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You were on this forum calling covid "a normal seasonal virus" in February of 2020, so maybe sit this one out.
by idlewords 5y ago
You were on this forum calling covid "a normal seasonal virus" in February of 2020, so maybe sit this one out.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoWeren't "experts" calling for events to continue and that border closures would be racist and that people should not wear masks around that time? Maybe he was just listening to the experts.
- frenchyatwork 5y agoYes, but none of those "experts" were calling it "a normal seasonal virus", they just didn't believe such measures were necessary. SARS-COV-1 didn't require widespread border closures or masking, and it very much wasn't "a normal seasonal virus".
- throwawaylinux 5y agoYep so the rhetoric about it could easily have lead someone to think it wasn't much more to worry about than the seasonal flu.
- tempestn 5y agoThat's fair, but when people have opinions based on weak evidence, they should hold those opinions weakly, rather than reinforcing them to others.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoAre you criticizing the experts here? Careful that's verboten.
- tempestn 5y agoI'm not, no. As more evidence is accumulated to support a hypothesis, it is rational to strengthen one's belief in it. All beliefs should start out weakly held, until sufficient evidence is gathered to either reinforce or change them. And of course even strongly held beliefs should be re-examined if sufficient evidence piles up to the contrary.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoSo the incorrect opinions based on weak evidence that the experts had over the past years of covid should not have been "reinforced to others"? That sounds to me like a criticism of the experts.
- tempestn 5y agoNo, the experts were disseminating the best available evidence at that time. I will criticize some steps by policy makers, like stating initially that masks were ineffective when in reality they were trying to discourage mask shortages to keep them for essential workers. I think in cases like that it's better to be honest with the public. But I don't have any criticism for scientists who accurately portray the best available evidence at a given time. My criticism was for the the hypothetical that the OP may have rationally stated that the virus was nothing more serious than a seasonal flu, based on experts stating that borders should not be closed. The statement that borders should not be closed was based on the most relevant research at the time; it turned out to be incorrect and was later reversed. But as a lay person, making the jump from that statement to the opinion that the virus is no big deal, and then echoing that opinion to others as fact, is not rational. One might have taken it as weak evidence in that direction, but no more than that.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoIf "experts" were saying not to wear masks, insisting that border restrictions were racist and xenophobic, telling people to go out and gather in large groups in public, then OP said absolutely nothing wrong by claiming it was no more serious than the seasonal flu. Now we know that some "experts" were just totally wrong and had no idea what they were talking about, and others were in fact spreading misinformation abouta pandemic for political gain. But that is not OP's fault. You can't condemn him and absolve the actual people who reinforced that incorrect information to him in the first place. Ludicrous.
- tcbawo 5y agoI've heard multiple references to experts/politicians/media "calling border closures racist" in early 2020, but only from conservative media claiming that liberals were espousing this viewpoint. Can someone provide sources or evidence for this?
- throwawaylinux 5y agoFirst hit in the first page of a simple google search. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/xenophobe-chief-democrats-blast-trump-s-plan-suspend-immigration-u-n1188551 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/xenophobe-chief-de... Weird you have no recollection of it. It was pretty loud in the media for a while there.
- tcbawo 5y agoThis article comes from April 21, 2020, not Feb 2020 as GP mentioned. Apparently it was a Democrat response to a tweet announcing a border closure after the US had already seen 42000 deaths (fta). This looks like Democrats criticizing a policy of shutting the barn door after the animals had already left the barn.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoNo it doesn't it looks like recklessly spreading disinformation during a crisis purely for personal political gain. The US has had strict border restrictions on foreign citizens through most of 2021 too. So unless you are going to call the Biden administration racist and xenophobic as well, then this reasoning doesn't work. But even if you did, then what you're saying about barn doors still contradicts what most experts have said in terms of reducing the movement of people to slow the spread.
- ardit33 5y agoDidn't Nancy Pelosi go to hug people in China town in late Feb 2020? Nancy Pelosi Visits San Francisco's Chinatown Amid Coronavirus Concerns https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-san-franciscos-chinatown/2240247/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-sa... "Fear of the Virus is Racially Motivated." Around the time the Trump administration announced the travel restriction, Biden said that Trump had a “record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.” In late January, the Trump administration implemented a travel restriction from China, where the coronavirus originated. Some on the left described the move as a racist or xenophobic ploy aimed at punishing a country that Trump has clashed with over trade. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/498350-biden-trumps-coronavirus-response-has-been-nakedly-xenophobic https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/498350-biden-trumps-co...
- dekhn 5y agoProminent scientists signed their names to articles saying that implying the virus was released from a lab (intentionally or otherwise) was racist and factually wrong. Those scientists, by and large, have walked back their statements and admit that the hypothesis that this was a lab leak that occurred in Wuhan is not impossible and that stating it is not necessarily racist. Also, those folks aren't considered "experts" any more (everybody else lowered their priors about those expert's beliefs).
- polote 5y agoDoesn't seem a wrong stake, the population was naive to this virus, but except that what is special with covid?
- tigershark 5y agoNothing, we didn’t have the whole world locked down for 1 year for the first time in a pandemic…
- jacquesm 5y agoWe didn't this time either.
- cortesoft 5y agoUmm all the deaths?
- dekhn 5y agoLet's look back at those deaths in about 10 years. I predict that over time, epidemiologists will have much better estimates on who died of what and when and what the risk factors for death are. From what I can tell, much of the deaths are front-loaded (IE, we saw them over a few years instead of decades), and concentrated in people who had comordibities. People evolved to respond to the flu over millenia before there was widespread travel. I think that explains much of the dynamics of covid.
- jacquesm 5y agoWe've been working hard as society to allow people to continue to live with chronic disease. Co-morbidities is just another way of saying 'they would have died sooner or later anyway', but for all of these cases you are looking at individuals and people that have family and dependents. In the long term all deaths are 'front-loaded'. Every person that dies of traffic, obesity, terrorism, disease, famine and so on would have eventually died anyway from some other cause. That doesn't stop us from trying to address these causes of death resulting in people living longer. We don't call those who live to an older age with diabetes 'time stealers' any more than we should call people that die early of COVID+some other factor 'front loaded'.
- chitowneats 5y agoAre you also asking for Anthony Fauci, CNN, etc, to "sit this one out"? Because that was the overwhelming consensus in February 2020 in the United States.
- idlewords 5y agoIf they post here I'll zing them too
- chitowneats 5y agoOn what basis? Have you offered evidence of your thoughts during that time? Does that even matter? Hindsight is 20/20. I hope that most of HN will forgive me for questioning the notion that u/idlewords is somehow entitled to disqualify others from this discussion about variants.
- kadoban 5y agoWhat? Please point to any time anywhere near there, that Anthony Fauci has called Covid a "normal seasonal virus".
- argonaut 5y agoEveryone commenting on Covid got something wrong at one point.
- wheelie_boy 5y agoEveryone has made errors, yes. Ideally we will make fewer in the future. To that end, we should consider the amount and directionality of errors made by individuals as we consider what weight to give their current predictions.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoSo when Fauci had this https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387 published in March 2020 that included the words "This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)", what weighting should we give to his current credibility, would you say?
- _djo_ 5y agoYou’re stripping out important context there. He was comparing it to SARS and MERS with CFRs of 9-10%, so saying COVID-19 would be closer to the influenza end of the spectrum if, and only if, some of the early info on the infection fatality rate was correct. What you did isn’t a good faith move. There’s tons to criticise Fauci on in any case, you shouldn’t need to selectively quote stuff like this.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoI didn't think I was stripping out important context, but I will add more for your: If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively. I don't think that really changes things. The orders of magnitude are 0.1%, 1%, 10%, and he's saying it may be considerably less than 1%, i.e., much closer in relative magnitude (and obviously far nearer in absolute terms) to a seasonal flu. You are the one who is missing the larger context of this thread, which has been an unfair bullying of someone going back over what they had said 2 years ago about covid and claiming he should "sit this one out". Given this is the position that the experts had back then, clearly having an opinion that it was like a seasonal flu was not way out of line. And my question to OP about Fauci stands too. Given that is what he wrote, and I provided the link for full context, what credibility should we assign to his current statements.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- culi 5y agoWhat were your thoughts on it in February 2020?
- lozenge 5y agoLess developed than today, can the persistent downplayers honestly say the same?
- dekhn 5y agoin feb 2020 I knew this wasn't going to be an existential crisis (IE, it wasn't going to kill 90% of people,and if the economy tanked, it wouldn't be because the virus itself was so virulent) and that ultimately it would begin to look more like other persistent viruses. This whole thing has played out more or less like I expected based on my prior experience with viruses. I am not happy that the people announced this did so with scare tactics (specific wording) rather than emotionless facts.
- jacquesm 5y agoOk, but that leaves the option that it kills up to 10% of the people and I can guarantee you that if that ends up being the case a lot of people will feel that we should have probably taken things a bit more serious in March 2020. Emotionless facts can be scary in their own right.
- dekhn 5y ago10% of what people? That doesn't match up with any stats that I'm aware of. Unless you mean "it kills up to 10% of people within certain population demographics" which is my point- and it's entirely uninteresting. I think US public health officials and generally in europe the leadership all pursued the most reasonable path and it's unlikely we could have reduced the overall death load significantly through any intervention short of extreme isolation. It is very unlikely that mainstream science will conclude, in a decade, that we could have taken actions that would have greatly reduced the spread and impact, without also applying highly restrictive rules.
- emerged 5y agoYou picked the wrong numbers in the lotto in March of 1997, so why don’t you keep your opinion to yourself?
- guscost 5y agoHere’s what I wrote in May 2020 (I underestimated both the seasonality, and the speed of mutations, at least): https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/ https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/