I am facing a similar issue with my aging parents. They are both 70+. They both get respiratory issues every year. My Mom in particular is convinced she is healthy and doesn't need to worry about it. I understand why she is resistant towards the notion that she is vulnerable (I have similar issues confronting my own aging, and I am roughly 40 years younger), but it still pains me to discuss this with them. I lose my patience, which isn't helpful. I am growing more and more fearful that they will put themselves at risk, become infected, and then not survive when the hospitals are overwhelmed.

If anyone has any ideas about how to communicate about this with them, I am all ears.

I went through this today. In German there‘s a really great Podcast „Coronavirus-Update“: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/podcast4684.html

30 min/weekday a science journalist talks to Christian Drosten, a world-renowned expert on Coronaviruses, who explains things in a very concise manner. Yesterdays episode was „We have to protect the elderly“, where Drosten talked about the high risk for the sick and elderly and trying to fully get this point across to his own father over the weekend. He also mentioned that we should work on hopefully achieving a broader societal awareness of this over the next week or two.

I talked to my mother and father a bit first, sent my mother a link to this episode and told her to put me on speakerphone. We then listened to it together and discussed it a bit afterwards. I found this to be really helpful.

My mother was in denial until 2 weeks ago, when she went a bit hysterical for a day and has been concerned (but okay) since. My father was mostly in denial until today. He also bailed out soon after the podcast ended, because it was a bit much for him. But overall he took it quite well and is taking it more seriously now.

Overall I am very happy with the way this went. Sorry, this isn‘t very helpful if you don‘t speak German. But maybe you are able to find a similar thing in your native language.

It's a good podcast. Since some may have a limited command of the german language, they made a full transcript: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/Coronavirus-Update-Die-P...

Your self-awareness, self-accountability, and emotional IQ to ascertain the likely source of her resistance are all extremely admirable.

It sounds like you need to convince her of two things: (1) she is vulnerable; and (2) she must change.

How about focusing on #2?

Instead of asking her to change for herself, perhaps suggest this could protect friends and others around her who may be more vulnerable. An appropriate analogy may be secondhand smoke. Maybe her lungs are resilient enough to withstand the toxic effects of smoking, but what about the lungs of all her loved ones?

Hopefully others can chime in with better ideas. I hope you and your family, and we all, can remain safe and healthy during this crisis.

"If anyone has any ideas about how to communicate about this with them, I am all ears. "

First of all, respect them. Even if they might be wrong, they are adults, who have the right, to make their own decisions. You can stress the point, how worried you are and provide them with a good article etc., that in this case some caution is advised, but try not to push them.

Also, eventually everybody has to die. When you are 70+ it can happen any moment. I can understand to not want my last years to live in fear of every disease there is. And there are plenty of them, which are especially dangerous for old people, because .. they are older and weaker.

By appealing to pathos aka emotions. Most intelligent people resent this style of persuasion.

Your parents are on death's doorstep as is everyone in their later years. It may be more meaningful to figure out what experiences you'd like to share with them in the limited time you have left instead of trying to prolong their existence at the cost of straining the relationship.

In other words don't put off whatever you might potentially regret not having done if they were to pass away suddenly - with each passing day, the inevitable conclusion every human being shares only draws closer.

I think the most important thing is to ask CLEARLY for what you want. Do you have a specific list of social distancing practices you would like them to implement? Do you want them to stockpile supplies? How many supplies? What is on your shopping list?

"Please take this seriously" is not a request. It's barely even english. It also contains an out of context judgement which you should also try to avoid. Use objective observations instead. So rather than saying "I think you're irresponsible", tell them the actual concrete things they said or did, that led you to that assessment. Something like "I notice you rode the bus during peak hours five times last week." is an example of an objective observation, devoid of judgement or criticism.

Many thanks to everyone for their thoughts. It will take me some time to digest it all.

What medical authorities are saying (in the EU) is that while widespread contagion is inevitable, we don't want everybody to get infected at the same time, because that would overwhelm medical resources and prevent serious cases from getting treated properly. Therefore it seems that the idea is not so much to stop the virus but to just slow it down.

I am sure it has crossed many people's minds, but what if I want to get it before the medical systems are taxed? Like get it before the peak. I am sure it's very bad thinking, but what are some solid points against such thinking?

Regardless of the merits from an individually selfish standpoint, this kind of behavior would be extremely anti-social.

The overriding public health concern is slowing the spread as much as possible. Even if in the asymptote the same number of people are infected, spreading that burden out over a protracted time period minimizes overloading on the healthcare system.

If even a small percent of the population became "bug-chasers", it would supercharge the rate of transmission. Especially because the incubation period is so long. The same unhygienic behavior of trying to acquire the disease, would very likely also spread the disease by the asymptomatic.

If you put any ethical weight on the consideration of other human beings, then the very minor plausible individuals benefits are more than outweighed by the massive social harm.

It may be too late for that, in the same sense that all the folks who chase the hot startup idea that just appeared in the news are too late. There's about a 3-week lag time between contracting the virus and needing serious medical care. The folks in the ICU now generally contracted it in early February. With a doubling time of roughly 4 days, there'll be 5 doublings = 32x increase of cases in that time frame. It's very likely that if you contract it now, by the time you need ICU support so will everyone else, and you'll be left to fend for yourself in a hallway while in serious respiratory distress.

OK so you think the early "slots" are better. Maybe they are. If you manage to get in slot n anyone you infect will be forced to take n+1 (perhaps not as good) and the exponentially increasing set of people _they_ infect will be forced to take n+2, n+3, ...

Now there are a lot more people in those time slots all competing for the same doctors and hospital beds, etc.

Congratulations, you made the curve a little less flat :(

If anything, experience from China has shown that the early slots are not better. The mortality % has gotten better over time as they've figured out what works, what doesn't, and how to properly manage the disease. For example, there's some retrovirals being given now that appear to be successful to some degree. That wasn't known in the early progression of the illness.

Odds are decent an even more effective treatment will be found in the coming months, and if you can stave off your infection date till then you'll be better off (which of course presumes that you will get the virus at all, which is far from a given).

You're assuming you would get it no matter what: you might not, especially given the precautions that are being taken. And there's a non-zero chance of dying. Assuming you're in a low risk age group from 20-50, you have, at minimum, between a 1 in 500 to a 1 in 250 chance of dying. Sure, you're much less likely to die than not die, but those still aren't odds I'd play willingly.

If everyone thought like you and tried to get it early, then the hospitals would be overrun and you'd be no better off. Also, it's possible for you to get it again after recovery [1], so it may not even help you at all.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-risk-of-re...

> If everyone thought like you and tried to get it early, then the hospitals would be overrun and you'd be no better off.

If the reality is that only a small fraction of people would think like that, the we don't need to worry about that line of reasoning.

But I agree with your point that it's moot due to the potential for reinfection.

The more people that think like that, the more that type of thinking increases. Like panic buying inducing more panic buying. So it might start small, but could easily balloon quite fast.

According to top health officials in Norway (as seen on a TV program last night), reinfection is not likely, at least in the short run. And the Japanese case apparently is based on a misunderstanding, not an actual reinfection.

Over the long haul, reinfection is quite possible, since immunity wears off with time. It is not considered unlikely that this disease will be with us forever. In that case, vaccination will perhaps be our best tool to manage it.

The idea is explored here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/02/consider-controlled-in...

That's actually not a bad strategy in a selfish sense, assuming that the virus grows otherwise normally. Obviously, the problem is that if everyone did it we'd be looking at the apocalyptic worst case extreme! Everyone would be sick simultaneously and have to endure the virus with no health care resources at all.

The more practical problem is that the growth is exponential, so the window between "no one has it, it's safe to get it now" and "everyone has it, mass quarantine" is just a few weeks. Add to that that the virus has a 5-6 day incubation period and it basically doesn't work. Statistically, by the time you know someone sick from whom you can infect yourself, the number of people with still-incubating cases (who are AHEAD of you in the "queue"!) is probably enough to overwhelm health care facilities anyway.

Don't do this.

I want to get it late - ideally I can hold off long enough for an effective vaccine and never get it. Lacking that, maybe at least someone will discover a better treatment. Maybe in a few months we will discover some existing rabies drug also helps this treatment, or some other such thing. There are also some other anti-virals in development, maybe one of them will turn out to be somewhat useful. However it will take time for doctors to figure that out. I'd rather they learn on someone else.

Chloroquine is looking quite promising eg see the linked article here https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/ffztou/expert_chlo...

Even with that there seem bureaucratic type delays till it gets used. I just took some as a prophylactic which is totally unproven but as a clinical treatment it seems to work well in trials.

There are some points in the article: https://www.flattenthecurve.com/#DO_NOT_BE_CARELESS

> Don’t be that person. It might not be about you but it is everyone’s problem. Don’t be careless in the hopes you get sick when you can “avoid the rush.” There is zero benefit to individuals or the population to getting sick early in the pandemic. You would be putting the lives of others at risk. It is not just that people are dying, but how they are dying. To say nothing of the physical trauma, emotionally speaking this is the opposite of a “good death”. People are dying alone, quarantined from those they love.

> Early reports are that people who recover develop antibodies that provide immunity if they are infected with the same strain again. However, this is great news for vaccine development, so flatten the curve and wait it out.

> This can get very serious; one person described the pain as feeling like her lungs were being put through a pasta maker. 10% of cases require ICU care and mechanical ventilation. Even if autopsy reports from China have been misrepresented or overstated, there is a possibility of long term or permanent lung damage if you do get sick and recover. There are lot of gaps in the information about lung damage, mostly because everyone qualified to let the public know exactly what is going on is already very busy saving lives and putting their own at risk.

If you get infected, you put others at risk of getting infected, no matter how perfectly you may think you've isolated yourself. Unless you have a clean room level setup somewhere, you're making yourself a reservoir of viral load for others to catch.

There are also two strains, one more aggressive than the other. I would imagine that getting the weaker strain out there ahead of the bad strain may be useful.

That wasn’t completely confirmed and may result from drawing conclusions from biased data. Also it doesn’t matter unless you can reliably get infected with the weaker strain.

I thought about that yesterday... It probably wont help you as an immunization. But it might help to reduce symptoms?

How old are you?

If you're under 60 or so, it's quite likely you won't need any medical attention at all after contraction.

This is why it's spreading -- most middle-aged and younger people feel like they have the common cold.

> This is why it's spreading -- most middle-aged and younger people feel like they have the common cold.

Is that actually the case? Don't the details look like a low grade flu? It's not sore throat or sniffles, it's still a cough and a fever.

About half of exposures have no symptoms at all, about half of the remaining ones have mild cold symptoms (fever, sore throat, dry cough), and then a further 30% of the remainder might have nasty symptoms (deep cough, walking pneumonia) that don't require hospitalization. The remaining 20% of symptomatic cases (10% of total) get pneumonia that's bad enough to require hospitalization, and half of those require ventilators and ICU beds. With good medical care and no pre-existing conditions about 90% of those patients recover, without medical care virtually all of them die.

Untreated, it's basically like playing Russian Roulette. 5 out of 6 times, nothing bad happens. 1 out of 6, you die. The disparity in outcomes is probably what makes this so insidious: a lot of folks look at the numeric outcomes for healthy people in the presence of ventilators and ICUs and reasonably think "Oh, I have a 1 in 500 chance of dying, it's no big deal". Medical professionals look at the exponential infection curve, the capacity to overwhelm health care systems, and the number of patients requiring hospitalization and think "this is the scariest disease I've ever seen".

One thing missing from your analysis is that the group you end up in is greatly impacted by age and current health.

Right, although the news out of Italy is that young healthy adults are ending up in the "bad pneumonia, need hospitalization" bucket nearly (but not quite) as much as older patients. They just have a much better prognosis with hospital interventions, because once they're ventilated or on oxygen for a while their immune system can reliably clear the virus, while with 80+ year olds or folks with pre-existing conditions it starts running amuck and causes ARDS or multiple organ failure. Overload the hospital system and the death rate jumps for healthy young adults as well - this happened in Wuhan and is now happening in Italy and Iran, and is why you see videos on the Internet of middle-aged adults dead in their bed from coronavirus.

Your analysis is suffering from survivorship bias -- Italy still has no idea how many infections they actually have.

South Korea is a better dataset because they have tested so many people.

Could you share the source for this? It's very useful for understanding the situation.

Some reports are showing that a little under half of those infected get no symptoms at all. Otherwise it can be anything from mild cold symptoms all the way to deadly pneumonia. That's from what I've been reading in the UK anyway.

Can someone be tested after recovery to see if they had it? Would that person be a possible carrier?

Data from Italy shows that currently 8% of the patients in ICU are 20-49 years old.

See section 2.8.2.11 of the article

Also nice that the appropriate domain wasn't squatted by some jerk.

Haha. I guess I’m that jerk.

Basically, I saw that this domain was available and saw the increasing talk of “flattening the curve” on Twitter. I grabbed it and wanted to do something helpful, like post just the pic of the tall and flat graph that was making the rounds, because I loved how simple the visual was, and how powerful the point it made. I thought at least people could share the concept easily.

But then someone shared Julie’s post, which was living on a gdoc at the time, and even that was struggling with the amount of readers... and was very much not an easily shareable link.

So I reached out and asked if she’d like to have it live at flattenthecurve.com, and promised to give her a login to update and add more info etc.

She said yes and I got the site live in half a day mostly spent reformatting the gdoc into WP.

I’m thrilled that the domain is really living up to its best use!

Nice work! Glad to see strangers come together and work on this in such a short timeline.

Good on ya!

I hope you have something like cloudflare behind it -- or at least static HTML. That sucker is "going viral", no pun intended.

You are a good human!

Thanks!

So this person who not only provides their prior work history but also links to primary source material in multiple places through the whole list, AND includes comments about where things are still unsure or developing, somehow _doesn't_ meet your criteria?

I'd think that compared to the vast majority of material posted anywhere, this discussion is of much higher quality and veracity.

"My comment is a response to the wording of parent comment, not the article itself."

... how do you judge the nice explanation? Why wouldn't you want to hear from someone who studied/works in something over someone who is a random observer?

I am saying trusting someone blindly because they are an expert is bad.

A nice explanation is one that is backed by science in this case.

And who determines what a "nice explanation" is, and what is or isn't backed by science? Another expert that you then have to trust?

When dealing with technical topics that require deep study, unless you're some kind of genius with an abundance of free time, it is impossible to judge the quality of someones argument without you yourself also being a mini-expert in the same field.

Specifically, for things like medical advice I look to the experts because medicine has been around for a few centuries and is backed with science.

New concepts such as cryptocurrency I just walk away.

My comments are about how a lot of people tend to put the person ( + credentials) before the soundness of their arguments.

(edit: The scientific method is well documented. This is a good place to start if one wants to learn about it, https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Scientific_Outlook....)

>My comments are about how a lot of people tend to put the person ( + credentials) before the soundness of their arguments.

Ok fair enough. So what is the argument that you feel was not sound? And who said that they believed the argument was sound because of 'credentialism'?

>(edit: The scientific method is well documented. This is a good place to start if one wants to learn about it, https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Scientific_Outlook....)

I don't know what a "well documented" philosophy book has to do with anything. That doesn't get you anywhere close to understanding deeply technical topics. Today's cutting edge science is deeply technical and you cannot gain knowledge simply by reasoning about it. You have to be an expert yourself to even begin to comprehend complex topics. A good educator can simplify a topic and make it approachable - like I suppose what Neil deGrasse Tyson does, but you are no closer to actually grasping the math or other details without going to grad school ... or putting in an equal amount of work at home using the library and self-study.

okay, but what do you do when you need an explanation but aren't knowledgeable enough to verify the reasoning?

An expert with good communication skills.

So you'd like to see "someone who has the qualifications explain so clearly" the issue?

Because that's what your original reply was taking issue with.

In general, trusting based on the letters behind a person's name is bad.

I am cultivating the habit of weighing the validity of the argument instead of implied trust based on a person's name or degrees.

But you said you wanted to hear from an expert. How do you imagine a non-expert can select an expert without indulging in something that could easily be called credentialism by a cranky internet commenter?

A good explanation not something from someone who claims to be an expert.

There are all sorts of people giving good explanations on almost any topic. Only some of them know what they're talking about. And there are plenty of experts who aren't very good at explaining, as they have spent their time and energy on gaining expertise.

So your heuristic easily leads to believing all sorts of nonsense. Antivaxxers, for example, frequently point to glib people with plausible-sounding explanations whose flaws are not at all obvious to the casual observer.

Unfortunately, the medical field is one place where credentialism is mandated and good for society. I would never let a "self-trained" doctor anywhere near me the way we accept bootcamp developers.

And for what it's worth, I'm incredibly wary of bootcamp developers too. I've seen too many terrible ones to not assume the worst without good proof otherwise.

The medical field relies on "training" more than just a degree. Fortunately, it's not a credentials based industry.

My comment is a response to the wording of parent comment, not the article itself.

Yes, but the training ends up converting to a license or title if you've completed it properly, and we judge whether or not a person is competent in that field based on whether or not they hold that title or license. For example, when quoting experts they're qualified as,"so-and-so is a board certified X," which is credentialism. But we have belief that the credential required training and knowledge, and that it was accredited by a board/panel of trained experts. But we trust those experts to be adjudicators of expertise because of their credentials. It's turtles all the way down.

I didn't call a "Board certified Physician" as credentialism. The previous commenter did. I never brought medicine to support my case against credentialism.

Credentialism is rejecting a sound argument or explanation because the author is perceived to lack credentials.

What you're doing here is the opposite.

I was right.

You seem confused.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/credentialism

"belief in or reliance on academic or other formal qualifications as the best measure of a person's intelligence or ability to do a particular job."

It's also accepting a weak argument because of the credentials of the author. I thought that was trivially understood, but I guess not.

Which is also not what you're doing; your case appears to be that credentials are a reason to reject a sound explanation or argument, which is absurd.

Now you are bringing in your own narrative to a dictionary definition. My case is that the parent comment seems to put credentials before a valid argument, which is what I am against. Credentials are not a proxy for a sound argument.

Dictionaries aren't weapons.

Dictionaries are references to look up words before opening mouths.

You have both on that page.

Listen, if you're going to cut off quotes to make up an imagined problem then you're not contributing. The very next words are "so clearly" which hits your "nice explanation" part.

Listen, I'm going to tell you this because feedback is important and this is for your benefit: low brow dismissals are easy. You can always make up an imagined way to disagree with someone and it is almost always useless.

Here's an example of one of these lowbrow dismissals with your comment:

> "nice explanation"

> Why does the explanation have to be nice? I'd rather have someone tell me the truth rudely rather than tell me lies kindly.

Behold the incredible worthlessness of that response! It is fucking idiotic. People who interpret things literally are not talented, they are crippled.

The original comment first addresses the credentials of the author before giving any valid feedback on the points in the article.

People do this a lot subconsciously and it affects the way we consume information.

Instead I prefer to first understand how valid the argument is before looking at who said it.

Unfortunately most people are wired to "like" based on who says a thing more than how valid their arguments are...