Coronavirus and Credibility

The point still holds to compare Covid vs flu+pneumonia then. This is some weird No True Scotsman argument you're making where it's not the "True Flu" if they had pneumonia as well... (likely getting pneumonia because of the flu) I doubt the dead people would be comforted by such a subtle distinction.

I just don't think you are seriously asking for information, because there is shitload on the Web already, but rather mocking me (judging by your one-worded response, which is rude). But in case I'm wrong, here's a nice collection of links to begin with, updated daily: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ Scroll to the bottom for most recent updates.

The idea that viruses always grow exponentially until they reach total saturation of the population comes from mathematical models that have never successfully modelled any real epidemic, ever. It doesn't come from experience of real diseases in nature, many of which were predicted by epidemiologists to grow to enormous proportions and yet - even in the absence of control measures - that isn't what happens.

It seems there are a ton of people right now who are enjoying thinking of themselves as intellectually and even morally superior to people who are just pointing out facts about the statistics gathered so far (which point to flu-like levels of danger and properties). I think the HN community is especially prone to this because it's full of computer programmers who are used to thinking in powers of two; some seem tempted to ascribe near-magical wisdom to this familiarity. But nature isn't a computer and just saying "exponential growth" over and over will eventually make fools of a lot of people, because it isn't there.

If this virus was really spreading exponentially, you'd expect to see the proportion of positive tests going up exponentially as well. But that isn't what is seen. In places that report the total number of tests administered (some places don't), the proportion of positive tests increases sub-exponentially or even hardly at all, coming to rest at about 15%, which is roughly the background level of coronavirus infections in the population during normal times.

It's especially disappointing to see PG fall into the trap of blaming politicians. Politicians have in the blink of an eye ceded power to a tiny cabal of (primarily) epidemiologists. So far they by and large aren't asking questions, instead simply doing whatever they're told even if it makes little sense.

But we really need people to start asking those scientists difficult questions. Citizens can do it but ultimately it only matters when politicians do it. Epidemiologists have a track record of absolute failure. They failed with Zika, they failed with foot and mouth disease, they're failing with CV. Go look at the models they produce and weep; some are invalidated the day they're published!

This guy is doing a good job of pointing out the many errors of modellers:

https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson

There's also some background here:

https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569

That's already well understood.

People are counted in the stats produced by hospitals if they have the virus, not if they've been hospitalised because of the virus. Literally if someone breaks their arm and they're tested positive, that goes into the stats for "COVID-19 cases". This is also true if someone dies of anything whilst having the virus; they're recorded as a "COVID-19 death".

The statistics here don't tell us what they sound like they're telling us. We'd see exactly the same pattern if the rules were suddenly changed to require every hospital admission to be tested for the common cold in a regular year - the number of "cases" and "deaths" would increase dramatically every day.

People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on ventilators

That statement is far too vague. People of all ages spend time on ventilators every years, especially during a flu outbreak. This is especially true of young children (under 5) whom COVID-19 doesn't affect at all! And COVID-19 is known to affect very few under 50s; the numbers here are so tiny the media can literally write entire stories about individual cases.

So what does "people" and "much time" mean in this sentence?

You can see some data on deaths from pneumonia by age group here:

https://ourworldindata.org/pneumonia#pneumonia-mortality-rat...

Of course deaths isn't the same thing as hospitalisation as the young are more likely to recover than the old. So this data isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it's at least quantifiable.

It's not safe to make a claim about this virus without comparing it to known values from prior years or outbreaks, when comparing the same thing. Every single number we're being presented with is presented without context and it leads to catastrophic mistakes of understanding. Number of positive test increases is shown without the number of negative test increases as well (i.e. an exponential increase in testing looks like an exponential increase in cases), deaths are counted without any investigation to decide what caused that death and so on.

It's very easy to get a totally misleading impression of what's going on. This is likely why in so many parts of the world hospitals are now reporting themselves as empty for weeks, despite the supposed "exponential growth" that should have overwhelmed them by now. In fact in Switzerland hospitals are needing to apply for emergency funding because the huge drop in patient numbers has caused their revenue to dry up.

You can get the numbers and do the math yourself, and prior to effective mitigation, the growth is exponential. There are policies that do have a mitigating effect, and that is the point. The mitigation of an effect does not mean either that it did not exist in the first place, or that it is not relevant.