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As Asimov once said: "It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong." Right now there

As Asimov once said: "It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong." Right now there are people running around saying that COVID is as deadly as the flu, that the pandemic was faked, that masks are a conspiracy. You don't have to believe that epidemiologists are 100% correct about every recommendation during a fast-developing emergency in order to see how the rejection of evidence and conspiracy-theorizing are harmful.

gus_massa 6y ago
> Right now there are people running around saying that COVID is as deadly as the flu, ... Which is the current best estimation of the risk of getting covid-19 and dying? Which is the current best estimation of the risk of getting flu and dying?
- gibspaulding 6y ago
  I actually would have guessed they were pretty close. Apparently I was wrong: The following claims 5% vs .2% https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-rate-us-compared-to-flu-by-age-2020-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-rate-us-co... Then again this chart seems to indicate something closer to 2% of confirmed cases are fatal for Covid: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-and-cases-covid-19?time=2020-01-22..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-and-cases-co... I imagine more non-fatal Covid cases go unreported than fatal ones so perhaps even that's high, but it's still close to an order of magnitude worse than the flu. Edit: That first source isn't great, and is outdated anyways. This one seems to verify the ~2% for Covid in the US. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I think you're mixing up IFR with CFR. Current best estimate of COVID IFR is 0.27%, which is basically the same as flu. https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf However the CI is extremely wide.
bxk1 6y ago
> Right now there are people running around saying that COVID is as deadly as the flu COVID is as deadly as flu. Some people just underestimate flu, as if it's something not dangerous. > that the pandemic was faked Technically all pandemics are faked, because what is and isn't pandemic is more or less an arbitrary decision made by some official purely for propaganda and obedience reasons. It doesn't actually matter if it's called pandemic or not. > how the rejection of evidence and conspiracy-theorizing are harmful Evidence based reasoning is not much different from superstition, it could be just as harmful as rejecting evidence to whatever you think rejecting evidence is harmful. To illustrate how faulty that reasoning is, here you are rejecting evidence that there was a literal conspiracy against general population with some officials and institutions telling people that masks don't work, an evidence they are liars, but somehow you don't want to consider that evidence in your evidence-based reasoning and suggest that others should not reject evidence from liars. Of course you can't just accept evidence if you want something more than a superstition level decision making. For that you need to actually think and calculate, with all those base rates and probabilities, use something like bayesian reasoning or whatever, do some science. Even just quickly estimating this is still better than "accepting evidence".

gus_massa 6y ago

> Right now there are people running around saying that COVID is as deadly as the flu, ... Which is the current best estimation of the risk of getting covid-19 and dying? Which is the current best estimation of the risk of getting flu and dying?

gibspaulding 6y ago
I actually would have guessed they were pretty close. Apparently I was wrong: The following claims 5% vs .2% https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-rate-us-compared-to-flu-by-age-2020-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-rate-us-co... Then again this chart seems to indicate something closer to 2% of confirmed cases are fatal for Covid: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-and-cases-covid-19?time=2020-01-22..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-and-cases-co... I imagine more non-fatal Covid cases go unreported than fatal ones so perhaps even that's high, but it's still close to an order of magnitude worse than the flu. Edit: That first source isn't great, and is outdated anyways. This one seems to verify the ~2% for Covid in the US. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
- thu2111 6y ago
  I think you're mixing up IFR with CFR. Current best estimate of COVID IFR is 0.27%, which is basically the same as flu. https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf However the CI is extremely wide.

bxk1 6y ago

> Right now there are people running around saying that COVID is as deadly as the flu COVID is as deadly as flu. Some people just underestimate flu, as if it's something not dangerous. > that the pandemic was faked Technically all pandemics are faked, because what is and isn't pandemic is more or less an arbitrary decision made by some official purely for propaganda and obedience reasons. It doesn't actually matter if it's called pandemic or not. > how the rejection of evidence and conspiracy-theorizing are harmful Evidence based reasoning is not much different from superstition, it could be just as harmful as rejecting evidence to whatever you think rejecting evidence is harmful. To illustrate how faulty that reasoning is, here you are rejecting evidence that there was a literal conspiracy against general population with some officials and institutions telling people that masks don't work, an evidence they are liars, but somehow you don't want to consider that evidence in your evidence-based reasoning and suggest that others should not reject evidence from liars. Of course you can't just accept evidence if you want something more than a superstition level decision making. For that you need to actually think and calculate, with all those base rates and probabilities, use something like bayesian reasoning or whatever, do some science. Even just quickly estimating this is still better than "accepting evidence".