Steve is a good writer, and at this point it's pretty clear everybody should stay the f* home, so I'm all for pieces that achieve that.

That being said, I do hate fear mongering, and insinuating that the situation in Italy is even worse than we may believe by a factor of 4 is a big stretch and unecessary.

Some facts from Italian government institutes:

[1] https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...

- median age of death is 80

- 87% of deaths above 70

- 99% of deaths with 1 co-morbidity, and 74% with at least 2.

[2] http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/caldo/SISMG_sintesi_ULTIMO....

- deaths in March for above 65 year olds are still projecting lower than previous years

This is a good rant. The anger is palpable and I dare say righteous. Good on you, Steve.

I am the intended audience of this article; one of the people who the author urges should be shamed into changing my beliefs.

I didn't find the article compelling. I read the entire thing. I see the author as breathless and overdramatic, asserting beliefs as fact.

I believe that the virus is:

- much less deadly (easily a tens of times less than the WHO number

- much less contagious (a third of the "80% of the population" numbers floating around social media)

- much more treatable clinically, pharmaceutically, herbally than is made out

- nearly over (weeks from leveling out where I live)

I predict that the flu season with vaccines this year will be worse than corona virus with distancing measures.

The fatality rate is based off of having required facilities and equipment. With those run out the fatality rate will jump from .5% to 5%.

I don't think this is true.

The WHO published one number for case fatality rate. According to you, they should have published two (or more) numbers.

The reality of the situation is that epidemiologists use certain fixed constants to understand the virus as part of a very crude model. The WHO is and was providing a number for this model. In these models, the distinction you made is not captured whatsoever (thus "crude model").

The WHO got to its number based on averaging unreliable data. This has two problems. The first is garbage in, garbage out. The second is that this averaging is an unscientific method.

I get what you're trying to say though, and broadly agree. Epidemiology models, insisting on a single fatality number, are so crude they are nearly not useful for making predictions.

What are you basing your beliefs on? Are their sources to back you up? (not being aggressive here, I would actually like to see any additional information/studies I can get my hands on)

I think the main problem is that, in the US, we are not really ready to deal with the extreme influx of the disease. We deal with flu every year with vaccines, and we know how many sick people to expect and the healthcare system adapts to that, but it's a slow process.

Asian countries (especially China) have had experience with acute respiratory diseases fairly frequently, and so are more setup to deal with and quash it quickly (and in an authoritarian manner)

Also, depending on your circumstances, this isn't really about you. Unless you are in one of the high risk groups, you will probably be fine, but you can easily, unknowingly spread the disease to an at-risk individual.

I hope that in 2 months time you remember you made this comment, and reflect back on your belief system.

I hope that I do the same.

Beliefs are based on public open source information including preprints, models, public data (e.g. WHO tracker), prior predictions and adjustments, news coverage, and statements made by medical experts. I will not exhaust them here.

Re: "flatten the curve" we are in this process. It's happened and it's happening. My belief takes this into account. My belief would change if this was new information.

Re: China and authoratarian Asia (e.g. Singapore) I think that's a gloss on a more nuanced topic. I believe it factors in, but is not itself highly determinative. I don't think my beliefs would change soley on this information if it were new, but it is not.

Re: "not about you". Agreed. Not new information. Unrelated to assertions, beliefs and predictions however.

Re: "reflecting back". Of course. This is not my first rodeo. The very purpose of stating beliefs and making predictions is to use them to refine perspective. I've actually been doing this since January and it's how I've come to my current set of beliefs. In fact that's been much finer grained. I've been making weekly forecasts on numbers for geographic areas of interest using the sources listed at the top of this comment since January, and been adjusting my beliefs since that time. I once believed the situation was much more dramatic.

I will of course continue to reflect back.

I do hope you will do the same.

Thank you for your reply. I appreciate your candor.

I hope you are right that the fear so many are experiencing is overblown, but as of this moment in time I disagree.

Respectfully, from all of the data, I believe your less deadly and less contagious beliefs are unfounded. Going by the current worldwide number of confirmed cases and confirmed deaths related to covid-19: (18,433 deaths / 413,467 confirmed cases) * 100 = 4.45% death rate.

I understand you might think these numbers are skewed because of places like Italy, so let's take the current US numbers: (804 deaths / 59,502 confirmed cases) * 100 = 1.35% death rate.

Both numbers are MUCH higher than any flu season. If you think that only 30% of the population of the US will get the disease, that is ~110 million people. 1.35% of 110 million people is 1,485,000 people. AND this is assuming the healthcare system isn't overwhelmed, and we can treat people as they need it. And these numbers are ON TOP OF the normal flue season numbers.

My fear is based on the data being put out every day, and the unimaginably, woefully late response and lack of responsibility from the federal government, as well as the lack of individual responsibility people are taking on. Western nations especially have been pathetically apathetic to respond.

Everybody needs to start treating this virus like the threat it is. Stay inside. Temporarily sacrifice some small pleasantries you are used to having in your life to save the lives of people's mothers, fathers, and grandparents.

Respectfully, dividing the number of deaths by the number of confirmed cases is not a useful method to determine mortality rates. The more any host country tests, the more confirmed cases arise compared to a relatively fixed number of deaths. A good recent example is NY, which doubled the number of confirmed cases (representing a halving of the fatality rate) due to a large testing surge. Across the international data, the countries that test more have much lower fatality rates (this is in fact a power law relationship). Germany, South Korea and the Diamond Princess - places with the most effective testing protocols - have rates of 0.2%, 0.6% and 1.0% respectively, with the Diamond Princess representing a much older and vulnerable population.

Of course even these testing regimes are missing a large number of cases, and to get an accurate measure the data we do have should be fit with regression and extrapolated out to much larger testing numbers - representing more true rates of deaths among total populations. When I did that the German numbers looked the most accurate, and may possibly be overestimated.

Furthermore, there is a modeling error introduced by using one single fatality rate across demographics. What we know of the fatality distribution is that it is exponentially weighted in older demographics, meaning an average number is an overestimate. In addition, this simplification dramatically reduces the role of "herd immunity" in epidemic simulations.

Finally, if we extrapolate current and peak death rates, epidemic onset and duration times, as well as steady state rates for epidemics that have stabilized (SK and China) across the international data sets we can get a sense of how real populations, demographics and geographies are responding to epidemic conditions. When I did this I got fewer than a half million deaths globally (today it is less than 20k). For perspective 250k to 600k are attributed to the flu globally each year.

Thank you for sharing your perspective and projections. I have seen these projections from other sources, and thought hard about them. I have been preferring other predictive methodologies due to limitations I expressed above.

For the record my family and I have been social isolating for weeks before it became recommended and public policy (my family works in healthcare, and we made the decision independently based on our own prudent judgement). We continue with these practices today.

That said I believe the public and political reaction has resulted in an inefficient allocation of goods, services, and attention - and that as a result the measures being taken and the manner they've been executed dramatically outweigh the risk.

For the record I do not believe that "nothing should be done". Clearly any disease without partial immunity, vaccines, and standard medical practices poses some threat to society. I believe that the projections used in common folklore about the nature of COVID has led us to severely inoptimal strategies for dealing with the threat.

> ... asserting beliefs as fact. I believe that ...

Right.

As you can see I stated my beliefs as beliefs.