To that end, we should consider the amount and directionality of errors made by individuals as we consider what weight to give their current predictions.
What you did isn’t a good faith move. There’s tons to criticise Fauci on in any case, you shouldn’t need to selectively quote stuff like this.
If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.
I don't think that really changes things. The orders of magnitude are 0.1%, 1%, 10%, and he's saying it may be considerably less than 1%, i.e., much closer in relative magnitude (and obviously far nearer in absolute terms) to a seasonal flu.
You are the one who is missing the larger context of this thread, which has been an unfair bullying of someone going back over what they had said 2 years ago about covid and claiming he should "sit this one out". Given this is the position that the experts had back then, clearly having an opinion that it was like a seasonal flu was not way out of line.
And my question to OP about Fauci stands too. Given that is what he wrote, and I provided the link for full context, what credibility should we assign to his current statements.
The piece also doesn’t argue against action or vigilance. It highlights the unknowns, risks, and some potential outcomes. As more information came out Fauci and others adjusted their reviews, predictions, and recommendations to suit.
It’s hardly the same thing as the group of people who’ve spent the last two years trying to downplay this virus every chance they got, and refused to learn from getting it wrong. Telling us it wasn’t serious, that it would die out on its own, that we didn’t need interventions like masks and social distancing, and all the rest.
Clearly bullying here of a person for pretty much repeating what many experts like Fauci and politicians like Pelosi were saying at the time is way out of line. Hopefully you can agree on that.
Plenty of scientists have admitted that they underestimated aspects of this pandemic, from the effectiveness of masking, to the likelihood and severity of variants, to how quickly vaccines would come on stream. But they learnt from it and moved on.
Someone who downplayed the pandemic from the very beginning and who, in response to a new variant that has virologists and epidemiologists extremely worried, says "this is danger porn. pay it no mind and have happy holidays" is neither a serious person nor worth listening to on this subject. They clearly haven't learnt from their past mistakes, or don't want to.
I don't think they do necessarily. I have heard very little in the way of contrition or reflection or honest explanation as to why so many got it wrong for so long. Wrong about the virus, wrong about how it spreads, wrong about vaccines, etc. And yet so many of them still act like they are absolutely certain of what they are saying, when it's clear they in fact don't.
Scientists and experts can be egotistical, dogmatic, inflexible, and rusted on to old ideas. That whole Planck's principle thing, you know.
> Someone who downplayed the pandemic from the very beginning and who,
Someone who said what many experts were saying, you mean?
> in response to a new variant that has virologists and epidemiologists extremely worried, says "this is danger porn. pay it no mind and have happy holidays" is neither a serious person nor worth listening to on this subject. They clearly haven't learnt from their past mistakes, or don't want to.
I disagree, I don't see how that follows. The media certainly have certainly hyped things up and exaggerated and peddled this danger porn. The OP was referring to a sentence from a news article, not a quote from a scientist. The claim is not that covid doesn't matter and this variant is harmless, it's that the news article is danger porn.
Which it is. If it's nothing there's not much we can do, if it's bad news there's not much we can do. As other top level comments say, mutations happen all the time. Look how many major variants there are https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-varian... what is there to gain by panicking every time a new one is found?
Maybe he was just listening to the experts.
Those scientists, by and large, have walked back their statements and admit that the hypothesis that this was a lab leak that occurred in Wuhan is not impossible and that stating it is not necessarily racist. Also, those folks aren't considered "experts" any more (everybody else lowered their priors about those expert's beliefs).
*But critics from WHO and elsewhere have said the bans are unnecessary and could generate a racist backlash against Chinese people.*
*Before long, Trump was running for president on an anti-immigrant platform. One message he pushed was that immigrants carry contagion. In 2015, he put out a statement warning that “tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border,” a claim unsupported by fact.* [ha! That hasn't aged well: https://news.yahoo.com/dhs-dropped-40-000-covid-190800213.html ]
*Just a month after praising China for its handing of the COVID-19 outbreak, U.S. President Donald Trump has sent out a racist tweet terming the coronavirus as “Chinese Virus”.*
*President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are using racism to try to distract from his disastrous preparations for and response to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of taking responsibility for and addressing early failures, they're blaming the crisis on China.*"The president’s chief adviser on immigration, Stephen Miller, had long tried to halt migration based on public health, without success. Then came the coronavirus."[1]
"The idea that immigrants carry infections into the country echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that associates minorities with disease."[1]
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/coronavirus-immigratio...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/xenophobe-chief-de...
Weird you have no recollection of it. It was pretty loud in the media for a while there.
The US has had strict border restrictions on foreign citizens through most of 2021 too. So unless you are going to call the Biden administration racist and xenophobic as well, then this reasoning doesn't work. But even if you did, then what you're saying about barn doors still contradicts what most experts have said in terms of reducing the movement of people to slow the spread.
Nancy Pelosi Visits San Francisco's Chinatown Amid Coronavirus Concerns https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-sa...
"Fear of the Virus is Racially Motivated."
Around the time the Trump administration announced the travel restriction, Biden said that Trump had a “record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.”
In late January, the Trump administration implemented a travel restriction from China, where the coronavirus originated.
Some on the left described the move as a racist or xenophobic ploy aimed at punishing a country that Trump has clashed with over trade.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/498350-biden-trumps-co...
The reality is, that back then, there was simply no better information than "coming from China". It wasn't based on xenophobia at all, just on common sense (that seemed to defy the Democrats / mainstream media). In beginning of March, Trump also closed borders to Europe. Xenophobic? No, Europe was having a spike (e.g. Bergamo, Italy). EU "president", Ursula von der Leyen, criticised the decision. 2 weeks later, EU closed its borders. (Ursula is another person that prefers politics to common sense.)
Something seems to have gone really badly wrong in Italy and it's somehow gone entirely unexamined by the media, despite the fact that it did more to doom the rest of the world's efforts than any of the countries that have been blamed for doing so. Entirely unrelately, Italy is lead by the kind of boring technocrat that the media likes rather than some Trumpian populist figure.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
(and several others)
My criticism was for the the hypothetical that the OP may have rationally stated that the virus was nothing more serious than a seasonal flu, based on experts stating that borders should not be closed. The statement that borders should not be closed was based on the most relevant research at the time; it turned out to be incorrect and was later reversed. But as a lay person, making the jump from that statement to the opinion that the virus is no big deal, and then echoing that opinion to others as fact, is not rational. One might have taken it as weak evidence in that direction, but no more than that.
Now we know that some "experts" were just totally wrong and had no idea what they were talking about, and others were in fact spreading misinformation abouta pandemic for political gain. But that is not OP's fault. You can't condemn him and absolve the actual people who reinforced that incorrect information to him in the first place. Ludicrous.
Studies like this one, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal..., do not support what you are saying. Experts predicted 30,000 people would die from covid in the UK by the end of 2020, compared with yearly deaths from influenza which is usually quoted at about 25,000-30,000.
We were already dying before February 2020. America is fat and we'll never get universal healthcare because people can't take responsibility for their actions. 80% of people who died from this thing were obese. If it hit 40 years ago it would have been nothing or similar to Hong Kong Flu
I am not happy that the people announced this did so with scare tactics (specific wording) rather than emotionless facts.
Emotionless facts can be scary in their own right.
I think US public health officials and generally in europe the leadership all pursued the most reasonable path and it's unlikely we could have reduced the overall death load significantly through any intervention short of extreme isolation. It is very unlikely that mainstream science will conclude, in a decade, that we could have taken actions that would have greatly reduced the spread and impact, without also applying highly restrictive rules.
Then I don't think we're going to end up being in agreement. To me the world isn't a science experiment where some outcomes are interesting and others are uninteresting when it comes to the deaths of millions of people. Call me a softie if you wish.
Obviously it's terrible that millions of people died. But then, millions of people died from the black plague, many die from car accidents, and preventable (via lifestyle changes) diseases. As an ex-scientist I work hard to take the long view on disease- that is, billions of years. Once you adopt this perspective and look at COVID, you realize that many aspects of it have been overreported in the press and that led many people to overestimate its relative danger compared to many other things we face on a regular basis.
The current reporting about the newest virus is a great example- the language is scary, but we have absolutely no data to tell us that this will have any global impact, nor that this represents any sort of phase change into a new situation.> As an ex-scientist I work hard to take the long view on disease- that is, billions of years.
That's fine, but that timescale is not the timescale at which our lives are unfolding.
> Once you adopt this perspective and look at COVID, you realize that many aspects of it have been overreported in the press and that led many people to overestimate its relative danger compared to many other things we face on a regular basis.
Well, even if I take the most conservative figures I end up with millions of 'front-loaded' deaths, and 100's of thousands of deaths where 'premature' is probably an accurate figure. And that's before we get to take into account that this is long from being over.
> The current reporting about the newest virus is a great example- the language is scary, but we have absolutely no data to tell us that this will have any global impact, nor that this represents any sort of phase change into a new situation.
That is absolutely true. But at the same time we also don't have any data for the opposite: that this will not affect things at all. Policy makers are in a bind, anything they do that helps will come with a price tag, the cost of doing nothing is likely political suicide, the cost of doing too much is going to come at the price of a massive global recession (and possibly set the stage for future wars).
So now we get this stretched out slow motion train wreck, which is far from ideal as well. What would you suggest we do instead?
As I said, nobody should follow my advice. it would be political suicide- in the same way that people who promote "death panels" (to allocate limited resources rationally) get shut down, even though it's the most rational approach that would maximize global health.
Further, everything I suggested above is merely intuition based on several decades of experience working in public health/medical biology, rather than hard epidemiological data. I could be completely wrong and my strategy could instead lead to a black death scenario or existential situation (death rates of 30+% due to virulent variants with high transmission rates and very long infectious periods). Again, I must say that nobody should follow my recommendation because it's based entirely on a lifetime of systems thinking and working with complex biological entities.
Seriously though I can't think of a more reasonable strategy than that carried out by the US, Sweden, and China (each represents a different experiment).
China's extreme level of population restriction and high level of testing seems to have greatly reduced transmission and impact (I don't know how to interpret China's published numbers, and I don't really trust them that much). This is probably necessary in any area where population density is high enough that rapid transmission can occur. However, my guess is that it also led to a large number immune-naive people and I don't think that any current vaccine will be useful for more than a year, so I think they're at constant risk of explosive disease growth that they can only address through strict policies.
For countries with fairly small number of dense cities, like Sweden, I think what they did was excellent. They stated their prior beliefs and more or less stuck to them and, in my interpretation, they did not suffer any more than other countries, when population density is considered.
Finally, the US. The US did fairly well even though there is a large noncompliant population for a number of reasons. First, we've invested heavily in disease management infrastructure (research, hospitals, strong public health) which meant that we could deal with (to some extent) the massive surge of patients going to hospitals who then infected others nosocomically, and have industries that developed vaccines and other treatments quickly. Second, we actually have a well organized public health system that is relatively powered to implement unpopular but reasonable policies. But, I worry that our court system moves too slowly (for example I would really like to see the supreme court making an extraordinary decision that the US has full rights to mandate vaccines for its entire population) and we have a large number of people who seem to actively fight reasonable public health measures.
So in short, the best approach is to have a large amount of resources (public health researchers, medical folks) combined with excellent realtime knowledge about spread, a largely compliant population which is willing to suspend civil liberties in emergency situations, and political leaders who are willing to risk their long-term careers by providing cover for the researchers.
Finally, thank goodness that the US had the foresight to make and fund the NIH and CDC for so long, providing us with an excellent foundation with which to respond to diseases like this. I am in awe of the folks who pushed for the creation of a new field (molecular biology) in the 30s and 40s which led to the elucidation of the genetic code and development of structural biology, which ultimately provides the foundation for much of our understanding of viruses.
Where I live the health care system has been weakened to the point that we can't really deal with such levels of calamity in a responsible manner any more, the result of years of neo-liberal cost cutting and attempts to create a market situation around health care. The end result is a terribly fragile mix of high density populations, extreme mobility and very little cushion to absorb mistakes. It remains to be seen if either one of the three scenarios you sketched will work for us in the longer term, so far it's not looking all that good but it also could have been far worse.
People evolved to respond to the flu over millenia before there was widespread travel. I think that explains much of the dynamics of covid.
A premature death is a premature death, no matter how many years it cuts off.
That's precisely what made it abnormal. The population isn't naive to normal seasonal viruses.
Hindsight is 20/20. I hope that most of HN will forgive me for questioning the notion that u/idlewords is somehow entitled to disqualify others from this discussion about variants.
https://twitter.com/miamalan/status/1463846528578109444?s=21
I don’t have a background to properly analyse this but to me it looks legit.
* SA has a <50% vaccination rate, so its not quite clear whether its spread could be circumvent vaccine-induced antibodies * SA is past its delta-wave, so this variant has made relatively huge gain over delta, but absolute numbers are still fairly moderate.
I'm all in for taking necessary precautions for slowing down the arrival of the new variant in other countries, but it seems it isn't clear yet that the effect we see in South Africa will replicate elsewhere.
it's closer to 25% countrywide, according to https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=ZAF
But this source says 35%: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/exclusive-south-africa-...
It will be higher in urban areas, and lower outside of them.
A similar thing happened in some South American countries with a cholera outbreak. Strains that made people more sick forced them to stay inside whereas the more harmless strains allowed people to socialize more and the harmless ones ended up spreading faster
What are the ethics in engineering a new virus and deliberately infecting people? What happens if some of those people die? What happens if your variant that has been engineered to spread extremely effectively mutates into something more lethal? How do you test your engineered virus? Large-scale tests on people? How would that be faster or more effective than producing a new vaccine and testing that instead? What happens if your tests show that the engineered virus is not as benevolent as you hoped, and is actually rather horrific? Can you put the genie back in the bottle?
This alone should make it a non-option, there will be no way to contain it or stop it from mutating, I fail to see how it wouldn't just be a question of time the same way COVID variants are. The consequences could be disastrous and simply worsen the situation.
Well, if you're a policymaker then suspending travel to prevent it from spreading internationally. If it's the worst case (more infectious than delta + immune evading) then buying a little time to adapt vaccines or produce the recently announced antivirals could save a lot of lives.
This was effectively the approach New Zealand took but it wasn't sustainable. Maybe it would be more effective when implemented by an authoritarian regime (although difficult to measure given issues with transparency) but even then it won't last. China's going to have to start learning to live with Covid like every other country has had to.
Have to get rid of the holiday-calories _somehow_.
(/s for those who were doubting)
Edit: I'm not saying anything about this paper. I know nothing about this. Just a meta comment that, in really hard to get published in journals, there might be a bi-modality of papers. Really important and really wrong :)
I have actively ignored Nature and Science papers for my entire career (with the exception of my one Nature publication, and W&C 1953 of course).
I wonder if in the end we're just prolonging the agony. And the measures have a human cost too. Depression, loss of economic welfare which leads to poorer health conditions.
There's more and more talk of letting things slide more ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29337373 for example) and I'm personally wondering if this isn't the right thing too. Corona isn't going away and if we have to keep living with constant lockdowns and masks there isn't much quality of life left. And really eventually we're all catching it anyway. I'm totally happy taking as many vaccines as needed but long-term behavioural changes into directions which are not human nature is a big price to pay.
We can't do this right away (we need more vaccination levels and effective medication) and we have to seriously invest in healthcare but as an end-goal this looks like a much more positive future perspective to me than continuing to fight against every infection.
Personally I'd gladly take a bit higher chance of dying instead of having to struggle with these measures every day.
Not only have happy holiday, but also have happy return to normal. Most adults are vaxxed, if we don't remove restrictions now we will never remove them.
We have evidence that Delta has a much larger viral load and that it has outcompeted the Alpha variant everywhere in the world. You have to be in total denial to pretend the Delta variant might have been no more transmissible than Alpha.
Imagine delta and alpha are both introduced in a naive population at the exact same time. Which one will spread faster? No one has a clue
A large (mostly) unvaccinated and uninfected population has been exposed to both variants and the delta variant won out, what more proof do you want?
this is danger porn. pay it no mind and have happy holidays.