This thread was created on 3/8/2020, or approximately one million years ago in virus time. It’s getting pretty bloated now, and a lot of things that were high value at the time have been eclipsed by events, making karma not a very useful sorting tool. So I’m declaring this thread finished, and asking everyone to move over to the April Coronavirus Open Thread.
Interested in what happened in this thread? Here’s the timeless or not-yet-eclipsed highlights:
Scott Alexander comes up with Hammer and Dance 6 days before Tomas Pueyo
Spiracular on why SARS-Cov-2 is unlikely to be lab-created.
Twodocuments collating estimates of basic epidemiological parameters, in response to this thread
Discussion on whether the tuberculosis vaccine provides protection against COVID-19.
What's the best way to convince skeptics of the severity of COVID? I keep seeing people saying it's just a slightly worse flu, or that car accidents kill a lot more people, and so on. I want some short text or image that illustrates just how serious this is.
Angela Merkel says that 60-70% of Germany is likely to be infected. That's useful if people believe that it won't infect that many. Example source, though you can google for others.
If they're willing to believe a redditor's summary, this one says that WHO says that 20% of infected people needed hospital treatment for weeks. (If they want primary sources, maybe you could find those claims in the links / somewhere else.)
Putting together 1 and 2 (and generalising from Germany to whatever country they're in), they ought to be convinced that it's pretty severe.
8Steven Byrnes
A nice figure is that 1 person infected with COVID-19 requires (I think) 100x the hospital capacity of 1 person infected with the flu - 30x likelier to need hospitalization, and they stay there 3x longer if they do (you'll have to check these figures, but it's something like that I think...). Then that connects to the nightmarish Italian hospital situation you mention, and the fact that the death rate is dramatically higher without available hospital beds, including for young healthy people.
This thread was created on 3/8/2020, or approximately one million years ago in virus time. It’s getting pretty bloated now, and a lot of things that were high value at the time have been eclipsed by events, making karma not a very useful sorting tool. So I’m declaring this thread finished, and asking everyone to move over to the April Coronavirus Open Thread.
Interested in what happened in this thread? Here’s the timeless or not-yet-eclipsed highlights: