This doc has the same problem I've mentioned before & that I see everywhere: there's a binary outcome, where you're either dead or you survived. But we've seen a lot of evidence of lasting damage in survivors now -- no one seems to consider this in these types of arguments.
Another smart person who does this is @naval. He explicitly strives for simple, Twitter-friendly models. But anything that's based on a binary survived/died outcome is IMO too simple for me to usefully assess the dangers of this to different populations.
We need models that are more granular, where readers can tally up their own pre-existing conditions & demographic factors, then game out their own risk on a spectrum from "survived with health intact" to "permanent damage" to "dead".
I scroll through tons of tweets & graphs about age-distributed fatality rates on crypto/biotech/vc twitter & think "This is not useful to me. At 44, I know my risk of dropping dead of this is low. But what about my risk of lung damage? Liver damage? Hello? Anybody?"
Honestly I think a bunch of really smart people who are running numbers on this are doing their own stealth version of "just the flu" thinking. It's "just the flu" but w/ a different fatality rate.
That is not accurate. It is not "basically the flu, but way more ppl die."
That is not accurate. It is not "basically the flu, but way more ppl die."
I've been developing a sense that we're at a weird stage of this where the crowd that could do basic forecasting with exponentials & simple parameters, & where thus much earlier than the medical community to sound the alarm, is already finding itself fighting the last war.
What I mean is, there was a set of skills & attitudes that let biotech/VC/BI/engineering/crypto guys call this early with some basic modeling & a willingness to believe the horrific-looking output they were getting. But I think we're out of that phase, yet many don't know it.
E.g. I think this exact thing is at work with @JamesTodaroMD. See this thread. I think he's now well out of his depth & doesn't know it, & we are now squarely back on the turf of the same infectious disease experts who utterly failed to see this coming.
It's like the old SNL Nick Burns skit, but if instead of just saying "MOVE" and printing the doc for the person, he stayed at the desk & started trying to run her spreadsheets for her & take her calls. nbc.com/saturday-night…
To clarify, Todaro was early, as were a number of people in tech/VC/biotech/crypto. I was early, too. But I think the same set of skills that let that crowd call the fact of the pandemic early on is not the same set of skills that tells us where it goes from here.
We're now back on the turf of pretty standard epidemiology and public health. They were blindsided by this, but now that they've had some time they're probably better equipped to navigate the next phase than the ppl who weren't blindsided by it.
