4 ms·

This seems like hindsight bias. Much less was understood about COVID back then and maybe you forgot how uncertain it was?

kleton 2y ago
I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me.
- skybrian 2y ago
  How do you know it was COVID and not some other disease with similar symptoms? Also, why would you be confident that your experience generalizes? Getting to “not one bit uncertain” from what you could possibly have known then shows poor reasoning skills.
  - kleton 2y ago
    There was only one thing going around in the Bay Area in January 2020, and the symptoms clearly lined up for everyone in my network.
    - skybrian 2y ago
      How could you know that there was "only one thing going around?" That would be kind of weird. Maybe you and your friends got a cold?
      - kleton 2y ago
        If there were two things going around January 2020, I would have gotten both of them. This is common sense to anyone who has had school age children.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  >>> it was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 > I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me. We learned a lot of lessons in the 18 months after Feb 2020, including about long COVID and who was impacted. Were any of your conclusions reshaped in the face of later broad, consistent medical evidence? If you were to consider your process of understanding COVID, was there ever a point where it could be fairly described as working backward from a conclusion?
  - kleton 2y ago
    One thing remained clear from the time I got Covid the first time- people with natural immunity should be allowed to return to going about their normal lives.
    - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
      > One thing remained clear from the time I got Covid the first time- people with natural immunity should be allowed to return to going about their normal lives. I'm going to parse this and offer some personal impressions. "One thing" (variant = "All I know") signals to me that my question - are you working backward from a conclusion - can't be considered at this time. It's a reasonable response and I hope you will consider my Q at a later time. In considering your whole response, I get a vibe that you were justified or maybe vindicated. In my experience, those are markers of clinging to a conclusion and waiting for evidence of it. If I'm off base, help me out here. I also think you're being forthright with me and not subversive.
mike_hearn 2y ago
It really wasn't that uncertain. SARS-CoV-2 behaved exactly like what it was (a novel coronavirus). Public health officials and those on their side tried to play it up as a totally unknown thing that could do literally anything, but that was just a way to obfuscate their bad decisions combined with a general tendency to engage in fear mongering.
- skybrian 2y ago
  It doesn't seem like other novel coronaviruses filled the hospitals like COVID did.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Coronaviruses can certainly do that. The Russian "flu" at the end of the 19th century is now believed to have been caused by a novel coronavirus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Coronavirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Cor... (BTW, take all death estimates for old pandemics with a giant pinch of salt). But at any rate, COVID didn't fill the hospitals. New York had a problem temporarily due to bad management of their very limited morgue capacity, but look at most other places and there was no issue. Even in Bergamo early on, in the period when doctors were accidentally killing patients with unnecessary intubation, they never actually ran out of hospital capacity. Go check the reports at the time if you don't believe me. Unfortunately, almost everything that people believe about COVID and what happened during it is wrong. When it came to hospitals what you'll see if you review the historical evidence carefully is that media reports and online commentary frequently blurred the line between "it is predicted that hospitals will overflow" and "hospitals are actually overflowing". The former rapidly became reported as the latter with no actual change in the situation. This kind of problem of predictions/reality getting mixed up cropped up many times in different contexts. Then on top you have the problem of outright fake or misleading reporting. For instance, there was a brief period when TV news crews simply faked reports of full hospitals. They often liked to do this by reporting on a local hospital and claiming it was straining/at the limit etc, then showing video footage of an ICU in Bergamo from months or even years ago without informing the viewer of where it was, leaving viewers to infer it was a video of what was actually happening. This trick with that specific video happened so frequently it became something of a meme. In another case, a news crew turned up and organized doctors and medical staff at the (in reality fairly quiet) hospital to get in their cars and pretend to be patients queuing up to enter the hospital. Someone local got suspicious and visited the hospital a day after the report, discovered there were no queues or overload problems anywhere and asked around what had happened, which is how the news crew were found out. If you remember, this blew up when bored medical workers started uploading videos of themselves dancing to Tiktok. This revealed the true situation at a time when people were being told to stay home to save the hospitals from overload. I remember getting into an argument with my German teacher about this topic, because the Swiss health minister (Berset, ugh) actually went on TV and claimed hospitals were overflowing. The Swiss government's own dashboard showed that there was no unusual level of hospital load, there were lots of free beds all over the country and there were no problems to report. He literally just made up a non-existent crisis. They do this because it works, she had no idea he was lying and when I tried to show her the actual graphs just got distressed, saying "I'm not a data person".

kleton 2y ago

I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me.

skybrian 2y ago
How do you know it was COVID and not some other disease with similar symptoms? Also, why would you be confident that your experience generalizes? Getting to “not one bit uncertain” from what you could possibly have known then shows poor reasoning skills.
- kleton 2y ago
  There was only one thing going around in the Bay Area in January 2020, and the symptoms clearly lined up for everyone in my network.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    How could you know that there was "only one thing going around?" That would be kind of weird. Maybe you and your friends got a cold?
    - kleton 2y ago
      If there were two things going around January 2020, I would have gotten both of them. This is common sense to anyone who has had school age children.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
>>> it was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 > I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me. We learned a lot of lessons in the 18 months after Feb 2020, including about long COVID and who was impacted. Were any of your conclusions reshaped in the face of later broad, consistent medical evidence? If you were to consider your process of understanding COVID, was there ever a point where it could be fairly described as working backward from a conclusion?
- kleton 2y ago
  One thing remained clear from the time I got Covid the first time- people with natural immunity should be allowed to return to going about their normal lives.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > One thing remained clear from the time I got Covid the first time- people with natural immunity should be allowed to return to going about their normal lives. I'm going to parse this and offer some personal impressions. "One thing" (variant = "All I know") signals to me that my question - are you working backward from a conclusion - can't be considered at this time. It's a reasonable response and I hope you will consider my Q at a later time. In considering your whole response, I get a vibe that you were justified or maybe vindicated. In my experience, those are markers of clinging to a conclusion and waiting for evidence of it. If I'm off base, help me out here. I also think you're being forthright with me and not subversive.

mike_hearn 2y ago

It really wasn't that uncertain. SARS-CoV-2 behaved exactly like what it was (a novel coronavirus). Public health officials and those on their side tried to play it up as a totally unknown thing that could do literally anything, but that was just a way to obfuscate their bad decisions combined with a general tendency to engage in fear mongering.

skybrian 2y ago
It doesn't seem like other novel coronaviruses filled the hospitals like COVID did.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Coronaviruses can certainly do that. The Russian "flu" at the end of the 19th century is now believed to have been caused by a novel coronavirus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Coronavirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Cor... (BTW, take all death estimates for old pandemics with a giant pinch of salt). But at any rate, COVID didn't fill the hospitals. New York had a problem temporarily due to bad management of their very limited morgue capacity, but look at most other places and there was no issue. Even in Bergamo early on, in the period when doctors were accidentally killing patients with unnecessary intubation, they never actually ran out of hospital capacity. Go check the reports at the time if you don't believe me. Unfortunately, almost everything that people believe about COVID and what happened during it is wrong. When it came to hospitals what you'll see if you review the historical evidence carefully is that media reports and online commentary frequently blurred the line between "it is predicted that hospitals will overflow" and "hospitals are actually overflowing". The former rapidly became reported as the latter with no actual change in the situation. This kind of problem of predictions/reality getting mixed up cropped up many times in different contexts. Then on top you have the problem of outright fake or misleading reporting. For instance, there was a brief period when TV news crews simply faked reports of full hospitals. They often liked to do this by reporting on a local hospital and claiming it was straining/at the limit etc, then showing video footage of an ICU in Bergamo from months or even years ago without informing the viewer of where it was, leaving viewers to infer it was a video of what was actually happening. This trick with that specific video happened so frequently it became something of a meme. In another case, a news crew turned up and organized doctors and medical staff at the (in reality fairly quiet) hospital to get in their cars and pretend to be patients queuing up to enter the hospital. Someone local got suspicious and visited the hospital a day after the report, discovered there were no queues or overload problems anywhere and asked around what had happened, which is how the news crew were found out. If you remember, this blew up when bored medical workers started uploading videos of themselves dancing to Tiktok. This revealed the true situation at a time when people were being told to stay home to save the hospitals from overload. I remember getting into an argument with my German teacher about this topic, because the Swiss health minister (Berset, ugh) actually went on TV and claimed hospitals were overflowing. The Swiss government's own dashboard showed that there was no unusual level of hospital load, there were lots of free beds all over the country and there were no problems to report. He literally just made up a non-existent crisis. They do this because it works, she had no idea he was lying and when I tried to show her the actual graphs just got distressed, saying "I'm not a data person".