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A case for ending lockdown

ryankemper.io

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Re: A case for ending lockdown

#111

Post by lbeltrame »

ryankemper wrote: post #102
lbeltrame wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our public health organizations (and the media) have adopted the following belief: It is worth it to either mislead the public or to outright lie in order to achieve compliance. If it's not clear from the article, I find such a position detestable, not only on ideological grounds but also because functionally it causes people to endanger their health by engaging in superstition. In Italy it's pretty evident from th…

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QuzAwSTND6N4k7yNj/seemingly-... is the critique (it's in the article but easy to miss) The most important point of criticism is this section: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QuzAwSTND6N4k7yNj/seemingly-...

Answering above for the same reason of the nesting limit.

Some models (not published) from our expert panel in Italy are instead, in my ignorant view, very pessimistic (they say they elaborated 90 of them). The lockdown will be "eased" (quotes, for most people it's the same as before) on May 4th and one of the predictions said we'd get 150K ICU cases (as I wrote in the parent post). This looks very hyperbolic, at least on paper, because there are many measures still in place, so it's not the same as "no social distancing, no protection, everyone free".

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#112

Post by lbeltrame »

ryankemper wrote: post #109
lbeltrame wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read it, but (perhaps I'm wrong, I'm a biologist turned to computational biology so not expert on epidemiological models ;) didn't the author (and similar Stats News post) argue that it is too optimistic , IOW the opposite that you were arguing in the post? I don't mean this is as a criticism, but it struck me as some dissonance as I was reading. I've also heard that there might be criticism to other models like…

Good question. I should have proactively addressed that: The IMHE model, after re-estimating, _was_ too optimistic. My argument does not hinge on the IMHE model being too pessimistic; but rather simply that the IMHE model is basically useless and thus we shouldn't base policy on it. I expect us to have well over 100,000 COVID-19 deaths - indeed probably 3x that but I admit I haven't sat down and done the age-bracket-…

Yes, I understand your point now. Thanks a lot for clarifying.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#113

Post by DanBC »

dang wrote: post #66
uniqueid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a great place to start... > I’m a software / site reliability engineer > based out of Santa Barbara, California. Given the stakes, we should have a preference for Coronavirus articles written by experts. It's fine for authors to trash the WHO or to disagree with the government, but they should have the chops if the rest of us are going to upvote them. I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few w…

There have also been many articles by experts. I'd be careful about making general conclusions based on what you remember, because most of us are far more likely to notice and remember the things we disliked ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). More importantly, though, there may be a misunderstanding about what HN is. It's an internet watercooler, the purpose of which is gratifying cu…

> It's an internet watercooler, the purpose of which is gratifying curiosity and having curious conversation.

Alternatively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzOv14fA-BI

"I don't know anything about zoology, biology, geology, geography, marine biology, crypto zoology, evolutionary theory, evolutionary biology, meteorology, limnology, history, hepatology, palaeontology, or archaeology, but I think ..."

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#114

Post by DanBC »

sethc2 wrote: post #77
dang wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the latter. It's possible for a submission to get so many flags that it also gets killed, but the software doesn't do that once there are lots of comments.

That seems like a pretty good algorithm.

Not if all the comments are versions of "this article is wrong".

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#115

Post by pbourke »

cjhopman wrote: post #57
cjhopman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I can't take serious something that claims to take an impartial look at all the evidence related to the lockdown but then tries its damnedest to present all possible negatives it could without doing the same for positives. For example, there's clear evidence that the lockdown has decreased lives lost to traffic accidents but that appears nowhere here. And then when actually looking at it, it's full of p…

> Specifically, once the proportion of recovered in the population reaches 1/(1-R_0), there are no longer enough vectors (infectable indviduals) remaining for a serious outbreak to occur. It’s worth noting that this is the same principle that vaccination relies upon; vaccination is just an artificial way to build immunity without having to undergo a full infection. I should learn to never read anything from random pe…

> I should learn to never read anything from random people working in areas they don't have any expertise in.

This is one clear lesson that can be drawn from the pandemic.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#116

Post by cjhopman »

dang wrote: post #68
cjhopman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few weeks, most of the medical articles to hit the front page have been written by dabblers. Honestly, that shouldn't be surprising. AFAICT, the only way in which the HN community exceeds some random subreddit is in thinking highly of itself. HN itself combined with hckrnews.com provides an okay enough ui and mix of random interesting articles that makes it still bea…

The HN community doesn't think anything. It's a collection of millions of people. Some of those people think highly of HN, while others think poorly of it and are not shy about saying so, including on this site. I'd caution against making generalizations based on what you happen to notice here, because it's mostly the things we dislike (for example, people thinking too highly of themselves) which stick in our memory…

Huh, the point of the bias towards noticing things that we dislike is interesting, and there's good research backing it. I don't think that it necessarily affects much the comparison of one community against another, though, as one wouldn't be particularly more susceptible to it than another. Still, it likely means that the negatives are not as pronounced as they are perceived to be.

> The HN community doesn't think anything. It's a collection of millions of people.

You could say the same thing about r/The_Donald. And it would be true there, too. But communities, including HN, do often tend to have particular inclinations and behavior as a group, even if there are many individual members who diverge.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#117

Post by cjhopman »

cjhopman wrote: post #116
dang wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN community doesn't think anything. It's a collection of millions of people. Some of those people think highly of HN, while others think poorly of it and are not shy about saying so, including on this site. I'd caution against making generalizations based on what you happen to notice here, because it's mostly the things we dislike (for example, people thinking too highly of themselves) which stick in our memory…

Huh, the point of the bias towards noticing things that we dislike is interesting, and there's good research backing it. I don't think that it necessarily affects much the comparison of one community against another, though, as one wouldn't be particularly more susceptible to it than another. Still, it likely means that the negatives are not as pronounced as they are perceived to be. > The HN community doesn't think…

> But communities, including HN, do often tend to have particular inclinations and behavior as a group, even if there are many individual members who diverge.

And I'd rather see people seriously discuss the groupthink of those communities rather than just dismiss it due to the fact that it isn't completely universal.

Re: A case for ending lockdown

#120

Post by etherio »

ryankemper wrote: post #2

If it's not obvious, I wrote this. The intent is to be a fairly comprehensive coverage of what we know about COVID-19 and what it means for our policy. Note that the article is written from a US-based perspective although I suspect it's relevant to a broader audience. In general, I believe that the case against lockdown has been highly stigmatized and thus many people have not been exposed to a convincing argument of…

I am sorry, but you are repeatedly presenting positives aspects for opening up without presenting any of the negatives. And even these positives are very hypothetical: > Sometimes lightning does strike twice

On the other hand, you say > Remember, flattening the curve does not reduce deaths in the long-run, except insofar as it avoids overrunning hospitals, which we have already achieved.

If some countries have achieved this containment in the hospitals, not all, it is only by doing the lockdown, I can't believe you would think that opening up would not overrun the hospitals, if we open up, they will be flooded with new victims and those deaths will NOT be hypothetical.

Although you bring up many valid points, in my opinion this is where your statement fails. Opening up WILL cause new deaths.

I believe a gradual opening would be much more efficient only once the rise has already been slowed down.

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