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i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that danger

by bsaul 7y ago

i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance. The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to it makes it a very peculiar epidemic. And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too worried at all. As for the number of death, let's not forget the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, and that is with people getting vaccinated. It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea.. Another thing that i haven't read a lot, is that the WHO have been alarming people in the past with previous epidemic (srars, mers, ebola, etc), and nothing "special" happened (i suppose partly because people correctly dealt with it, but also because of the nature of the virus). It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.

nullc 7y ago
Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally. FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with substantial year to year variation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ Even if you steadfastly refuse to accept the obvious exponential dynamics of contagion in a naive population, perhaps the fact that the figures you are reasoning from are off by a constant factor of 3 to >10 might cause you to reconsider your level of confidence?
- MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
  > Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally. This. It seems most people are incapable of making decisions purely based on what their mind or the math says. I kind of get it, it didn't "feel real" in the beginning, it was just the mind that went "omg we need to act NOW", not the stomach. I suspect this is why the Silicon Valley Crowd was so far ahead of the curve - they deal with exponential growth more often, and are used to listen to just their brains, for better or worse.
  - Juliate 7y ago
    Or they work with remote teams around the world, including China & Europe, and saw first-hand what was coming.
    - jannes 7y ago
      Every major bank in NYC has trading desks across the world, including Asian markets. Shouldn't they have seen it coming as well?
      - zentiggr 7y ago
        Not if their salaries depended on not understanding...
  - michaelt 7y ago
    > it didn't "feel real" in the beginning Plus, a lot of the interventions don't really make much sense if you're the only one doing them. For example, imagine I'm not worried about my own safety, but I am for the safety of others. Staying home and self-isolating will help with this if almost everyone else does it - but if I start a month early, doing it on my own? Negligible benefit. And of course, much easier to get to work from home at an otherwise-non-WFH company once your boss and their boss are thinking the same way as you, and they've heard Google and Apple are doing the same...
- bsaul 7y ago
  I don't think people feared catching the virus at all. Exponential dynamics doesn't change anything in your response in that situation. I think every winter viruses have exponential dynamics as well, and they're not a big deal. You catch it, and you get over it.. Actually that's why most public communication for staying at home doesn't say "protect yourself", but rather emphasis on protecting "others" (aka : people vulnerable). The virus is extremely dangerous, but only for a (not that small) minority of people. That's a weird one.
  - nullc 7y ago
    It's still making a large portion of the people who aren't dying extremely ill. I think one of the biggest public health communication disasters of covid19 is the reliance on mortality as the communication endpoint. It's acceptable for other threats-- like automotive accidents-- to speak in terms of mortality because there isn't a huge population which is much less exposed to dying but still exposed to serious illness. Automotive accidents also seriously injure many more people than they kill, but not in a way that lends itself to a false impression of immunity. "Death" makes a nice clear warning for the risks of driving, and other very bad but not death outcomes are just some factor of the death outcomes... it isn't like the audience is comparing death rates to population numbers then deciding that the death from driving isn't worth worrying about just because we didn't also include maimed-for-life. For covid19 we've ended up making many 20 and 30 year olds believe that it doesn't threaten them. It does. They may not be dying in especially large numbers-- especially where either hospitals are not overloaded or where they're engaging in the ethically dubious practice of triaging younger people ahead of others based purely on their age rather than, e.g. response to treatment--, but they are still becoming seriously and painfully ill and ending up with severe immune system damage -- which takes a long time will recover and will result in latent mortality --, and for many likely lifelong injury in the form of extensive lung scaring. Infections like influenza are much less contagious-- with an R0 of 1.3 vs 2 to 3 (an enormous difference)--, less deadly, face a population which is at least somewhat resistant (in part due to heroic vaccination efforts) and which knows how to rapidly create new and effective vaccines against it. It's not really that comparable.
    - 7y ago
- akvadrako 7y ago
  > CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia" That's just like Covid though - they are counting everyone who dies with the virus even though most have other conditions.
  - nullc 7y ago
    That argument no longer works when we're seeing highly infected regions with significant increases in their _all cause_ mortality rate, e.g. https://reason.com/2020/03/17/italian-daily-death-rate-up-20-because-of-coronavirus-lombardy-up-about-80/ https://reason.com/2020/03/17/italian-daily-death-rate-up-20... https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/04/01/virus-deaths-nearly-doubling-milans-normal-mortality-rate.html https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/04/01/virus-deaths-...
    - diryawish 7y ago
      Italy’s death rates are up 20% when comparing this year’s average to a typical year’s whole average. This way of comparing averages may skew the information. In America, we have more average daily deaths in the beginning of the year than in the middle and end until December. The average of January through March will always be higher than the yearly average.
      - amenod 7y ago
        This! This is the latest data published by the Italian Ministry of Health. Looking at the chart on the second page, try to ignore the lines (we all know there is an infinite amount of ways one can approximate a curve to the dots) and just observe the dots. Does this seem like a bad year to you? Compared to winter 2016/17? http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/caldo/SISMG_sintesi_ULTIMO.pdf http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/caldo/SISMG_sintesi_ULTIMO.... Also note that all the charts are misleading since they don't start with 0 (the effect is exaggerated).
        takeda 7y ago
        What are you talking about? The spike started in mid March, that's just a single data point on that graph.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  > people will continue to ignore an exponential trend Every cold and flu grow exponentially. Not sure what the fixation of HN readers is on the work exponential. Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically. I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators, and the futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown.
  - nullc 7y ago
    Like soylent green the economy is made of people. If people are doing well, the economy will likely catch up-- weak businesses will fail, new ones will be created. It may hurt, may hurt for a while-- but from a purely economic perspective this might turn out to be a useful reboot. There are going to be a lot of phenomenal opportunities in the coming year. But the economy cannot do well if the people are not. For a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that we didn't need to keep delivering food and power and whatnot. It would be possible to simply pause the entire economy-- just like contracts that don't consider weekends business days-- in this fictional world we could freeze all accounts and all debts and whatnot for a year and then do "2020" over again. We can't do this because we need to keep a lot of people working to keep food and medical care flowing-- but I think the crazy idea is a useful illumination that the economy is a shared delusion. Whats going on now is only as devastating as we allow it to be, but the deaths of millions would be devastating (economically and otherwise) regardless of what we otherwise want.
    - sorisos 7y ago
      I wish and hope just pausing the economy is as easy as you say. I'm worried though, as the last decades the Economy appears to be this unpredictable daemon that affects everything and everyone but no one knows how to please it.
  - matwood 7y ago
    > Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically. For many layperson, this is their first experience when it really matters. My mom isn't sitting around thinking about exponential spread when she gets a cold. > I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators I agree. Something like 80% of the people who end up on a ventilator die. Of course those other 20% are happy one was available, but by the time ventilators are being discussed it's really too late. Prevention is key. > futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown Depends. The economy was going to be hit hard regardless. Even if nothing was ever forced closed, the number of people sick and the number of overwhelmed hospitals would have killed the economy. For example, even before there were any official lockdowns in the US, companies I work with were already stopping all travel (late February timeframe).
- matwood 7y ago
  > Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally. Non-math/cs people typically haven't been directly exposed to exponential growth. Which, to be fair, can be an intuitively hard concept until someone sits down and thinks it through. The classic lily pad example is my usual go-to way of explaining exponential growth to someone. I also think a large part of this problem is societies overall rejection of science, but that's a different discussion.
- diryawish 7y ago
  Isn’t all flu growth exponential over the season then dies down? Apparently Australia had a bad flu season last year: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7148553/Horror-graph-shows-Australia-facing-extremely-dangerous-flu-season.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7148553/Horror-grap...
  - FartyMcFarter 7y ago
    There's a vaccine for the flu. That makes a huge difference, even if the diseases were otherwise just as bad as each other.
  - alacombe 7y ago
    Yes, seasonal flu starts exponentially, but people don't understand exponential growth and its limits.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  You can tell that, even today, people (especially the media) still don't understand the nature of exponential growth. Every day, there's an article describing the new cases or deaths as a "surge". Look for that word: Surge. This word implies that the growth is somehow sudden or unexpected, whereas every day's actual day-to-day growth was predicted pretty accurately months ago. But, if you read the news, every day is described as some surprising "surge". I wish the media would stop calling every day's number a "surge" and start reporting "New coronavirus cases grew at (or above or below) the expected rate, doubling every N days."
  - dboreham 7y ago
    Yes, if you click "log scale" on any of the many graph sites for almost any region, you see a line that's better straight than I could draw freehand.
    - vkou 7y ago
      Actually, the log scale for infections in pretty much every polity has started bending downwards, about a week and a half after the lockdowns were put in place.
  - isbadawi 7y ago
    I've always read "a surge" as synonymous with "an increase", which could be expected or unexpected depending on the context.
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  If you lose your job, your lunch is being eaten.
watwut 7y ago
> i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance. It looks like flu, among other reasons, because popular comparison at the time compared all-ages mortality for flu (e.g. including old and sick) with healthy-young-person mortality of the covid. This very same comparison also ignores asymptomatic covid people and does not ignore asymptomatic people with flu. So it is twisted in all kind of ways.
Juliate 7y ago
The flu, even with vaccines, does not overwhelm medical personel, facilities and logistics as this does. And the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is already going way way worse than the flu.
- bsaul 7y ago
  Agreed, and that's why i changed my mind since i saw what's going on in europe. I just wanted to explain my initial reaction, based on what happened in china and by reading various medical people give their opinion.
- casefields 7y ago
  Yes it does. 2018: Flu stomps the nation, overwhelming ERs and leaving 20 children dead: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/flu-surveillance-cdc/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/flu-surveillance-cdc/i... 2013: Flu Outbreak Overwhelms Hospitals: https://fox8.com/news/flu-outbreak-overwhelms-area-hospitals/ https://fox8.com/news/flu-outbreak-overwhelms-area-hospitals... 2017: Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/ https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie... I still have yet to hear from the medical and nursing schools about increasing the number of students for the future.
  - Lewton 7y ago
    Those articles do not in anyway describe situations that are close to what we're seeing now in new york, italy, france and spain The flu is still terrible, btw. And I hope this situation will increase the vaccination rates for the flu
  - Juliate 7y ago
    I don't think you picture yet the scale at which we are all hit right now...
- ShorsHammer 7y ago
  > the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is already going way way worse than the flu Fully aware of the types that will come out of the woodwork for simply saying this, however: no, it's currently still not on track for even a mild flu year yet alone a bad one. A bad year for influenza is about 650,000 deaths worldwide, pneumonia deaths are often an aftereffect of the flu and it kills 2.5 million on average each year. SARS-COV-2 has killed 60,000 in 5 months despite having no vaccine or known medicinal treatment, mainly due to locally overstretched medical resources more than anything else. It's not even close to being equivalent to a bad flu year yet, and that's ignoring the secondary deaths.
pm90 7y ago
I had a similar experience but I was ignorant about how rapid infection rates could overwhelm hospitals and lead to much higher mortality rates. In part probably because this stuff has never been explained in so much detail before.
heimidal 7y ago
The part of that most people, including you, seen to miss is that this goes way beyond those sick with the virus. The strain this virus is putting on healthcare is unlike anything the flu does in any given year, even during epidemics in the past several decades. That means it will kill people who are sick with something else. Pray you don't have a need for an ICU bed any time soon. In the US, the flu kills between 12,000 and 61,000 people each year depending on the season. COVID-19 will almost certainly reach the low end of that range in between two and three days. It went from 100 to more than 9,000 deaths in only three weeks. It's not the flu. P.S. everyone who can get a flu shot should, every year, regardless of age. Herd immunity assists in protecting the entire population.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gpderetta 7y ago
  Yes. In Italy it has already killed twice as many people as a normal influenza season.
  - krn320 7y ago
    Looking at this shows completely different story: https://www.euromomo.eu/ https://www.euromomo.eu/ January 2017 was much worse overall in Europe, it's not even comparable.
    - gpderetta 7y ago
      That's interesting, it shows how misleading an average can be (the average 8000 dead for the flu that I quoted). Still, if you focus on Italy, which is the most ahead in Europe, by March 28th (the time that report was updated), the number of deaths was already matching the 2017 peak (and in about 2/3 of the time). Since then the death count went up 70%. edit: also note the caution about the uncertainty due to delayed registration.
      - gpderetta 7y ago
imgabe 7y ago
Comparing annual death totals for the flu to coronavirus deaths over a couple of months is mistake number 1. Comparing a number that is static from year to year to one that is growing exponentially is mistake number 2.
- alacombe 7y ago
  and comparing "estimated contamination cases vs associated death" to "a known-positive cases vs. associated death" is mistake number 3. CDC data shows 220k known-tested-positive case and 22k associated death. The 36 millions case is pulled out of a hat. As per these number, seasonal flu kills 10% of the known-positive cases.
  - luis12 7y ago
    .
pritovido 7y ago
I probably had covid19 in February(in Asia), only in retrospect I could differentiate it from the flu. The main difference was it took the superior part of the throat instead of the inferior. Talking with doctors they tell me I had all the symptoms. The problem with it is that at first it is "benign"(I had high fever for "just" two days) if your body stops it before getting into the lungs. Once it gets there it could be nasty(as it produces cytokine storm syndrome there) very fast. So it is very easy to get confident. Even the flu could get very dangerous is you get it combined with something else like a bacteria at the same time.
- azeirah 7y ago
  Do you have a source for corona infecting the inferior part of your throat rather than the inferior part? I know you spoke to doctors, but I find it incredibly difficult to find credible sources other than either incredibly simplified accessible articles on mainstream health websites, stating that a symptom is "throat pain" or having to go through 20 pages of medical research which I understand basically nothing of.
GistNoesis 7y ago
>the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health I'm not so confident yet. What is still worrying me, is that it is not clear about the importance of the initial dose with respect to the severity of the outcome. The disease having a quite slow progression, may mean that if you let it spread wildly, suddenly there is a large percentage of the population exposed, and this mean that when people gets contaminated they receive a high inoculum which may bring down even healthy individuals.
michaelmrose 7y ago
To a degree we deal with catastrophic threats aptly without having our responses deadened by past fears never having come to fruition regularly. For example we swim knowing that if we stop moving we will sink and drown, we drive knowing that a slip up we could well die. We are collectively guilty of many errors in judgement but on the whole we show on average not only are we able to mostly behave competently in complex situations individually we are able collectively to make some systemic changes to decrease mortality over the years. This gives me hope that we take the correct lesson from this terrible experience and adjust our individual and collective behavior to avoid a re occurrence.
bcrosby95 7y ago
> And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too worried at all. Medical professionals aren't professionals in everything. You may have been asking the equivalent a frontend developer for advice on writing COBOL for z/OS.
jimbokun 7y ago
The differences with this coronavirus, as I understand it: 1. People are often contagious well before showing symptoms, making it much harder to track and isolate the people who have it. 2. It is about 10x more deadly than the flu. Could be more than that, as it's difficult to extrapolate from the current messy data. But I think it's safe to say it is much more deadly than the seasonal flu. So far more people getting it, in a very short period of time, and a much higher percentage dying or requiring hospitalization, giving us the results we see. Overwhelmed health care systems, and death counts that will be much higher than seasonal flu without large scale mitigations in place.
rconti 7y ago
>i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe Have you stopped saying that, or are you still saying it for some reason? >It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea.. Do you realize, you can, and probably should, get vaccinated for the flu each year? And that these vaccines are only a 'best guess' for that particular year, so you should get on each year? >It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions. I suppose the alternative is to not warn people about pandemics and just let them all run wild? I'm sorry if people choose to get "desensitized", but these organizations are not interested in the politics of whether or not the general public will be able to appropriately digest their messages, and hence don't ration warnings based on how much we can "handle".

by bsaul 7y ago

nullc 7y ago

Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally. FWIW, totally aside from that, CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia", and according to the NHS in the UK-- which doesn't bin the same way-- no more than 1/3rds of those deaths are due to the flu. Other estimates have put the flu well under 10% of flu+pneumonia, though with substantial year to year variation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827586/ Even if you steadfastly refuse to accept the obvious exponential dynamics of contagion in a naive population, perhaps the fact that the figures you are reasoning from are off by a constant factor of 3 to >10 might cause you to reconsider your level of confidence?

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
> Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally. This. It seems most people are incapable of making decisions purely based on what their mind or the math says. I kind of get it, it didn't "feel real" in the beginning, it was just the mind that went "omg we need to act NOW", not the stomach. I suspect this is why the Silicon Valley Crowd was so far ahead of the curve - they deal with exponential growth more often, and are used to listen to just their brains, for better or worse.
- Juliate 7y ago
  Or they work with remote teams around the world, including China & Europe, and saw first-hand what was coming.
  - jannes 7y ago
    Every major bank in NYC has trading desks across the world, including Asian markets. Shouldn't they have seen it coming as well?
    - zentiggr 7y ago
      Not if their salaries depended on not understanding...
- michaelt 7y ago
  > it didn't "feel real" in the beginning Plus, a lot of the interventions don't really make much sense if you're the only one doing them. For example, imagine I'm not worried about my own safety, but I am for the safety of others. Staying home and self-isolating will help with this if almost everyone else does it - but if I start a month early, doing it on my own? Negligible benefit. And of course, much easier to get to work from home at an otherwise-non-WFH company once your boss and their boss are thinking the same way as you, and they've heard Google and Apple are doing the same...
bsaul 7y ago
I don't think people feared catching the virus at all. Exponential dynamics doesn't change anything in your response in that situation. I think every winter viruses have exponential dynamics as well, and they're not a big deal. You catch it, and you get over it.. Actually that's why most public communication for staying at home doesn't say "protect yourself", but rather emphasis on protecting "others" (aka : people vulnerable). The virus is extremely dangerous, but only for a (not that small) minority of people. That's a weird one.
- nullc 7y ago
  It's still making a large portion of the people who aren't dying extremely ill. I think one of the biggest public health communication disasters of covid19 is the reliance on mortality as the communication endpoint. It's acceptable for other threats-- like automotive accidents-- to speak in terms of mortality because there isn't a huge population which is much less exposed to dying but still exposed to serious illness. Automotive accidents also seriously injure many more people than they kill, but not in a way that lends itself to a false impression of immunity. "Death" makes a nice clear warning for the risks of driving, and other very bad but not death outcomes are just some factor of the death outcomes... it isn't like the audience is comparing death rates to population numbers then deciding that the death from driving isn't worth worrying about just because we didn't also include maimed-for-life. For covid19 we've ended up making many 20 and 30 year olds believe that it doesn't threaten them. It does. They may not be dying in especially large numbers-- especially where either hospitals are not overloaded or where they're engaging in the ethically dubious practice of triaging younger people ahead of others based purely on their age rather than, e.g. response to treatment--, but they are still becoming seriously and painfully ill and ending up with severe immune system damage -- which takes a long time will recover and will result in latent mortality --, and for many likely lifelong injury in the form of extensive lung scaring. Infections like influenza are much less contagious-- with an R0 of 1.3 vs 2 to 3 (an enormous difference)--, less deadly, face a population which is at least somewhat resistant (in part due to heroic vaccination efforts) and which knows how to rapidly create new and effective vaccines against it. It's not really that comparable.
  - 7y ago
akvadrako 7y ago
> CDC numbers for the "flu" are actually a combined "flu and pneumonia" That's just like Covid though - they are counting everyone who dies with the virus even though most have other conditions.
- nullc 7y ago
  That argument no longer works when we're seeing highly infected regions with significant increases in their _all cause_ mortality rate, e.g. https://reason.com/2020/03/17/italian-daily-death-rate-up-20-because-of-coronavirus-lombardy-up-about-80/ https://reason.com/2020/03/17/italian-daily-death-rate-up-20... https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/04/01/virus-deaths-nearly-doubling-milans-normal-mortality-rate.html https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/04/01/virus-deaths-...
  - diryawish 7y ago
    Italy’s death rates are up 20% when comparing this year’s average to a typical year’s whole average. This way of comparing averages may skew the information. In America, we have more average daily deaths in the beginning of the year than in the middle and end until December. The average of January through March will always be higher than the yearly average.
    - amenod 7y ago
      This! This is the latest data published by the Italian Ministry of Health. Looking at the chart on the second page, try to ignore the lines (we all know there is an infinite amount of ways one can approximate a curve to the dots) and just observe the dots. Does this seem like a bad year to you? Compared to winter 2016/17? http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/caldo/SISMG_sintesi_ULTIMO.pdf http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/caldo/SISMG_sintesi_ULTIMO.... Also note that all the charts are misleading since they don't start with 0 (the effect is exaggerated).
      - takeda 7y ago
        What are you talking about? The spike started in mid March, that's just a single data point on that graph.
redis_mlc 7y ago
> people will continue to ignore an exponential trend Every cold and flu grow exponentially. Not sure what the fixation of HN readers is on the work exponential. Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically. I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators, and the futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown.
- nullc 7y ago
  Like soylent green the economy is made of people. If people are doing well, the economy will likely catch up-- weak businesses will fail, new ones will be created. It may hurt, may hurt for a while-- but from a purely economic perspective this might turn out to be a useful reboot. There are going to be a lot of phenomenal opportunities in the coming year. But the economy cannot do well if the people are not. For a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that we didn't need to keep delivering food and power and whatnot. It would be possible to simply pause the entire economy-- just like contracts that don't consider weekends business days-- in this fictional world we could freeze all accounts and all debts and whatnot for a year and then do "2020" over again. We can't do this because we need to keep a lot of people working to keep food and medical care flowing-- but I think the crazy idea is a useful illumination that the economy is a shared delusion. Whats going on now is only as devastating as we allow it to be, but the deaths of millions would be devastating (economically and otherwise) regardless of what we otherwise want.
  - sorisos 7y ago
    I wish and hope just pausing the economy is as easy as you say. I'm worried though, as the last decades the Economy appears to be this unpredictable daemon that affects everything and everyone but no one knows how to please it.
- matwood 7y ago
  > Although true, using it doesn't add anything to analysis of corona virus specifically. For many layperson, this is their first experience when it really matters. My mom isn't sitting around thinking about exponential spread when she gets a cold. > I'd rather talk about the false hope in ventilators I agree. Something like 80% of the people who end up on a ventilator die. Of course those other 20% are happy one was available, but by the time ventilators are being discussed it's really too late. Prevention is key. > futility and destruction to our economy by lockdown Depends. The economy was going to be hit hard regardless. Even if nothing was ever forced closed, the number of people sick and the number of overwhelmed hospitals would have killed the economy. For example, even before there were any official lockdowns in the US, companies I work with were already stopping all travel (late February timeframe).
matwood 7y ago
> Just goes to show that people will continue to ignore an exponential trend until it eats their lunch personally. Non-math/cs people typically haven't been directly exposed to exponential growth. Which, to be fair, can be an intuitively hard concept until someone sits down and thinks it through. The classic lily pad example is my usual go-to way of explaining exponential growth to someone. I also think a large part of this problem is societies overall rejection of science, but that's a different discussion.
diryawish 7y ago
Isn’t all flu growth exponential over the season then dies down? Apparently Australia had a bad flu season last year: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7148553/Horror-graph-shows-Australia-facing-extremely-dangerous-flu-season.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7148553/Horror-grap...
- FartyMcFarter 7y ago
  There's a vaccine for the flu. That makes a huge difference, even if the diseases were otherwise just as bad as each other.
- alacombe 7y ago
  Yes, seasonal flu starts exponentially, but people don't understand exponential growth and its limits.
ryandrake 7y ago
You can tell that, even today, people (especially the media) still don't understand the nature of exponential growth. Every day, there's an article describing the new cases or deaths as a "surge". Look for that word: Surge. This word implies that the growth is somehow sudden or unexpected, whereas every day's actual day-to-day growth was predicted pretty accurately months ago. But, if you read the news, every day is described as some surprising "surge". I wish the media would stop calling every day's number a "surge" and start reporting "New coronavirus cases grew at (or above or below) the expected rate, doubling every N days."
- dboreham 7y ago
  Yes, if you click "log scale" on any of the many graph sites for almost any region, you see a line that's better straight than I could draw freehand.
  - vkou 7y ago
    Actually, the log scale for infections in pretty much every polity has started bending downwards, about a week and a half after the lockdowns were put in place.
- isbadawi 7y ago
  I've always read "a surge" as synonymous with "an increase", which could be expected or unexpected depending on the context.
creaghpatr 7y ago
If you lose your job, your lunch is being eaten.

watwut 7y ago

> i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance. It looks like flu, among other reasons, because popular comparison at the time compared all-ages mortality for flu (e.g. including old and sick) with healthy-young-person mortality of the covid. This very same comparison also ignores asymptomatic covid people and does not ignore asymptomatic people with flu. So it is twisted in all kind of ways.

Juliate 7y ago

The flu, even with vaccines, does not overwhelm medical personel, facilities and logistics as this does. And the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is already going way way worse than the flu.

bsaul 7y ago
Agreed, and that's why i changed my mind since i saw what's going on in europe. I just wanted to explain my initial reaction, based on what happened in china and by reading various medical people give their opinion.
casefields 7y ago
Yes it does. 2018: Flu stomps the nation, overwhelming ERs and leaving 20 children dead: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/flu-surveillance-cdc/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/flu-surveillance-cdc/i... 2013: Flu Outbreak Overwhelms Hospitals: https://fox8.com/news/flu-outbreak-overwhelms-area-hospitals/ https://fox8.com/news/flu-outbreak-overwhelms-area-hospitals... 2017: Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/ https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie... I still have yet to hear from the medical and nursing schools about increasing the number of students for the future.
- Lewton 7y ago
  Those articles do not in anyway describe situations that are close to what we're seeing now in new york, italy, france and spain The flu is still terrible, btw. And I hope this situation will increase the vaccination rates for the flu
- Juliate 7y ago
  I don't think you picture yet the scale at which we are all hit right now...
ShorsHammer 7y ago
> the total death toll, given the current dynamics, is already going way way worse than the flu Fully aware of the types that will come out of the woodwork for simply saying this, however: no, it's currently still not on track for even a mild flu year yet alone a bad one. A bad year for influenza is about 650,000 deaths worldwide, pneumonia deaths are often an aftereffect of the flu and it kills 2.5 million on average each year. SARS-COV-2 has killed 60,000 in 5 months despite having no vaccine or known medicinal treatment, mainly due to locally overstretched medical resources more than anything else. It's not even close to being equivalent to a bad flu year yet, and that's ignoring the secondary deaths.

pm90 7y ago

I had a similar experience but I was ignorant about how rapid infection rates could overwhelm hospitals and lead to much higher mortality rates. In part probably because this stuff has never been explained in so much detail before.

heimidal 7y ago

The part of that most people, including you, seen to miss is that this goes way beyond those sick with the virus. The strain this virus is putting on healthcare is unlike anything the flu does in any given year, even during epidemics in the past several decades. That means it will kill people who are sick with something else. Pray you don't have a need for an ICU bed any time soon. In the US, the flu kills between 12,000 and 61,000 people each year depending on the season. COVID-19 will almost certainly reach the low end of that range in between two and three days. It went from 100 to more than 9,000 deaths in only three weeks. It's not the flu. P.S. everyone who can get a flu shot should, every year, regardless of age. Herd immunity assists in protecting the entire population.

deleted 7y ago
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gpderetta 7y ago
Yes. In Italy it has already killed twice as many people as a normal influenza season.
- krn320 7y ago
  Looking at this shows completely different story: https://www.euromomo.eu/ https://www.euromomo.eu/ January 2017 was much worse overall in Europe, it's not even comparable.
  - gpderetta 7y ago
    That's interesting, it shows how misleading an average can be (the average 8000 dead for the flu that I quoted). Still, if you focus on Italy, which is the most ahead in Europe, by March 28th (the time that report was updated), the number of deaths was already matching the 2017 peak (and in about 2/3 of the time). Since then the death count went up 70%. edit: also note the caution about the uncertainty due to delayed registration.
    - gpderetta 7y ago

imgabe 7y ago

Comparing annual death totals for the flu to coronavirus deaths over a couple of months is mistake number 1. Comparing a number that is static from year to year to one that is growing exponentially is mistake number 2.

alacombe 7y ago
and comparing "estimated contamination cases vs associated death" to "a known-positive cases vs. associated death" is mistake number 3. CDC data shows 220k known-tested-positive case and 22k associated death. The 36 millions case is pulled out of a hat. As per these number, seasonal flu kills 10% of the known-positive cases.
- luis12 7y ago
  .

pritovido 7y ago

I probably had covid19 in February(in Asia), only in retrospect I could differentiate it from the flu. The main difference was it took the superior part of the throat instead of the inferior. Talking with doctors they tell me I had all the symptoms. The problem with it is that at first it is "benign"(I had high fever for "just" two days) if your body stops it before getting into the lungs. Once it gets there it could be nasty(as it produces cytokine storm syndrome there) very fast. So it is very easy to get confident. Even the flu could get very dangerous is you get it combined with something else like a bacteria at the same time.

azeirah 7y ago
Do you have a source for corona infecting the inferior part of your throat rather than the inferior part? I know you spoke to doctors, but I find it incredibly difficult to find credible sources other than either incredibly simplified accessible articles on mainstream health websites, stating that a symptom is "throat pain" or having to go through 20 pages of medical research which I understand basically nothing of.

GistNoesis 7y ago

>the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health I'm not so confident yet. What is still worrying me, is that it is not clear about the importance of the initial dose with respect to the severity of the outcome. The disease having a quite slow progression, may mean that if you let it spread wildly, suddenly there is a large percentage of the population exposed, and this mean that when people gets contaminated they receive a high inoculum which may bring down even healthy individuals.

michaelmrose 7y ago

To a degree we deal with catastrophic threats aptly without having our responses deadened by past fears never having come to fruition regularly. For example we swim knowing that if we stop moving we will sink and drown, we drive knowing that a slip up we could well die. We are collectively guilty of many errors in judgement but on the whole we show on average not only are we able to mostly behave competently in complex situations individually we are able collectively to make some systemic changes to decrease mortality over the years. This gives me hope that we take the correct lesson from this terrible experience and adjust our individual and collective behavior to avoid a re occurrence.

bcrosby95 7y ago

> And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too worried at all. Medical professionals aren't professionals in everything. You may have been asking the equivalent a frontend developer for advice on writing COBOL for z/OS.

jimbokun 7y ago

The differences with this coronavirus, as I understand it: 1. People are often contagious well before showing symptoms, making it much harder to track and isolate the people who have it. 2. It is about 10x more deadly than the flu. Could be more than that, as it's difficult to extrapolate from the current messy data. But I think it's safe to say it is much more deadly than the seasonal flu. So far more people getting it, in a very short period of time, and a much higher percentage dying or requiring hospitalization, giving us the results we see. Overwhelmed health care systems, and death counts that will be much higher than seasonal flu without large scale mitigations in place.

rconti 7y ago

>i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe Have you stopped saying that, or are you still saying it for some reason? >It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea.. Do you realize, you can, and probably should, get vaccinated for the flu each year? And that these vaccines are only a 'best guess' for that particular year, so you should get on each year? >It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions. I suppose the alternative is to not warn people about pandemics and just let them all run wild? I'm sorry if people choose to get "desensitized", but these organizations are not interested in the politics of whether or not the general public will be able to appropriately digest their messages, and hence don't ration warnings based on how much we can "handle".