The posts I read were specifically all about the virus situation.
BTW, everyone should understand that there’s a whole lot of guesswork going on right now. It’s a new and understudied virus. How long should they keep the factories closed? How many people are getting the virus and not getting sick enough to go to the hospital? The fog of war is very think.
Also, everyone should listen to the new corona virus episode of This Podcast Will Kill You. Skip like the first 10 minutes, that’s mostly filler.
http://thispodcastwillkillyou.com/2020/02/04/episode-43-m-m-m-my-coronaviruses/
Unless this is as bad as the worst fears here, more people will probably die from the disruption around the virus than from the virus. (Those will all be very poor people.)
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When he can stay away from trolling and politics, TS actually provides pretty good content by bfi standards.
He has provided good analysis of tsla. I haven’t the slightest clue how he can see through Musk’s con, but not Trump’s.
He’s a very big pessimist wrt coronavirus.
It’s an act, it’s all an act. He knows Trump is FOS.
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Sorry for even bringing up that moron ITT. It was a throw in line that hopefully I’m wrong since my read lines up with his. (I didn’t read any of his thoughts on it until this morning.)
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¯_(ツ)_/¯
Agree with your last para.
Comparing road deaths and gun deaths is nonsensical, I agree, but many car journeys are virtually mandatory as not everyone has the luxury of taking the most environmentally friendly route to work (even many here drive to work), as is walking along busy streets to school etc. So maybe it’s not far from your analogy of breathing for a lot of people who can’t move house closer to work because of financial considerations.
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I apologize to the forum in that there isn’t much for me to do these days but worry for family, watch cricket, and have a few. My takes are shit in normal situations, so…
My dominant feeling is that the city shot callers are figuring better safe than sorry because its not just their careers that are on the line. But it could go either way. China’s politics are 9999999x as fucked as American politics and this is the exact situation where that manifests itself. Even in the most optimal of situations its quite difficult to gauge the motives/fears of local officials.
So it could be that shit is fucked worse than the actions of the “Chinese government” indicate or it could be the opposite. At this point, at least in my view, we simply can’t make such determinations.
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So theres no reason for Westerners in particular to panic yet.
In terms of personal health, it seems quite silly to panic unless you’ve had contact with someone who’s been in Hubei recently.
I’ve been following the situation from the China side mostly but haven’t almost all the non-Chinese cases been people who’ve either been in Hubei or been in contact with someone from Hubei?
Here in Taiwan a ton of people are wearing masks, but its business as usual apart from that. Its a topic of discussion and definitely a concern, but I don’t sense people are scared.
Analyzing information and trying to make sense of it is not equivalent to panicking.
I used to kind of laugh at my wife being a Hubei separatist given that it is smack dab in the middle of China proper.
I wasn’t necessarily referring to you. Someone upstream itt was most certainly panicking and probably still is. It’s highly counterproductive for all the usual reasons and for the reasons JT stated.
But there’s a general climate itt of people being alarmist about how bad this will be when there’s no hard evidence for that yet.
Strong protection, no panic, believe in science, don’t spread rumors.
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For a forum full of people who should be good at maths, this discussion really sucks.
How bad it is NOW, whether it has spread far out of China NOW, how many deaths NOW, should not have an effect on your level of shookness.
It really is as simple as
- Is this going to be successful contained in china? (Answer. No)
- What is the death rate (We don’t know. But it could be considerably higher than flu)
- Are we going to get effective treatments and/or a vaccine in time to bring the death rate down to normal flu levels (we don’t know. Maybe)
Exponential curves are hard to understand. I get that. The rest of the media get a pass on that. Y’all dont.
To a degree. OTOH, viral epidemics are notorious for moving in odd directions - GLOBALLY, it’s pretty clear that I could name half a dozen viruses that show up every late winter, run through the community and taper off pretty dramatically every spring. Flu is one of them, but I can think of at least 3 others off the top of my head that share the same pattern in Reno where I live - and it doesn’t seem to matter WHAT people do about it, in the community sense - of course washing hands/good hygiene should be a priority on a personal basis . Hopefully, coronavirus will do this. Might not. Dunno. I do suspect that we’re going to have effective treatment/vaccines for the NEXT outbreak.
So we’ll see. I do think that if I was trying to somehow maximize an outbreak in a particular area of a respiratory virus I’d cram a shit load of people, a lot of them elderly with a good percentage of chronic illness issues, into a cruise ship and see how many of them I could knock off, and keep them on the boat until as many as possible were identified as sick. That seems…bad.
MM MD
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Who ITT do you think doesn’t understand exponential curves, and why do you think that? Epidemics spread exponentially until they don’t. The actual data from China looks like the number of infected has been increasing linearly in the past week or so, if the data can be trusted (the WHO seems to trust it but I and many others have their doubts). It’s possible that infections could still be exponentially growing in China which would be very bad, but we don’t know that at all.
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I haven’t seen a post here that says someone finds exponential curves hard to understand.
What a weird post.
Literally every post which says that flu is worse is doing this.