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Comment by djaychela | Hacker News Reader

From what I'm reading, I think there are still a significant minority of people who think this isn't an issue. I've had to learn to just walk away from comments on a variety of media where comments such as 'psychosomatic', 'less dangerous than the flu that kills 50,000 each year', 'patented by the illuminati', 'caused by 5G masts', and so on. I ended up deleting my twitter account as I dared try to engage with one UK-based journalist who was saying that 'they' were destroying the economy to serve their own foul needs (everyone under house arrest, total control of society, etc). For me, it's just not worth doing this - it's hard enough being separated from the people I care about, without filling the void with attempts to have a rational discussion with people who seem to be divorced from everyday fact.

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.

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i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance.

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.

Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.

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?

> Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.

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.

Or they work with remote teams around the world, including China & Europe, and saw first-hand what was coming.

Every major bank in NYC has trading desks across the world, including Asian markets. Shouldn't they have seen it coming as well?

Not if their salaries depended on not understanding...

> it didn't "feel real" in the beginning

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...

I don't think people feared catching the virus at all. Exponential dynamics doesn't change anything in your response in that situation. I think every winter viruses have exponential dynamics as well, and they're not a big deal. You catch it, and you get over it..

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.

It's still making a large portion of the people who aren't dying extremely ill.

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.

Curious: what are you basing this on? Do you have some statistical data that shows hospitalization rates of young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona virus?

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... :-/

> hospitalization rates of young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona virus?

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?

That's already well understood.

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.

Your theory is that there is surge of broken hands and unrelated health issues, but all those people also happen to have covid so covid gets blamed? Like, New York and Italia and France have to build make-shift hospitals cause of broken hands epidemic?

No.

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.

Thanks for describing exactly what it looks like when preparing for a major outbreak. Its measurable, growing geometrically without breaking stride, and 6X-10X more deadly than anything we can name.

If we succeed at slowing the growth, even stopping it, then thank god those hospitals will remain empty.

It is not growing geometrically (or only with a tiny multiplier if so). If the feared scenario of exponential growth were the case then we'd see the proportion of positive test cases doubling, not just the raw number. Right now what's being seen is that if you increase testing 10x you find 10x more cases, which is consistent with finding something that's at a somewhat steady background level.

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!

That's pretty glib - its just testing that's increasing? Geometrically? With scarcity of test resources in the news daily?

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.

> That's not consistent with being at the start of a very long exponential growth phase.

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.

Let me reply to the edited comment.

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.

The stable proportion is seen around the world, including in places like Germany where they are doing tons of testing and certainly far more than just those who turn up to hospital.

You're right that it's not a uniform sample, but the consistency across the world is very suggestive. Not everywhere has test shortages.

Frankly, you lie about Italy. Also, we are actually closing schools when there is outbreak of flu - few schools is enough to get flu under control.

To answer your question ("do people die with covid-19, or of it?") with data you might want to read this twitter thread. https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1246866119597621248

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.

> Do you have some statistical data that shows hospitalization rates of young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona virus?

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-...

> BTW, how do you explain the unprecedented hospitalization and ICU rates in Northern Italy?

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.

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.

> CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia"

That's just like Covid though - they are counting everyone who dies with the virus even though most have other conditions.

That argument no longer works when we're seeing highly infected regions with significant increases in their _all cause_ mortality rate, e.g. https://reason.com/2020/03/17/italian-daily-death-rate-up-20... https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/04/01/virus-deaths-...

Italy’s death rates are up 20% when comparing this year’s average to a typical year’s whole average. This way of comparing averages may skew the information. In America, we have more average daily deaths in the beginning of the year than in the middle and end until December. The average of January through March will always be higher than the yearly average.

This!

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).

What are you talking about? The spike started in mid March, that's just a single data point on that graph.

"What the official figures don’t say. They don’t say that in March 2020 more than 5.400 people have died in Bergamo province, 4.500 of which due to coronavirus. Six times more than the previous year."

https://www.ecodibergamo.it/stories/bergamo-citta/coronaviru...

Doesn't that seem like a bad year to you?

It does because regional fluctuations don't warrant a widespread overreaction.

Overall mortality for Europe is lower than during most flu seasons:

https://www.euromomo.eu/

That’s for week 13. I expect france would be higher now.

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.

Because if no coronavirus this would be rather a good year. The December-February looked better than on average.

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).

> people will continue to ignore an exponential trend

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.

Like soylent green the economy is made of people.

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.

I wish and hope just pausing the economy is as easy as you say. I'm worried though, as the last decades the Economy appears to be this unpredictable daemon that affects everything and everyone but no one knows how to please it.

> Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically.

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).

We also do take notice when more mundane exponential threats crop up -- for instance, the R0 of measles is something like 12-18 (compared to a "measly" 2-2.5 for the novel coronavirus, or 1.28 for the typical seasonal flu), and when it got out of control in a few cities in the US last year, it was a Big Deal even though most people are vaccinated for it.

> Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically.

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.

The idea that viruses always grow exponentially until they reach total saturation of the population comes from mathematical models that have never successfully modelled any real epidemic, ever. It doesn't come from experience of real diseases in nature, many of which were predicted by epidemiologists to grow to enormous proportions and yet - even in the absence of control measures - that isn't what happens.

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:

https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569

You can get the numbers and do the math yourself, and prior to effective mitigation, the growth is exponential. There are policies that do have a mitigating effect, and that is the point. The mitigation of an effect does not mean either that it did not exist in the first place, or that it is not relevant.

Nobody is able to test all or even most of their population with tests overwhelmingly concentrated among those either likely to be infected or at least exposed one would expect the proportion of positive tests to be a function of the testing methodology rather than a fiction of its prevalence in the population. If for example a group is only testing those already experiencing severe symptoms and had a 93% positive rate what would it even mean for the proportion of positive tests to increase exponentially?

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?

with tests overwhelmingly concentrated among those either likely to be infected

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.

> Every cold and flu grow exponentially.

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.

>Every cold and flu grow 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.

> Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.

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.

Isn’t all flu growth exponential over the season then dies down? Apparently Australia had a bad flu season last year: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7148553/Horror-grap...

There's a vaccine for the flu. That makes a huge difference, even if the diseases were otherwise just as bad as each other.

Yes, seasonal flu starts exponentially, but people don't understand exponential growth and its limits.

You can tell that, even today, people (especially the media) still don't understand the nature of exponential growth.

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."

Yes, if you click "log scale" on any of the many graph sites for almost any region, you see a line that's better straight than I could draw freehand.

Actually, the log scale for infections in pretty much every polity has started bending downwards, about a week and a half after the lockdowns were put in place.

I've always read "a surge" as synonymous with "an increase", which could be expected or unexpected depending on the context.

If you lose your job, your lunch is being eaten.

> i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance.

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.

The flu, even with vaccines, does not overwhelm medical personel, facilities and logistics as this does.

And the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is already going way way worse than the flu.

Agreed, and that's why i changed my mind since i saw what's going on in europe.

I just wanted to explain my initial reaction, based on what happened in china and by reading various medical people give their opinion.

Yes it does.

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.

Those articles do not in anyway describe situations that are close to what we're seeing now in new york, italy, france and spain

The flu is still terrible, btw. And I hope this situation will increase the vaccination rates for the flu

I don't think you picture yet the scale at which we are all hit right now...

> the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is already going way way worse than 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.

> A bad year for influenza is about

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/ ).

The point still holds to compare Covid vs flu+pneumonia then. This is some weird No True Scotsman argument you're making where it's not the "True Flu" if they had pneumonia as well... (likely getting pneumonia because of the flu) I doubt the dead people would be comforted by such a subtle distinction.

The plus operator here is "and/or" not "and", but I presume you must have understood this. The GP's point is that flu+pnumonia = (flu) U (non-flu pneumonia). Nobody is denying that flu with pneumonia is flu.

What's really happening is that some people are trying to compare deaths from Covid-19 to deaths from the typical flu/pneumonia season. Nitpicking about what is or isn't the flu really doesn't matter, what matters (to me at least) is how many more deaths Covid-19 is causing than normal "flu/common cold/pneumonia/whatever" deaths which happen every year.

The CDC's figure is "flu or pneumonia" (non-exclusive). The majority of the moralities included in it do not have influenza.

I really don't understand your intent. Are you trying to say more people have died so far from Covid-19 than die from a bad flu or pneumonia season?

I had a similar experience but I was ignorant about how rapid infection rates could overwhelm hospitals and lead to much higher mortality rates. In part probably because this stuff has never been explained in so much detail before.

The part of that most people, including you, seen to miss is that this goes way beyond those sick with the virus. The strain this virus is putting on healthcare is unlike anything the flu does in any given year, even during epidemics in the past several decades. That means it will kill people who are sick with something else. Pray you don't have a need for an ICU bed any time soon.

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.

Yes. In Italy it has already killed twice as many people as a normal influenza season.

Looking at this shows completely different story: https://www.euromomo.eu/

January 2017 was much worse overall in Europe, it's not even comparable.

That's interesting, it shows how misleading an average can be (the average 8000 dead for the flu that I quoted).

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.

It seems that the website was updated a few minutes ago with data for week 14. Italy is looking much worse than 2017. England is also very scary.

The data is still lagging by a few days, but it seems that the numbers are starting to trend down.

Comparing annual death totals for the flu to coronavirus deaths over a couple of months is mistake number 1.

Comparing a number that is static from year to year to one that is growing exponentially is mistake number 2.

and comparing "estimated contamination cases vs associated death" to "a known-positive cases vs. associated death" is mistake number 3.

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.

I probably had covid19 in February(in Asia), only in retrospect I could differentiate it from the flu.

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.

Do you have a source for corona infecting the inferior part of your throat rather than the inferior part? I know you spoke to doctors, but I find it incredibly difficult to find credible sources other than either

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.

>the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health

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.

To a degree we deal with catastrophic threats aptly without having our responses deadened by past fears never having come to fruition regularly. For example we swim knowing that if we stop moving we will sink and drown, we drive knowing that a slip up we could well die.

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.

> 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.

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.

The differences with this coronavirus, as I understand it:

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.

>i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe

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".

What's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the incompetence of governments across the world, and conclude they'd be capable of any kind of organized conspiracy against the general population.

Yes exactly. Most people don’t know or care about how Governments and Corporations really work. All they see are memes and conspiracy theories and latch on to them.

Like the endless YouTube conspiracy-oriented channels which rant about the vast Illuminati/Jewish/Deep-State/whatever conspiracy that holds our world in thrall and assassinates with impunity, yet somehow can't manage to file a few bogus DMCA claims to get the YouTube channels shutdown.

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.

Supposing for the sake of argument that the Illuminati were real and you were in charge of it. You know a bunch of weirdos on youtube know the truth and are generally regarded as cranks. Would you bother concerning yourself with them, or would you ignore them since they're pathetic and powerless? I'd ignore them.

To be clear, I don't think the Illuminati are real, but I don't think your reasoning is sound either.

An all-encompassing conspiracy orchestrating events across the globe, sparing no effort or expense to weave us all into an inescable spider's web of connected threads, that then says "eh, probably nobody is even going to listen to those guys, let's not bother with having the intern fire off a few boilerplate take-downs"?

Sure, why not? It's obvious "probably nobody is even going to listen to those guys" is true...

Why not? Because what evil puppet-master settles for "probably ok" when a slight extra effort buys certainty.

One that isn't totally neurotic, presumably. Just to reiterate, I don't believe such an organization exists. But when trying to understand the plausible actions of even fictional characters or organizations, I try to imagine myself in their shoes. If I were in their fictional shoes, I would ignore the people who say I rule the world if those people are widely mocked and derided as insane by the general public. To do anything other than ignore them would be to risk giving them a sliver of credibility.

Things like wholesale NSA data collection were organized conspiracies against the population. There are plenty of examples, even just considering the US.

Strange that you got downvoted. NSA collection of American data fits any reasonable definition of "conspiracy against the population" that I can think of.

Indeed! Every time someone mentions "them" running whatever conspiracy I'm reminded of the quote "Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"

Looks like it's already centuries old even, from 1600s Sweden: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna#Quotation

Yep. Actual conspiracies are comparatively banal, and often more to do with covering up incompetence than establishing new world orders with incredible technological advances. To bring up famous examples from the not too distant past, the same administration supposedly capable of secretly planting demolition charges in busy NYC offices without anyone noticing apparently saw it as too risky to secretly plant chemical weapons needed to be 'discovered' somewhere in an entire country under the control of its military.

Not in order to give credibility to the idea, but I do think it would be easier for a group of conspirators based in the US to pull off secret demolition charges than for them to plant weapons in a foreign country unnoticed.

One theoretical conspiracy involves personnel carrying around large explosive charges and drilling holes in strategically placed beams on every floor of a permanently occupied and secure office building unnoticed by any one of thousands of surviving workers. The other involves a truck in an area the US is known to be conducting military operations unloading stuff at an abandoned remote facility and then calling in non-conspirators to validate their 'find', and accusing any Iraqi who argues the facility had other purposes of lying. Not saying there aren't reasons the second wouldn't go wrong - from getting ambushed or inspected en route to UN weapons inspectors concluding the material is unlikely to be of Iraqi origin - but it's not more difficult to plant stuff in a remote location than secretly prepare for a controlled demolition of a heavily occupied skyscraper.

All theories about what happened on 9/11/2001, including the official 9/11 Commission Report, are conspiracy theories. They disagree on who the conspirators were, but every last theory about it is a conspiracy theory.

People can be capable of organizing conspiracies for their own self-interest and quite poor (or simply disinterested) in coordinating effective action otherwise. This is the story of every corrupt institution in history. You have to think beyond binary frames.

The sorts of incentives for organized conspiracy would naturally be bigger than the incentives for competence in executing ordinary matters of government. However the rareness of uncovering organized conspiracies suggests they are rarely attempted more than it suggests some hypercompetent class of conspirators.

Define "rare". Based on the ones I know were admitted alone, I'd think they are rather common.

Its because they're not what people want to imagine (hypercompetent ubermenchen who they're outsmarting) but just covering up "mundane" though still devestating crimes.

I wouldn't classify putting LSD in the water supply to be "mundane".

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.

It's always about benefits. Incompetence doesn't cost government benefits, so nobody cares. However, if there are benefits to be had by organizing a conspiracy against whomever, you can bet your money that this will be done. Nobody cares for "the greater good" or whatever. It's always about personal benefits.

I only wish it was only about benefits, because then it would be rational agent. What (economic) benefit does the Republican party of the US gain by suppressing gay rights or abortion? I can understand wanting to quash unions, prevent minorities from voting, remove environmental controls (in the short run anyway), or cast doubt on opposition media. But who actually gains when e.g. a gay couple can't buy a cake?

Benefits do not have to be economic. It means getting the things you want.

"What's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the incompetence of governments across the world, and conclude they'd be capable of any kind of organized conspiracy against the general population."

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.

Technically the government itself is a form of conspiracy against the general population. But people don't know that, even educated people, because political science isn't mandatory in higher education. But labeling something as conspiracy theory is a useful tool to silence discussions about all the evil governments and large organizations do.

Right. Conspiracies happen all the time because there are plans, which if understood by those upon whom the planners wish to enact them, would be rejected by their targets.

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 the government itself is a form of conspiracy against the general population

"Technically" in which sense? Which political science course taught you that? Or are you referring to some specific government?

The listed examples are conspiracies by the dictionary definition - "a group of people acting in harmony to a common, illegal end" - but I don't think they're the same thing the parent poster was referring to. Conspiracy theories generally revolve around some secret action by the government or other large organizations, not open slaughter. A better example might be COINTELPRO.

I used to think conspiracy theories are unrealistic, the image of a group of people sitting in a dark room conspiring against others just seems ridiculous.

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.

Isn’t that called “cronyism” (or “old boys club”) rather than “conspiracy”?

True, although the term cronyism and old boys club focus on the exclusivity of those "elite" circles, rather than the impact of their decisions, which looks a lot like conspiracy from outside.

Some people end up coming up with conspiracy theories based on their outsider observations.

I think that at least US governments have done a poor job explaining the motivation behind the drastic precautionary orders. For a brief period, there was much talk of "flattening the curve" but I doubt that many people understand how that gets us to "deliberately wreck the economy."

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.

> We are doing this because there are O(10^6) preventable deaths

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?

To slow down the spread and ultimately reduce the number of people that will get to go in ICUs, go on a ventilator and/or die.

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.

> Almost everybody who goes on a ventilator dies.

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.

Flu doesn't spread as well, because large number of people take a vaccine.

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.

> 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.

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 what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUvWaxuurzQ

Reasonable people can certainly disagree about whether the cure is worse than the disease.

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.

> The point is to prevent the medical infrastructure from becoming overwhelmed

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.

The people who are currently sick will either recover or die. Lock down can make the effective R0 below 1. When it is below 1 the disease will die on its own. Of course we would have to be locked for a very long time, but even if we won't wait that long the active infection curve will go down and buy us some time.

The disease will never die out on its own. The question raised is hat are we waiting for and how long are we willing to wait for it.

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.

Of all the conspiracy theories out there, the 'caused by 5G masts' is the one that confuses me the most. I get the possible aversion to 5G, but how does one make the leap from that to it causing COVID?

Your mistake is assuming people are using reason to come up with that theory :)

IMO this is deliberate mis-information, some type of info-guerilla, to stir and channel anger against the establishment.

Yep, this also comes packaged with NWO, there is one country that actively works on spreading this crap on social media, I believe the goal is to weaken Western countries by setting up their citizens against their own government.

I’ve tried to understand them, their rationale appears include:

- 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.

The argument all over my facebook feed is that Africa is both the only country with no Coronavirus and the only country with no 5G. But really, these are the same friends arguing for flat earth in a lot of cases.

The number of things wrong with this makes me despair.

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.

For every reasoned answer you give them an avalanche of utter bullshit flows forth. This might be one of those rare occasions where the solution to bad speech is not more speech. The mind of the conspiracy believers is just too darned efficient at justifying bad reasoning.

Alternatively your reasoned answer wasn't as good as you think it was.

To the conspiracy minded no answer is good enough.

Yes, but to those who are undecided and are on the edge, a good answer might pull them to the right side. I know for a fact that it happened to me multiple times, when I saw a heated argument between two people (mostly on technical topics though, not something like corona).

@Beltiras Or maybe that's just your excuse to not even try.

Maybe unfounded but it's no like I can't see where they are coming from. Neither do I have the ability to refute any of those points.

My aunt sent me a video asking my opinion (yay?), and I've been hearing ominous FUD about "5G" long enough that I wanted to see where it was actually coming from. So I watched it.

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.

5G comes from China; coronavirus comes from China.

REALLY JUST A COINCIDENCE!? /s

What's different, I suppose, is that certain types of people have a huge platform in the US via Fox News and the like.

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.

You need to walk away from these people entirely. Get rid of the conspiracy theorists in your life.

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.

Some humans won’t change their mind regardless of how much soft evidence they’re presented with. This is good because we need variability. Evidence might be wrong, or it could be right, but following it could turn out to be worse a posteriori.

This idea helps me provide a plausible explanation to some behavior I find counterintuitive.

Perhaps they'd all been watching Dr. Drew, who is apparently trying to use the DMCA to remove this[0] compilation of him downplaying the Coronavirus.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKlJlQadZtE

I’ve also had this issue and I’ve decided to simply give up on these people. In three weeks time, they are going to be eating their words anyway.

The flu kills 290,000 to 650,000 per year worldwide according to WHO. Today we're still <80k for Corona, and new cases are slowing.

It’s not slowing down naturally - we are all on lockdown in order to slow it.

my hot take: this is all because we are engineers designing social networks.

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.

Maybe you should try to explain why something that kills on average 450k every year is less serious then something that has only ever killed 70k. And not just less serious, but warranting several orders of magnitude fewer resources.

It's you who need a reality check.

I think that a lot of the people who are deniers are afraid of the economical consequences from the lockdown because they will be hit harder than others. So in their mind they choose to underplay the epidemic in order to justify their insecurity.

Meh. I'm extremely dubious, often in politics we often see the public arguing against their own economic self-interest. Why should this be any different?

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.

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