Coronavirus and Credibility • Hacker News Board

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#111

Post by randallsquared » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:04 AM UTC

> Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have.

No, this is a terrible test of credibility. Journalists and politicians often go the other way, amplifying the danger, or outrage, or worry. Taking the outside view, it's overwhelmingly likely that any forecasted pandemic or disaster doesn't happen; we almost always get sky-is-falling predictions and then nothing really seems to happen from the perspective of most viewers or readers. Swine flu, bird flu, ebola, zika, on and on: these have previously in media-market memory been hyped as global catastrophes in the making, and then they turn into localized awfulness. This time, there were many more people than previously who seemed willing to espouse the outside view that this would probably blow over, and it seems incredibly ironic that this time, it didn't go away, and now those same categories of people who have been previously criticized for fear mongering are being lambasted for not fear mongering enough...

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#112

Post by mehrdadn » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:04 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #107

mehrdadn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you joking? She says a heck of a lot more than that. Her tone is extremely cautious and she's extremely clear that we know very little about this virus, she's describing the current situation of who is dying rather than making baseless predictions about who will die in the future, and all she's saying in that one sentence is that for the current situation, "you have to put it into context". Meanwhile you have sna…

You should look at the video again. Her tone is calming and reassuring and she is saying it's scary because it is NEW. Are you deliberately trying to misinterpret it?

No, I'm trying to point out everything you're ignoring, which fundamentally affects the meaning of the message coming across. Like right now when you just ignored the rest of my comment. I'm not gonna put more effort into this though, since it's clear you're not going to see what you don't intend to see.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#113

Post by redis_mlc » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:04 AM UTC

jordanpg wrote: post #98

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…

I think that at least US governments have done a poor job explaining the motivation behind the drastic precautionary orders. For a brief period, there was much talk of "flattening the curve" but I doubt that many people understand how that gets us to "deliberately wreck the economy." This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge of exponential ma…

> We are doing this because there are O(10^6) preventable deaths

That doesn't appear to be true. Almost everybody who goes on a ventilator dies. Corona virus will infect as many people as any other flu or cold.

So it's a valid question - why do we still have a lockdown?

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#114

Post by nullc » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:04 AM UTC

atomashpolskiy wrote: post #87

paulgb wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"just the flu" to me implies that we can treat it like the flu, i.e. go about life as usual and stay home if we catch it. It seems beyond obvious at this point that that's not the case. (Hopefully soon there will be a vaccine and it will become the case.)

But it literally is a strain of flu. And staying at home, sleeping and drinking a lot of water is exactly what the majority of people who contracted COVID are doing at the moment. Or do you believe that there are 1.3 million people in hospitals or cemeteries right now?

> But it literally is a strain of flu.

No, it literally is not. The flu is caused by influenza. Covid19 is caused by sars-cov-2, a relative of SARS-CoV which caused SARS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... ). It is also a (more distant) relative of HCoV-OC43 which is one of the many viruses that cause the cold.

The problems that influenza and sars-cov-2 cause for us are pretty different: Influenza mutates fairly quickly so we're not able to stop it completely with our otherwise highly effective vaccines, while even though they mutate comparatively much slower we don't have any effective drug treatments for coronaviruses: Some are not dangerous enough to have been economically interesting to develop treatments for while others were stopped by non-drug interventions (like the sick people dying too quickly and the detection of fever before the virus was highly communicable).

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#115

Post by yodsanklai » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

jordanpg wrote: post #98

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…

I think that at least US governments have done a poor job explaining the motivation behind the drastic precautionary orders. For a brief period, there was much talk of "flattening the curve" but I doubt that many people understand how that gets us to "deliberately wreck the economy." This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge of exponential ma…

> This is what people who say it's just flu++ are missing, and I am trying to be sympathetic to their lack of knowledge

This is very condescending. There are still a lot of unknowns, and there are smart people (for instance [1]) out there who think the cure may be worth than the disease. We urgently need more data.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUvWaxuurzQ

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#116

Post by Jugurtha » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

Not enough to remember. The shit we have seen must end careers and throw to jail.

We could be more tolerant if said "predictions" were in late December or early January. Persisting mid March? That's a threat to national security, endangering the health and economy of a nation. This should be up there considering the scale of the misinformation encouraging people to be a danger.

Terrorism is the use of violence to instore a climate of fear, sap morale, and win especially when inferior in number and means.

This is symmetrical: the use of words to instore a climate of confidence, boost morale and conduct to imprudence by using vastly superior media means to shape the behavior of people.

Someone should count all the damage this has done in terms of lives, of livelihoods, of GDP, of wasted resources, and make them pay. People get to pull this shit because there are no consequences for a catch phrase on Fox news, and all the braggadocio and tough guy talk must be accounted for.

One of the cases where being or feigning to be an idiot shouldn't save someone.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#117

Post by diryawish » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:06 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #92

akvadrako wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia" That's just like Covid though - they are counting everyone who dies with the virus even though most have other conditions.

That argument no longer works when we're seeing highly infected regions with significant increases in their _all cause_ mortality rate, e.g. https://reason.com/2020/03/17/italian-daily-death-rate-up-20... https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/04/01/virus-deaths-...

Italy’s death rates are up 20% when comparing this year’s average to a typical year’s whole average. This way of comparing averages may skew the information. In America, we have more average daily deaths in the beginning of the year than in the middle and end until December. The average of January through March will always be higher than the yearly average.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#118

Post by redis_mlc » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:07 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #19

bsaul wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance. The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to…

Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally . FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with…

> people will continue to ignore an exponential trend

Every cold and flu grow exponentially.

Not sure what the fixation of HN readers is on the work exponential. Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically.

I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators, and the futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown.

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#119

Post by amenod » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:07 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #62

bsaul wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people feared catching the virus at all. Exponential dynamics doesn't change anything in your response in that situation. I think every winter viruses have exponential dynamics as well, and they're not a big deal. You catch it, and you get over it.. Actually that's why most public communication for staying at home doesn't say "protect yourself", but rather emphasis on protecting "others" (aka : people v…

It's still making a large portion of the people who aren't dying extremely ill . I think one of the biggest public health communication disasters of covid19 is the reliance on mortality as the communication endpoint. It's acceptable for other threats-- like automotive accidents-- to speak in terms of mortality because there isn't a huge population which is much less exposed to dying but still exposed to serious illne…

Curious: what are you basing this on? Do you have some statistical data that shows hospitalization rates of young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona virus?

I myself haven't yet seen any data that would make this virus any worse than the flu (which means it's still dangerous, just maybe not "everybody-hide-under-the-rock" dangerous). Even data from Italy doesn't show mortality any higher than previous years.

Do you have links to data that supports what you wrote?

I agree it is a communication disaster though. If I see another chart with red line, logarithmic scale, not starting from zero or with some approximated (red) curve that doesn't specify the formula... :-/

Re: Coronavirus and Credibility

#120

Post by nullc » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

ash wrote: post #105

dntbnmpls wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1, 2, 4, 8 isn’t that different from 1, 3, 5, 7. What? The former is exponential and the latter is linear. They are the definition of different. The 30th number in the first series is 536870912. The 30th number in the second series is 59.

> [1, 2, 4, 8] is exponential and [1, 3, 5, 7] is linear. You can't say just from 4 data points. Real data is noisy. Imagine each number is ±1.

To be fair, people-- even experts (checkout the first 538 survey of experts) and authorities-- have happily pretended covid19's behavior was linear even when the linear fit was many sigma away from the measurements...

I agree that it's worthwhile intuition in many cases, but really not here and even people equipt with both the data and the mathematical expertise to use it there have also made many bad calls on this.