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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 triba

• 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.
• rayiner 6y ago
  I was pro lockdown at the beginning. Now, I’m convinced that we could have gotten most of the benefits with a substantially less invasive approach, especially outside the mega cities.
  • DanBC 6y ago
    Or a shorter harder lockdown earlier on, combined with rigorous test and trace programme.
    • ska 6y ago
      I think it's pretty clear the best use of a lock down is to allow time to develop and improve the infrastructure and protocols to do this properly. But if you lack the competence or political/social will to do this properly, all you really have in the face of rising (or rising again) case numbers rolling lock downs and wait in hope of a vaccine. Or failing to manage it spectacularly, that also seems to be an option.
    • salmon30salmon 6y ago
      Testing/tracing is very, very hard in the United States. In my own community, we have immigrants who are afraid to talk to the government at any level due to fears of deportation. You have the libertarians who refuse all but the most basic interactions with anything government. You have some other specific immigrant communities who are here legally, but have a deep, deep distrust of government due to abuses back in their original countries. Add in a language divide and a population strewn across many different jurisdictions (several major cities cross state/county lines) and it is just a mess.
• matthewdgreen 6y ago
  I don’t know what you mean by “change your mind”. I’ve come to understand that it is much less infectious outdoors, that it is more responsive to moderate social distancing than we though initially (possibly due to super spreading?) and that masks appear to work well. This has made me more relaxed about many activities. I continue to believe that it’s an extremely infectious RNA virus that will spread exponentially in situations where people are in close proximity or indoors without social distancing and masks. I think New Orleans, NYC, Lombardy, Wuhan, and the ongoing situation in Brazil are more than enough evidence for that. I also think the success of Europe and China in using social distancing plus test/trace/isolate to tamp down their epidemics is pretty solid evidence that this was the right strategy, and I’m incredibly disappointed that America was incapable of executing on it. The question I think you’re asking is: given that we failed to take the right advice, have I given up on trying to make us take it? And the answer is: basically yes. I think we’ll have to let nature take its course and protect ourselves now.
  • JPKab 6y ago
    Specifically, I was asking if you had informed opinions on the virus that are now significantly different than the informed opinions you hold now?
    • tunesmith 6y ago
      Echoing GP - the additional data on how contagious it appears it isn't in circumstances of brief, well-ventilated contact, helps me feel safer outdoors. Over the last two weeks, we've had or visited two different outdoor get-togethers with friends, sitting and chatting in the lawn 6-10 years apart, and feeling like it was no big deal to step forward briefly to (for instance) hold out a dish of cupcakes for your friend to grab one. I definitely wouldn't have felt comfortable with that a month ago. And I still don't want to do that more than once a week or so.
• ouid 6y ago
  Say we believe that the number of people that will be killed be coronavirus is 10^x where x is a gaussian random variable with mean 5 and standard deviation 1. What is the expected number of people killed? In the case we believe to be most common, the expected number of people to be killed is 100,000. However, the the mean value of this distribution is 1.4 million, https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=X%7EGaussian%285%2C1%29%2C+EV%5B10%5EX%5D https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=X%7EGaussian%285%2C1%2... This is a the very strongest mathematical case for pessimism that I can give. Any argument that "we should have been less cautious" is automatically bullshit.
• mdemare 6y ago
  I'm surprised at how little effect even a strict lockdown (western style - Wuhan style was much more effective) had compared with the Swedish approach. I did not expect cases to rise so slowly and even plateau with the policy that Sweden chose, and I did not expect cases and deaths to decrease so slowly with the policies that Spain, France, Belgium and Italy chose. I now suspect that ending lockdowns, temporarily banning just a couple of high risk activities such as conferences and clubbing, universal mask wearing, and extra protection in hospitals and long term care homes might be enough, at least until October (in the Northern hemisphere).
• nostrademons 6y ago
  Yes, but early. I changed my mind from thinking it was "just the flu - I'm going to get it, but probably won't be able to tell it apart from a cold" to "this is probably a big deal that I really don't want to get" in late February. Haven't found any information to make me change my mind since, even as public opinion has yo-yo'd. The critical information for me was data on hospitalization rates, along with some math on hospital capacity and exponential infection rates. Before, I'd looked at the death rate for 20-40 year olds of ~0.1% and figured it wasn't a big problem for me. Then I realized that the 20% "severe" cases out of Wuhan was actually the percentage that required hospitalization, not just the percentage that develop pneumonia (which is ~60% of symptomatic cases, ~30% of infections). And it doesn't vary by age range nearly as much as the death rate does: while only about 0.1% of 20-40 year olds die from COVID-19, 3-5% end up in the hospital, only about 4x lower than the ~20% of 65+ seniors that do. (These numbers already account for asymptomatic infections, which are about 50% of cases. The Wuhan numbers didn't, so halve them.) And the average hospital stay lasts for 3-5 weeks. With the doubling time of unchecked COVID-19, we could potentially end up with 150M infections during the time period of one hospitalization. 10% hospitalization rate over the whole population, and that's 15M hospitalizations, well over the number of hospital beds in the U.S. If you gather data from a wide variety of sources instead of grabbing the latest headline, most of the relevant data hasn't actually changed all that much since February. Back then we were saying a roughly 2% CFR; now best estimates are a 1-1.25% IFR, which is completely consistent with that when you add the new information that 50% of infections are asymptomatic, which was discovered in late February. IFRs in situations where the whole population was tested (eg. South Korea, the Diamond Princess) were about 0.7-1.5%, depending on the age of the population. The age curve data from Wuhan has held up remarkably well across Europe and NYC. R0 and doubling time was pretty consistent across most temperate northern climates before the lockdowns (1.5-2.5 days in most of Europe and the U.S.). The progression of the virus when unchecked was also quite consistent between Wuhan, Italy, and NYC, as was the effect of the lockdown.
  • marcell 6y ago
    > now best estimates are a 1-1.25% IFR Just FYI, the CDC gives their best estimate at 0.26% IFR. (source: https://reason.com/2020/05/24/the-cdcs-new-best-estimate-implies-a-covid-19-infection-fatality-rate-below-0-3/ https://reason.com/2020/05/24/the-cdcs-new-best-estimate-imp... , note that 0.26% adds in the estimated 35% asymptomatic population)
• tunesmith 6y ago
  I was less worried about it at the beginning - I think I had a decent understanding of how fatal it was, but underestimated how contagious it was. I think I came around to a mental model of how to react fairly early on, though. The basic model was stay at home until either a vaccine arrives or until we have anti-viral treatments that reduce severity and improve outcomes. Neither has happened, so I'm in the same boat. It's great - great - that the lockdown has reduced occurrences of it so much. And I recognize the argument that if we've tamped down on it enough, that it's safer to go out there. But... an x% less likelihood of catching it doesn't mean it will be x% less severe when you do catch it. I think that a lot of non-technical people are confused on that point. And finally, even if we did have really good contact-tracing... that doesn't help you, it only helps your friends. There are still those two days when people are contagious without being symptomatic. That's just still reality, I don't see a way around that. A healthy people can die from interacting with a seemingly healthy person. Besides, what happened to contact tracing anyway? I thought we were going to have this snazzy contact-tracing tech on our phones and watches by now, courtesy of Apple and Google. I'm sure our contact-tracing is still lousy overall. It's great we have more tests, but we're not at the point where we would have been able to stop February in its tracks. So overall... yeah, I've changed my minds in ways, like recognizing that the probabilities are more on my side than they used to be, so I feel a little safer if I have to go to the doctor/dentist for non-COVID reasons. But other than that, it's still a super-contagious virus that has a decent chance of really screwing up your life even if you aren't 80+, so... I'm still in the "stay at home until treatment/virus improves" camp.
  • JPKab 6y ago
    "The basic model was stay at home until either a vaccine arrives or until we have anti-viral treatments that reduce severity and improve outcomes." Something key about this statement: This was not what the public was initially told. We were told that the lockdown was to flatten the curve while testing was ramped up and to ensure that the rate of infection was slowed to prevent a spike from causing avoidable deaths due to an overwhelmed health care system. It wasn't sold as reduction of the area under the curve. The narrative of staying locked down until a vaccine was developed didn't happen until after the lockdown became a political football. That was a ridiculous notion, based on the typical time to develop vaccines, especially since a coronavirus vaccine has never been developed before for SARs or any others.
• umvi 6y ago
  I was skeptical of covid-19 from the start (check my comment history) even though the data appeared to be against me initially. My "gut" told me we were overreacting though, and a lot of things didn't make sense (like the aircraft carrier full of asymptomatic sailors). I was browbeaten and I conformed, assuming the data would eventually prove me wrong. I dutifully wore a mask and social distanced and didn't let my kids go to the park to be a "team player" but now I'm kind of angry that I'm slowly being vindicated. Not because I was "correct" in my predictions, but because of how sure the zealots were of their position while browbeating me into conformance. I'll never get an apology, of course. It'll just be the same old "not my fault, I formed my view based on the expert guidance of the time, what else could I have done?" Strong opinions, loosely held, indeed.
• thu2111 6y ago
  At the start (by which I mean late Feb/early March as I wasn't paying attention before then), I believed it all. I was worried about the ventilator crisis and wanted to find ways to help manufacture or mass create them. Towards the end of March I started to realise that I kept reading about the supposed impending ventilator shortage, but it should have happened already and yet we didn't seem to be ever quite running out. Then a newspaper published some article about the history of Professor Ferguson and his failed foot-and-mouth disease models. I went and read some papers about the failings of epidemiology and was really shocked at how divergent the views were on the utility of these models. Then in the comments on that story, I found someone linking to https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ which just had so much data, so many links to raw sources and interviews with skeptical doctors. At that point I started to realise that many of the comments I was reading here on HN appeared to be mixing up predictions with reality; I kept reading people here talk about how Italy was experiencing mass deaths and hospital overflow yet on the SWPRS site there were links to actual articles in Italian where hospital officials said they hadn't yet run out of capacity, they weren't yet turning people away, they were just worried it might start soon. And this kept happening. Moreover my attempts to point this out kept getting voted down, so that's when I realised it was going ideological. A lot of people were desperate to correct "misinformation" and were just getting angry at anything that contradicted the official narrative. There was no rational reason to vote down posts saying "actually the situation is better than you think" yet it was happening. So I guess that's the point I became a serious lockdown skeptic. The disparity between what people consuming regular media believed vs what the raw (often non English) data was saying just became too wide. And after that I believe everyone has been catching up, especially now with this "protests against health policies are dangerous but protests against racism aren't" nonsense.
• Nasrudith 6y ago
  I at first thought exponential was an overhyping - and that it would self limit far more. It quickly became clear that the long incubation period and infectivity made it very not self limiting, especially with the absolute hash made of the response as ass-covering was preferred over getting real data. Now we are largely in an awkward halting problem situation of not knowing if it will trigger a second wave and if the second wave will level off, form an endemic stable background rate, or explode again.