Coronavirus and Credibility • Hacker News Board

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#581

Post by thebruce87m » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

abstractbarista wrote: post #567

djaychela wrote: post #5

From what I'm reading, I think there are still a significant minority of people who think this isn't an issue. I've had to learn to just walk away from comments on a variety of media where comments such as 'psychosomatic', 'less dangerous than the flu that kills 50,000 each year', 'patented by the illuminati', 'caused by 5G masts', and so on. I ended up deleting my twitter account as I dared try to engage with one UK…

The flu kills 290,000 to 650,000 per year worldwide according to WHO. Today we're still <80k for Corona, and new cases are slowing.

It’s not slowing down naturally - we are all on lockdown in order to slow it.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#582

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

runeks wrote: post #402

throwaway5752 wrote: post #208

In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players . There is also zero introspection - the people who were wrong about covid-19 are simply denying they said what they said. The truly scary part is they are getting away with it in real time, and changing a large populations' memory of contemporary events. I realize it's hard to remember f…

> In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players. No, global warming has a very different dynamic. With a virus, if you do the right thing and protect yourself, you’re more likely to survive. With global warming, if you get a lot of people to emit less CO2, you might just end up making CO2 emissions cheaper for everyone else.

Hum... The GP seems to be talking about Global Warming denialists, and the dynamics of how they communicate with people. This one is the same.

But yes, Global Warming has the bad quality that it is completely not obvious how to solve it. There is an entirely different dynamic at the side that accepts it for settling on a solution... and what is more disturbing, R&D and science are mostly neglected there too, even by the academics so prone on applying science to predict the problem.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#583

Post by banads » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #467

cortesoft wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what should we do?

Carbon taxes, and protectionist trade tariffs against countries who don't adopt carbon taxes. Make non-compliance painful enough, and the defectors will fall in line.

>Make non-compliance painful enough, and the defectors will fall in line.

Maybe they don't, or maybe in the end that's all too little too late, which is why I'd suggest adding adaptation initiatives to your list.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#584

Post by aledalgrande » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #457

itronitron wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The low 200k fatality estimate probably factors in the that the curve is flattening. The current estimate is that 300k people are infected in the US. If the number of people infected by Covid-19 doubles every week, then in 10 weeks there will be 300 million infected in the US. Assuming 1% mortality puts you at 3 million dead.

Doubling each week is not how it happens... as a higher percentage of people have or have had the virus, the growth rate decreases because there are less people available to infect. That is why infection percentage is an s shaped curve.

> as a higher percentage of people have or have had the virus, the growth rate decreases because there are less people available to infect

That is what you would call "herd immunity" and no, current numbers of recovered patients are not even close to have it. It doesn't happen like magic like some politician wants to make people believe, and current estimations for COVID _herd immunity threshold_ are 29%-74% of the community [1]. Make a count of that on the US population.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Mechanics

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#585

Post by acqq » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

lliamander wrote: post #469

moultano wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you look at what they actually predicted? https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

That's a useful start. I'll definitely dig into this. The question still stands as to why, even if the problem lay with journalists/media rather than scientists, is why did they get it so wrong? Also, if I as lay person am going to be getting my information from sources like NYT and National Geographic instead of IPCC reports directly, have they fixed the problems that led to the erroneous reporting?

> if I as lay person am going to be getting my information from sources like NYT and National Geographic

If you'd like to have better understanding of any topic you have to learn to improve your critical thinking capabilities. The media simply print different "opinions" and "statements" and even mark them as such. You have to learn that the media never reflect the truth, the way they are used to cover almost any topic. They are simply the reflections of the power of those who do the influence. Big corporations (or organizations having immense funding) have big influence even when it is not obvious to the "lay person".

From the media side, how it typically work is that the "debate" and the "controversy" sell (more ads, more readers, more viewers). So very often they would give as much attention to one person representing the conclusion 95% of all world scientist as to another person representing a set of fringe "contrarians" financed by some NGO's which are actually financed by some corporations whose interest is to promote that view:

https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Ob...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#586

Post by surround » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

drocer88 wrote: post #275

If you're getting your "news" from CNN/Fox/MSNBC, or "gathering evidence" to promote one the two permitted narratives, that's your problem. This is stuff is low effort "Presidential Level Politics" 24x7. Real news died when reporters stopped having to craft a story so that the Associated Press or United Press International picked it up and made it available to the varied local newspapers of America, both liberal and…

I don’t think “real news” has ever died - it was always dead. The term “Yellow Journalism” has been around since the late 1800s.

I don’t think news that tries to push a narrative is useless. You just have to understand the viewpoint that they’re providing. By reading several different conflicting sources, and trying to understand each viewpoint and why they disagree, you can become informed on the issue.

The problem is, many people would rather take the easy route and treat every issue as if it were black and white. This opinion is right, that opinion is wrong. This news outlet is right, this news outlet is wrong.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#587

Post by jmull » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #470

jmull wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple numbers tell us the deaths so far from covid-19 have been less than an average flu season. But so what? You're not actually suggesting anything so there's nothing to get directly angry about. But since you don't suggest anything, you leave it to people to infer what you really mean, and then there may be good reason to get angry. Are you suggesting that we should have treated covid-19 like the flu -- although…

Hmm, that's a good point. my main point is that we should treat flu more seriously (personally I would prefer legally mandated vaccines with extremely limited exceptions, and more funding into improved vaccines that have a higher effectivity). My second point is about the response to covid. To me it's unclear (and it won't be clear to the epidemiologists for a few years) whether the reactions we have taken had the ef…

> we should treat flu more seriously

Agreed (though in the US we do have a yearly nation-wide vaccination program, imperfect as it is, and largely staff and equip hospitals to handle the high-water mark of cases).

> I think making predictions on how many people "could have died" when we're doing extremely limited testing isn't helpful.

I disagree with that. The alternative to making imperfect predictions (predictions are imperfect by nature) is to not make predictions. Without predictions you can't make reasonable decisions to direct your future.

Of course, when your predictions are too far off you can't make good decisions to direct your future either, but that just suggests you should try to make the best predictions you can (hence the science and study of epidemiology), not that you shouldn't make predictions.

If you don't make predictions (or you make them based on hunches or by other low quality means) you're just throwing yourself randomly into the future and are unlikely to get good outcomes.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#588

Post by aianus » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:28 PM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #543

adjkant wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing missing here is that you're looking at deaths without looking at number of cases of each. The flu causes the number of deaths it does because it infects tens of millions of people a year[0]. The death rate is an order of magnitude lower than with COVID-19 across every single age bracket. [2] So when people say things like: > "I'm not worried about getting this illness" They are likely not considering that e…

> They are likely not considering that even the younger are taking as much as a 1% risk of their life, which is incredibly high. Depending on factors like the load on the medical community at the time and others, it can get as high as 5% or more quite easily as we have seen around the world. Currently using only napkin math from the numbers here[1], the death rate is currently at just under 4% over all age groups in…

> All said, a 0.1% death rate is still pretty dangerous and catching the disease is something like raising your risk of death by 50% in a given year. Lockdowns are still justified under those numbers.

0.1% of the rest of my life is ~3 weeks. The lockdown has already cost me more of my life than a confirmed case of COVID-19 would (on average).

And the math doesn't get much better the older you get, an 85 year old has the same chance of dying of natural causes during a 12 month lockdown as he has from actually contracting COVID-19.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#589

Post by banads » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:28 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #442

Paul is off by a mile and a half on this one. They weren't worried about getting caught. At all. The thing they would be worried about is whether or not getting caught would have consequences. And if there is anything that you could have learned from the last three years then it is that lying to the public carries no consequences at all.

>if there is anything that you could have learned from the last three years then it is that lying to the public carries no consequences at al

If you study history, you realize thats been a thing for much more than just 3 years...

https://youtu.be/VGdWIwiVMF4

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#590

Post by concordDance » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

throwaway5752 wrote: post #208

In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players . There is also zero introspection - the people who were wrong about covid-19 are simply denying they said what they said. The truly scary part is they are getting away with it in real time, and changing a large populations' memory of contemporary events. I realize it's hard to remember f…

COVID-19 just isn't that important on the global scale.

Car accidents last year almost certainly cost way more QALYs* than COVID-19 will this year (particularly if Imperial College in their 13th report is right about how badly undercounted the case numbers are).

* Car accidents affect most ages and health levels relatively equally, while COVID-19 mostly kills the old and infirm who are unhealthy, with poor quality of life and have few years left.