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Really sick of marketers acting like their "I write viral Medium posts!" experience is an epidemiological qualification.
Now is the time for extreme caution. We can laugh about how it was an overreaction later.
Now is the time for extreme caution. We can laugh about how it was an overreaction later.
There's an overreaction budget that when you exhaust goes into 'boy who cried wolf' territory.
This is bullshit. As but one example of the guy’s cluelessness: the curve of (new) infections over time is not a bell curve . The shape is roughly similar. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the normal distribution.
Farr's Law says otherwise: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22farr%27s+law%22 .
Yes, he got as Farr as noticing that it’s roughly bell-shaped. But just because it goes up and then down it’s not actually a normal distribution.
At the beginning, when no one is immune, infections obviously grow exponentially. But the bell curve, even though it looks similar (sigmoid) doesn’t rise exponentially.
So it looks similar, but it’s not. If you observe infections and somehow try to fit a normal distribution, you’ll get widely wrong predictions, especially at the beginning.
Farr came up with this in 1840. That’s before Pasteur formulated germ theory as we know it today, so it was probably close enough for its time. Today it’s not.
This is bullshit. As but one example of the guy’s cluelessness: the curve of (new) infections over time is not a bell curve . The shape is roughly similar. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the normal distribution.
If that is your only criticism, you may be throwing away a whole article over a typo. The virus caseload in China is looking bell curve-ish. I am not on board with everything in this article, though. I am unsure about his proposition on reopening schools, for example. But I'm not throwing it all away over that one part.
Since this is an exponential phenomenon, I don't buy that "per-capita" matters (on top of the fact that he seems to be pulling in numbers as a snapshot in absolute time rather than windowed from initial cases).
If the numbers double every 5 days, the US can have 16 times the population of some other smaller country and be only 3 weeks from the same per capita effects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you wager that the majority of news circulating today is written by pandemic experts and medical professionals?
There are large number of government organizations, pandemic experts, medical professionals, and research groups communicating in the social media and blogs. There is no reason to post news articles or blogs from random Joes in HN when you can post directly from experts.
I’d rather judge them on the merits of their contribution than some meta signals.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1241092187577819137?...
I'll probably do myself a favour and stop clicking on coronavirus medium links
> driven by data from medical professionals and academic articles
...as filtered through one person's understanding and biases. Often this results in a very different picture than perusal of the original source material would.
> I’m most known for popularizing the “growth hacking movement” in Silicon Valley
That's an anti-qualification.
> Rank ordering based on the total number of cases shows that the US on a per-capita basis is significantly lower than the top six nations
This is right after he got done explaining why total number of cases of useless. So why is it here? Because it suits the overall theme of minimizing the threat.
> Daily growth rates declined over time across all countries regardless of particular policy solutions
Sounds compelling, but is it true? Note that the first chart is from SoberLook, which is definitely not one of the top-tier sources cited at the beginning of the article and not even one of those supposedly cited at the bottom (Bloomberg, Johns Hopkins). Bit deceptive, that. I'll leave it to you to figure out what kind of source SoberLook is. Oh, and we're using the "losing metric" of total reported cases again. Doesn't everyone know by now how fraught that is? The author certainly does.
The second chart already shows a very different story. There's no legend (which is suspicious) but it's clear that many of the lines do not flatten out as would be necessary to support the author's claim.
> Both the CDC and WHO are optimizing virality and healthcare utilization, while ignoring the economic shock to our system.
We're starting to see a hint of where the author wanted to go with this, probably before one word was written.
> According to WHO’s COVID-19 lead Maria Van Kerkhove, true community based spreading is very rare.
Hm. Where did van Kerkhove say this? Why is there no specific citation, as for more convenient factoids?
> The data from China shows that community-based spread was only a very small handful of cases.
Same as above. No citation. And does the data actually show that?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi... "The virus that causes COVID-19 seems to be spreading easily and sustainably in the community"
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati... "Community transmissionis evidenced by the inability to relate confirmed cases through chains of transmission for a large number of cases,"
Don't let the digression about aerosols (which nobody has claimed to be a primary mechanism for spread of COVID-19) fool you; the experts, including those included in the author's appeal to authority at the beginning, seem to have very different beliefs than those he presents.
> Released on March 10th, one study mapped COVID-19 virality capability by high temperature and high humidity.
One study. Minimizing again. It's a very pretty temperature graph, which doesn't actually prove anything. If you follow the link, you'll see that it was actually limited to China, which might not tell us much about anywhere else. What we actually know about the temperature sensitivity of coronaviruses is that they're remarkably stable up to about 37°C, and infectivity only starts to decline above that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14631830
> Children and Teens aren’t at risk
This does seem to be true, or close to it, for once. But why only talk about the lowest-risk groups? Why not people in their 20s, or the high-risk folks at the other end of the spectrum? Minimizing again.
This is getting long, so I'll stop dissecting each little piece. You get the idea. Let's skip to the end, where the agenda becomes clear.
> Local governments and politicians are inflicting massive harm and disruption with little evidence to support their draconian edicts.
Very objective choice of words there. Inflicting. Draconian.
> Every local government is in a mimetic race to one-up each other in authoritarian city ordinances
Attributing motive.
> The COVID-19 hysteria is pushing aside our protections as individual citizens and permanently harming our free, tolerant, open civil society
More appeal to emotion, and expressive of the author's real priorities. Don't get me wrong, politicians taking advantage of the situation to extend authoritarian power is a real and valid concern. But no way in hell should it be our first concern. It certainly doesn't justify twisting the facts and minimizing the threat that disease poses to the most vulnerable - not just the old but also the homeless, the already ill, etc. Those people are not expendable to "Support business and productivity" as the author puts it in a heading.
Now is the time for extreme caution. We can laugh about how it was an overreaction later.
Emergency funding will only go so far and once we get past a month of extraordinary measures the serious pain hitting millions of people will be a guarantee. Even in countries with far wider safety nets than the US, none of them are designed to handle this sort of unprecedented event.
Then we see Hong Kong announcing 50 new cases in a single day [1] after getting down to zero for an extended period. The only certainty is that there will be no easy answers. Which I think the OP posts downplays in their ‘data driven’ recommendations.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic...