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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
But you can’t adjust the the deaths and the instances of infection 1:1. You’re running them in parallel. Why? On what basis?
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I don't understand what you mean or what you're asking. The virus has already killed .14% of the population of New York City, and the best evidence is that it has infected 21% of that population. That is pretty strong evidence that it kills at least .7% of the people who get it, far higher that the Santa Clara study suggests. And we also know that it is killing more people than that, because of this phenomena of additional deaths over the usual number, though that is hard to measure.
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I also note, you’re quick to get behind that which supports you, quick to align against that which challenges you. Stanford has been shredded, but anecdata about NYC at a 10x death rate is worth noting?
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The anecdata is not a study, but suggests that the official death rate is an undercount. The phenomena are pretty well established, if not the magnitude. Do you disagree with that?
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Burning down the house to smoke out the mouse. It’s a rotten virus, but the more we learn, the more measured our approaches and less extreme our fear should be.
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Unless learning more means that a lot of people are dying, we don't have a cure or a good way to treat the symptoms, and we need to do what we're doing to avoid mass contagion that will kill a lot more people. Every indication is that a lot of places have avoided what has been happening in New York and Milan by enforcing social distancing. Stopping now is like saying, hey, it's raining, but I'm not getting wet, so I guess I can throw away this umbrella.
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My concern on this, having spoken to friends who’ve had it, is possibly two weeks of malaise. That sucks.
If this kills me, considering the other statistical chances I’ve taken with my life, okay. It’s a perfectly comical and ignominious end.
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I really don't want to go to the Covid ward in the Kaiser hospital in San Jose. If you want to take your chances, why would I try to talk you out of it. But when you call for lifting the social distancing, you are saying that everyone else should accept that risk too -- that because you are happy to be cavalier with your own life, everyone else should be too. If there's anything we should have learned in the last two months, it's that the decisions people make on these issues have enormous costs to everyone else. When you are cavalier with your own life, it affects others around you.
That's hard for a libertarian to accept, so it's better just to find people saying that the risks are really low, and pretend the problem away.
eta: The death toll in NYC is up again today, above 11,800, so that .139% figure from yesterday is now .142%.
