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Also, my estimates from a few days ago were out of date and I did more research in the intervening time and found that the case fatality rate was probably lower than I was previously lead to believe (I did research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.
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