We can stop the pandemic if we slow it down plus heavily ramp up testing. We don’t need to give up and accept that everyone will get it. And we don’t need to stay home for over a year until there’s a vaccine. We just need to do enough testing to figure out who to quarantine. Once we mostly know who has it, the rest is pretty easy, and we’ll be able to manage it when a few cases initially sneak by us. Until testing gets things under control, we must do a lot of social distancing. We can probably get this under control in one month if we take it seriously, which will save hundreds of thousands of lives in USA alone.

To prevent exponential growth of the pandemic, the average person needs to avoid around 70% of their regular contact with other people. That’s a reasonable, achievable number even if most people keep their jobs and go to the grocery store. (70% is a rough estimate based on several sources. Maybe the correct number is actually 80%, but it’s not 99%, it’s something achievable.) People who can isolate extra are a big help who will bring the average down. They’ll make up for some people, such as medical workers, who stay in contact with a lot of people. I’m staying home now.

Don’t go outside for non-essential reasons. Don’t congregate in groups. Stay home as much as you reasonably can. Do your best to leave public spaces for people who need them, e.g. utility workers who keep the water, sewers, power, internet, and phones working. Some people have really good reasons to go outside like healthcare workers, police, firefighters, delivery people, grocery workers, and pharmacy workers. Everyone needs to stop going out for entertainment, luxuries or socializing.

If you can cut down your going out just to work (if you can’t work from home and are in a bad situation to take a break from work), getting medicine and getting groceries when you actually run out (stay home and get stuff delivered if you can), it’ll be a big help to everyone. Get more food at once and eat non-perishables so that you have to shop less often. If you go out, shower when you get home and put all your clothes in the laundry. And don’t place unimportant orders for deliveries right now.

Once the pandemic is under control – we stop it from spreading exponentially, most currently infected people stop being contagious, and we do a lot more testing to find out who has it and who doesn’t – then we can go out more.

Remember: You can spread the disease before you have symptoms or even if you never get symptoms! This appears to be common and is part of why the disease is spreading rapidly.

The best time to get things under control is now, not after the bodies start piling up like they are in Italy.

More Info

Slow the coronavirus spread so we can test way more.

Coronavirus info thread (multiple updates per day; anyone can share info or ask questions)

My Coronavirus video

I tweet coronavirus info. Follow me or read my tweets directly at @curi42.

There is a coronavirus channel on the Fallible Ideas Discord

Johns Hopkins March 17 Coronavirus update:

The researchers concluded that efforts to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic in each country—defined here as slowing transmission to reduce the peak of the epidemic—would be expected to still result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and overwhelmed health systems. Subsequently, they argue that efforts to suppress the epidemics—defined here as lowering transmission to bring R0 less than 1—are necessary to ensure the continued functioning of health systems. These measures, however, would likely need to be implemented for 18 months or longer. The study considered multiple interventions, both alone and combination with others: case isolation at home, voluntary quarantine of those living with cases, social distancing for individuals over the age of 70, social distancing of the entire populations, and school closures. The model indicates that a combination of these measures would be sufficient to suppress the epidemic and preserve the health system, but the disease would be expected to “quickly rebound” after the interventions are lifted. In order to maintain their impact, the measures would essentially need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available, which could be 18 months or longer.

Study link. And FYI R0 means the average number of people that an infected person infects.

This info is dangerously wrong. Specifically, the 18 month claim is very discouraging (the rest is fine). People, including policymakers, will give up and think stopping the disease is hopeless. We're not all going to stay home for 18+ months (and there's actually no guarantee we'll have a working vaccine in 5 years – unpredictable scientific progress is involved). That won't work. But we shouldn't be planning to wait for a vaccine. That's the wrong plan.

We need to buy time to do way more testing to see who's infected. When we test enough, we can control the disease. Proof is logical and explanatory thinking about how diseases work (if we know who's infected, we can isolate them), as well how well heavy testing is working in e.g. South Korea and Vo, a small Italian town which got the disease completely under control with lots of testing.

See also my coronavirus info thread with multiple updates per day. You can share info there, too.

And see What To Do About Coronavirus

This is a discussion topic for posting info and questions about the CCP Coronavirus. Check back regularly for updates and share important info. This is a serious pandemic and we all need to educate ourselves and stay home. Don't go out for non-essential reasons. A lot of people are going to die, and our behavior today (March 15, 2020) will still dramatically affect how many die.

March 23 update: Although diseases are commonly named after locations, I edited the post title from The Wuhan Coronavirus to The CCP Coronavirus to reflect the fact that the fault lies with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), not the city of Wuhan.

Below is the original post.

I'm not a medical expert and I haven't given my full attention to the Wuhan Coronavirus. But I've looked into it some and I have a few guesses, below. Summary: It's a real danger, which might kill millions, and China is lying about containment.

• Coronavirus is spreading in mainland China outside of Hubei province.
• The Chinese government is lying heavily.
• China reports fake coronavirus data.
• Experts could and should have known the above points a month ago.
• There's a significant chance, let's say >= 20%, that coronavirus kills a lot of people, let's say over a million.
• If the virus infects 25% of the world and has a 1% mortality rate, that's 19 million dead. The 25% and 1% figures are both plausible. Worse is not unreasonable.
• Things might not turn out all that bad, but people ought to be concerned and take it seriously.
• The virus is a bigger threat than the government measures to contain the virus.
• Many measures to stop or slow the virus' spread are being done too late to have a large benefit.
• Many people with coronavirus show no symptoms, but can still be contagious.
• Individual quarantine measures are frequently inadequate. Self-quarantined persons are told e.g. to keep their distance from their spouse ... who can still live with them and go to the grocery store.
• A 14 day quarantine is inadequate for a person who is around healthy family members or roommates. E.g. they could infect a family member on day 6. Then the quarantine ends too soon (8 days, not 14) after that person got sick.
• Although we may still slow the spread down, we can't realistically expect to stop the virus from spreading to most of the world. It may not spread that much, but if it doesn't, that will be luck more than skill. We don't know all the details of the virus and how good it is at spreading. Also, the potential exception would be if someone comes up with a major medical breakthrough to protect us.
• Politicians and others still going around shaking the hands of dozens of people are fools or bastards.
• The people mocking those who do "social distancing" like not touching other people (e.g. no handshakes) are second-handers disconnected from reality, and they will be responsible for many deaths.
• Literal life and death threats are inadequate for most social-reality-oriented persons to start focusing on facts, science, details and logic. They can't snap out of it and will continue to be dangerously careless, and to make decisions based on e.g. not wanting to show weakness. People deal with situations by social dynamics like acting tough instead of fearful, and not wanting to be reactive or high effort, and it doesn't matter if coronavirus has no social behavior and cannot act on social interpretations. People will e.g. stock up on supplies if and when other people stock up, and do whatever they think others are doing; they don't want to be different and that matters more to them than their lives.

The goal is to live a life guided by good ideas. Good ideas come from ongoing improvement – learning new things and error correction – while avoiding systematic blockers. So the goal of life is unbounded progress for your ideas.

Discuss below. Ask questions, express objections, try to elaborate on what this means or how to do it.

Topic for discussing Eli Goldratt ideas.

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Discuss topics related to Apple, like the Mac or iPhone.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry (2004) is about the 1918 flu. I started reading it today after enjoying his 2017 article How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America. Here are quotes and comments on the prologue:

In 1918 an influenza virus emerged—probably in the United States—that would spread around the world, and one of its earliest appearances in lethal form came in Philadelphia. Before that worldwide pandemic faded away in 1920, it would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history. Plague in the 1300s killed a far larger proportion of the population—more than one-quarter of Europe—but in raw numbers influenza killed more than plague then, more than AIDS today.

The lowest estimate of the pandemic’s worldwide death toll is twenty-one million,

He says 21m is a bad estimate, the truth is likely more like 50m and could be 100m. And the world population was 1/3 as much back then as today.

And that this underestates how bad it was b/c it killed young adults, not just elderly and babies like the flu usually mostly kills. Roughly half of deaths were people aged 20-39.

Young adults dying is worse than the elderly dying because more future years of life are lost. Babies dying is also better than young adults because not many resources have been invested in a baby yet. (This paragraph is my own blunt comments, which are not representative of the book.)

And they died with extraordinary ferocity and speed. Although the influenza pandemic stretched over two years, perhaps two-thirds of the deaths occurred in a period of twenty-four weeks, and more than half of those deaths occurred in even less time, from mid-September to early December 1918. Influenza killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century; it killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years.

Scary. And I had no idea this had happened. I'm pretty sure I'd heard the words "Spanish Flu" (misnamed) before, but had no idea what it actually was. By contrast, I've heard plenty about the black plague and AIDS.

He says it’s kinda the first time we (well a few ppl, but they had outsized impact) dealt with something like this with science instead of religion.

After humans do anything great, people think it’s dangerous and set up rules and institutions to harness, control and contain that human power. That’s what the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Adminstration – other countries have similar agencies) now does to our medical pioneers. 100 years after the 1918 flu, with the COVID-19 threat scaring the world, I actually don't know, with confidence, that we're in a better position to face it. Yes science has advanced, but it's also more controlled now. Plus science has been mainstreamed and let in far too many mediocre social climbers and low-initiative, uncreative follower-types (too quickly, without enough cultural assimilation, and without enough requirement that they can actually achieve anything, paid for with mostly government funds with little accountability and no need for profit).

In a way, these researchers had spent much of their lives preparing for the confrontation that occurred in 1918 not only in general but, for a few of them at least, quite specifically. In every war in American history so far, disease had killed more soldiers than combat. In many wars throughout history war had spread disease.

I knew wars had a lot of non-combat deaths (from weather, malnutrition and other stuff too, besides disease) but didn't know the particular statistic that I've italicized in the quote.

Not until late—very late—in the nineteenth century, did a virtual handful of leaders of American medical science begin to plan a revolution that transformed American medicine from the most backward in the developed world into the best in the world.

William James, who was a friend of—and whose son would work for—several of these men, wrote that the collecting of a critical mass of men of genius could make a whole civilization “vibrate and shake.” These men intended to, and would, shake the world.

To do so required not only intelligence and training but real courage, the courage to relinquish all support and all authority. Or perhaps it required only recklessness.

I think Ayn Rand would have liked this even though it speaks of a small group changing the world instead of a single individual. The last sentence about recklessness shows the author's own mixed thinking: he's not really sure what side he's on or why. But he still managed to say something nice. Maybe he said it because it's true – and he knows it's true in a particular case in the field where he has detailed, expert knowledge – rather than because it's nice. (It can of course be both true and nice.)