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Comment by pacala | Hacker News Reader

The OP is, for lack of better words, so academic. He wants an apology? OK, the study has flaws X, Y and Z. How about propose and conduct a better study? ASAP? Throw darts on a map if you have to.

There are millions of people kicked out of a job. People defer medical procedures indefinitely. Kids skipping school for months on end. We will, sooner or later, run out of basic necessities as well. The world doesn't run on money or theories. It runs on us, real people, shuffling our hands and turning sun and soil into food and heat and clothing. Right now we are grounded at home. This can't go on forever. We are running against the clock. Do something about it!

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The OP wants people to stop spreading misinformation.

We are already drowning in misinformation. We have no clue how deadly this disease is, and yet we are using what appears to be [gross?] overestimations to drive public policy to the tune of trillions of dollars printed with a flick of a pen.

Produce and spread good information instead.

> Produce and spread good information instead.

Also: identify bad information and seek to stop it from spreading! That’s what this article is all about.

January. February. March. April. It's been almost 4 months since we know about Covid-19. From the rock I'm living under, it appears that the scientific community at large has produced remarkably little reliable data. Where are the epidemiological studies?

Producing reliable data is the highest priority.

Epidemiological studies are known as “models”. Those are being produced at a rapid clip, and are being updated daily as we get more data. As with most models, they start out with huge error bars and get better over time.

Every epi would LOVE to have widespread test data, but we don’t. Oh well.

These antibody tests only became feasible in the past two weeks, when the tests were actually developed and validated, and then this test was run.

There’s a ton of science being done, if you stop and listen to what is being published.

Conducting experiments is expensive in both money and effort. Let's all sit in our comfy chairs and build fancier models with garbage data instead. If we could divine just the right formula, it will magically paper over the holes in the data. Sounds like every other scientific area I'm aware of. For whatever reason, the experimentalist is a dying breed.

Edit: Do you happen to have a link to a good aggregator for listening to "what's being published"?

You do know that epidemiologists are statisticians, right? They, um, don’t do experiments and never have and never will. They crunch numbers and fit them to models. Which is what they are doing.

If you want to see more data, well yes, so does everyone. What magic tool would you like people to use to get that data? As I explained above, we seem to have a shortage of swab tests to determine infection, and antibody tests only became available about a week ago, at which point people started to use them.

Not quite sure what more you are asking to be done here?

That attitude reminds me of certain type of software engineers: We are engineers, our time is too valuable to write tests, hire someone else to do so. When I hear that, I run away. Fast. The world needs results, and there are little. How about we stop the excuses and roll our sleeves instead?

Could people stop looking at the death rate ? If you have millions of people in intensive care for 3 to 5 weeks it is equally detrimental to the economy. Plus, the more people are infected, the more likely it is to mutate. Did you take those 2 points into account ?

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