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Coronavirus: Elon Musk 'child immunity' tweet will stay online
- api 7y agoElon's dumb tweets about coronavirus are a great example of the non-transferrability of expertise. He is a great engineer in many areas and a great founder and visionary business leader (in the Jobs mold), but seems to have major issues understanding epidemiology and public health. The assumption that expertise is transferrable is probably one of the biggest fallacies in the public discourse. Jobs displayed a similar blind spot around medicine, likely killing himself by attempting to treat severe cancer with alt-med crackpottery. Then of course there are all the celebrities that gave us all that nonsense plus the anti-vax movement. Medicine seems to be a popular area for this. For whatever reason when a person gets rich or famous they seem to develop the need to play amateur doctor with zero training and zero willingness to actually undertake the requisite study. Maybe you know you've arrived when you develop a strong desire to be a medical crank.
- zajd 7y agoI think you're confusing expertise and having a really rich dad
- brink 7y agoI've seen "pandemic experts" say some dumb stuff too. Like declaring that the death rate to be reported deaths / reported cases without a single acknowledgement of the drove of cases that go unreported, or declaring that we should completely shut down for five weeks like this is Ebola and the virus will just disappear and won't go on another tear after the five weeks are over. To be clear, I support the partial shutdown and taking measures to slow the spread. I'm just annoyed by those who think we can stop the virus from spreading completely if we just try hard enough. It's unrealistic.
- api 7y agoYou don't see the whole picture. The problem is that this thing DDOSes the medical system, causing a spike in deaths beyond what the system can handle as well as increased all cause mortality as emergency care becomes unavailable. It may be no more deadly than the flu with appropriate care, but many more people seem to require that care than the flu. This is probably because it goes after the respiratory system, causing issues that require costly and labor intensive intervention. The flu might make you feel like total shit but it generally does not mess with respiration much, allowing many more patients to just wait it out in bed. Italy has more hospital beds per capita than the US. Check out their condition. You have to look at whole systems and the long game. Quarantine is about keeping the medical system up until we have drugs and hopefully vaccines not only developed but in production. Elon is great at whole systems analysis. Not sure why he can't see this.
- brink 7y agoThey are also far more population dense than the US. Viruses love close contact. Like I said earlier, I support slowing it down. But there is a balance.
- belltaco 7y agoThere are huge metropolitan areas in the US that are very dense, and work places and shopping is very dense, so is mass transit. Plus a lot more routinely commute every day for work more than 50 miles one way. People also fly and drive a lot betwen cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropolitan_areas_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...
- belltaco 7y agoAlso a good 50% or more of people are immune to the flu at any given time because they got it in the last few years, while pretty much no one is immune to this one.
- new_realist 7y agoMusk isn’t a great engineer. Look at the mistakes made with the Model X falcon wing doors and the Model 3 factory automation debacle. Nor is he a great businessman. Didn’t found Tesla, and it’s spent $22B and lost $6.5B. None of his companies are consistently profitable.
- api 7y agoJordan was a horrible basketball player. Just look at that time he missed an easy shot. Nobody gets a perfect score at anything, but on balance Musk is quite an engineer. As for business: I consider success to be measured as product of value created and profit. Casinos and herbal quack MLM companies are highly and consistently profitable.
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- jariel 7y agoIt's worse because the information he's tweeting about doesn't require strong expertise. It's that he's not careful with language. The point of the tweet - that family gatherings with the elderly is problematic, is probably valid. But his wording 'children are immune' is really bad. They are not immune. The will get Coronavirus. They just get it less often and are less likely to show symptoms and very unlikely to die from it. So they are not 'immune', rather they are 'immune to dying from it', which is a big difference. Elon speaks off the cuff, with sensitive things, you have to be careful about how you word stuff. This is why we have communications people.
- fyrefoxboy12 7y agothis guy went from...having almost religious love of the people, to...just a lot of facepalming. I feel like dr. fauci now. you're smart, mr. musk, but in SOME thing, not all things. his entitled ass needs to learn that sometimes you need to just stay in your lane, man. stay in your lane
- viklove 7y agoHarder to do when you're getting less than 4 hours of sleep a night and being kept awake with amphetamines and caffeine, I'd imagine.
- hownottowrite 7y agoSo irresponsible. Infection rates are the same. Symptoms are just mild in most cases. He should be ashamed of himself, but he won't be. [0] "Epidemiological Characteristics of 2143 Pediatric Patients With 2019 Coronavirus Disease in China" https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/early/2020/03/16/peds.2020-0702.full.pdf https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/ea... [1] "Epidemiology and Transmission of COVID-19 in Shenzhen China: Analysis of 391 cases and 1,286 of their close contacts" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v...
- cs02rm0 7y agoInfection rates are the same. Symptoms are just mild in most cases. That's exactly and clearly what he meant, isn't it?
- hownottowrite 7y agoAbsolutely not. He said they were immune which implies they cannot carry the infection. They absolutely can at the same rate as adults. This makes them vectors for further contagion just like everyone else.
- lm28469 7y ago> which implies they cannot carry the infection. You might want to update your internal definition of "immune".
- hownottowrite 7y agoI think my internal definition is just fine thanks. Immunity implies that the host body has developed antibodies to neutralize viral replication or interferons which straight up kill viruses. As a result, the presence of the virus is reduced, possibly to near zero. But that's not really the case here. You might be asymptomatic but still shedding virus just as much as someone on their deathbed. With respect to children, they still become infected at the same rate. They still provide a place for viral replication even if they are asymptomatic.
- ErikAugust 7y agoA description of Zaphod from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reminds me of Elon: "He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which."
- api 7y agoThis describes most geniuses. Just in these (hackers and engineers) circles I've met quite a few extraordinarily intelligent idiots. This includes one outstanding biomedical genius who thinks the Earth is 6000 years old, one almost superhuman programmer who thinks Hitler was misunderstood, and one who thinks the Earth is flat.
- reaperducer 7y agoI don't think it's unique to geniuses, or that Mr. Musk is a genius. I think it's just mathematical odds, and also human beings being human. If a homeless guy says that drinking pee is good for your health, people say he's crazy. If a guy with 20 million Twitter followers says drinking pee is good for your health, people say he's a genius.
- ipodopt 7y agoNah, I got another theory. Basically, people that tend to be more 'intelligent'/'successful' are better at learning. You optimize learning in a similar fashion to a start-up. By failing fast. In general I think you tend to hear alot of silly thoughts from very 'intelligent'/'successful' people because they tend to speak their thought often and early (even if they do not have a grasp on it yet). Which leads to quick correction and refinement. Or in other words faster learning.
- api 7y agoI agree about being better at learning. Maybe they (we?) tend to sometimes vastly underestimate the difficulty of learning in certain highly complex areas (like medicine) due to past successes learning difficult (but not as difficult) things.
- opwieurposiu 7y agoI mean Musk is essentially correct. For children the WuFlu is unlikely to be a serious problem. For grandpa and grandma it's likely to be a problem.
- jpxw 7y agoThat’s not the same as “immunity” though. The issue is that if people think children are immune, they may not see them as the infection-carrying vectors that they (potentially) are...
- __s 7y agoMeanwhile in his tweet he explicitly says they're a high risk vector for the elderly. "Family gatherings with close contact between kids & grandparents probably most risky." He had a poor choice of words, but what he's trying to say makes sense Criticizing "the coronavirus panic is dumb" also depends on how one reads into it, especially as the article gives no context (like date). Maybe he's saying people shouldn't worry. Or maybe he's saying people shouldn't be fighting in grocery stores. Mass panic is never an optimal play. But if he's referring to preventitive measures being taken by governments as panic, then his tweet at the time can be seen as poor in hindsight. Ofc it'd be nice to know the date when that was said, because the "it's just a flu" crowd greatly diminishes with each passing day, nevermind where public opinion was a month ago
- hownottowrite 7y agoNo, he is not. Children have the same rate of infection which makes them vectors for further contagion.
- opwieurposiu 7y agoAnyone who has kids knows they are vectors for all sorts of pathogens. Give a kid your phone for 10min and It comes back covered in boogers every time. Speaking of, have to go wash my waterpoof phone now.
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- LanceH 7y agoRead his whole comment, he's actually suggesting kids stay away from the elderly. He's not saying "kids are immune, let them do whatever." He's saying the opposite. They're basically not going to be showing as sick, and essentially make the best carriers. It was a tweet...you all can read that far at least. Edit: also, the headline (both here and on bbc.com) have "child immunity" in quotes, which are two words he did not say. He said, "Kids are essentially immune, but elderly with existing conditions are vulnerable." Yes, you could twist it around and say it was on the topic of 'child immunity', but it was put in quotes directly next to his name and was designed to inflame.
- greedo 7y agoI usually try to take a charitable reading of people's online thoughts, but it's difficult to parse the difference between saying "Kids are essentially immune" and "child immunity." Kids are synonymous with children (unless Elon meant baby goats), and immune and immunity, well, if you can't agree that those are identical...
- LanceH 7y agoSo you're going to drop the "essentially" and the fact that he's using it to talk about keeping kids away from the vulnerable? Oh, and putting something in quotes generally means it's a quote. A quote is not something which could be read as equivalent. So, no, they are not identical. And from context you can also tell he's talking about otherwise healthy kids -- the "essentially" part of the actual quote.
- Retric 7y agoPlaying devils advocate. Try and add up known cases of children dying. I have been looking and I don’t actually see any support for the often quoted 0.2% fatality risk. In China people under 20 made 2.1% of known Coronavirus cases, but they represent a vastly larger share of the population. Italy and South Korea show mortality by age but zero deaths under 30. I would now say that as “essentially immune,” but it does support them being at 1/100th the risk of 80+ year olds. Further it also means shutting down schools early is extremely important. A largely asymptotic population in close contact with each other for hours a day is a nightmare for disease transmission.
- Geee 7y agoElon also predicted that there will be close to zero new cases in the US by the end of April.
- woofie11 7y agoTo be frank, I made similar predictions. I knew exactly what kind of virus this was, but I kind of assumed the US government was preparing this whole time. It was only towards mid-to-late February that I could see we had a problem, when none of the expected government responses happened, or happened weeks after they would have been helpful.
- Geee 7y agoHe made that prediction on 19th, three days ago. Either he isn't following the numbers or he predicts a total shutdown and a cure. Maybe if he's a genius it's possible for him to make "meta-level" predictions e.g. "research for cure is accelerated by 100% for every mortality %", and thus actually the epidemic severity would always be balanced by a faster cure. In any case, the prediction contradicts his views that the shutdown is unnecessary.
- benmmurphy 7y agoDuring January the official line from the WHO was that there was limited transmission between people. Should Twitter have been removing any tweets which contradicted the WHO's position at this time under the 'misinformation' rules? I think it is important people are able to express opinions that contradict the 'official' knowledge.