Thread by @hansthered

I have to say this about "Fear Mongering" and "Making decisions based on fear." This has become a catch-all phrase that is intended to discredit the person who dared to let "fear" run them or spread this to others. You do realize fear is why we survived as a species?

Consider this. What stops you from walking out into traffic? Pretend for a moment there is traffic... bear with me here. I hope it's the "fear" of being crushed by a car which is actually completely rational. Why do we look left, look right, then cross the road?

Even if there's no car directly in front of me I can determine that if a vehicle is heading towards where I WILL BE, then I shouldn't try to cross the road right now. When we see a trend, like a moving car or spreading disease, we attempt to avoid a terrible outcome.

Now this... Deaths follow cases. You can't die from Covid-19 unless you actually HAVE Covid-19. As you can see, there's a striking similarity between the shape of these two charts, first the case, then the resolution into recovery or ...

Now let's cover the whole linear versus log scale thing again because it can be confusing. Here's a chart of the number of cases in linear scale for the USA. Note that it looks like nothing was going on until the last few days "it came out of nowhere."

Now a plot twist. If I went back in time and loaded that chart seven days ago what would it have looked like? Would it have been a flat line sort of leaning upwards, or would it look the same as it does now?

Answer: It would look the very similar as it does now in linear scale! Why? Because this is a logarithmic function and that's what it looks like in linear scale. It ALWAYS looks like the action is happening right now (axes autoscale). Compare that to log scale.

And now you can understand why scientists, quants, and other data nerds were making a big deal about this virus before it "came out of nowhere." Just look, here's a screenshot I took on February 14th. See how the trend was clearly visible even back then?

Here's February 16th, focusing on cases outside China. Data inside China was unreliable, so people started focusing on cases outside the mainland.

In order to get people to take action on what we know, it's necessary to raise their level of "give a fuck" from zero to some point beyond that. Can you risk going too far, sure. But since the alternative is getting run over by a global pandemic, err on the side of caution IMO.