
‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona influencers - hhs
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/im-not-an-epidemiologist-but-the-rise-of-the-corona
======
nostromo
I've been comparing this with the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009.

H1N1 ended up not being as fatal as SARSCoV2, but we didn't know that at the
time. People were saying it had a CFR of >1% in Mexico (where the original
outbreak was). That number dropped way down as better data came in after the
outbreak.

But still, up to 575,000 people may have died from it. That's not nothing.

And... nobody cared? People were calm. It was on the news, but there was no
panic.

I think part of it was how social media has changed the way we consume and
respond to information. I've seen extreme panic on FB, Reddit, HN, Twitter --
which seems to cause more panic. Everything in the media is turned up to 11
now.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic)

It's interesting to go back further and read this Bird Flu article from 2005,
where a UN Health Official warned of 150 million possible deaths, and said
things like, "It's like a combination of global warming and HIV/Aids 10 times
faster than it's running at the moment." So, the media has always turned
things up to 11, but something about the current era has exacerbated the
issue.

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-
pacific/4292426.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4292426.stm)

~~~
tanilama
SARS doesn't even come close to the infectiousness of COVID-19. China only
registered like 8k patients by the end of it, even you times that by 10, that
still dwarfed by the COVID-19 on global scale, and it is only the beginning.

The reason COVID-19 get singled out might not be the mortality rate alone (it
looks edging close to 10% right now in Italy, which is alarmingly scary), but
more on its impact on paralyzing our health care system with a swarm of people
requires hospitalization. And it achieves all this in record time.

I don't agree this is a perception problem, the threat is real. Social media
can panic, but you can't really tell people it is OK when patients are
lying/dying on the floor of hospitals.

~~~
Veen
It's worth remembering that the "fatality rate" you're quoting accounts only
for people who have been tested and then died. We have no idea what the
denominator in an accurate fatality rate calculation would be. Many thousands
of mildly symptomatic infections aren't recorded.

~~~
joe_the_user
South Korea does exhaustive and they get a fatality rate of 1%. WHO gives 1%
max + 20% needing hospitalization. The various cruise ships also give a good
idea.

At the start, the "Many thousands of mildly symptomatic infections aren't
recorded" claim had plausibility. Now it needs to die in fire. This stuff has
demonstrated it's qualities at scale and we need to get with it.

~~~
bosswipe
"I'm not an epidemiologist but" that South Korea number is misleading because
it's calculated as death/"people that tested positive". That undercounts the
death rate because some of the people that tested positive are still sick and
might die. The correct formula is death/"closed cases" which takes into
account only people that have recovered or died. That number in SK is
currently around 5% though trending down as cases are closed.
[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-
kore...](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/)

~~~
joe_the_user
That's not quite right.

Your link shows the seriously ill among the unclosed cases as 59 people. If
those dies, it won't increase the death significantly - maybe bump it to 1.5%.

But an increase to the base death rate doesn't matter. We should know a 1%
death rate is going to be catastrophic and take action.

Edit: originally read you as arguing the death rate as too high so different
argument. It's probably better to assume a higher death rate regardless anyway
so I changed "you are wrong" to "not quite right" too.

------
lacker
When you have things like the New York Times publishing articles about how the
CDC is publishing misleading information, or the WHO and the South Korean
government publish contradictory guidelines, or the federal government
announcing one thing one day and the opposite thing the next day, then you
really can't just blindly trust an authoritative source any more. It's
impossible, because the authoritative sources don't agree with each other!
Everyone is forced to do their own amateur analysis. It is no surprise that
given the situation, many people are publishing their own amateur analyses.

IMO this is better than the situation in previous similar disasters. Like in
the 1918 influenza epidemic, many governments censored information, and there
was no social media to circumvent this, so the public understanding of the
real situation was quite poor.

~~~
m0zg
I think _everyone's_ understanding of the situation is quite poor, not just
the public's. If you read studies of the previous epidemics such as SARS, H1N1
etc, you will see that early in the epidemic cycle everyone tends to
exaggerate the impact in all aspects, sometimes by orders of magnitude, in
part because it's safer to err on the side of caution rather than not be
cautious enough, and in part for selfish reasons ("woo-hoo, I get my 15
minutes of fame after working for peanuts in some godforsaken epidemiology lab
for a decade"), but mostly the former. For bird flu, for example, the initial
prediction was "up to" 150M deaths worldwide:
[https://slate.com/technology/2009/05/the-problems-with-
the-w...](https://slate.com/technology/2009/05/the-problems-with-the-world-
health-organization-s-approach-to-
pandemics.html#:~:text=Back%20in%20the%20fall%20of,could%20die%20of%20bird%20flu.&text=The%20WHO's%20Global%20Influenza%20Preparedness,the%20H5N1%20avian%20flu%20scare).
This estimate, supposedly, came from one of he most "informed" people in the
world.

People just hate unknowns, and especially "unknown unknowns" and therefore
latch onto the most dramatic damage estimates and act accordingly, often
further exacerbating the situation.

~~~
wool_gather
This is why the lack of testing is so galling: more information would help
everyone -- predictors and consumers of those predictions -- stay calmer.

~~~
MikeAmelung
I want to see serological testing results from random samples of the
population... hopefully we get that soon.

~~~
jpxw
Is there any idea on when exactly this might happen? Here in the UK we’re
hearing about this a lot in the daily updates, but there is never a concrete
time. It could be a gamechanger.

~~~
MikeAmelung
I have no idea of any plans to start doing the testing, but:

[https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/biomerica-
begins-s...](https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/biomerica-begins-
shipping-samples-of-10-minute-test-for-covid-19-virus-exposure-/)

[https://www.biomedomics.com/products/infectious-
disease/covi...](https://www.biomedomics.com/products/infectious-
disease/covid-19-rt/)

Maybe we need more people on Twitter to start demanding it? (I'm not really
being sarcastic, as crazy as that sounds.)

------
davidw
This is what happens when there's a leadership vacuum at the top. People start
trying to figure it out for themselves.

I've been loudly talking about what's happening in Italy, because we had time
to get ready in the US if we took it seriously.

~~~
new2628
Arguably there has been a leadership vacuum for decades, where expert
bureaucrats are lecturing and patronizing the population, while themselves are
being proven wrong and clueless more often than not, with no negative
consequences, see the 2008 crisis, etc.

~~~
sykick
Do you have more than a single instance to point to in which expert
bureaucrats are lecturing and patronizing while being wrong?

From my perspective it seems clear that the American public has been in the
grips of anti-intellectualism for quite a long time. In 1980 Asimov made the
following famous statement:

 _There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has
been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding
its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion
that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. "_

~~~
new2628
Here are some examples of dubious advice from experts: the Iraq war, regime
changes throughout the middle east, interventionism in general, margarine
instead of butter, fat is bad/sugar is good, antidepressants are harmless,
medical doctors don't understand Bayes' rule, etc. etc. etc.

For the record, I'm not American, and not anti-intellectual.

Here's a better example of patronizing by experts from the current crisis:
"The average person should not wear a mask. Not only it doesn't protect
against the virus, but it actually may harm."

What they mean is: it may harm by giving a false sense of certainty. Clearly
the average person is too stupid to understand the difference between perfect
protection and "not quite perfect, but better than nothing" protection.

~~~
sykick
I don’t see the lecturing and patronization that you referenced in your
original comment with some of the examples you provided. That’s the part of
your post that I disagree with.

In your Iraq war example I don’t recall bureaucratic experts being involved in
support of it. General Shinseki famously thought Rumsfeld’s predictions were
wrong and Hans Blicks (spelling?) was famously skeptical of Bush
administration claims.

I’ll certainly agree that we’ve had crappy political leadership in the U.S.
but I won’t agree that bureaucrats have let the nation down in matters of
science. Experts get it wrong and consensus expert opinion is sometimes wrong.
There will continue to be examples of where consensus expert opinion is wrong.

You can find individual experts who are patronizing and lecturing as you put
it. It’s been rare in my experience that consensus expert opinions that aren’t
motivated by money, greed, power, or fame are condescending or lecturing.

------
SpicyLemonZest
This seems like a positive trend. The article quotes a guy saying Twitter is
two days ahead of newspapers, but that's severely underselling it; many
Twitter sources were saying "watch out, this isn't likely to be localized" in
late January and "this will be a problem everywhere, start preparing for a
lockdown" in mid-February. If it's possible for people to be a month ahead of
the mainstream media, that's not a matter of higher verification standards -
there's gotta be some structural obstacle in place that systematically
prevents the media from noticing important new things. And if that's true I'm
glad to have alternative sources without the obstacle.

~~~
creato
Many Twitter sources were also saying that it's nothing or a hoax or whatever
right up until a week or two ago (and probably some still are).

~~~
pault
Your and GP's comments are a perfect illustration of the social media bubble
effect. Some people saw an entire news feed telling them it was nothing to
worry about, and another group saw a news feed saying it was going to be a
global pandemic. It's easy to point the finger after the fact, but you have to
understand that people will believe what they perceive as being "common
knowledge", and in this day and age that means whatever their twitter and
facebook friends say for the majority of people.

------
haunter
I don't blame people when you see/hear contradictory things. People look at
China, Japan, Taiwan, SK etc. everyone covered in masks and then newspapers
like NYT and even the Surgeon General of the US coming out saying don't wear
masks. So ordinary people scratching their head that who is right? So this is
what happens really. There is none to "look up to"

At least the NYT is now backtracking but it's too little too late
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-
face-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-
masks.html)

------
trentnix
I think the 'OMG so much disinformation!' storyline is a tempest in a teapot.

I won't speak for the rest of the world but the entire United States has
effectively shut down thanks to an invisible threat that almost certainly has
not affected anyone you know. Yet people are generally calm, considerate, and
taking appropriate measures. There are _always_ outliers who will buck that
trend, but they are pretty far and few between. Don't get fooled just because
the media has highlighted those exceptions as if they are widespread.

Where I'm at people are staying home, closing their businesses, keeping their
distance from others, and expressing genuine concern. But they aren't
panicked.

There are a few people I'm connected with on social media that insist the
measures being taken are excessive. Some are just natural skeptics. Some of
them are desperate for attention. A few others believe there are aliens at
Area 51.

And they might even be right that we've overreacted - time will tell. But in
the meantime, they are staying home and taking the recommended precautions
anyway, despite their rhetoric.

Focus on the attention whoring cranks at your own psychological peril. But my
experience suggests the actions and behavior of my fellow citizens and
residents have, so far, been worthy of praise.

------
grecy
This is what happens when you ask celebrities and politicians for their input
on critical things for which they have absolutely zero qualifications or
expertise. They are not experts, and we should not ask them, or even give one
second of airtime to their opinions.

Why we give them any time on the stage is beyond me.

The video of the football manager biting back is perfect[1], and we need to
realize this every time a politician or celebrity is asked something of
consequence.

[1] [https://www.cnn.com/videos/sports/2020/03/05/jurgen-klopp-
no...](https://www.cnn.com/videos/sports/2020/03/05/jurgen-klopp-not-an-
expert-on-coronavirus-football-liverpool-spt-intl.cnn/video/playlists/intl-
sports-football/)

------
alexandercrohde
I feel like this is implying this is a bad thing, which it absolutely is not.
Am I the only one who hasn't stumbled onto any conspiracy theories whatsoever?

I've found the internet to be an invaluable source of outstanding information
on this virus (dashboards of diagnoses, research on variants, journal articles
on origin, updates about potential treatments) and have found most people to
relatively reasonable (e.g. frustrated about lack of testing, but nothing
resembling conspiracy theories). That said I focus on HN/reddit.

~~~
irrational
It probably has to do with whom you talk to and what sites you frequent. I've
seen lots of conspiracy theories about how this was engineered by China in
order to crash Western economies with China getting back on its feet first so
it could take advantage of the West while we are down. Seriously. I've heard
many people saying that social isolation is going to be permanent going
forward. I've heard that the government is going to use this to enforce
martial law. I've heard that Trump is going to use this to cancel the upcoming
election and invoke something or other to put himself into power permanently,
a la Putin. Etc. That's just the tip of the iceburg. There are tons of
conspiracy theories. I know people who are starting to stockpile guns and
ammunition (and probably TP) in insane amounts. I know people who are pulling
all of their money out of the banks. I know others that are buying gold. A lot
of gold. In my view, people are verging into extreme unreasonableness.

On the other hand, there is the other side of not being reasonable. Yesterday
a friend was at the park with her kids. Another mom was on her phone talking
to her doctor about her kid's fever and cough. The same kid that she had
brought to the public park!

I know people who are planning trips to Hawaii while the kids are on this
extended vacation.

There are a lot of people who are not taking this at all seriously.

~~~
pault
The doomer and prepper crowd will twist any news to fit their narrative. You
can go back through the last 20 years of blog posts and see these same
predictions made about every large news story. If you hear people quoting this
stuff remind them that it's the same thing people said about the financial
crisis, hurricane katrina, 9/11, and y2k, and none of those things ever
happened.

~~~
irrational
Yeah, but the people I am talking about were never ever doomers and preppers
before. They were just ordinary people who never had any interest in that sort
of stuff. Why is it different this time? I have no idea.

------
icelancer
Epidemiologists who ignore economic effects are almost as bad. Plans that
involve destroying the economy to contain the virus are unacceptable.

------
themodelplumber
> “I have a two-hour podcast every week,” he said. “Very few people are
> listening because it's long and complicated.”

I think this is a good example of an opportunity the population here on HN can
exploit, and which many others can't: We can metabolize a deeper-than-average
scientific discussion and help convert that into reliable and responsible
social discourse. It's just a matter of making the time, of seeking out the
expert-level information, and digging in.

This is also more respectable IMO than mainly just being critical of
information and influencers. A lot of the so-called influencers are good
people who are trying to help out where they can. That's why they're getting
attention; the social organism is looking for help right now. The critical
viewpoint is not nearly as effective under these circumstances, in part
because it shoots down solutions more than it creates or identifies them.

~~~
creato
I don't think the commentary I've seen here is that much better than what I
see e.g. on reddit. Maybe on average, people here are better at reading
primary scientific sources, but that is still a small minority of people that
either can or take the time to do so.

~~~
timr
I am a scientist, with extensive training in biochemistry and cell and
molecular biology, and I can tell you that the commentary here has been
abysmal. Factual information with citations (often, multiple) is routinely
grayed out due to herd downvoting, while wild speculation and opinion are at
the top of threads.

Folks here know about enough science and math to be persuasive when
extrapolating, but not enough to truly understand what they're reading, and
that's dangerous.

------
AbrahamParangi
Speaking of misinformation, buzzfeed news originally posted this

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/coronavirus-...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/coronavirus-
cases-deaths-flu)

with the title _" Don't Worry About The Coronavirus. Worry About The Flu."_
They have since scrubbed or edited much of the content of the article, surely
not to hide their completely irresponsible behavior.

edit: If anything, the real story here is the absolute, abject failure of both
national and international health organizations and traditional media to
provide accurate and up-to-date information on this emerging pandemic and how
Twitter and Reddit filled that gap.

~~~
gnulinux
I have anxiety disorder and have been seeing a therapist for years. I've been
freaking out about this disease since January (saw on reddit) and been
prepping. My therapist kept saying me this is just the flu, and made me read
articles like this. I read this article back when it's title was "Don't Worry
About The Coronavirus. Worry About The Flu."

My point is, I don't think this is irresponsible. This is something else. This
new pandemic is an unprecedented occurrence. Normally, the rational thing to
do for to not be scared of a pandemic like this because all previous instances
(avian, swine flues, SARS, MERS etc) ended up being ok. So, it seemed like
being scared for this disease was irrational, panicky, anxious etc. I really
don't disagree with that. Even many experts back then were arguing this will
be like them. Turns out we just overfit to our immediate history of pandemics.

~~~
AbrahamParangi
I think that you shouldn't lose sleep over any pandemic (this one included)
but any pandemic contains low-probability of high-impact. Novel pathogens will
almost always turn out to be nothing, except when they are something.

This has always been a tail risk situation, something which the media is
exceptionally bad at evaluating correctly.

------
ggm
Mark Handley, UCL is very clear: he doesn't do interviews and he doesn't do
analysis 'what does it mean' he just published charts and sticks to his
knitting.

Wise man.

[http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/](http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/)

 _Q: You aren 't an epidemiologist. Why should I listen to you?_

 _You probably shouldn 't. I'm a computer scientist and I've spend decades
analysing data, but you should talk to a real epidemiologist if you want to
understand the underlying causes. Computer scientists do know a lot about
exponential growth though._

 _Q: I 'm a journalist. Will you appear on my TV show?_

 _No. You should have a real epidemiologist on your TV show._

Mark Handley, UCL. _

~~~
sgt101
It's pretty easy to descend into numerology this way. The vomiting camel being
the most egregious example [1]. It's just not a reliable or informative way to
creating information from numbers.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk037xDQF2Ya-
Hu4vjdEs...](https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk037xDQF2Ya-
Hu4vjdEs-d3M3xhqrQ:1584571272332&q=vomiting+camel)

~~~
ggm
Do you think that applies in this specific instance? Do you wish Mark to stop
doing this, rather than in general deprecating data science absent analytics?

~~~
sgt101
I do. These charts don't seem consistent or useful to me, some of the things
that they "show" are artefacts, the numbers have not been refounded as data in
the sense that the information required to make them genuinely informative is
not available, understood or used here. Handley references data collection
having been changed in the UK, but cannot quantify the impact. He does not
note that testing is being done differently all over the place, some countries
are doing drive throughs as an example. I think that some places are doing one
test, others are double testing cases. The list of problems goes on. This is
part of the noise that is going to confuse and delay effective responses.

Btw. This is analytics absent Data Science....

------
empath75
They give eric ding a hard time, but he was sounding the alarm while other
epidemiologists were downplaying it. Because of him, I stocked up on groceries
over a month ago, decided not to buy a house, and got prepared to work from
home and started selling stocks before the market crashed. If I had listened
to the ‘real’ experts, I’d have lost twice as much money in the crash and I’d
have been scrambling to find food for my family right now.

I took everything with a grain of salt, but I was alarmed enough about worst
case scenarios to start preparing.

~~~
jacobush
Are you out of food where you are?

Where is it this bad, already?

~~~
sky_rw
My local whole foods is sold out of the cauliflower crust frozen pizza I like.
End times my friend.

------
tomp
2 days ago, UK government was still recommending Ibuprofen. A few days before
that, I had aready found some info that NSAIDs should be avoided if you have
CoronaVirus, and you should be taking Paracetamol instead.

I’ll take my “influencers” any day, thank you very much!

~~~
mattkrause
Is there any /solid/ data on that?

I've seen the short _Lancet_ piece which speculates about co-morbidities and
an ACE-related mechanism, but the text is explicitly very speculative.

~~~
tomp
French Ministry of Health tweeting that is solid enough for me.

But feel free to wait for scientific paper in 18 months!

~~~
mattkrause
It certainly makes sense as a precaution, but I'm surprised how widely this
advice has spread.

As near as I can tell, it's based on a) 4 sicker-than-expected youth who were
taking NSAIDs b) a difficult-to-disentangle association and c) a plausible but
by no means ironclad mechanism.

~~~
tomp
There's a difference between a void of evidence because there's little (or no)
effect, vs. a void of evidence because the potential causal factor (and
observations of it) (in this case: novel coronavirus) hasn't been present long
enough to allow more/better evidence.

------
irrational
'I'm not a physician but': The rise of anti-vaxer influencers

This medical influencer issue seems to be a much more common thing: from Goop
eggs, to anti-vaxers, to corona-influencers.

The solution seems to be the need to increase scientific knowledge.

------
cameldrv
All of those people on Twitter were way ahead of Buzzfeed.

------
DyslexicAtheist
one of top Apple podcasts right now is "A White Nationalist Has Rebranded
Himself as Coronavirus Expert. And People Are Flocking to Him."
[https://news.yahoo.com/white-nationalist-rebranded-
himself-c...](https://news.yahoo.com/white-nationalist-rebranded-himself-
coronavirus-084738034.html)

------
nabla9
You can also take any deep learning project you have, train it with corona
data and milk least little publicity.

------
arthurcolle
Not trying to spread misinformation, but what do you guys think about it being
a bioweapon developed at the Wuhan level 4 biochemical warfare lab?

Does anyone think there's any possibility that is, in fact, its true origin?

~~~
hyko
Yes, there’s a possibility. It’s highly implausible though for many reasons,
including:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9)

------
sgt101
Anti Vaxx, Climate Denial, Flat Earth, Moon Fake, Kennedy, 9-11, Co- co- co-
corvid... 19. [1]

[1] Feel good hit of the summer, Homme, J. et-al (2000)

------
Animats
Fox News probably has more influence. They did a complete change of direction
a few days ago. One morning, Trump and Hannity had disappeared from the front
page of the Fox News site, and more or less reasonable statements appeared.
Within half a day, Trump changed course, and he started appearing on the Fox
News site again.

Still the most useful graph: [1] The Financial Times updates that daily. No
projections, just actuals. It's striking how consistently the infection rates
track a straight line on a log-linear graph. The US is on the same track as
Italy, 12 days behind. So is most of Europe. Only a few Asian countries show
signs of control.

[1] [https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-
aeb3-955839e06...](https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-
aeb3-955839e06441)

------
Alex3917
So for context, last night I made a subreddit for discussing over-the-counter
drugs, supplements, and other interventions for coronavirus:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/covid19stack](https://www.reddit.com/r/covid19stack)

I already knew this before I made the subreddit, which I did just because I
find this stuff interesting, but honestly right now there is very little
appetite from the general public in terms of experimenting with treatments or
prophylactic measures that could potentially hurt them. Maybe that will change
in a few weeks, but right now there is very little risk of people being harmed
by whatever misinformation is currently out there.

As of right now most people don't even believe the virus can hurt them in the
first place. It's hard enough just to folks to stay inside.

