Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

kalzumeus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 182 posts

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#61

Post by skybrian »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #45

This article frankly sounds like the rambling of a crazy person with all of the attempts of secrecy and defensiveness. > A distant secondary consideration, but a real one, was that choosing to publish could bring down heavy sanctions, through predictable pathways. Why is the author afraid of "sanctions" in a first world democracy with strong freedom of speech protections? A much more interesting and useful article wo…

He works for Stripe in Japan and is presumably worried about disrupting professional relationships in Japan. I generally assume he knows more about Japan than we do, having lived there for many years.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#62

Post by barry-cotter »

abduhl wrote: post #33
barry-cotter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

Yes, but do you have any thoughts about the topic we were talking about before your rant?

A month ago it was obvious to Patrick that there was a great deal of untracked community spread of COVID in Japan. If the Japanese government was aware of that they would have shut the country down. In reality they only did that four days ago[1]. If they had done that a month ago there wouldn’t be such a shortage of PPE they’re calling for donations of raincoats. There are going to be thousands of excess deaths in Tokyo and they’ll be triaging people leaving the old to die like they did in Lombardy before the month is out.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52313807

> One poll shows 75% of people think the prime minister took too long to declare a state of emergency in Tokyo. After a recent spike in cases in the capital Tokyo, experts warned that the city’s emergency medical facilities could collapse under the pressure. Officials in Tokyo have also urged people to work from home. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, centre, declared the state of emergency at a special meeting of medical experts After the initial state of emergency came into force on 8 April, a number of other regional governors called for the measures to be extended to their areas, saying that cases were growing and their medical facilities were overwhelmed. Japan’s two emergency medical associations also issued a joint statement warning that they were “already sensing the collapse of the emergency medical system”.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#63

Post by fastball »

aikinai wrote: post #48
jldugger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because you could end up losing your visa and get sued by the Olympic Committee if you say 'Shinzo Abe is suppressing covid-19 research because of the Olympics.' Maybe even jail time.

That's not how Japanese immigration or prosecution work. What law or immigration requirement would he be breaking? Also, tons of people have been saying that for months, both native and foreign.

Japan has a conviction rate of 99.9%.

There is a difference between someone with a big internet presence and someone without one saying something.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#64

Post by nico_h »

ForHackernews wrote: post #51
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #2

>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…

Yeah, I don't understand at all what the purpose of publishing this hash was supposed to be. Is it just to be able to say "I told you so!" (or in this case, I didn't tell you so, but I really did think this) at some later date? > In a world where I was wrong, people who trust me professionally would likely think less of me. That was an acceptable risk. Yeah, what a hero taking an extremely slight risk to his reputati…

The point of the hash is a marker to force yourself to come to terms with your idea. You make it public and then act on it.

The author has a visa to stay in Japan, a country with strict rules on the disruption of public order. Spreading unfounded speculation on a pandemic might rule afoul of such rules.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#65

Post by philwelch »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #6

I 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.

What appears “evasive/defensive” to one culture may appear merely polite to another culture. As always I would presume good faith here.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#67

Post by XorNot »

panarky wrote: post #37
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #2

>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…

One might argue that a "true count of infections" is not falsifiable -- people aren't getting tested, causes of deaths aren't properly attributed, officials are juking the stats. A more falsifiable claim is "a breakdown of provision of care in Nagoya, Osaka, and Tokyo, before the end of April". If patients are in parking lots or bodies are in refrigerated trucks and mass graves, that evidence is harder to hide. There…

Exponential growth means fully half of the present population occurred in the last growth cycle (presuming R0 ~ 2).

With a mean time to symptoms of 14 days, depending on what Japan is doing, 10 days is an age (though it's worth noting that severe respiratory symptoms set in in week 3).

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#68

Post by XorNot »

nostromo wrote: post #60
btilly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan is a country where at the best of times, a lot of people die at home and are not discovered for some time. If you remove social contacts thanks to lockdown, this is going to become more common. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi for more.

Yes, that happens sometimes, but no, there are not thousands of unnoticed dead people in their apartments in Japan. Occam’s razor in this case is that the pandemic in Japan isn’t as bad as the author projected. It’s not a conspiracy or coverup and there aren’t dead bodies hiding everywhere, the author was just wrong.

"Sometimes" is doing a lot of heavy lifting during a viral pandemic which hasn't been matched in severity for the last century.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#69

Post by derefr »

pavlov wrote: post #34
joebot123 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe because the virus and Olympics are both sensitive topics of national pride in a country that has turned increasingly nationalistic. Japan has a conviction rate of over 99%. If a prosecutor decides you're guilty of something, it's basically a done deal. You don't want to get on the wrong side of authorities in a country like that.

> Japan has a conviction rate of over 99%. If a prosecutor decides you're guilty of something, it's basically a done deal.

I thought that was because the prosecutors are very conservative about choosing what cases to prosecute in the first place, only going after effective slam dunks.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#70

Post by aikinai »

fastball wrote: post #63
aikinai wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how Japanese immigration or prosecution work. What law or immigration requirement would he be breaking? Also, tons of people have been saying that for months, both native and foreign.

Japan has a conviction rate of 99.9%. There is a difference between someone with a big internet presence and someone without one saying something.

The "big internet presence" is among readers of Hacker News. He's nowhere near the prominence of plenty of people in Japan making public, pessimistic predictions about the pandemic without acting like they're going to get persecuted for it.
Post reply on HN