
Elon Musk: "The coronavirus panic is dumb" - madarco
Elon Musk: &quot;The coronavirus panic is dumb&quot;<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;FxzzOnTheBeat&#x2F;status&#x2F;1236556448810831872<p>&quot;Virality of C19 is overstated due to conflating diagnosis date with contraction date &amp; over-extrapolating exponential growth, which is never what happens in reality. Keep extrapolating &amp; virus will exceed mass of known universe!&quot;<p>&quot;Fatality rate also greatly overstated. Because there are so few test kits, those who die with respiratory symptoms are tested for C19, but those with minor symptoms are usually not. Prevalence of coronaviruses &amp; other colds in general population is very high!&quot;
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pdpi
I'm getting pretty damn fed up with Musk, and even more so with with the cult
of personality around him.

The _panic_ is "dumb", sure, but panic is people reacting emotionally. Of
course it's dumb. It's also understandable. Posting about how dumb it is is
not constructive, it's just chest thumping about how intellectually superior
you are.

Also, I'm not taking medical advice from Musk, and you shouldn't either. He's
not an epidemiologist, an infectious diseases expert, or any sort of medical
doctor for that matter. He's just a techie who got lucky and has the loudest
megaphone in the world.

~~~
SamReidHughes
There isn’t even any panic. When’s the last time people panicked?

~~~
quickthrower2
Global share markets are going down the toilet, and there is no toilet paper
to flush them down with!

~~~
SamReidHughes
That's not panic, that's investors making a calculation.

The Italian prison riots might be... more panicky:
[https://www.thedailybeast.com/six-inmates-dead-scores-
escape...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/six-inmates-dead-scores-escape-as-
prisoners-riot-across-italy-after-visitor-restrictions-over-coronavirus)

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nostrademons
Both of his objections are true but don't really change the "you should
probably panic" conclusion.

True fatality rate is likely close to what South Korea is registering, because
they test everybody regardless of whether they're sick or not. It's about 0.7%
there.

Exponential growth won't continue forever, but it doesn't have to. If
exponential growth continues until COVID-19 has infected 30-60% of the world's
population (as typical flu pandemics do), that's 2-4B infected and 15-30M
dead. Those are huge numbers.

Deaths will be overwhelming concentrated among older folks (death rates are
about 0.2% for < 40, up to 15% for > 80), but that basically amounts to "Would
you play Russian roulette with your mother?" I certainly wouldn't.

~~~
WaltPurvis
I see little reason to think this virus will infect 30-60% of the world's
population.

It has infected <0.1% of South Korea's population and the number of new cases
per day has been going down for several days in a row now. Today they reported
less than a hundred new cases.

It sure doesn't seem to be sweeping through the South Korea population like
wildfire. It doesn't appear they will even reach 1% infected, let alone
30-60%.

It also doesn't look to be on a path to infecting 30-60% of China's
population. New infections in China have dwindled to almost nothing, and the
total number of cases there is less than 1/10,000th of their population. (Even
if one is skeptical about China's official count, it's preposterous to think
they've undercounted by tens or hundreds of millions.)

~~~
nostrademons
Both of them have enacted extremely rigorous (some would say "draconian")
quarantine procedures. They can't keep these procedures up forever without
severely damaging their economy.

The problem is that coronavirus escaped and is now circulating worldwide. So
as soon as they drop the quarantines, they're likely to end up reinfected from
some other country. Most of the infections in the U.S. are now coming from
Italy and Iran, not China. All it takes is one asymptomatic carrier (and
evidence from South Korea and the Diamond Princess indicates that close to
half of cases are asymptomatic) to start a local outbreak. The Washington
State and Italian outbreaks were both started from a single undetected index
case, for example (Washington State was the original index case from Wuhan in
Seattle, Italy was traced back to the German car manufacture that had a local
outbreak in early January).

You can't really stop a highly-infectious airborne disease with no natural
immunity in the population. The best you can do is buy time to develop
treatments or a vaccine, or hope that it mutates into something less virulent.

~~~
buboard
also consider cultural habits. eastern asians are more likely to wear a mask
or distance socially, while italians and other southern europeans are much
more touchy feely , and less likely to keep distances

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prostanac
To put this into context: [https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-
compensation...](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-compensation-
package-tranches-explainer)

It’s in his best interest to keep the stock price up.

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hef19898
Ah, so Elon studied virology over the week-end?

