"Nobody could have imagined the Coronavirus crisis. But the scope and damage are enormous. The Black Swan event is here. Nassim Taleb calls it a White Swan, an expected pandemic that will eventually happen. You can buy his book to learn this distinction."
I'm confused by this comment. If Phuoc Do, the author of this blog post, disagrees with Taleb about what a "Black Swan" event is, what does he think it means instead, and why is he citing Taleb?
The poster was referring to post infection "long covid", and stated suspect that the number of actual cases of "infection caused consequences" could be small. Before, in priority, challenging that idea, the poster was asked whether he actually met acquaintances who were "normal" before infection, and claiming being dramatically hit many months after. This is to pose a preliminary point about the existence of the problem, before considering the magnitude - one black swan entails black swans exist. That was the scope. So, not really an argument (to the poster's full point).
> If this was the case we'd be hearing, and reading, about it everywhere
Hearing, it depends who you hear; reading, I think mention of long covid can be found with reasonable frequency. I submitted one of the divulgative articles in mid October ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28854321 ). Progress in the development of information leaves could "always" be faster and better.
Quote: “ The deaths from covid have been spread out across the population enough to not make as visible an impact as 9/11. Which is precisely why comparing the effects of covid to widely known historical events helps build an impression of the size and effect of the event.”
Okay so the pandemic was predictable and it was predicted. I'm not interested in semantics quibbling if you want to say it wasn't predictable, I'm interested in the contradiction between claims that the pandemic was not predictable and yet other similarly hard to predict things are predictable.
Appropriate context: right now, daily US deaths from covid19 are about equal to heart disease and cancer. That's pretty high for a threat that didn't exist a few months ago.
We try pretty hard to reduce heart disease and cancer deaths, but we don't social distance for them because they're not contagious. If we allow covid's exponential spread to resume, it will be our leading cause of death before long.
Meanwhile, countries that did strict lockdowns for a while and used that time to roll out lots of testing are getting through this with little damage.
> People sick with corona going to events will clearly cause statistical deaths, it's not ambiguous.
People with any kind of cold symptoms going out and mingling also clearly cause statistical deaths, it's not ambiguous. Yet, we lived in a world where people did that routinely and it was left up to parents to protect their children from influenza, something far deadlier than Covid19 for them.
Also, destroying economies, livelihoods, preventing socialization, travel will also clearly cause statistical deaths, it's not ambiguous.
But, I guess, Covid19 means the saint class never owning up to their mistakes.
Beatings will continue until morale improves, I guess.
Is the threshold in that specific neurone of yours really set to a level such that any $foo "not as bad as ebola" is always failing the "if $foo was bad" test?
> > But it could have been
> But it wasn’t! Hooray!
Same argument applies to Russian roulette.
Strange game. No idea why people chose to play it, not even metaphorically.
Meh, I don't think pandemic is a binary term. If the perpetual flu pandemic is the baseline, for the forwardgoing 1 year I don't think COVID is going to be, e.g. 10x worse in deaths in vaccinated countries.
> I do want to question the effect on the society, and the personal responsibility of everyone involved.
What does this mean?
There are many factors at play here. Aside from mortality, you also have to look at the R0. Covid 19 has a significantly higher R0 than seasonal flu (estimated 1.5 vs 2.5+).
In addition, many people have some immune resistance to seasonal flu, but there was no existing resistance to Covid 19.
You only have to look at the health situation in Italy, Portugal, UK and elsewhere to see the difference between the two. Or look at the excess death graphs.
> This is misinformation pulling on the heartstrings of the non-logical. Most people who caught covid would have died if they caught the normal flu...like every other year.
Even if that were true, I fail to see how it is relevant.
We demonstrably have massively more people dying from COVID than die from normal flues, so either COVID is more fatal than normal flu, or we have a massive amount of people catching COVID who would not have caught normal flu.
Because A Black Swan event is a Russell's teapot.
So since Black Swan events have no meaning, people assign meaning to them.
Since everyone talks about Black Swan events so much, they must exist right?
Which Covid-19 fits.
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