7 ms·

Evidence over Hysteria – Covid-19

31 points by sprague 7y ago

IAmEveryone 7y ago
This is bullshit. As but one example of the guy’s cluelessness: the curve of (new) infections over time is not a bell curve. The shape is roughly similar. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the normal distribution.
- AuthorizedCust 7y ago
  If that is your only criticism, you may be throwing away a whole article over a typo. The virus caseload in China is looking bell curve-ish. I am not on board with everything in this article, though. I am unsure about his proposition on reopening schools, for example. But I'm not throwing it all away over that one part.
  - sgt101 7y ago
    Maybe you should because the fella has demonstrated sloppiness and ignorance on one issue, and that shakes my faith in the quality of the rest of it. If you are going to attempt to influence life and death policy you better be good. Compare the quality of this article to the Imperial College report last week.
    - sgt101 7y ago
      This fella goes to town on the nonsense in the GP : https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241549349999411201 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241549349999411201
  - IAmEveryone 7y ago
    It’s not a typo. It’s the equivalent of mixing up Java and JavaScript.
- neonate 7y ago
  Farr's Law says otherwise: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22farr%27s+law%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22farr%27s+law%22.
  - IAmEveryone 7y ago
    “ In the mid-19th century, Dr. William Farr made the observation that epidemic events rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern that can be approximated by a bell-shaped curve. ” Yes, he got as Farr as noticing that it’s roughly bell-shaped. But just because it goes up and then down it’s not actually a normal distribution. At the beginning, when no one is immune, infections obviously grow exponentially. But the bell curve, even though it looks similar (sigmoid) doesn’t rise exponentially. So it looks similar, but it’s not. If you observe infections and somehow try to fit a normal distribution, you’ll get widely wrong predictions, especially at the beginning. Farr came up with this in 1840. That’s before Pasteur formulated germ theory as we know it today, so it was probably close enough for its time. Today it’s not.
  - IAmEveryone 7y ago
    Oh, also: try to fit a bell curve on the AIDS epidemic and see how “Farr” you get.
hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
Half of the article is about making numbers relative (active/total cases, cases/population, etc). But death toll is counted in absolute numbers. No one will think 1M deaths is victory just because this is 1% of whatever. People are right to be hysterical, we have tough times ahead.
- guscost 7y ago
  By that logic, with those numbers (and if 1M is the total globally), then we “lose” almost as badly to the seasonal flu, every year. I’m not saying we shouldn’t care about deadly illnesses. But the world is a dangerous place, and we’ve been pretty bad about changing that, historically. Also, if we ruin 5 million lives to save (some percent of) 1 million, is that worth it? How about ruining 50 million lives? We can save lives with drastic measures, but drastic measures will have bad consequences too, and it seems like nobody has any perspective on that.
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    What's the name of this fallacy? 1. "New thing X puts us at risk of losing Y lives every day." 2. "We lose Y lives to car accidents every day". 3. "Ergo, X is harmless!" You now have 2Y lives lost every day.
    - guscost 7y ago
      That’s not even close to what I’m saying. How did you read my comment and understand it as that??
hanche 7y ago
Well, Farr's law is all about the general shape of an epidemic, plotted as number of infected people against time. It does not say anything about the location or height of the peak. The devil is in those details.
tjr225 7y ago
Unrelated - is there a term for exhaustion of opinions? I swear you could go into any HN comment thread related to this outbreak and it breaks down to; Person A saying X is going to happen and then Person B saying Y is going to happen and then Person C saying that No! Z is going to happen! How did everyone get so opinionated about something so unpredictable and unprecedented? In any case I think we should all calm down regardless of how dangerous this situation is. Stay sane, everyone!
- ludamad 7y ago
  My family is unemployed right now, an opinion has to be formed, then we are all kept indoors. I foresee continued growing pains
  - tjr225 7y ago
    But how can we form an opinion while shouting at each other? We know what the answer is; and it’s called sharing. Unfortunately nobody seems to want to entertain this idea.
nabla9 7y ago
Maybe it's not a good idea to upvote these layman ramblings and influencer opinions.
- sakopov 7y ago
  Do you wager that the majority of news circulating today is written by pandemic experts and medical professionals?
  - nabla9 7y ago
    There are large number of government organizations, pandemic experts, medical professionals, and research groups communicating in the social media and blogs. There is no reason to post news articles or blogs from random Joes in HN when you can post directly from experts.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - dmix 7y ago
      There was a time when blog posts by “regular Joes” was the norm on HN and it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Quality content can come from anywhere. I’d rather judge them on the merits of their contribution than some meta signals.
      - nabla9 7y ago
        > I’d rather judge them on the merits This assumes that you can do that. If you are not an expert you can't possibly have the background to put things in the perspective. This is not the issue of the ability to read and study, it's about missing variables and weighting evidence. If you don't have the background, you must spend weeks studying to get some hold of issues. Argument from authority is fallacy of reasoning but it's not fallacy when learning and gathering relevant information. We you can reason only after you have learned the subject. Social media is full of people who learned basic math behind SIR model and are building layman theories based on them.
andbberger 7y ago
Now is the time for extreme caution. We can laugh about how it was an overreaction later.
- guscost 7y ago
  I’ve talked to a lot of folks in the past few weeks who aren’t laughing at all over what might be an overreaction. It’s making their lives very hard. If it turns out this is indeed an overreaction, they’re going to be totally pissed off, and I’m probably going to agree with them. You’re free to laugh all you want, but it’s a privilege that you probably don’t appreciate.
  - basscomm 7y ago
    >I’ve talked to a lot of folks in the past few weeks who aren’t laughing at all over what might be an overreaction. It's a no-win situation for a lot of people with a certain mindset. If we take extreme measures and the infection is worse than predicted, then they'll say that everyone should have done more. If we take extreme measures and 'flatten the curve' enough so that the hospitals aren't overwhelmed and the number of deaths is lower than expected, then they'll say that all those measures were an overreaction to something that turned out to not be that bad. Even though that was the desired outcome of taking those extreme measures in the first place. There is also a worryingly-large number of people that will insist that everything is overblown, everything is fine, et cetera, until they (or someone they know personally) is impacted. Until then all these things are happening to 'someone else' and can be ignored.
    - guscost 7y ago
      You’re not even acknowledging the third possibility: if it doesn’t turn out “that bad” and the extreme measures don’t make much of a difference. This is the possibility I would be super pissed about, not the other two. Unfortunately, in either “not that bad” outcome it’s going to be very hard to prove which one it is, which of course won’t stop a bunch of folks from parading around and bragging about how they saved the world. I’ve seen this pattern more than once in my short time alive. But assuming what we all hope, that one of the “not that bad” scenarios plays out, the difference this time will be that many millions of lives will have been directly ruined because of those extreme measures.
wrs 7y ago
Great, so we just make sure there’s lots of testing being done so we can focus our efforts, and hugely expand our health care system to take care of that tiny 1% of the population. And we’ve got a whole week or two to do it. So why’s everyone so worked up about it?
cjbprime 7y ago
Really sick of marketers acting like their "I write viral Medium posts!" experience is an epidemiological qualification.
- okareaman 7y ago
  This one is really much worse than any other I've seen. He is the 32 yr old CTO of the California Young Republican Federation, without medical background, who is recommending that schools reopen because closing them is counterproductive. I'm not sure how this got upvoted on Hacker News to the extent that it made the front page. Why did he write this? What is his agenda?
sgt101 7y ago
"Our focus here isn’t treatments but numbers. You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say. Numbers are universal." That's 180' from what I believe and have experienced repeatedly in industry settings. Transforming the numbers to meaningful data is always fundamental to success. For example here the number of cases confirmed is determined by the testing approach and process - you must know that to be able to make meaningful comparisons (there are many other aspects to epi data but that's just one).
wbronitsky 7y ago
This is an article written by a “growth hacker” who knows literally nothing about public health, claiming to explain public health to all of us. This crap shouldn’t be on HN. This forum has become next to useless, slowly, then all at once in the last few weeks. I would assert that this community could do better, but at this point maybe it can’t.
iron0013 7y ago
The author is a Republican careerist, in case you needed some context to help situate his perspective.
wwweston 7y ago
> Still, there is a massive blindspot with this type of graph. None of these charts are weighted on a per-capita basis. Since this is an exponential phenomenon, I don't buy that "per-capita" matters (on top of the fact that he seems to be pulling in numbers as a snapshot in absolute time rather than windowed from initial cases). If the numbers double every 5 days, the US can have 16 times the population of some other smaller country and be only 3 weeks from the same per capita effects.
artsalamander 7y ago
The very first chart this guy shows, and then rubbishes, is from the Financial Times. The methodology behind the chart and why they show the data the way they show it is explained pretty clearly on his twitter feed. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1241092187577819137?s=20 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1241092187577819137?... I'll probably do myself a favour and stop clicking on coronavirus medium links
notacoward 7y ago
Starts well enough, but gets more questionable in the middle and downright risible at the bottom. Claims to be more objective, empirical, etc. than others are unrelated to actually being more objective, empirical, etc. > driven by data from medical professionals and academic articles ...as filtered through one person's understanding and biases. Often this results in a very different picture than perusal of the original source material would. > I’m most known for popularizing the “growth hacking movement” in Silicon Valley That's an anti-qualification. > Rank ordering based on the total number of cases shows that the US on a per-capita basis is significantly lower than the top six nations This is right after he got done explaining why total number of cases of useless. So why is it here? Because it suits the overall theme of minimizing the threat. > Daily growth rates declined over time across all countries regardless of particular policy solutions Sounds compelling, but is it true? Note that the first chart is from SoberLook, which is definitely not one of the top-tier sources cited at the beginning of the article and not even one of those supposedly cited at the bottom (Bloomberg, Johns Hopkins). Bit deceptive, that. I'll leave it to you to figure out what kind of source SoberLook is. Oh, and we're using the "losing metric" of total reported cases again. Doesn't everyone know by now how fraught that is? The author certainly does. The second chart already shows a very different story. There's no legend (which is suspicious) but it's clear that many of the lines do not flatten out as would be necessary to support the author's claim. > Both the CDC and WHO are optimizing virality and healthcare utilization, while ignoring the economic shock to our system. We're starting to see a hint of where the author wanted to go with this, probably before one word was written. > According to WHO’s COVID-19 lead Maria Van Kerkhove, true community based spreading is very rare. Hm. Where did van Kerkhove say this? Why is there no specific citation, as for more convenient factoids? > The data from China shows that community-based spread was only a very small handful of cases. Same as above. No citation. And does the data actually show that? https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi... "The virus that causes COVID-19 seems to be spreading easily and sustainably in the community" https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200313-sitrep-53-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=adb3f72_2 https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati... "Community transmissionis evidenced by the inability to relate confirmed cases through chains of transmission for a large number of cases," Don't let the digression about aerosols (which nobody has claimed to be a primary mechanism for spread of COVID-19) fool you; the experts, including those included in the author's appeal to authority at the beginning, seem to have very different beliefs than those he presents. > Released on March 10th, one study mapped COVID-19 virality capability by high temperature and high humidity. One study. Minimizing again. It's a very pretty temperature graph, which doesn't actually prove anything. If you follow the link, you'll see that it was actually limited to China, which might not tell us much about anywhere else. What we actually know about the temperature sensitivity of coronaviruses is that they're remarkably stable up to about 37°C, and infectivity only starts to decline above that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14631830 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14631830 > Children and Teens aren’t at risk This does seem to be true, or close to it, for once. But why only talk about the lowest-risk groups? Why not people in their 20s, or the high-risk folks at the other end of the spectrum? Minimizing again. This is getting long, so I'll stop dissecting each little piece. You get the idea. Let's skip to the end, where the agenda becomes clear. > Local governments and politicians are inflicting massive harm and disruption with little evidence to support their draconian edicts. Very objective choice of words there. Inflicting. Draconian. > Every local government is in a mimetic race to one-up each other in authoritarian city ordinances Attributing motive. > The COVID-19 hysteria is pushing aside our protections as individual citizens and permanently harming our free, tolerant, open civil society More appeal to emotion, and expressive of the author's real priorities. Don't get me wrong, politicians taking advantage of the situation to extend authoritarian power is a real and valid concern. But no way in hell should it be our first concern. It certainly doesn't justify twisting the facts and minimizing the threat that disease poses to the most vulnerable - not just the old but also the homeless, the already ill, etc. Those people are not expendable to "Support business and productivity" as the author puts it in a heading.
loudmax 7y ago
The trouble with an article like this is that it mixes well reasoned arguments with nonsense. The economic cost of closing schools and shutting borders is real, especially as the epidemic continues for months. The trouble is that the article downplays the seriousness of covid-19. A mortality rate of 0.6% means nearly one million deaths if covid-19 spreads to half all Americans. The article points to South Korea as an example of a success story in the fight against covid-19. South Korea immediately began widespread testing for covid-19 as soon as infections were detected. They trace cases and isolate people suspected of having become infected. South Korea has universal healthcare, ranking first among OECD countries for access. All of this is pretty much the opposite of we've been doing in the US, which is why a lot of people here are worried about what's going to happen in the next few months. It's reasonable to ask whether school closings or shutting borders are the right policies. But we should be discussing alternative means of containing the virus and we need to be clear what we're up against.
- guscost 7y ago
  On the other hand, the problem with your argument is that there is absolutely no way to be sure, today, that the mortality rate is even within an order of magnitude of 0.6%. And as more evidence comes out that this thing is spreading faster and more stealthily than expected, one consequence is that the true mortality rate may be much lower than those estimates.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    > even within an order of magnitude of 0.6% Have previous estimates for other diseases been off by that much? A whole order of magnitude, at this level of study? Citations please. Yes, the number is probably not perfectly accurate, but it's also converging toward what is very likely to be a correct figure. Also, how much does it have to change to affect the broader point? A hundred thousand deaths (i.e. one order of magnitude) is still nothing to take lightly. Such aggressive minimization of danger is still a worse problem than the "hysteria" the OP is supposedly trying to address.
    - 7y ago
cameldrv 7y ago
This is a bad article.
drummer 7y ago
This article has been censored by Medium. Can't say I'm surprised as it goes against the official hysteria promoting big pharma narrative. This is what I now get: 410 This post is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules. -- It is archived here: http://archive.md/yuaUq http://archive.md/yuaUq
- eddyg 7y ago
  It also has been torn-apart by numerous people with way more credibility. e.g. https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241522140559503360 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241522140559503360
- notacoward 7y ago
  > it goes against the official hysteria promoting big pharma narrative Well yes, it fell afoul of the conspiracy. :eyeroll: Also it's crap.
xdandeman 7y ago
Funny How many caught the flu? and is testing positive for Corona the same as having Ebola or Leprosy ? or will you be sick for a week and recover like we normally do from the flu>? Keep in mind more people have died in the U.S. from seasonal, common flu than has died World Wide from this 'epidemic'. (Which started in the most populous country so listening to the pundits it should have had 100s' of millions deaths!) How is that possible?

31 points by sprague 7y ago

This is bullshit. As but one example of the guy’s cluelessness: the curve of (new) infections over time is not a bell curve. The shape is roughly similar. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the normal distribution.

AuthorizedCust 7y ago
If that is your only criticism, you may be throwing away a whole article over a typo. The virus caseload in China is looking bell curve-ish. I am not on board with everything in this article, though. I am unsure about his proposition on reopening schools, for example. But I'm not throwing it all away over that one part.
- sgt101 7y ago
  Maybe you should because the fella has demonstrated sloppiness and ignorance on one issue, and that shakes my faith in the quality of the rest of it. If you are going to attempt to influence life and death policy you better be good. Compare the quality of this article to the Imperial College report last week.
  - sgt101 7y ago
    This fella goes to town on the nonsense in the GP : https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241549349999411201 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241549349999411201
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  It’s not a typo. It’s the equivalent of mixing up Java and JavaScript.
neonate 7y ago
Farr's Law says otherwise: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22farr%27s+law%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22farr%27s+law%22.
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  “ In the mid-19th century, Dr. William Farr made the observation that epidemic events rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern that can be approximated by a bell-shaped curve. ” Yes, he got as Farr as noticing that it’s roughly bell-shaped. But just because it goes up and then down it’s not actually a normal distribution. At the beginning, when no one is immune, infections obviously grow exponentially. But the bell curve, even though it looks similar (sigmoid) doesn’t rise exponentially. So it looks similar, but it’s not. If you observe infections and somehow try to fit a normal distribution, you’ll get widely wrong predictions, especially at the beginning. Farr came up with this in 1840. That’s before Pasteur formulated germ theory as we know it today, so it was probably close enough for its time. Today it’s not.
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  Oh, also: try to fit a bell curve on the AIDS epidemic and see how “Farr” you get.

hcarvalhoalves 7y ago

Half of the article is about making numbers relative (active/total cases, cases/population, etc). But death toll is counted in absolute numbers. No one will think 1M deaths is victory just because this is 1% of whatever. People are right to be hysterical, we have tough times ahead.

guscost 7y ago
By that logic, with those numbers (and if 1M is the total globally), then we “lose” almost as badly to the seasonal flu, every year. I’m not saying we shouldn’t care about deadly illnesses. But the world is a dangerous place, and we’ve been pretty bad about changing that, historically. Also, if we ruin 5 million lives to save (some percent of) 1 million, is that worth it? How about ruining 50 million lives? We can save lives with drastic measures, but drastic measures will have bad consequences too, and it seems like nobody has any perspective on that.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  What's the name of this fallacy? 1. "New thing X puts us at risk of losing Y lives every day." 2. "We lose Y lives to car accidents every day". 3. "Ergo, X is harmless!" You now have 2Y lives lost every day.
  - guscost 7y ago
    That’s not even close to what I’m saying. How did you read my comment and understand it as that??

hanche 7y ago

Well, Farr's law is all about the general shape of an epidemic, plotted as number of infected people against time. It does not say anything about the location or height of the peak. The devil is in those details.

tjr225 7y ago

Unrelated - is there a term for exhaustion of opinions? I swear you could go into any HN comment thread related to this outbreak and it breaks down to; Person A saying X is going to happen and then Person B saying Y is going to happen and then Person C saying that No! Z is going to happen! How did everyone get so opinionated about something so unpredictable and unprecedented? In any case I think we should all calm down regardless of how dangerous this situation is. Stay sane, everyone!

ludamad 7y ago
My family is unemployed right now, an opinion has to be formed, then we are all kept indoors. I foresee continued growing pains
- tjr225 7y ago
  But how can we form an opinion while shouting at each other? We know what the answer is; and it’s called sharing. Unfortunately nobody seems to want to entertain this idea.

nabla9 7y ago

Maybe it's not a good idea to upvote these layman ramblings and influencer opinions.

sakopov 7y ago
Do you wager that the majority of news circulating today is written by pandemic experts and medical professionals?
- nabla9 7y ago
  There are large number of government organizations, pandemic experts, medical professionals, and research groups communicating in the social media and blogs. There is no reason to post news articles or blogs from random Joes in HN when you can post directly from experts.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmix 7y ago
    There was a time when blog posts by “regular Joes” was the norm on HN and it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Quality content can come from anywhere. I’d rather judge them on the merits of their contribution than some meta signals.
    - nabla9 7y ago
      > I’d rather judge them on the merits This assumes that you can do that. If you are not an expert you can't possibly have the background to put things in the perspective. This is not the issue of the ability to read and study, it's about missing variables and weighting evidence. If you don't have the background, you must spend weeks studying to get some hold of issues. Argument from authority is fallacy of reasoning but it's not fallacy when learning and gathering relevant information. We you can reason only after you have learned the subject. Social media is full of people who learned basic math behind SIR model and are building layman theories based on them.

andbberger 7y ago

Now is the time for extreme caution. We can laugh about how it was an overreaction later.

guscost 7y ago
I’ve talked to a lot of folks in the past few weeks who aren’t laughing at all over what might be an overreaction. It’s making their lives very hard. If it turns out this is indeed an overreaction, they’re going to be totally pissed off, and I’m probably going to agree with them. You’re free to laugh all you want, but it’s a privilege that you probably don’t appreciate.
- basscomm 7y ago
  >I’ve talked to a lot of folks in the past few weeks who aren’t laughing at all over what might be an overreaction. It's a no-win situation for a lot of people with a certain mindset. If we take extreme measures and the infection is worse than predicted, then they'll say that everyone should have done more. If we take extreme measures and 'flatten the curve' enough so that the hospitals aren't overwhelmed and the number of deaths is lower than expected, then they'll say that all those measures were an overreaction to something that turned out to not be that bad. Even though that was the desired outcome of taking those extreme measures in the first place. There is also a worryingly-large number of people that will insist that everything is overblown, everything is fine, et cetera, until they (or someone they know personally) is impacted. Until then all these things are happening to 'someone else' and can be ignored.
  - guscost 7y ago
    You’re not even acknowledging the third possibility: if it doesn’t turn out “that bad” and the extreme measures don’t make much of a difference. This is the possibility I would be super pissed about, not the other two. Unfortunately, in either “not that bad” outcome it’s going to be very hard to prove which one it is, which of course won’t stop a bunch of folks from parading around and bragging about how they saved the world. I’ve seen this pattern more than once in my short time alive. But assuming what we all hope, that one of the “not that bad” scenarios plays out, the difference this time will be that many millions of lives will have been directly ruined because of those extreme measures.

wrs 7y ago

Great, so we just make sure there’s lots of testing being done so we can focus our efforts, and hugely expand our health care system to take care of that tiny 1% of the population. And we’ve got a whole week or two to do it. So why’s everyone so worked up about it?

cjbprime 7y ago

Really sick of marketers acting like their "I write viral Medium posts!" experience is an epidemiological qualification.

okareaman 7y ago
This one is really much worse than any other I've seen. He is the 32 yr old CTO of the California Young Republican Federation, without medical background, who is recommending that schools reopen because closing them is counterproductive. I'm not sure how this got upvoted on Hacker News to the extent that it made the front page. Why did he write this? What is his agenda?

sgt101 7y ago

"Our focus here isn’t treatments but numbers. You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say. Numbers are universal." That's 180' from what I believe and have experienced repeatedly in industry settings. Transforming the numbers to meaningful data is always fundamental to success. For example here the number of cases confirmed is determined by the testing approach and process - you must know that to be able to make meaningful comparisons (there are many other aspects to epi data but that's just one).

wbronitsky 7y ago

This is an article written by a “growth hacker” who knows literally nothing about public health, claiming to explain public health to all of us. This crap shouldn’t be on HN. This forum has become next to useless, slowly, then all at once in the last few weeks. I would assert that this community could do better, but at this point maybe it can’t.

iron0013 7y ago

The author is a Republican careerist, in case you needed some context to help situate his perspective.

wwweston 7y ago

> Still, there is a massive blindspot with this type of graph. None of these charts are weighted on a per-capita basis. Since this is an exponential phenomenon, I don't buy that "per-capita" matters (on top of the fact that he seems to be pulling in numbers as a snapshot in absolute time rather than windowed from initial cases). If the numbers double every 5 days, the US can have 16 times the population of some other smaller country and be only 3 weeks from the same per capita effects.

artsalamander 7y ago

The very first chart this guy shows, and then rubbishes, is from the Financial Times. The methodology behind the chart and why they show the data the way they show it is explained pretty clearly on his twitter feed. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1241092187577819137?s=20 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1241092187577819137?... I'll probably do myself a favour and stop clicking on coronavirus medium links

notacoward 7y ago

Starts well enough, but gets more questionable in the middle and downright risible at the bottom. Claims to be more objective, empirical, etc. than others are unrelated to actually being more objective, empirical, etc. > driven by data from medical professionals and academic articles ...as filtered through one person's understanding and biases. Often this results in a very different picture than perusal of the original source material would. > I’m most known for popularizing the “growth hacking movement” in Silicon Valley That's an anti-qualification. > Rank ordering based on the total number of cases shows that the US on a per-capita basis is significantly lower than the top six nations This is right after he got done explaining why total number of cases of useless. So why is it here? Because it suits the overall theme of minimizing the threat. > Daily growth rates declined over time across all countries regardless of particular policy solutions Sounds compelling, but is it true? Note that the first chart is from SoberLook, which is definitely not one of the top-tier sources cited at the beginning of the article and not even one of those supposedly cited at the bottom (Bloomberg, Johns Hopkins). Bit deceptive, that. I'll leave it to you to figure out what kind of source SoberLook is. Oh, and we're using the "losing metric" of total reported cases again. Doesn't everyone know by now how fraught that is? The author certainly does. The second chart already shows a very different story. There's no legend (which is suspicious) but it's clear that many of the lines do not flatten out as would be necessary to support the author's claim. > Both the CDC and WHO are optimizing virality and healthcare utilization, while ignoring the economic shock to our system. We're starting to see a hint of where the author wanted to go with this, probably before one word was written. > According to WHO’s COVID-19 lead Maria Van Kerkhove, true community based spreading is very rare. Hm. Where did van Kerkhove say this? Why is there no specific citation, as for more convenient factoids? > The data from China shows that community-based spread was only a very small handful of cases. Same as above. No citation. And does the data actually show that? https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi... "The virus that causes COVID-19 seems to be spreading easily and sustainably in the community" https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200313-sitrep-53-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=adb3f72_2 https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati... "Community transmissionis evidenced by the inability to relate confirmed cases through chains of transmission for a large number of cases," Don't let the digression about aerosols (which nobody has claimed to be a primary mechanism for spread of COVID-19) fool you; the experts, including those included in the author's appeal to authority at the beginning, seem to have very different beliefs than those he presents. > Released on March 10th, one study mapped COVID-19 virality capability by high temperature and high humidity. One study. Minimizing again. It's a very pretty temperature graph, which doesn't actually prove anything. If you follow the link, you'll see that it was actually limited to China, which might not tell us much about anywhere else. What we actually know about the temperature sensitivity of coronaviruses is that they're remarkably stable up to about 37°C, and infectivity only starts to decline above that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14631830 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14631830 > Children and Teens aren’t at risk This does seem to be true, or close to it, for once. But why only talk about the lowest-risk groups? Why not people in their 20s, or the high-risk folks at the other end of the spectrum? Minimizing again. This is getting long, so I'll stop dissecting each little piece. You get the idea. Let's skip to the end, where the agenda becomes clear. > Local governments and politicians are inflicting massive harm and disruption with little evidence to support their draconian edicts. Very objective choice of words there. Inflicting. Draconian. > Every local government is in a mimetic race to one-up each other in authoritarian city ordinances Attributing motive. > The COVID-19 hysteria is pushing aside our protections as individual citizens and permanently harming our free, tolerant, open civil society More appeal to emotion, and expressive of the author's real priorities. Don't get me wrong, politicians taking advantage of the situation to extend authoritarian power is a real and valid concern. But no way in hell should it be our first concern. It certainly doesn't justify twisting the facts and minimizing the threat that disease poses to the most vulnerable - not just the old but also the homeless, the already ill, etc. Those people are not expendable to "Support business and productivity" as the author puts it in a heading.

loudmax 7y ago

The trouble with an article like this is that it mixes well reasoned arguments with nonsense. The economic cost of closing schools and shutting borders is real, especially as the epidemic continues for months. The trouble is that the article downplays the seriousness of covid-19. A mortality rate of 0.6% means nearly one million deaths if covid-19 spreads to half all Americans. The article points to South Korea as an example of a success story in the fight against covid-19. South Korea immediately began widespread testing for covid-19 as soon as infections were detected. They trace cases and isolate people suspected of having become infected. South Korea has universal healthcare, ranking first among OECD countries for access. All of this is pretty much the opposite of we've been doing in the US, which is why a lot of people here are worried about what's going to happen in the next few months. It's reasonable to ask whether school closings or shutting borders are the right policies. But we should be discussing alternative means of containing the virus and we need to be clear what we're up against.

guscost 7y ago
On the other hand, the problem with your argument is that there is absolutely no way to be sure, today, that the mortality rate is even within an order of magnitude of 0.6%. And as more evidence comes out that this thing is spreading faster and more stealthily than expected, one consequence is that the true mortality rate may be much lower than those estimates.
- notacoward 7y ago
  > even within an order of magnitude of 0.6% Have previous estimates for other diseases been off by that much? A whole order of magnitude, at this level of study? Citations please. Yes, the number is probably not perfectly accurate, but it's also converging toward what is very likely to be a correct figure. Also, how much does it have to change to affect the broader point? A hundred thousand deaths (i.e. one order of magnitude) is still nothing to take lightly. Such aggressive minimization of danger is still a worse problem than the "hysteria" the OP is supposedly trying to address.
  - 7y ago

cameldrv 7y ago

This is a bad article.

drummer 7y ago

This article has been censored by Medium. Can't say I'm surprised as it goes against the official hysteria promoting big pharma narrative. This is what I now get: 410 This post is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules. -- It is archived here: http://archive.md/yuaUq http://archive.md/yuaUq

eddyg 7y ago
It also has been torn-apart by numerous people with way more credibility. e.g. https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241522140559503360 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241522140559503360
notacoward 7y ago
> it goes against the official hysteria promoting big pharma narrative Well yes, it fell afoul of the conspiracy. :eyeroll: Also it's crap.

xdandeman 7y ago

Funny How many caught the flu? and is testing positive for Corona the same as having Ebola or Leprosy ? or will you be sick for a week and recover like we normally do from the flu>? Keep in mind more people have died in the U.S. from seasonal, common flu than has died World Wide from this 'epidemic'. (Which started in the most populous country so listening to the pundits it should have had 100s' of millions deaths!) How is that possible?