If these actions are successful in curbing the virus' spread, most people won't appreciate how bad things could have really gotten.
One example is the Knight Capital trading disaster, where they eventually noticed (I don't remember the exact number) X minutes after the runway trading bot had been put into place, and shut it down, but got blamed for not shutting down the trading soon enough.
Can't find any links about this right now though :(
It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick.
To be fair, I am sure doctors experience that a lot.
I also blame him because, over the years, other patients of him had trouble for his sloppy work.
I absolutely praise the dentist I went after that one, who made his best to fix everything, explained me the pros and cons of every decision he made, and ultimately got me top notch (as best as could be done).
Sorry for he weird "counterpoint", but the example could be open to ambiguity. I still get the point: don't blame the guy fixing things when it's someone elses responsibility.
In my case: I'd be wrong to blame the 2nd dentist for the mistakes of the 1st.
Everyday people in the leadup to y2k assumed it meant that every computer would somehow explode. Almost nobody stopped to actually reason through the real life consequence of a program getting the date and time wrong.
Fast forward to 2020, we still have Feb 29 bugs around (I saw a few posted on twitter, none in person). The response back then was huge and adequate, but totally underappreciated as time went by.
In the American context, a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction. The administration responsible (federal or state) would be blamed for the economic damage and voted out.
It would take a very strong leader who was willing to act without thought to reelection to really meet the crisis head on. That would be ... rare.
This is what worries me the most. Is there a name for this bias? Seems similar to survivorship bias, I'm sure it's seen across all kinds of contexts.
1, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/emergency....
Seems likely. Since solving the problem would make it look like there was no problem in which case what was the point of all the work.
This is also one of those cases where you have to overreact to begin with because once you have an actual problem its too late.
Consider raw r0 of 3.0. Each case infects three other people. But as more and more of the population gets infected and acquires immunity the infection rate drops. Say half the population is immune due to prior infection. The rate is now half r0 = 3.0 * 0.5 Left unchecked 66% of the population will get infected and then the disease dies out.
Social distancing, hand washing, quarantine reduces r0. And reduces the total number that the virus can infect before is dies out. Cut r0 from 3.0 to 1.5 and the number of infected goes from 66% to 33%.
In the US that would be 100 million people. And maybe a million fewer deaths.
Scuttlebutt is China and Taiwan due to high early compliance have r0 down to about 0.3, which means the epidemic is in a state of exponential crash.
If a vaccine wasn't even in the picture flattening the curve would help with these things.
They’re eventually going to lift quarantines after it burns out in different areas.
There are students who are graduating this spring and the skills they learn in upper division or capstone lab classes are some of the most important skills they will learn at school. You can’t just cancel the classes (or those students won’t graduate), you can’t do a very good job at all teaching them online... What can you do? We haven’t figured it out here at my institution, and it looks like nobody else has figured it out.
Or, refund this semesters’s tuition, room, and board, and give everyone a do-over until next fall. (I am assuming the virus will burn out in 2-3 months.)
Maybe the best outcome would be radically improve remote learning, this time with full institutional support.
This is a really optimistic assumption. I hope you're right, but I would hope no political unit is making plans based on it.
Not excited to install a rootkit on my computer to take finals, but oh well.
"No non-religious head coverings"
Which makes me think that they record a video of you while you're taking it, which is kind of eerie.
That being said, it won't stop anyone who has a USB webcam you can just unplug, unless the software requires you to have a webcam plugged in and pointed in the right direction.
- Someone will watch you
- The entire session is recorded
- You hold up multiple forms of ID and rotate it / tilt it
- It's effectively a keylogger + mouse tracker + eye tracker + ..., basically malware
- Triggering any security features like looking "to the side or down" will result in human intervention asking you to do a 360 degree view of your room
- You are not permitted to cover or pause the video stream and you may be randomly asked to do things like blink or hold up fingers
- Yes, they can remote control your device
Unless maybe the requirement is to catch you looking elsewhere?
Israel is the best example right now. They have the strongest reaction of any country, essentially closing their borders, but their people don't seem to be outraged, at least not yet.
As a current undergrad at UC Berkeley, they've moved all classes here online [1], and exams are either being postponed or converted to take-home assignments. I'm currently accessing lectures through Zoom.
[1] https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/03/09/as-coronavirus-spreads-...