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0 pointsnot_a_moth6y ago0 comments

Yes, it seems it could either be "measures are more effective than thought" or "disease is not as severe as thought", or both.

Fwiw Michael Burry, someone who has earned the right to be listened to in the face of collective thinking, is strongly arguing for the "disease is not as severe as thought".

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mattkrause6y ago

You might also be interested in this thread from Andy Slavitt, who ran CMS during the Obama administration.

https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1248362891201392640

He makes the point that a) the new model has some optimistic assumptions, like no interstate travel and b) due to the exponential growth, a small uncertainty in R0 leads to wildly variable outcomes.

I guess I am uneasy with the "disease is not as severe" hypothesis because it's essentially unknowable. There's no objective measure of severity: it depends on knowing how to treat/prevent the disease and whether the necessary resources are available to do so.

not_a_mothOP6y ago

> There's no objective measure of severity

While it varies with health care rationing, think CFR is still a useful measure of disease severity and allows us to situate COVID vs. the flu. Knowing the real CFR depends right now on how we calculate the denominator. Burry had analysis that 4% of the undiagnosed asymptomatic Danish population had COVID-19 per blood donation data, which suggests the CFR is 80x less severe than official figures in Denmark.

Anecdotally the disease entered countries weeks, arguably months before any cases were officially announced, making it likely that the denominator is an order of magnitude greater than official stats, and thus CFR an order of mag less severe.

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