Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

kalzumeus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 182 posts

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

#91

Post by nico_h »

derefr wrote: post #69
pavlov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because the virus and Olympics are both sensitive topics of national pride in a country that has turned increasingly nationalistic. Japan has a conviction rate of over 99%. If a prosecutor decides you're guilty of something, it's basically a done deal. You don't want to get on the wrong side of authorities in a country like that.

> Japan has a conviction rate of over 99%. If a prosecutor decides you're guilty of something, it's basically a done deal. I thought that was because the prosecutors are very conservative about choosing what cases to prosecute in the first place, only going after effective slam dunks.

Long pre-trial detention in some rather uncomfortable situation and social isolation might help you obtain more "confessions" than in a different system.

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

#92

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

XorNot wrote: post #86
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quarantine measures were widely implemented in major cities during the 1918 pandemic, but at different times in response to different catastrophes and with a very different result in deaths per capita. See the bottom graph. Deaths/week vs when closures were implemented. Another more wordy source: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/history-of-how-st-louis-v... > Around the same time, the city of St. Louis was closing…

Your more wordy source does not describe general business closures and doesn't say the word "quarantine". The lessons of history are clear that we needed to do something, certainly.

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

#93

Post by whycombagator »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #2

>We project a true count of over 500,000 infections, including more than 5,000 severe cases, and a breakdown in provision of care (“overshoot”) in Nagoya, Osaka, and Tokyo, before the end of April. The current count is ~21,000 with the number of confirmed daily cases declining for 6 days straight, from 741 to 338 yesterday. So... not only wrong on the numbers themselves, but also on the scale, trajectory and impact o…

> The current count is ~21,000 with the number of confirmed daily cases declining for 6 days straight

Yes, but all of those 6 days are still higher than 7 & 8 days ago. In fact, all the days you picked are also higher than they were through March 15st-April 4th too - and several days between April 4th onwards as well.

Today's new cases in Japan are many multiples higher than most days in March - but I do hope they continue their recent trend of decline.

> So... not only wrong on the numbers themselves, but also on the scale, trajectory and impact on society.

Maybe, but they did use the term "true count" which appears to mean: asymptomatic and those who have it but haven't/won't get tested.

As the US has learned, once you start to ramp up testing the case count ramps up too.

Looking at Japan's testing, they are testing more per day now than in March[0] but their total number of people tested is still not very high at almost 117k[1] - given they have ~125m population.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-covid-19-tests-...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-total-tests-for...

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

#94

Post by twic »

grosales wrote: post #21

This is just my 2 cents but according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries Japan has only done 923 tests for 1M of their population. That's much lower than any developed nation. One thing the article claims is the spread of the virus by asymptomatic infected people. Given this low level of testing - it's hard to gauge the true level of infection in the country - although the continuous decrease on…

We often conflate asymptomatic and presymptomatic people: my understanding is that asymptomatic people aren't very infectious, but presymptomatic people are. I can't find a solid citation for this, though.

The mechanistic basis for that is simply viral load: asymptomatic people have some virus, but not enough to ever make them really ill, whereas presymptomatic people have loads of virus, but it hasn't made them really ill yet.

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

#95

Post by ohazi »

Most of this seemed blindingly obvious to me and my peers (in the US) at the time that Patrick tweeted his hashes. Several of the replies to his tweets correctly guessed the topic, and most came to similar conclusions. Anybody with half a brain knew what was going on.

Maybe Japanese culture really is "different" and things really did need to be done this way, but I find myself agreeing with other comments here that this whole effort seems puzzlingly labrynthine with relatively little to show for it, other than providing an opportunity to tweet hashes.

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

#96

Post by davidw »

philwelch wrote: post #65
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.

What appears “evasive/defensive” to one culture may appear merely polite to another culture. As always I would presume good faith here.

Agreed - but it did leave me a bit ... curious, if nothing else.

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

#97

Post by aikinai »

tptacek wrote: post #83
aikinai wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Patrick has a ton of credibility Did? I think he just lost all of it with this arrogant stunt. Especially since he himself said, Either: 1) I am materially wrong about the most consequential thing I've had to have a view on in 15 years. You should probably degrade your estimate of my ability to think through complex problems. 2) We need a data point to counter "Nobody could possibly have seen this coming." He didn'…

You're all over the thread with comments like these. If you were responding to Patrick directly on HN, you'd be quickly and rightly flagged for writing this way. That Patrick wrote this in a blog post and not in HN comments has insulated you from that effect, but it shouldn't, and I would guess won't for long. Patrick isn't infallible and may be wrong in a multitude of ways in this post (I haven't lived my whole adul…

I'm all over the thread with comments like these since the whole charade is ridiculous and is only getting undue attention here since Patrick is popular on Hacker News and very few commenters have familiarity with Japan, either as a whole or especially regarding the pandemic response.

I've never met Patrick personally but also had a lot of respect for him from past writings; that's probably why I was so disappointed with what he did here. If I weren't knowledgeable about Japan, maybe I'd also just assume he's right because he feels like someone I know, but I do know better and that's why I'm commenting.

My shots aren't at his arguments about pandemic modeling, but everything he's done surrounding that. As plenty of other comments here mention; everything is heavily self-promotional and smug. And I agree under normal circumstances the above comment would be flag-worthy, but he specifically staked his reputation on this with extreme language, so I mirrored that. So I apologize for the poor tone; but I think it's appropriate in the context of referencing that Tweet.

A friend showed me the tweet last month and asked if it was about the pandemic in Japan. I said it can't possibly be that since everyone here sees it coming and knows the government is just dragging their feet. And I don't mean "everyone" in a smugly exclusive sense; all of the top comments on every article on the Japanese news sites were saying the same thing.

So maybe there's novel work in the white paper; that's great, but my "best shots" are that it's ridiculous to claim that no one else saw this coming, this paper influenced Japan to shift their strategy, and being public is going to get him persecuted in Japan (those last two even seem contradictory). These would all be obvious to anyone living here, and make it seem like Patrick is using this information asymmetry and his existing reputation to blow this into something it's not in the eyes of a foreign community.

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

#98

Post by tptacek »

aikinai wrote: post #97
tptacek wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're all over the thread with comments like these. If you were responding to Patrick directly on HN, you'd be quickly and rightly flagged for writing this way. That Patrick wrote this in a blog post and not in HN comments has insulated you from that effect, but it shouldn't, and I would guess won't for long. Patrick isn't infallible and may be wrong in a multitude of ways in this post (I haven't lived my whole adul…

I'm all over the thread with comments like these since the whole charade is ridiculous and is only getting undue attention here since Patrick is popular on Hacker News and very few commenters have familiarity with Japan, either as a whole or especially regarding the pandemic response. I've never met Patrick personally but also had a lot of respect for him from past writings; that's probably why I was so disappointed…

Not only does this article not say that "nobody saw this coming", but it in fact says the exact opposite thing.

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

#100

Post by AnonC »

> I felt, while my subjective confidence was 90%, that I was likely miscalibrated. The likelihood that one non-expert, doing casual sleuthing in his spare time, had scooped not just any expert but almost all the experts and almost all the parties in formal authority felt infinitesimally small.

So...was it just a coincidence that the results seem vindicated? Or is the above statement just too much modesty? Or both?

Post reply on HN