Bill Gates on the Imperial Study...

"Fortunately it appears the parameters used in that model were too negative. The experience in China is the most critical data we have. They did their “shut down” and were able to reduce the number of cases. They are testing widely so they see rebounds immediately and so far there have not been a lot. They avoided widespread infection. The Imperial model does not match this experience. Models are only as good as the assumptions put into them. People are working on models that match what we are seeing more closely and they will become a key tool. A group called Institute for Disease Modeling that I fund is one of the groups working with others on this."

In a way, it sounds like Gates is saying that a widespread societal lockdown is a wise move, which is what any reader of the Imperial study would conclude. Unfortunately, it seems that such a move was not politically palatable until the study's release.

The other thing is that panic is bad, panic leads to much much worse outcomes. I've read the report, and I have access to non-disclosed orders, one of the major point is: do not spread too much information for risk of panics.

So we're all discussing this, and if you've read the report you already know more than most people, and we know that the truth is in the middle.

But what we should really think about as clever individuals is that whatever is going to happen this year, and however long the lockdowns are going to be: it has to happen in order.

Why do people keep saying that panic is bad? Sometimes panic is the appropriate action and is necessary to motivate us to take extreme life saving action.

It's partly in the very definition of the word.

> panic: sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly unthinking behavior.

When fear runs wild and uncontrolled, it can paralyze us into inaction, or worse yet, motivate us unthinkingly towards action that may end more lives than even inaction would. Or to put it another way - panic is a great way to waste a bunch of perfectly good fear.

Fear should be properly harnessed, controlled, and guided through proper thinking and wisdom - then we can maximize our chances of it motivating us to take those extreme, life saving actions you alude to.

Stress - as caused by fear - can shorten your lifespan and reduce it's quality as well. When possible, one should guide ones fears towards reasonable risks you can do something about - where the costs might be worth it - and away from the irrational or unactionable - where they are not.

We are going to see the US expand the mandatory lockdown to the whole country soon. I don't think panic is going to help much.

The federal government doesn't have the authority to lockdown the whole country, only the national and state borders. To lockdown the whole country all 50 states would need to individually issue orders, which is unlikely.

I suspect the governors of some rural states are likely to issue weaker social distancing orders, minimizing the economic impact but still benefiting from national economic relief legislation the same as states more severely effected.

The federal government might just get such authority from Congress, if things keep going the way they are.

There would certainly be a lawsuit claiming that it's unconstitutional. It might even win... eventually. You know, back when SCOTUS is in proper session, and it's all kinda moot.

You implore people not to encourage panic in one breath then make the absurd suggestion that the US is going to impose "mandatory lockdown to the whole country soon".

"When in trouble, or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."

At the risk of beating a dead horse, are the numbers coming out of China trustworthy?

We know for a fact there were some early suppression of the outbreak, so it wouldn't be too much to speculate that they're under-reporting new cases and/or over-reporting recoveries.

Even if so, there's the problem that totalitarian, high-control societies like China have tools to deal with these kinds of problems that other societies do not.. to put it lightly.

The generally seem to be, especially corroberated by other experience:

- HK, SG, KR, and JP have similar trends.

- No "patriotic virus" -- infecting Chinese only after leaving China.

- Limited spread / impacts outside Hubei.

- Lifting quarantine.

Testing numbers are all but certainly low, but given shitshows elsewhere (IT, US, PH, DE, ES, likely IN and others), due to logistics and limitations. Comprehensive population antibody testing should be interesting.

Cases in Hubei is likely under reported, but this is probably more attributed to early test kit shortages and the fact to ramp up test requires time, etc. We have see the same thing in Italy and other European countries as well, the capacity is limited and testing itself is biased not aiming for coverage.

But what China's data can tell, is that there is a strategy out there to contain the virus, if implemented. And it takes about 2 months of total lockdown. It is probably the most effective containment in human history, but with a cost.

So the exact number of China's data isn't going to be meaningful to others, but the actions taken have implications and we should follow.

The fact that we know there was suppression means they aren't very good at it.

Link...

31 questions and answers about COVID-19

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/A-coronavirus-AMA

The material op is referring to is in the appendix.

Do you still drive a car?

I don't think the reaction to 9/11 is a good measuring stick

Cool it Django. Big numbers hide little numbers.

The numbers that matter are local numbers surrounding you. No leader will tell you that cause they want obedience.

40,000 die on our streets every year. Our pants are quite dry.

You're proud of that?

This is an exogenous event, which will kill a lot of people in short time, on top of the usual circumstances. A natural disaster. A war.

3000 Americans died, a Trillion USD was spent on two wars, civil liberties were irrevocably destroyed (DHS, etc).

The USA never suffered casualties of 1+mil ever. Ask the old Europeans how that feels.

> The USA never suffered casualties of 1+mil ever.

Proportionately speaking, that estimate is on par with the amount of American deaths per total population during WW2 and something like 1/7 the American deaths per total population during the civil war.

> Proportionately speaking, that estimate is on par with the amount of American deaths per total population during WW2 and something like 1/7 the American deaths per total population during the civil war.

You think if they had the choice they would have rather sat at home watching netflix?

In the civil war people would totally picnic on the hill next to the big fight.

This is difficult point to make delicately, but there is a difference between a million young healthy men (or women) dying for their country, and a million people dying who are mostly at a much greater risk of dying from sickness compared to the general population.

2.8 Million people die in the US every year anyway.

Civil War comes close, ~ 600,000 - 850,000. And about 13 years of reconstruction.

A virus isn't comparable to people hijacking planes and flying them into buildings.

For one thing, it should be easy to prevent the latter whereas it's far from clear whether there's much we can do about the former.

> A virus isn't comparable to people hijacking planes and flying them into buildings.

Being dead is absolutely comparable with being dead though, no matter what lead there. It's the absence of a person that matters, to the people who miss them, not what people removed from that think about it in the abstract.

I lost my father through a completely stupid accident, made possible through carelessness on his behalf I think. If he had been murdered by someone, I would have felt a lot of hate, and that would have sucked and damaged me no doubt -- but the grief of missing someone is still the same, and I'd say the difference between murder and an accident are both tiny pebbles compared to a person being gone. Even if he had died to save 1000 million people, I would miss him exactly the same.

Denying that we can make worthwhile distinctions between different ways that people die is absolutely nonsensical.

If a serial killer murders your father, we're going to react differently than if your father dies of a heart attack.

> If a serial killer murders your father, we're going to react differently than if your father dies of a heart attack.

What matters, to me, is that I can no longer speak to a person. How that came about is very, very minor compared to that. Even knowing that we all will die some day does not change the simple, banal, them-shaped gap someone leaves. That gap is what remains, what created it does not. I'm just speaking for myself, but that I do.

How and why people die is no doubt very important when it comes to very removed people using tragedies, which was very much the case with 9/11. For them it's the other way around: the gap never really mattered and is soon utterly forgotten, while that evil deed none of us most forget remains as long as it's useful. I remember families of victims speaking out against war after 9/11, and mostly being ignored by a nation angry on their behalf. The dead were exploited more than honored, if you ask me.

Car accidents do not pose systemic risk, a super contagious virus with a fatality rate of ~1-2% definitely does. I think a misunderstanding of this phenomenon (risk comes in different flavors!!) combined with an inability to grok exponential growth is really gonna screw us over, both in the next few months and more generally as a species.

Now imagine if every car accident caused 2 more 3 days later.

Now imagine that if after 20 years worth of deaths car accidents would just go away on their own. Not ideal, but it's better than the current state of affairs with car accidents.

> Now imagine that if after 20 years worth of deaths car accidents would just go away on their own.

We don't actually know that will happen with the virus, it could become like the flu and continue killing every year. We hope natural immunity will last but that is far from a given, it may only last months or years. A vaccine is also not a given, it's older brother SARS doesn't have one.

5 billion hosts gives an awful lot of room for mutations to occur, this thing is still in a new environment it's not adapted to.

Then there's the lasting health effects, it's possible it causes permanent lung damage and we have no idea if it leaves any landmines behind like chickenpox does.

You're not wrong, there is a small possibility that this virus does continuously mutate to keep us from becoming immune, and that we don't find a vaccine or a cure.

If so we're pretty thoroughly fucked. We aren't going to manage to wipe out this virus by shutting down the developed worlds economy's because the rest of the world (especially warzones and the like) isn't capable of doing the same. We can't keep the economy shut down forever to prevent spread in the developed world and not all starve to death.

I'd argue that the best response should that turn out to be true is to pour more resources into medical research until we do find a vaccine... which rather requires having functional stable economies instead of us all going bankrupt because we shut them down.

The virus mutates at a slower rate than the flu, of which we make a new vaccine for every year. So maybe we have a new corona vaccine every few years.

Funding for a SARS vaccine dried up, after SARS died off. The researchers have picked up where they left off with SARS for the covid vaccine.