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 daily cases is good, it doesn't mean it cannot spike back up. We just have to wait and see what happens.
An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
21–30 of 182 posts
Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
#22It would be exceptionally difficult—if not outright impossible—for me to write something like this and not once make even a passing attempt to imply blame or culpability for a core dishonesty that may well end up causing thousands of deaths.
Patrick, I admire your professionalism and restraint in service of your goals.
Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
#23> Over a roughly 2 week period, we would expect approximately 64,000 passengers to fly from Japan to Singapore. 3 infections in that population is a rate of approximately 47 basis points, which is 5X the 9 basis points rate of infection in Japan. If one believes the government, the rate with surveilled clusters backed out be a tiny fraction of 9 basis points. This argument is a bit flawed. People that travel from Jap…
Three is way too few samples to draw any statistics from anyway. It does suggest untracked transmission in Japan. And that's about it.
When I read that part I was disappointed to have been lured into reading another iteration of "I multiply numbers without tracking associated uncertainty". Sigh. That stuff runs rampant at the moment.
Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
#24[deleted]
Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I read that wrong, but wasn't the point that Japan wasn't acting appropriately, and that white paper, along with other research, forced (for lack of a better word) them to own up to the scale of what they were seeing? Isn't the point that, while the particulars were proved false, the overall thrust of the article that Japan was stalling action which MAY lead to those numbers was true? Did I miss the point of th…
Everyone with disastrous predictions about the coronavirus can and does make that claim. If my predictions aren't true, give it a few weeks and exponential growth will make them true. If they still aren't true, then they would have been true, but whatever we did a few weeks ago must have been the correct reaction to my predictions. The very general thrust - that Japan surely had community spread - I agree was true an…
I understand the problem with some of the claims people make about things being really bad being unfalsifiable.
At the same time, the expected outcome of social distancing is for the outcome to be not as bad... so people will always be able to make this complaint. What exactly do you expect from people who are advocating social distancing?
Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
#26This 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…
To give an indication of how low that testing is, on that site Japan is ranked #119th country in the world in terms of testing.
Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
#27This 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…
What I find confusing though is Japan's low death numbers. I was assuming that spikes in mortality couldn't be hidden, but recent comments from inside sources in Japanese hospitals are starting to make me doubt this assumption. Still, there is not a crisis on Lombardia-level going on, which one would expect given the relative inaction of Japanese government. I'm guessing the truth is somewhere in the middle - Japan's reported numbers are underestimating the issue, but at the same time Japanese society is as a whole more resistant than at least Southern Europe.
Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
#28>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…
You forgot that test capacity in Japan is still close to nil.
Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
#29I 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.
Perhaps that's on purpose. Perhaps he wants to avoid being sued, or similar things. Patrick has a ton of credibility and I would give him the benefit of the doubt here.
The purpose of the overall evasiveness could be to prevent personal retaliation of some kind - that would be understandable. But why avoid mentioning the word Olympics and instead call it "the sporting event" repeatedly? Especially now when your connection to the white paper is public.
Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I read that wrong, but wasn't the point that Japan wasn't acting appropriately, and that white paper, along with other research, forced (for lack of a better word) them to own up to the scale of what they were seeing? Isn't the point that, while the particulars were proved false, the overall thrust of the article that Japan was stalling action which MAY lead to those numbers was true? Did I miss the point of th…
Honestly, who has 1-1.5h to read this without skimming through most of the verbiage to tease out the point? I read the "pre-registered" part. It was wrong on a bunch of points, both numbers and impact. I strongly doubt a major world economy of 126 million people with many world-class epidemiologists and doctors and generally non-disastrous political leadership was 'forced' into anything by this. The hubris of this gu…
> The hubris of this guy is quite off-putting.
You’re not a certified expert. Shut up and listen to your betters.
If there were actually the reserves of competence you and others like you believe in; if the authorities actually deserved our trust almost everywhere would have done as well as Taiwan or at least Korea. In the world we actually live in the CDC stopped the Seattle Flu Study from testing for COVID-19 and banned private labs from testing for more than two weeks after fucking up its own tests.
In the world we actually live in the prestige media spent most of February making fun of people who thought this was a real problem that would spread outside China, and later Italy. They didn’t act like they were taking it seriously. They followed the lead of the WHO, which should have been setting the alarm and instead was telling people that the real enemy was prejudice.
Many countries with well credentialed experts failed. You wouldn’t accuse them of hubris. But they failed.