Re “proof of a lab leak [is] potentially very dangerous”:
What’s the danger model here? That the US government would be forced to condemn China in that case and that China would react very aggressively to that? And that would lead to some kind of escalating spiral? Or something else?
JesperO
Karma: 105
At least on the internet you could argue that people give their permission by choosing to visit the sites (as opposed to avoiding them, or paying for an adfree experience). But maybe people aren’t giving their permission because they underestimate the power of ads and are not making a conscious choice?
Curious what you think of JeffTk’s argument about the counterfactual - would universal paywalls be better?
Cool! So that explains the weird effects at state borders.
On the bright side, that 88% of people may not be as insane as they seem. The vast majority of people don’t think for themselves on most topics. Rather people outsource thinking to trusted institutions and specialized individuals. That makes sense. Unless you’ve focused a lot on how to think well it’s going to be far too expensive and ineffective to figure out (most things) by yourself.
Unfortunately, when the institutions are bad and spread insane views, this outsourced thinking causes the trusting majority to share those insane views.
Great to hear you only got a mild case.
OT: what’s your impression of COVID spread in Russia? According to official statistics total cumulative deaths and confirmed cases per capita in Russia are maybe half of what they are in Europe and the Americas.
Do you expect this is right, or is there severe underreporting? If no underreporting—did Russia somehow manage the COVID response much better for some reason, or were you guys just lucky?
Where can one get fluvoxamine and antivirals?
Some more guidepost #7 experiences: I used to take daytime naps frequently, and ended up getting a lot of experience of #7. For me there was a lot of scary phenomenology in the beginning. Often I would see flashing occult symbols, hear loud noises and feel like my body was rapidly falling or being pulled off in some direction. If I let the fear take over I would wake up. But when I eventually learned to just observe the sensations, and solidly believed that they were nothing dangerous the sequence would reliably take me directly into lucid dreams.
Not sure how common these experiences are. Maybe they are more common during morning/daytime naps (and some lucid dreaming techniques recommend setting an early alarm and then going back to sleep). I almost never experienced the #7 stage when going to sleep at night, instead I would just fall asleep at some earlier step.
Also curious about this.
Maybe useful to put the TLDR at the top of the post? I had a similar reaction to MikkW and was originally intending to save the link to possibly read at some later time. But then I was lucky enough to start skimming the post instead, getting a good chunk of value. Would have done that for sure if there was TLDR that gave some more guidance.
(Great and well-written post-overall.)
Even if this is right, it still seems incredibly dysfunctional for CDC (and other governing bodies) to not use age categories among healthcare workers, and other essential worker categories.
The only real serious worry I’ve heard about is antibody-dependent-enhancement, basically that in a worst case scenario a vaccine could make the disease more dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement
Very interesting overview!
It looks like most of the data is from relatively recent, smaller, recessions.
Did you look into the consequences of much bigger economic upheavals, like the great depression, any? Since there’s some risk that the covid crisis could cause a much bigger recession than anything recent it would be interesting to know if these could have outsized effects.
• The Russia-suicides result may point in that direction, since the collapse of the USSR was a much larger crisis than—and there was a large increase in suicides.
• Also, here’s mention of a ~20% increase in US suicides in 1932 compared to 1928: https://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2011/04/suicide-rates-rise-and-fall-economy-say-cdc-researchers/
Further, from skimming the “great depression” wikipedia article it’s notable that a lot of regime change happened during that era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Socio-economic_effects
That may be another important consequence of large recessions to look into.
So extrapolating from the current Singapore+Diamond Princess numbers, assuming 50% worldwide infection rate and 0-100% dead among severe/critical cases—and no hospital care—about 0.5%-3% of the world population will die.
Notably eg the Diamond Princess number (36) isn’t critical cases, but “serious/critical” cases. Do you expect 70% fatality without critical equipment for the entire “serious/critical” category, or just the “critical” sub-category?
Further, curious about if there are explicable reasons underlying your 70% estimate, cause I am trying to estimate this myself too. Notably, I’ve seen numbers from China that 50% of critically ill patients die *with* medical care.
From a quick and dirty skim of the linked article, it looks like the 10-20% number may not be based directly on the Singapore data—but possibly it is based on China data. Quote in context:
Fifth, the medical community needs to collectively find better ways to communicate and engage the public in the social media era. The public is understandably anxious about COVID-19, given how rapidly the epidemic has spread with 10% to 20% of hospitalized patients becoming severely ill.
According to the data here (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/) only 6⁄108 = 5.6% are in serious or critical condition. That’s about the same as on Diamond Princess (36/699=5.1%).
So 5.2% of cases in serious/critical condition, plus 0.9% deaths in the sum of these two especially relevant populations.
I am wondering this too. I think they contain more of the essential compounds we need need for our water/”salt” balance. Like, not just sodium and chloride as in table salt, but also maybe potassium and calcium?
Store bought “potassium salt” provides you everything but the calcium, unsure about the proportions though. Also, it looks like not all “electrolytes” contain calcium anyway. Eg this one just contains potassium, sodium and chloride and zinc: https://www.target.com/p/pedialyte-advancedcare-electrolyte-solution-tropical-fruit-33-8-fl-oz/-/A-21538752
Good points.
Notably, those studies are still based on surveys and self-reports.
Compare supposed long lyme disease or previously, supposed candida infection. In those cases a lot of people self-report various general, common symptoms like tiredness. In neither case is the disease medically recognized. Rather, its existence is doubted by medical authorities. In addition to these two, I there’s a series of past similar scares, with the same properties. These scares include at least electricity oversensitivity and worries about mercury dental implants.
In all these cases it seems likely that there is no physiological long-lasting disease. Rather, because belief in a long disease spreads, people start to wrongly attribute their general symptoms and issues in life to it. Things such as tiredness, depression and pain get self-reported in large numbers.
Now, it seems to me somewhat likely that long covid will turn out to be in the same category. There is a lot more self-reported cases of long covid than long lyme disease. But belief in long covid is also a lot more widespread.
Why do medical authorities not apply to same skepticism to long covid as they did to eg long lyme disease? One possibility is that there’s a perceived (maybe justified) need to spread beliefs about how covid is dangerous, and so a different standard of evidence is applied.