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the ventilator hysteria is just of the examples of the irrational fear and irrational hope that people seem to get caught up in. The next such fallacy is that

the ventilator hysteria is just of the examples of the irrational fear and irrational hope that people seem to get caught up in. The next such fallacy is that of testing and contact tracing. As if that were a solution to anything at all ... That too will go the way of ventillator hope. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it will do absolutely nothing. It is not feasible at the scale that people are proposing it and it cannot possibly work without even more disruption than we already have. All it will do is push the disease into the winter when it will be more lethal. The only rational solution is finding improvements in therapeutics. We cannot keep people from getting infected, but we should be able to keep people from dying of the diseases. And that is a far closer and more achievable goal than any other. The virus already exhibits several characteristics that show that many people can easily handle it. Finding out what that is, and enhancing the same defenses in those that are at risk will be a quicker and more effective solution than all other factors combined: masks and lockdown, contact tracing etc. these "solutions" may buy some time right now, but at the same time massively slow down our progress studying the disease.

untog 7y ago
> The next such fallacy is that of testing and contact tracing. Except that other countries have documented success with this. Are you an epidemiologist?
- nradov 7y ago
  The countries where contract tracing actually worked such as Taiwan, South Korea, and New Zealand started much earlier in the infection cycle. We should have done the same, but now it's basically too late. Locking the barn door after the horse has run away.
  - untog 7y ago
    Are you an epidemiologist? I'm seeing a lot of very confident opinions in this thread!
    - glofish 7y ago
      This is saying one could have an informed and correct opinion on any matter unless they are directly involved in that particular field. Oh, the movie sucked? Are you a professional movie critic? Have you ever directed a movie? Oh, incarceration rates are unfair? Are you a lawyer? Have you committed a crime? No? How could you possibly know. Bailing out a bank is unethical? Are you working in the financial industry? No, how could you know what is fair.
- glofish 7y ago
  Kids don't get infected - is that due to contact tracing? Epidemiologists are just as confused here as anyone else. They have never seen anything like this disease, there is no data, there is no evidence to anything claimed here. You can't compare to any epidemics before. The best evidence is the absurd statements by epidemiologists at CDC yesterday: 1. It is extremely important to maintain social distancing to save lives! 2. The next wave in the winter might be much worse due to the current social distancing that will be pushing many of the vulnerable into the winter months where the risks of coinfections are higher. Uhh? What? Do you see the absurdity in these statements? They make no sense, as if they had no idea what to do.
  - untog 7y ago
    > Epidemiologists are just as confused here as anyone else. They have never seen anything like this disease, there is no data, there is no evidence to anything claimed here. Of course they have! There are a lot of coronaviruses. And we already have experience with SARS and MERS. Obviously this isn't exactly the same but suggesting that epidemiologists don't know any more than the rest of us commenting in Hacker News is absolutely absurd. We don't all get to be experts on this just because we've decided that we're clever. Or maybe we should all be burning down 5G masts as well, after all, who knows?
    - glofish 7y ago
      what you are doing is a classic fallacy, you take an absurd example and equate my opinion to that. What's 5G got to do with it? Neither SARS or MERS are even remotely similar to COVID-19. The mechanisms are different, the spread is different etc. I have also never stated an epidemiologists knows as much as an average hacker news reader. What I said they are just as confused and unable to decide what is right or wrong and what the right course of action is. That is a completely different statement. I note how you never addressed the obviously contradictory statements by the CDC.
      - untog 7y ago
        > Neither SARS or MERS are even remotely similar to COVID-19. Again, you have absolutely zero authority to make that statement, unless you forgot to mention that you are an infectious disease specialist. Same with “children can’t be infected”, in your reply you’re making statements about what “you would” do but do you have any data showing that children are being tested at the same rate as adults? We could spend forever in a back and forth over things like CDC statements (which aren’t contradictory, but whatever) but it would just be dancing around the central point: you don’t know. You aren’t qualified to speak about it authoritatively. If an epidemiologist tried to weigh in on and online debate about the merits of Rust vs Go I’d say the same thing, but luckily for us they don’t. Having an opinion on things is just fine, but this thread (I’m not singling you out here) is full of authoritative statements with no scientific basis. > you take an absurd example and equate my opinion to that. What's 5G got to do with it? The only reason it’s absurd is because you and I both know enough about 5G to know that the idea of it spreading COVID-19 is silly. How can you be confident that the assumptions you’re making aren’t equally absurd to an epidemiologist?
- shadowprofile77 7y ago
  A small number of other countries with well organized governments, good epidemic response teams, manageably small populations and strong IT infrastructure. Now imagine all of this being done effectively in a country with several hundred million people, many of them extremely (and not entirely unjustifiably) opposed to privacy invasions and mistrustful of their government in many ways. That's the U.S I speak of in case it's not obvious. Now go a bit further and imagine this same mass testing and contact tracing procedure in the majority percentage of the wider world that actively lacks good government, good administration, has terrible infrastructure (clinical especially but of any kind in general) and is largely poor. It doesn't require an epidemiology degree to see the difficulties. I can't even easily imagine the mechanics of effective mass testing and contact tracing in places like India, Latin America or large parts of Africa, with hundreds of millions of barely documented residents living lives steeped in informality.(I live in Latin America and have actually seen how poorly government in my country manages even basic testing) It's good that testing and contact tracing are attempted where possible and continued wherever they work, but let's be realistic about the fact that a majority of the world outside these places will drive the dynamics of the virus with a social weight well beyond that of the minority population of regions where the above work, and in that same majority part of the world, mass testing and contact tracing have very little chance of effectively being applied. In essence, remember that most people don't live in the well-structured bubbles of small European and Asian states with relatively efficient, modern administrations.
  - untog 7y ago
    My objection is primarily that the OP asserted: - ventilators are useless - testing and contact tracing will be useless - all of these things slow down our progress in studying the real answer ...without absolutely any evidence to back it up, or with any kind of disclaimer attached. In an environment where people are literally burning down cellphone masts because they think it's giving them COVID I don't think it's unreasonable to ask someone making such strident assertions where they're getting their conclusions from.
    - glofish 7y ago
      That the ventillators are not useful is stated in the top post. That our progress is slowed down because of the measures is also obvious and evident. The whole world is slowed down, why would you think research is not? As for contact tracing - if you think it a bit through and consider all the possible problems with both performing and enforcing it - not to mention the asymptomatic carriers and the windows of time in which that even makes sense to do it simply appears to be unfeasible. Not to mention that it is an approach that no one has ever tried to do before at this scale. Saying that the we will scale up a process in the US to a national level in a few months is absurd. I am simply pointing out that it is very unlikely that it would work and perhaps resources should be spent elswhere.
dpflan 7y ago
"The only rational solution is finding improvements in therapeutics. The solution is not to keep people from getting infected, but to keep people from dying of the diseases. And that is a far closer and more achievable goal than any other." Regarding this point: what improved therapeutics have you seen arise? Is a ventilator a therapeutic?
- glofish 7y ago
  not putting people on ventilators actually improved their chances, having people face down, or rotating them regularly improves their chances, and of course the myriad other important medical decisions that are made hospitalization rates are actually going down, even where cases and deaths are the same
whatshisface 7y ago
>I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it will do absolutely nothing. It is not feasible at the scale that people are proposing it and it cannot possibly work without even more disruption than we already have. All it will do is push the disease into the winter when it will be more lethal. Barring that more evidence be supplied for that point, I can counterbalance it by saying, "contract tracing will be amazing because large-scale social distancing will push the case count down to a level where it is feasible. Quick cheap and accurate tests are coming soon and will make it even easier. The whole economy will be able to go back to normal in a couple months." Do I know if that's true? No, but I don't know if the above claim is true either.
- glofish 7y ago
  this is a fallacy because it equates the chances for something working to that of not working. We all know how complex process tend to turn out. If someone claims to write a brand new e-commerce website that serves the entire United States and rivals Amazon in just three months. Would you consider that a realistic promise? Would only devops and programmers have sufficient expertise to express valid concerns on its feasibility?
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    There may be a general pessimism appropriate for anything complicated, but predicting the outcome of a complicated thing is complicated, which means that we should be pessimistic about the reliability of pessimistic predictions.
nl 7y ago
these "solutions" may buy some time right now, but at the same time massively slow down our progress studying the disease. The whole point is to buy time. That's what "flatten the curve" means. I don't understand why you think any of this would slow down progress of studying the disease at all.
shirro 7y ago
> The next such fallacy is that of testing and contact tracing That is an odd opinion. Australian and NZ and some other relatively successful countries are well past flattening the curve and have both new cases and active cases rapidly heading towards zero and have only had a small number of deaths. Most retail is open here. Most schools are open. Lots of job losses in hospitality and tourism with bars and restaurants closed and borders shut. Testing is freely available to anyone with any cold-like symptom at all and I expect that testing will be extended to people with no symptoms at all, probably in teaching, law enforcement and healthcare so we have a sort of early warning system. We seem to have a reasonable path back to being a productive society while other countries still seem a mess and are only managing to keep their death rates down through massive restrictions. I struggle to understand what the rest of the world is going on about sometimes. Experts have been saying how to deal with a problem like this for a long time. But nobody much seems to have taken them seriously.

untog 7y ago

> The next such fallacy is that of testing and contact tracing. Except that other countries have documented success with this. Are you an epidemiologist?

nradov 7y ago
The countries where contract tracing actually worked such as Taiwan, South Korea, and New Zealand started much earlier in the infection cycle. We should have done the same, but now it's basically too late. Locking the barn door after the horse has run away.
- untog 7y ago
  Are you an epidemiologist? I'm seeing a lot of very confident opinions in this thread!
  - glofish 7y ago
    This is saying one could have an informed and correct opinion on any matter unless they are directly involved in that particular field. Oh, the movie sucked? Are you a professional movie critic? Have you ever directed a movie? Oh, incarceration rates are unfair? Are you a lawyer? Have you committed a crime? No? How could you possibly know. Bailing out a bank is unethical? Are you working in the financial industry? No, how could you know what is fair.
glofish 7y ago
Kids don't get infected - is that due to contact tracing? Epidemiologists are just as confused here as anyone else. They have never seen anything like this disease, there is no data, there is no evidence to anything claimed here. You can't compare to any epidemics before. The best evidence is the absurd statements by epidemiologists at CDC yesterday: 1. It is extremely important to maintain social distancing to save lives! 2. The next wave in the winter might be much worse due to the current social distancing that will be pushing many of the vulnerable into the winter months where the risks of coinfections are higher. Uhh? What? Do you see the absurdity in these statements? They make no sense, as if they had no idea what to do.
- untog 7y ago
  > Epidemiologists are just as confused here as anyone else. They have never seen anything like this disease, there is no data, there is no evidence to anything claimed here. Of course they have! There are a lot of coronaviruses. And we already have experience with SARS and MERS. Obviously this isn't exactly the same but suggesting that epidemiologists don't know any more than the rest of us commenting in Hacker News is absolutely absurd. We don't all get to be experts on this just because we've decided that we're clever. Or maybe we should all be burning down 5G masts as well, after all, who knows?
  - glofish 7y ago
    what you are doing is a classic fallacy, you take an absurd example and equate my opinion to that. What's 5G got to do with it? Neither SARS or MERS are even remotely similar to COVID-19. The mechanisms are different, the spread is different etc. I have also never stated an epidemiologists knows as much as an average hacker news reader. What I said they are just as confused and unable to decide what is right or wrong and what the right course of action is. That is a completely different statement. I note how you never addressed the obviously contradictory statements by the CDC.
    - untog 7y ago
      > Neither SARS or MERS are even remotely similar to COVID-19. Again, you have absolutely zero authority to make that statement, unless you forgot to mention that you are an infectious disease specialist. Same with “children can’t be infected”, in your reply you’re making statements about what “you would” do but do you have any data showing that children are being tested at the same rate as adults? We could spend forever in a back and forth over things like CDC statements (which aren’t contradictory, but whatever) but it would just be dancing around the central point: you don’t know. You aren’t qualified to speak about it authoritatively. If an epidemiologist tried to weigh in on and online debate about the merits of Rust vs Go I’d say the same thing, but luckily for us they don’t. Having an opinion on things is just fine, but this thread (I’m not singling you out here) is full of authoritative statements with no scientific basis. > you take an absurd example and equate my opinion to that. What's 5G got to do with it? The only reason it’s absurd is because you and I both know enough about 5G to know that the idea of it spreading COVID-19 is silly. How can you be confident that the assumptions you’re making aren’t equally absurd to an epidemiologist?
shadowprofile77 7y ago
A small number of other countries with well organized governments, good epidemic response teams, manageably small populations and strong IT infrastructure. Now imagine all of this being done effectively in a country with several hundred million people, many of them extremely (and not entirely unjustifiably) opposed to privacy invasions and mistrustful of their government in many ways. That's the U.S I speak of in case it's not obvious. Now go a bit further and imagine this same mass testing and contact tracing procedure in the majority percentage of the wider world that actively lacks good government, good administration, has terrible infrastructure (clinical especially but of any kind in general) and is largely poor. It doesn't require an epidemiology degree to see the difficulties. I can't even easily imagine the mechanics of effective mass testing and contact tracing in places like India, Latin America or large parts of Africa, with hundreds of millions of barely documented residents living lives steeped in informality.(I live in Latin America and have actually seen how poorly government in my country manages even basic testing) It's good that testing and contact tracing are attempted where possible and continued wherever they work, but let's be realistic about the fact that a majority of the world outside these places will drive the dynamics of the virus with a social weight well beyond that of the minority population of regions where the above work, and in that same majority part of the world, mass testing and contact tracing have very little chance of effectively being applied. In essence, remember that most people don't live in the well-structured bubbles of small European and Asian states with relatively efficient, modern administrations.
- untog 7y ago
  My objection is primarily that the OP asserted: - ventilators are useless - testing and contact tracing will be useless - all of these things slow down our progress in studying the real answer ...without absolutely any evidence to back it up, or with any kind of disclaimer attached. In an environment where people are literally burning down cellphone masts because they think it's giving them COVID I don't think it's unreasonable to ask someone making such strident assertions where they're getting their conclusions from.
  - glofish 7y ago
    That the ventillators are not useful is stated in the top post. That our progress is slowed down because of the measures is also obvious and evident. The whole world is slowed down, why would you think research is not? As for contact tracing - if you think it a bit through and consider all the possible problems with both performing and enforcing it - not to mention the asymptomatic carriers and the windows of time in which that even makes sense to do it simply appears to be unfeasible. Not to mention that it is an approach that no one has ever tried to do before at this scale. Saying that the we will scale up a process in the US to a national level in a few months is absurd. I am simply pointing out that it is very unlikely that it would work and perhaps resources should be spent elswhere.

dpflan 7y ago

"The only rational solution is finding improvements in therapeutics. The solution is not to keep people from getting infected, but to keep people from dying of the diseases. And that is a far closer and more achievable goal than any other." Regarding this point: what improved therapeutics have you seen arise? Is a ventilator a therapeutic?

glofish 7y ago
not putting people on ventilators actually improved their chances, having people face down, or rotating them regularly improves their chances, and of course the myriad other important medical decisions that are made hospitalization rates are actually going down, even where cases and deaths are the same

whatshisface 7y ago

>I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it will do absolutely nothing. It is not feasible at the scale that people are proposing it and it cannot possibly work without even more disruption than we already have. All it will do is push the disease into the winter when it will be more lethal. Barring that more evidence be supplied for that point, I can counterbalance it by saying, "contract tracing will be amazing because large-scale social distancing will push the case count down to a level where it is feasible. Quick cheap and accurate tests are coming soon and will make it even easier. The whole economy will be able to go back to normal in a couple months." Do I know if that's true? No, but I don't know if the above claim is true either.

glofish 7y ago
this is a fallacy because it equates the chances for something working to that of not working. We all know how complex process tend to turn out. If someone claims to write a brand new e-commerce website that serves the entire United States and rivals Amazon in just three months. Would you consider that a realistic promise? Would only devops and programmers have sufficient expertise to express valid concerns on its feasibility?
- whatshisface 7y ago
  There may be a general pessimism appropriate for anything complicated, but predicting the outcome of a complicated thing is complicated, which means that we should be pessimistic about the reliability of pessimistic predictions.

nl 7y ago

these "solutions" may buy some time right now, but at the same time massively slow down our progress studying the disease. The whole point is to buy time. That's what "flatten the curve" means. I don't understand why you think any of this would slow down progress of studying the disease at all.

shirro 7y ago

> The next such fallacy is that of testing and contact tracing That is an odd opinion. Australian and NZ and some other relatively successful countries are well past flattening the curve and have both new cases and active cases rapidly heading towards zero and have only had a small number of deaths. Most retail is open here. Most schools are open. Lots of job losses in hospitality and tourism with bars and restaurants closed and borders shut. Testing is freely available to anyone with any cold-like symptom at all and I expect that testing will be extended to people with no symptoms at all, probably in teaching, law enforcement and healthcare so we have a sort of early warning system. We seem to have a reasonable path back to being a productive society while other countries still seem a mess and are only managing to keep their death rates down through massive restrictions. I struggle to understand what the rest of the world is going on about sometimes. Experts have been saying how to deal with a problem like this for a long time. But nobody much seems to have taken them seriously.