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WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

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Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#161

Post by eveningcoffee »

singularity2001 wrote: post #156
Sevrene wrote: post #87

I've noticed a trend in the discussion of Covid-19 when talking to people. They tend to either under estimate it; "it's just the flu", or they over estimate it; "This is going to be really bad, time to buy all toilet paper". There's a lot of confusing mixed messages, not even from just random people, but from the WHO and different governments. They say they are fully prepared and it can be contained yet doctors and h…

Where do you put Paul Grahams simple analysis that at the current rate within one month we have 1 million cases? Over estimation?

Can you refer to his model? Is it just that the number of cases doubles in 3 days?

I think it is an overestimate but not more than by 1 order of magnitude.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#162

Post by marvin »

singularity2001 wrote: post #156
Sevrene wrote: post #87

I've noticed a trend in the discussion of Covid-19 when talking to people. They tend to either under estimate it; "it's just the flu", or they over estimate it; "This is going to be really bad, time to buy all toilet paper". There's a lot of confusing mixed messages, not even from just random people, but from the WHO and different governments. They say they are fully prepared and it can be contained yet doctors and h…

Where do you put Paul Grahams simple analysis that at the current rate within one month we have 1 million cases? Over estimation?

Doubling rate in confirmed cases is closer to 4 days than 3 unless you include only the last week or so. A doubling rate of 6 days in the medium term has also been estimated. This will obviously delay the time to reach one million cases. However, confirmed cases are a lower bound for the total number of cases, as cases only get confirmed when evaluated by healthcare personnel. It is not credible that Iran and Italy have 3000 cases each, when lots of tourists returning from there have been diagnosed. Did they just randomly bump into one of the 3000 in a country of millions?

Uncertainties aside, the model of exponential growth is sound. Disease spread follows exponential growth until it hits an inflection point, either due to running out of viable hosts or due to quarantines and other countermeasures reducing the transmission rate per infected below 1. China forcibly caused this inflection on February 4th, by essentially stopping their economy through strict quarantines.

A doubling rate of 4 days yields 1 million infected globally on the 29th of March, and that's what we'll get unless the transmission rate somehow falls before then. Plenty of assumptions in that statement though.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#163

Post by dang »

knzhou wrote: post #148
dang wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> jacking off on nationalism Please don't comment like this here, regardless of how frustrating you find some other comments.

Are you agreeing with me that people shouldn't do that? Or are you saying that calling out people that do that is the real problem? I'm outnumbered 100:1 here by users that flood almost all of these threads and never say anything actually correct, following blind nationalistic instinct.

There's more than one "the real problem". Moderating one doesn't preclude moderating others.

Lashing out with phrases like "jacking off on nationalism" is flamebait and therefore against the site guidelines. You need to follow the rules regardless of how outnumbered you are, or how wrong others are or you feel they are. I know the experience and I know it's frustrating, but that's the way it is when you're representing a contrarian view. When someone possesses a truth that others don't, they need to hold themselves to a higher standard, because if you sink to a degraded level in presenting that truth, you end up discrediting it, which harms the minority cause you're trying to serve, and harms other people by driving them further from the truth.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#164

Post by knzhou »

dang wrote: post #163
knzhou wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you agreeing with me that people shouldn't do that? Or are you saying that calling out people that do that is the real problem? I'm outnumbered 100:1 here by users that flood almost all of these threads and never say anything actually correct, following blind nationalistic instinct.

There's more than one "the real problem". Moderating one doesn't preclude moderating others. Lashing out with phrases like "jacking off on nationalism" is flamebait and therefore against the site guidelines. You need to follow the rules regardless of how outnumbered you are, or how wrong others are or you feel they are. I know the experience and I know it's frustrating, but that's the way it is when you're representi…

Sigh. Alright, understood, thanks for modding.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#165

Post by dang »

knzhou wrote: post #164
dang wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more than one "the real problem". Moderating one doesn't preclude moderating others. Lashing out with phrases like "jacking off on nationalism" is flamebait and therefore against the site guidelines. You need to follow the rules regardless of how outnumbered you are, or how wrong others are or you feel they are. I know the experience and I know it's frustrating, but that's the way it is when you're representi…

Sigh. Alright, understood, thanks for modding.

I know it's not easy.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#166

Post by Sevrene »

singularity2001 wrote: post #156
Sevrene wrote: post #87

I've noticed a trend in the discussion of Covid-19 when talking to people. They tend to either under estimate it; "it's just the flu", or they over estimate it; "This is going to be really bad, time to buy all toilet paper". There's a lot of confusing mixed messages, not even from just random people, but from the WHO and different governments. They say they are fully prepared and it can be contained yet doctors and h…

Where do you put Paul Grahams simple analysis that at the current rate within one month we have 1 million cases? Over estimation?

I honestly have no idea! Can you link to his analysis, I haven't seen it.

Regardless, I'm no expert on this matter, and it would be nice if people stated this more often than defer to which ever thing they heard as being correct, which I think is what people are doing when they say it's 'just a flu'.

Ideally we should prepare for the worst of possible outcomes, hope for the best of possible outcomes, and expect the actual outcome to be in the middle. Those possible outcomes change as more information gets released.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#167

Post by usaar333 »

knzhou wrote: post #110
deveac wrote: post #82

It feels like all of the reporting I've seen from experts (not just mainstream news outlets which are admittedly terrible)has indicated Covid-19's R0 is worse than influenza. It would have been awfully nice if The WHO tossed us a citation on their claim that this is not the case. It was hard to read the entire piece with that unsupported claim hanging so heavily. And the containment claim...again...would have loved f…

Unfortunately R0 is a bit of a vague thing. For seasonal flu, you could think of it as being very low, because most people already have immunity. It's already endemic, so there isn't room for exponential growth. For a new flu (like the 2008 swine flu) it is extremely high, which is why people barely did anything to contain it back then -- it was just impossible. What we have right now is in between.

Isn't R0 by definition for a population that isn't immunitized?

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#168

Post by hkai »

kalleboo wrote: post #146
potiuper wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a person has a fever, then he or she should not be at a public airport.

As long as airlines (and hotels, resorts, etc) don't let you reschedule for free or cancel for a full refund if you are sick people will keep flying sick. The same as as long as people don't get unlimited paid sick days and protection from being fired, they will keep going to work sick. These things need to be legislated if we want to reduce deaths and lost productivity from infections diseases (including the yearly…

Most airlines seem to allow rescheduling free of charge at this time? In Asia at least
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