[ExI] COVID-19 has now killed more Americans than Chinese

Darin Sunley dsunley at gmail.com
Wed Apr 1 16:36:29 UTC 2020


This is true. Every piece of data we are given in the media is pure
garbage, and the academic numbers, even fully qualified, aren't much better,

Fivethirtyeight ran an [uncharacteristically for them, these days]
excellent piece on the difficulties in creating a data model for COVID that
isn't a pure, panic-mongering, stab in the dark.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-its-so-freaking-hard-to-make-a-good-covid-19-model/


Fortunately, there's a lot of media organizations form whom panic-mongering
is their bread and butter, so we have no shortage of models to work with,
all of which are terrible.

The correct response to complete ignorance is a the null hypothesis, not
the worst-case scenario. But worst-case scenarios get WAY more clicks.. So
here we are.



On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 10:01 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 10:06 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
>
>> *> that chart didn’t show why because it wasn’t in per-capita infection
>> rates.*
>>
>
> Speaking of per-capita, we don't know the true number of people in the USA
> that are infected because the USA has done far fewer testing per-capita
> than any other modern industrial nation and started doing them far later,
> even later and fewer than some third world nations. As a result we're
> flying blind, all we have is a lower bound.
>
>  John K Clark
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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