5 ms·

Unreal, a month ago (February 7th) I was posting this news story [1] related to the city of Shenzen which was about to be put into some form of lockdown, it onl

Unreal, a month ago (February 7th) I was posting this news story [1] related to the city of Shenzen which was about to be put into some form of lockdown, it only received one upvote. A month from that event and we have an entire European country (a G7 member to add) under lockdown. I guess the normalcy bias [2] was too strong for too many people until reality hit us hard in the face. [1] https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/20/2/8/n11853273.htm https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/20/2/8/n11853273.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I feel like it's less a matter of normalcy bias, and more that people reasonably distrust a Falun Gong newspaper written in a language they can't read.
- paganel 7y ago
  For a while this Falun gong member [1] was one of the few persons who was publishing real news and videos of what was happening in Wuhan and in China as a whole. [1] https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    How do you know that the news and videos she was publishing were real?
    - paganel 7y ago
      Because news organisations like the FT or the BBC published the same news that she had published two or three days before. Granted, she was not the only one publishing them on Twitter, but she was the one I was following the most. Also to add, news organisations like the FT or the BBC were only publishing news that could be taken for a political spin, like in the case of Li Wenliang, they were not publishing news about people committing suicide on their home as not to infect their loved ones or desperate phone calls made by people who were trying to get their loved ones into an hospital (which were already full by that point). Also, many of the hospital scenes I was seeing on Twitter on her account are similar to what now surfaces from hospitals located in Northern Italy.
      - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        But you see the obvious concern, right? If news organizations publish some but not all of the same news she's reporting, that could mean that they're selectively skipping news to push a political angle - or it could mean that she's selectively adding fake news for her own political motivations. My inclinations are not to break the tie in favor of the person posting about a mystical connection between coronavirus and the shape of the Wuhan train station.
lollerk 7y ago
>The opposite of normalcy bias is overreaction, or worst-case scenario bias, in which small deviations from normality are dealt with as signals of an impending catastrophe. The question is to which one we are closer? That's what I think no one knows. Like how reddit says "2 million will die in the US" and some people say "it's just a flu" the truth maybe between the two half way there or so
- tunesmith 7y ago
  It doesn't matter - what matters is the point when hospitals get overwhelmed. Past that points, fatality rate goes up just from lack of treatment. Societies have already proven they can put in sufficient containment practices to keep hospitals from getting overwhelmed, so it's a matter if other countries follow similarly effective practices or let themselves get overwhelmed.
  - afiori 7y ago
    I think this in and underdeveloped topic; as I see it this infection even if it is comparable to the flu in mortality require often more intense medical intervention.
vsareto 7y ago
Prison riots too: https://www.thedailybeast.com/six-inmates-dead-scores-escape-as-prisoners-riot-across-italy-after-visitor-restrictions-over-coronavirus?via=twitter_page https://www.thedailybeast.com/six-inmates-dead-scores-escape...
danielovichdk 7y ago
One upvote? Are we supposed to feel sorry for your karma craving personality?
- paganel 7y ago
  I've been on this site for more than 10 years, I do not care about karma, I was using the karma number as proof that that news/story was being neglected/ignored.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Doesn't actually mean much. A submission that eventually gets 600 upvotes can be posted a dozen times only receiving 1 upvote. It's mostly a lottery. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=coronavirus&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
airstrike 7y ago
I had a trip booked to Italy starting on March 20 so have been following the news very closely since at least mid February... I Ask HN'd how people were tracking the virus, and the answers I got were "I'm not tracking it in any way, shape or form and I hope it reciprocates the courtesy." Quite funny, but the stats don't lie[0]. The number of new cases in Italy has grown at an exponential rate. This is a developed economy. Similar rates are being seen in France, the UK and Switzerland. The same will happen in the US. We're all going to get this, and most of us will be fine, but if you take the midpoint of experts' forecast of 40-80% of people being infected and multiply that for a conservative 1% death rate (the WHO has mentioned 3.4% and 2% is also often thrown around), that yields 7.8 billion * 0.6 * 0.01 = 46.8 million dead At an 80% infection rate and an 3.4% mortality rate (worst case scenario), you get 212.2 million dead. That's a once-in-a-century, catastrophic black swan event. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_Italy#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_I... – see the chart below the table for the unbelievable exponential rate
- cm2187 7y ago
  The range of mortality I see is rather 0.3-1% [1] [2] [1] https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1236321986122375168 https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1236321986122375168 [2] https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1235956761015783427 https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1235956761015783427 Not a doctor, but I suspect 3.4% is the upper end of the case fatality ratio (i.e. death among people tested positive) as opposed to the infection fatility ratio (i.e. death among estimate of people infected).
  - int_19h 7y ago
    The range varies a lot depending on the quality of the treatment. The early initial estimates were based on data from Wuhan, where hospitals were overwhelmed early. The later, lower numbers were from areas where all new cases had hospital beds and ICUs available if they needed them. Problem is, given the current numbers, the projected total number of people who will require hospitalization, and of those that will require ICU, significantly exceed availability. So if it spreads too fast, and all these people get sick at the same time, we won't have enough beds to go around - and that will cause the mortality rate to spike again.
zachguo 7y ago
TBH epochtimes.com is not a legit news source. It's run by the cult group who also produces Shen Yun.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dang 7y ago
The biggest factor in what does or doesn't get upvotes is randomness, so you can't conclude anything from a single data point. In that case (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274728) also, the article wasn't in English, which makes it off topic here (we deeply respect other languages, but HN is an English-language site).
lqs469 7y ago
This is not surprising, even very common. The media can easily guide the direction of public opinion. After all, there are not many people who think independently (Fortunately, most of the people on the HN were able to make their own judgments). Look at these two tweets from NYT, just separated by 20 minutes: [1] https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1236484352965521408 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1236484352965521408 [2] https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1236479276586807296 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1236479276586807296 I mean the events happened are similar, but the point of reporting is totally different.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

I feel like it's less a matter of normalcy bias, and more that people reasonably distrust a Falun Gong newspaper written in a language they can't read.

paganel 7y ago
For a while this Falun gong member [1] was one of the few persons who was publishing real news and videos of what was happening in Wuhan and in China as a whole. [1] https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  How do you know that the news and videos she was publishing were real?
  - paganel 7y ago
    Because news organisations like the FT or the BBC published the same news that she had published two or three days before. Granted, she was not the only one publishing them on Twitter, but she was the one I was following the most. Also to add, news organisations like the FT or the BBC were only publishing news that could be taken for a political spin, like in the case of Li Wenliang, they were not publishing news about people committing suicide on their home as not to infect their loved ones or desperate phone calls made by people who were trying to get their loved ones into an hospital (which were already full by that point). Also, many of the hospital scenes I was seeing on Twitter on her account are similar to what now surfaces from hospitals located in Northern Italy.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      But you see the obvious concern, right? If news organizations publish some but not all of the same news she's reporting, that could mean that they're selectively skipping news to push a political angle - or it could mean that she's selectively adding fake news for her own political motivations. My inclinations are not to break the tie in favor of the person posting about a mystical connection between coronavirus and the shape of the Wuhan train station.

lollerk 7y ago

>The opposite of normalcy bias is overreaction, or worst-case scenario bias, in which small deviations from normality are dealt with as signals of an impending catastrophe. The question is to which one we are closer? That's what I think no one knows. Like how reddit says "2 million will die in the US" and some people say "it's just a flu" the truth maybe between the two half way there or so

tunesmith 7y ago
It doesn't matter - what matters is the point when hospitals get overwhelmed. Past that points, fatality rate goes up just from lack of treatment. Societies have already proven they can put in sufficient containment practices to keep hospitals from getting overwhelmed, so it's a matter if other countries follow similarly effective practices or let themselves get overwhelmed.
- afiori 7y ago
  I think this in and underdeveloped topic; as I see it this infection even if it is comparable to the flu in mortality require often more intense medical intervention.

vsareto 7y ago

Prison riots too: https://www.thedailybeast.com/six-inmates-dead-scores-escape-as-prisoners-riot-across-italy-after-visitor-restrictions-over-coronavirus?via=twitter_page https://www.thedailybeast.com/six-inmates-dead-scores-escape...

danielovichdk 7y ago

One upvote? Are we supposed to feel sorry for your karma craving personality?

paganel 7y ago
I've been on this site for more than 10 years, I do not care about karma, I was using the karma number as proof that that news/story was being neglected/ignored.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Doesn't actually mean much. A submission that eventually gets 600 upvotes can be posted a dozen times only receiving 1 upvote. It's mostly a lottery. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=coronavirus&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

airstrike 7y ago

I had a trip booked to Italy starting on March 20 so have been following the news very closely since at least mid February... I Ask HN'd how people were tracking the virus, and the answers I got were "I'm not tracking it in any way, shape or form and I hope it reciprocates the courtesy." Quite funny, but the stats don't lie[0]. The number of new cases in Italy has grown at an exponential rate. This is a developed economy. Similar rates are being seen in France, the UK and Switzerland. The same will happen in the US. We're all going to get this, and most of us will be fine, but if you take the midpoint of experts' forecast of 40-80% of people being infected and multiply that for a conservative 1% death rate (the WHO has mentioned 3.4% and 2% is also often thrown around), that yields 7.8 billion * 0.6 * 0.01 = 46.8 million dead At an 80% infection rate and an 3.4% mortality rate (worst case scenario), you get 212.2 million dead. That's a once-in-a-century, catastrophic black swan event. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_Italy#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_I... – see the chart below the table for the unbelievable exponential rate

cm2187 7y ago
The range of mortality I see is rather 0.3-1% [1] [2] [1] https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1236321986122375168 https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1236321986122375168 [2] https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1235956761015783427 https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1235956761015783427 Not a doctor, but I suspect 3.4% is the upper end of the case fatality ratio (i.e. death among people tested positive) as opposed to the infection fatility ratio (i.e. death among estimate of people infected).
- int_19h 7y ago
  The range varies a lot depending on the quality of the treatment. The early initial estimates were based on data from Wuhan, where hospitals were overwhelmed early. The later, lower numbers were from areas where all new cases had hospital beds and ICUs available if they needed them. Problem is, given the current numbers, the projected total number of people who will require hospitalization, and of those that will require ICU, significantly exceed availability. So if it spreads too fast, and all these people get sick at the same time, we won't have enough beds to go around - and that will cause the mortality rate to spike again.

zachguo 7y ago

TBH epochtimes.com is not a legit news source. It's run by the cult group who also produces Shen Yun.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dang 7y ago

The biggest factor in what does or doesn't get upvotes is randomness, so you can't conclude anything from a single data point. In that case (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274728) also, the article wasn't in English, which makes it off topic here (we deeply respect other languages, but HN is an English-language site).

lqs469 7y ago

This is not surprising, even very common. The media can easily guide the direction of public opinion. After all, there are not many people who think independently (Fortunately, most of the people on the HN were able to make their own judgments). Look at these two tweets from NYT, just separated by 20 minutes: [1] https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1236484352965521408 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1236484352965521408 [2] https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1236479276586807296 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1236479276586807296 I mean the events happened are similar, but the point of reporting is totally different.