6 ms·

I'm not sure where this level of panic is coming from. Numbers are about to spike everywhere pretty much no matter what anybody does, because better testing an

by corel_ 7y ago

I'm not sure where this level of panic is coming from. Numbers are about to spike everywhere pretty much no matter what anybody does, because better testing and funding has become available. Quarantining an entire continent, and even worse than this badly doing it, seems to be an astonishing overreaction. The average age of death for coronavirus victims is 83. The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Korea or as high as 5% in Italy. Italy is especially vulnerable because it has the oldest population in Europe which is one of the factors that is leading to the 5% figure from there. It is not an End of Days zombie apocalypse. I recently watched a speech by a US mayor which essentially said that the panic over Corona is going to do much more damage to people than the actual virus and I tend to agree. Simple quarantining measures mixed with best practices for infection control until we have more information about the virus seems perfectly fine. Blowing up the global economy is complete overkill and is a typical move from an administration whose response to topics are either to ignore them or sledgehammer them.

andbberger 7y ago
Exponential growth doesn't seem like a problem, until it is. A primary concern is reducing peak load on medical services. https://www.flattenthecurve.com/ https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
- corel_ 7y ago
  This website doesn't contradict anything I've said and I cannot see the relevance to the point.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I tried modeling infection rates, number of infected, and total number recovered and dead. Couple of things stood out. 1. Reducing the transmission rate lowers the total number of people sick at one time. Lowers the ultimate number who contract it. And pushes the peak infection rate out. 2. The above numbers are very sensitive to r0. 3. An exponential when it hits looks like a wall. You end up with a significant percentage of the population sick at once. Could be my model being shitty but it looks like at high r0 there is a momentum effect which drives the total number infected above what you would expect.
  - TheGallopedHigh 7y ago
    You’re describing a typical SIR model (susceptible infected recovered) which can be solved analytically. You can see the dependence on all those points you mentioned above. Note this is a “mean-field” model (everyone evenly mixed together) so take it with a grain of salt...
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      That's what I was trying to do. I thought it would be interesting to build one and play with it. The issue with it being a mean model vs a mixes contact model noted.
      - TheGallopedHigh 7y ago
        Both of these models are well studied and compared in the literature
knzhou 7y ago
> The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Korea or as high as 5% in Italy. [...] It is not an End of Days zombie apocalypse. A few percent is a lot. World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where we're headed if we don't stop it.
- corel_ 7y ago
  Because World War 2 killed 3% of the general population. The coronavirus, in a single country, has killed 5% of infected people and elder people or those with pre-existing conditions are majorly overrepresented in infection rates. >World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where we're headed if we don't stop it. This isn't just wrong. It's irresponsible for you to be saying these types of absolutely incorrect things.
  - sumofi 7y ago
    The chance right now that you will know someone you love being killed by Corona is really realistic. I'm not sure how you think how critical it is. I personally have never had this issue and do not mind at all to lay still for a whole year to try to reduce the risk of this happening.
    - koyote 7y ago
      > The chance right now that you will know someone you love being killed by Corona is really realistic. Unless all the people you love are over 80 (in which case the chance of them dying before Corona hit was not much less realistic than it is now) that sentance is just completely false. Why spread such fear and misinformation?
      - defined 7y ago
        It’s not only over 80s. It’s anyone with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, morbid obesity, and some others, which collectively describes large swaths of the US population.
      - 7y ago
legolas2412 7y ago
Europe or North America are not being quarantined off. And if people don't take measures, all healthcare is going to be overwhelmed.
lurquer 7y ago
There is a panic. Doesn't matter if its justified (its not, imho). But it is real and it has the potential to seriously damage the economy. A tanked economy will harm far more people than this virus. If the ban gives sufficient reassurance to the chicken littles to induce them not to sell their stocks and invest in toilet paper, it will be a success.
- cmurf 7y ago
  So when the ICU's are all full, and more people are coming in and a space in the ICU is freed up - who gets the slot? A randomly chosen person? Triage? First come first served? Or someone who can pay extra for VIP access? Because one person will get that space, and the next ten people are going to die in the hallway before the next ICU space opens up. The reason why it's going to go this way is because we won't have the capacity for everyone who needs critical care. And the reason we won't have the capacity is a) lack of proper investments imagining this scenario, where in Japan and South Korea they have this capacity because they've had this experience and know better; and b) lack of discipline to weld ourselves into our homes or even voluntarily self-quarantine in order to slow things down and effectively give us more critical care capacity. I spoke to 1/2 dozen people today who are traveling. Three think they have this thing, and have 3 of 3 symptoms. I told them not to travel. They said "Oh well" and are traveling anyway. That's what we're dealing with. A total lack of personal responsibility, upon which both the free market and our democratic government is based - and so far this is about as far as we've come. The European flights being cancelled, seems sane to me. It's not about 1 or 10 people being sick per plane. It's reasonable to assume after a 6-12 hour flight, that everyone on board is infected if there was even 1 person infected at the start of the flight. I don't know the exact number of incoming European flights per day, I think it's about 80-110K passengers? That's what this stops. Stopping all domestic travel would be better. Short term pain translates into tens of thousands fewer deaths over the next 3 months. China got a handle on this for now because they welded people in their homes. We aren't doing that which means we haven't slowed it down that much let alone stopped it. Stopping cargo, if that turns out to be accurate reporting, I think is an overreaction.
slg 7y ago
Estimates have said that they expect 20%-60% of people to get it (originally [1] but updated according to [2]. Something like 10-15% of those people require hospitalization [2] and something like 0.5% - 4% of people die [4]. If we use the lower bounds on all those we are talking about 6.5 million Americans hospitalized and 327,000 dead. For the sake of comparison, that is almost half the number of Americans who have ever died of HIV/AIDS [5]. [1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-infection-outbreak-worldwide-virus-expert-warning-today-2020-03-02/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-infection-outbreak-... [2] - https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=20 https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2... [3] - https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-answers-covid-19/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-ans... [4] - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-... [5] - https://www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-in-the-united-states-the-basics/ https://www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-... EDIT: I originally didn't post sources, so I backfilled those in and slightly tweaked the numbers to match. EDIT 2: I adjusted the numbers again because as a reply points out one of my sources updated their estimates.
- Proziam 7y ago
  FOR CLARITY - I'm not saying that there isn't a need to take measures to protect people. However, I do believe that a lot of inaccurate information is being presented. The public attention on this subject is enormous, making it a ripe topic for the media to profit from alarmist headlines. [0]The source of the 40%-70% figure has since dramatically altered their estimates, and added several qualifiers. [0]https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=20 https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2...
  - knzhou 7y ago
    He lowered it from 40-70% to 20-60%, hardly a qualitative change. The fact is that under essentially any epidemiological model, if you have R0 > 1 and no countermeasures, it's going to hit a sizable fraction of the world population, because the exponential growth only gets stopped by running out of victims.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
defined 7y ago
Death is not the only thing that coronavirus can do to you. You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs. I think many are discounting, or are unaware of, these other nasty possibilities. We don’t know enough yet of the prevalence of these effects, but we do know they happen.
- bart_spoon 7y ago
  > You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs. Given that we've only been tracking the virus closely for 2 months, and we've only had a decent sample size of patients for only about 1 month, you really can't be making claims like this at this point.
  - kkdaemas 7y ago
    Some survivors of SARS had significant long-term health complications. It remains to be seen if this will be the same.
  - defined 7y ago
    I'm not making these claims. A senior doctor in Western Europe is making these claims[1]. > Fatality is the wrong yardstick. Catching the virus can mess up your life in many, many more ways than just straight-up killing you. "We are all young"—okay. "Even if we get the bug, we will survive"—fantastic. How about needing four months of physical therapy before you even feel human again. Or getting scar tissue in your lungs and having your activity level restricted for the rest of your life. [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/young-unafraid-coronavirus-pandemic-good-you-now-stop-killing-people-opinion-1491797 https://www.newsweek.com/young-unafraid-coronavirus-pandemic...
- rimliu 7y ago
  AFAIK besides spending weeks in therapy, other possibilities are not confirmed for COVID-19.

by corel_ 7y ago

andbberger 7y ago

Exponential growth doesn't seem like a problem, until it is. A primary concern is reducing peak load on medical services. https://www.flattenthecurve.com/ https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

corel_ 7y ago
This website doesn't contradict anything I've said and I cannot see the relevance to the point.
Gibbon1 7y ago
I tried modeling infection rates, number of infected, and total number recovered and dead. Couple of things stood out. 1. Reducing the transmission rate lowers the total number of people sick at one time. Lowers the ultimate number who contract it. And pushes the peak infection rate out. 2. The above numbers are very sensitive to r0. 3. An exponential when it hits looks like a wall. You end up with a significant percentage of the population sick at once. Could be my model being shitty but it looks like at high r0 there is a momentum effect which drives the total number infected above what you would expect.
- TheGallopedHigh 7y ago
  You’re describing a typical SIR model (susceptible infected recovered) which can be solved analytically. You can see the dependence on all those points you mentioned above. Note this is a “mean-field” model (everyone evenly mixed together) so take it with a grain of salt...
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    That's what I was trying to do. I thought it would be interesting to build one and play with it. The issue with it being a mean model vs a mixes contact model noted.
    - TheGallopedHigh 7y ago
      Both of these models are well studied and compared in the literature

knzhou 7y ago

> The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Korea or as high as 5% in Italy. [...] It is not an End of Days zombie apocalypse. A few percent is a lot. World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where we're headed if we don't stop it.

corel_ 7y ago
Because World War 2 killed 3% of the general population. The coronavirus, in a single country, has killed 5% of infected people and elder people or those with pre-existing conditions are majorly overrepresented in infection rates. >World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where we're headed if we don't stop it. This isn't just wrong. It's irresponsible for you to be saying these types of absolutely incorrect things.
- sumofi 7y ago
  The chance right now that you will know someone you love being killed by Corona is really realistic. I'm not sure how you think how critical it is. I personally have never had this issue and do not mind at all to lay still for a whole year to try to reduce the risk of this happening.
  - koyote 7y ago
    > The chance right now that you will know someone you love being killed by Corona is really realistic. Unless all the people you love are over 80 (in which case the chance of them dying before Corona hit was not much less realistic than it is now) that sentance is just completely false. Why spread such fear and misinformation?
    - defined 7y ago
      It’s not only over 80s. It’s anyone with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, morbid obesity, and some others, which collectively describes large swaths of the US population.
    - 7y ago

legolas2412 7y ago

Europe or North America are not being quarantined off. And if people don't take measures, all healthcare is going to be overwhelmed.

lurquer 7y ago

There is a panic. Doesn't matter if its justified (its not, imho). But it is real and it has the potential to seriously damage the economy. A tanked economy will harm far more people than this virus. If the ban gives sufficient reassurance to the chicken littles to induce them not to sell their stocks and invest in toilet paper, it will be a success.

cmurf 7y ago
So when the ICU's are all full, and more people are coming in and a space in the ICU is freed up - who gets the slot? A randomly chosen person? Triage? First come first served? Or someone who can pay extra for VIP access? Because one person will get that space, and the next ten people are going to die in the hallway before the next ICU space opens up. The reason why it's going to go this way is because we won't have the capacity for everyone who needs critical care. And the reason we won't have the capacity is a) lack of proper investments imagining this scenario, where in Japan and South Korea they have this capacity because they've had this experience and know better; and b) lack of discipline to weld ourselves into our homes or even voluntarily self-quarantine in order to slow things down and effectively give us more critical care capacity. I spoke to 1/2 dozen people today who are traveling. Three think they have this thing, and have 3 of 3 symptoms. I told them not to travel. They said "Oh well" and are traveling anyway. That's what we're dealing with. A total lack of personal responsibility, upon which both the free market and our democratic government is based - and so far this is about as far as we've come. The European flights being cancelled, seems sane to me. It's not about 1 or 10 people being sick per plane. It's reasonable to assume after a 6-12 hour flight, that everyone on board is infected if there was even 1 person infected at the start of the flight. I don't know the exact number of incoming European flights per day, I think it's about 80-110K passengers? That's what this stops. Stopping all domestic travel would be better. Short term pain translates into tens of thousands fewer deaths over the next 3 months. China got a handle on this for now because they welded people in their homes. We aren't doing that which means we haven't slowed it down that much let alone stopped it. Stopping cargo, if that turns out to be accurate reporting, I think is an overreaction.

slg 7y ago

Estimates have said that they expect 20%-60% of people to get it (originally [1] but updated according to [2]. Something like 10-15% of those people require hospitalization [2] and something like 0.5% - 4% of people die [4]. If we use the lower bounds on all those we are talking about 6.5 million Americans hospitalized and 327,000 dead. For the sake of comparison, that is almost half the number of Americans who have ever died of HIV/AIDS [5]. [1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-infection-outbreak-worldwide-virus-expert-warning-today-2020-03-02/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-infection-outbreak-... [2] - https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=20 https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2... [3] - https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-answers-covid-19/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-ans... [4] - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-... [5] - https://www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-in-the-united-states-the-basics/ https://www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-... EDIT: I originally didn't post sources, so I backfilled those in and slightly tweaked the numbers to match. EDIT 2: I adjusted the numbers again because as a reply points out one of my sources updated their estimates.

Proziam 7y ago
FOR CLARITY - I'm not saying that there isn't a need to take measures to protect people. However, I do believe that a lot of inaccurate information is being presented. The public attention on this subject is enormous, making it a ripe topic for the media to profit from alarmist headlines. [0]The source of the 40%-70% figure has since dramatically altered their estimates, and added several qualifiers. [0]https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=20 https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2...
- knzhou 7y ago
  He lowered it from 40-70% to 20-60%, hardly a qualitative change. The fact is that under essentially any epidemiological model, if you have R0 > 1 and no countermeasures, it's going to hit a sizable fraction of the world population, because the exponential growth only gets stopped by running out of victims.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

defined 7y ago

Death is not the only thing that coronavirus can do to you. You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs. I think many are discounting, or are unaware of, these other nasty possibilities. We don’t know enough yet of the prevalence of these effects, but we do know they happen.

bart_spoon 7y ago
> You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs. Given that we've only been tracking the virus closely for 2 months, and we've only had a decent sample size of patients for only about 1 month, you really can't be making claims like this at this point.
- kkdaemas 7y ago
  Some survivors of SARS had significant long-term health complications. It remains to be seen if this will be the same.
- defined 7y ago
  I'm not making these claims. A senior doctor in Western Europe is making these claims[1]. > Fatality is the wrong yardstick. Catching the virus can mess up your life in many, many more ways than just straight-up killing you. "We are all young"—okay. "Even if we get the bug, we will survive"—fantastic. How about needing four months of physical therapy before you even feel human again. Or getting scar tissue in your lungs and having your activity level restricted for the rest of your life. [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/young-unafraid-coronavirus-pandemic-good-you-now-stop-killing-people-opinion-1491797 https://www.newsweek.com/young-unafraid-coronavirus-pandemic...
rimliu 7y ago
AFAIK besides spending weeks in therapy, other possibilities are not confirmed for COVID-19.