Dumb question, but what's a "shark" in this context?

I will second this as I am currently working in the biotech field. The amount of short sighted thinking and opportunism from small start ups to the most massive CMO's in the world is staggering.

My take is that the whole field is extremely underfunded and that breeds levels of competition and short term profit seeking, but that's probably a biased opinion.

I'm sure if the field had the level of VC support that traditional software/computing gets we would be making huge strides with our humanity.

I agree the times are worrying. What's keeping me reassured is that the radical protest elements are very small with regard to our countries population's. There are far more people not expressing their opinion and it gives me hope that cool heads are silently prevailing.

Edit: typo

I think that you are making the same mistake that you are accusing healthcare workers and officials of making. You are assuming that these protests will "obviously" result in thousands more deaths because it feels that way to you. I believe that that's pretty unlikely, though, since there are probably fewer than a million protestors across the country. Many of the protestors are wearing masks and the protests being outside reduces the risk of spreading the disease. There will certainly be some spread due to the protests, but probably not nearly as much as at grocery stores or churches. You are also assuming that this is just about unjust police-involved deaths; it is not. It is about the many millions of negative interactions with the police and justice system that perpetuate poverty (police lying under oath, egregious sentences for non-violent crimes, etc.) I don't think it's a bad faith argument to say that correcting these injustices is more important than maintaining a totally strict quarantine.

The reason both sides talk past each other is because they have different values and different assumptions. Based on your post your first priority is preventing deaths and your assumption is that these protests will cause more deaths than they prevent. My first priority is living in a fair world, with preventing deaths being a close second. My assumption is that the protests will not cause a large number of excess deaths, but that they do have a high chance of moving our justice system closer towards real justice. I also am making the assumption that living in a fair and just society will increase overall health outcomes over the long term.

I believe that most (but definitely not all) people don't argue in bad faith, they just have different values and make different assumptions. There's not much that can be done about having different values, but better data can help every side have more similar assumptions, which should help opinions to converge somewhat.

I am honestly and hearteningly surprised to even hear these sentiments from someone else here, which I have now observed for years. It's one reason why I love HN.

I'm not in the science field, but I absolutely am a student of human nature (and mindfulness). It's unbelievable how much the mechanism of science is dirtied, distorted, and abused by our emotional pride, greed, tribalism, fear, and all other aspects of human nature, which show that - for all our intelligence - we humans are wired for survival, and only wired for truth if and when it helps that survival. If truth comes at odds with it, we will lie - even if to ourselves, and at very deep subconscious levels - as much as we need to.

Rationalisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)

How this biological reality plays out is complex. It's not just in our lizard brain, but the entire realm of our secondary limbic brain, with its 'tribal' swirl of social emotions and resulting behaviours. 'Survival' means a great of things, not just literal survival right in front of you right now. It's a powerful and primary goal coursing through our blood and all behaviour at the deepest and most subtle levels. We would do well to educate about this fact, and practice mindfulness to be able to see it in ourselves.

That is pretty unfair to Lennie; at least his intentions were good.

What does that 287k include? Presumably just positive test cases? Probably there are far more undiagnosed infections that didn't require hospitalization. If the IFR was really 14% like your numbers suggest, we would see politicians putting themselves in submarines, lol. That's almost halfway to black plague IFR. The CDC's recent data suggests an actual IFR of well below 1%.

> Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later.

I think you misunderstand the reasoning. If you want to wipe a disease out you lockdown as soon as you can. If you want to flatten the curve, you lockdown just before the peak, so as to prevent it. Or if you are ok with flattening the curve for a longer time, you lock down just before you reach capacity.

> Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later: hence the UK's delayed lockdown and therefore highest death toll in Europe.

UK's strategy was as advised by various epidemiology teams across the country, predominantly Imperial and Oxford. They understand exponentials. That's epidemiology 101.

> The people advocating for "herd immunity" never addressed the death rate; a death rate of even 0.5% in the UK would be three hundred thousand people, plus more with lingering side effects.

That was acknowledged. They were concerned that suppression was infeasible, and would cause more deaths e.g. if there is a second wave during UK winter, or if lockdown has knock on health impacts.

> As it is, we've confirmed 287k infected for 40k deaths, or 0.5% of the country infected. A very, very long way from immunity.

The number of confirmed cases is smaller than the number of actual cases, since many cases are asymptomatic and hence typically not tested.

Epidemiology and public health is a complex field, beyond armchair analysis.

I read everything downthread of this and am flummoxed at how much people are talking past each other. If the UK has 40k deaths, the only way the UK is close to herd immunity is if the IFR 0.05%. People can quibble about how many actual cases there are, but no matter how you slice it, reinforcing the parent poster, we are a long way from herd immunity.

Also, remember that if you want to argue the IFR down, that means you're arguing the R0 up, which makes herd immunity more difficult.

actually I think there's been a tremendous amount of discussion wrt the true fatality rate, and since the lockdown started, estimates across the board have been tumbling.

People deciding that a certain arbitrary fatality rate would be unacceptable, and lockdown adversely affecting basically everyone was preferable, usually do so without any kind of reasoning but hide behind the notion that life has near infinite value.

If you trust the death rate, and the number of deaths reported are both accurate, the UK is at 40k/300k = 13%. A very long way from immunity, but not 0.5%.

> 0.5% of the country infected

Your own numbers show this is totally incorrect: death rate 0.5% times 40k deaths, means infected is 8 million (or more precisely the count was that number some weeks ago as deaths take time to happen).

this has been an obvious calculation from the start and I am not the only person trying to correct the misuse of the confirmed infected count (287k) for your conclusion.

Honest question: why do you not know this?

Evaluating whether an opinion is partisan is not ignoring their reasoning or motivation. Quite the opposite, it is evaluating their reasoning and motivation and determining the extent to which that reasoning and motivating is influence and determined by partisanship or group affiliation.

Expert opinion is supposed to be formed by empirical evidence and science. Not political affiliation or personal opinion. For instance, an expert opinion would be, "protests of X size stand to increase rates of infection by Y%" Whether or not a certain protest justified in accepting that increase of infection is a question of personal values not medical science.

Is protesting against police brutality worth the increased rate of infection? Is protesting against the lockdowns and subsequent mass unemployment worth the increased rates of infection? It's fine to form your own answers to these questions. But these are questions determined by values, not science. Expert opinions have no business trying to answer these. But medical experts are making the latter statement, and are doing so in a way that comes off as extremely partisan:

> We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.

How on Earth are we supposed to trust these experts' advice on when to lift lockdowns when they openly state that resistance to lockdowns is rooted in white nationalism? Let alone the double standard in supporting some protests while opposing others. As much as I am inclined to defer to experts, messages like these makes it extremely hard for me to do so here. When medical experts are making statements like these, it is highly indicative of reasoning informed by partisanship rather than science.

An article decrying prejudice lets the reader give their own demonstration of it.

I was very worried about Covid-19 when the initial data and charts were coming out of China and Italy. It seemed like it was going to quickly overwhelm all the hospitals in America. Since then, I've become much less scared about the impact on me personally, and more skeptical about the need for most (not all) lockdown measures. This was based on my reading of antibody prevalence data, and data on death rates separated out by age and risk factors.

At this point, I think Sweden strategy makes the most sense. It is sustainable for many months, unlike more extreme lockdowns. Additionally, I think more strict lockdowns on older population makes sense. For 90%+ of the population, I think we can lift most/all lockdown measures today.

My opinion of its severity has dropped and continues to drop quite significantly. I bought a lot of supplies in late January because I saw videos coming out of China of people dropping in the streets and them welding entire buildings shut with people in them, stuff I'd never seen before.

I still don't fully know how to reconcile that with what happened. That is, more than just saying "oh, those videos were fake"... well, why? Who made them? Why were they made? I dunno. Even ignoring those it still looks an awful lot like China covered an awful lot of stuff up.

Regardless, whatever made it overseas didn't seem to do that. Evidence at this point seems to suggest a lot more people got it than we realized, without them even realizing it [1]. Any number of possible reasons. Unfortunately, between the tribalism, the outright coverups by the Chinese, and the "errors" if you are generous and "lies" if you are not in our own media, I don't expect to ever have a good grasp of what actually happened.

(Even so, purchasing supplies was the right move. Our local stores never really quite "ran out" of stuff for extended periods of time, but I was reasonably well prepared for what was certainly some supply chain disruption, and had a good practice run for some other real disaster in the future. Got a better idea of how to stock the food up in more effective ratios now.)

[1]: Possibly concerning, and I hope some follow-up study is done on this. Estimates of modern spread rates of disease based on COVID-19 could end up being really wrong if we underestimate how far it spread.

I was skeptical of covid-19 from the start (check my comment history) even though the data appeared to be against me initially. My "gut" told me we were overreacting though, and a lot of things didn't make sense (like the aircraft carrier full of asymptomatic sailors). I was browbeaten and I conformed, assuming the data would eventually prove me wrong. I dutifully wore a mask and social distanced and didn't let my kids go to the park to be a "team player" but now I'm kind of angry that I'm slowly being vindicated. Not because I was "correct" in my predictions, but because of how sure the zealots were of their position while browbeating me into conformance.

I'll never get an apology, of course. It'll just be the same old "not my fault, I formed my view based on the expert guidance of the time, what else could I have done?" Strong opinions, loosely held, indeed.

I was pro lockdown at the beginning. Now, I’m convinced that we could have gotten most of the benefits with a substantially less invasive approach, especially outside the mega cities.

At the start (by which I mean late Feb/early March as I wasn't paying attention before then), I believed it all. I was worried about the ventilator crisis and wanted to find ways to help manufacture or mass create them.

Towards the end of March I started to realise that I kept reading about the supposed impending ventilator shortage, but it should have happened already and yet we didn't seem to be ever quite running out. Then a newspaper published some article about the history of Professor Ferguson and his failed foot-and-mouth disease models. I went and read some papers about the failings of epidemiology and was really shocked at how divergent the views were on the utility of these models.

Then in the comments on that story, I found someone linking to https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ which just had so much data, so many links to raw sources and interviews with skeptical doctors. At that point I started to realise that many of the comments I was reading here on HN appeared to be mixing up predictions with reality; I kept reading people here talk about how Italy was experiencing mass deaths and hospital overflow yet on the SWPRS site there were links to actual articles in Italian where hospital officials said they hadn't yet run out of capacity, they weren't yet turning people away, they were just worried it might start soon. And this kept happening. Moreover my attempts to point this out kept getting voted down, so that's when I realised it was going ideological. A lot of people were desperate to correct "misinformation" and were just getting angry at anything that contradicted the official narrative. There was no rational reason to vote down posts saying "actually the situation is better than you think" yet it was happening.

So I guess that's the point I became a serious lockdown skeptic. The disparity between what people consuming regular media believed vs what the raw (often non English) data was saying just became too wide. And after that I believe everyone has been catching up, especially now with this "protests against health policies are dangerous but protests against racism aren't" nonsense.

Yes, but early. I changed my mind from thinking it was "just the flu - I'm going to get it, but probably won't be able to tell it apart from a cold" to "this is probably a big deal that I really don't want to get" in late February. Haven't found any information to make me change my mind since, even as public opinion has yo-yo'd.

The critical information for me was data on hospitalization rates, along with some math on hospital capacity and exponential infection rates. Before, I'd looked at the death rate for 20-40 year olds of ~0.1% and figured it wasn't a big problem for me. Then I realized that the 20% "severe" cases out of Wuhan was actually the percentage that required hospitalization, not just the percentage that develop pneumonia (which is ~60% of symptomatic cases, ~30% of infections). And it doesn't vary by age range nearly as much as the death rate does: while only about 0.1% of 20-40 year olds die from COVID-19, 3-5% end up in the hospital, only about 4x lower than the ~20% of 65+ seniors that do. (These numbers already account for asymptomatic infections, which are about 50% of cases. The Wuhan numbers didn't, so halve them.) And the average hospital stay lasts for 3-5 weeks. With the doubling time of unchecked COVID-19, we could potentially end up with 150M infections during the time period of one hospitalization. 10% hospitalization rate over the whole population, and that's 15M hospitalizations, well over the number of hospital beds in the U.S.

If you gather data from a wide variety of sources instead of grabbing the latest headline, most of the relevant data hasn't actually changed all that much since February. Back then we were saying a roughly 2% CFR; now best estimates are a 1-1.25% IFR, which is completely consistent with that when you add the new information that 50% of infections are asymptomatic, which was discovered in late February. IFRs in situations where the whole population was tested (eg. South Korea, the Diamond Princess) were about 0.7-1.5%, depending on the age of the population. The age curve data from Wuhan has held up remarkably well across Europe and NYC. R0 and doubling time was pretty consistent across most temperate northern climates before the lockdowns (1.5-2.5 days in most of Europe and the U.S.). The progression of the virus when unchecked was also quite consistent between Wuhan, Italy, and NYC, as was the effect of the lockdown.

I'm surprised at how little effect even a strict lockdown (western style - Wuhan style was much more effective) had compared with the Swedish approach. I did not expect cases to rise so slowly and even plateau with the policy that Sweden chose, and I did not expect cases and deaths to decrease so slowly with the policies that Spain, France, Belgium and Italy chose.

I now suspect that ending lockdowns, temporarily banning just a couple of high risk activities such as conferences and clubbing, universal mask wearing, and extra protection in hospitals and long term care homes might be enough, at least until October (in the Northern hemisphere).

I'm in the same boat as you. It's exhausting to try to avoid these tendencies. How comfy it must be to give in and accept them with no further thought.

The most frustrating times are those moments when I fear I'll never root out all of my biases or tribalistic tendencies and become an enlightened human. But onward and upward, eh?

I don’t know what you mean by “change your mind”. I’ve come to understand that it is much less infectious outdoors, that it is more responsive to moderate social distancing than we though initially (possibly due to super spreading?) and that masks appear to work well. This has made me more relaxed about many activities.

I continue to believe that it’s an extremely infectious RNA virus that will spread exponentially in situations where people are in close proximity or indoors without social distancing and masks. I think New Orleans, NYC, Lombardy, Wuhan, and the ongoing situation in Brazil are more than enough evidence for that. I also think the success of Europe and China in using social distancing plus test/trace/isolate to tamp down their epidemics is pretty solid evidence that this was the right strategy, and I’m incredibly disappointed that America was incapable of executing on it.

The question I think you’re asking is: given that we failed to take the right advice, have I given up on trying to make us take it? And the answer is: basically yes. I think we’ll have to let nature take its course and protect ourselves now.

I at first thought exponential was an overhyping - and that it would self limit far more. It quickly became clear that the long incubation period and infectivity made it very not self limiting, especially with the absolute hash made of the response as ass-covering was preferred over getting real data. Now we are largely in an awkward halting problem situation of not knowing if it will trigger a second wave and if the second wave will level off, form an endemic stable background rate, or explode again.

Say we believe that the number of people that will be killed be coronavirus is 10^x where x is a gaussian random variable with mean 5 and standard deviation 1. What is the expected number of people killed? In the case we believe to be most common, the expected number of people to be killed is 100,000. However, the the mean value of this distribution is 1.4 million, https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=X%7EGaussian%285%2C1%2...

This is a the very strongest mathematical case for pessimism that I can give. Any argument that "we should have been less cautious" is automatically bullshit.

I was less worried about it at the beginning - I think I had a decent understanding of how fatal it was, but underestimated how contagious it was.

I think I came around to a mental model of how to react fairly early on, though. The basic model was stay at home until either a vaccine arrives or until we have anti-viral treatments that reduce severity and improve outcomes. Neither has happened, so I'm in the same boat.

It's great - great - that the lockdown has reduced occurrences of it so much. And I recognize the argument that if we've tamped down on it enough, that it's safer to go out there. But... an x% less likelihood of catching it doesn't mean it will be x% less severe when you do catch it. I think that a lot of non-technical people are confused on that point.

And finally, even if we did have really good contact-tracing... that doesn't help you, it only helps your friends. There are still those two days when people are contagious without being symptomatic. That's just still reality, I don't see a way around that. A healthy people can die from interacting with a seemingly healthy person.

Besides, what happened to contact tracing anyway? I thought we were going to have this snazzy contact-tracing tech on our phones and watches by now, courtesy of Apple and Google. I'm sure our contact-tracing is still lousy overall. It's great we have more tests, but we're not at the point where we would have been able to stop February in its tracks.

So overall... yeah, I've changed my minds in ways, like recognizing that the probabilities are more on my side than they used to be, so I feel a little safer if I have to go to the doctor/dentist for non-COVID reasons. But other than that, it's still a super-contagious virus that has a decent chance of really screwing up your life even if you aren't 80+, so... I'm still in the "stay at home until treatment/virus improves" camp.

We flattened the curve for a little while. It's about to get unflattened.