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Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

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Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#411

Post by 0x8BADF00D »

JediWing wrote: post #153
0x8BADF00D wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about 99% of your income? Your assets? How much is a stranger’s life worth to you.

Slippery slope fallacy. We are nowhere near that point.

You guys missed the point of my post. GP was saying that he found it reprehensible to make calculations on human life. My point was that he had already made such a calculation, implicitly. The value of a stranger to him is exactly worth however % income decrease he's willing to take + % increase in tax. Everyone makes this calculation every day.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#413

Post by marcus_holmes »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #402
hef19898 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem, yes. I still ignore the media, others don't. Both approaches are fine. The thing is, the media doesn't have any other sources, do they? But the have to produce content, so they do. Not very helpfull in the quality department if you ask me.

I would say that broadly speaking, media is better than the institutional outlets for providing information. You have to sift through the garbage, but the content exits. to use the topics I listed above as an examples, I can find more details on local closures and outbreaks in the local news the local department of public health. Similarly, I have found coverage and links to medical journal publications embedded in a…

the point I was making, really, is that media sites exist to make a profit, not to inform, while government-funded sites purely exist to inform.

There's a lot of money to be made from scaring people.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#414

Post by marcus_holmes »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #345
hef19898 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, just giving the top search spots to updates from WHO, followed by the national, regional and local sources. Play with the search algorythm to push the more alarmist ones further down. Help the above mentioned institutions to write their "content" in a social media optimized way. That would be agreat opportunity for these tech giants to gain trust they lost since 2016. Not doing anything right now moght very well…

I think it would have been terribly irresponsible to forcibly give the WHO top billing back when they were arguing nobody should restrict travel, or to suppress news of the preparations starting to take place in SV when official US authorities were universally saying it’s not a big deal.

Exactly. This. It's a Big Deal because of the media frenzy, not because of the inherent lethality or virality of the disease. We've seen similar pandemics before, without this media frenzy.

The WHO is making science-based responses, which are then perceived as "inadequate" by a public stoked into a frenzy by the media. The media are not motivated by public good, but by profit. The more scared you are, the more times you hit refresh.

We should definitely give WHO top billing on search results, because these are the people we've entrusted to do exactly the right thing in response to this situation. Giving top billing to profit-driven media companies is utterly irresponsible.

Or if we've got this wrong, then sack the WHO and appoint a half-dozen billionaires to their role. Same same.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#415

Post by marcus_holmes »

hef19898 wrote: post #337
whatshisface wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you suggesting exactly? Do you want them to delete "alarmist" posts? That sounds like a recipe for a total collapse in trust in public institutions.

No, just giving the top search spots to updates from WHO, followed by the national, regional and local sources. Play with the search algorythm to push the more alarmist ones further down. Help the above mentioned institutions to write their "content" in a social media optimized way. That would be agreat opportunity for these tech giants to gain trust they lost since 2016. Not doing anything right now moght very well…

this is a really good idea. Give WHO top spot on any virus-related search.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#416

Post by marcus_holmes »

whatshisface wrote: post #341
hef19898 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, just giving the top search spots to updates from WHO, followed by the national, regional and local sources. Play with the search algorythm to push the more alarmist ones further down. Help the above mentioned institutions to write their "content" in a social media optimized way. That would be agreat opportunity for these tech giants to gain trust they lost since 2016. Not doing anything right now moght very well…

The WHO waited an extra month before declaring a pandemic, and US national sources are generally considered by experts to be understating the severity of the issue. What you want is the top slots to go to the experts, who are not necessarily ranked correspondingly to the hierarchy of political bodies. For example the top virologists are probably in labs and universities, not the Cabinet.

if you think the WHO are not the best people to be dealing with this problem, that's a different problem than thinking that the WHO are not the best organisation to be dealing with this problem.

The WHO are literally the organisation we specify to deal with this problem. If they're staffed with the wrong people, that's a different problem.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#417

Post by s1artibartfast »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #413
s1artibartfast wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that broadly speaking, media is better than the institutional outlets for providing information. You have to sift through the garbage, but the content exits. to use the topics I listed above as an examples, I can find more details on local closures and outbreaks in the local news the local department of public health. Similarly, I have found coverage and links to medical journal publications embedded in a…

the point I was making, really, is that media sites exist to make a profit, not to inform, while government-funded sites purely exist to inform. There's a lot of money to be made from scaring people.

That is true and I agree. I would just point out that the unfortunate reality we live in is that the government sites are doing a terrible job of informing.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#418

Post by pishpash »

anotheryou wrote: post #266
pishpash wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no. Nice hyperactive imagination to find any plausible justification for inaction. The intuitive impulse is there (trade off hospitals getting "creamed" vs. shutting down economy), but the implementation isn't realistic, so with the incubation period and lag in testing, all governments act too late. It's an impossible control problem. On the other hand, maybe the right time to act is to watch your stock market.…

it does tank already, no? (sorry for the german link, just literally what I have open in the next tab) https://www.onvista.de/etf/VANGUARD-FTSE-ALL-WORLD-UCITS-ETF...

At least the US seems to have waited for the markets to signal, not epidemiology.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#419

Post by lbeltrame »

busyant wrote: post #395
makomk wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that pretty much all of the data is garbage quality, and if you feed garbage into a computer you of course just get garbage out. The figures from Wuhan are particularly bad, probably just a function of their testing ramp-up until well after the peak, and the ones from Italy might not be much better. (The other problem is that China has taken the position that their numbers are an exact description of r…

I wouldn't necessarily call the data "garbage" but the numbers are definitely _soft_. But soft numbers are a common issue with many areas of public health. In particular, analysis of the current pandemic suffers from both a "numerator" and "denominator" problem ( http://conflict.lshtm.ac.uk/page_83.htm ) I think many of us are accustomed to getting high-quality stats when studying a process. But that's often not poss…

I've tried doing some stuff with the Italian data but got a similar roadblock. For example, I'd be interested in knowing, among the ICU cases, if these cases were new (people arrived in the ICU with a diagnosis) or a worsening of the already existing patients (perhaps in sub-intensive care earlier).

It would help forming an idea on how the current situation (in addition to the new cases) is going.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#420

Post by bufferoverflow »

mhandley wrote: post #248
silvestrov wrote: post #152

Denmark did act yesterday evening & today: - events with more than 100 people forbidden. - all schools will close - all non-critical employees must stay home. - all private employees off-job as much as possible. - stay in your home. - don't travel to [many] countries, more restricts will come. - All indoor cultural institutions, libraries, leisure facilities, etc. are closed. And today they made a temporary law which…

Denmark's situation is very unusual. This graph gives an idea of where Denmark lies relative to Italy: http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/covid-eu-norm2.png This is actual case data, plotted with the time offsets shown in the key. No other country had a ramp-up like that. Right now, Denmark is 5-6 days behind Italy in terms of cases per million inhabitants, and the incubation period is about that time. Really pleased to…

Maybe it is quick decision making, but the list of decisions is questionable. This one the most:

> events with more than 100 people forbidden.

Which still allows rapid infections of relatively large groups of people.

In Italy you can't even walk outside without a valid reason (buying groceries, medical emergency, solo exercising).

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