Anyone else look at the coronavirus outbreak and think this is how a future existential accident will play out, with policy always one step behind what’s necessary to control it, because governments don’t want to take the risk of “overreacting” and triggering large or very large political and economic costs “for no good reason”. So they wait until absolutely clear evidence emerge, by which time it will be too late.
Why will governments be more afraid of overreacting than underreacting? (Parallel: We don’t seem to see governments doing anything in this outbreak that could be interpreted as overreacting.) Well, every alarm up to that point will have been a false alarm. (Parallel: SARS, MERS, Ebola, every flu pandemic in recent history.)
I share this reaction. I think that a lot of people are under-reacting due to misperception of overreaction, signaling wisdom and vague outside view stuff. I can tell because so far everyone who has told me to “stop panicking” won’t give me any solid evidence for why my fears are underrated.
It now seems plausible that unless prominent epidemiologists are just making stuff up and the deathrate is also much smaller than its most commonly estimated value, then between 60-160 million people will die from it within about a year. Yet when I tell people this they just brush it off! [ETA: Please see comments below. This estimate does not imply I think there is a greater than 50% chance of this happening.]
I see this problem all the time with regard to things that can be classified as “childish”. Beside pandemics, the most striking examples in my mind are risk of nuclear war and risk of AI, but I expect there are lots of others. I don’t exactly think of it as signaling wisdom, but as signaling being a serious-person-who-undestands-that-unserious-problems-are-low-status (the difference being that it doesn’t necessitate thinking of yourself as particularly “smart” or “wise”).
between 60-160 million people will die from it within about a year.
That seems high. If you assume that it’s as contagious as the regular flu, and given that every year about 5-15% of people get infected (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Epidemic_and_pandemic_spread), that makes roughly 700 million infected, and given the expected mortality rate in single percents (currently 7% and dropping of all closed cases, estimated 1% in general), we arrive at the 10 million deaths estimate without any containment measures in place. Given the containment measures, the number of infections and deaths is likely to be a fraction of that, likely under a million dead.
The coronavirus spreads a little faster than the flu.
You have some natural immunity to flu even though each season the strain is different. You probably have no immunity against this coronavirus.
We have a reliable vaccine against seasonal flu. We will not have a vaccine or effective treatment for coronavirus for some time.
Seasonal flu is very well characterized and understood. This virus is still under intensive study, and all the numbers I give have uncertainty, which means that it may be worse than our best guess. Long-term effects of catching the virus are unknown.
Also, my estimates from a few days ago were out of date and I did more research in the intervening time and found that the case fatality rate was probably lower than I was previously lead to believe (I did research back in January and then stopped for a while since it was draining to research it).
My current estimate that you can quote me on is that there is a 10% chance of the virus killing more than 50 million people [ETA: Update, I did more research. 5% is now probably my current estimate.]. I used language that did not reflect my probability estimates here as I used the word “plausible” but not in a sense that implied probable.
One would think the incentives for an international body like the WHO would be different, but the way they handled it sadly suggests otherwise. (That said, I don’t actually know whether a stronger early reaction by the WHO would have changed anything, because it seems like most of the necessary stuff happens on national levels anyway.)
Or in “The Cutter Incident” in 1955, where a rush to get a polio vaccine out in advance of the next polio season resulted in some batches containing live polio virus, with several children receiving the vaccine actually getting polio instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#The_Cutter_incident
There’s definitely a history of incidents in public health of perceived overreaction followed by public backlash, which could potentially be playing into public health officials’ heads nowadays. I don’t know if becoming more conservative and less-quick-to-take-action is necessarily a wrong lesson, though – even if you think, just simply on the numbers, that taking preventative measures in each of these incidents was correct ex ante given the stakes involved, reputational risks are real and have to be taken into account. As much as “take action to prepare for low probability, high consequence scenarios when the expected cost < expected benefit” applies to personal preparation, it doesn’t translate easily to governmental action, at least not when “expected cost” doesn’t factor in “everyone will yell at you and trust you less in the future if the low probability scenario doesn’t pan out, because people don’t do probabilities well.”
This does put us in a bit of a bind, since ideally you’d want to have public health authorities be able to take well-calibrated actions against <10%-likely scenarios. But they are, unfortunately, constrained by public perception to some extent.
Anyone else look at the coronavirus outbreak and think this is how a future existential accident will play out, with policy always one step behind what’s necessary to control it, because governments don’t want to take the risk of “overreacting” and triggering large or very large political and economic costs “for no good reason”. So they wait until absolutely clear evidence emerge, by which time it will be too late.
Why will governments be more afraid of overreacting than underreacting? (Parallel: We don’t seem to see governments doing anything in this outbreak that could be interpreted as overreacting.) Well, every alarm up to that point will have been a false alarm. (Parallel: SARS, MERS, Ebola, every flu pandemic in recent history.)
I share this reaction. I think that a lot of people are under-reacting due to misperception of overreaction, signaling wisdom and vague outside view stuff. I can tell because so far everyone who has told me to “stop panicking” won’t give me any solid evidence for why my fears are underrated.
It now seems plausible that unless prominent epidemiologists are just making stuff up and the deathrate is also much smaller than its most commonly estimated value, then between 60-160 million people will die from it within about a year. Yet when I tell people this they just brush it off! [ETA: Please see comments below. This estimate does not imply I think there is a greater than 50% chance of this happening.]
I see this problem all the time with regard to things that can be classified as “childish”. Beside pandemics, the most striking examples in my mind are risk of nuclear war and risk of AI, but I expect there are lots of others. I don’t exactly think of it as signaling wisdom, but as signaling being a serious-person-who-undestands-that-unserious-problems-are-low-status (the difference being that it doesn’t necessitate thinking of yourself as particularly “smart” or “wise”).
That seems high. If you assume that it’s as contagious as the regular flu, and given that every year about 5-15% of people get infected (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Epidemic_and_pandemic_spread), that makes roughly 700 million infected, and given the expected mortality rate in single percents (currently 7% and dropping of all closed cases, estimated 1% in general), we arrive at the 10 million deaths estimate without any containment measures in place. Given the containment measures, the number of infections and deaths is likely to be a fraction of that, likely under a million dead.
From this thread,
The coronavirus spreads a little faster than the flu.
You have some natural immunity to flu even though each season the strain is different. You probably have no immunity against this coronavirus.
We have a reliable vaccine against seasonal flu. We will not have a vaccine or effective treatment for coronavirus for some time.
Seasonal flu is very well characterized and understood. This virus is still under intensive study, and all the numbers I give have uncertainty, which means that it may be worse than our best guess. Long-term effects of catching the virus are unknown.
Also, my estimates from a few days ago were out of date and I did more research in the intervening time and found that the case fatality rate was probably lower than I was previously lead to believe (I did research back in January and then stopped for a while since it was draining to research it).
My current estimate that you can quote me on is that there is a 10% chance of the virus killing more than 50 million people [ETA: Update, I did more research. 5% is now probably my current estimate.]. I used language that did not reflect my probability estimates here as I used the word “plausible” but not in a sense that implied probable.
Can’t remember where, but I remember reading that for people in their 20s and 30s, the death rate is only 0.1%.
https://predictionbook.com/predictions/198261
One would think the incentives for an international body like the WHO would be different, but the way they handled it sadly suggests otherwise. (That said, I don’t actually know whether a stronger early reaction by the WHO would have changed anything, because it seems like most of the necessary stuff happens on national levels anyway.)
See these news stories about the WHO being blamed for being too aggressive about swine flu, which probably caused it to learn a wrong lesson:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100420235803/http://www.msnbc.msn.com:80/id/36421914
https://web.archive.org/web/20100531094130/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article7104253.ece
You might also be interested in the 1976 mass vaccination program in the US for swine flu, which was a case of perceived overreaction (given the anticipated pandemic never materialized) and also hurt the reputation of public health generally: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-public-health-legacy-of-the-1976-swine-flu-outbreak
Or in “The Cutter Incident” in 1955, where a rush to get a polio vaccine out in advance of the next polio season resulted in some batches containing live polio virus, with several children receiving the vaccine actually getting polio instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#The_Cutter_incident
There’s definitely a history of incidents in public health of perceived overreaction followed by public backlash, which could potentially be playing into public health officials’ heads nowadays. I don’t know if becoming more conservative and less-quick-to-take-action is necessarily a wrong lesson, though – even if you think, just simply on the numbers, that taking preventative measures in each of these incidents was correct ex ante given the stakes involved, reputational risks are real and have to be taken into account. As much as “take action to prepare for low probability, high consequence scenarios when the expected cost < expected benefit” applies to personal preparation, it doesn’t translate easily to governmental action, at least not when “expected cost” doesn’t factor in “everyone will yell at you and trust you less in the future if the low probability scenario doesn’t pan out, because people don’t do probabilities well.”
This does put us in a bit of a bind, since ideally you’d want to have public health authorities be able to take well-calibrated actions against <10%-likely scenarios. But they are, unfortunately, constrained by public perception to some extent.