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An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

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Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#71

Post by philwelch »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #10
Loughla wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I read that wrong, but wasn't the point that Japan wasn't acting appropriately, and that white paper, along with other research, forced (for lack of a better word) them to own up to the scale of what they were seeing? Isn't the point that, while the particulars were proved false, the overall thrust of the article that Japan was stalling action which MAY lead to those numbers was true? Did I miss the point of th…

Honestly, who has 1-1.5h to read this without skimming through most of the verbiage to tease out the point? I read the "pre-registered" part. It was wrong on a bunch of points, both numbers and impact. I strongly doubt a major world economy of 126 million people with many world-class epidemiologists and doctors and generally non-disastrous political leadership was 'forced' into anything by this. The hubris of this gu…

> Honestly, who has 1-1.5h to read this without skimming through most of the verbiage to tease out the point?

I’m not trying to flex on you, but it didn’t take me nearly that long to read it. And it really does not demonstrate good faith on your part to come here and tear down patio11 without even doing the basic due diligence of actually reading the damn thing you’re commenting on first.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#72

Post by lazyasciiart »

will4274 wrote: post #39
m_mueller wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find confusing though is Japan's low death numbers. I was assuming that spikes in mortality couldn't be hidden, but recent comments from inside sources in Japanese hospitals are starting to make me doubt this assumption. Still, there is not a crisis on Lombardia-level going on, which one would expect given the relative inaction of Japanese government. I'm guessing the truth is somewhere in the middle - Japan's…

I mean, look at the comorbidity data - heart disease, hypertension, diabetes - aren't the Japanese one of the healthiest people in the world?

Yes, but the population is even older than in Italy, which is also a big factor.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#73

Post by aikinai »

philwelch wrote: post #58
lalaland1125 wrote: post #45

This article frankly sounds like the rambling of a crazy person with all of the attempts of secrecy and defensiveness. > A distant secondary consideration, but a real one, was that choosing to publish could bring down heavy sanctions, through predictable pathways. Why is the author afraid of "sanctions" in a first world democracy with strong freedom of speech protections? A much more interesting and useful article wo…

I strongly suspect your mental model of “a first world democracy with strong freedom of speech protections” is based on your experience living in a Western country, quite possibly as a citizen of that country. I wouldn’t presume to understand how that differs from the experience of living in Japan as an American. Patrick should have earned enough good faith in this community for us to trust his ability to navigate th…

Or he just likes to act like he's important. No one in positions of power cares what he has to say about pandemic modeling and they certainly aren't going to persecute him for it.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#74

Post by XorNot »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #49
cortesoft wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the problem with some of the claims people make about things being really bad being unfalsifiable. At the same time, the expected outcome of social distancing is for the outcome to be not as bad... so people will always be able to make this complaint. What exactly do you expect from people who are advocating social distancing?

I expect a degree of epistemic humility. "We don't know how bad it's going to get, but we know that the worst case is very bad, so let's go to extreme lengths to make sure we don't hit it" - no objections to that message. But in my local area, and from what I understand many others, people were saying in mid-March that it was already too late and there would surely be bodies in the streets. Which hasn't been that bad…

"We took the measures that mitigated a disaster, therefore the disaster was never going to happen" is an idiotic opinion.

A virus that spreads from close proximity with infected people, and you're arguing that shoving people back in close proximity is not going to contribute to spreading it? Why? On what basis will this not happen, despite this being exactly what happened?

Spain took about 1 month to go from "hm this coronavirus thing is spreading" to "if you're over 75 we're not going to bother with ventilators because we can't spare the capacity".

Things have to reopen eventually, but if you haven't actually increased your test and tracing capacity, then the effect is going to be exactly what happened in 1918 https://www.popsci.com/story/health/coronavirus-1918-flu-pan... (wherein an experiment with a control was accidentally run at a substantial cost in lives between two US cities).

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#75

Post by nico_h »

dahdum wrote: post #46
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #6

I usually like patio11's writing style, but this is super verbose even by his standards and oddly evasive/defensive to boot. There's a number of important messages here, but they make up perhaps 10% of the content, and I still don't really fully understand the rationale behind the cloak and dagger "hash of report" business.

I thought the same, like he's walking on eggshells? Maybe it's his assocation with Stripe or due to someone else in the working group? The memo doesn't read as particularly controversial nor did it recommend much concrete action. I left Japan in early March, by personal anecdote masks seemed pretty ubiquitious (and all public facing employees were wearing them), hotels were screening guest temperatures, warning signs…

> The memo doesn't read as particularly controversial nor did it recommend much concrete action.

Well it was pointing out that the current plan was B.S. and had already failed, and that the testing plan in place resisted falsification by preventing testing of unconnected / asymptomatic people. no biggie.

The point of the memo was to gather and surface disparate information already public separately un-worrisome but that together might be able to be paid enough attention to for a (positive) governmental reaction.

It was to force agencies to connect dots that the authors believe were not being connected. (Maybe it just wasn’t anybody’s job to connect them)

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#76

Post by ForHackernews »

nico_h wrote: post #64
ForHackernews wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't understand at all what the purpose of publishing this hash was supposed to be. Is it just to be able to say "I told you so!" (or in this case, I didn't tell you so, but I really did think this) at some later date? > In a world where I was wrong, people who trust me professionally would likely think less of me. That was an acceptable risk. Yeah, what a hero taking an extremely slight risk to his reputati…

The point of the hash is a marker to force yourself to come to terms with your idea. You make it public and then act on it. The author has a visa to stay in Japan, a country with strict rules on the disruption of public order. Spreading unfounded speculation on a pandemic might rule afoul of such rules.

But...posting a hash doesn't force you to do anything. All it does is help you be cryptographically-verifiably smug after the fact.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#77

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

XorNot wrote: post #74
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect a degree of epistemic humility. "We don't know how bad it's going to get, but we know that the worst case is very bad, so let's go to extreme lengths to make sure we don't hit it" - no objections to that message. But in my local area, and from what I understand many others, people were saying in mid-March that it was already too late and there would surely be bodies in the streets. Which hasn't been that bad…

"We took the measures that mitigated a disaster, therefore the disaster was never going to happen" is an idiotic opinion. A virus that spreads from close proximity with infected people, and you're arguing that shoving people back in close proximity is not going to contribute to spreading it? Why? On what basis will this not happen, despite this being exactly what happened? Spain took about 1 month to go from "hm this…

Sorry, what's the accidental experiment here? The article doesn't suggest any cities in 1918 were doing testing or contact tracing - they couldn't have been, because they didn't even know that the flu was a virus at the time. And I'm not seeing anything about a general closure of non-essential businesses either.

I certainly wouldn't dispute that closing schools and banning public gatherings were good moves.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#78

Post by XorNot »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #54

This seems a bit over-the-top. Sure, maybe Japan isn't testing and is just treating pneumonia cases as pneumonia cases instead of the cornavirus cases they actually are, but if that is allowing society to function mostly normally and isn't changing death rates all that much I don't see the harm. Arguably that is a better response than shutting down your economy and creating massive debt problems that will need to be…

The death rate from COVID-19 is a constant: about ~1% of all cases, so far as is currently known.

If the R0 of the virus is about 2 (which from evidence is about the case for uncontained spread, possibly higher) then half of your entire case load is discovered in the last increment.

That period is (roughly) 14 days from infection to the onset of symptoms. We cannot build a hospital, nor train doctors and nurses, in 14 days.

But here's the thing: the hospitalization rate - which is what keeps the death rate at 1% - is around 10 - 15%. And both those numbers are constants, multiplied against an exponential factor. And hospital stays are around 3 to 4 weeks long.

By the time your hospital beds are 50% full, you're already out of capacity - the next wave is going to be being denied treatment. And in fact, anyone else who has an otherwise treatable but potentially life-threatening condition is also going to be denied treatment. At which point a lot of your deaths aren't going to be directly due to COVID-19...but that's really not going to matter.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#79

Post by SkyMarshal »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #6

I usually like patio11's writing style, but this is super verbose even by his standards and oddly evasive/defensive to boot. There's a number of important messages here, but they make up perhaps 10% of the content, and I still don't really fully understand the rationale behind the cloak and dagger "hash of report" business.

> I still don't really fully understand the rationale behind the cloak and dagger "hash of report" business.

I didn’t read every word of it but got the sense there were political and/or Japanese cultural sensitivities why he didn’t initially feel comfortable with a full public, attributed release.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#80

Post by rmccue »

The clearest communication about the use of hashes rather than direct publication is laid out quite simply in patio11's original memo:

> I have concerns about saying this loudly because I have an immigration status and because Japan has previously shot the messengers in times of national emergency, including in the wake of the 2011 disaster. As someone who has spent their entire adult life in Japan, who lives here with my wife and children, and who has family on the front lines, I pray daily that I am wrong.

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