6 ms·

Elon is a good critical thinker and saw from the very beginning that the response to COVID-19 was way out of proportion. Lots of other scientists and doctors sa

Elon is a good critical thinker and saw from the very beginning that the response to COVID-19 was way out of proportion. Lots of other scientists and doctors saw from the very beginning that COVID-19 was not worse than the flu, most of whom have been censored again and again. There's even a paper published about it early in March showing the new corona virus is not worse than the ones before [1]. So Elon is being proven correct again and this is not the first time this happens. [1] Roussel et al., “SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data.”, Int J Antimicrob Agents. 2020 Mar 19:105947, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354 “Under these conditions, there does not seem to be a significant difference between the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries and that of common coronaviruses (χ2 test, P=0.11). Of course, the major flaw in this study is that the percentage of deaths attributable to the virus is not determined, but this is the case for all studies reporting respiratory virus infections, including SARS-CoV-2.” “Under these conditions, and all other things being equal, SARS-CoV-2 infection cannot be described as being statistically more severe than infection with other coronaviruses in common circulation.” “Finally, in OECD countries, SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to be deadlier than other circulating viruses.”

javagram 6y ago
Your quoted paper is 5 weeks old, as shown by the excerpt “ compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.” Now, today, we are at 50,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths just in the USA, and an analysis of excess mortality data already shows that a significant % of COVID-19-related deaths are not included in that count. This is with a massive mitigation campaign and nationwide social distancing. The only place where the virus seems to have established itself is in NYC (20% of people infected according to a recent study) where we have seen incredible death tolls and overwhelmed morgues. (Edit, needless to say, none of the 4 common cold coronaviruses do this, ever.)
- drummer 6y ago
  The data presented by the two doctors is fresh, and shows exactly what the paper says. COVID-19 is not worse than the flu.
  - javagram 6y ago
    The “data presented by the two doctors” has obvious reasoning errors to anyone who has taken even high school math. At this point, how can you look at the number of people who died from COVID-19 in just the last month in NYC and claim this is no worse than the flu? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-city.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona... The last flu to cause such a severe spike in mortality statistics was the devastating 1918 Spanish flu. Even the Asian Flu and Hong Kong Flu pandemics didn’t do this. Edit: corrected the Spanish flu year. My bad :-)
    - mikem170 6y ago
      >The last flu to cause such a severe spike in mortality statistics was the devastating 1918 Spanish flu The second wave of the 1918 flu killed between 17 to 50 million people, perhaps as high as 100 million people, during the fall of 1918, with a higher than expected mortality rate for the young and healthy. It killed between 1 and 6 percent of the world's population. So far 200,000 people have died from the coronavirus. The current coronavirus is 1/100 as deadly as the flu of 1918.
      - javagram 6y ago
        Your argument assumes that coronavirus deaths will stop tomorrow, and also that mitigation measures used to reduce deaths from coronavirus via social distancing don’t affect the evaluation of whether it is “deadly”. It feels like you didn’t engage with the data I presented at all. (Edit: removed sentences that would only apply if you had read my other post) Edit 2: if your only argument is that COVID-19 is not worse than Spanish flu, that’s something that is reasonable. It’s worse than any pandemic flu since Spanish flu though, this is a once in a century occurrence.
        mikem170 6y ago
        I apologize, there's a lot of numbers flying around and I probably did miss the thrust of what you were saying. I shouldn't have focused on the comparison with the 1918 flu. Plus, as someone pointed out, drawing conclusions from the numbers we have so far in comparison with the 1918 flu is difficult. I've been working with NYC numbers. The link you gave was for NY State deaths. NYC has reported about 12.3k deaths [1], has a population of about 8.4 million [2] and 21% of people appear to have antibodies at this time. Doing some math with the above numbers I end up with .14% dead so far with 1/5th of people exposed. From there I assume the amount of dead would quadruple before we reach herd immunity. I also assume that antibodies provide at least a handful of years of immunity, just like for other coronaviruses, reducing the severity of future infections. A likely outcome is that this becomes another variant of several coronaviruses that circulate with the common cold. I guess even for those who might agree with all of the above there still exists differences in opinion on what actions should be taken. I personally understand some people's comparison with the yearly flu, but realize that is most definately not an apples to apples comparison. [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york-update.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...
- Apaec 6y ago
  The data regarding number of deaths is severely tainted though. Many doctors have claimed(this is also mentioned in the OP video) that their administration pressures them for including COVID-19 in causes of death.
  - javagram 6y ago
    But in reality, the number of excess deaths compared to the average year, or compared to last year, is well above the counted number of COVID-19 deaths. Anecdotal claims about deaths being miscounted as COVID-19 don’t really stand up to this. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-city.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona... https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1252616296891465729 https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1252616296891465729 The level of deaths/week we are seeing is like nothing that has occurred in decades of recorded vital statistics. (The 1968 flu pandemic shows on the 2nd chart, but is small beans compared to COVID).
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      For those that are paywalled, in New York the excess deaths of 6 times normal. You can't make that go away by claiming normal deaths are being misclassified.
      - cpwright 6y ago
        There are likely deaths that are collateral damage. Fewer people are going to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes. It seems unlikely that we actually have fewer heart attacks, but people are scared of the hospital - so don't go and are more likely to die. I am in the end the lockdown camp; but even if we allow businesses to open, many people will still be legitimately worried or scared and stay home even when it is something important like medical care.
        aw1621107 6y ago
        > There are likely deaths that are collateral damage. Fewer people are going to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes. And on the flip side, there are people who might have died of things like car accidents if the pandemic and subsequent lockdown had not taken place.
sschueller 6y ago
A good critical thinker does not tweet out his emotions, calls someone a pedo on Twitter and later doubles down on the mistake he made.
- mikem170 6y ago
  I question your line of reasoning. I don't know if critical thinking correlates to emotional intelligence. Someone can be a genius in some regards and an idiot in others.
James_Henry 6y ago
I honestly am not sure how to put the idea that this is not worse than the flu together with the death numbers that we've seen in New York City, Italy, and other places. Suppose the death rate had been inflated as Roussel et al. suggest, is there another more important metric by which to measure the severity of the pandemic or the necessary severity of reaction to a pandemic (though the death rate in NYC is definitely more than .2% because that much of the population has already died)?

javagram 6y ago

Your quoted paper is 5 weeks old, as shown by the excerpt “ compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.” Now, today, we are at 50,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths just in the USA, and an analysis of excess mortality data already shows that a significant % of COVID-19-related deaths are not included in that count. This is with a massive mitigation campaign and nationwide social distancing. The only place where the virus seems to have established itself is in NYC (20% of people infected according to a recent study) where we have seen incredible death tolls and overwhelmed morgues. (Edit, needless to say, none of the 4 common cold coronaviruses do this, ever.)

drummer 6y ago
The data presented by the two doctors is fresh, and shows exactly what the paper says. COVID-19 is not worse than the flu.
- javagram 6y ago
  The “data presented by the two doctors” has obvious reasoning errors to anyone who has taken even high school math. At this point, how can you look at the number of people who died from COVID-19 in just the last month in NYC and claim this is no worse than the flu? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-city.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona... The last flu to cause such a severe spike in mortality statistics was the devastating 1918 Spanish flu. Even the Asian Flu and Hong Kong Flu pandemics didn’t do this. Edit: corrected the Spanish flu year. My bad :-)
  - mikem170 6y ago
    >The last flu to cause such a severe spike in mortality statistics was the devastating 1918 Spanish flu The second wave of the 1918 flu killed between 17 to 50 million people, perhaps as high as 100 million people, during the fall of 1918, with a higher than expected mortality rate for the young and healthy. It killed between 1 and 6 percent of the world's population. So far 200,000 people have died from the coronavirus. The current coronavirus is 1/100 as deadly as the flu of 1918.
    - javagram 6y ago
      Your argument assumes that coronavirus deaths will stop tomorrow, and also that mitigation measures used to reduce deaths from coronavirus via social distancing don’t affect the evaluation of whether it is “deadly”. It feels like you didn’t engage with the data I presented at all. (Edit: removed sentences that would only apply if you had read my other post) Edit 2: if your only argument is that COVID-19 is not worse than Spanish flu, that’s something that is reasonable. It’s worse than any pandemic flu since Spanish flu though, this is a once in a century occurrence.
      - mikem170 6y ago
        I apologize, there's a lot of numbers flying around and I probably did miss the thrust of what you were saying. I shouldn't have focused on the comparison with the 1918 flu. Plus, as someone pointed out, drawing conclusions from the numbers we have so far in comparison with the 1918 flu is difficult. I've been working with NYC numbers. The link you gave was for NY State deaths. NYC has reported about 12.3k deaths [1], has a population of about 8.4 million [2] and 21% of people appear to have antibodies at this time. Doing some math with the above numbers I end up with .14% dead so far with 1/5th of people exposed. From there I assume the amount of dead would quadruple before we reach herd immunity. I also assume that antibodies provide at least a handful of years of immunity, just like for other coronaviruses, reducing the severity of future infections. A likely outcome is that this becomes another variant of several coronaviruses that circulate with the common cold. I guess even for those who might agree with all of the above there still exists differences in opinion on what actions should be taken. I personally understand some people's comparison with the yearly flu, but realize that is most definately not an apples to apples comparison. [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york-update.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...
Apaec 6y ago
The data regarding number of deaths is severely tainted though. Many doctors have claimed(this is also mentioned in the OP video) that their administration pressures them for including COVID-19 in causes of death.
- javagram 6y ago
  But in reality, the number of excess deaths compared to the average year, or compared to last year, is well above the counted number of COVID-19 deaths. Anecdotal claims about deaths being miscounted as COVID-19 don’t really stand up to this. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-city.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona... https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1252616296891465729 https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1252616296891465729 The level of deaths/week we are seeing is like nothing that has occurred in decades of recorded vital statistics. (The 1968 flu pandemic shows on the 2nd chart, but is small beans compared to COVID).
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    For those that are paywalled, in New York the excess deaths of 6 times normal. You can't make that go away by claiming normal deaths are being misclassified.
    - cpwright 6y ago
      There are likely deaths that are collateral damage. Fewer people are going to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes. It seems unlikely that we actually have fewer heart attacks, but people are scared of the hospital - so don't go and are more likely to die. I am in the end the lockdown camp; but even if we allow businesses to open, many people will still be legitimately worried or scared and stay home even when it is something important like medical care.
      - aw1621107 6y ago
        > There are likely deaths that are collateral damage. Fewer people are going to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes. And on the flip side, there are people who might have died of things like car accidents if the pandemic and subsequent lockdown had not taken place.

sschueller 6y ago

A good critical thinker does not tweet out his emotions, calls someone a pedo on Twitter and later doubles down on the mistake he made.

mikem170 6y ago
I question your line of reasoning. I don't know if critical thinking correlates to emotional intelligence. Someone can be a genius in some regards and an idiot in others.

James_Henry 6y ago

I honestly am not sure how to put the idea that this is not worse than the flu together with the death numbers that we've seen in New York City, Italy, and other places. Suppose the death rate had been inflated as Roussel et al. suggest, is there another more important metric by which to measure the severity of the pandemic or the necessary severity of reaction to a pandemic (though the death rate in NYC is definitely more than .2% because that much of the population has already died)?