481–490 of 740 posts
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Canada has a population of 38 million, and only 150 confirmed cases. But one of those cases is the Prime Minister's wife. Do we really think there are only 150 cases? It's obviously way, way, way higher than that.
Mme. Grégoire Trudeau seems to have contracted the novel coronavirus in the UK, so your datapoint doesn't really suggest anything about the situation in Canada.
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Yes we should be so flippant about hundreds of thousands of people dead. How dare you ask me to sacrifice going to a restaurant for that?
For you it's not eating out. For working families it's losing their jobs, their healthcare, and their housing because a bunch of healthy young people, that are facing almost no risk, are afraid to leave their apartments. In Seattle we're one week into this and 50+ restaurants have closed and hundreds of jobs have been lost. Those people can't pay rent and now have no healthcare. That's one week. In one month it'll be…
This figure is fictitious; you just made it up.
AMF, one of the most cost-effective anti-malarial charities in Africa, averts one death for about every $2331 in donations, per GiveWell's 2019 analysis: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zLmPuddUmKsy3v55AfG_...
(Listed as: "Cost per death averted at any age.")
> How many dinners have you sacrificed to save those lives, personally?
Personally? Not that it's any of your business, but I've given $50k to the Against Malaria Foundation.
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> "you know that promises to the largest loss of life on US soil ever" From what I'm aware, if hospitals are able to handle the patients, it shouldn't be up to that level. And the "slow it down" plan is primarily about not overwhelming hospitals.
You understand wrong and these common arguments can be easily seen to have incorrect arithmetic. There are no countries with mass infections where the fatality rate is plausibly below 1%. Of course, when the health system is overwhelmed, the fatality rate can be 4-5%. But let's just look at a 1% fatality rate to start with. The US population is 327,000,000. Seventy percent of that is 228,900,000. One percent of that…
> If you decrease the doubling time of a exponential curve, you still have a situation where most of the area, most of the deaths in this case, is in the last double.
The closer you get to affecting the entire population, the less exponential your curve becomes. Especially if you're assuming that a significant chunk of the population doesn't get infected, you have to have a curve that spends a lot of time slowing down. The max infection rate will be a lot lower than an exponential curve that keeps accelerating until it slams into a brick wall and somehow instantly stops.
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>you're missing that China initially suppressed info abt this virus Not only that, refuse to acknowledge, or share any information to international communities. The amount of things they do just to saves faces.
You mean like making the DNA public, posting statistics daily, sending doctors and resources to other countries to help train ... That kind of not sharing information?
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> Human beings do not intuitively understand exponential growth. This layman has read that we intuitively think of numbers logarithmically, which makes him wonder if we human beings do, in fact, intuitively understand exponential growth. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-natural-log/
...and see it as merely linear. That's the problem. Exponential growth is like dynamite. It's absurdly fast, compared to anything people see in daily lives.
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That is the most useful graph on this subject so far. Go look at it now. Most countries have exactly the same growth trajectory measured from 100 cases. That's solid data about how this behaves. Singapore and Hong Kong have been able to slow things down by strong measures, but it's still a straight line on a log graph, just with 1/3 of the growth rate. Italy is on the same line, just 8 days ahead of Europe and 13 day…
I have one issue with or maybe just question about this graph. Why it starts with 100 detected cases? It seems like arbitrary round number, but it also seems to be the smallest arbitrary-looking number that makes SK overlap other countries. Why is that? Why is the initial slow spread in SK irrelevant? What caused it to be initially slower than in other countries?
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That's a very important point if we're discussing the upsides and downsides of censorship, or whether China is a bad country and should feel bad about itself. But if we're looking for an example of how to solve the pandemic, when people point to China as an example, they aren't saying "we should spend a few weeks pretending the virus doesn't exist, threaten doctors who talk about it, order our labs not to study it, a…
Which is why I honestly don't understand why the mainstream media isn't saying "do what Korea/Japan did". Other countries have handled this admirably (e.g. Taiwan and Singapore), but Korea and Japan are larger and had very sudden upward trajectories in infection rates. Both countries acted decisively and they got this under control incredibly quick and with minimal loss of life, all without resorting to extreme auth…
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Human beings do not intuitively understand exponential growth. It's just too fast for our primitive brains. In some sense, we are standing in the middle of the road, frozen like deer in the headlights. Science is supposed to mitigate the shortcomings of our natural intuitions and cognitive biases. The problem is that most people are not scientists. When a non-scientist is asked to trust a scientist, he or she is subj…
That may explain but certainly not excuse. We submit our individual freedoms to governments we vote for to be able to act better than our ingrained short term reflexes. Best and brightest and all. It's also not necessarily an indictment of democracy- Taiwan clearly has been on the ball here. But it is absolutely an indictment of our current state of affairs in many western countries.
I did my numbers back in December. In January was already pretty worried, but I'm not an expert I thought. Maybe there's something I'm not taking in account.
So I kept reading about models and stats. Not that difficult. Ran my numbers again and again, yep it seemed pretty bad no matter what I cheated myself with parameters etc.
Then it came to Spain. I was pretty nervous by that time, kept it cool, tried to warn to people that this was no joke, everyone thought that I was a bit crazy and alarmist. Days passed, government went absolutely erratic and irreposible, lost all my trust in the lead epidemiologist and the ministry of Healthcare, not to mention the HUGE amount of healthcare workers that were insisting that it was just a flu and some of us were alarmists for two month and turned 360 in a few days.
Too late. Now I'm in it.
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For you it's not eating out. For working families it's losing their jobs, their healthcare, and their housing because a bunch of healthy young people, that are facing almost no risk, are afraid to leave their apartments. In Seattle we're one week into this and 50+ restaurants have closed and hundreds of jobs have been lost. Those people can't pay rent and now have no healthcare. That's one week. In one month it'll be…
> By the way, you can prevent a malaria death for about $50 in Africa. Could you point at a source of that? Last I've seen the Against Malaria Foundation was estimated to save 1 life for every couple thousand dollars.
As an Italian, I raise my eyebrows every time China is mentioned as an example for the successful containment of this virus. It could do that because it could afford to take the economical hit and because it is an authoritarian state, which means you can get almost everyone to obey, in one way or another. Also, the Chinese Party is what caused this mess to begin with, by allowing this virus to spread all around the w…
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00548-w
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opinion/coronavirus-china...
Xi was aggressive shutting stuff down but then went on to praise Chinese medicine (basically Naturopathy) multiple times after the Coronavirus became apparent. Which is where the quack medicine that results in people grinding up Pangolin scales and taking them like medicine, then eating the meat. Not to mention having markets with live wildlife in unsanitary areas in the middle of major urban areas with high density.
I'm surprised the continued spread of woo by Chinese authorities isn't taking more of a beating. Not just doing nothing, but promoting it.
Even the recent wildlife market "ban" has a giant loophole:
> The coronavirus epidemic prompted China to permanently ban trade of wild animals as food, but not for medicinal use.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/science/coronavirus-pango...