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.
> You are playing Russian roulette that I do not wish to play. In majority of the cases COVID-19 is not lethal at all
You accuse them of playing Russian roulette while you justify not taking the vaccine with "the majority of COVID cases aren't lethal"?
> I think this is way too overblown.
1.5 million people have died.
> I want to know how likely it is for asymptomatic people to spread the virus. I swear, I will keep checking the responses because I am curious how likely it is that people will catch it from me
If you're trying to determine the risk of someone catching it from you (and assuming that you'd immediately self-isolate when you start experiencing symptoms) you should be looking at pre-symptomatic transmission rather than just asymptomatic transmission.
> Catching this virus is a bit like playing a round of Russian roulette.
Well, the comparison is a bit unfair, recent studies [1] give : P(death | infected) = 0.05% overall which is order of magnitude less than Russian's roulette where P(death | play) = 16%
I am not playing games. This stuff is far too serious to play games over.
> To extrapolate over the general population with the 1.4% case fatality of serious hospital cases, would be wrong and would be fear mongering. The general population does not have a infection rate of 100% nor a case fatality rate of 1.4%.
No, but the Spanish Flu for instance had an infection rate of about 25%, and the general infected population could very well be above that 1.4% (in fact, there is every indication so far that it will end up somewhere between 2 and 3%).
> So the premise is wrong, the assumptions are wrong, and the result are wrong.
The premises isn't nearly as faulty as you make it out to be, it might be off by a factor of four, hopefully much less than that. But so far - taking Wuhan as our baseline - unchecked this thing will spread very fast and kill lots of people. The only reason the onslaught was halted is because the Chinese took a bunch of draconian counter measures, the likes of which very few countries in the world will be able to copy.
> Qualifying a statement ending with ”means 2 million deaths in that single bracket alone.” with a qualifier that is false is what I would call fearmongering.
That's fine by me. But it isn't. As a whole it isn't and in the details it isn't either. We actually have precedent for this whole situation, it is the 1918 pandemic and the world apparently hasn't learned its lesson fully. Which may mean we are about to re-learn it the hard way. Maybe this time it will stick. But then - as now - there were plenty of people like you who were willfully - given the way this conversation is progressing I am assuming you are doing this on purpose - ignoring the cold hard facts. And that made the pandemic much worse than it had to be.
Large events were not called off and led to the disease spreading much further than it had to.
Absent an effective anti-dote to this virus and with an overwhelmed health care system (note the qualifiers!) we might as well be in 1918.
> No, it’s not an “implied assumption” it’s faulty epidemiology.
Not as far as I can see. People talk about hypotheticals all the time. You can't really come out like this against a pretty clear comment and at the same time make up stuff you rail against that never happened in the first place. Fix your own issues first.
> First, it is faulty to assume that everyone who is exposed will be infected.
Agreed, so let's divide the number by 4 and call it a day. That's the worst this could possibly get. Right? Or do you think that given a sample of '1' the 1918 flu might not be the best guideline for precision and that it might be better or worse? We don't actually know the answer to that.
> Second, it is faulty to apply the 1.4% case fatality rate of serious hospital infections to the entire US population.
That's true. But for all the same money we end up with a higher case fatality rate. So that may end up affecting the equation in a negative way.
But assuming 10% of the country becomes infected and 5% of those end up with symptoms serious enough to warrant ICU care there is a serious problem.
And that 10% could very well be low. So as far as I'm concerned you should start taking this a bit more serious instead of trying to shout down the discussion. Stay dispassionate and try to argue your case with actual numbers rather than nay-saying. That way you can contribute rather than just irritate. Think of it as an opportunity to educate, and you just might learn a thing or two yourself.
> Okay, what number do you think is the worst possible case? Is there a reason to believe that there's a nearly 100% chance that people will get infected?
Based on the number of people testing positive for the antibodies ([0] something like ~21% of random tests in New York), and given that the average estimated R0 is really high, I think ~100% of people being infected by this time next year is a pretty reasonable assumption. This also indicates that the death rate we previously estimated is much lower in reality. Infecting a few more young, healthy people and supervising their health seems a pretty good deal for the world at large.
> 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.
> How exactly do you know that your interpretation is more accurate than someone elses?
I don't. However, given the severity of the outcome of contracting COVID, would you rather play it safe, or be secure in your interpretation (which is less severe than mine)?
> ... disproportionately killed young people. I know this sounds callous, but a virus that spares the lives of people with more years ahead of them seems preferable over one that kills people in their prime.
Younger people are also dropping dead from COVID, and being scarred for life by it, far more than the original numbers in March and April indicated. You don't need to just be worried about your grandparents, you need to be worried about yourself just as much.
Being elderly, and all the comorbidities that are associated with older people, just increase an already significant chance of unfavorable outcome.
> I really would like to understand what your measure is that brought you to your conclusion that COVID-19 is "worse than the Spanish Flu" because, from most measures I can tell, it's not as bad.
Lets try this another way. Do you know why the US military switched from 7.62 to 5.56? If you kill a soldier, hes dead, the body will be dealt with after the battle. If you wound a soldier, now another, healthy, soldier is trying to pull him out of the fray to save his life.
Spanish Flu is that 7.62, SARS is that 5.56. We are now going to have to spend significantly more resources than we would have otherwise to deal with the outcome of SARS, and it would be barbaric of us not to.
People will be suffering from heart, lung, even brain damage for the rest of their lives. This is happening during a time that, pre-COVID, the healthcare system in many countries, the US included, was coming off the rails.
SARS couldn't have come at a worse time. We don't have the medical system to deal with what we have now, how are we going to possibly deal with this new thing?
We couldn't even get proper insurance reform to go through with Obamacare without a full-scale partisan war happening in Congress. We're going to have to have something at least that big to tackle the eventual outcome of this.
If COVID would have killed people like the Spanish Flu did, then the worst we'd have to work with is the number of people missing from society, the brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers that aren't here anymore. But, this? We have to worry about something we don't understand and can't easily predict, something that could get much worse, and is getting worse.
We have to worry about something that may never go away. What if this becomes a SARS season, every year, like the Flu season? They are working on a vaccine, but it isn't here yet, and from the papers I have read, they have indicated that this may be very difficult given some people do not have useful immune responses, and we don't have an accurate idea of what percentage of the population has this issue; relying on herd immunity to save us doesn't seem to be working.
Any reasonable person should be absolutely terrified. However, what I see is a lot of unreasonable people that are not taking this as what may be the worst threat to society in our lifetimes, something that can only be compared to things we read about in history books.
> this is a good example of people saying the response was overblown, because the response had its intended effect
"this" being the article.
The comments upon the article are a good example of someone (actually, a group of people, near unanimously [1]) saying ~"because the outcome was <x>, we know (~it is proven, or logically conclusive)[1] that the cause was <y>", which is also poor logic. This seems quite tricky for people to see though, due in part to the ~"culture war" nature of the subject I suspect (change the subject, strict logical capabilities return to normal, or so goes the theory), as well as how beliefs ("facts") are formed in the mind - I've seen this ~"if nothing happened, it proves(!) our recommended measures worked!" meme repeated so often across both social and mainstream media, and it seems to me that it has kind of become an axiomatic belief, not to be questioned, even by scientific/logical people.
If a similar assertion was made but with the subject being something other than covid-19, I suspect references to the "garlic repels vampires" fallacy would be plentiful.
You can often detect other artifacts of this thinking in online discussions. In this case, there was a lot more detail in the paragraph than the single excerpted sentence:
> Weeks and months later, facts on the ground show that the purported collapse of the healthcare system did not occur. Moreover, this was not due to success in seriously curtailing the spread in hard-hit areas like New York, but was rather due to the aforementioned discovery that COVID-19, while extremely deadly in certain subsets of the population, was not nearly as deadly overall as previously thought. An analysis of the flawed IMHE model is outside the scope of this article, but suffice to say that the model is built on extremely dubious assumptions and represents an approach of blind curve-fitting rather than a true epidemiological model, and makes bizarre assumptions that result in an unrealistic symmetricality as far as death drop-off is concerned (see this excellent analysis by “LessWrong” user Zvi) [2]. Confronted with the reality of having “succeeded” in avoiding the collapse of the healthcare system, albeit arguably not due to the lockdown policy, policymakers have not lifted the lockdown restrictions in much of the country, but on the contrary appear to have shifted the goal to a goal of total containment: staying locked down until COVID-19 has been suppressed to such an extent that it becomes feasible to perform widespread location tracking (dubbed “contact tracing”). Indeed, the current policy seems to be one of “indefinite postponement”, the key assumption being that it is feasible to avoid exposure to SARS-CoV-2 until a safe and effective vaccine is developed and delivered to the global population, and that the indefinite lockdown will not lead to excess mortality. We strongly dispute these assumptions and believe that they don’t hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.
Interestingly, this very same behavior can typically be seen on both sides of any culture war [3] related disagreement, if(!) one is willing and able to look for, and see it that is (which is far easier said than done, because of the very neurological phenomenon that causes the disagreement in the first place). And to make it even more tricky, it is incredibly easy for the mind to spot logic errors in one's ideological opponent, but very difficult to spot in oneself. So, both sides evaluate the other as ~"soooooo stupid".
As for myself, I have no stance on the matter, because epistemically, the actual(!) truth of the matter is essentially unknowable - all we can do is make educated guesses. I mostly just derive great enjoyment from observing the conversations, which illustrate the various ways that humans think, and how thinking seems to vary depending on the content of the variables involved.
>> There is massive difference between the appropriate response to an illness with a 5% fatality rate and an illness with a 0.36% fatality rate.
Is there? What is the appropriate response to 0.36%? The flu has a mortality rate of 0.1%, which seems comparable, except we all have some immunity from having the flu multiple times in the past. Flu shots are available for vulnerable people. So while people on average have a 1 in 1000 chance of dying if they get the flu, they also only have a 1/40 to a 1/7 chance of getting the flu at all. The probability of getting corona virus appears to be much, much higher for people exposed to it, and we have no idea what the rate of infection could get to if we let it run free and behaved normally.
> The problem is that if you control for the right parameters the expected outcome is worse, possibly by multiple orders of magnitude, than that of being infected with covid.
How come? COVID infections have a high probability of causing blood clots.
> Humans are also terrible at intuitively assessing risk
Doesn't that also apply to you? Have you looked into when and where testing is performed? In the US, if you don't have a china travel history, they won't test you.
This has an incubation period that is still indeterminate, and in the US and other large countries, they are barely testing. So you literally don't have a way to be sure of what you're claiming--there's just no data, but somehow you are very confident in what you claim?
Have you read up on the Spanish Flu? Was that just a "panic"? So far, by every measure, this looks to be worse--more transmissible, harder to detect, with a higher mortality rate. The Spanish Flu killed between 1 and 5% of the world's population.
> The good news is for people under 70 personal danger of the virus is close to zero.
I feel like I'm missing some key context that would lead a person to declare that with any sense of certainty. It's on a chart and everything! But it's not in agreement with everybody else's charts, and it's early days when it comes to the epidemiology.
(and at least in the US, our treatment capabilities are vast, but our testing regime is cartoonishly bad)
> But this is being spun to imply that it's a serious threat to people who are otherwise in extremely low risk categories for severe covid. There's no solid evidence for that.
It's a numbers game.
When hundreds of millions of people are infected, you're still going to get a lot of hard hit people in 'low risk' categories, aren't you?
>One only needs to look at Italy, Spain, NYC to spot the main problem(s) with the statement
Many are asymptotic, many have mild symptom, yes there is deaths but low in number. Is it not the same case as in Italy, Spain, NYC ?
>Not the least problem is that it implicitly assumes that others will take steps to reduce the worst effects, so that you don't need to bother
I don't assumes others will take steps to reduce the worst effects. Even in in the worst case situation where everyone eventually will get infected (including me), it didn't bother me.
> The whole thing is seen as some type of bizarre competition.
Yes, it's somewhat ugly, but I feel that some confirmation bias is unavoidable. At this point, pretty much everybody has experienced substantial downsides of the epidemic (either restricted public life, or increased deaths around them), so it seems only natural to look for data implying that it was all worth it.
> Famously, Covid is different in that it can be spread asymptomatically.
This is another fallacy. All they did was test for the presence of the virus through PCR tests. But that doesn't show anything about infectivity. Every study I could find showed decreasing confidence over the years since 2020 that asymptomatic patients are actually infectious/contagious. Just because they can find the virus on you doesn't mean that you're infectious, those are two different things, and something that actually hasn't been measured properly.
Six million dead.
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.
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