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This may get downvoted, but I think the following judgement-free statement is true: this is starting to look scary/serious /solely/ because of the measures the

by sershe 7y ago

This may get downvoted, but I think the following judgement-free statement is true: this is starting to look scary/serious /solely/ because of the measures the governments are taking, and the media circus around it. Otherwise (while it would have almost certainly "started to look serious" eventually, probably for a short time), at this point, you would not have even noticed given the actual numbers.

throwanem 7y ago
Your suggestion here and elsewhere has been that it would be ultimately less harmful overall to let the disease run unchecked, even if it kills millions in a few weeks that way, than to attempt to control it in the ways our various levels of government are doing. I have yet to see you substantiate that claim in any way.
- umvi 7y ago
  AFAIK, covid-19 is basically a "slightly worse flu". Most people are not at risk of dying and in fact most people don't even need to go to the hospital to recover. Surely there has to be a balance between protecting the vulnerable at the cost of ruining the economy and protecting the economy at the cost of ruining the vulnerable. How about instead of shutting down planet earth we advise people over the age of 60 to self-quarantine for a few months. The disease will run its course and then they will be protected by herd immunity. Neighbors and friends can drop off supplies on the front doorstep during this time.
  - satya71 7y ago
    Sorry this is not a "slightly worse flu". The "Spanish Flu" was both less virulent and less deadly and killed ~50 million world-wide. This is the mostly deadly pandemic since the "Black Death" of medieval times.
    - nostromo 7y ago
      It’s not more deadly. The fatality rate is 0.6% or so, and almost entirely focused on the very old or il.
      - MaybiusStrip 7y ago
        You can't just cherry-pick South Korea's case fatality rate because it's convenient to your argument. The case fatality rate worldwide is currently 3.7%. Regardless of what the reasons for that may be and whether it will remain the same, that is a cold, hard, fact about the current reality. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpreting-the-case-fatality-rate https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpr...
    - djsumdog 7y ago
      It's no where near the Black Death. From what I've heard from multiple people are the limits are most likely a lower bound of 0.6% and an upper of maybe 1.5%. That's still a lot of people. America is ~330 million. 1% is more than 3 million. Assuming only 1/3 of Americans get infected, there could still be an upper bound of a million people dying (although it'll more like be 300k ~ 1m with all the efforts to spread out everything).
  - arbitrary_name 7y ago
    It is not a slightly worse flu though. There are numerous experts in record pointing to it's long incubation time, that some people are asymptomatic, that it may be airborne, the death rate... It is not normal seasonal flu and it demands a different response. Now, what that response is can be debated, but it should be more than doing nothing.
    - djsumdog 7y ago
      > that it may be airborne To be pedantic, it's not airborne. It's a respiratory virus. An airborne virus can linger in the air, possibly for hours or even a day. It's much much more transmissible. The danger with SARS-cov2 is that, when going back to some of these cities where the first patients appeared, WHO researchers have found people with large viral load in their throats, and they didn't develop symptoms for over a week! So just being within 3~4 feet of them breathing could spread the disease. Sure, it's less likely than if they coughed or you shook hands, but it's still dangerous.
  - jogjayr 7y ago
    The difference is that for regular flu we have vaccines, herd immunity, and medicines that work. We have none of those things for COVID-19. The effect of that is to drive up hospitalization rates to the point that it's a DDoS on the healthcare system. People suffering from unrelated issues now can't get care on time, and some of them will die too. We don't even know for certain if getting it once makes you immune. How do you know herd immunity will work if you don't have the answer to something basic like that? Isolating just over-60s only works to some extent. What about the healthcare and nursing home workers whom they interact with?
  - ChrisClark 7y ago
    If you are ignorant of the virus, why talk about it like this? 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50, and it causes permanent damage to your lungs and organs. If you don't take paranoid drastic measures, many millions will die. If you do take paranoid drastic measures, lives will be saved, and then everyone will call you crazy for taking those measures because it ended up not that bad. Just like people think Y2K was an overblown non-issue. Because it was fixed by millions of people working hard.
    - umvi 7y ago
      > 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50 And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? When the mortality rate is 0.2% for people < 60 years old, I just have a hard time believing that it requires the response we've been giving it. I would bet that for healthy, non-vulnerable adults (i.e. they don't have a pre-existing condition that makes them extra susceptible) the death rate is virtually 0%. I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.
      - MaybiusStrip 7y ago
        >And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance. > I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction. Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why? 1. You have a hypothesis that taking less drastic measures would result in a manageable death rates and less impact on the economy. However, Wuhan and Italy tried to deal with the virus through these less drastic measures (telling the elderly to self-quarantine, asking the population to social-distance), and the results were disastrous. Does that not invalidate your hypothesis? 2. Even if you're right, and there was a good chance we could avoid the worst of the epidemic, we know for a fact that the worst case scenario is that in the US, 21 million people will require hospitalization, and 1.7 million people will die. Saying that it's worth taking a risk on less drastic measures is the equivalent of saying it's OK to play Russian roulette because the odds are actually really good: it totally ignores the tremendously high cost of the worst case scenario. I have found that risk-analysts like Taleb have the most convincing arguments for why all these extreme measures are called for. Check out his twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb https://twitter.com/nntaleb
- sershe 7y ago
  First of all, I made this suggestion in the other comment and I absolutely did substantiate it with numbers. On the contrary, the responses I've received were 1) Point #2 below. That is fair. 2) Failing to read my post, e.g. saying healthcare will collapse while I already include that assumption. 3) Appeal to emotion like (literally) "[you are] not human" or "shit HN says" If you have something better, I welcome you to comment on my other post. Two new pieces of information I got since then: 1) Medical supplies are in danger because of the local disruption (e.g. local blood drives are cancelled in King County so they say the supply is collapsing), factory closures, and shipping disruption - again, the cure is worse than the disease and it just reinforces my point. 2) People noted that sudden death spike would cause economic disruption due to panic too, however I argue that (a) without the media and govt attention at the early stage, the panic would be brief, (b) even after healthcare collapses, the panic and impact would be much less significant than now, as evidenced by Italian doctors on FB/Twitter being unhappy with the common reaction of reading the horror stories and then going out with friends.
lm28469 7y ago
Either you don't do anything and it eventually _gets_ serious, or you do something and it _looks_ serious. > you would not have even noticed given the actual numbers. Surely you'd notice if 15%+ of your family's elders died in one year. People don't seem to get that it's not so bad (health wise) as long as you take serious decisions to slow the spread, so yes, you're right, it _looks_ serious, because it is, and it would be much worse if governments didn't do anything about it.
- nostromo 7y ago
  At 85 you have a 10% chance of dying each year for any and all reasons, and it goes up each year. So most of us are indeed used to losing about 15% of our elders each year, and have been forever.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    You got what I meant, no need to play with bs percentages. Old people will die, more than usual, and you would notice.
- sershe 7y ago
  That remains to be seen. The consequences of current actions, while the current impact of the virus itself is basically nil, will be severe, including extra deaths (and lack of births, for that matter - didn't occur to me to count that but looking at demographic articles I realized it's also lives lost in the net), and massive waste of life-years due to economic disruption that will disproportionately affect the developing world, the poor and the young. Which one is worse, I don't know, but over the last few days my opinion is starting to change towards the latter being worse.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    > while the current impact of the virus itself is basically nil You should read about Italy, and how they're running out of hospital beds. Which means usually non life threatening issues are getting much more serious. It's not a boolean choice between "saving lives" and "saving the economy"... If you don't do anything: people get sick, sick people can't work, the economy tanks, hundred thousand people die. If you do something, less people get sick, the economy tanks anyway, but less people die. As it turns out it seems like most government prefer prioritizing human life over money.
dkarl 7y ago
No, we're treating it as serious because educated guesses say it is, and unfortunately, because of the lack of testing capacity, we can't do any better than that. We're taking measures that are proportional to the problem as measured in countries that have the capacity to measure it. When we're in the dark scrambling around with a lighter trying to find the light switch, it doesn't mean much that we can't see the problem.
Buttons840 7y ago
You should not call the media a "circus" if you are trying to be judgement-free. So, removing judgement: this is starting to appear serious because of government actions and media reporting. I find this to be personally true, because if the government and media had not informed me of this illness, I would be unaware and unconcerned. I think you probably want some discussion of this point, but it is so plain and obvious it is hard to discuss. I suspect you are trying to argue your personal judgement that the media is a "circus", that they are not justified in their reporting. That is not judgement-free and could use some supporting arguments.
- sershe 7y ago
  That is fair, "circus" was a judgement. Regardless, the main point stands. I tried to start a discussion in another thread; this post was mostly to bring more attention to the fact that the virus is not disrupting things at all at this point, the reaction to it is.

by sershe 7y ago

throwanem 7y ago

Your suggestion here and elsewhere has been that it would be ultimately less harmful overall to let the disease run unchecked, even if it kills millions in a few weeks that way, than to attempt to control it in the ways our various levels of government are doing. I have yet to see you substantiate that claim in any way.

umvi 7y ago
AFAIK, covid-19 is basically a "slightly worse flu". Most people are not at risk of dying and in fact most people don't even need to go to the hospital to recover. Surely there has to be a balance between protecting the vulnerable at the cost of ruining the economy and protecting the economy at the cost of ruining the vulnerable. How about instead of shutting down planet earth we advise people over the age of 60 to self-quarantine for a few months. The disease will run its course and then they will be protected by herd immunity. Neighbors and friends can drop off supplies on the front doorstep during this time.
- satya71 7y ago
  Sorry this is not a "slightly worse flu". The "Spanish Flu" was both less virulent and less deadly and killed ~50 million world-wide. This is the mostly deadly pandemic since the "Black Death" of medieval times.
  - nostromo 7y ago
    It’s not more deadly. The fatality rate is 0.6% or so, and almost entirely focused on the very old or il.
    - MaybiusStrip 7y ago
      You can't just cherry-pick South Korea's case fatality rate because it's convenient to your argument. The case fatality rate worldwide is currently 3.7%. Regardless of what the reasons for that may be and whether it will remain the same, that is a cold, hard, fact about the current reality. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpreting-the-case-fatality-rate https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpr...
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    It's no where near the Black Death. From what I've heard from multiple people are the limits are most likely a lower bound of 0.6% and an upper of maybe 1.5%. That's still a lot of people. America is ~330 million. 1% is more than 3 million. Assuming only 1/3 of Americans get infected, there could still be an upper bound of a million people dying (although it'll more like be 300k ~ 1m with all the efforts to spread out everything).
- arbitrary_name 7y ago
  It is not a slightly worse flu though. There are numerous experts in record pointing to it's long incubation time, that some people are asymptomatic, that it may be airborne, the death rate... It is not normal seasonal flu and it demands a different response. Now, what that response is can be debated, but it should be more than doing nothing.
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    > that it may be airborne To be pedantic, it's not airborne. It's a respiratory virus. An airborne virus can linger in the air, possibly for hours or even a day. It's much much more transmissible. The danger with SARS-cov2 is that, when going back to some of these cities where the first patients appeared, WHO researchers have found people with large viral load in their throats, and they didn't develop symptoms for over a week! So just being within 3~4 feet of them breathing could spread the disease. Sure, it's less likely than if they coughed or you shook hands, but it's still dangerous.
- jogjayr 7y ago
  The difference is that for regular flu we have vaccines, herd immunity, and medicines that work. We have none of those things for COVID-19. The effect of that is to drive up hospitalization rates to the point that it's a DDoS on the healthcare system. People suffering from unrelated issues now can't get care on time, and some of them will die too. We don't even know for certain if getting it once makes you immune. How do you know herd immunity will work if you don't have the answer to something basic like that? Isolating just over-60s only works to some extent. What about the healthcare and nursing home workers whom they interact with?
- ChrisClark 7y ago
  If you are ignorant of the virus, why talk about it like this? 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50, and it causes permanent damage to your lungs and organs. If you don't take paranoid drastic measures, many millions will die. If you do take paranoid drastic measures, lives will be saved, and then everyone will call you crazy for taking those measures because it ended up not that bad. Just like people think Y2K was an overblown non-issue. Because it was fixed by millions of people working hard.
  - umvi 7y ago
    > 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50 And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? When the mortality rate is 0.2% for people < 60 years old, I just have a hard time believing that it requires the response we've been giving it. I would bet that for healthy, non-vulnerable adults (i.e. they don't have a pre-existing condition that makes them extra susceptible) the death rate is virtually 0%. I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.
    - MaybiusStrip 7y ago
      >And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance. > I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction. Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why? 1. You have a hypothesis that taking less drastic measures would result in a manageable death rates and less impact on the economy. However, Wuhan and Italy tried to deal with the virus through these less drastic measures (telling the elderly to self-quarantine, asking the population to social-distance), and the results were disastrous. Does that not invalidate your hypothesis? 2. Even if you're right, and there was a good chance we could avoid the worst of the epidemic, we know for a fact that the worst case scenario is that in the US, 21 million people will require hospitalization, and 1.7 million people will die. Saying that it's worth taking a risk on less drastic measures is the equivalent of saying it's OK to play Russian roulette because the odds are actually really good: it totally ignores the tremendously high cost of the worst case scenario. I have found that risk-analysts like Taleb have the most convincing arguments for why all these extreme measures are called for. Check out his twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb https://twitter.com/nntaleb
sershe 7y ago
First of all, I made this suggestion in the other comment and I absolutely did substantiate it with numbers. On the contrary, the responses I've received were 1) Point #2 below. That is fair. 2) Failing to read my post, e.g. saying healthcare will collapse while I already include that assumption. 3) Appeal to emotion like (literally) "[you are] not human" or "shit HN says" If you have something better, I welcome you to comment on my other post. Two new pieces of information I got since then: 1) Medical supplies are in danger because of the local disruption (e.g. local blood drives are cancelled in King County so they say the supply is collapsing), factory closures, and shipping disruption - again, the cure is worse than the disease and it just reinforces my point. 2) People noted that sudden death spike would cause economic disruption due to panic too, however I argue that (a) without the media and govt attention at the early stage, the panic would be brief, (b) even after healthcare collapses, the panic and impact would be much less significant than now, as evidenced by Italian doctors on FB/Twitter being unhappy with the common reaction of reading the horror stories and then going out with friends.

lm28469 7y ago

Either you don't do anything and it eventually _gets_ serious, or you do something and it _looks_ serious. > you would not have even noticed given the actual numbers. Surely you'd notice if 15%+ of your family's elders died in one year. People don't seem to get that it's not so bad (health wise) as long as you take serious decisions to slow the spread, so yes, you're right, it _looks_ serious, because it is, and it would be much worse if governments didn't do anything about it.

nostromo 7y ago
At 85 you have a 10% chance of dying each year for any and all reasons, and it goes up each year. So most of us are indeed used to losing about 15% of our elders each year, and have been forever.
- lm28469 7y ago
  You got what I meant, no need to play with bs percentages. Old people will die, more than usual, and you would notice.
sershe 7y ago
That remains to be seen. The consequences of current actions, while the current impact of the virus itself is basically nil, will be severe, including extra deaths (and lack of births, for that matter - didn't occur to me to count that but looking at demographic articles I realized it's also lives lost in the net), and massive waste of life-years due to economic disruption that will disproportionately affect the developing world, the poor and the young. Which one is worse, I don't know, but over the last few days my opinion is starting to change towards the latter being worse.
- lm28469 7y ago
  > while the current impact of the virus itself is basically nil You should read about Italy, and how they're running out of hospital beds. Which means usually non life threatening issues are getting much more serious. It's not a boolean choice between "saving lives" and "saving the economy"... If you don't do anything: people get sick, sick people can't work, the economy tanks, hundred thousand people die. If you do something, less people get sick, the economy tanks anyway, but less people die. As it turns out it seems like most government prefer prioritizing human life over money.

dkarl 7y ago

No, we're treating it as serious because educated guesses say it is, and unfortunately, because of the lack of testing capacity, we can't do any better than that. We're taking measures that are proportional to the problem as measured in countries that have the capacity to measure it. When we're in the dark scrambling around with a lighter trying to find the light switch, it doesn't mean much that we can't see the problem.

Buttons840 7y ago

You should not call the media a "circus" if you are trying to be judgement-free. So, removing judgement: this is starting to appear serious because of government actions and media reporting. I find this to be personally true, because if the government and media had not informed me of this illness, I would be unaware and unconcerned. I think you probably want some discussion of this point, but it is so plain and obvious it is hard to discuss. I suspect you are trying to argue your personal judgement that the media is a "circus", that they are not justified in their reporting. That is not judgement-free and could use some supporting arguments.

sershe 7y ago
That is fair, "circus" was a judgement. Regardless, the main point stands. I tried to start a discussion in another thread; this post was mostly to bring more attention to the fact that the virus is not disrupting things at all at this point, the reaction to it is.