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Comment by javagram | Hacker News Reader

Elon’s response since the beginning has been way off, “The coronavirus panic is dumb” (March 6). I guess he doesn’t want to learn from his mistakes.

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.

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I'm not really a fan of the idea that any person (or company) can be compelled to give a platform to someone (or something) they don't want to. Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you a soapbox, and it certainly doesn't guarantee you the right to someone else's soapbox. It sounds like a strictly emotional argument to suggest that YouTube doesn't have the right to decide what is or isn't allowed on their platform, and it breaks down under any sort of scrutiny. There are all sorts of other "legal" things that you, yourself, would likely draw the line on.

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.

You can criticize a company's behavior while recognizing it is their right to do what they are doing. We do it all the time with other industries. Critiques of hiring/firing decisions, environmental practices, poor customer service, bad products, etc.

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.

The (dictionary) definition of censorship does include private institutions censoring. For instance, if private libraries remove a book from their shelves because they dislike the contents, that’s absolutely censorship.

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.

> It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views

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.

Yes, I find that even more bizarre. The “just the flu” crowd clearly put down their stakes with death predictions for a no-mitigation scenario that were greatly exceeded by the actual high-mitigation scenario we experienced over the last 1.5 months.

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 case of the "doomers", there are strong psychological elements at play. Lockdowns are not fun and have an obvious cost to the economy and to people. Lives and companies and future plans are being ruined at an astonishing rate.

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.

Calling COVID-19 "just the flu" is certainly wrong, but it's still fair to draw comparisons between the two. The latest projected death estimate for the US is 60-80k, down from an original estimate of 100-240k. We're about a week past the peak death rate and the total death count is approaching 60k, so the revised estimate was likely too optimistic probably closer to 100k is more realistic. By comparison 80k people died of the flu last winter in the US (last winter was higher than the average flu season, average is apparently closer to 40-60k). 600k die annually of cancer, on average, as another point of comparison.

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.

Elon is a good critical thinker and saw from the very beginning that the response to COVID-19 was way out of proportion. Lots of other scientists and doctors saw from the very beginning that COVID-19 was not worse than the flu, most of whom have been censored again and again. There's even a paper published about it early in March showing the new corona virus is not worse than the ones before [1]. So Elon is being proven correct again and this is not the first time this happens.

[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.”

Your quoted paper is 5 weeks old, as shown by the excerpt “ compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.”

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.)

The data presented by the two doctors is fresh, and shows exactly what the paper says. COVID-19 is not worse than the flu.

The “data presented by the two doctors” has obvious reasoning errors to anyone who has taken even high school math.

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 :-)

The death counts rise extremely quickly, but also drop quickly as well. The total amount of deaths is represented by the area of under the graph, not the maximum. This is a tall, but narrow spike.

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

There isn’t any reason to believe the virus kills a resident of NYC any easier than it kills a resident of Kansas if either is infected with it.

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.

The infection rate relevant insofar as it means the population will approach 100% infection [1],- and subsequent immunity or death - faster than other regions. Densely populated areas like New York will have a sharp spike and sharp decline. Loosely populated areas like Kansas will see a slower, steadier rise but also a slower and steadier decline. Social distancing makes areas behave more like rural areas, by virtue of limiting contact. But the same number of people are going to get infected eventually until herd immunity is achieved.

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.

> 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.

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.

The R0 of Measels is 10-3x as high as COVID-19, at 12-18 as compared to 1.7 to 5. The total number of people affected to achieve herd immunity is fixed. Distancing reduced the rate at which people get infected. And contrary to what you claim, several countries are not engaging in social distancing. And they're not experiencing death rates several times higher than the US.

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 last flu to cause such a severe spike in mortality statistics was the devastating 1918 Spanish flu

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.

Your argument assumes that coronavirus deaths will stop tomorrow, and also that mitigation measures used to reduce deaths from coronavirus via social distancing don’t affect the evaluation of whether it is “deadly”.

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.

I apologize, there's a lot of numbers flying around and I probably did miss the thrust of what you were saying. I shouldn't have focused on the comparison with the 1918 flu.

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-...

Thanks.

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.

> The current coronavirus is 1/100 as deadly as the flu of 1918.

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.

I agree with what you are saying, the numbers I presented in response to a comparison with the 1918 flu are not good to draw conclusions from.

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?

> So far 200,000 people have died from the coronavirus.

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.

One of the comments made in the video (referenced in the article as well) is

"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....

The data regarding number of deaths is severely tainted though. Many doctors have claimed(this is also mentioned in the OP video) that their administration pressures them for including COVID-19 in causes of death.

But in reality, the number of excess deaths compared to the average year, or compared to last year, is well above the counted number of COVID-19 deaths. Anecdotal claims about deaths being miscounted as COVID-19 don’t really stand up to this.

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).

For those that are paywalled, in New York the excess deaths of 6 times normal. You can't make that go away by claiming normal deaths are being misclassified.

There are likely deaths that are collateral damage. Fewer people are going to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes. It seems unlikely that we actually have fewer heart attacks, but people are scared of the hospital - so don't go and are more likely to die.

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.

> There are likely deaths that are collateral damage. Fewer people are going to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes.

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.

On the flip side I saw a short interview with a UCSF doctor that went to help out in New York where mentioned the hospital converted their cafeteria into a COVID19 ward. Not just in case but because it was full of patients on vents.

No amount of Hacker News Mental Gymnastics(tm) is going to explain that away.

Well, I also saw a medical worker saying that if someone dies before testing, that will be counted as a COVID death[1].

No amount of Hacker News Mental Gymnastics(tm) is going to explain that away.

[1]:https://twitter.com/BraveTheWorld/status/1254232498122428416

Considering mortality is 6x normal, that is a sane default under lack of resources for testing considering at least 80% probability.

> I also saw a medical worker saying that if someone dies before testing, that will be counted as a COVID death[1]

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".

A good critical thinker does not tweet out his emotions, calls someone a pedo on Twitter and later doubles down on the mistake he made.

I question your line of reasoning. I don't know if critical thinking correlates to emotional intelligence. Someone can be a genius in some regards and an idiot in others.

I honestly am not sure how to put the idea that this is not worse than the flu together with the death numbers that we've seen in New York City, Italy, and other places. Suppose the death rate had been inflated as Roussel et al. suggest, is there another more important metric by which to measure the severity of the pandemic or the necessary severity of reaction to a pandemic (though the death rate in NYC is definitely more than .2% because that much of the population has already died)?

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