7 ms·

The virus is indeed pretty benign compared to many other disasters. Very benign when you take into account the various statistical distortions e.g. most COVID d

The virus is indeed pretty benign compared to many other disasters. Very benign when you take into account the various statistical distortions e.g. most COVID deaths being more like "tested positive at time of death" rather than actual additive deaths. But the over-reaction to it is on an ahistoric scale. It's quite cataclysmic. You've had people pulling their own teeth out with pliers because the dentists were all closed [1], you have people being locked in their homes for weeks or even months without being able to go outside [2], people being welded inside buildings [3], you have half of all restaurants on Yelp permanently closing [4], you have the elderly being abandoned in care homes to die [5] [6] So whilst I agree diseases have happened before, the kind of global end-of-days mentality we're seeing here is extremely rare. It's not driven by the actual facts of the virus, there's something else at work. [1] https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/people-are-pulling-their-own-teeth-with-dentists-on-lockdown/ https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/people-are-pulling-their-own-t... [2] https://www.abc.es/sociedad/abci-hombre-permanece-aislado-italia-tras-17-test-positivos-covid-19-202007231415_noticia.html https://www.abc.es/sociedad/abci-hombre-permanece-aislado-it... [3] https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/coronavirus-residents-welded-inside-their-own-home/ https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/coronavirus-residents-welded-insi... [4] https://mashable.com/article/yelp-restaurants-temporary-permanent-closures/?europe=true https://mashable.com/article/yelp-restaurants-temporary-perm... [5] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023 [6] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/canada-care-homes-military-report-coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/canada-care-ho...

flunhat 6y ago
My understanding is that it’s the other way around — both cases and deaths are being undercounted substantially. And testing capacity has been intentionally kneecapped by the govt (if you test fewer, you’ll find fewer cases, which looks good). All told, COVID looks to be about 10x deadlier than the flu. Which is still low, but not trivial given how quickly it spreads.
- thu2111 6y ago
  I don't think your understanding is up to date. 10x deadlier than the flu would require it to have an IFR of 1%. Even the US CDC, which has been over-exaggerating the dangers from the start, peg it at much less than that, more like 0.3% and many studies are putting it even lower, like between 0.08% (low end, Denmark) and 0.36% (Germany, Heisenberg). But those IFRs are also calculated using the standard definition of a COVID death - someone who died, and was testing positive. If you look at Italy, early on they realised there was a conflation going on, and so they did proper studies of some sample of COVID deaths to see why they really died. They concluded only 4% of the patients had no other medical conditions, and I recall reading (but don't have a link right now) that they concluded about 12% had really died of COVID. The rest all just happened to be infected when they died of something else, which would make sense given the first stat. So you can cut a digit off most of the reported death rates. All suggestions of undercounting are based on the assumption that all excess death is caused by COVID, and nothing else, even though in some countries e.g. the UK many excess death certificates don't even mention COVID, and in other countries like Germany there basically isn't any excess death: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Society/population_death.html https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Socie...
  - malyk 6y ago
    If you look at the CDC data on Excess Deaths[1] then you can see that COVID and the response to COVID has been responsible for a significant number of excess deaths in every week since the week ending on 3/28. So, maybe not 10x deadlier, but certainly way deadlier in total count of deaths. 1 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
    - thu2111 6y ago
      COVID and the response to it - maybe yes. But remember that many countries have seen no excess death at all, their graphs are totally flat. Just look at EuroMOMO. People have tried to figure out why. It's supposedly the same virus everywhere. It's not related to hospital overload or healthcare availability because nowhere ran out of that, despite the initial scares. It might be care home related, as that's where 80% of the deaths are (reported to be). It might be related to decisions to flush hospitals to make way for a modelled surge that never happened. But then that'd fall squarely into the response bucket. The US data is hard to interpret because it only goes back to 2017. I can't seem to find longer term data. Do you know where to find it? In the UK - one of the 'worst hit' in the world supposedly (but those stats were found to be wrong) - to find similar excess deaths you have to go back to 1998/1999/2000. Is this bad? Well, "once in 20 year excess death spike" may seem bad. But events that happen once every 20 years aren't especially rare. Back then nobody panicked. Nobody talks about the terrible winters of 1999 when they lost so many loved ones. So it's really important to be able to put these excess death stats in perspective, otherwise you just see a bump in a graph and are told "this is really bad".
CathedralBorrow 6y ago
> It's not driven by the actual facts of the virus, there's something else at work. What do you think that might be?
- thu2111 6y ago
  See my comment below, about page 12 of this poll: https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_opinion_tracker_wave-4.pdf https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-... I only just learned about it but if this poll is accurate, it explains a lot.
jastiling 6y ago
Yeah, so benign that hospitals are being overrun... oh, but that must be made up. Come on and open your eyes.
- thu2111 6y ago
  It is common for individual hospitals to occasionally need to load balance to other nearby hospitals. That is nothing unusual. Overload in an entire region would be, but as far as I know that has never happened anywhere. However, you can be forgiven for thinking that. Bad news sells newspapers, which seems to have led to a lot of very deceptive reporting. For example, headlines that literally say: "All the hospitals are full: in Houston overwhelmed hospitals leave COVID-19 patients waiting in ER" but at the time of publishing there were 2500 free beds in the Texas Medical Center system in Houston. So it wasn't possible that all the hospitals were full.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Are the refrigerated trucks being loaded with bodies that won't fit in the morgue just for show as well?
    - thu2111 6y ago
      No, but that's inevitable if funeral workers refuse to handle body's due to lack of ppe, which was the underlying cause for the temporary morgues in most places (not sure about New York)
mindslight 6y ago
> The virus is indeed pretty benign compared to many other disasters I agree with you here - it's not like it kills a third of people who get infected. Also, the virus is not very contagious - all it really takes is wearing masks and distancing for the spread to diminish. But most everyone has rationally judged that a 1% chance of death is too high, never mind the larger chance of life long complications. So anyone who can reduce their own exposure finds it prudent to do so. Meanwhile, and this ties into "something else at work", we've got corrupt leaders and corrupt mass media that have done little to address the public health crisis, and everything possible to inflame and politicize the issue. And so our society is still stuck at essentially the same position we began at in March. Either we're going to have to buckle down and actually work together to control this thing, or we're going to be stuck with this virus (and therefore a broken economy) until a vaccine is created.
- thu2111 6y ago
  The chance of death is not 1%. Here are a couple of reviews: https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/ https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v3 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v... Across 32 different locations, the median infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.24%). Most studies were done in pandemic epicenters with high death tolls. But recall that these IFRs are calculated with a very questionable definition of COVID death (see my other comment). Real IFRs are much lower when you take into account that many people who have "died of COVID" have in reality died of something else, even perhaps the supposedly no longer existent condition of old age. This is how you can have countries that have hundreds of thousands of cases yet totally flat excess death charts. I suspect these kind of inflated figures are partly what's driving people's over-reactions (look at how my post was voted). And there's some evidence for this. Today there was a poll released with truly shocking results. page 12 here: https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_opinion_tracker_wave-4.pdf https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-... In polls Brits are estimating that 7% of the population has died of COVID. In other words they think it's 100x more deadly than current government stats claim, and those stats are themselves currently suspended due to rampant over-counting. But Americans are even further out. They believe the death rate is 225x higher than it really is. They also believe the virus is 20x more prevalent than in reality. Top marks go to Germans who believe 300x more people have died of COVID than is really true.
ac29 6y ago
> you have half of all restaurants on Yelp permanently closing You misunderstood the data. Half of all restaurants that temporarily closed went on to permanently close. >98% of restaurants stayed open, less than 1% permanently closed.

flunhat 6y ago

My understanding is that it’s the other way around — both cases and deaths are being undercounted substantially. And testing capacity has been intentionally kneecapped by the govt (if you test fewer, you’ll find fewer cases, which looks good). All told, COVID looks to be about 10x deadlier than the flu. Which is still low, but not trivial given how quickly it spreads.

thu2111 6y ago
I don't think your understanding is up to date. 10x deadlier than the flu would require it to have an IFR of 1%. Even the US CDC, which has been over-exaggerating the dangers from the start, peg it at much less than that, more like 0.3% and many studies are putting it even lower, like between 0.08% (low end, Denmark) and 0.36% (Germany, Heisenberg). But those IFRs are also calculated using the standard definition of a COVID death - someone who died, and was testing positive. If you look at Italy, early on they realised there was a conflation going on, and so they did proper studies of some sample of COVID deaths to see why they really died. They concluded only 4% of the patients had no other medical conditions, and I recall reading (but don't have a link right now) that they concluded about 12% had really died of COVID. The rest all just happened to be infected when they died of something else, which would make sense given the first stat. So you can cut a digit off most of the reported death rates. All suggestions of undercounting are based on the assumption that all excess death is caused by COVID, and nothing else, even though in some countries e.g. the UK many excess death certificates don't even mention COVID, and in other countries like Germany there basically isn't any excess death: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Society/population_death.html https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Socie...
- malyk 6y ago
  If you look at the CDC data on Excess Deaths[1] then you can see that COVID and the response to COVID has been responsible for a significant number of excess deaths in every week since the week ending on 3/28. So, maybe not 10x deadlier, but certainly way deadlier in total count of deaths. 1 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
  - thu2111 6y ago
    COVID and the response to it - maybe yes. But remember that many countries have seen no excess death at all, their graphs are totally flat. Just look at EuroMOMO. People have tried to figure out why. It's supposedly the same virus everywhere. It's not related to hospital overload or healthcare availability because nowhere ran out of that, despite the initial scares. It might be care home related, as that's where 80% of the deaths are (reported to be). It might be related to decisions to flush hospitals to make way for a modelled surge that never happened. But then that'd fall squarely into the response bucket. The US data is hard to interpret because it only goes back to 2017. I can't seem to find longer term data. Do you know where to find it? In the UK - one of the 'worst hit' in the world supposedly (but those stats were found to be wrong) - to find similar excess deaths you have to go back to 1998/1999/2000. Is this bad? Well, "once in 20 year excess death spike" may seem bad. But events that happen once every 20 years aren't especially rare. Back then nobody panicked. Nobody talks about the terrible winters of 1999 when they lost so many loved ones. So it's really important to be able to put these excess death stats in perspective, otherwise you just see a bump in a graph and are told "this is really bad".

CathedralBorrow 6y ago

> It's not driven by the actual facts of the virus, there's something else at work. What do you think that might be?

thu2111 6y ago
See my comment below, about page 12 of this poll: https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_opinion_tracker_wave-4.pdf https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-... I only just learned about it but if this poll is accurate, it explains a lot.

jastiling 6y ago

Yeah, so benign that hospitals are being overrun... oh, but that must be made up. Come on and open your eyes.

thu2111 6y ago
It is common for individual hospitals to occasionally need to load balance to other nearby hospitals. That is nothing unusual. Overload in an entire region would be, but as far as I know that has never happened anywhere. However, you can be forgiven for thinking that. Bad news sells newspapers, which seems to have led to a lot of very deceptive reporting. For example, headlines that literally say: "All the hospitals are full: in Houston overwhelmed hospitals leave COVID-19 patients waiting in ER" but at the time of publishing there were 2500 free beds in the Texas Medical Center system in Houston. So it wasn't possible that all the hospitals were full.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Are the refrigerated trucks being loaded with bodies that won't fit in the morgue just for show as well?
  - thu2111 6y ago
    No, but that's inevitable if funeral workers refuse to handle body's due to lack of ppe, which was the underlying cause for the temporary morgues in most places (not sure about New York)

mindslight 6y ago

> The virus is indeed pretty benign compared to many other disasters I agree with you here - it's not like it kills a third of people who get infected. Also, the virus is not very contagious - all it really takes is wearing masks and distancing for the spread to diminish. But most everyone has rationally judged that a 1% chance of death is too high, never mind the larger chance of life long complications. So anyone who can reduce their own exposure finds it prudent to do so. Meanwhile, and this ties into "something else at work", we've got corrupt leaders and corrupt mass media that have done little to address the public health crisis, and everything possible to inflame and politicize the issue. And so our society is still stuck at essentially the same position we began at in March. Either we're going to have to buckle down and actually work together to control this thing, or we're going to be stuck with this virus (and therefore a broken economy) until a vaccine is created.

thu2111 6y ago
The chance of death is not 1%. Here are a couple of reviews: https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/ https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v3 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v... Across 32 different locations, the median infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.24%). Most studies were done in pandemic epicenters with high death tolls. But recall that these IFRs are calculated with a very questionable definition of COVID death (see my other comment). Real IFRs are much lower when you take into account that many people who have "died of COVID" have in reality died of something else, even perhaps the supposedly no longer existent condition of old age. This is how you can have countries that have hundreds of thousands of cases yet totally flat excess death charts. I suspect these kind of inflated figures are partly what's driving people's over-reactions (look at how my post was voted). And there's some evidence for this. Today there was a poll released with truly shocking results. page 12 here: https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_opinion_tracker_wave-4.pdf https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-... In polls Brits are estimating that 7% of the population has died of COVID. In other words they think it's 100x more deadly than current government stats claim, and those stats are themselves currently suspended due to rampant over-counting. But Americans are even further out. They believe the death rate is 225x higher than it really is. They also believe the virus is 20x more prevalent than in reality. Top marks go to Germans who believe 300x more people have died of COVID than is really true.

ac29 6y ago

> you have half of all restaurants on Yelp permanently closing You misunderstood the data. Half of all restaurants that temporarily closed went on to permanently close. >98% of restaurants stayed open, less than 1% permanently closed.