Coronavirus and Credibility • Hacker News Board

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#121

Post by thombat » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #104

maest wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "western", but "American". Both your sources are US based (and cite the CDC). The WHO has been warning about the coronavirus for ages.

I live in Europe and can confirm that it was similar here. E.g. German state media quoting a head physician: https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/schwabinger-chefarzt-co... (literally saying in the title it's not more dangerous than the flu) Also, the WHO posted this on Twitter in January, draw your own conclusions: https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152

When WHO relayed the Chinese belief/hope of "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" (Jan 14) there were only 40 identified cases, mostly with plausible links to the presumed origin at the market. It should be read as "widespread action not yet justified" rather than "no need to worry at all, ever"

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#122

Post by ldrndll » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

technion wrote: post #103

jpxw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve tried to understand them, their rationale appears include: - 5G occurred at the same time as corona - This is therefore “too much of a coincidence” - 5G kills off things that naturally kill coronavirus - 5G makes our immune systems weaker All of which are unfounded of course. But it’s important not to just reject people’s ideas out-of-hand, or to suppress them.

The argument all over my facebook feed is that Africa is both the only country with no Coronavirus and the only country with no 5G. But really, these are the same friends arguing for flat earth in a lot of cases.

The number of things wrong with this makes me despair.

1. Africa is a continent, not a country. 2. Some countries in Africa DO have 5G deployments, including my home country of South Africa. In the news recently is a possible link between BCG vaccinations and reduced fatality rates from Covid-19. South Africa has fairly high BCG vaccination rates due to the prevalence of TB 3. Iran has a severe problem with Covid-19, but no 5G deployments.

But as you say, this comes from the same type of crowd that believes in all the other bullshit (flat earth, vaccinations give you autism, etc.) so you can hardly expect an informed response to this.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#123

Post by Juliate » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

redis_mlc wrote: post #113

jordanpg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that at least US governments have done a poor job explaining the motivation behind the drastic precautionary orders. For a brief period, there was much talk of "flattening the curve" but I doubt that many people understand how that gets us to "deliberately wreck the economy." This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge of exponential ma…

> We are doing this because there are O(10^6) preventable deaths That doesn't appear to be true. Almost everybody who goes on a ventilator dies. Corona virus will infect as many people as any other flu or cold. So it's a valid question - why do we still have a lockdown?

To slow down the spread and ultimately reduce the number of people that will get to go in ICUs, go on a ventilator and/or die.

Because those _are_ preventable, if they don't get infected.

That, in turn, buys time to medical research & practice to mitigate and cure the disease, so that, later, when someone vulnerable is infected, we'll know better how to take care of them.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#124

Post by matwood » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #19

bsaul wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance. The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to…

Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally . FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with…

> Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally.

Non-math/cs people typically haven't been directly exposed to exponential growth. Which, to be fair, can be an intuitively hard concept until someone sits down and thinks it through. The classic lily pad example is my usual go-to way of explaining exponential growth to someone.

I also think a large part of this problem is societies overall rejection of science, but that's a different discussion.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#125

Post by tannhaeuser » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

brain5ide wrote: post #78

tannhaeuser wrote: post #66

I've had this idea for some time already where if you post something news-like, you should attach a link to your sources, like "citation needed" for non-Wikipedia text. I know that sounds bland and like basic journalistic practice - but it is not, nor should be followed by professional/accredited journalists who of course need to be able to protect their sources and publish on their own site; it's intended for social…

How is that different from what happens now with links being added? Also, journalists (or let's call them news media agencies) often abuse this by reporting of "claims by this" on the topic rather than the topic and in that way refusing any iota of responsibility for what they put on the spotlight.

I guess technically it's not different, but if used in a visually consistent way and followed widely, it could help critical thinking and add awareness to the fact that there are interested parties and spinsters behind most published material, rather than invite a habit of passive consumption/believing text just because it appears on shiny digital or printed media.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#126

Post by Lewton » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #97

Lewton wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's wrong. More people being asymptomatic is not a cause for reacting less strictly, which is the view being promoted. If more people are asymptomatic, that's great news, but it does not impact how severely you should lockdown society as the DDOS'ing of the health sector is still clearly a problem to avoid looking at france, spain and italy. It only means that you'll be able to end the lockdown sooner than expected

We'll see how Sweden fares in the end. I'm not promoting their methods of dealing with the pandemic, but I believe the different health systems affect the outcome more. Italy has around 1/3 to 1/4 the hospital beds per capita of Austria, Germany, South Korea but more than Sweden and the USA.

Comparing Denmark vs Sweden, it looks like we're beginning to see the difference in outcome on the death toll and hospitalization rates. Denmarks death toll is stabilizing (or at the very least only growing linearly) and the amount of people in hospitals with covid-19 has been stable for a week [0] (and no not because the hospitals are packed)

While Sweden is seemingly continuing the exponential trend in both over the past 4-5 days

[0] https://www.sst.dk/da/corona/tal-og-overvaagning the chart say "Indlagte patienter med bekræftet COVID-19 pr. dag "

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#127

Post by thewindowmovie » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #111

> Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have. No, this is a terrible test of credibility. Journalists and politicians often go the other way, amplifying the danger, or outrage, or worry. Taking the outside view, it's overwhelmingly likely that any forecasted pandemic or disaster doesn't happen; we almost always get sky-i…

There were enough actual data and evidence out there to conclude this was actually a pandemic. Whole cities and countries were being shutdown and ICUs under strain when these people were going on TV encouraging people to travel. It is well known that some of this host work for a channel which is biased towards the president and that seem to have affected how they covered the news rather than based on available evidence.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#128

Post by Beltiras » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:16 AM UTC

jpxw wrote: post #25

martinko wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the conspiracy theories out there, the 'caused by 5G masts' is the one that confuses me the most. I get the possible aversion to 5G, but how does one make the leap from that to it causing COVID?

I’ve tried to understand them, their rationale appears include: - 5G occurred at the same time as corona - This is therefore “too much of a coincidence” - 5G kills off things that naturally kill coronavirus - 5G makes our immune systems weaker All of which are unfounded of course. But it’s important not to just reject people’s ideas out-of-hand, or to suppress them.

For every reasoned answer you give them an avalanche of utter bullshit flows forth. This might be one of those rare occasions where the solution to bad speech is not more speech. The mind of the conspiracy believers is just too darned efficient at justifying bad reasoning.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#129

Post by nullc » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:17 AM UTC

redis_mlc wrote: post #118

nullc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally . FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with…

> people will continue to ignore an exponential trend Every cold and flu grow exponentially. Not sure what the fixation of HN readers is on the work exponential. Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically. I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators, and the futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown.

Like soylent green the economy is made of people.

If people are doing well, the economy will likely catch up-- weak businesses will fail, new ones will be created. It may hurt, may hurt for a while-- but from a purely economic perspective this might turn out to be a useful reboot. There are going to be a lot of phenomenal opportunities in the coming year.

But the economy cannot do well if the people are not.

For a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that we didn't need to keep delivering food and power and whatnot. It would be possible to simply pause the entire economy-- just like contracts that don't consider weekends business days-- in this fictional world we could freeze all accounts and all debts and whatnot for a year and then do "2020" over again. We can't do this because we need to keep a lot of people working to keep food and medical care flowing-- but I think the crazy idea is a useful illumination that the economy is a shared delusion. Whats going on now is only as devastating as we allow it to be, but the deaths of millions would be devastating (economically and otherwise) regardless of what we otherwise want.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#130

Post by diryawish » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:19 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #19

bsaul wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance. The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to…

Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally . FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with…

Isn’t all flu growth exponential over the season then dies down? Apparently Australia had a bad flu season last year: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7148553/Horror-grap...