The Coronavirus thread - Page 5

On March 15 2020 00:30 FiSheYe wrote: Show nested quote + On March 14 2020 23:44 bigredhoss wrote:   On March 14 2020 23:02 LemOn[5thF] wrote: So what's your shopping strategy boys I'm in China, so things are just getting back to normal =s Are they? I heard conflicting information on that, that it is nowhere near back to normal and that China could also face re-infections / 2nd wave outbreaks. Where in China are you? Great to have your information. I trust people here actually a lot more than official news about whats going on at the ground

Yeah sorry, I should clarify a little bit if people are going to take my words as a report of the situation here.

I'm in Dongguan (city in Southeast of China with about ~8 million people, near Guangzhou and Shenzhen; about 45 minute train ride to Hong Kong).

When I say things are getting back to normal, I mean more in the sense that they seem to have turned the corner. A month ago, almost EVERYTHING non-essential was shut down. Some supermarket chains stayed open on shortened hours, closing early in the evening instead of 10-11pm like usual. But every restaurant, cafe, convenience store, bike shop, etc. was completely closed. I would ride around the streets on my motorbike looking for something, and not only was everything closed, there were almost no vehicles on the road, which was super weird to see in a city of 8M people. You could feel the uneasiness and sense of paralysis in the air from everyone.

The thing is there is a confounding variable because this was during Chinese New Year holiday which is already normally a dead time of year because everyone goes back to their villages or on vacation somewhere. Anyway, after talking to people who have been here longer I confirmed that yes, it's normally dead during CNY, but no, not this dead.

Right now:

-Businesses are back to regular hours and there's more traffic, but outside of peak hours still less traffic than before the virus
-Everyone still wears masks whenever they go outside, and it's kind of remarkable to me how well everyone complies with this.
-People seem a lot more relaxed and good-natured. People are back to their normal activities - you see families playing badminton outside, walking their dogs, etc. (but still with masks)
-Anytime you want to go into a public building like a mall, restaurant, gated apartment complex, etc. you have to have your temperature taken.
-Everyone has their own personal QR codes that we are supposed to have ready to show the guards at out apartment complex if they want to scan, but in practice they just take a look to see that the QR code is there and wave people through. They store a lot of personal information about each person - a bit more than I'd like - but it is what it is.
-Foreigners who entered China after a certain date or left and came back to China after a certain date (I forget what the date is) have to be quarantined in their apartments for 14 days. They have to take a photo of their temperature every so often and send it to the officials, once in a while someone will come in and check on them to make sure they're not violating the quarantine. I've been going on grocery runs for a few people in my apartment complex that have to go through quarantine now. Also the 14-day quarantine thing is a Dongguan-specific policy, other cities may have different requirements.

So yeah, not quite business as usual. I was mostly thinking of #1 and 3 when I made the comment. As far as there being danger of a second wave, I have also heard about that, but I don't have any more info on that than anyone else.

How'd you end up living in china anyways?

On March 15 2020 09:09 LemOn[5thF] wrote: How'd you end up living in china anyways?

I teach high school math at an international school here.

Interesting
I was worried about public transport
First instinct was that they'd limit or stop it
- they did it on student lines at first
- and my 100k people hometown changed to holiday schedules

But apparently the government might enforce the OPPOSITE
and try to add as many connections as possible and shorten intervals
to avoid cramping of people

On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: 1. It's trivial to see from the R0 and mortality rates that Ebola, SARS, and MERS were never in the same league as CV is in terms of potential damage. It's not the Spanish Flu, but it's closer to that than it is to anything we've had since the Spanish Flu.

Yeah I definitely am not saying that. If Corona was like any of those and we got the current amount of panic though, wouldn't you agree with me that the reaction would be INSANELY overblown?

I think it's totally possible for both of these to be true at the same time
1. Corona is worse than any of the outbreaks you listed
2. People are still overreacting, society is not about to collapse

On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: 2. If you insist on not doing any research and meta-consuming news headlines, please consider the following: -The short, headline-catching facts of CV are set up perfectly for people to under-react to it. "Just a bad flu", 0.2% death rate if you're not old, overall death rate also not a shockingly high number at first glance, "X0,000 people die each year from the flu, bro".

You can also name only the impressive stats to overplay the dangers while ignoring the good news. E.g. "this is like ebola but way more contageous". But yeah the just flu bros are simply wrong. I don't think that opinion is very prevalent, it just gets retweeted alot on twitter because it's so outrageous.

On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: -People, as you have shown, are maximally numb right now to anything they perceive as sensationalist headlines because of the way the news cycle has evolved over the past few years. It's extraordinarily difficult to try and sell Joe Blow on the idea that he should cancel non-urgent travel plans and self-isolate for a month or more because of something that has a 1 in 500 chance of killing him if he even catches it, and (assuming he's not from China/Italy/Iran/Spain) has killed less than 100 people in his country. And yet that is what the WHO and governments are (finally) advising - or in some cases mandating.

Yeah I can't get any more numb with media headlines. If some truly earth-shattering event really happens I don't think the media can warn me anymore they've just conditioned me to ignore them forever.

The last time there was a tyfoon here in Tokyo I was a 5 min walk away from the worst-struck area and saw the actual reality of the situation and the media coverage both. On TV it looked literally 1000x worse than outside, the things they can do with selecting / editing footage from a huge selection into tiny segments is amazing. The idea of news under-representing a danger / being lax and not vigilant enough just seems so alien to me I can't really explain it.

On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: -It is extraordinarily difficult to convince sports leagues, event promoters, etc. that they need to lose out on billions of dollars of revenue for...well, any reason. And yet major games, events, etc. are being canceled.

I agree but doesn't that help my case? I actually don't think canceling big events is overreacting - we can do without sports leagues for a bit - but you know there's some serious fear in the air when you see big corps giving up money lol. Most big gatherings are just rituals that are in our human nature, I don't think we really *need* them

On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: 3. There is still a very wide range of possible outcomes, depending on what levels governments go to isolate people and how people comply, what extent warm and humid weather has on the spread (I think the data is still unclear about this), and how well countries are able to ramp up their health care capacity so that they aren't overwhelmed when the disease reaches its peak. I suppose there is some irony in that if countries take very aggressive and effective preventative measures, the resulting death toll numbers will look a bit like this was never that big of a deal in the first place. But if governments prepare for for the bottom 20 percentile worst case scenario, we are completely fucked if the bottom 2 percentile scenario happens (to be fair I think you implicitly acknowledged this).

Yeah I agree with you 100%. I also think that after this blows over and things turn out be OK like always, team "not worried" will say "see? told u so" and team "impending zombie apocalypse" will say "all thanks to our timely warning & vigilance", hehe

Btw just to make sure when I am predicting that things will turn out OK and society is not going to collapse (and I think u agree with me on that), I am doing that including all the precautions etc. that people, businesses and governments have taken, as a given. I'm definitely NOT saying "we should have ignored this and done nothing, nothing would have gone wrong". From reading your posts I suspect we feel about the same level of risk, but we are way off on others' perception of risk (with me thinking other people act like the sky is falling, while you feel many people feel there is no risk at all).

I mean look at Fisheye's posts. This is a highly intelligent guy and he's talking about "beginning of a disaster movie", the orchestral music is kicking in, zombie apocalypse could have been avoided etc., that's fear talking imo. Imagine what that fear does to someone who is less well informed / maybe can't think about probabilities in an educated way. I think a lot of people out there are just paralyzed with fear clustered to the news & twitter thinking it's 50-50 right now whether or not we end up in a nuclear wasteland and that's just preposterous.

On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: 4. From a probability standpoint the majority of the mega-bad outcomes from this are in the long tail of the probability distribution. 8-figure worldwide deaths may not be a likely outcome at this point, but such figures are also not a figment of the imagination of over-reactive journalists who are over-extrapolating data as you seem to imply.

Yeah 8-figure worldwide deaths seems EXTREMELY unlikely to me but I would agree with u that it's unfortunately not impossible. I also appreciate that you said "at this point", some optimism

I don't really think journalists are over-imaginative stresschickens, I just think they're trained to write interesting stories / get clicks & views and in the case of that disasters worse is more interesting

What about the 25% stock market drop & super market doomsday runs for toilet paper? Wouldn't u agree with me that these are good indicators of exaggerated fear? In case you feel a 25% drop in valuation is an under-reaction, how much would have been appropriate?

Wouldn't you agree with my basic premise that, since the media has consistently overblown everything in the past, we can assume it's more likely they're overblowing this as well?

On March 15 2020 07:55 LemOn[5thF] wrote: I'm not sure how productive what you're doing is at all Fisheye by the way, in a crisis like this people should focus on what they can change individually in their communities right now You can e.g. make home made disinfectant and distribute it Make sure your social circle does what they can and influence them Do you really think spending this much time studying global trends and long term projections is a good use of your time?

I think you are far ahead in terms of understanding what is happening, but you seem to be unaware of how most others perceive the situation. Here in Germany people still go to restaurants, shake hands and until yesterday went partying. People in supermarkets are complaining about the hysteria and why there is no toilet paper. Most people are clueless of what is happening in the next months. I think first and foremost our obligation is to understand for our-self the best we can what is going on. Then inform our family and friends about the urgency of precaution / measures / self-isolation and point them to the right resources. Then if you are a hero, go outside and help others, produce your own masks and so forth. Your suggestion to me is like at the end of this process, like you want to be the firefighter at 9/11 running into the burning buildings. Be my guest, I will talk about you in the highest manner but I am not sure that is the right approach for everyone.
Right now in isolation the best you can do is inform others, rational with good information. And go from there.. debating about who does better and who doesn't do enough is probably for a later time. Right now it is more about giving those that are clueless, stupid or ignorant an opportunity to catch up to those that are informed. Best case we look like crazy fools in the end and be laughed at. Best case is you don't have to go to any funerals or tell your friends you are sorry for their loss

I started a discord with Eri, everyone who wants to talk about the situation or educate me or be educated can join. Bigredhoss I would love to have you there just so I can talk to someone who actually lives in China and could maybe make me understand how the next weeks will look like in Europe and so forth.

https://discord.gg/DdstkPe

All of you stay safe and as mentioned a few times, I think logically/ GTO approach is to over-react now and then be laughed at, rather than under-react in a phase where it seems more and more obvious how big this is gonna be.

On March 15 2020 10:58 Jelle wrote: Show nested quote + On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: 1. It's trivial to see from the R0 and mortality rates that Ebola, SARS, and MERS were never in the same league as CV is in terms of potential damage. It's not the Spanish Flu, but it's closer to that than it is to anything we've had since the Spanish Flu. Yeah I definitely am not saying that. If Corona was like any of those and we got the current amount of panic though, wouldn't you agree with me that the reaction would be INSANELY overblown? I think it's totally possible for both of these to be true at the same time 1. Corona is worse than any of the outbreaks you listed 2. People are still overreacting, society is not about to collapse   On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: 2. If you insist on not doing any research and meta-consuming news headlines, please consider the following: -The short, headline-catching facts of CV are set up perfectly for people to under-react to it. "Just a bad flu", 0.2% death rate if you're not old, overall death rate also not a shockingly high number at first glance, "X0,000 people die each year from the flu, bro". You can also name only the impressive stats to overplay the dangers while ignoring the good news. E.g. "this is like ebola but way more contageous". But yeah the just flu bros are simply wrong. I don't think that opinion is very prevalent, it just gets retweeted alot on twitter because it's so outrageous.   On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: -People, as you have shown, are maximally numb right now to anything they perceive as sensationalist headlines because of the way the news cycle has evolved over the past few years. It's extraordinarily difficult to try and sell Joe Blow on the idea that he should cancel non-urgent travel plans and self-isolate for a month or more because of something that has a 1 in 500 chance of killing him if he even catches it, and (assuming he's not from China/Italy/Iran/Spain) has killed less than 100 people in his country. And yet that is what the WHO and governments are (finally) advising - or in some cases mandating. Yeah I can't get any more numb with media headlines. If some truly earth-shattering event really happens I don't think the media can warn me anymore they've just conditioned me to ignore them forever. The last time there was a tyfoon here in Tokyo I was a 5 min walk away from the worst-struck area and saw the actual reality of the situation and the media coverage both. On TV it looked literally 1000x worse than outside, the things they can do with selecting / editing footage from a huge selection into tiny segments is amazing. The idea of news under-representing a danger / being lax and not vigilant enough just seems so alien to me I can't really explain it.   On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: -It is extraordinarily difficult to convince sports leagues, event promoters, etc. that they need to lose out on billions of dollars of revenue for...well, any reason. And yet major games, events, etc. are being canceled. I agree but doesn't that help my case? I actually don't think canceling big events is overreacting - we can do without sports leagues for a bit - but you know there's some serious fear in the air when you see big corps giving up money lol. Most big gatherings are just rituals that are in our human nature, I don't think we really *need* them   On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: 3. There is still a very wide range of possible outcomes, depending on what levels governments go to isolate people and how people comply, what extent warm and humid weather has on the spread (I think the data is still unclear about this), and how well countries are able to ramp up their health care capacity so that they aren't overwhelmed when the disease reaches its peak. I suppose there is some irony in that if countries take very aggressive and effective preventative measures, the resulting death toll numbers will look a bit like this was never that big of a deal in the first place. But if governments prepare for for the bottom 20 percentile worst case scenario, we are completely fucked if the bottom 2 percentile scenario happens (to be fair I think you implicitly acknowledged this). Yeah I agree with you 100%. I also think that after this blows over and things turn out be OK like always, team "not worried" will say "see? told u so" and team "impending zombie apocalypse" will say "all thanks to our timely warning & vigilance", hehe Btw just to make sure when I am predicting that things will turn out OK and society is not going to collapse (and I think u agree with me on that), I am doing that including all the precautions etc. that people, businesses and governments have taken, as a given. I'm definitely NOT saying "we should have ignored this and done nothing, nothing would have gone wrong". From reading your posts I suspect we feel about the same level of risk, but we are way off on others' perception of risk (with me thinking other people act like the sky is falling, while you feel many people feel there is no risk at all). I mean look at Fisheye's posts. This is a highly intelligent guy and he's talking about "beginning of a disaster movie", the orchestral music is kicking in, zombie apocalypse could have been avoided etc., that's fear talking imo. Imagine what that fear does to someone who is less well informed / maybe can't think about probabilities in an educated way. I think a lot of people out there are just paralyzed with fear clustered to the news & twitter thinking it's 50-50 right now whether or not we end up in a nuclear wasteland and that's just preposterous.   On March 14 2020 22:59 bigredhoss wrote: 4. From a probability standpoint the majority of the mega-bad outcomes from this are in the long tail of the probability distribution. 8-figure worldwide deaths may not be a likely outcome at this point, but such figures are also not a figment of the imagination of over-reactive journalists who are over-extrapolating data as you seem to imply. Yeah 8-figure worldwide deaths seems EXTREMELY unlikely to me but I would agree with u that it's unfortunately not impossible. I also appreciate that you said "at this point", some optimism I don't really think journalists are over-imaginative stresschickens, I just think they're trained to write interesting stories / get clicks & views and in the case of that disasters worse is more interesting What about the 25% stock market drop & super market doomsday runs for toilet paper? Wouldn't u agree with me that these are good indicators of exaggerated fear? In case you feel a 25% drop in valuation is an under-reaction, how much would have been appropriate? Wouldn't you agree with my basic premise that, since the media has consistently overblown everything in the past, we can assume it's more likely they're overblowing this as well?

Jelle, I think you are misunderstanding my postings a bit. At this point, fortunately all these discussions are theoretical for the most part but it is important to understand the possible outcomes that are unfortunately on the table. I am mostly in panic-mode and maybe blowing it out of proportion because almost everyone else IS NOT. My friends just post whatsapp meme's of dutch guys riding in huge warehouse full of toilet paper and make jokes about isolation jerking off. As I mentioned previously I am fine being laughed at for this but imagine it goes bad, do you want to sit with your grand children when they ask what you did during the biggest financial and humanitarian crisis in our lifetime and you talk about posting funny meme's and telling your friends to enjoy the sun with this flu hysteria ? What are the downsides to underplaying and overplaying it? Unfortunately the smart people I talk to are all very pessimistic when it comes to the numbers. Of course this is NOT zombie time nor will we lose a huge chunk of the world population in my opinion. But even the more optimistic smart informed people told me that they basically see 1 Mio. deaths as a best case scenario. Those are all individual thinkers that scream BS on almost all the media shenanigans but when I individually talked to them about their assessment NONE of them think it can be much better than that case. That is SCARY as fuck to me and when you do some basic math it is hard to derive at a number lower anyways. I am sure the bigredhoss can do a much better job at this than I can but the basic calculation would be something like this (and please elaborate / fix my errors):

We have 7.7 Billion people, lets assume like during the Spanish flu 27% will get infected (in Germany experts assume 60-70 for Germany, in Norway they assume 40-70% for Norway). Mortality rate in Italy is 6.8, in South Korea it seems to be under 1%, globally the number is between 2-3.4% as of current predictions. We don't know about re-infections (Japan has a guy now that got reinfected within 1 month), we don't know about mutations and we don't know about Fibrosis /Pneumonia like issues after being healed (some ppl lost 30-40% of lung capacity after severe issues).

7.7 Billion * 0.27 * 0.01 = ~ 20.8 Mio. deaths.
Now if we go with a simulation based on Italian numbers we would all be fucked. If we go to a spread of the virus not around 1.4-3.9x but higher (some suggest up to 6x) then we are fucked big time. But South Korea for example and even China give hope that this is completely blown out of proportion and that we could get to a fatality rate of below 1% with the right measures. Good testing / masks / hygiene / (a certain level of government compliance) / self-isolation and other measures could push the important numbers like growth rate and fatality towards a much better number. In those scenarios I can see a very good case where we probably only infect a much smaller % of the population, find a cure/something that helps quickly / avoid over hospitalization and maybe will only talk about something like 500k deaths worldwide over a 1-2 year period. In that case it might be less dramatic than the seasonal flu globally and indeed it was all just crazy overreaction.

Now I can see why this seems outrageous and overblown and drama etc. but if you really try to calculate the numbers you might find a hard time to get the number of deaths to below my best case, and that should be alarming to you. Outside of all the media news and that is why the smart people in the room that I listen to seem so worried, and that is maybe why you should be, too.

Just for the Flu-type corner that might be lurking. Germany had 2017/18 the worst case of the flu in a long time, 25k people died and 9 mio were infected (mortality rate around 0.25%). It is tragic but can happen. Now 9 Mio represents only ~11-12% of the population. All the experts expect on a low end 40 on a higher end 70% of the population to get infected. So far best case is a mortality rate of around 0.7 - 1%. No matter how you move the numbers around, it will be hard to have less than 10x of what the flu did in Germany. And that was during a time of no financial crisis, no panic, no racism etc. that could come out of this as well.
I want smarter people than me to point out where I am so misguided and wrong about this, trust me I don't want to be right here, I want to be laughed off the forums but please use rational arguments and not just oh you are just in panic-mode relax, dude. Now in my perception with all the global measures being taken so quickly and a lot of questions about the mutation and death rate of this virus, I have to assume that the media is actually UNDERPLAYING some parts of this (of course others are overblown but just in a general context), you can insert whatever conspiracy why that might be, my best guess is to avoid a mass panic too quickly. That is why schools close for 2 weeks at first, and not 3 months. They take full measures but at a slower need to know basis, where slowly it goes from 1000 people gatherings to stay home. From work at home to safety net for global financial crisis and so forth. If you are intellectually slow I don't mind that argument, but if you are just ignorant I want you to wake up. NOW

You know what
maybe we need two threads
one for unpractical walls of text like this and theorycrafting

and one for practical advice and actions you should take

wanted to ask a question about that but this is getting way too cluttered

thank you, that is what I keep telling Baalim for a day now, after he closed my thread. This is way bigger than just one thread about what we think. I actually think there should be 3

1# What to do, just good information about reality

2# Can be for conspiracies, off topic, memes pictures blabla

3# serious discussions about what we are facing, what this could all mean, what is happening in countries, etc.


In the end hopefully none of it is warranted but I don't see the upside of not taking this serious

Thanks for writing out some numbers that's pretty cool

On March 15 2020 11:58 FiSheYe wrote: 7.7 Billion * 0.27 * 0.01 = ~ 20.8 Mio. deaths.

Why would we assume 27% of the world gets infected? Because of the Spanish flu in 1918? That's like data from a different planet.

According to google; "In 1915 the transcontinental telephone line began operating. "
On the other hand, we have smartphones

Imagine this; I'm talking to some random dudes on the internet and you guys have already impacted me, I will probably go out even less in the coming weeks and switch some of my boxing at the gym with lifting weights at home. In 1918 my hermit lifestyle would have been completely unthinkable.

If you want to cut me some slack and make the numbers more optimistic, we can add some variables
- Probability of finding a vaccine before the virus runs its course
- Probability of other innovations that slow down the virus or
- Potential massive slowdown in infection rate from all the adjustments we're making as a society

On March 15 2020 11:58 FiSheYe wrote: Now if we go with a simulation based on Italian numbers we would all be fucked. If we go to a spread of the virus not around 1.4-3.9x but higher (some suggest up to 6x) then we are fucked big time.

Why would we go with only Italian numbers? If you grab some dataset and then arbitrarily filter out all but the worst cases, and then make your predictions based off that, you will always end up with an apocalyptic disaster. I just don't see any reason to be that pessimistic.

On March 15 2020 11:58 FiSheYe wrote: But South Korea for example and even China give hope that this is completely blown out of proportion and that we could get to a fatality rate of below 1% with the right measures. Good testing / masks / hygiene / (a certain level of government compliance) / self-isolation and other measures could push the important numbers like growth rate and fatality towards a much better number. In those scenarios I can see a very good case where we probably only infect a much smaller % of the population, find a cure/something that helps quickly / avoid over hospitalization and maybe will only talk about something like 500k deaths worldwide over a 1-2 year period. In that case it might be less dramatic than the seasonal flu globally and indeed it was all just crazy overreaction.

Yeah. South Korea was operating without the kind of information & data we have, and they still got it to 1%. So it seems only natural that we should outperform them, maybe even really badly. Unless maybe they had some massive advantage from not being obese / the food they eat or something, but I don't think something like that would matter that much


btw, since you are researching a lot, what do you think about Japan? I never see it discussed anywhere. We have so much contact with China so it seems like we should have been hit early. We have very little testing (still beating USA!) and so of course few cases found but also few deaths. Japanese people seem to have barely adjusted their lifestyle at all (they are jaded because they've had so many disasters recently), so I think they should be at elevated risk compared to Europe / USA. On top of that, they live in ultra-densely populated scenarios which should elevate risk even more. But so far nothing seems to be happening. The unspectacular numbers seem to vibe with my suspicion that data indicating safety just gets largely ignored. If we suddenly experience an upswing I'm sure Japan graphs will be all over twitter.

On March 15 2020 13:44 LemOn[5thF] wrote: You know what maybe we need two threads one for unpractical walls of text like this and theorycrafting and one for practical advice and actions you should take wanted to ask a question about that but this is getting way too cluttered

ah sorry bro T_T

On March 15 2020 14:00 FiSheYe wrote: thank you, that is what I keep telling Baalim for a day now, after he closed my thread. This is way bigger than just one thread about what we think. I actually think there should be 3 1# What to do, just good information about reality 2# Can be for conspiracies, off topic, memes pictures blabla 3# serious discussions about what we are facing, what this could all mean, what is happening in countries, etc. In the end hopefully none of it is warranted but I don't see the upside of not taking this serious

your thread belongs in this one imo with theorycrafting
Nobody here knows what they are talking about anyways and get it from the media so 2+3 is the same thing

I'll start a practical thread
and ask my question there

Hey I resent that - I don't know what I'm talking about but all my opinions are my own, didn't get anything from media

Busta on coronavirus

On March 15 2020 14:10 Jelle wrote: Thanks for writing out some numbers that's pretty cool Why would we assume 27% of the world gets infected? Because of the Spanish flu in 1918? That's like data from a different planet.

Our government expects 60-70%, I just wanted to make it less extreme with 27%, based on something we already experiences with probably a lower spread factor

Imagine this; I'm talking to some random dudes on the internet and you guys have already impacted me, I will probably go out even less in the coming weeks and switch some of my boxing at the gym with lifting weights at home. In 1918 my hermit lifestyle would have been completely unthinkable.

That is why I am talking to you, so you are more aware. Either we both laugh about how stupid I am in a few weeks, or you will write me thank you notes. Lets hope for the former.

If you want to cut me some slack and make the numbers more optimistic, we can add some variables - Probability of finding a vaccine before the virus runs its course - Probability of other innovations that slow down the virus or - Potential massive slowdown in infection rate from all the adjustments we're making as a society

-There is no vaccine for the next 18-24 months and even if so the most important part is the next weeks and first big wave and to avoid growth factors by doing the right thing (flattening the curve, just google if you don't understand that yet)
-I hope for innovation, too but lets focus on what we can do ourself at the moment
-Potential of slowdown is what I am aiming for here as well, lets hope there are additional things we can do soonish

Why would we go with only Italian numbers? If you grab some dataset and then arbitrarily filter out all but the worst cases, and then make your predictions based off that, you will always end up with an apocalyptic disaster. I just don't see any reason to be that pessimistic.

I calculate with 1%, which is lower than what the experts assume the death numbers to be (2- 3.4% without severe mutation). So I am calculating with a scenario where we are at a 3x lower mortality rate as is suggested by experts

Yeah. South Korea was operating without the kind of information & data we have, and they still got it to 1%. So it seems only natural that we should outperform them, maybe even really badly. Unless maybe they had some massive advantage from not being obese / the food they eat or something, but I don't think something like that would matter that much btw, since you are researching a lot, what do you think about Japan? I never see it discussed anywhere. We have so much contact with China so it seems like we should have been hit early. We have very little testing (still beating USA!) and so of course few cases found but also few deaths. Japanese people seem to have barely adjusted their lifestyle at all (they are jaded because they've had so many disasters recently), so I think they should be at elevated risk compared to Europe / USA. On top of that, they live in ultra-densely populated scenarios which should elevate risk even more. But so far nothing seems to be happening. The unspectacular numbers seem to vibe with my suspicion that data indicating safety just gets largely ignored. If we suddenly experience an upswing I'm sure Japan graphs will be all over twitter.

I pray for Japan (I am an atheist). I hope that Japan just does what they do best, care about others, wear masks, stay hope, obey authority in this case, do better than Europe. Keep in mind that Korea was well prepared compared to Italy due to many factors mentioned by me and others. But it is my hope that there are lower % of mortality possible than Korea which would save millions of lives. Too early to tell tho

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/

Here's the article for flattening the curve in case anyone else is interested, cool simulations too. Yeah, I heard those arguments before and I agree with them, I'm just way more optimistic for the future I guess.

Anyway I think we understand each others' pov really well so I'm gonna call it a day. Thanks for a manner discussion, I really appreciate it because I wanted to hear somebody out who doesn't think it's gonna be all peaches & cream ~<3

No worries, we are in this together. I hope I am all wrong and you never come back to this thread. Until then I will try and collect data / opinions / theories so we can be prepared in case our bad case scenarios become true. Don't think there is anything much more +EV I can do right now with my life

fuck all these quotes in this thread

Btw I see facebook posts from "brave" people saying people should wear face masks
with photos of actual proper face mask and commenting how people look weird at them when they have it

These people mean well but they are fucking up big time in countries with facemask and respirator shortages

Pharmacists don't have them, police don't have them and 0 shopkeepers have them because there are huge shortages
And these virtue signalling "selfless" geniuses are making it worse by telling people to start buying them...

Shut the fuck up mate, gift the good ones (hospitals are asking for them to be gifted) ...Just shows how tricky the situation is.

There are wards asking people to sow masks for them and gift them.


Not sure what's going to happen really, it doesn't help much to protect you but no grocery sales staff or pharmacist having them is just fucked up