16 ms·

Tribalism comes for pandemic science

120 points by seinundzeit 6y ago

salmon30salmon 6y ago
This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are working with the same plans set in March. We _now_ know that children are at a very low risk, people under 40 are very low risk. Most risk is within shared living situations (migrant workers, retirement homes, prisons). We can respond to the _real_ risks and use a nuanced approach that actually saves lives. But instead, the left says "lockdown lockdown lockdown" and the right says "open 100%"... Both are full of shit to the point of it being disgusting. This isn't a game. This has life and death consequences so far beyond COVID-19, and the lack of foresight that the partisans are demonstrating will have reverberations for generations. We are playing the life of real people, we are risking the financial security of real people, who have families and debts and dreams. Finally, the fact that the public health sector has devolved into partisanship really has me worried for when we _actually_ have a repeat of Spanish Flu, or a more virulent Ebola etc. Then we are screwed. Edit: fixed a typo
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  If we could just convince the hoaxers that wearing masks in public is not emasculating, and convince the doomers that we need to flatten the curve rather than attempt to completely contain the virus, we could go back to something bordering on normal life pretty quickly while we waited for vaccines to come along and kill off the virus altogether. And then we would be prepared to react to the next pandemic, too.
  - salmon30salmon 6y ago
    Exactly. We need some humility in people. It is okay to admit that this is (thankfully!) not as bad as we thought, but it is still bad. It will still kill a lot of people. We need to take it seriously, but not as seriously as we feared. The doomers need to have the humility to admit that, and the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. I don't believe any significant number actually thinks that, it's their counter to "everybody will die, the science is settled". They will aim for something on the opposite extreme, that is a pretty common reaction. Imho: if you don't try to convince them that an asteroid is about to crash into earth, but instead tell them that lots of people are scared to death of an asteroid crashing into earth, they'll have a much easier time saying "okay, sure, I don't want them to be scared, I can wear a mask when I go shopping, I guess". > Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day. Where you live, maybe. Where I live, we haven't had a case in 10 days in the county of 330k people, we've had laughably low deaths to begin with, the curve was pretty much flattened the moment we went into constraints ... and we still have mandatory masks with no end in sight, and our local government still does not go back to normal mode, the trash is still getting picked up on irregular schedules etc. It's neither disastrous here, and it's not getting worse. But a lot of people are still scared out of their mind. And we need to help them to breathe and calm down, and tell them that it was scary, but that it's okay to go back outside. And at some point we'll have to tell them that they need to go back outside because we can't keep society running around them without them.
      - salmon30salmon 6y ago
        I mean the response is a disaster, not the epidemic itself. The fact that 40m are unemployed, that income tax receipts have nosedived, that business are shuttering leading to blight etc. Those are the long term disasters in the making.
  - ColanR 6y ago
    I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth. The recent hydroxychloroquine is an obvious example [1]; The Lancet should never have published something with data so obviously questionable, and the media should not have picked it up so immediately as political ammunition. But the result is that the media appears to be "once again" lying to the public. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421797
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      > I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth. Fully agree here. I'm aware of Heterodox Academy trying to tackle this problem in the academic world--is there an analog solving for media bias?
      - jerf 6y ago
        At this point, the only thing I'm hoping for is basically total media collapse. It's actually proceeding apace. By its very nature, being slick TV shows and edited textual content, it'll superficially look like everything's fine until the very end, but the layoffs continue to roll through, marginal outlets are closing, the viewership drops, the respect keeps finding new lows... it's still looking good and may even come sooner than you think. This does not, on its own, solve the problem, but it makes the problem possible to solve.
        thu2111 6y ago
        Yes for TV news. Not for every kind of news. Some outlets are having a good crisis. In the UK the Daily Telegraph is giving back the government furlough/support money as it doesn't need it. So is The Spectator. Interestingly these are the right wing newspapers. Why give up free money? Because the government really needs it but the newspapers don't, given that they are profitable and subscriptions have been rising, not falling. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-statement-from-the-chairman-of-the-spectator https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-statement-from-the-cha... The Daily Telegraph has doubled subscriptions in March alone.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    In my state the virus has killed less than 2,000 people with a population of 27 million and hospitalization rates continue to plummet in spite of lifted restrictions weeks ago. The problem I have with all arbitrary Covid rules is that they're not based on any objective criteria. For example, if we were rational, we would base policy entirely on local hospital capacity and hospitalization count (the original impetus for draconian shut downs was the belief that hospitals would get overrun, which never happened in 99% of the country). We cannot live in bubbles forever, and the disease may well persist forever with no vaccine. There's no threshold being set for arbitrary rules (i.e. if Covid hospitalizations less than X, restrictions lifted). So we just get this random enforcement of arbitrary policies, where you have leaders in CA fining people for being on the beach, in the sun, in open air, where there's extremely small chance of transmission. For my own part, I choose my own risks, and if you want to a wear a mask, go for it. But the curve was flattened even in places that never had restrictions. So we know by now this isn't the plague. We gotta move on. We only get so many trips around the sun. Can't live it in fear.
    - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
      That's exactly the strategy that Washington state is following. We even have a dashboard where can see the indicators, and they are things like infection rates per day per capita over 7 days, hospitilization rates.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  In fairness, the right has been pretty consistent about tailoring the response according to risk—i.e., those who are at risk should isolate and everyone else should resume work. They happened to be right in this regard. The left has also made exceptions in their “lockdown everything” policy, specifically with regard to their own protests (and the response of pandemic experts is a particularly interesting case study of the polarization of science production as opposed to the polarization of science consumption).
  - salmon30salmon 6y ago
    I didn't want to get into a game of who has been most wrong, because that will automatically trigger people to go back to their camps and hunker down. I agree that the "isolate the vulnerable, continue with life otherwise" is most likely the best outcome. The fact that this idea is attributed to the right is going to mean it is DOA, for the most part.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Understandable. Partisanship is the scourge of our generation.
    - albybisy 6y ago
      i would like to know how to "isolate the vulnerable"...?! We send to an island? we weld inside home? We should talk only if we have a realizable plan and not a "dream/idealistinc" plan.
      - salmon30salmon 6y ago
        Well we were able to somewhat effectively isolate the entire country, so I would say have modified stay-home orders that target those who are most vulnerable. That, in addition to common sense acts like hand washing, isolating the sick etc. would go a long way to flatten the curve enough to not overwhelm the hospitals, which after-all was the original goal.
- tw000001 6y ago
  >This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are working with the same plans set in March. As the article somewhat loosely implies, the problem is that all new data becomes suspect when all of our institutions are openly politicized. You think these biases only exist with respect to COVID? The marginalized right (consider the viceral response you're about to have to reading these next sentences) has been saying the same thing about academia for at least a decade. That goes for climate change and much of modern psychological theory. And no, these aren't extreme far right Nazis/incels as people like to stereotype, these are near center moderates, these are (typically in the minority) doctors, scientists, engineers, this is the so called silent majority that is denied a voice on most modern platforms. And part of the reason that our society is gridlocked is that the majority has decided that this minority is not allowed a voice because in a one dimensional two party system one side falls closer to morally repugnant views, so we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Our institutions are collapsing because actors are no longer operating in good faith. And those in power believe there are morally justified in suppressing opposing views. Edit: and I'd like to add, another contribution to gridlock is the tendency for black and white thinking that at this point I'm starting to accept is extremely common human nature - there is a world of nuance between criticism and outright denial that is inevitably ignored almost any time someone expresses criticism for, say, climate change resources or the media (explicitly not scientist) derived predictions.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    There are a lot of moderate liberals who are willing to admit that the political homogeneity of academia is a serious problem as well. Heterdox academy is a bipartisan coalition of academics devoted to addressing this problem. The right has also raised awareness about this in the media, and I (moderate liberal) couldn't agree more. We can't begin to really solve these problems and get everyone on board so long as we have openly partisan epistemological institutions--bias is the enemy of truth and we're maximizing it when we should be minimizing it. Those on the left will be quick to accuse the right of being anti-science and there's certainly some truth there, but I'm very suspicious of the idea that the falling political diversity is a function of the right selecting out of these fields rather than explicit or implicit discrimination (and at least within certain fields of academia, preliminary studies indicate a majority of faculty are willing to openly admit that they would discriminate against conservative candidates). EDIT: I’m definitely not being downvoted out of the same kind of partisan tribalism that TFA is calling out. ◔̯◔
- 373uehedhd 6y ago
  Political realism is about optics. If the Democrats back down on their egregious lockdowns they'll look even more disorganized than they did in the primaries so it's not worth the risk when the progressive arm of the party is still throwing a tantrum and Biden is struggling to unify the party. On the other side, many Republican states have constituencies that see COVID as a matter of personal responsibility and which feel that nearly any restriction is overreach by the government. So neither group has an incentive to back pedal even if both would probably benefit from pivoting. Couple this with the reality that the scientific communities seem to have embraced making normative statements outside the direct scope of their fields (sometimes even acting against or excluding peers with political differences) and you have little reason for people to act on good advice anyway.
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    The democrats are not in control of the country, they are in control of a few states but there's a lot of different ideas gonig around. No one would say NY would be better off if they hadn't cut it down a lot and shut down. Washington state is another place that looked like it was going to get out of control but the shutdown moved us from worst in the us to a much smaller impact than originally feared. Now look at Texas where their daily positive covid 19 detection has double in the past weeks from about 750 a day to 1500 a day. They are going to have a lot more people getting really sick, because that just following from daily exposure. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/texas/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/texas/ (go to daily new cases in texas, click on 7 day average). You can se e the same data at rt.live (find Teaxs, click on per day).
    - 373uehedhd 6y ago
      > The democrats are not in control of the country, they are in control of a few states...< Yes but (assuming I understand your point correctly) the U.S. federal government isn't in control of the country either in this context. They certainly could have been more cooperative with states in terms of distributing supplies and communicating new developments as they came in but, short of bringing in troops and asserting themselves by force, they lack the authority to implement a hard nation wide lockdown. Given the early panic over the virus it's hard to imagine a federal level quarantine not resulting in violence. >No one would say NY would be better off if they hadn't cut it down a lot and shut down.< I'm not sure if I phrased my first post badly or if we agree here. When I said the lockdowns were egregious compared to Rep. states I was speaking relative to the present. I agree things would have been much worse if early and cautious action hadn't been taken. >Now look at Texas where their daily positive covid 19 detection has double in the past weeks from about 750 a day to 1500 a day. They are going to have a lot more people getting really sick, because that just following from daily exposure.< This is basically the entire national debate. We've seen increasingly that just getting the corona virus isn't a death sentence for most people. Texas' infections have been rising, which will by extension lead to some amount of additional deaths, but Texas also has an extremely low death toll compared to other states in terms of deaths per million people (going by Worldometer). The significance of this is that most infected arent going to die and dying after infection, for the most part, isn't a random lottery and so whether it's wise or not to continue to force people to remain in lock-down is a value/political judgement rather than a distinctly scientific one. This holds especially true when people in need are refraining from visiting hospitals for fear of getting the virus and instances of depression and suicide have risen dramatically as a consequence of lock-down policies. You can argue fewer people might still die with heavy lock-down measures in the present but those deaths arent the same people and so what's ultimately being dicussed is whether or not it's fair to drive certain individuals to death or unnecessary physical suffering in order to save people they largrly have no relation with. And that's before discussing the small business owners who have lost their life's work due to government mandates (consumers didn't stop going out by choice after all). My point about the parties themselves was purely meant to highlight that at this stage both sides could probably be managing their policies better (regardless of value distinctions) but neither wants to make it look like the other team was correct. The irony is that neither side would be taking the same actions since for Dem states like California this would be loosening up a little while for Rep stated it would be tightening up or at least implementing financial support for at-risk individuals and their cohabitants. From here, my broader point was that it's an election year and so, regardless of if any particular state is actually beholden to a particular plan of action, anyone who breaks too far off from the party line (in a manner that risks bad optics) is going to lose clout within their party. I'm not endorsing that as the way things should be but that's the apparent state of things going by the predominantly partisan split in terms of current lock-down action.
- Kiro 6y ago
  In Sweden it's the opposite: the right wants lockdown and the left opposes it.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    It's interesting why this isn't the case in the US, too. Conservatives in the US are much older, and the people in the at-risk age groups are disproportionately Republican. Yet they oppose the lockdown. Liberals, who are the ones being laid off and bearing the economic brunt of the lockdown while being at much lower risk to their own health support it.
    - aaron695 6y ago
      Evolutionary you can see a case for having society members of both keeping culture and changing culture at the same time. Roughly Conservatives don't like change (lockdown) Liberals like change (lockdown)
  - ryandvm 6y ago
    Just goes to show you how insidious partisanship is. It's clearly not about liberty or policy principals, but rather whatever solution one party puts forward, the other has no choice but to oppose it. One of my favorite pet daydreams is trying to figure out a way of abolishing political parties altogether...
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      > Just goes to show insidious partisanship is I think this is the wrong take away. The corona debate in Sweden is pretty healthy. Not very partisan and neither side has dug their heels in.
    - Taikonerd 6y ago
      It's a nice dream, but I would settle for having more than 2 political parties. Then at least we could break out of the "are you with Us or are you with Them" dichotomy.
  - 6y ago
- jamesrcole 6y ago
  > the left says "lockdown lockdown lockdown" of course that hasn’t really been the case over the last week or so.
  - lotu 6y ago
    This is about what we value most. People on the right then to value individualism, self-sufficiency, and self-determination more. While people on the left value equity, and community more. You can see these values reflected in what each side is willing to take risks for.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  I guess I am on the “left”, and my view throughout this thing has been “do what the experts say we should, while maintaining a diversity of expert views.” This is also the vibe I get from most of my “left” friends. Moreover, Europe has largely followed its experts’ advice —- and with a few exceptions they’ve largely brought cases under control, so it’s not like the advice was bad. This “pox on both houses” post, in which you try to blame both sides equally (while also ignoring the fact that only one controls the executive branch of the Federal government), does not comport with my lived reality.
  - guygurari 6y ago
    > “do what the experts say we should, while maintaining a diversity of expert views.” I don’t think this is an actual strategy. If there is a diversity of views, which experts do you listen to? Also, experts in which field? Epidemiologists have generally recommended very strict shutdowns, but they are not economists and are not experts on the economic ramifications. Some economists agree with strict lockdowns, others do not. So it’s not at all clear what “listen to the experts” means in this case.
    - eirini1 6y ago
      obviously you listen to the epidemiologist, not the economist. The economist is an expert on the economy and not on pandemics, and therefore will always give advice that is aimed at keeping up the economy and not saving people and preventing the spread of the virus. Its baffling to me that you think an economist has any kind of valid input on this matter. At best an economist could advise you on how to keep the economy afloat under the restrictions the epidemiologists has advised.
      - Snoozle 6y ago
        Economic problems come with a cost on human life. There are numerous studies and paper that show how bad being poor and unhappy are for a person's health. Why WOULDN'T we consider the economic ramifications?
- KarlKemp 6y ago
  "The left" doesn't say "lockdown lockdown lockdown". As a card-carrying (ANTIFA, laminated) member of the left, I consider countries like Austria, South Korea, or maybe Germany the gold standard: lockdown, yes, but continually adjusted, exchanging the most draconian measures with lesser ones when more knowledge allows more targeting, or when infection numbers sink. All those countries have now effectively exited lockdowns, at levels of single-digit daily deaths. This allows further lockdown-free reduction by amassing resources for contact tracing every single infection. Meanwhile, the US, UK, Brasil, and other countries are seeing thousands of deaths daily because they stopped maybe two or three weeks too early, and/or did it half-heatedly and/or failed to use that time to stand up alternatives to lockdown. This has won them absolutely nothing, economically, as far as I can tell: Germany is at +3% unemployment (6.6% total) while the US is on >15%. And except hoping for the weather to make a difference, they will either continue to see people dying and incurring the cost of people self-quarantine. Or they'll change course, do another round of sustained lockdowns after all, and use that time to think of an excuse for wasting three months and 100,000 lives on a thought process that took competently managed countries the better part of the last in-person meeting they had this year.
  - robocat 6y ago
    Everyone has their own theory about why some countries do better than others, but we don’t yet know why: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/immunological-dark-matter-does-it-exist-coronavirus-population-immunity https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/immunological-... Does it help to jump to conclusions about the cause being lockdown variations, or weather, or sunlight, or political leanings? Anybody can cherry-pick their example countries to support their argument, but so far I can find counter-examples to their points whenever I look. I do agree lockdowns have their place (e.g. New Zealand has eliminated the disease using a lockdown, and the Asian success stories).
  - robocat 6y ago
    Pollen is apparently another cause of variation: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.05.20123133v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.05.20123133v... Of course, there are multiple causes, and trying to pin variation in infection rates or deaths on a single factor would be silly. Hopefully we find the driving factors... Spring or vitamin D could explain why Italy doctors are opining that the disease is less deadly now than in March.
- Press2forEN 6y ago
  The US will not resume its position as a functioning democracy until both sides reconcile their differences. But when those differences are on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, perhaps we should be considering other options. At this point, with COVID and the riots, its a matter of life and death.
  - umvi 6y ago
    > perhaps we should be considering other options. You mean splitting into 2 countries (blue USA and red USA)? Then whichever country fares worse economically will find a way to blame the more prosperous one, and it could mean war.
- microtherion 6y ago
  > We _now_ know that children are at a very low risk, people under 40 are very low risk. … at very low risk of death, but there seems to be increasing evidence that some COVID-19 survivors, including children, suffer serious, and possibly permanent health effects.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  By your words, let's allow vastly heightened danger to those over 40. How about, we have national regulations for safe interactions, rules requiring ppe when appropriate, and available ppe. Your company has to provide it if you work together. It turns out its very very hard to provide ppe that protects people when they work closely together (see the meat packing plants, see hospitals). My families economic safety is also impacted if I'm dead or in the hospital with covid, even if they are all in your 'safe' category. Only a few 100 kids will die unnecessarily so we can open the economy?
  - salmon30salmon 6y ago
    How many kids die of the flu each and every year? How many kids die of malaria? Of tuberculoses? Where were you during the last strong flu season? Get off your high horse and actually contribute ideas instead of fear.
    - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
      In [1] it says in the last 10 years the # of deaths from the flu was 10 to 60k, avg about 30k for all americans. I'm not contributing fear. I'm talking about the facts of the situation and the fact is its a serious issue. I'm frustrated that so many people act like it won't hurt them so they dont care somehow. We have to make serious choices between variations of opening up and helping the economy vs saving people. We need to do this in an informed way and not what can ideologically help or hurt various politicians. [2] is a great article about how different cities in 1918 made various choices about socially isolating and the impact of that. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html 2. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-1...
      - salmon30salmon 6y ago
        You are creating a Sophie's Choice in your dichotomy of "opening and helping the economy vs. saving people". It isn't that black and white and I would hope you understand that. It is "saving people vs. saving people". That is the stark choice we have to make. It isn't "getting a haircut vs. killing children" or even "helping small business vs. giving old people another year or two". It is literally lives vs lives. If you are so disconnected from the reality of a majority of the country to not understand that three months without work is a life risking disaster, then you won't see the damage created by our continued draconian response to a virus which is much different than originally assumed. My point is, if you stratify death rates by age[1] you see that children are at a very, very low risk from COVID-19. This is the nuanced approach that universal lockdowns trample over. You literally employed the "think of the children" fallacy[2] (technically appeal to emotion) when you know well that children are at a low risk. I mentioned flu, TB, and malaria because they kill legions of children every year. TB killed 200,000 children in 2018[3]. Malaria kills .5 million children a year worldwide[4]. So don't tell me you care about the children. Unless of course you mean American or European children, in which case make your case but admit to yourself that you are viewing the world through a lens of personal risk, not actual risk. Either you want to save the children, in which case we need to dedicate 20% of our GDP to combating TB, malaria and flu worldwide, or you only care about local children, in which case you are okay with burning through 20% of our GDP to prevent kids from getting a disease which isn't dangerous to them. [1] https://twitter.com/daniellevitt22/status/1269454910749196289 https://twitter.com/daniellevitt22/status/126945491074919628... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children [3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosi... [4] https://ourworldindata.org/malaria#all-charts-preview https://ourworldindata.org/malaria#all-charts-preview
Animats 6y ago
"In this century, we have become accustomed to heated political debates that somehow avoid contact with reality." Which is a big problem. It keeps the US from actually doing anything. (Then again, that may be a good thing. The current administration does not do much follow-through, so most of the weirder ideas stay rhetoric and don't get implemented. Compare the rise of the Nazi party. Much of the stuff they planned to build in the early years was actually built, from the "People's Radio" to the autobahns. With the organization in place to build, arming up for WWII could be done effectively. If the Nazis were all hype, they would not have been able to do much beyond their borders.)
- m0zg 6y ago
  Fascism is private enterprise under total government control. Of course it'll be very effective at getting things done, both the autobahns and the gas chambers. Communism is pretty effective too. It's government-owned enterprise under total government control. The only thing that really changes is who owns the means of production. And, well, under Communism you're de-facto a slave to the state as well. Not having a job was illegal in e.g. the Soviet Union. The fact that US political establishment is unable to enact quick change is kind of by design, IMO. While they are at each other's throats, they don't have the time to attack We The People. That, in my book, is a good thing.
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    Communism is known for economically collapsing on itself, that's not very efficient or productive.
    - m0zg 6y ago
      Yes. But it takes decades for it to do so, and in the initial stages it can appear to be quite effective. And as any communist will tell you, "it's not really communism" if it collapses on itself, killing tens of millions of people in the process.
      - growlist 6y ago
drewcoo 6y ago
"You’re probably doing it right now — skimming quickly to the end of this piece to see if I’m criticizing you or only those other people who behave so irresponsibly." An article decrying prejudice gives us its own demonstration of it. Does that somehow make the case better?
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  An article decrying prejudice lets the reader give their own demonstration of it.
pjc50 6y ago
The people who said that lockdown needed to be limited in length because people couldn't take it for long were right. Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later: hence the UK's delayed lockdown and therefore highest death toll in Europe. The people advocating for "herd immunity" never addressed the death rate; a death rate of even 0.5% in the UK would be three hundred thousand people, plus more with lingering side effects. As it is, we've confirmed 287k infected for 40k deaths, or 0.5% of the country infected. A very, very long way from immunity.
- xamuel 6y ago
  What does that 287k include? Presumably just positive test cases? Probably there are far more undiagnosed infections that didn't require hospitalization. If the IFR was really 14% like your numbers suggest, we would see politicians putting themselves in submarines, lol. That's almost halfway to black plague IFR. The CDC's recent data suggests an actual IFR of well below 1%.
- mdemare 6y ago
  If you trust the death rate, and the number of deaths reported are both accurate, the UK is at 40k/300k = 13%. A very long way from immunity, but not 0.5%.
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    300k confirmed cases / 59M population = .5% of the country having had the virus. Of course, this is inaccurate, since many more have had it and not gotten confirmed positive tests.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  > Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later. I think you misunderstand the reasoning. If you want to wipe a disease out you lockdown as soon as you can. If you want to flatten the curve, you lockdown just before the peak, so as to prevent it. Or if you are ok with flattening the curve for a longer time, you lock down just before you reach capacity.
JPKab 6y ago
Question: Has anyone here changed their mind about COVID19 in a major way as the data has become more complete? Just wondering. I have sensed in myself tribalistic tendencies of not changing my mind when the data changes. I'm trying hard to look at myself and recognize it and experiment with different thoughts. I find myself bouncing between thinking we have overreacted to then thinking that my perception of an overreaction is paradoxical because we did lock down and have contained the virus' damage to some extent. I'm trying hard to be super open-minded about the data, and recognizing that I'm just a simple primate whose brain doesn't want to expend energy and resorts to bias to conserve it.
- deadwing0 6y ago
  I'm in the same boat as you. It's exhausting to try to avoid these tendencies. How comfy it must be to give in and accept them with no further thought. The most frustrating times are those moments when I fear I'll never root out all of my biases or tribalistic tendencies and become an enlightened human. But onward and upward, eh?
- marcell 6y ago
  I was very worried about Covid-19 when the initial data and charts were coming out of China and Italy. It seemed like it was going to quickly overwhelm all the hospitals in America. Since then, I've become much less scared about the impact on me personally, and more skeptical about the need for most (not all) lockdown measures. This was based on my reading of antibody prevalence data, and data on death rates separated out by age and risk factors. At this point, I think Sweden strategy makes the most sense. It is sustainable for many months, unlike more extreme lockdowns. Additionally, I think more strict lockdowns on older population makes sense. For 90%+ of the population, I think we can lift most/all lockdown measures today.
- beervirus 6y ago
  We flattened the curve for a little while. It's about to get unflattened.
- jerf 6y ago
  My opinion of its severity has dropped and continues to drop quite significantly. I bought a lot of supplies in late January because I saw videos coming out of China of people dropping in the streets and them welding entire buildings shut with people in them, stuff I'd never seen before. I still don't fully know how to reconcile that with what happened. That is, more than just saying "oh, those videos were fake"... well, why? Who made them? Why were they made? I dunno. Even ignoring those it still looks an awful lot like China covered an awful lot of stuff up. Regardless, whatever made it overseas didn't seem to do that. Evidence at this point seems to suggest a lot more people got it than we realized, without them even realizing it [1]. Any number of possible reasons. Unfortunately, between the tribalism, the outright coverups by the Chinese, and the "errors" if you are generous and "lies" if you are not in our own media, I don't expect to ever have a good grasp of what actually happened. (Even so, purchasing supplies was the right move. Our local stores never really quite "ran out" of stuff for extended periods of time, but I was reasonably well prepared for what was certainly some supply chain disruption, and had a good practice run for some other real disaster in the future. Got a better idea of how to stock the food up in more effective ratios now.) [1]: Possibly concerning, and I hope some follow-up study is done on this. Estimates of modern spread rates of disease based on COVID-19 could end up being really wrong if we underestimate how far it spread.
throwawaysea 6y ago
Not to sound alarmist, but recent events have felt like the early warning of a pending collapse of our country. When I saw healthcare workers and officials abandon logic, reason, and evidence to put their weight behind justifying recent mass protests, I really lost a lot of faith. These protests obviously will result in thousands more deaths (much larger in number than unjust police-involved deaths). This is no longer about losing faith in institutions alone, but really about losing faith in fellow citizens who are willfully burying their heads in the sand and willfully acting in bad faith nearly all the time. Of course, there is plenty of blame to hand out for all sides, going back well before recent events and well before COVID-19 itself. My question for HN: what has happened to past societies when they reach this point, where emotions and tribalism cause all sides to hate each other, to talk past each other, to hold each other to unequal standards, to use every last loophole/technicality to win through bad faith means, etc.? Have any such societies de-escalated from there to a point of stability again?
- Johnjonjoan 6y ago
  I agree the times are worrying. What's keeping me reassured is that the radical protest elements are very small with regard to our countries population's. There are far more people not expressing their opinion and it gives me hope that cool heads are silently prevailing. Edit: typo
- sacred_numbers 6y ago
  I think that you are making the same mistake that you are accusing healthcare workers and officials of making. You are assuming that these protests will "obviously" result in thousands more deaths because it feels that way to you. I believe that that's pretty unlikely, though, since there are probably fewer than a million protestors across the country. Many of the protestors are wearing masks and the protests being outside reduces the risk of spreading the disease. There will certainly be some spread due to the protests, but probably not nearly as much as at grocery stores or churches. You are also assuming that this is just about unjust police-involved deaths; it is not. It is about the many millions of negative interactions with the police and justice system that perpetuate poverty (police lying under oath, egregious sentences for non-violent crimes, etc.) I don't think it's a bad faith argument to say that correcting these injustices is more important than maintaining a totally strict quarantine. The reason both sides talk past each other is because they have different values and different assumptions. Based on your post your first priority is preventing deaths and your assumption is that these protests will cause more deaths than they prevent. My first priority is living in a fair world, with preventing deaths being a close second. My assumption is that the protests will not cause a large number of excess deaths, but that they do have a high chance of moving our justice system closer towards real justice. I also am making the assumption that living in a fair and just society will increase overall health outcomes over the long term. I believe that most (but definitely not all) people don't argue in bad faith, they just have different values and make different assumptions. There's not much that can be done about having different values, but better data can help every side have more similar assumptions, which should help opinions to converge somewhat.
reddog 6y ago
Whenever science and politics intersect, science loses. If science is studying something apolitical like the metabolism of water bear or a quasar burst from a distant galaxy it’s fine. Throw politics in the mix and the waters become muddied very quickly when funding and reputational concerns motivate and corrupt a delicate process. Politics is like Lennie who wants to pet the rabbits. Science is like the rabbits.
- colpabar 6y ago
  That is pretty unfair to Lennie; at least his intentions were good.
- mindfulhack 6y ago
  I am honestly and hearteningly surprised to even hear these sentiments from someone else here, which I have now observed for years. It's one reason why I love HN. I'm not in the science field, but I absolutely am a student of human nature (and mindfulness). It's unbelievable how much the mechanism of science is dirtied, distorted, and abused by our emotional pride, greed, tribalism, fear, and all other aspects of human nature, which show that - for all our intelligence - we humans are wired for survival, and only wired for truth if and when it helps that survival. If truth comes at odds with it, we will lie - even if to ourselves, and at very deep subconscious levels - as much as we need to. Rationalisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology) How this biological reality plays out is complex. It's not just in our lizard brain, but the entire realm of our secondary limbic brain, with its 'tribal' swirl of social emotions and resulting behaviours. 'Survival' means a great of things, not just literal survival right in front of you right now. It's a powerful and primary goal coursing through our blood and all behaviour at the deepest and most subtle levels. We would do well to educate about this fact, and practice mindfulness to be able to see it in ourselves.
dropit_sphere 6y ago
"Tribalism" didn't come for pandemic science. Tribalists did. Every individual has the power to behave forthrightly, with epistemic hygiene. You can't shove the responsibility to do that onto a nebulous interstitial emergent effect.
dekhn 6y ago
There are times I'm glad I left health science/biology/medicine as a field and it's interesting to watch people slowly realize just how badly structured the entire human health field is organized (from academic research to research hospitals to profit hospitals to world health organizations) and how all the incentives are messed up. The closer you get in biology to human health, the more ego, tribalism, and assholery you have to deal with. Something about "saving lives" really brings out the intelligent jerks and the sharks. As a contrast, I enjoy working in computing so much more. The experiments people run are replicable, the code compiles, and people (in general) are far less egotistical and arrogant (still plenty of sharks, though). I've watched enough major paradigm shifts in my own fields to know that embracing humility, admitting your own ignorance, and being open to new ideas is key to the furtherment of science.
- umvi 6y ago
  Dumb question, but what's a "shark" in this context?
  - dekhn 6y ago
    Sharks are opportunists- for example people who wait for somebody else to do all the hard work, then come in, take over and get all the credit. It's not a really strong analogy but I've heard many people in biotech referring to sharks in that context.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  I will second this as I am currently working in the biotech field. The amount of short sighted thinking and opportunism from small start ups to the most massive CMO's in the world is staggering. My take is that the whole field is extremely underfunded and that breeds levels of competition and short term profit seeking, but that's probably a biased opinion. I'm sure if the field had the level of VC support that traditional software/computing gets we would be making huge strides with our humanity.
  - DennisAleynikov 6y ago
xiphias2 6y ago
,,people should not be walking around with masks'' What Fauci was telling to people is not science. I was wearing my N100 masks when I had the chance, because I hadn't seen any evidence of masks making the coronavirus more infectious, but much evidence to the contrary. The whole anti-mask propaganda made it hard to me to trust scientific leaders, and even some papers at this point.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lotu 6y ago
  The anti-mask “propaganda” was obviously an only partially successful effort to preserve the supply of masks for first responders. If the CDC/WHO and came out and said everyone wear masks in the beginning of march the supply would have spiked harder and faster than it already did, likely resulting in more health care worker fatalities.
  - StanislavPetrov 6y ago
    Successful or not they lied to the public openly about the benefits of wearing masks. Not only does this destroy whatever credibility they had with the public, but it also shields government and health officials who failed to stockpile enough masks for inevitable outbreaks and offshored our medical productive capacity to China from accountability (making it more likely we will face the same shortages during the next, inevitable crisis).
danharaj 6y ago
Just a quiet reminder that accounting for other peoples' actions with "partisanship" and "tribalism" is just a very easy way to stop thinking about their reasoning or motivation. If someone explained your behavior away as unthinking loyalty or allegiance you would be offended-- and rightfully so. P.S. This article is not an apolitical analysis of politics, this journal is not an apolitical scientific journal.
- manfredo 6y ago
  Evaluating whether an opinion is partisan is not ignoring their reasoning or motivation. Quite the opposite, it is evaluating their reasoning and motivation and determining the extent to which that reasoning and motivating is influence and determined by partisanship or group affiliation. Expert opinion is supposed to be formed by empirical evidence and science. Not political affiliation or personal opinion. For instance, an expert opinion would be, "protests of X size stand to increase rates of infection by Y%" Whether or not a certain protest justified in accepting that increase of infection is a question of personal values not medical science. Is protesting against police brutality worth the increased rate of infection? Is protesting against the lockdowns and subsequent mass unemployment worth the increased rates of infection? It's fine to form your own answers to these questions. But these are questions determined by values, not science. Expert opinions have no business trying to answer these. But medical experts are making the latter statement, and are doing so in a way that comes off as extremely partisan: > We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives. How on Earth are we supposed to trust these experts' advice on when to lift lockdowns when they openly state that resistance to lockdowns is rooted in white nationalism? Let alone the double standard in supporting some protests while opposing others. As much as I am inclined to defer to experts, messages like these makes it extremely hard for me to do so here. When medical experts are making statements like these, it is highly indicative of reasoning informed by partisanship rather than science.
  - 6y ago
eirini1 6y ago
I find it really hilarious that right-wingers (sorry, I mean "moderate centrists") really obviously veer towards very asinine "both sides fucked up" style of rhetoric. Its been happening since forever but I realized ever since Charlottesville and Trumps "both sides" tweet that this is a consistent pattern.
pfkurtz 6y ago
There's almost certainly a lot of safe opening up we could do. What would make it dramatically safer would be pro-social behavior from people on the right. The protesters are all wearing masks and doing their best to maintain social distance outside of the actions. They calculate that it is worth the risk. Time will tell, but the calculus isn't merely do the protests increase the spread? but also will they achieve political goals that have a large bearing on public health, specifically the health of people whom the US Coronavirus response is already systematically failing (black people, whose lives matter).
- jtbayly 6y ago
  > The protesters are all wearing masks Really? I keep seeing people saying this. It’s laughably false. Here is the governor of MI at a protest that breaks her own rules about social distancing and protests, directly between two men without masks. (Just one high profile example.) https://mobile.twitter.com/TPCarney/status/1268902820410843136 https://mobile.twitter.com/TPCarney/status/12689028204108431...
  - pfkurtz 6y ago
    Been to a major one, and a very, very high percentage of the people there wore masks, enough that it was consistently odd to see people without them. Also people trying as much as possible to keep a little space between each other. Who wasn't wearing masks, consistently? White male police (the National Guard was all masked). Doubt me if you want. Obviously a rhetorical "all" and very easy to find photographic counterexamples. But certainly most.
    - pfkurtz 6y ago
      Also there were many people distributing masks to the maskless, and people whose sole mission was to pump hand sanitizer onto people's hands. The people in the crowd care about the virus and for the most part when right back to social distancing after leaving the protest.
guscost 6y ago
Science as you know it is dead: https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/ https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  That was a really poor read. Anxiety from lockdown is going to kill more people than coronavirus? Like, I'm not exactly an ardent supporter of lockdown but it's clear we've saved many lives by keeping hospitalizations minimal. Even if that estimate is below what initial models suggested, it's inept to suggest it was useless. Likewise you fail to actually link to any stats to support claims about increased suicide rates or deaths from heart attacks, while linking to a 404 as a source for New York state supposedly hiding pushing covid cases into nursing homes. Science has issues but this is trending towards baseless tabloid journalism instead of a serious introspection of methodological flaws.
  - guscost 6y ago
    You skipped over a lot, and we will see about the rest. I can’t prove most of it right now, but it is what I think. In fairness it is perhaps way too cynical for your taste, so if you prefer a serious introspection, try this: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/science-without-validation-in-a-world-without-meaning/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/science-without-v...
  - DanBC 6y ago
    > Likewise you fail to actually link to any stats to support claims about increased suicide rates Currently there are about 40,000 deaths by suicide in the US each year. We know that deaths by suicide will increase because of economic downturn. We have some understanding of this after 2007 and similar. No-one working in suicide prevention thinks we'll come anywhere near doubling the 40,000 number.
josephby 6y ago
“Yuval Levin is director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, editor of National Affairs, and a senior editor of The New Atlantis.” Useful context before the click.
luord 6y ago
I try in general to steer clear and not to comment on anything regarding both the pandemic and the protests, but I gotta say that that open letter is the most bizarre take I've read on both issues. Or it at least gives even Trump's most outrageous tweets a run for their money.
PeterStuer 6y ago
"don't wrestle with a pig. You'll both get dirty but the pig will love it" Somehow the lowest kind of politics, on all sides, manage to drag us all down to their level. A culture war is just like any other war in the sense that on the battlefields nobody wins, and both sides lose. As a child growing up late last century, I always wondered how prosperous progressing culture's could have collectively devolved into the dark ages. I saw the seeds of the unraveling start in the 80's, but like any exponential process, it took some time to become a clear vector. I am not sure this is a preventable or correctable evolution at this point, as the devolution forces are enshrined within the system itself, leaving only room for a collapse at the meta level. I may be wrong. I truly hope I am.
bagacrap 6y ago
Great article, especially the bit about the healthcare professionals' statement on BLM protests. However this article (and the public at large) fail to distinguish between what doctors practice, and science. Medical doctors are about as far from scientists as you can get: they're highly trained robots. They don't perform science; at best they write up a case study. Jumping to conclusions from insufficient data is what they consider "expertise".

120 points by seinundzeit 6y ago

This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are working with the same plans set in March. We _now_ know that children are at a very low risk, people under 40 are very low risk. Most risk is within shared living situations (migrant workers, retirement homes, prisons). We can respond to the _real_ risks and use a nuanced approach that actually saves lives. But instead, the left says "lockdown lockdown lockdown" and the right says "open 100%"... Both are full of shit to the point of it being disgusting. This isn't a game. This has life and death consequences so far beyond COVID-19, and the lack of foresight that the partisans are demonstrating will have reverberations for generations. We are playing the life of real people, we are risking the financial security of real people, who have families and debts and dreams. Finally, the fact that the public health sector has devolved into partisanship really has me worried for when we _actually_ have a repeat of Spanish Flu, or a more virulent Ebola etc. Then we are screwed. Edit: fixed a typo

rootusrootus 6y ago
If we could just convince the hoaxers that wearing masks in public is not emasculating, and convince the doomers that we need to flatten the curve rather than attempt to completely contain the virus, we could go back to something bordering on normal life pretty quickly while we waited for vaccines to come along and kill off the virus altogether. And then we would be prepared to react to the next pandemic, too.
- salmon30salmon 6y ago
  Exactly. We need some humility in people. It is okay to admit that this is (thankfully!) not as bad as we thought, but it is still bad. It will still kill a lot of people. We need to take it seriously, but not as seriously as we feared. The doomers need to have the humility to admit that, and the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu. I don't believe any significant number actually thinks that, it's their counter to "everybody will die, the science is settled". They will aim for something on the opposite extreme, that is a pretty common reaction. Imho: if you don't try to convince them that an asteroid is about to crash into earth, but instead tell them that lots of people are scared to death of an asteroid crashing into earth, they'll have a much easier time saying "okay, sure, I don't want them to be scared, I can wear a mask when I go shopping, I guess". > Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day. Where you live, maybe. Where I live, we haven't had a case in 10 days in the county of 330k people, we've had laughably low deaths to begin with, the curve was pretty much flattened the moment we went into constraints ... and we still have mandatory masks with no end in sight, and our local government still does not go back to normal mode, the trash is still getting picked up on irregular schedules etc. It's neither disastrous here, and it's not getting worse. But a lot of people are still scared out of their mind. And we need to help them to breathe and calm down, and tell them that it was scary, but that it's okay to go back outside. And at some point we'll have to tell them that they need to go back outside because we can't keep society running around them without them.
    - salmon30salmon 6y ago
      I mean the response is a disaster, not the epidemic itself. The fact that 40m are unemployed, that income tax receipts have nosedived, that business are shuttering leading to blight etc. Those are the long term disasters in the making.
- ColanR 6y ago
  I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth. The recent hydroxychloroquine is an obvious example [1]; The Lancet should never have published something with data so obviously questionable, and the media should not have picked it up so immediately as political ammunition. But the result is that the media appears to be "once again" lying to the public. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421797
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    > I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth. Fully agree here. I'm aware of Heterodox Academy trying to tackle this problem in the academic world--is there an analog solving for media bias?
    - jerf 6y ago
      At this point, the only thing I'm hoping for is basically total media collapse. It's actually proceeding apace. By its very nature, being slick TV shows and edited textual content, it'll superficially look like everything's fine until the very end, but the layoffs continue to roll through, marginal outlets are closing, the viewership drops, the respect keeps finding new lows... it's still looking good and may even come sooner than you think. This does not, on its own, solve the problem, but it makes the problem possible to solve.
      - thu2111 6y ago
        Yes for TV news. Not for every kind of news. Some outlets are having a good crisis. In the UK the Daily Telegraph is giving back the government furlough/support money as it doesn't need it. So is The Spectator. Interestingly these are the right wing newspapers. Why give up free money? Because the government really needs it but the newspapers don't, given that they are profitable and subscriptions have been rising, not falling. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-statement-from-the-chairman-of-the-spectator https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-statement-from-the-cha... The Daily Telegraph has doubled subscriptions in March alone.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  In my state the virus has killed less than 2,000 people with a population of 27 million and hospitalization rates continue to plummet in spite of lifted restrictions weeks ago. The problem I have with all arbitrary Covid rules is that they're not based on any objective criteria. For example, if we were rational, we would base policy entirely on local hospital capacity and hospitalization count (the original impetus for draconian shut downs was the belief that hospitals would get overrun, which never happened in 99% of the country). We cannot live in bubbles forever, and the disease may well persist forever with no vaccine. There's no threshold being set for arbitrary rules (i.e. if Covid hospitalizations less than X, restrictions lifted). So we just get this random enforcement of arbitrary policies, where you have leaders in CA fining people for being on the beach, in the sun, in open air, where there's extremely small chance of transmission. For my own part, I choose my own risks, and if you want to a wear a mask, go for it. But the curve was flattened even in places that never had restrictions. So we know by now this isn't the plague. We gotta move on. We only get so many trips around the sun. Can't live it in fear.
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    That's exactly the strategy that Washington state is following. We even have a dashboard where can see the indicators, and they are things like infection rates per day per capita over 7 days, hospitilization rates.
throwaway894345 6y ago
In fairness, the right has been pretty consistent about tailoring the response according to risk—i.e., those who are at risk should isolate and everyone else should resume work. They happened to be right in this regard. The left has also made exceptions in their “lockdown everything” policy, specifically with regard to their own protests (and the response of pandemic experts is a particularly interesting case study of the polarization of science production as opposed to the polarization of science consumption).
- salmon30salmon 6y ago
  I didn't want to get into a game of who has been most wrong, because that will automatically trigger people to go back to their camps and hunker down. I agree that the "isolate the vulnerable, continue with life otherwise" is most likely the best outcome. The fact that this idea is attributed to the right is going to mean it is DOA, for the most part.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Understandable. Partisanship is the scourge of our generation.
  - albybisy 6y ago
    i would like to know how to "isolate the vulnerable"...?! We send to an island? we weld inside home? We should talk only if we have a realizable plan and not a "dream/idealistinc" plan.
    - salmon30salmon 6y ago
      Well we were able to somewhat effectively isolate the entire country, so I would say have modified stay-home orders that target those who are most vulnerable. That, in addition to common sense acts like hand washing, isolating the sick etc. would go a long way to flatten the curve enough to not overwhelm the hospitals, which after-all was the original goal.
tw000001 6y ago
>This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are working with the same plans set in March. As the article somewhat loosely implies, the problem is that all new data becomes suspect when all of our institutions are openly politicized. You think these biases only exist with respect to COVID? The marginalized right (consider the viceral response you're about to have to reading these next sentences) has been saying the same thing about academia for at least a decade. That goes for climate change and much of modern psychological theory. And no, these aren't extreme far right Nazis/incels as people like to stereotype, these are near center moderates, these are (typically in the minority) doctors, scientists, engineers, this is the so called silent majority that is denied a voice on most modern platforms. And part of the reason that our society is gridlocked is that the majority has decided that this minority is not allowed a voice because in a one dimensional two party system one side falls closer to morally repugnant views, so we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Our institutions are collapsing because actors are no longer operating in good faith. And those in power believe there are morally justified in suppressing opposing views. Edit: and I'd like to add, another contribution to gridlock is the tendency for black and white thinking that at this point I'm starting to accept is extremely common human nature - there is a world of nuance between criticism and outright denial that is inevitably ignored almost any time someone expresses criticism for, say, climate change resources or the media (explicitly not scientist) derived predictions.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  There are a lot of moderate liberals who are willing to admit that the political homogeneity of academia is a serious problem as well. Heterdox academy is a bipartisan coalition of academics devoted to addressing this problem. The right has also raised awareness about this in the media, and I (moderate liberal) couldn't agree more. We can't begin to really solve these problems and get everyone on board so long as we have openly partisan epistemological institutions--bias is the enemy of truth and we're maximizing it when we should be minimizing it. Those on the left will be quick to accuse the right of being anti-science and there's certainly some truth there, but I'm very suspicious of the idea that the falling political diversity is a function of the right selecting out of these fields rather than explicit or implicit discrimination (and at least within certain fields of academia, preliminary studies indicate a majority of faculty are willing to openly admit that they would discriminate against conservative candidates). EDIT: I’m definitely not being downvoted out of the same kind of partisan tribalism that TFA is calling out. ◔̯◔
373uehedhd 6y ago
Political realism is about optics. If the Democrats back down on their egregious lockdowns they'll look even more disorganized than they did in the primaries so it's not worth the risk when the progressive arm of the party is still throwing a tantrum and Biden is struggling to unify the party. On the other side, many Republican states have constituencies that see COVID as a matter of personal responsibility and which feel that nearly any restriction is overreach by the government. So neither group has an incentive to back pedal even if both would probably benefit from pivoting. Couple this with the reality that the scientific communities seem to have embraced making normative statements outside the direct scope of their fields (sometimes even acting against or excluding peers with political differences) and you have little reason for people to act on good advice anyway.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  The democrats are not in control of the country, they are in control of a few states but there's a lot of different ideas gonig around. No one would say NY would be better off if they hadn't cut it down a lot and shut down. Washington state is another place that looked like it was going to get out of control but the shutdown moved us from worst in the us to a much smaller impact than originally feared. Now look at Texas where their daily positive covid 19 detection has double in the past weeks from about 750 a day to 1500 a day. They are going to have a lot more people getting really sick, because that just following from daily exposure. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/texas/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/texas/ (go to daily new cases in texas, click on 7 day average). You can se e the same data at rt.live (find Teaxs, click on per day).
  - 373uehedhd 6y ago
    > The democrats are not in control of the country, they are in control of a few states...< Yes but (assuming I understand your point correctly) the U.S. federal government isn't in control of the country either in this context. They certainly could have been more cooperative with states in terms of distributing supplies and communicating new developments as they came in but, short of bringing in troops and asserting themselves by force, they lack the authority to implement a hard nation wide lockdown. Given the early panic over the virus it's hard to imagine a federal level quarantine not resulting in violence. >No one would say NY would be better off if they hadn't cut it down a lot and shut down.< I'm not sure if I phrased my first post badly or if we agree here. When I said the lockdowns were egregious compared to Rep. states I was speaking relative to the present. I agree things would have been much worse if early and cautious action hadn't been taken. >Now look at Texas where their daily positive covid 19 detection has double in the past weeks from about 750 a day to 1500 a day. They are going to have a lot more people getting really sick, because that just following from daily exposure.< This is basically the entire national debate. We've seen increasingly that just getting the corona virus isn't a death sentence for most people. Texas' infections have been rising, which will by extension lead to some amount of additional deaths, but Texas also has an extremely low death toll compared to other states in terms of deaths per million people (going by Worldometer). The significance of this is that most infected arent going to die and dying after infection, for the most part, isn't a random lottery and so whether it's wise or not to continue to force people to remain in lock-down is a value/political judgement rather than a distinctly scientific one. This holds especially true when people in need are refraining from visiting hospitals for fear of getting the virus and instances of depression and suicide have risen dramatically as a consequence of lock-down policies. You can argue fewer people might still die with heavy lock-down measures in the present but those deaths arent the same people and so what's ultimately being dicussed is whether or not it's fair to drive certain individuals to death or unnecessary physical suffering in order to save people they largrly have no relation with. And that's before discussing the small business owners who have lost their life's work due to government mandates (consumers didn't stop going out by choice after all). My point about the parties themselves was purely meant to highlight that at this stage both sides could probably be managing their policies better (regardless of value distinctions) but neither wants to make it look like the other team was correct. The irony is that neither side would be taking the same actions since for Dem states like California this would be loosening up a little while for Rep stated it would be tightening up or at least implementing financial support for at-risk individuals and their cohabitants. From here, my broader point was that it's an election year and so, regardless of if any particular state is actually beholden to a particular plan of action, anyone who breaks too far off from the party line (in a manner that risks bad optics) is going to lose clout within their party. I'm not endorsing that as the way things should be but that's the apparent state of things going by the predominantly partisan split in terms of current lock-down action.
Kiro 6y ago
In Sweden it's the opposite: the right wants lockdown and the left opposes it.
- manfredo 6y ago
  It's interesting why this isn't the case in the US, too. Conservatives in the US are much older, and the people in the at-risk age groups are disproportionately Republican. Yet they oppose the lockdown. Liberals, who are the ones being laid off and bearing the economic brunt of the lockdown while being at much lower risk to their own health support it.
  - aaron695 6y ago
    Evolutionary you can see a case for having society members of both keeping culture and changing culture at the same time. Roughly Conservatives don't like change (lockdown) Liberals like change (lockdown)
- ryandvm 6y ago
  Just goes to show you how insidious partisanship is. It's clearly not about liberty or policy principals, but rather whatever solution one party puts forward, the other has no choice but to oppose it. One of my favorite pet daydreams is trying to figure out a way of abolishing political parties altogether...
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    > Just goes to show insidious partisanship is I think this is the wrong take away. The corona debate in Sweden is pretty healthy. Not very partisan and neither side has dug their heels in.
  - Taikonerd 6y ago
    It's a nice dream, but I would settle for having more than 2 political parties. Then at least we could break out of the "are you with Us or are you with Them" dichotomy.
- 6y ago
jamesrcole 6y ago
> the left says "lockdown lockdown lockdown" of course that hasn’t really been the case over the last week or so.
- lotu 6y ago
  This is about what we value most. People on the right then to value individualism, self-sufficiency, and self-determination more. While people on the left value equity, and community more. You can see these values reflected in what each side is willing to take risks for.
matthewdgreen 6y ago
I guess I am on the “left”, and my view throughout this thing has been “do what the experts say we should, while maintaining a diversity of expert views.” This is also the vibe I get from most of my “left” friends. Moreover, Europe has largely followed its experts’ advice —- and with a few exceptions they’ve largely brought cases under control, so it’s not like the advice was bad. This “pox on both houses” post, in which you try to blame both sides equally (while also ignoring the fact that only one controls the executive branch of the Federal government), does not comport with my lived reality.
- guygurari 6y ago
  > “do what the experts say we should, while maintaining a diversity of expert views.” I don’t think this is an actual strategy. If there is a diversity of views, which experts do you listen to? Also, experts in which field? Epidemiologists have generally recommended very strict shutdowns, but they are not economists and are not experts on the economic ramifications. Some economists agree with strict lockdowns, others do not. So it’s not at all clear what “listen to the experts” means in this case.
  - eirini1 6y ago
    obviously you listen to the epidemiologist, not the economist. The economist is an expert on the economy and not on pandemics, and therefore will always give advice that is aimed at keeping up the economy and not saving people and preventing the spread of the virus. Its baffling to me that you think an economist has any kind of valid input on this matter. At best an economist could advise you on how to keep the economy afloat under the restrictions the epidemiologists has advised.
    - Snoozle 6y ago
      Economic problems come with a cost on human life. There are numerous studies and paper that show how bad being poor and unhappy are for a person's health. Why WOULDN'T we consider the economic ramifications?
KarlKemp 6y ago
"The left" doesn't say "lockdown lockdown lockdown". As a card-carrying (ANTIFA, laminated) member of the left, I consider countries like Austria, South Korea, or maybe Germany the gold standard: lockdown, yes, but continually adjusted, exchanging the most draconian measures with lesser ones when more knowledge allows more targeting, or when infection numbers sink. All those countries have now effectively exited lockdowns, at levels of single-digit daily deaths. This allows further lockdown-free reduction by amassing resources for contact tracing every single infection. Meanwhile, the US, UK, Brasil, and other countries are seeing thousands of deaths daily because they stopped maybe two or three weeks too early, and/or did it half-heatedly and/or failed to use that time to stand up alternatives to lockdown. This has won them absolutely nothing, economically, as far as I can tell: Germany is at +3% unemployment (6.6% total) while the US is on >15%. And except hoping for the weather to make a difference, they will either continue to see people dying and incurring the cost of people self-quarantine. Or they'll change course, do another round of sustained lockdowns after all, and use that time to think of an excuse for wasting three months and 100,000 lives on a thought process that took competently managed countries the better part of the last in-person meeting they had this year.
- robocat 6y ago
  Everyone has their own theory about why some countries do better than others, but we don’t yet know why: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/immunological-dark-matter-does-it-exist-coronavirus-population-immunity https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/immunological-... Does it help to jump to conclusions about the cause being lockdown variations, or weather, or sunlight, or political leanings? Anybody can cherry-pick their example countries to support their argument, but so far I can find counter-examples to their points whenever I look. I do agree lockdowns have their place (e.g. New Zealand has eliminated the disease using a lockdown, and the Asian success stories).
- robocat 6y ago
  Pollen is apparently another cause of variation: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.05.20123133v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.05.20123133v... Of course, there are multiple causes, and trying to pin variation in infection rates or deaths on a single factor would be silly. Hopefully we find the driving factors... Spring or vitamin D could explain why Italy doctors are opining that the disease is less deadly now than in March.
Press2forEN 6y ago
The US will not resume its position as a functioning democracy until both sides reconcile their differences. But when those differences are on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, perhaps we should be considering other options. At this point, with COVID and the riots, its a matter of life and death.
- umvi 6y ago
  > perhaps we should be considering other options. You mean splitting into 2 countries (blue USA and red USA)? Then whichever country fares worse economically will find a way to blame the more prosperous one, and it could mean war.
microtherion 6y ago
> We _now_ know that children are at a very low risk, people under 40 are very low risk. … at very low risk of death, but there seems to be increasing evidence that some COVID-19 survivors, including children, suffer serious, and possibly permanent health effects.
NotSammyHagar 6y ago
By your words, let's allow vastly heightened danger to those over 40. How about, we have national regulations for safe interactions, rules requiring ppe when appropriate, and available ppe. Your company has to provide it if you work together. It turns out its very very hard to provide ppe that protects people when they work closely together (see the meat packing plants, see hospitals). My families economic safety is also impacted if I'm dead or in the hospital with covid, even if they are all in your 'safe' category. Only a few 100 kids will die unnecessarily so we can open the economy?
- salmon30salmon 6y ago
  How many kids die of the flu each and every year? How many kids die of malaria? Of tuberculoses? Where were you during the last strong flu season? Get off your high horse and actually contribute ideas instead of fear.
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    In [1] it says in the last 10 years the # of deaths from the flu was 10 to 60k, avg about 30k for all americans. I'm not contributing fear. I'm talking about the facts of the situation and the fact is its a serious issue. I'm frustrated that so many people act like it won't hurt them so they dont care somehow. We have to make serious choices between variations of opening up and helping the economy vs saving people. We need to do this in an informed way and not what can ideologically help or hurt various politicians. [2] is a great article about how different cities in 1918 made various choices about socially isolating and the impact of that. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html 2. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-1...
    - salmon30salmon 6y ago
      You are creating a Sophie's Choice in your dichotomy of "opening and helping the economy vs. saving people". It isn't that black and white and I would hope you understand that. It is "saving people vs. saving people". That is the stark choice we have to make. It isn't "getting a haircut vs. killing children" or even "helping small business vs. giving old people another year or two". It is literally lives vs lives. If you are so disconnected from the reality of a majority of the country to not understand that three months without work is a life risking disaster, then you won't see the damage created by our continued draconian response to a virus which is much different than originally assumed. My point is, if you stratify death rates by age[1] you see that children are at a very, very low risk from COVID-19. This is the nuanced approach that universal lockdowns trample over. You literally employed the "think of the children" fallacy[2] (technically appeal to emotion) when you know well that children are at a low risk. I mentioned flu, TB, and malaria because they kill legions of children every year. TB killed 200,000 children in 2018[3]. Malaria kills .5 million children a year worldwide[4]. So don't tell me you care about the children. Unless of course you mean American or European children, in which case make your case but admit to yourself that you are viewing the world through a lens of personal risk, not actual risk. Either you want to save the children, in which case we need to dedicate 20% of our GDP to combating TB, malaria and flu worldwide, or you only care about local children, in which case you are okay with burning through 20% of our GDP to prevent kids from getting a disease which isn't dangerous to them. [1] https://twitter.com/daniellevitt22/status/1269454910749196289 https://twitter.com/daniellevitt22/status/126945491074919628... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children [3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosi... [4] https://ourworldindata.org/malaria#all-charts-preview https://ourworldindata.org/malaria#all-charts-preview

Animats 6y ago

"In this century, we have become accustomed to heated political debates that somehow avoid contact with reality." Which is a big problem. It keeps the US from actually doing anything. (Then again, that may be a good thing. The current administration does not do much follow-through, so most of the weirder ideas stay rhetoric and don't get implemented. Compare the rise of the Nazi party. Much of the stuff they planned to build in the early years was actually built, from the "People's Radio" to the autobahns. With the organization in place to build, arming up for WWII could be done effectively. If the Nazis were all hype, they would not have been able to do much beyond their borders.)

m0zg 6y ago
Fascism is private enterprise under total government control. Of course it'll be very effective at getting things done, both the autobahns and the gas chambers. Communism is pretty effective too. It's government-owned enterprise under total government control. The only thing that really changes is who owns the means of production. And, well, under Communism you're de-facto a slave to the state as well. Not having a job was illegal in e.g. the Soviet Union. The fact that US political establishment is unable to enact quick change is kind of by design, IMO. While they are at each other's throats, they don't have the time to attack We The People. That, in my book, is a good thing.
- TomMarius 6y ago
  Communism is known for economically collapsing on itself, that's not very efficient or productive.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    Yes. But it takes decades for it to do so, and in the initial stages it can appear to be quite effective. And as any communist will tell you, "it's not really communism" if it collapses on itself, killing tens of millions of people in the process.
    - growlist 6y ago

drewcoo 6y ago

"You’re probably doing it right now — skimming quickly to the end of this piece to see if I’m criticizing you or only those other people who behave so irresponsibly." An article decrying prejudice gives us its own demonstration of it. Does that somehow make the case better?

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
An article decrying prejudice lets the reader give their own demonstration of it.

pjc50 6y ago

The people who said that lockdown needed to be limited in length because people couldn't take it for long were right. Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later: hence the UK's delayed lockdown and therefore highest death toll in Europe. The people advocating for "herd immunity" never addressed the death rate; a death rate of even 0.5% in the UK would be three hundred thousand people, plus more with lingering side effects. As it is, we've confirmed 287k infected for 40k deaths, or 0.5% of the country infected. A very, very long way from immunity.

xamuel 6y ago
What does that 287k include? Presumably just positive test cases? Probably there are far more undiagnosed infections that didn't require hospitalization. If the IFR was really 14% like your numbers suggest, we would see politicians putting themselves in submarines, lol. That's almost halfway to black plague IFR. The CDC's recent data suggests an actual IFR of well below 1%.
mdemare 6y ago
If you trust the death rate, and the number of deaths reported are both accurate, the UK is at 40k/300k = 13%. A very long way from immunity, but not 0.5%.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  300k confirmed cases / 59M population = .5% of the country having had the virus. Of course, this is inaccurate, since many more have had it and not gotten confirmed positive tests.
im3w1l 6y ago
> Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later. I think you misunderstand the reasoning. If you want to wipe a disease out you lockdown as soon as you can. If you want to flatten the curve, you lockdown just before the peak, so as to prevent it. Or if you are ok with flattening the curve for a longer time, you lock down just before you reach capacity.

JPKab 6y ago

Question: Has anyone here changed their mind about COVID19 in a major way as the data has become more complete? Just wondering. I have sensed in myself tribalistic tendencies of not changing my mind when the data changes. I'm trying hard to look at myself and recognize it and experiment with different thoughts. I find myself bouncing between thinking we have overreacted to then thinking that my perception of an overreaction is paradoxical because we did lock down and have contained the virus' damage to some extent. I'm trying hard to be super open-minded about the data, and recognizing that I'm just a simple primate whose brain doesn't want to expend energy and resorts to bias to conserve it.

deadwing0 6y ago
I'm in the same boat as you. It's exhausting to try to avoid these tendencies. How comfy it must be to give in and accept them with no further thought. The most frustrating times are those moments when I fear I'll never root out all of my biases or tribalistic tendencies and become an enlightened human. But onward and upward, eh?
marcell 6y ago
I was very worried about Covid-19 when the initial data and charts were coming out of China and Italy. It seemed like it was going to quickly overwhelm all the hospitals in America. Since then, I've become much less scared about the impact on me personally, and more skeptical about the need for most (not all) lockdown measures. This was based on my reading of antibody prevalence data, and data on death rates separated out by age and risk factors. At this point, I think Sweden strategy makes the most sense. It is sustainable for many months, unlike more extreme lockdowns. Additionally, I think more strict lockdowns on older population makes sense. For 90%+ of the population, I think we can lift most/all lockdown measures today.
beervirus 6y ago
We flattened the curve for a little while. It's about to get unflattened.
jerf 6y ago
My opinion of its severity has dropped and continues to drop quite significantly. I bought a lot of supplies in late January because I saw videos coming out of China of people dropping in the streets and them welding entire buildings shut with people in them, stuff I'd never seen before. I still don't fully know how to reconcile that with what happened. That is, more than just saying "oh, those videos were fake"... well, why? Who made them? Why were they made? I dunno. Even ignoring those it still looks an awful lot like China covered an awful lot of stuff up. Regardless, whatever made it overseas didn't seem to do that. Evidence at this point seems to suggest a lot more people got it than we realized, without them even realizing it [1]. Any number of possible reasons. Unfortunately, between the tribalism, the outright coverups by the Chinese, and the "errors" if you are generous and "lies" if you are not in our own media, I don't expect to ever have a good grasp of what actually happened. (Even so, purchasing supplies was the right move. Our local stores never really quite "ran out" of stuff for extended periods of time, but I was reasonably well prepared for what was certainly some supply chain disruption, and had a good practice run for some other real disaster in the future. Got a better idea of how to stock the food up in more effective ratios now.) [1]: Possibly concerning, and I hope some follow-up study is done on this. Estimates of modern spread rates of disease based on COVID-19 could end up being really wrong if we underestimate how far it spread.

throwawaysea 6y ago

Not to sound alarmist, but recent events have felt like the early warning of a pending collapse of our country. When I saw healthcare workers and officials abandon logic, reason, and evidence to put their weight behind justifying recent mass protests, I really lost a lot of faith. These protests obviously will result in thousands more deaths (much larger in number than unjust police-involved deaths). This is no longer about losing faith in institutions alone, but really about losing faith in fellow citizens who are willfully burying their heads in the sand and willfully acting in bad faith nearly all the time. Of course, there is plenty of blame to hand out for all sides, going back well before recent events and well before COVID-19 itself. My question for HN: what has happened to past societies when they reach this point, where emotions and tribalism cause all sides to hate each other, to talk past each other, to hold each other to unequal standards, to use every last loophole/technicality to win through bad faith means, etc.? Have any such societies de-escalated from there to a point of stability again?

Johnjonjoan 6y ago
I agree the times are worrying. What's keeping me reassured is that the radical protest elements are very small with regard to our countries population's. There are far more people not expressing their opinion and it gives me hope that cool heads are silently prevailing. Edit: typo
sacred_numbers 6y ago
I think that you are making the same mistake that you are accusing healthcare workers and officials of making. You are assuming that these protests will "obviously" result in thousands more deaths because it feels that way to you. I believe that that's pretty unlikely, though, since there are probably fewer than a million protestors across the country. Many of the protestors are wearing masks and the protests being outside reduces the risk of spreading the disease. There will certainly be some spread due to the protests, but probably not nearly as much as at grocery stores or churches. You are also assuming that this is just about unjust police-involved deaths; it is not. It is about the many millions of negative interactions with the police and justice system that perpetuate poverty (police lying under oath, egregious sentences for non-violent crimes, etc.) I don't think it's a bad faith argument to say that correcting these injustices is more important than maintaining a totally strict quarantine. The reason both sides talk past each other is because they have different values and different assumptions. Based on your post your first priority is preventing deaths and your assumption is that these protests will cause more deaths than they prevent. My first priority is living in a fair world, with preventing deaths being a close second. My assumption is that the protests will not cause a large number of excess deaths, but that they do have a high chance of moving our justice system closer towards real justice. I also am making the assumption that living in a fair and just society will increase overall health outcomes over the long term. I believe that most (but definitely not all) people don't argue in bad faith, they just have different values and make different assumptions. There's not much that can be done about having different values, but better data can help every side have more similar assumptions, which should help opinions to converge somewhat.

reddog 6y ago

Whenever science and politics intersect, science loses. If science is studying something apolitical like the metabolism of water bear or a quasar burst from a distant galaxy it’s fine. Throw politics in the mix and the waters become muddied very quickly when funding and reputational concerns motivate and corrupt a delicate process. Politics is like Lennie who wants to pet the rabbits. Science is like the rabbits.

colpabar 6y ago
That is pretty unfair to Lennie; at least his intentions were good.
mindfulhack 6y ago
I am honestly and hearteningly surprised to even hear these sentiments from someone else here, which I have now observed for years. It's one reason why I love HN. I'm not in the science field, but I absolutely am a student of human nature (and mindfulness). It's unbelievable how much the mechanism of science is dirtied, distorted, and abused by our emotional pride, greed, tribalism, fear, and all other aspects of human nature, which show that - for all our intelligence - we humans are wired for survival, and only wired for truth if and when it helps that survival. If truth comes at odds with it, we will lie - even if to ourselves, and at very deep subconscious levels - as much as we need to. Rationalisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology) How this biological reality plays out is complex. It's not just in our lizard brain, but the entire realm of our secondary limbic brain, with its 'tribal' swirl of social emotions and resulting behaviours. 'Survival' means a great of things, not just literal survival right in front of you right now. It's a powerful and primary goal coursing through our blood and all behaviour at the deepest and most subtle levels. We would do well to educate about this fact, and practice mindfulness to be able to see it in ourselves.

dropit_sphere 6y ago

"Tribalism" didn't come for pandemic science. Tribalists did. Every individual has the power to behave forthrightly, with epistemic hygiene. You can't shove the responsibility to do that onto a nebulous interstitial emergent effect.

dekhn 6y ago

There are times I'm glad I left health science/biology/medicine as a field and it's interesting to watch people slowly realize just how badly structured the entire human health field is organized (from academic research to research hospitals to profit hospitals to world health organizations) and how all the incentives are messed up. The closer you get in biology to human health, the more ego, tribalism, and assholery you have to deal with. Something about "saving lives" really brings out the intelligent jerks and the sharks. As a contrast, I enjoy working in computing so much more. The experiments people run are replicable, the code compiles, and people (in general) are far less egotistical and arrogant (still plenty of sharks, though). I've watched enough major paradigm shifts in my own fields to know that embracing humility, admitting your own ignorance, and being open to new ideas is key to the furtherment of science.

umvi 6y ago
Dumb question, but what's a "shark" in this context?
- dekhn 6y ago
  Sharks are opportunists- for example people who wait for somebody else to do all the hard work, then come in, take over and get all the credit. It's not a really strong analogy but I've heard many people in biotech referring to sharks in that context.
Avicebron 6y ago
I will second this as I am currently working in the biotech field. The amount of short sighted thinking and opportunism from small start ups to the most massive CMO's in the world is staggering. My take is that the whole field is extremely underfunded and that breeds levels of competition and short term profit seeking, but that's probably a biased opinion. I'm sure if the field had the level of VC support that traditional software/computing gets we would be making huge strides with our humanity.
- DennisAleynikov 6y ago

xiphias2 6y ago

,,people should not be walking around with masks'' What Fauci was telling to people is not science. I was wearing my N100 masks when I had the chance, because I hadn't seen any evidence of masks making the coronavirus more infectious, but much evidence to the contrary. The whole anti-mask propaganda made it hard to me to trust scientific leaders, and even some papers at this point.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lotu 6y ago
The anti-mask “propaganda” was obviously an only partially successful effort to preserve the supply of masks for first responders. If the CDC/WHO and came out and said everyone wear masks in the beginning of march the supply would have spiked harder and faster than it already did, likely resulting in more health care worker fatalities.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  Successful or not they lied to the public openly about the benefits of wearing masks. Not only does this destroy whatever credibility they had with the public, but it also shields government and health officials who failed to stockpile enough masks for inevitable outbreaks and offshored our medical productive capacity to China from accountability (making it more likely we will face the same shortages during the next, inevitable crisis).

danharaj 6y ago

Just a quiet reminder that accounting for other peoples' actions with "partisanship" and "tribalism" is just a very easy way to stop thinking about their reasoning or motivation. If someone explained your behavior away as unthinking loyalty or allegiance you would be offended-- and rightfully so. P.S. This article is not an apolitical analysis of politics, this journal is not an apolitical scientific journal.

manfredo 6y ago
Evaluating whether an opinion is partisan is not ignoring their reasoning or motivation. Quite the opposite, it is evaluating their reasoning and motivation and determining the extent to which that reasoning and motivating is influence and determined by partisanship or group affiliation. Expert opinion is supposed to be formed by empirical evidence and science. Not political affiliation or personal opinion. For instance, an expert opinion would be, "protests of X size stand to increase rates of infection by Y%" Whether or not a certain protest justified in accepting that increase of infection is a question of personal values not medical science. Is protesting against police brutality worth the increased rate of infection? Is protesting against the lockdowns and subsequent mass unemployment worth the increased rates of infection? It's fine to form your own answers to these questions. But these are questions determined by values, not science. Expert opinions have no business trying to answer these. But medical experts are making the latter statement, and are doing so in a way that comes off as extremely partisan: > We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives. How on Earth are we supposed to trust these experts' advice on when to lift lockdowns when they openly state that resistance to lockdowns is rooted in white nationalism? Let alone the double standard in supporting some protests while opposing others. As much as I am inclined to defer to experts, messages like these makes it extremely hard for me to do so here. When medical experts are making statements like these, it is highly indicative of reasoning informed by partisanship rather than science.
- 6y ago

eirini1 6y ago

I find it really hilarious that right-wingers (sorry, I mean "moderate centrists") really obviously veer towards very asinine "both sides fucked up" style of rhetoric. Its been happening since forever but I realized ever since Charlottesville and Trumps "both sides" tweet that this is a consistent pattern.

pfkurtz 6y ago

There's almost certainly a lot of safe opening up we could do. What would make it dramatically safer would be pro-social behavior from people on the right. The protesters are all wearing masks and doing their best to maintain social distance outside of the actions. They calculate that it is worth the risk. Time will tell, but the calculus isn't merely do the protests increase the spread? but also will they achieve political goals that have a large bearing on public health, specifically the health of people whom the US Coronavirus response is already systematically failing (black people, whose lives matter).

jtbayly 6y ago
> The protesters are all wearing masks Really? I keep seeing people saying this. It’s laughably false. Here is the governor of MI at a protest that breaks her own rules about social distancing and protests, directly between two men without masks. (Just one high profile example.) https://mobile.twitter.com/TPCarney/status/1268902820410843136 https://mobile.twitter.com/TPCarney/status/12689028204108431...
- pfkurtz 6y ago
  Been to a major one, and a very, very high percentage of the people there wore masks, enough that it was consistently odd to see people without them. Also people trying as much as possible to keep a little space between each other. Who wasn't wearing masks, consistently? White male police (the National Guard was all masked). Doubt me if you want. Obviously a rhetorical "all" and very easy to find photographic counterexamples. But certainly most.
  - pfkurtz 6y ago
    Also there were many people distributing masks to the maskless, and people whose sole mission was to pump hand sanitizer onto people's hands. The people in the crowd care about the virus and for the most part when right back to social distancing after leaving the protest.

guscost 6y ago

Science as you know it is dead: https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/ https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/

vorpalhex 6y ago
That was a really poor read. Anxiety from lockdown is going to kill more people than coronavirus? Like, I'm not exactly an ardent supporter of lockdown but it's clear we've saved many lives by keeping hospitalizations minimal. Even if that estimate is below what initial models suggested, it's inept to suggest it was useless. Likewise you fail to actually link to any stats to support claims about increased suicide rates or deaths from heart attacks, while linking to a 404 as a source for New York state supposedly hiding pushing covid cases into nursing homes. Science has issues but this is trending towards baseless tabloid journalism instead of a serious introspection of methodological flaws.
- guscost 6y ago
  You skipped over a lot, and we will see about the rest. I can’t prove most of it right now, but it is what I think. In fairness it is perhaps way too cynical for your taste, so if you prefer a serious introspection, try this: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/science-without-validation-in-a-world-without-meaning/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/science-without-v...
- DanBC 6y ago
  > Likewise you fail to actually link to any stats to support claims about increased suicide rates Currently there are about 40,000 deaths by suicide in the US each year. We know that deaths by suicide will increase because of economic downturn. We have some understanding of this after 2007 and similar. No-one working in suicide prevention thinks we'll come anywhere near doubling the 40,000 number.

josephby 6y ago

“Yuval Levin is director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, editor of National Affairs, and a senior editor of The New Atlantis.” Useful context before the click.

luord 6y ago

I try in general to steer clear and not to comment on anything regarding both the pandemic and the protests, but I gotta say that that open letter is the most bizarre take I've read on both issues. Or it at least gives even Trump's most outrageous tweets a run for their money.

PeterStuer 6y ago

"don't wrestle with a pig. You'll both get dirty but the pig will love it" Somehow the lowest kind of politics, on all sides, manage to drag us all down to their level. A culture war is just like any other war in the sense that on the battlefields nobody wins, and both sides lose. As a child growing up late last century, I always wondered how prosperous progressing culture's could have collectively devolved into the dark ages. I saw the seeds of the unraveling start in the 80's, but like any exponential process, it took some time to become a clear vector. I am not sure this is a preventable or correctable evolution at this point, as the devolution forces are enshrined within the system itself, leaving only room for a collapse at the meta level. I may be wrong. I truly hope I am.

bagacrap 6y ago

Great article, especially the bit about the healthcare professionals' statement on BLM protests. However this article (and the public at large) fail to distinguish between what doctors practice, and science. Medical doctors are about as far from scientists as you can get: they're highly trained robots. They don't perform science; at best they write up a case study. Jumping to conclusions from insufficient data is what they consider "expertise".