9 ms·

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

by 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.

by nullc 7y ago

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.