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

[Darin Sunley]

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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