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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

#141

Post by barry-cotter »

abduhl wrote: post #135
barry-cotter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A month ago it was obvious to Patrick that there was a great deal of untracked community spread of COVID in Japan. If the Japanese government was aware of that they would have shut the country down. In reality they only did that four days ago[1]. If they had done that a month ago there wouldn’t be such a shortage of PPE they’re calling for donations of raincoats. There are going to be thousands of excess deaths in To…

Is patio11 a certified expert? Should he be considered my better? Your better? Should we consider him the better of the actual certified experts in infectious diseases? If not, then shouldn’t you shut up and listen to those people, who are certified as your betters when it comes to their subject matter? Even the ones who you called out as being wrong in your initial post? I think maybe you should kick up the leg rest…

Shut up and listen to your betters is kspacewalk’s attitude. Anyone accusing others of hubris for trying to save lives and not assuming competence when the authorities have shown so little is a part of the problem. Anyone who believes that serious problems should be left to experts is a dangerous obstacle to actually solving them in situations of high uncertainty.

The certified experts at the WHO, CDC and FDA failed. Why the hell should they be trusted?

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

#142

Post by tptacek »

aikinai wrote: post #104
tptacek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is uncontrolled spread in Japan, and the NYT article prompted the Japanese government to acknowledge it and begin locking the country down, and the Working Group motivated the NYT article in any significant way, he doesn't have to "act" like he's important.

Does the post claim that the NYT article was based on his work? The timing doesn't make sense unless he was working with the journalist before she published and I didn't see that claim. I would also say he's over-exaggerating the impact of the NYT article, but I don't have any more proof than he does. I've been following Japanese news and didn't really see any splash based on something in the western press. There wer…

This is not an interesting or persuasive argument. It's premised on the idea that I should just assume that the Japanese government had this situation well in hand, because it is well-staffed with experts. My own country is also well-staffed with experts, and we've shut our economy down for lack of test kits while rationing PPE at hospitals; we botched our response in a variety of ways. Japan's outlier status has been a subject of commentary for weeks, and only now --- weeks after Patrick's precommitment --- is Japan acknowledging the gap between that reported status and reality.

I am certainly ignorant of the actual forces at play inside Japan. Patrick is not; he has lived there his entire adult life, starting with years as a salaryman. He is at pains to try to explain the dynamics of what's happening in Japan in the post we're commenting on.

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

#143

Post by knolax »

aikinai wrote: post #70
fastball wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan has a conviction rate of 99.9%. There is a difference between someone with a big internet presence and someone without one saying something.

The "big internet presence" is among readers of Hacker News. He's nowhere near the prominence of plenty of people in Japan making public, pessimistic predictions about the pandemic without acting like they're going to get persecuted for it.

Never heard of this guy before. Seems like the typical exaggerating expat to me.

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

#144

Post by tptacek »

aikinai wrote: post #108
aikinai wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To mention one more thing, I think what really frustrates me about this and incited me to comment a lot here is that to make his effort seem like a big deal, Patrick is presenting everyone else in Japan as fools and building up this white savior narrative. His post implies that the Japanese experts and officials are both so inept that they couldn't keep up with his overnight-expert pandemic modeling and so malicious…

You have to want this "white savior" thing to see that as a narrative. Corrupt and/or inept government responses to pandemics is something people of all colors seem to share right now. I'm not interested in debating it, but if your argument is that Patrick is playing "white savior", yes, you should make that more explicitly, rather than expressing it subtly through being a jerk.

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

#145

Post by tptacek »

abduhl wrote: post #135
barry-cotter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A month ago it was obvious to Patrick that there was a great deal of untracked community spread of COVID in Japan. If the Japanese government was aware of that they would have shut the country down. In reality they only did that four days ago[1]. If they had done that a month ago there wouldn’t be such a shortage of PPE they’re calling for donations of raincoats. There are going to be thousands of excess deaths in To…

Is patio11 a certified expert? Should he be considered my better? Your better? Should we consider him the better of the actual certified experts in infectious diseases? If not, then shouldn’t you shut up and listen to those people, who are certified as your betters when it comes to their subject matter? Even the ones who you called out as being wrong in your initial post? I think maybe you should kick up the leg rest…

Patrick's entire narrative is sourced from facts generated by experts. His own contributions appear to involve statistical literacy, deep conversance with Japanese language and culture, the ability to locate and comprehend "open source" government documents, and the initiative to do something with those capabilities. We're not asked to take Patrick's word on whether HCQ is an effective treatment or whether procedure masks are effective at combating spread; all we're relying on from Patrick is "yes, these documents produced by the government of Japan do indeed contradict the party line".

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

#146

Post by barry-cotter »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #123
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being a bit too accommodating. McKenzie does have a flair for the dramatic; he did the same thing with Tether where there really was no reason he couldn't just say what he thought when he thought it. At the same time, yeah, it seems very plausible that a white guy in Japan announcing the Japanese pandemic response is run by fools would face blowback for it.

>At the same time, yeah, it seems very plausible that a white guy in Japan announcing the Japanese pandemic response is run by fools would face blowback for it. Haha, yeah pretty much that. And any blowback may also have been directed at his employer, Stripe. So there was certainly cause for caution. That said, I don't think recognizing in late March that this virus spreads faster and is harder to control than previo…

> That said, I don't think recognizing in late March that this virus spreads faster and is harder to control than previous similar ones was much of a leap of insight, and the article does seem a little too self-congratulatory over that. Having that realization back in January is evidence of foresight, but late March not so much.

If this had been obvious to the Japanese authorities in late March they would have declared a nationwide state of emergency in late March, not late April. They would have issued stay at home orders for almost everyone 25 days ago, not five days ago. Being right when the government is wrong, it being wrong will cost lives and trying to get them to save those lives is not trivial.

The doubling time of this virus is well under ten days. If lockdown had begun on the date this memo was published there would be under a quarter as many cases as there are now.

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

#147

Post by panarky »

barry-cotter wrote: post #50
panarky wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One might argue that a "true count of infections" is not falsifiable -- people aren't getting tested, causes of deaths aren't properly attributed, officials are juking the stats. A more falsifiable claim is "a breakdown of provision of care in Nagoya, Osaka, and Tokyo, before the end of April". If patients are in parking lots or bodies are in refrigerated trucks and mass graves, that evidence is harder to hide. There…

Refusing to test, secret testing locations, over two hours on hold on the COVID hotline. Things aren’t looking great. https://www.facebook.com/groups/524159784940511/permalink/52... > 4/17 Friday: At noon my friend wakes up and asks if I can call her ward's 保健所 and make a PCR test appointment for her. I call them at 12:30. > It took 2 HOURS to set up a PCR test. > As I expected, the staff was INCREDIBLY resistant to…

Ugh, that sounds like a system designed to frustrate and obfuscate at every level.

But at some point, it's impossible to hide behind bureaucratic procedures to limit testing.

@patio11's most falsifiable prediction was for a "breakdown of provision of care" -- too many sick people for the number of critical care beds, patients warehoused in hallways, lobbies, parking lots, tents and stadiums.

And if sick people don't show up there, then they eventually show up at the morgue.

If there's a public health catastrophe in Japan, at some point it must be too big to hide.

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

#148

Post by makomk »

aikinai wrote: post #42
EE84M3i wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One theory is that people are dying but it hasn't been discovered yet because of people staying inside. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi Having just ridden the Yamanote today though, it's unreal how empty it is.

I doubt there's much overlap in people who have so little human contact that no one knows they're dead and people who catch viruses that are still present in only a tiny fraction of the population. Oh, and a third condition that these people be such recluses that they don't even call a doctor when deathly ill.

Even people with little human social interaction need to get groceries from somewhere...

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

#149

Post by abduhl »

tptacek wrote: post #145
abduhl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is patio11 a certified expert? Should he be considered my better? Your better? Should we consider him the better of the actual certified experts in infectious diseases? If not, then shouldn’t you shut up and listen to those people, who are certified as your betters when it comes to their subject matter? Even the ones who you called out as being wrong in your initial post? I think maybe you should kick up the leg rest…

Patrick's entire narrative is sourced from facts generated by experts. His own contributions appear to involve statistical literacy, deep conversance with Japanese language and culture, the ability to locate and comprehend "open source" government documents, and the initiative to do something with those capabilities. We're not asked to take Patrick's word on whether HCQ is an effective treatment or whether procedure…

While I appreciate what you're trying to say here, your point is orthogonal to the discussion.

The original comment was about the tone of patio11's post and the assertion that an anonymous white paper significantly altered policy decisions of one of the world's most technologically, scientifically, and academically advanced countries. The response the original commenter got from barry-cotter was to "shut up and listen to your betters" because the commenter wasn't a "certified expert" followed by a rant that could have come straight from an episode of Coast to Coast AM. Even his attempts below to walk back his position or re-frame his post as being somehow tongue-in-cheek fail basic logic checks and sound like the ravings of a lunatic bent on exposing some great conspiracy by the learned elite that control the medical-industrial-media complex.

It's just worthless noise. He says we shouldn't trust the experts because they got it wrong, but we should trust patio11 because he didn't get it wrong (or did he? who knows, it's in the future!), but we should trust the "certified experts," but we shouldn't trust the goddamn "prestige media" because all they cared about in February was making fun of people who thought this was a real problem, but wait a minute isn't that media also now taking aim at people who think we should relax social distancing? So is the media going after people who think it's a real problem or are they going after people who don't think it's a real problem?

See what I'm saying? It's just anger and frustration being vented through a keyboard. It's noise and serves no discernible purpose.

We can quibble about patio11's true contribution (we can, but I won't) but, again, that is orthogonal to the point which is that a lot of self-righteous folks have used the coronavirus outbreak as a great way to lash out and/or push their ideology in not so civil manners and through fear-mongering ("THOUSANDS of EXCESS DEATHS in Tokyo!!!"), and we should discourage this behavior as a community.

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

#150

Post by simonebrunozzi »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #5
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #3

Oh my. The Japanese government should feel ashamed to have hidden all of this from the public (edit: I mean the real data and the real gravity of the situation, of course). I, for one, fled the US to come to Japan for a few weeks because I mostly believed these numbers. I hate this. I really hate that politicians (all over the world, in this specific case in Japan) can afford to treat us like this, and usually not fa…

>I, for one, fled the US to come to Japan for a few weeks because I mostly believed these numbers. SARS-CoV-2 thanks you for your efforts to help it find new populations to replicate in.

The prior 3 weeks I was in a remote area with essentially no contact with anyone. I came back to SF, stayed at home for one night, and left.

Also, if I feel endangered, I have every right to decide where to go. You might see it as selfish, I see why. At least I am paying my useless and expensive health insurance in the US (out of my own pocket, because you know what? I'm unemployed right now) to support the system, even if I am not taking advantage of it.

Sometimes things are a bit more complicated than "SARS-CoV-2 thanks you for your efforts...".

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