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We know enough now to act decisively against Covid-19. Social distancing is a good place to start - Marc Lipsitch reponding to John Ioannidis.
Previous conversation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22620283
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some historians attribute the French Revolution at least partly to a mass hysteria of the idea that aristocrats were planning on starving the populace during a grain shortage. And feudalism was abolished as a result.
But didn't the French revolution have highly intellectual leaders that sought to create an entirely new government? I doubt they decided their rules of law while feeling panic. It was likely done over a long period of time with careful thought and consideration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
The road to hell, & etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider this, if the news reported "Old people with pre-existing conditions should quarantine themselves because a deadly virus may kill them", that would be rational advice based on data. Instead, the entire economy has been shut down, and the solution? Test everyone regardless of risk or value of testing. This is not rational, and many scientists and doctors are saying this. Doctors and nurses should be tested reg…
> Instead, the entire economy has been shut down, and the solution? The hospitals are being overrun. Your whole comments just reads like you're upset that you can't go out with your friends anymore. "Why should I have to stay at home, its the old people that are in danger, they should have to stay home." The hospitals are being overrun. That means that if left unchecked the virus overwhelms healthcare. Just yesterday…
Which hospitals in the US are being overrun by Covid cases? Close friend works at a large hospital just north of Sacramento (near the first Covid death in California)... not a single Covid patient in their hospital. Heard a guy from NYU Lagone on the radio earlier - said they're nowhere near capacity. I'm not saying this isn't serious, but a lot of the rhetoric is alarmism with no basis in fact at this point.
It’s much easier to quantify the harms of allowing business as usual and letting the infection spread (namely # of deaths) than it is quantifying the cascading repercussions of a massive global economic meltdown. Accordingly, world leaders are being judged based on their ability to contain the spread rather than prevent economic devastation. As a society we are faced with navigating the delicate balance between how m…
An economy is not something that one should have to shovels lives into to keep going. And in any case, if we sacrifice all the lives this virus could take to the economy, it won't help the economy at all - the massive dislocation involved in the deaths will certainly be far worse than the shutdown, if you really want to think that way. All that said, part of the collapse of things like the stock market comes through…
I mean I want to agree in principle, but this is just an incorrect statement. It's a matter of what is a good-enough tradeoff of risk and reward. If you make people drive to work, some will die. If you want to mine lithium, some people will die in industrial accidents that wouldn't have died if you never built a lithium mine. If you are only willing to accept 0.000% risk, then we have to respond with a full economic shutdown whenever there is a flu outbreak, or even a common cold outbreak, because people will die if we don't stop the spread. All economic activity leads to deaths, most of the time the deaths are less obviously linked, and at a much lower rate, so we don't connect the fact that people commute to work in trains, and so the economic activity they are commuting into work to engage in directly causes their death in the form of the flu, train crashes, pedestrian accidents, and so on.
There is also a question of net lives lost, or harm minimization. Economic activity also leads to resources which can be used to tend for the sick and elderly, or better nutrition, or education, and to sum up everything that isn't eating acorns you can find on the ground (except even that is a form of economic activity). I would assume that just letting covid run free would be dramatically worse than shutting down the economy for a few weeks, but then what the endgame is I'm not sure, it really does depend on the death rate in an ICU vs with limited medical support, and the amount of economic harm this causes.
However, I think we can learn a lot from this outbreak. I was very, very embarrassed to wear my filter mask when I went to the store, so I only wore work gloves up until yesterday. Now I'm sitting in bed with a fever wondering whether I'm about to start coughing up blood (probably not, it's still more likely to be the flu). Next flu season (or, sadly, next covid season) I think I will wear my mask, though.
If people start wearing fashionable masks and gloves in the winter, we can virtually eliminate lots of communicable diseases.
The title is funny, since Ioannidis is actually the one proposing measures ("do nothing") based on no evidence and exaggeration. Basically every number in the paper is tainted by him cherry-picking the most optimistic number possible, and then trying to twist it further into something even better. Like his argument for the R0 being near 1.3 is just that it's "probably" the case. At some point we need to be able to ca…
Weirdly enough, just yesterday I took all available sequence data currently on GISAID, used it to estimate R0, and got ... 1.3.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It kinda proves the point that covid19 alone is less deadly than many other causes
I don't see how you've come to that conclusion.
In France and Italy, there were between 50000 and 60000 deaths per month in 2018 and 2019. If most of those people died because of 2 or 3 accumulated factors, covid19 would be just one more factor. But maybe those people would have died one month later anyway without covid19
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many cases in SK and Germany have not resolved yet. I don’t think you can use those numbers so definitively.
I think SK's numbers are becoming more reliable by the day though. The new case rate has stabilised to a small number in the range of 50 to 150 per day and the active case count is dropping at a rate of over 200 per day. The daily death rate has been below 10 the whole time I believe. If that trend continues then SK's CFR will be well known soon and I would guess not dissimilar to current estimates. Though it's alway…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how you've come to that conclusion.
Did you look at the charts? If you didn't know there is a global epidemic, would you have been able to see it on these curves? In France and Italy, there were between 50000 and 60000 deaths per month in 2018 and 2019. If most of those people died because of 2 or 3 accumulated factors, covid19 would be just one more factor. But maybe those people would have died one month later anyway without covid19
Context for the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis He wrote a column a couple days before this paper. Linking the response as well. https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/18/we-know-enough-now-to-ac...
As others have noted here, the article calls for action based on very little data and lots of ad-hoc speculation. It also cheery picks its and falsely claims we don't have enough data.
I wonder if thinking all research is false too much lets jump to the idea you dream any opinion that's convenient.
Moreover, Ioannidιs has absolutely jumped into advocating this position from a partisan political position, with his positions picked up by partisan political sites such as the dailywire.com; Headline: "Stanford Professor: Data Indicates We’re Severely Overreacting To Coronavirus" https://www.dailywire.com/news/stanford-professor-data-indic...