Show some humanity dude.

It would be all too easy for the media to pick a healthy senior with a mild case and tout “it sucks but it’s not so bad” or find cases of healthy 18yo dying in horrific conditions to fit their overall narrative.

Just data wouldn’t give me sympathy/empathy and not being a medical professional I’m not familiar with diagnostic or clinical language. Data won’t properly convey the suffering unless you’ve seen it.

I’m weary of just anecdotes because it is impossible for me to be able to allocate my limit resources efficiently. I’m not saying this isn’t important or can only be validated when enough people are devastated.

But it's not an isolated tragedy like a school shooting. If the proposed response to school shootings were indefinite social isolation, I would definitely want to know the percentage of kids that got shot and I would be intensely suspicious of a narrative that it's rude or dangerous to ask the question.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhiprakash/coronaviru...

> And two of the hardest-hit areas in the nation — New York City and Los Angeles County — released guidance earlier this week encouraging doctors not to test patients unless they think the test will significantly change their course of treatment. That means that potentially more people in both places could be admitted to hospitals with severe respiratory symptoms and recover — or die — and not be registered as a coronavirus case.

https://twitter.com/JIMrichards1010/status/12391407105589698...

Other hard data takes time to collect and will only be reliable once the disaster has swept through.

There was an article in the Spectator today where a doctor made that point: that this disease has been made a 'notifiable disease' whereas a normal flu wouldn't be, meaning each death gets tested and reported up to the government if positive, whereas for other types of coronavirus the death would just be marked as pneumonia, for example. The data isn't being treated consistently.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

Additionally, a very large percentage of health care workers will catch the virus, this will further reduce the amount of capacity.

Loss of health care workers could be a long term issue as well given the CFR in a place like Italy.

A bit like audio compression - if everything is compressed to the same volume then it gets really hard to tell how loud things are relative to each other.

Another problem is people encounter stories where there are anecdotes in the other direction e.g. today I read stories about Ticino, Japan, Germany where hospitals are waiting for an influx, but it doesn't seem to be growing in the expected way. Why? Unclear. These stories of course get less attention.

The problem with your way of arguing is that one can not win. If they say "if we don't do anything there will be 3 in 100 people dying" and they do something, you say they lied. If they don't do anything, you will ask "why have they not done anything! They are incompetent or malicious"

Clickbait-style "everyone in New York is dead!" bad-faith hysteria would erode my trust.

"We saw a terrible situation, and communicated the situation as clearly as we could at the time, even though our information was incomplete. Since then we have more facts, and are striving to communicate them to you" enhances my trust, not erodes it.

Randomly infecting cells to over broadcast, attack each other, focus on noise, unfocus signal etc etc.

Basic prediction about them, whether on the left or right or podcasting from a garage is that they don't contribute to good outcomes and the bad outcomes are not their fault.

Then one year down the road they hand each other Pulitzers for "unravelling" what actually happened.

Exponential growth of cases and deaths translate into many horrible anecdotes.

It would be interesting to see geographic case density vs. geographic ventilator capacity.

Here in our county in rural Montana (based on info from the local medical establishment, who I know fairly well), we have been conducting much more testing than you'd expect based on reports from around the country, and we have never had a shortage of tests, and our small hospital lab will shortly have in-house testing deployed.

I don't think this makes sense. If this is actually true then the US is just completely broken. Coronavirus is a global pandemic - are you arguing that each individual local jurisdiction should develop and manage it's own tests? That's horribly inefficient and slow.

The initially hit states were depending on the CDC and FDA to provide tests (or at least approve tests):

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-went-wrong-wit...

Unfortunately under the current administration the CDC and FDA are understaffed and being run extremely poorly, which greatly hampered initial testing. If your argument is that local jurisdictions should be responsible for pandemic testing, that makes very little sense to me. It is far more efficient for a single organization to coordinate pandemic response at the national level.

Half of the world’s population are or have been under some kind if restriction due to this virus. I don’t governments do that if they are uncertain.

> I don't think we'll really know what's actually going on for a few more weeks or months

I don’t think it is going to happen, but if the US does what Trump wants and ”lets it rip”, that will answer the question about the seriousness.

Imagine 81 people died in a bus accident, or a fire, or a mass shooting. This is very serious and we're still at the beginning of it.

Don't look at the lit fuse. Look at the bomb it leads to.

NYC death numbers double in under 2 days now.

Using CDC's FluView app I looked at the 2017/2018 flu season to see what the doubling time was. It's not 3 days indeed. It varied quite significantly during the outbreak, but there were periods where it was doubling approximately every week. Potentially faster I suppose depending on how closely people were looking for it (not that close if I understand correctly for most flus).

Viruses can grow pretty fast.

The problem is, as bad as the current numbers are, without significant changes, they are inevitably going to get considerably worse quickly, as you can see from the graphs.

Imagine what'll happen if 60% of the US population gets this quickly (over the next 3 months say) and then 2% of those people die with another 8% in hospital...

But with covid-19 the numbers of people dying is doubling every 3 days.

80, 160, 320, 640, 1280, 2560, 5120, 10,240, 20,480

Potentially Covid-19 would hit that 29200 figure in about 25 days from today.

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/

   8th   17 deaths
  11th   55 
  14th  196 
  17th  533
  20th 1093
  23rd 2311
  26th 4365