we would have a population of people walking around with dog cones around their necks.
It's actually disappointing and embarrassing.
It is at least 10x more lethal and much more contagious. We will bear the brunt of it in the US because we didn't take it seriously for so long. The only reason we aren't at 2,000+ deaths per day in the US is because now we are taking it seriously. That death rate sustained for a typical flu season (4 months) would be 240,000 deaths. This is serious. If we never took it seriously the death toll would be well over a million. And that is just in the US. Downplaying the severity of it will get people killed.
Yes we should take flu more seriously. But that doesn't make this not so bad.
You are making predictions that we have absolutely no confidence about. That's not helpful. I'm saying we don't have the data to claim what you're claiming.
The data so far shows that it's the same lethality or less in people under 60 y.o. with no pre-existing conditions which is a huge proportion of the world and it may even be LESS because 80% of those tested have NO OR MINOR SYMPTOMS so who knows how many have it and haven't been tested!
It's not even remotely serious at all in that population.
Context matters in epidemiology am I incorrect?
1. COVID-19 has not killed more people than the flu in the US so far
2. Therefore COVID-19 is comparable to the flu
3. We have not responded so seriously to the flu in the past as we are to this new virus
4. Therefore... people are messed up, I'm shocked
I'm pointing out that [1] does not imply [2] for the very basic reason that the situation is still unfolding. I think you even recognize this ("This isn't to say COVID-19 isn't bad, or doesn't have the potential to become worse"), so I'm wondering why you would pin your conclusion on COVID-19 being comparable to the flu.
A pretty good video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVIGhz3uwuQ
You're not actually suggesting anything so there's nothing to get directly angry about. But since you don't suggest anything, you leave it to people to infer what you really mean, and then there may be good reason to get angry.
Are you suggesting that we should have treated covid-19 like the flu -- although one without a vaccine -- and just went about our normal lives? If so, how much faster do you think our medical systems would have been overwhelmed and what do you think we could have done about that? You can crunch numbers... estimate the numbers dead from covid-19 without any curve-flattening efforts and the additional dead due to the medical system being overwhelmed.
Or are you suggesting something else? We can't read your mind over the internet.
My second point is about the response to covid. To me it's unclear (and it won't be clear to the epidemiologists for a few years) whether the reactions we have taken had the effects we predicted. Much of what we're doing now, it's actually unclear what would have happened if we hadn't has social distancing etc, due to the extremely low rate of testing.
Another issue is that large numbers of scientists have dropped their regular work and are working on covid... most of them will not produce useful results (in terms of health care) and instead, their daily work is being forgotten. This will have long-term consequences for scientific productivity without having a large outcome for covid.
I think making predictions on how many people "could have died" when we're doing extremely limited testing isn't helpful.
Agreed (though in the US we do have a yearly nation-wide vaccination program, imperfect as it is, and largely staff and equip hospitals to handle the high-water mark of cases).
> I think making predictions on how many people "could have died" when we're doing extremely limited testing isn't helpful.
I disagree with that. The alternative to making imperfect predictions (predictions are imperfect by nature) is to not make predictions. Without predictions you can't make reasonable decisions to direct your future.
Of course, when your predictions are too far off you can't make good decisions to direct your future either, but that just suggests you should try to make the best predictions you can (hence the science and study of epidemiology), not that you shouldn't make predictions.
If you don't make predictions (or you make them based on hunches or by other low quality means) you're just throwing yourself randomly into the future and are unlikely to get good outcomes.
We come out of quarantine it blows up again, we go back into quarantine.
That's as infeasable solution as this current lockdown quarantine.
Epidemiologists are likely to know the answers to these sorts of questions in a few years.
Hundreds of thousands of patients and no reports of repeat healthy patients.
Preliminary studies with macaque monkeys show that an immunity is built.
There's plenty of data to show that an infection is built.
And you're also noting that the US currently has 9,616 recorded deaths from COVID-19? Whereas data puts the worst flu season since 2010-2011 at 61,000 (2017-2018) deaths over an entire year, right? Again, with various provisions to help slow this virus already in place?
And you're also noting that hospitalization rates would include the regular flu, typical hospital visits that require an ICU, AND hospital visits from COVID-19, right?
Sure, I get the point of taking the flu more seriously, and I agree 100% with you. But to try to make the point that COVID-19 has been less bad than a bad year of flu is pretty pointless and also misleading. A more appropriate comparison would be to go back in time to Dec 2019 and have no countries put anything in place and let COVID-19 run wild. But at that point, you're sacrificing people just to make a dumb comparison that COVID-19 isn't much worse than a bad year of flu.
Also it's disingenuous to pick the worst season of flu. Let's compare COVID-19 to 2015-2016's 23,000 influenza deaths and see how, after all these provisions, we're already at 9,616 COVID-19 deaths in the US in April.
https://public.tableau.com/profile/jonas.nart#!/vizhome/COVI...
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html?CDC_AA_refVa...
You're so accomplished! Is there anything you aren't a 100% certified expert on?
To all of these people and anyone sincerely interested in the topic I'd like to post an interview with Dr John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health, as well as professor by courtesy of biomedical data science at Stanford University School of Medicine, professor by courtesy of statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) at Stanford University, that hopefully sheds the light on the true amount of fear-mongering and plain stupidity in the media right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw
Here are some of his thoughts in written form:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
As you may see, he is much more reserved about the subject than many of the people in the comments to this submission.
What does this have to do with PG's blog post? Well, PG's post is blatant and dogmatic witch-blaming, while the people, that he is blaming, may actually be right. And they definitely have the right to express their opinion on the subject.
And it's not just him - his colleagues Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, who are presently conducting the first large-scale antibody test have also had a more sober tone. And David Katz. And Frank Ulrich Montgomery. And Albert Ko.
I mean, I understand that somebody disagree with the matter of how to interpret a situation in which available data is thin, but throughout this thread, I'm seeing a lot of people denigrate anybody who is taking a more cautious approach instead of fanning the flames of panic.
Let's try to stay science-based here, if we can do that.
And thanks for /r/PrepareInsteadOfPanic, good stuff!
Where'd you find out about it? Did I tell you?
"If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)"
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387
Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., H. Clifford Lane, M.D., and Robert R. Redfield, M.D.
The actual quote is “This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”
They are not saying COVID-19 is the same as a flu, they are saying its mortality rate is closer to a bad flu year than to SARS or MERS. And that’s only half of the story — they go on to say that the rate it is spreading is what is truly worrying even if the mortality rate is low.
Please stop spreading disinformation.
Edit: This would be true even if they didn't provide a link to the source, which they did.
And he uses the undefined and unusual phrase "false predictions". What, please, is a true prediction?
The purpose of these commentators is not news, it is entertainment. The fact they are talking through their ass is part of their attraction. It is all bullshit and viewers know it. As does Paul Graham:
> Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o., which, as the epidemic has made clear, is to talk confidently about things they don't understand.
Paul Grahams' analysis is also subject to the same critique:
> let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have.
Covid-19 in China: 0.50-0.66% mortality [2, 3]
I mean from numbers it is indeed not much worse than flu, but we don't know the potential extra deaths caused by running out of ICU beds.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1327
[3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v...
Covid-19 is serious, but the major crisis right now is that it's new, and the medical system is struggling to adapt.
When you consider as well that everyone is susceptible and you may have infection rates well over the 5-15% you get for flu it’s at least an order of magnitude worse.