Exactly. We need some humility in people. It is okay to admit that this is (thankfully!) not as bad as we thought, but it is still bad. It will still kill a lot of people. We need to take it seriously, but not as seriously as we feared. The doomers need to have the humility to admit that, and the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu.

Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day.

> the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu.

I don't believe any significant number actually thinks that, it's their counter to "everybody will die, the science is settled". They will aim for something on the opposite extreme, that is a pretty common reaction.

Imho: if you don't try to convince them that an asteroid is about to crash into earth, but instead tell them that lots of people are scared to death of an asteroid crashing into earth, they'll have a much easier time saying "okay, sure, I don't want them to be scared, I can wear a mask when I go shopping, I guess".

> Again, I fear people don't realize that this isn't a game. This is disastrously bad and getting worse every. single. day.

Where you live, maybe. Where I live, we haven't had a case in 10 days in the county of 330k people, we've had laughably low deaths to begin with, the curve was pretty much flattened the moment we went into constraints ... and we still have mandatory masks with no end in sight, and our local government still does not go back to normal mode, the trash is still getting picked up on irregular schedules etc.

It's neither disastrous here, and it's not getting worse. But a lot of people are still scared out of their mind. And we need to help them to breathe and calm down, and tell them that it was scary, but that it's okay to go back outside. And at some point we'll have to tell them that they need to go back outside because we can't keep society running around them without them.

I mean the response is a disaster, not the epidemic itself. The fact that 40m are unemployed, that income tax receipts have nosedived, that business are shuttering leading to blight etc. Those are the long term disasters in the making.

Oh, my mistake, I misunderstood. Thanks for clearing that up!

> and the hoaxers need to have the humility to admit that it is worse than the seasonal flu.

Seasonal flu happens every year. Novel virus pandemics happen once per century. Seasonal flu is much more deadly, just spread out over longer timeline. And estimated covid mortality rate for my age group falls every week. I'm still not convinced it's measurably worse than the flu (for my age group).

In my state the virus has killed less than 2,000 people with a population of 27 million and hospitalization rates continue to plummet in spite of lifted restrictions weeks ago. The problem I have with all arbitrary Covid rules is that they're not based on any objective criteria. For example, if we were rational, we would base policy entirely on local hospital capacity and hospitalization count (the original impetus for draconian shut downs was the belief that hospitals would get overrun, which never happened in 99% of the country). We cannot live in bubbles forever, and the disease may well persist forever with no vaccine. There's no threshold being set for arbitrary rules (i.e. if Covid hospitalizations less than X, restrictions lifted). So we just get this random enforcement of arbitrary policies, where you have leaders in CA fining people for being on the beach, in the sun, in open air, where there's extremely small chance of transmission. For my own part, I choose my own risks, and if you want to a wear a mask, go for it. But the curve was flattened even in places that never had restrictions. So we know by now this isn't the plague. We gotta move on. We only get so many trips around the sun. Can't live it in fear.

That's exactly the strategy that Washington state is following. We even have a dashboard where can see the indicators, and they are things like infection rates per day per capita over 7 days, hospitilization rates.

I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth.

The recent hydroxychloroquine is an obvious example [1]; The Lancet should never have published something with data so obviously questionable, and the media should not have picked it up so immediately as political ammunition. But the result is that the media appears to be "once again" lying to the public.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421797

This happened again today, with Washington Post publishing an article based on a study that was submitted to Nature on March 22, 2020. They used this old data (2 months ago is old in this case) to claim that the lockdown saved millions upon millions of lives. To be that disingenuous can't be accidental, I am afraid. And I am normally a fan of WaPo

The data is indeed old but China began its lockdown on January 24th and South Korea a month later. Those countries seem to be the central focus of the study with regards to evaluating the effectiveness of the shutdown(s).

I'm only a layperson but it doesn't seem too far-fetched that they could extrapolate from how those countries "flattened the curve" to come up with a ballpark estimate of global fatalities averted. After all, other countries mostly followed a similar "curve flattening" pattern (as far as I'm aware).

At the very least, I don't see anything inherently disingenuous.

Side note: FWIW, the study itself says the authors last "updated" it on May 13th (not the data itself though it appears).

IMO, it is pretty easy to see why an extrapolation is faulty. Let us look at two different reasons:

1. Density. China and South Korea are far more dense than most of the western world. Seoul has a density of 42,000 per square mile. New York City, the densest city in the US, has a density of 23,000 per square mile. The next top 10 most populous cities in the USA have an average density of 5,000 per square mile. Over half of South Koreans live in an urban environment, while less than 25% of Americans do. Density, and the number of interactions someone has in a day, is a major determining factor in the spread of any airborne virus.

Density also has implications for transit use, which in NYC was shown to be a large source of transmission.

2. Demographics. Italy, the United States and Sweden all have very different demographics and cultures. In Italy, many people live in multi-generational housing, and nursing home usage is far lower than the United States. The average age of Italy is also higher. Sweden is more like the US in terms of nursing homes, but still lower. As the older folks are far more likely to die from this, or even have detectable infections, the way each country manages their aging population will have a huge impact on mortality.

For example, people going about their day like normal, and then returning to their shared home with their Grandma would put Grandma at a much higher risk of infection. That is the Italy scenario. In the United States, where the old either live independently or in a group home, their vectors are much more limited. Test and trace everyone going to and working at a nursing home. It should also be noted that the areas if NYC most heavily hit are also more multi-generational than the rest of the city and country.

So see, you can't take one nation and extrapolate it out to the world. That is a faulty model and those who championed it should know better.

What you're saying makes sense, thank you.

I'm wondering though, are you saying it because the study did indeed fail to account for all those factors or are you basing it my (probably poor) interpretation/description of it? :-) If you're going off my comments, I may have done a disservice as my laypersons understanding of the topic is pretty rudimentary.

FWIW, the study does indeed model other countries like the US and Italy so I'd be surprised if much of what you speak of was not taken into account.

I certainly don't think they modeled one nation and simply extrapolated that out into the world without other considerations. I apologise if my words gave that impression... Even I can see how stupid that would be.

Here's the link if anyone is interested https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2404-8_reference....

Hey,

Not sure if you are comfortable with R or Python, but you can look at the code here: https://codeocean.com/capsule/1887579/tree/v1

They do not seem to be taking cultural or demographic information into account. A lot of the data is sourced from the Johns Hopkins data set and fed into an SRI type model, with some data about when and how strict lockdowns where.

It is actually pretty sloppy to be given so much weight.

Cheers, I will indeed take a look. Thanks.

> I think that the root problem that needs to be addressed is that to a lot of people, scientists and the media appear to put politics before truth.

Fully agree here. I'm aware of Heterodox Academy trying to tackle this problem in the academic world--is there an analog solving for media bias?

At this point, the only thing I'm hoping for is basically total media collapse.

It's actually proceeding apace. By its very nature, being slick TV shows and edited textual content, it'll superficially look like everything's fine until the very end, but the layoffs continue to roll through, marginal outlets are closing, the viewership drops, the respect keeps finding new lows... it's still looking good and may even come sooner than you think.

This does not, on its own, solve the problem, but it makes the problem possible to solve.

Yes for TV news. Not for every kind of news. Some outlets are having a good crisis.

In the UK the Daily Telegraph is giving back the government furlough/support money as it doesn't need it. So is The Spectator. Interestingly these are the right wing newspapers. Why give up free money? Because the government really needs it but the newspapers don't, given that they are profitable and subscriptions have been rising, not falling.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-statement-from-the-cha...

The Daily Telegraph has doubled subscriptions in March alone.