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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

There are several downvoted comments here attempting to express the common idea that this virus has impacted different regions in very different ways. That observation alone is not an argument against there being only a single strain of this virus, but it is a valid observation in its own right. There are plenty of half-explanations that rely on cultural differences (hand shaking, masks), climate (heat, humidity), and various other factors, but so far no one has proven precisely what factors make the biggest differences. That piece of information is one of the most valuable things in the world right now and we do not have it.

The other big factor is the different government responses, but these are all over the map. Specifically, the lack of a lockdown does not always equal a high rate of transmission, and the presence of a lockdown does not always result in a low enough rate of transmission to avoid a crisis. This is something we should all be curious about.

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I wasn't sure about publishing this but I took some time to go over Worldometers' data and associate a lockdown type to each country in the EU (+ a few more countries). There doesn't seem to be a strong correlation between how strict the lockdown is and the total cases per million people: https://www.notion.so/Lockdown-data-361fe56821d046a787d76535.... So, yeah, I completely agree with you. We should definitely try to find out what's going on.

I'm writing this because I think HN is one of the very few communities able to properly discuss ideas with hard science and facts. So any observation, correction, criticism etc. is more than welcome!

> I'm writing this because I think HN is one of the very few communities able to properly discuss ideas with hard science and facts.

I propose that if you pay very close attention to the nature of discussions, over a long period of time, across a broad spectrum of differing topics, you may notice that the ability to "discuss ideas with hard science and facts" varies greatly according to the topic.

Or to be more specific...when the topic involves issues that are "political or values oriented", as this one does, the discussion and thinking styles exhibited in the comments much more resembles that which you would find within less "logically capable" communities.

I couldn’t agree more.

The COVID discussions have been the single most frustrating experience for me on HN since I joined. Ever single comment I’ve made downvoted, even accused of contributing to millions of deaths (an account which was thankfully banned for making the remark).

It’s only in the last week or two that it’s started to become remotely possible to have intellectual discussions on COVID, but it’s still overwhelmingly politicized and unscientific.

agreed, it's been hard having discerning discussions about this disease. the tide has been turning though in the last few weeks as the hysteria wanes.

The problem is that you have every Jane and Joe who's ever put a line through a set of points making graphs and arguments that conflict with the consensus of epidemiologists/social statisticians. It's fine (and good!) to investigate that sort of thing and share your results, but then you should be sharing "I did this sort of analysis, it seems to conflict with all these other analyses, does anyone know why? Maybe X?". Instead you have "OMG when you do this it looks like Y, the powers that be are lying to us!".

For a non-critical issue this would lower the quality of discourse slightly, but it's not an exceptional problem. In the case of critical major issues involving active disinformation this is highly irresponsible behavior.

> For a non-critical issue this would lower the quality of discourse slightly, but it's not an exceptional problem. In the case of critical major issues involving active disinformation this is highly irresponsible behavior.

Assuming your description of "the" problem is accurate (I suspect it isn't - and it's "a" problem, not "the" problem, pardon the nitpicking), what do you propose should be done about it? On an individual basis, a community basis, a governmental basis, etc - what should be do? Because as far as I can tell, we (the citizens of planet Earth) seem to be stuck in this recursive loop of anger, finger pointing, and general failure. And it doesn't seem like anyone else notices.

Well, mostly no one.

https://i.imgur.com/QA6vSzC.png

I'd say that behavior is similar to if an individual in, say, a school or assembly, shouted "FIRE" upon witnessing a chemistry demonstration involving a controlled flame. If that somehow caused a stampede resulting in loss of life they might be held accountable by the courts. These acts on social media can be quite similar philosophically, so one would expect that the legal treatment should be similar (albeit perhaps adjusted proportionately for impact and reasonableness of the held belief).

I don't necessarily think that's what should be done in practice, but it seems consistent with how western society responds to this behavior in other settings.

I don't necessarily think there is a good solution, either - I just mean to say that people who do that, even if they are well-meaning, are behaving unethically. That's because they believe in their own perspective with 100% probability, but that's obviously unreasonable from a Bayesian perspective. If they accounted for even a small probability that they are wrong then their behavior would change dramatically.

> I don't necessarily think there is a good solution, either - I just mean to say that people who do that, even if they are well-meaning, are behaving unethically. That's because they believe in their own perspective with 100% probability, but that's obviously unreasonable from a Bayesian perspective. If they accounted for even a small probability that they are wrong then their behavior would change dramatically.

Completely agree, but I believe this behaviour applies to 90%+ of those who express confident opinions on the matters of the day, and downvote anyone who dares question those opinions when they can't put together a convincing argument for their strong assertions.

Some evidence for the frequency of this behaviour exists, we could have insight into it, but I suspect we shall choose to not discuss such things. Only downvote them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_humility

https://behavioralscientist.org/epistemic-humility-coronavir...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wisdom/

(These links are not directed at you personally, just to be clear).

Looks like either every single person I reply to disapproves of my words, or we have yet another busy little beaver, eh dang?

Let's see how this one fares.

Not the OP, but one thing that is vital is that those in power are inscrutably honest and value scientific method, IMO.

If a politician stands between the scientific advisors and the people then when they make pronouncements saying "this is for medical reasons" when in fact the reasons are primarily financial, or tempered by the interests of other parties (their personal backers), that needs to be made clear.

When the UK said "we're using different models" they should have been publishing those models, among with the facts they were relying on, published a list of all people who had input to that decision and the context.

A rolling diary of all people any senior politician had contact with; a list of every shareholding by any member of a politician's family; and such information need to be openly accessible in real time.

Basically we need to treat them as an obsessive helicopter-parent would treat their teenage children, they need to have tracking devices, they need to have "friends" (employees of opposition parties) that attend every meeting they go to, they've down they simply can't be trusted.

But of course you can't do any of those things because corrupt politicians won't vote for it. We're stuck at a local minima of democraacy, IMO.

How to progress? I don't see a way, politicians have enough of the population in their thrall (eg using media manipulation) to sustain the current system. Two things that may help are to have bodies parallel to government adopted ones, like UK's SAGE but excluding the politicians, and have media that will report direct from those bodies to the people rather than via a filter of politicisation. Maybe then enough people can get onboard to bit-by-bit elect trustworthy officials interested in government for the good of the people.

> When the UK said "we're using different models" they should have been publishing those models, among with the facts they were relying on, published a list of all people who had input to that decision and the context.

Everything should be published (it isn't), and nothing should be censored, without good reason (not the case today). That so few people seem to realize this is mind boggling to me. But then, it's human nature, so it shouldn't be surprising.

> How to progress? I don't see a way, politicians have enough of the population in their thrall (eg using media manipulation) to sustain the current system. Two things that may help are to have bodies parallel to government adopted ones, like UK's SAGE but excluding the politicians, and have media that will report direct from those bodies to the people rather than via a filter of politicisation. Maybe then enough people can get onboard to bit-by-bit elect trustworthy officials interested in government for the good of the people.

This idea, and others like it, seem like a very plausible way out of this mess. I really see no other way.

But how much effort, in man-hours, is being expended in this direction, as compared to, oh I don't know, people having the same arguments year after year, in thread after thread?

One part of being a community is slowly building values in new members. Many communities, many subreddits as an example, form monocultures and ruthlessly stamp out opinions not aligned to the deigned philosophy (and then being monocultures, they die a slow death).

HN as a community places value on interesting, well informed debates, but that value isn't universally shared outside of HN. It takes regular exposure to build that value in new members but over time they'll either embrace it or wash out of the community as long as we do our best to consistently embrace it positively.

Keep debating and pushing forward on interesting conversations, keep doing it politely and in the interest of meaningful debate.

> One part of being a community is slowly building values in new members. Many communities, many subreddits as an example, form monocultures and ruthlessly stamp out opinions not aligned to the deigned philosophy (and then being monocultures, they die a slow death).

Yes indeed. Reddit is famous for this, and getting worse by the day. But how might we know, for sure, the degree to which that also happens here? And I don't mean that rhetorically. We can all instantaneously generate "an" answer to that question, based on heuristics, but how accurate is that answer? To gain some certainty, it would require looking at actual data, which is firstly dependent on a willingness to look at the data, which is firstly dependent on a willingness to consider the idea that there may be a problem. This last point seems like a rather touchy subject.

"building values in new members" also seems like a well-accepted but heuristically-based idea. Is it, in fact, only new members who lack these values? Luckily, HN profiles contain an "accounted_created" attribute...with a little effort writing some scraping code (something I don't presently know how to do), I suspect some more precise, evidence-based answers would quickly reveal themselves.

What would be even more revealing would be if one had access to voting history. This way, we could get a decent feel for how certain individuals feel about this general topic. But alas, you and I don't have access to that data. But someone does (see: willingness to look at the data). Shall we truly pursue righteousness, or should we just declare ourselves to be, by fiat, as seems to be the most popular approach in broad society?

> HN as a community places value on interesting, well informed debates...

In the abstract, principled[1] sense, sure. But, how well do we "walk the talk"? Once again: what does the data say?

> as long as we do our best to consistently embrace it positively

And consistently. But now we're back to where we started.

> Keep debating and pushing forward on interesting conversations, keep doing it politely and in the interest of meaningful debate.

Despite the obvious unpopularity, and repeatedly inconsistent (again, based on topic) evaluation of "meaningful debate", as well as the HN Guidelines in general, I seem unable to stop lol

[1] "Lord, I promise not to sin!" Inconsistent adherence to an ideology, however strongly held in theory or principle, is not a problem only within the domain of religion, I suspect. Rather, it seems more like something inherent in human beings. Failure rates may vary fairly significantly across domains (or may not!), but this is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.

You're right that at least large parts of this can be tested and answered with data. Obviously short of a magical classifier for questions like "is this a productive debate" and "is this ideological fighting or a search for truth?" then we're going to need someone to hand classify a bunch of things which is expensive, slow and only as accurate as the person making the judgement call. In other words, we'd just be making ad hoc judgements again, but calling them something else because we made those ad hoc judgements in a csv instead of a comment.

The other issue is that communities are dynamic, and behaviors trend. You're probably not going to see a flat correlation, you're going to see something that resembles a wave function.

> then we're going to need someone to hand classify a bunch of things which is expensive, slow

True. But not impossible.

And I would recommend comparing effort to potential reward. Imagine, just for fun, the possibility that HN could find a way to discuss climate change[1] in a disciplined, truthful, and non-heuristic manner. What might the value of that discovery be? And if we could find a way do it, perhaps others could as well?

> and only as accurate as the person making the judgement call

How deeply have you thought about that? Like, say it was an engineering problem you've been asked to solve - have you put as much effort into thinking about it as you would if it was a paid assignment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

> In other words, we'd just be making ad hoc judgements again, but calling them something else because we made those ad hoc judgements in a csv instead of a comment.

Do you realize you are:

a) predicting the future

b) making several assumptions

c) utilizing loaded terms (which is harmful not only to others, but sometimes also to oneself)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_language

> The other issue is that communities are dynamic, and behaviors trend.

This is true.

> You're probably not going to see a flat correlation, you're going to see something that resembles a wave function.

Your prediction may be correct. But it also may be incorrect.

[1] A topic we seem to loooooove to talk about as if it only involves climate science, and has no psychological aspect whatsoever.

You should double check your definition for loaded language as I agree with the article you linked but not your usage of it. To quote from your source:

> Loaded words and phrases have significant emotional implications and involve strongly positive or negative reactions beyond their literal meaning.

I hope 'ad hoc', 'judgements', 'csv' and 'comment' don't carry any strongly positive or negative reactions, nor stereotypes or implications. (Though I have known a few people to have negative reactions to the idea of csv files...)

> I hope 'ad hoc', 'judgements', 'csv' and 'comment' don't carry any strongly positive or negative reactions, nor stereotypes or implications.

I would very much like for us to have a written language that has the same bandwidth as a long form, in-person discussion. But we have to play the hand we've been dealt, not the hand we wish we'd been dealt.

And to be clear, I don't object to your complaint, or consider it unreasonable - quite the contrary: this is the type of conversation I think we need more of. My comment above could have been improved by adding some disclaimers to make it explicit that I am not intending to speak in an "accusatory" manner, but I reckon the vast majority of people would have read it that way, and for good reason. So, apologies for that.

The ideas I had in mind are somewhat (again, limited by the fundamental shortcomings in our written language) captured in here:

> Loaded language (also known as loaded terms, emotive language, high-inference language and language-persuasive techniques) is rhetoric used to influence an audience by using words and phrases with strong connotations associated with them in order to invoke an emotional response and/or exploit stereotypes.[1][2][3] Loaded words and phrases have significant emotional implications and involve strongly positive or negative reactions beyond their literal meaning.

(The intent, emotional, and exploit parts I do not consider at all relevant to this discussion).

The larger, more abstract point that I'd like to make is: reality is infinitely complex, and we as individuals reason upon it with far from infinitely powerful minds. Now, start layering on all the other complexities, like collective reasoning (hampered by language and a variety of other things), necessities of being forced to make incredibly imprecise/coarse group decisions on a strict timeline (our political systems), complex and imperfect incentive systems, asymmetry and inaccuracy of information, advances in some domains (science, technology, industrialization) without corresponding advances in complementary domains (psychology, consciousness, etc), and so forth...and before too long you've got a bit of a mess on your hands.

Isn't this what Issac Ben-Israel claims in his article[1]? Basically there seems to be a common pattern in all countries, independent from the type of lockdown applied. After 40 days the peak is reached, after 70 days there are almost no new infections.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-end-of-exponential-growth-...

That’s not a useful comparison though. You want to compare cases now to cases when lockdown or similar measures were imposed. Otherwise a country that wastes 2 months doing nothing and then takes action far too late just gets put in the “lockdown” bin.

While I mostly agree with you, I wouldn't call the comparison useless. I want to add a few additional things as well that add to the difficulty of these comparisons (and why these simple comparisons people are making are potentially wildly inaccurate)

1) Testing is all over the place and mostly done only on people that are hospitalized. This creates a huge selection bias in official numbers, especially when we're talking about a disease where we're seeing claims from 25-80% of carriers being asymptomatic. There's plenty of evidence to show that many people that suspect themselves (i.e. they show symptoms) are not getting tested because they aren't "sick enough". So all we can do is guess that official numbers are on the low side. This is part of why we see wildly different CFR numbers (as opposed to IFR) in different countries. (Obviously there are other factors as well, but this one captures effects like living conditions)

2) Deaths are being attributed in different ways. In some areas any pneumonia death is being counted while in others the person must have tested positive for covid. In America the attribution even varies by state. What makes this more complicated is that when the metric changes these tend to be deaths added on a single day (creating spikes). This makes it difficult to do 1 to 1 comparisons.

3) The disease's fatality rate drastically changes with the victim's age. There's strong evidence to show that if you're healthy and young that you have little to worry. But if you're relatively healthy and old you should be concerned. There are drastic differences in country's age, and thus this makes a big difference in comparisons.

4) The number of cases isn't exactly a bad thing. Let's take Sweden for example. If their method for containment (develop herd immunity in the general population, isolate the elderly and immunocompromised, and social distance strictly to not overwhelm hospitals) is effective you'd expect a faster rate of new cases AND deaths. But if their method is the better solution they will have less total deaths by the end. But are they right? No one knows yet because we need time. Time is a difficult factor to work into these comparisons, which are often single snapshots rather than growth rates and inflections.

All sorts of confounding variables. Hard to test just one variable at a time.

I think cases/1M population is a good variable though. Deaths depend on the quality of the healthcare system, number of infected people (per 1M) only by how quickly the virus spreads + number of tested people (assuming the quality of the tests is the same across all EU countries). Would you please elaborate on that?

Cases are a difficult metric because there's a selection bias. Most places, including the US, does not have adequate testing. Especially for a virus we suspect a significant amount of people to show no symptoms. We're mostly testing those that are hospitalized.

Deaths, on the other hand, are easier (but not perfectly) to count because it is much more clear that someone has died. The symptoms are trivially obvious. The difficulty here is that there is no universal attribution (even within the US) as to what constitutes a covid death. Let's show a tricky example. Let's say an elderly patient had a stroke and are in the hospital. You THEN get infected and die. Did you die from the stroke or covid? Is this as deadly as a disease that kills a healthy 60 year old? How do we distinguish this?

I'm just trying to say that without context these simple comparisons can miss a lot of nuance of the reality of the situation. The thing here is that there are a significant number of variables at play and without discussing those variables you can get inaccurate results.

I agree, that's why I published the table and anyone can comment (in Notion itself), therefore contribute. I think such a comparison can at the very least spark the discussion you mention.

> lockdown does not always result in a low enough rate of transmission to avoid a crisis.

On that topic, Cuomo just declared that among the last batch of infected people in NY, more than 80% were apparently respecting the lockdown and staying at home and we have no idea how they were even contaminated. Puzzling.

Do you have a link? With incubation periods of up to two weeks and cases without symptoms everything is possible.

That makes sense to me. The lockdown has reduced people getting infected from being out. There are still people getting infected and that is people in institutions (care homes, prisons, hospitals) and people in houses. Ie if one person in a house of 4 gets the virus and passes it on to the rest of the family 75% of people infected were staying at home.

Generally lockdown in the US has been pretty loose. Many people have left their homes, and had the opportunity to be exposed.

I also think there is a likelihood that between presymptomatic/asymptomatic transmission, and the possibility of 2 week incubation this seems like a nightmare to track transmission.

A friend who had SARS-cov2 was sick for 30+ days. So it’s not clear to me that a mild infection would be over in 14 days.

> Generally lockdown in the US has been pretty loose.

I'd like to see the same study done outside of NY, because the NY lockdown was one of the most stringent in the country, from what I've read.

Was it? It reads about the same as the Bay Area's, possibly even a bit looser.

If it's a mild infection, by definition, the immune system has squashed it. If it didn't, the virus would take hold; it's not a latent viral infection like herpes.

Edit: okay, okay, I didn't specify "a mild infection that stays mild and goes away". We know complications can arise and the infection can progress into severe symptoms. Plenty of examples.

The evidence does not support this viewpoint. Also, things are complicated by the evidence that the worst symptoms are caused by cytokine storm, i.e. an auto-immune response.

Which evidence? Are you referring to the "lag" in immune response in the initial stage of infection?

Perhaps I should have said there is no evidence that I am aware of that supports that viewpoint. Instead, there is evidence that asymptomatic people can transmit the virus. No symptoms does not mean no virus.

Asymptomatic does not mean permanently infected

There are plenty of cases that start with mild symptoms, and then progress to severe/critical after about a week. Boris Johnson is a perfect example of this.

Please don't spread misinformation.

I've had coughs that have lasted a month or more - including at the start of lockdown [#] (caught from my son, I think, who was coughing for 8 weeks or more). I've always assumed that this is because a virus can be kept at low levels, but can "hide" in the body not coming across antibodies that will harm it, but not spreading enough to create a heightened immune response??

Kinda like when you don't take a full course of antibiotics, the latent infection grows again to problem levels.

You indicate this is wrong thinking (not a suprise as it's just a null hypothesis from someone without biology training): so what is going on when you have a cough/blocked nose for weeks on end?

{# I'm very curious to find if the virus I had was Covid19; it sent me to bed with mild flu-like symptoms, gave a tight chest, had me occasionally [not persistently] coughing for weeks. No noticeable anosmia. Very little phlegm; no snot (nasal/sinus mucus).}

More importantly than the tightness or looseness, we don't really have any facilities set up for if one member of a household gets sick and wants to stay away from the other members and not infect them. I can understand discharging patients back to their families before they're PCR negative because infectiousness in SARS-CoV-2 seems to be very frontloaded. But for people recently diagnosed with mild cases of Covid-19 it would be good if we had places for them to quarantine outside their households even if it was on a voluntary basis.

I've worried about apartments for that reason. If air circulation is shared, wouldn't it be possible to transmit from apartment to apartment?

I think it would be worth a test, at least.

No, the virus doesn't just float around in the air, at least, not for any appreciable amount of time. It's much more likely that people in these apartments are touching the same elevator buttons and then wiping their eyes and contracting the virus.

> No, the virus doesn't just float around in the air, at least, not for any appreciable amount of time.

Here is a pretty approachable summary of how transmission happens that contains a review of some specific cases where airflow was critical to transmitting the infection: https://erinbromage.wixsite.com/covid19/post/the-risks-know-.... None of these occurred in isolated spaces connected by shared ventilation but I would be cautious about saying flatly that it can't happen.

I didn't say flatly that it can't happen. I said it can't happen at any appreciable distance. Obviously, if someone sneezes in your mouth your going to get sick.

That's not what you said, and why don't you take a look at that article I linked. The restaurant case and the call center case it looks at were hardly in the category of "someone sneezes in your mouth."

> No, the virus doesn't just float around in the air

I'd be interested in any references you can point to that explain why that doesn't happen. A priori I would expect virus particles to be able to remain airborne indefinitely. Viruses are very small, much smaller than pollen grains that I believe are well known to remain airborne over long distances so I would think Brownian motion from collisions with air molecules would suffice to keep them aloft.

There are multiple lines of evidence that suggest airborne transmission is the primary form of transmission. For example: https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/125372588101882675...

"Lines of evidence" and "twitter.com" do not belong in the same sentence. If there's something of substance in a tweet, link the substance.

If this were an academic journal, I would. But this is a casual web forum.

The setup of this whole thread is 'trustable data and scientific method'.

Also, please be aware that a name is often not enough to show that a source is relatively trustworthy, some credentials can help; this is a worldwide forum.

Surely that depends on whose tweets they are? If its Jeremy Konyndyk or Scott Gottlieb or such that's a pretty decent source. If it's a celebrity or political figure or some random person less so.

It's precisely because of the way infections cluster in cases like that that we can tell that we're not seeing (much at least) long range airborne transmission. It this was a true aerosol like you see with chickenpox, measles, or TB you wouldn't be seeing such a nice separation as that. It looks like the furthest away you should be able to be infected someone is maybe 20 or 30 feet if you sneeze without covering your nose. That's the significance of Mr. Konyndyk talking about droplets rather than aerosols. Though it was a big deal in the original SARS outbreak that you could generate aerosols via intubation which caused some nurses wearing surgical masks to get sick in that outbreak.

Unfortunately, even talking and breathing generates micro-droplets that remain airborne for hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2azcn7MqOU

> No, the virus doesn't just float around in the air, at least, not for any appreciable amount of time.

Can you share what degree of certainty you ascribe to that claim?

Edit: Also, does this change it? https://erinbromage.wixsite.com/covid19/post/the-risks-know-...

That agrees that the virus is mostly transmitted via droplets rather aerosolized virus particles. A bare virus can float in the air for quite a while but all the evidence we have, especially stuff like form that site, seems to show that that isn't a route by which people are being infected. Instead its being transmitted over shorter distances, generally around 6 feet but longer if someone is shouting, singing, coughing without covering, or just directly downwind.

??? It talks about miniscule droplets that could stay in the air for minutes, and move downwind quite easily.

I think what the parent commenter is saying is that maybe the virus stays in the air like that but it's not a way in which people get infected, otherwise the clusters wouldn't be so tight. Any tracing would be impossible for example. One possibility is that you need a threshold amount of virus to infect you so close contact is necessary.

There was a SARS outbreak in an apartment building due to shared (and presumably faulty) plumbing, and CV-19 does seem to have a fecal route.

That plumbing was not in any way up to standard. If you've got s-curves in your pipes you shouldn't have anything to worry about with getting this (or cholora, or norovirus) via your toilet from another unit.

I don't think we've actually had any fecal transmission with SARS-2 either, or even had someone successfully culture live virus from a stool sample. We've seen a lot of virus RNA show up in stool from infected patients but that might be due to swallowed saliva. I'd try to avoid contact with other people's feces in any event but the danger here really does seem to be mostly droplets.

Reference: "Preliminary data submitted by 113 hospitals over the last three days show most new admissions have mostly been staying home; they're predominantly from the downstate area (57 percent NYC, 18 percent Long Island) and people of color. Most of them are older and non-essential employees; 66 percent were admitted from their own residences.

Of the new New York City hospitalizations, 90 percent have not been traveling by car service, personal automobile, mass transit or even walking around. If they've been working, they've been doing it from home and apparently weren't going out much, the governor said."

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/subway-shutdown-...

I wonder about other people in their households, who may be going outside more or even working.

In Wuhan the infection rate went down only when they started to place any person who required quarantine to separated buildings.

This points out that perhaps transmission across apartment building is significant.

News alert: Americans lie and/or are misinformed on surveys.

There's a strong incentive, if you're going in to hospital with Covid19, to lie. They ask "were you sheltering in place?" and you'd think "if I answer no, will I be denied care?". That's going to make survey almost useless, a secondary survey (eg speak to neighbors) might be better but would still be relatively poor.

That's a bit of a stretch of what he said (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/ny-gov-cuomo-says-its-shocki...).

* Hospitalizations, not cases and not infections. That skews old/out of the workforce.

* The stat is that 66% live at home and 84% not working.

* That doesn't mean they are 100% to the letter respecting social distancing. Nor does it mean they don't have housemates that aren't working. (That could be the case, but there's no data).

That's not what the numbers meant. The majority were admitted from home to the hospital, i.e., they were not institutionalized or homeless.

That data is poorly framed. I have no idea why he's surprised. This is the one I've seen people cite:

https://i.imgur.com/b9RAr8g.jpg

Cuomo:

> 66% of the people were at home, which is shocking to us...This is a surprise: Overwhelmingly, the people were at home...We thought maybe they were taking public transportation, and we’ve taken special precautions on public transportation, but actually no, because these people were literally at home.

That chart is titled "Source of Admission," not "Was supposed to be staying home." Someone providing critical services who woke up with a fever and got tested would fall under "home."

There's also nothing to compare it to. What percent of people are in those circumstances?

To what I think he misread and was surprised by, the idea that most people getting hospitalized were sheltering in-place (a stat I haven't seen), with how many New Yorkers who have been exposed to SARS-CoV2, you'd expect essential workers who are going out every day to be more likely to be immune at this point, those sheltering in place aren't. More people are sheltering in-place than out working, they're less likely to have been exposed, so I wouldn't be surprised to see more of them infected. But again, that's not the data Cuomo was talking about with "66%."

Ventilation systems like what happened in South Korea?

> so far no one has proven precisely what factors make the biggest differences.

The problem is in the question itself. Behind it is an expectation that there is just a tiny number of "magic spells" or "a trick" that would "solve" the problem, and that anything else is unnecessary.

The reality is the opposite: all the countries, and where the regulation was weaker, the people on their own, with the time attempted with different levels of success to protect themselves. They all did many things, many real people on many different levels, and with many not identical results. But it's much more complex than the assumption behind the question.

For example, people like to quote Sweden as some "magical other way country" whereas the universities and upper schools were shut down there too, it still has more deaths per capita than the US, the rate of new confirmed cases is not sinking etc.

Also, those who claim that there is an "impact" which "is different" typically don't try to fairly compare the actual impacts which are eventually much more similar when compared properly than implied in such a claim with no correct comparison done.

That is, a lot of such "arguments" are frauds which depend on those hearing it not willing or being able to look at the data properly.

I worked in finance for years, and I can tell you: if those who promote various claims in the news, media and social media would trade while ignoring so much data which is here so obviously available to find and compare, like they do in their claims, they would lose all their money in a blink of an eye.

I don't know how it would be possible to organize that, but if people who claim bullsh.t would have to invest some money behind their claims, and lose it if their claims would be proven wrong, we'd have much less insane conversations.

Just looking at the raw data and comparing can show you that a lot of claims floating around are plainly and completely false.

One page that allows magnificently easy comparison is

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Additionally, one should search for the original sources of the information for different countries, and compare the numbers based on that additional information.

I can especially recommend translate.google.com for an amazingly efficient way to read some information from the original sources.

I strongly suspect when we're through all this, two things will probably be true:

-- We will probably be able to make some statements about what practices seem to have various effects for better or worse and what environmental factors (like density and isolation) tilt the results in one direction or another

-- There will remain debate over what we should have done given the benefit of perfect hindsight

-- However, we're also going to conclude that some of the wide variation in outcomes can best be described as luck of the draw

I doubt our hindsight will be perfect. 9/11 happened in broad daylight at 9 in the morning, in two major cities, yet it is almost impossible to suss out what actually happened that day based on the current, publicly available data. SARS-CoV 2 is probably going to get filed away into the "suspicious mystery" drawer, right next to JFK, Jimmy Hoffa, DB Cooper, MH370 et al.

There's a lot of political effort, it seems, going in to ensuring the truth is hidden from the demos. In part this can be considered necessary - some people need lying to in order to keep them compliant and save lives, but largely is about covering up errors of judgement, and decisions that have purposefully been made against population-health advice. That effect is reduced over time, but doesn't d disappear entirely; if a politician -- or political appointee -- is in charge of the output of a scientific advisory group then their filtering will likely obscure content forever.

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