Elon Musk appears to like what they said as well: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/12544950502282608...
It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views despite the failure of containment in NYC (and high death tolls overseas in the UK and elsewhere) making it clear how many more people would have died if their plan of just letting the virus rip through the entire country had been enacted in March.
Regarding the removal of the video from YouTube, i don’t like this. Even though it’s clearly wrong, and is being used to push for something bad, YouTube exercising this type of censorship over legal content worries me.
To some extent I think using the word "censorship" is disingenuous here as well. No one is censoring this video, they can post the video on their own website wherever they please. Just because you can't post the video on someone else's website doesn't mean you are being censored.
It is not unreasonable to dislike the trend of a company named "YouTube" increasingly favoring large state-sponsored and corporate organizations both in hard policy and soft algorithms.
It’s YouTube’s legal right to remove this, but I do recognize that the more YouTube exercises censorship and editorial judgment over the content, the more likely they are to remove content I like and agree with as well, so that is what concerns me.
And I also wonder if removing this specific video might do more harm than good, because it lets the authors cry out that the establishment is censoring them and helps promote their conspiracy-theory-level thinking. In certain cases speech suppression can be very effective, but since powerful elements of US society (e.g. Fox News) are engaging in motivated reasoning to agree with the contents of this video, it could provide an additional plank to convince those who aren’t capable of evaluating the scientific arguments themselves.
The same exact accusation is being made by the other side towards the "doomers". That the doomsday crows is doubling down because they can't admit their fault. I'm not siding with anyone here, just noticing.
For instance, here is Elon claiming on march 18 that by the end of April, the USA would have followed the same pattern as China and cases would have dropped to near zero. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240483296347181057?s=20 (Never mind that china achieved this by a massive shutdown and quarantine regime stricter than any US state has done). His prediction was way off but he doesn’t seem to have learned.
In order to reconcile that, you have to justify the lockdowns, and one way of doing that is to shout from the top of your lungs that if we hadn't gone into lockdown, everyone would be dead, dead, dead.
The truth of the matter is probably incredibly complicated. Yes, some lockdown measures have an effect, but we don't actually know which ones are most effective, which measures gives us the best bang for the buck, and which measures are useless and therefore harmful in the long run.
So any places that have less severe lockdown measures than what the doomers are advocating, and that are seeing decent results at stopping the spread, those places are a threat to the doomer side of the argument, and therefore those places have to fail.
And that's on top of the fact that statistics is hard, and everyone is spouting bullshit every other way, myself included.
Even if the current estimate is undercounting by half, COVID-19 will still have killed 2x as many people as last flu season. It's inherently speculative to compare against the death toll of what would have happened without a total economic shutdown. Figures ranging from 1-2 million have been tossed around here on HN. NPR ran a story with a claim of 1.3 million. However the experiences of countries that did not adopt distancing restrictions or adopted much less drastic ones, including denser and more populated ones like Japan, are not seeing anything close to these death rates. We'll be able to glean better information once testing becomes more widespread and comparisons can be made more reliably, but the 10-20x increase in deaths without social distancing that was initially claimed doesn't seem to be happening.
It's not "just the flu", its "just 3-4x deadlier than the flu, and spreads twice as fast". How scared are people of the flu? How scared are people of COVID-19? The latter is way more than 3 to 4 times larger than the former. If you asked people in 2019 "If we sacrifice 25% of the economy and make 25 million people unemployed, then we can stop a virus that will probably kill ~4x as many people as the last flu season[1]. Should we do it?" How many people would say yes? Probably not very many.
Phrase the same question differently: "If we sacrifice 25% of the economy and make 25 million people unemployed, then we can halve cancer deaths for this year. Should we do it?" Again, people would balk at this.
This is why the coronavirus panic is dumb in a lot of people's views. People are experiencing fear that is orders of magnitude off from the actual threat. Much in the same vein that people fear shark attacks when they are incredibly rare.
1. This is assuming a death toll of a quarter million, all of which are prevented in this scenario by economic shutdown. In reality, we'd only be saving the delta between the deaths with the shutdown and without.
[1] Roussel et al., “SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data.”, Int J Antimicrob Agents. 2020 Mar 19:105947, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354
“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.”
Now, today, we are at 50,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths just in the USA, and an analysis of excess mortality data already shows that a significant % of COVID-19-related deaths are not included in that count.
This is with a massive mitigation campaign and nationwide social distancing. The only place where the virus seems to have established itself is in NYC (20% of people infected according to a recent study) where we have seen incredible death tolls and overwhelmed morgues. (Edit, needless to say, none of the 4 common cold coronaviruses do this, ever.)
At this point, how can you look at the number of people who died from COVID-19 in just the last month in NYC and claim this is no worse than the flu? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona...
The last flu to cause such a severe spike in mortality statistics was the devastating 1918 Spanish flu. Even the Asian Flu and Hong Kong Flu pandemics didn’t do this.
Edit: corrected the Spanish flu year. My bad :-)
Also, bear in mind that you're being very selective with your data: you're picking out one of (the?) most densely populated centers, which also happens to be an international travel hub
NYC is an excellent example to look at precisely because of what you said - it’s a dense population center and international travel hub, so it was seeded with quite a few coronavirus cases early on and unfortunately the virus seems to have infected up to 20% of the residents of the city (as shown by a new serology survey), despite social distancing having begun mid-March.
Other regions outside NYC weren’t as affected in terms of mortality, and we have no indication that’s because of anything other than that not as many people outside NYC fell ill with the virus.
The drop in deaths after the spike is because of data reporting (deaths are commonly revised upward as the data trickles in) and also because 6 weeks of social distancing and school closures would have greatly reduced the spread of the virus, this is just common sense as we know the virus spreads through physical proximity of an infected person with non-infected persons, and social distancing has greatly reduced the number of those situations.
Faster infection doesn't directly result in higher total fatalities, unless medical care lacks capacity. This is a bigger problem for places like New York where the infection rates did put significant burden on healthcare facilities. On the flip side, places less dense than NYC can go without restrictions and this will not impact the overall health outcomes.
Deaths nation-wide have peaked more than a week ago. Deaths among developed countries have also mostly peaked over the last few weeks. Testing almost always under counts, both by virtue of not counting asymptomatic people, and by delays in forming antibodies in the infected. The latter also affects random studies. New York's 20% indicated infection rate likely means that the infection rate today is approaching the 50% or more required to achieve herd immunity.
1. To be more specific, it's estimated that the virus will spread to 50-70% of people before herd would diminish the ability of the virus to spread much further.
Yes, if by approaching you mean at least twice the number of people who have already died from the virus would have to die to achieve this, since 20% is less than half of 50%. I’ve seen scientific experts estimating that with this specific virus, due to its high R0, 50-70% is not the threshold for herd immunity anyway and it could be up to 84% or higher (Polio = 80%, Measles = 95% thresholds, for comparison). That could mean up to 4x the amount of deaths we’ve already seen.
The total number of people who would be affected by a herd immunity strategy could also be changed by a social distancing intervention around the time the threshold is reached. Otherwise, models indicate there would be an overshoot and a higher % of people would end up being infected than is necessary for herd immunity. No country or region seems to have reached this threshold yet though since they all engaged in social distancing first. https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1252078649827667968
The other option would have been to do what several countries in the Asia Pacific region did - Taiwan, Vietnam, and apparently China, for instance. Instead of allowing the virus to run free, they have worked toward eliminating it within their borders. Many lives will be saved if that plan can succeed and they can avoid a “herd immunity” result until a safe vaccine is available to provide the herd immunity.
Where much of the western world is seeing cases peak, China has been seeing them rise again [1]. The idea that the virus has been eliminated is incorrect. China aggressively flattened its curve, but concluding that they will eliminate infections without herd immunity is not a certainty at this point.
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
The second wave of the 1918 flu killed between 17 to 50 million people, perhaps as high as 100 million people, during the fall of 1918, with a higher than expected mortality rate for the young and healthy. It killed between 1 and 6 percent of the world's population.
So far 200,000 people have died from the coronavirus.
The current coronavirus is 1/100 as deadly as the flu of 1918.
It feels like you didn’t engage with the data I presented at all. (Edit: removed sentences that would only apply if you had read my other post)
Edit 2: if your only argument is that COVID-19 is not worse than Spanish flu, that’s something that is reasonable. It’s worse than any pandemic flu since Spanish flu though, this is a once in a century occurrence.
Plus, as someone pointed out, drawing conclusions from the numbers we have so far in comparison with the 1918 flu is difficult.
I've been working with NYC numbers. The link you gave was for NY State deaths. NYC has reported about 12.3k deaths [1], has a population of about 8.4 million [2] and 21% of people appear to have antibodies at this time.
Doing some math with the above numbers I end up with .14% dead so far with 1/5th of people exposed. From there I assume the amount of dead would quadruple before we reach herd immunity. I also assume that antibodies provide at least a handful of years of immunity, just like for other coronaviruses, reducing the severity of future infections. A likely outcome is that this becomes another variant of several coronaviruses that circulate with the common cold.
I guess even for those who might agree with all of the above there still exists differences in opinion on what actions should be taken. I personally understand some people's comparison with the yearly flu, but realize that is most definately not an apples to apples comparison.
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...
Yes I believe your rough math is matching others that are reported by the scientific literature which is estimating around 0.7% infection fatality ratio (IFR) for this virus, 4*0.14 would be on the low end of estimates but within the consensus estimate. Seasonal Flu IFR is estimated to be between 0.04% and 0.1%, so by your numbers the coronavirus is, at a minimum, 5 times more deadly than seasonal flu.
I also agree this virus will become a part of life in the future. Although some Asia-Pacific countries seem to have successfully controlled the spread (Vietnam, Taiwan, etc) the only way for them to keep it from spreading will be to maintain a border closure until a vaccine can be developed to safely give their populations herd immunity.
In the west, we let the virus run free for two months and it’s probably too late to get it under control no matter what we do now.
Wow: you are saying the final death rate from Covid19 will be from 0.01% to 0.06%.
You are making irrelevant comparisons: we don’t yet know how many people will die from Covid19; we have no idea of numbers of deaths in many poorer countries where deaths can’t even be counted; comparing number of deaths in a world with 7 billion people against number of deaths for 1918 population is pointless.
In fact I will admit that thinking further about the numbers we have so far I am sobered by how they may add up across the world.
But back on topic, talking about lockdowns: The stated purpose of the lockdown was to flatten the curve so that hospitals are not overwhelmed, which has been successful so far. Do you think lockdowns lower the number of deaths when all is said and done? How long can lockdowns be sustained? Would it be more effective for vulnerable folks to self-isolate? Unless we can mass produce a vaccine in the next couple of months won't this continue moving through the population regardless of what we do?
No. We don't know the numbers because most countries don't have the numbers yet. This 200,000 number includes data from countries like the UK or US who are only counting confirmed covid-19 deaths. We know that deaths outside hospital make up about half the total, so we'd expect about 400,000 deaths.
"We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter in place. No shutting down businesses."
Since early Feb we've seen ~54K deaths from Coronavirus alone (excluding influenza deaths) [0]. The argument that this is just part of the normal flu cycle doesn't make any sense.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case....
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona...
https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1252616296891465729
The level of deaths/week we are seeing is like nothing that has occurred in decades of recorded vital statistics. (The 1968 flu pandemic shows on the 2nd chart, but is small beans compared to COVID).
I am in the end the lockdown camp; but even if we allow businesses to open, many people will still be legitimately worried or scared and stay home even when it is something important like medical care.
And on the flip side, there are people who might have died of things like car accidents if the pandemic and subsequent lockdown had not taken place.
No amount of Hacker News Mental Gymnastics(tm) is going to explain that away.
No amount of Hacker News Mental Gymnastics(tm) is going to explain that away.
[1]:https://twitter.com/BraveTheWorld/status/1254232498122428416
But this is what happens for flu too. You want to count them using the same methodology. You either use confirmed cases (Covid-19 kills more people than a bad flu year, and yes we do test for flu); or you use confirmed and suspected cases (again, covid-19 kills more than a bad flu year); or you use excess mortality (and this year we have huge increase in excess mortality).
There's no way to look at the data and come up with anything other than "covid-19 kills a lot of people".
What is the world coming to that people are so afraid of opinions that they don’t agree with?
First note that this video is more than just "opinions that they don't agree with" as the doctors are claiming and framing as fact some blatantly false ideas (like their statistical nonsense where they extrapolate their testing data to get a .03 IFR).
Now note that a lot of people are using this video to justify their desire to not social distance. I know older at-risk people who are using this video to try and convince other older at-risk people to stop social distancing. What if some of those at-risk people were people you cared about? Then you might be afraid about these opinions.
Whether the answer is calling on Twitter and Youtube to curate people's tweets and videos, I'm not sure (and I want to believe the answer is no, but I'm very much not sure that it is).