We live in a democracy, people who get voted in run the country not someone who a select few think should run the country.

A week ago we were talking about 2.2 million people dead. Now we are talking about 240k dead. Both figures given to us by scientists. Guess what? That 240 number will change in a week again probably. Point is, not even the experts can model this perfectly. It's very difficult to make calls or decisions and for them to turn out right. Scientists can't do it but you expect politicians to do it?

How dare those racist cops disperse them poor black citizens. Effing Trump voting racists!!

The 2.2 million figure was what might happen if mitigation efforts weren't put into place, which I told you when I posted the study. You either forgot or you're being deliberately deceptive by comparing it to the 240k figure.

I gotta disagree with this take. It was back in January when the Chinese completely locked in a whole 60m province and videos of the disastrous situation in their hospitals went around the world. Yes, the CCP kept info about the virus from the public for too long and has to take responsibility for things getting this bad in China - but the rest of the world had enough time to prepare nonetheless, and didnt. There were almost 2 months between the visible escalation of the situation in China and the moment when Western goverments started their own shutdown. Two months to prepare hospitals, to ramp up production of masks, protective gear, ventilators, testing infrastructure. Nobody did. Two months to shut down international travel from hotspots like China or Iran, no one but Trump did. Two months to prepare the economy, the schools and universities for what was about to come. No one did, particularly in the U.S.

The simple fact is that despite China's attempts at sweeping this under the rug, the rest of the world still had at least 6 weeks, if not more, to prepare for this pandemic, and no one did. I dont see a cogent argument for why things should have gone different if China had admitted to the scope of the problem in December or November.

It's a comparison in so far that this is a fluid situation based on a million different variables. I didn't like that 2.2 million headline because it's fear mongering and unrealistic when we were already implementing responses. Now a week later we see that the expected outcome is, as i said, no where near the 2.2 upper bound.

New article on under reporting in China, but mentions other culprits as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-concealed-extent-of-virus-outbreak-u-s-intelligence-says?srnd=premium

Official world death count is at 44k. As a ballpark estimate we should probably triple that

?

Nobody thought it would be 2.2 million with mitigation efforts enacted. The study didn't say that... nobody said that. You're not comparing like with like.

This post was edited by IceMage on Apr 1 2020 09:51am

Policy makers at least in part base their decisions on data. Like if they were looking at China and their numbers and only see XX infected y deaths and think 'oh well the scale of this isn't that bad' naturally the preparation is not going to be as much as if the death number is 5x as high and death rate is 2x of what's being given to us by China. Read the Bloomberg article, i think it does a decent job talking about this.



Except that's the number the media was circulating as their headlines. If you see "Up to 2.2 million people could die in US from Corona" it's not a factually dishonest claim yet it severely undermines the truth by omitting that it's the upper bound with a very small % probability of happening.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Apr 1 2020 09:55am

https://medium.com/@wpegden/a-call-to-honesty-in-pandemic-modeling-5c156686a64b

Thought this was interesting. Are we really just delaying the inevitable?