Quote:
Originally Posted by DaFace
I recently read a book called Factfulness that tries to point out all of the weird (wrong) perceptions we have about how awful the world is. One of the concepts the author puts out there is that we should always be skeptical of "lonely numbers" - numbers that sound really bad, but we don't have any context for.
This is definitely a time for that. While 2,814 deaths from Coronavirus sounds bad, the flu kills between 291,000 and 646,000 each year, so we're nowhere near that level for now. It's just a question of how long it'll keep growing as fast as it is now.
The book also points out another common issue - people always assume that things will keep growing linearly. At some point, the spreading will taper off either due to human intervention or just because most of the vulnerable people have already been infected. It's just a matter of how long it takes us to get to that point. |
Yup. it right now looks like a more contagious, more harmful version of the flu. That shouldn't undermine the emergency and clearly it's much much more of a public concern than the flu. But it's not ebola.
But yeah, a lot of the numbers are influenced by systems woefully unprepared for this. The disease will eventually be better detected, treated, and prevented. The areas that should be most concerned are areas with lousy public health infrastructure. It could mutate into something much worse but I'll worry about that only if we get there.