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Comment by monkeybutton | Hacker News Reader

Seeing 200M as an upper bound and that the current excess deaths are around 21M from COVID, the prediction is "only" off by 1 order of magnitude. At most.

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The thing is, "upward of" denotes a lower bound, not an upper bound.

Cool, "upward of" means "in excess of" rather than "up to". Thanks for the correction.

Haha I always interpreted it as the opposite of that, but this makes much more sense!

We’re not entirely done with this last one yet, either.

Having read Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague in the 1990s, a pandemic was the most obvious prediction possible. Only timing is the hard part. We got rather lucky that our research on SARS-CoV-1 was available in advance, along with the new development of lipids for mRNA vaccines. Without that, 1% death rate was certainly possible with COVID, if not the 2.5% predicted in the article. Which is still much better than historical pandemics like plague and smallpox in the New World.

Though, uh, maybe all that research made pandemic possible in the first place. Anyway a miss by one order of magnitude on a virus that does exponential growth is really good but obvious prediction. Public policy should definitely plan to deal with outbreaks on this scale of death.

I don’t know why we’re all saying “a miss by (just) one order of magnitude” makes it a good or close prediction. After all, a guess of 200 million deaths is just as close to “excess Covid deaths” (one order of magnitude, but in the other direction) as it is to complete human extinction

We were lucky SARS-CoV-1 was not as contagious as SARS-CoV-2.

Or unlucky that the lab leak happened. I don’t think the virus origin is knowable either way, though.

We can't disprove that it was planted by space aliens, either. That doesn't mean it's useful, absent of evidence, to entertain that hypothesis.

Which is why I only brought up the hypotheses with a lot of evidence behind them.

I dispute that there's a lot of evidence for the "lab leak" theory.

There is a plague like this every so many years, so not difficult to predict.

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