Golly, this thread has aged poorly.
Yeah, it is kind of hilarious now to go back and read the first few dozen posts. It is like Lincoln live-tweeting Our American Cousin.
Yeah and I hold my hand up that I was one of the people who really underestimated where this would go.
It’s just…there was a point where the numbers were coming down in China, and the number of cases outside China was (at least thought to be) trivial, so it really looked like containment was likely.
Then it exploded everywhere. Didn’t see it coming.
That was like a few days.
When a danger is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t
This article came out on March 10, and it really resonated with me. I forwarded it to everyone I knew.
Until then, we ate out a lot (restaurants and takeout), and didn’t have a lot of food in the house. Within the next two days (March 11-12), we bought enough groceries for a month. That’s also when we started social distancing.
With that said, I can’t say I was in any way prescient before this. I wasn’t particularly worried until right around the time this article came out. Until then, I’d spent the winter traveling all over North America on ski trips.
Which is true…but it’s not like this is the first thing that has grown exponentially since Spanish flu; it’s just that others peaked long before this point.
For sure, everybody should have prepared for the worst case, but I don’t blame anyone for being surprised by its sudden acceleration in early March (IIRC). I certainly was.
Here is a video which does an great job of explaining exponential increases.
Nice video. Interesting that it uses similar language at the end as the Washington Post article I linked to.
Incidentally, I posted a link to that same Washington Post article here last month, and commented that:
Nailed it.
Oh wait, you missed by a mile. There are already 3X the number of deaths in the US than the upper bound of your estimate range and we’re only in April. The fatality rate hasn’t peaked yet, the rate of decline will be far slower than the ramp up, and it’s likely that we’ll see another wave of Covid-19 deaths later this year.
This prediction ranks right up there with the “Self-driving cars are still decades away” prediction made here a few years ago.
True it is, to date, shaping up to be more like a very compressed slightly worse than bad influenza season level event, not a mild one. Still for a stab at a WAG made in Feb, also taking the WAG based on the data had at the time of a true IFR of less than 0.5% possibly under 0.3%, and given the context of various experts making predictions much later flipping from best case 100 to 200K in the US to 60K within weeks, I’ll stand by that as a pretty good stabbed at WAG.
Especially in contrast to the sorts of predictions others were confidently sure of …
Currently a flattening U.S curve at just under 47K and globally about 184K.
Of course there is lots yet to happen but I’ll stand by that if my early days WAG of 10-15K US deaths and 250 to 300K globally ends up considered as “missed by a mile”, then 1-2 million US and 30 to 40 million deaths globally will relatively be missing by 100 miles or more!
Do you still think your assessment then is the more reasonable one?
I especially stand by my statement then that this virus is not going to cause societal meltdown. I’ve not hoarded canned goods, and have not bought a gun, and still feel no need to do either!
The essence of my belief then was a hypothesis that there were many more infections than were being counted as cases, and a desire from those days on to get some handle on how many there actually were as a critical piece of information. That hypothesis has NOT yet been falsified.
As expected a completely dishonest selectively edited quote from you. Here’s what I actually posted:
Obviously this was predicated on Lipsitch’s projections, which he made in early February prior to any lockdowns being placed.
I am very bored in my house. I think complete 2020 is going to waste for me.
Dseid, I love you to death and there’s no doubt that Surreal is ignoring the plank in his own eye, but that prediction you made was significantly off. This doesn’t mean it was was a bad prediction–there was deeply imperfect knowledge–but you were off qualitatively. Five thousand people died in the last 48 hours, and while the curve is flattening, it’s not going down. We will likely be at 50,000 deaths by this weekend, and it seems very optimistic to me to assume that it will drop off so quickly past that that this will seem like a bad flue season, only more quickly. Italy is weeks past their peak, and they still are seeing over 400 deaths a day. We can say this is more intense than a “bad” flu season. I think it’s too soon to say that it going to be much shorter.
Past that, we’ve reached the level of “bad flu season” due to incredible effort and sacrifice by the entire world. It seems undeniable to me that if we had reacted to this with the same precautions we consider appropriate for a “bad flu season”–the things we did in 2017-2018 and no more–we wouldn’t be looking at a “bad flu season” now. So saying “it turned out bigger than I thought, but still within the range of normal” seems inaccurate.
Furthermore, I feel like you are moving the goalposts on “no societal meltdown”. Is it Mad Max in the streets? No. But 25 million people applied for unemployment in the last month, a number so far out of normal that I think they will just have to cut it from future graphs and mark it with an asterisk. Half of lower income households have had someone lose a job or have hours cut. Oil is trading below zero. The Dow lost a third of its value in a few weeks. We have had persistent shortages of common household items–it’s not just TP. There’s alternatives–people are not starving–but it’s still sobering to see empty grocery store shelves where you expect eggs or butter or pasta or flour to be. We did have the medical system of a major city entirely overrun. Nearly every facet of day to day life for nearly every American, and much of the world, has been substantially disrupted or transformed. The impact on our societal structures is nothing like the flu season of 2017-2018, and just because people aren’t staging home invasions doesn’t mean everything is fine.
Manda JO oh I readily admit that that off the cuff WAG stab in February was simply wrong, more than “significantly off”! And I very much accept the great intensity of this disease’s spread. This is far far from the mild flu season level event I was guessing it would be if it escaped.
That said I remain very comfortable defending the idea of this being in the range of a (compressed, very bad) flu season range, with a likely IFR of 0.3 or less (the number of the moment in that thread) as the better early WAG over the predictions that were saying people needed to hoard food and buy guns with literally millions of Americans dying as a the low end (which was the context of the conversation at the time). That was the goalposts of the conversation at the time Manda JO. People literally asking about if they should be buying guns to defend their hoarded food supplies.
How much of the damage we are having is from the disease, and how much from our response to the disease, is a very different discussion. I remain on the side of that discussion that much of what we have done and are doing is required but only because of inadequate information at many steps along the way due to poor pandemic preparedness, along with failed leadership, which has lead to such uncertainties. I believe we are, out of necessity born of uncertainties, causing significant harms with our responses that is not of the disease itself, that could have been avoided if the right actual evidence was available to guide decision-making by actual leadership at the right times.
What is clear now is that the germ had already not been contained well before the point of that conversation. It already had community spread in California at least, and if there then likely many other parts of the world. Some of us were hoping it would be able to be contained unaware that several horses were already grazing and mating in pastures many miles out of the barn and that the door was long off its hinges.
I am still actually comfortable with an expectation that 0.3% is a high end for the IFR and still hope for under 0.2%. But yes, if Lipsitch’s early prediction was correct, and am thinking that it will be (or has) in at least in some areas, and 0.2 to 0.3 IFR is right, then it could end up more than three times as bad as a bad flu, maybe much more. And few have any real appreciation of how close to overwhelming some systems “just” the 2017-18 influenza year came.
You are completely correct that we don’t know what will happen from here. All we can with confidence is that the U.S. is 6 days into being flat on its deaths per day per million number and that other countries ahead of us have dropped off on that rate at after about a week on the plateau. We don’t know exactly what of what has been done has been effective to flatten the curve and what has been done without adding much good while still adding harms, and that lack of knowledge means that we need to release cautiously as well, until the knowledge gaps are filled in better, if they ever are, even as we appreciate the magnitude of the harms our responses, the very rational unavoidable ones and the irrational ones like hoarding, also cause.
I completely agree that this same disease probably could have been handled much less destructively if there had not be catastrophic failures of administration at all kinds of levels, and that if we had, as a world, acted very differently, things would be different. But you could say that about anything: the Spanish Flu didn’t NEED to be so destructive, but wartime secrecy and a failure to appreciate how dangerous is was, lead to massive casualties. The Flood of 1927 didn’t have to be so terrible, if people hadn’t fucked it up from start to finish. A tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean might have saved hundreds of thousands in 2004.
Human incompetence, selfishness, and general inability to weigh risks or respond appropriately to circumstances is baked into any tragedy. You can’t say “Well, CORVID-19 didn’t crash the stock market and lay off a quarter of America, our bungled response to it did” any more than you can say “Well, the Boxing Day Tsunami wasn’t really the issue, it was the bungled preparation and response”. It’s all the same.
Just a quick example to show how unrealistic the 0.2% IFR rate is: As of today New York City has had over 15,000 Covid-19 deaths (for the purposes of this post we’ll ignore the additional 5,000 deaths that weren’t officially counted but are thought to have resulted from the virus).
NYC has a population of 8.4 million. In order for the IFR to be 0.2%,** 90% of the city’s population would have to have been infected with the virus**. This contradicts just about every piece of data that we’ve collected so far on Covid-19.
I am concerned enough that I started eating healthy and started exercising a lot. A lot of ppl told me the same. In 2017 I was 70 kg. My BMI (body mass index) was 25.7. That means I was very healthy. Now I am 82 kg and I am borderline obese. I think that’s one of the good aspects of the pandemic.