7 ms·

One of the characteristics of an exponential spread is that you will be either behind or ahead. If it seems like nobody is at "just right", it's because "just r

by jerf 7y ago

One of the characteristics of an exponential spread is that you will be either behind or ahead. If it seems like nobody is at "just right", it's because "just right" is an exponentially small target. I would suggest cutting people some slack in both directions. (It wasn't that long ago when our government was being criticized as moving too fast and xenophobically shutting the borders before it was justified. Moving back and forth between "too far ahead" and "too far behind" is also a thing that will continue to happen.)

kkylin 7y ago
Quite agree, and your comment reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control
shock-value 7y ago
In this situation most would agree it's better to be ahead; the criticism is justified.
- jerf 7y ago
  Would they? First of all, the criticism I mentioned was when the governent was "ahead"; experience indicates people were not "agreeing it was good to be ahead". "Ahead" in this case may be shutting down the economy far more than is justified. While it may be fun to talk about "the rich" and stuff, remember that "the economy" is what feeds all of us, clothes us, houses us, and keeps us in electricity and clean water. It is even now not necessarily clear that we aren't "ahead", once you put aside the partisan political sniping, and doing ourselves much greater damage than is actually justified. Thousands of deaths are bad, but a 30% employment rate (and presumably growing) is going to be bad too. I am not implicitly claiming one is worse than the other... I'm saying right here, right now, we don't actually know. The "correct" response is an exponentially small target. Right now in the fog of war we don't even know what it would be. It would fit the evidence that the coronavirus fatality rate really is sub-.5%, if you count all the asymptomatic cases that may exist, and that we're badly overreacting. It would fit the evidence that coronavirus is still, if anything, downplayed, that there is no reserve of asymptomatic cases, and that even if it doesn't kill you there will be a generation of people crippled by it just like there was by polio. The nastier end of the rumors I'm hearing are really nasty [1]. It will only be visible in hindsight. [1]: Can the virus kill the part of the brain responsible for determining whether or not you have enough oxygen in your blood, and then also kill your lungs, so that you think you're recovered and doing well and everything's fine even as your blood oxygen level sinks until you just keel over dead? Is that what the videos of people literally keeling over dead in the streets of China were? Dunno. Won't know for a while yet. But if it can do stuff like that, it could be a scar on us for the rest of our lives. Or that could be something else entirely, up to and including some intelligence agency's way of fearmongering. Heck if I know. Maybe it is ultimately just a bad cold that tends to cause pneumonia and everything else is just the Internet doing its echo-y thing. Zoonoses (diseases that jump the species barrier) have a history of that sort of thing.
  - mindslight 7y ago
    > It is even now not necessarily clear that we aren't "ahead", once you put aside the partisan political sniping, and doing ourselves much greater damage than is actually justified I haven't been out in over a week, but have we actually gotten to the point where everybody now wears a mask in public? The shutdowns were partly necessitated by an utter failure to produce and distribute PPE (whether by market or by fiat), which made it impossible for most people to just take reasonable precautions and then continue about (most of) their daily lives. Until the supply catches up until everybody who wants a mask has one, and front line grocery store workers have them provided by their employers, I would say we're most definitely still "behind".
    - 0xffff2 7y ago
      >I haven't been out in over a week, but have we actually gotten to the point where everybody now wears a mask in public? Certainly not in the bay area. I just got back from shopping (first time I've been out in about a week and a half). I couldn't find a mask in stock online, so I cut up and old shirt and some coffee filters and sewed my own. No one looked at me funny, but I was a bit surprised to find that maybe 1/3 of the people in the store had any kind of mask on. Most people seemed to be making very little effort to keep their distance either. Lots of good the little markers for the checkout lines are going to do when people are still walking past each other barely a foot apart in the aisles.
- iso1631 7y ago
  1 week early and you end up with 1% of deaths as other countries and complaints that "too much was done", then when people rebel against the lockdown after a few weeks, deaths shoot up again. 1 week late and you end up with 100 times the deaths as other countries
Klinky 7y ago
The xenophobia remarks were probably more in relation to classifying it as a "Chinese problem" and the targeting of specific nationalities, instead of fully closing the borders, as if this was going keep us in our bubble of protection, when the spread had probably already occurred, and was by then coming in through all ports of entry, not just Chinese people from China.
- jerf 7y ago
  'The xenophobia remarks were probably more in relation to classifying it as a "Chinese problem"' At the time, it was a "Chinese problem". It's hard to "close your borders to China" without being accused of "xenophobia" in the modern era. What's your/their concrete counterproposal for the time? Leave them open? That certainly appears to have been the implicit counterproposal being made by the accusers; what else could they possibly mean? In hindsight, how has that fared? Or perhaps close the borders with Brazil and other countries, just to avoid singling out China, even though at the time, the disease was only in China? The accusation of xenophobia can only float in an environment where the accusers aren't actually responsible for making concrete policy proposals. Once you have to manifest the accusation in concrete proposals, then you're playing the "are you going to be ahead or behind?" game just like everybody else, and will lose in one direction or the other, just like everybody else. (One of the privileges of being the minority party is the ability to take shots at the majority party without having to actually propose anything concrete that would allow counteranalysis. This seems to be a non-trivial component of how the parties tend to oscillate back & forth. I phrase it as the "minority party" precisely because it isn't an accusation I'm slinging at a specific party. I've seen the cycle several times now on both sides.)
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    > At the time, it was a "Chinese problem". It's hard to "close your borders to China" without being accused of "xenophobia" in the modern era. What's your/their concrete counterproposal for the time? Leave them open? That certainly appears to have been the implicit counterproposal being made by the accusers; what else could they possibly mean? In hindsight, how has that fared? Most of the criticism I've seen covers two factors: 1. It only made perhaps a little dent, as it'd spread far past China already. Trump is dramatically exaggerating its effectiveness in an attempt to distract from how feckless the overall response was. 2. It was implemented in a rather silly fashion. Instead of actually banning travel from China, we permitted US citizens to come back with minimal screening to spread it here. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel-restrictions/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel...
KarlKemp 7y ago
Closing the border (metaphorically) to Europe was xenophobic. Or at least an attempt to appeal to the xenophobia the administration believes to be widespread among its potential voters. It's entirely possible for a policy to be both helpful and xenophobic. Excluding Ireland & Britain when they have higher case numbers than many European countries not receiving such favours tends to support the theory that the motivation may not have been based on scientific fact alone. So does the almost complete lack of any other measures. American citizens returning from Europe in the days after the ban were rarely tested, asked about symptoms, or to self-quarantine, for example. And was it even useful? At the time, there were already dozens of known and hundreds of suspected cases in every US state that dared to look for them. Shutting down travel between two populations with broadly similar case numbers per capita changes nothing. The earlier shutdown of flights from China was probably beneficial, and a policy specific to Italy might have also made sense. But if your whole political toolbox consists of closing borders, banning foreigners, and appealing to base instincts by calling even a virus "foreign" or "Chinese", it's a bit much to ask for such actions to be interpreted in the best possible light.
ModernMech 7y ago
I dunno, California and Washington seem to be doing a better job than most, and they were the first hit in the US. First community transmission case was in CA, first death was in WA. And yet, it's places like NY, NJ, LA, and MI on the other side of the country who are having an issue with hospitals being overrun. The Bay Area took the lead on shelter in place orders and they don't have the situation NYC has. What if they took it as seriously as CA and WA?. US and South Korea reported their first cases on the same day with very different outcomes. What if the US responded like South Korea instead of the way it did?
- jerf 7y ago
  "Some people are ahead and some people are behind" doesn't exactly contradict what I said.
  - ModernMech 7y ago
    You seem to be suggesting that the right response is unknowable ahead of time. But the people who listened to epidemiologists early had better outcomes, so it seems like we did know what to do -- we just didn't want to or were in denial. I just don't see how given that any slack is warranted in the aftermath of this.
    - jerf 7y ago
      There's a wide range of measures that lead to effectively no infection. You have no way of knowing that the "correct" measures were taken, only that measures at least as expensive as necessary were taken. They could well be far more expensive than necessary. That's the future-history perspective, too, where we assume that we can already count them as having successfully contained the disease; in the here-and-now perspective, there's plenty of time for it to develop that they in fact didn't do enough either and will explode in disease in the next two weeks or something. Or months. Or, in the worst scenario, years. (See Spanish Flu history, as you've probably seen cited; what we know of as the "Spanish Flu" was not the original outbreak, but a later one.)
qqqwerty 7y ago
Fact check: Almost all health experts and political leaders agreed with (or did not publicly oppose) implementing travel restrictions[1], and the xenophobic remarks were being taken out of context, and are likely aimed at Trump's attempt to re-name COVID-19 as the "China Virus"[2] [1]https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel-restrictions/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel... [2]https://www.statesman.com/news/20200330/fact-check-did-biden-call-trump-lsquoxenophobicrsquo-for-china-travel-restrictions https://www.statesman.com/news/20200330/fact-check-did-biden...
jhpriestley 7y ago
source on the government being criticized as xenophobic for moving too fast? I follow politics pretty closely and did not see any such criticism. Was it from a major figure or publication?
- jhpriestley 7y ago
  I checked into it myself - perhaps OP was referring to this Trump claim, which is supported only by a single tweet? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statesman.com/news/20200330/fact-check-did-biden-call-trump-lsquoxenophobicrsquo-for-china-travel-restrictions%3ftemplate=ampart https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statesman.com/news/20200330...
atomi 7y ago
At the same time, it's my understanding that New York is having such a large problem because many Italians flew in from Italy to that region. But I don't recall anyone calling that out at the time.
- webninja 7y ago
  I heard New York is having such a large problem is because they waited and shut down their state two weeks after New York and California shut down their states. If you remember correctly, Seattle started with the largest number of cases, but since they did a great job at containing it, the COVID-19 case growth has been linear but not exponential allowing many other big cities to surpass it.

by jerf 7y ago

kkylin 7y ago

Quite agree, and your comment reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control

shock-value 7y ago

In this situation most would agree it's better to be ahead; the criticism is justified.

jerf 7y ago
Would they? First of all, the criticism I mentioned was when the governent was "ahead"; experience indicates people were not "agreeing it was good to be ahead". "Ahead" in this case may be shutting down the economy far more than is justified. While it may be fun to talk about "the rich" and stuff, remember that "the economy" is what feeds all of us, clothes us, houses us, and keeps us in electricity and clean water. It is even now not necessarily clear that we aren't "ahead", once you put aside the partisan political sniping, and doing ourselves much greater damage than is actually justified. Thousands of deaths are bad, but a 30% employment rate (and presumably growing) is going to be bad too. I am not implicitly claiming one is worse than the other... I'm saying right here, right now, we don't actually know. The "correct" response is an exponentially small target. Right now in the fog of war we don't even know what it would be. It would fit the evidence that the coronavirus fatality rate really is sub-.5%, if you count all the asymptomatic cases that may exist, and that we're badly overreacting. It would fit the evidence that coronavirus is still, if anything, downplayed, that there is no reserve of asymptomatic cases, and that even if it doesn't kill you there will be a generation of people crippled by it just like there was by polio. The nastier end of the rumors I'm hearing are really nasty [1]. It will only be visible in hindsight. [1]: Can the virus kill the part of the brain responsible for determining whether or not you have enough oxygen in your blood, and then also kill your lungs, so that you think you're recovered and doing well and everything's fine even as your blood oxygen level sinks until you just keel over dead? Is that what the videos of people literally keeling over dead in the streets of China were? Dunno. Won't know for a while yet. But if it can do stuff like that, it could be a scar on us for the rest of our lives. Or that could be something else entirely, up to and including some intelligence agency's way of fearmongering. Heck if I know. Maybe it is ultimately just a bad cold that tends to cause pneumonia and everything else is just the Internet doing its echo-y thing. Zoonoses (diseases that jump the species barrier) have a history of that sort of thing.
- mindslight 7y ago
  > It is even now not necessarily clear that we aren't "ahead", once you put aside the partisan political sniping, and doing ourselves much greater damage than is actually justified I haven't been out in over a week, but have we actually gotten to the point where everybody now wears a mask in public? The shutdowns were partly necessitated by an utter failure to produce and distribute PPE (whether by market or by fiat), which made it impossible for most people to just take reasonable precautions and then continue about (most of) their daily lives. Until the supply catches up until everybody who wants a mask has one, and front line grocery store workers have them provided by their employers, I would say we're most definitely still "behind".
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    >I haven't been out in over a week, but have we actually gotten to the point where everybody now wears a mask in public? Certainly not in the bay area. I just got back from shopping (first time I've been out in about a week and a half). I couldn't find a mask in stock online, so I cut up and old shirt and some coffee filters and sewed my own. No one looked at me funny, but I was a bit surprised to find that maybe 1/3 of the people in the store had any kind of mask on. Most people seemed to be making very little effort to keep their distance either. Lots of good the little markers for the checkout lines are going to do when people are still walking past each other barely a foot apart in the aisles.
iso1631 7y ago
1 week early and you end up with 1% of deaths as other countries and complaints that "too much was done", then when people rebel against the lockdown after a few weeks, deaths shoot up again. 1 week late and you end up with 100 times the deaths as other countries

Klinky 7y ago

The xenophobia remarks were probably more in relation to classifying it as a "Chinese problem" and the targeting of specific nationalities, instead of fully closing the borders, as if this was going keep us in our bubble of protection, when the spread had probably already occurred, and was by then coming in through all ports of entry, not just Chinese people from China.

jerf 7y ago
'The xenophobia remarks were probably more in relation to classifying it as a "Chinese problem"' At the time, it was a "Chinese problem". It's hard to "close your borders to China" without being accused of "xenophobia" in the modern era. What's your/their concrete counterproposal for the time? Leave them open? That certainly appears to have been the implicit counterproposal being made by the accusers; what else could they possibly mean? In hindsight, how has that fared? Or perhaps close the borders with Brazil and other countries, just to avoid singling out China, even though at the time, the disease was only in China? The accusation of xenophobia can only float in an environment where the accusers aren't actually responsible for making concrete policy proposals. Once you have to manifest the accusation in concrete proposals, then you're playing the "are you going to be ahead or behind?" game just like everybody else, and will lose in one direction or the other, just like everybody else. (One of the privileges of being the minority party is the ability to take shots at the majority party without having to actually propose anything concrete that would allow counteranalysis. This seems to be a non-trivial component of how the parties tend to oscillate back & forth. I phrase it as the "minority party" precisely because it isn't an accusation I'm slinging at a specific party. I've seen the cycle several times now on both sides.)
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  > At the time, it was a "Chinese problem". It's hard to "close your borders to China" without being accused of "xenophobia" in the modern era. What's your/their concrete counterproposal for the time? Leave them open? That certainly appears to have been the implicit counterproposal being made by the accusers; what else could they possibly mean? In hindsight, how has that fared? Most of the criticism I've seen covers two factors: 1. It only made perhaps a little dent, as it'd spread far past China already. Trump is dramatically exaggerating its effectiveness in an attempt to distract from how feckless the overall response was. 2. It was implemented in a rather silly fashion. Instead of actually banning travel from China, we permitted US citizens to come back with minimal screening to spread it here. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel-restrictions/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel...

KarlKemp 7y ago

Closing the border (metaphorically) to Europe was xenophobic. Or at least an attempt to appeal to the xenophobia the administration believes to be widespread among its potential voters. It's entirely possible for a policy to be both helpful and xenophobic. Excluding Ireland & Britain when they have higher case numbers than many European countries not receiving such favours tends to support the theory that the motivation may not have been based on scientific fact alone. So does the almost complete lack of any other measures. American citizens returning from Europe in the days after the ban were rarely tested, asked about symptoms, or to self-quarantine, for example. And was it even useful? At the time, there were already dozens of known and hundreds of suspected cases in every US state that dared to look for them. Shutting down travel between two populations with broadly similar case numbers per capita changes nothing. The earlier shutdown of flights from China was probably beneficial, and a policy specific to Italy might have also made sense. But if your whole political toolbox consists of closing borders, banning foreigners, and appealing to base instincts by calling even a virus "foreign" or "Chinese", it's a bit much to ask for such actions to be interpreted in the best possible light.

ModernMech 7y ago

I dunno, California and Washington seem to be doing a better job than most, and they were the first hit in the US. First community transmission case was in CA, first death was in WA. And yet, it's places like NY, NJ, LA, and MI on the other side of the country who are having an issue with hospitals being overrun. The Bay Area took the lead on shelter in place orders and they don't have the situation NYC has. What if they took it as seriously as CA and WA?. US and South Korea reported their first cases on the same day with very different outcomes. What if the US responded like South Korea instead of the way it did?

jerf 7y ago
"Some people are ahead and some people are behind" doesn't exactly contradict what I said.
- ModernMech 7y ago
  You seem to be suggesting that the right response is unknowable ahead of time. But the people who listened to epidemiologists early had better outcomes, so it seems like we did know what to do -- we just didn't want to or were in denial. I just don't see how given that any slack is warranted in the aftermath of this.
  - jerf 7y ago
    There's a wide range of measures that lead to effectively no infection. You have no way of knowing that the "correct" measures were taken, only that measures at least as expensive as necessary were taken. They could well be far more expensive than necessary. That's the future-history perspective, too, where we assume that we can already count them as having successfully contained the disease; in the here-and-now perspective, there's plenty of time for it to develop that they in fact didn't do enough either and will explode in disease in the next two weeks or something. Or months. Or, in the worst scenario, years. (See Spanish Flu history, as you've probably seen cited; what we know of as the "Spanish Flu" was not the original outbreak, but a later one.)

qqqwerty 7y ago

Fact check: Almost all health experts and political leaders agreed with (or did not publicly oppose) implementing travel restrictions[1], and the xenophobic remarks were being taken out of context, and are likely aimed at Trump's attempt to re-name COVID-19 as the "China Virus"[2] [1]https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel-restrictions/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel... [2]https://www.statesman.com/news/20200330/fact-check-did-biden-call-trump-lsquoxenophobicrsquo-for-china-travel-restrictions https://www.statesman.com/news/20200330/fact-check-did-biden...

jhpriestley 7y ago

source on the government being criticized as xenophobic for moving too fast? I follow politics pretty closely and did not see any such criticism. Was it from a major figure or publication?

jhpriestley 7y ago
I checked into it myself - perhaps OP was referring to this Trump claim, which is supported only by a single tweet? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statesman.com/news/20200330/fact-check-did-biden-call-trump-lsquoxenophobicrsquo-for-china-travel-restrictions%3ftemplate=ampart https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statesman.com/news/20200330...

atomi 7y ago

At the same time, it's my understanding that New York is having such a large problem because many Italians flew in from Italy to that region. But I don't recall anyone calling that out at the time.

webninja 7y ago
I heard New York is having such a large problem is because they waited and shut down their state two weeks after New York and California shut down their states. If you remember correctly, Seattle started with the largest number of cases, but since they did a great job at containing it, the COVID-19 case growth has been linear but not exponential allowing many other big cities to surpass it.