An open letter to wejo

In general, society needs to focus on D.U.I. arrests over addressing prostitution. During this crisis, 90% of cops hunting impaired drivers need to assist vice cops. Mayors, governors and federal health personnel are saying social distance and avoiding pubs and coffee shops. I have not heard one public official specifically state: We are closing gentlemen's clubs and massage parlors.

I cannot think of a faster way to spread an airborne virus than strippers giving personal dances and prostitutes.

David S wrote:

How many people need to shout down a crackpot before the messaging is neutralized?

There are multiple sites dedicated to providing accurate and up to date information from actual scientists who are processing the data directly from the field. Snopes is one and Johns Hopkins is another. Those are the places people should be going. LetsRun is not the authority on this and no one here should be taken at face value on anything they say. It really isn't hard to google "is xyz really that high/bad/gonna kill us/etc."

LetsRun is a huge offender when it comes to pseudo-intellectual armchair scientists consuming data from their favorite blogger saying stupid sh!t or doing legit fear mongering. It's not gonna change. At best they can remove patently false information but most people are throwing around real statistics that can be interpreted irresponsibly if you spin it (is statistics even a real science?).

fartlekpa wrote:

No I didn't. Sorry chief, you're assessment puts you in a category that warrants minimal attention. You're so far off that it's not even wrong. And you keep trying to say what's going to happen. You don't get it.

Rule of thumb:

harmless idiocy: ignore

harmful idiocy: hostile response

good faith questions: carefully read and respond

You are #2. That idiot math prof (hilarious name btw) is #1.

I asked you questions you can't answer, so you respond with insults. Your lack of coherence is a problem.

fartlekpa wrote:

No I didn't. Sorry chief, you're assessment puts you in a category that warrants minimal attention. You're so far off that it's not even wrong. And you keep trying to say what's going to happen. You don't get it.

Rule of thumb:

harmless idiocy: ignore

harmful idiocy: hostile response

good faith questions: carefully read and respond

You are #2. That idiot math prof (hilarious name btw) is #1.

I call out your inability to calculate even beginner level statistics for a population and this is your response? Shows that you are the idiot.

Here ya go, my answers in CAPS.

1, Old people with pre existing medical conditions are greatly at risk. What evidence do you have that younger healthier people are greatly at risk? EVERYONE IS AT RISK WHEN IT COMES TO NOVEL CONTAGIOUS DISEASE.

So you think I'm a sociopath because I wish to counter what I consider alarmism? YES

I think I'm a realist. YOU ARE NOT.

2, Who is causing harm on these boards? YOU ARE. I say there is a lot of fear mongering going on, possibly by posters over a certain age? WHO KNOWS. I'M 40 AND A HEALTHCARE PROVIDER. Are these fears justified or just causing more problems? JUSTIFIED.

3, We can't predict where the clusters of infection are going to be next week. But the mortality rate has been greatly exaggerated by some people in high positions who have a responsiblity not to spread misinformation. And what preventative action do you think is realistic if the air pollution and the wind speed and direction is unpredictable? WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS SCIENCE.

Took me all of 30 seconds.

So what can you offer? Will someone tell me where the money is supposed to come from to finance these social distancing stratgies for the next few months, given that Covid 19 may continue to be contagious in the summer?

fartlekpa wrote:

Here ya go, my answers in CAPS.

1, Old people with pre existing medical conditions are greatly at risk. What evidence do you have that younger healthier people are greatly at risk? EVERYONE IS AT RISK WHEN IT COMES TO NOVEL CONTAGIOUS DISEASE.

You are absolutely wrong. As we have seen countless times, the coronavirus is harmless for the vast majority of people. Most show no illness or very mild cold like illness. This coronavirus is non-news except for people like you who want to tell everyone it is the end of the world. Shutting down society for the coronavirus that is harmless to the majority of people is completely irresponsible and you should be jailed for it and for spreading panic.

Dude listen--I get it. Scary times. But you need to accept that you live in a world that is extremely interconnected. What happens on the other side of the world has potential to affect you in a very real way. We have terrible circuit breakers when it comes to contagious disease--and this is the quintessential risk to well being. F*cking wall street understands this (two circuit breakers triggered recently). You either pay early or pay later. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong chose to pay early and they're back to business as usual (close to it). We're a ways away b/c we waited way too long.

If there is a reason we pay taxes it's for MOMENTS LIKE THIS.

"I don't see your posts as being what you claim "straightforward logic and evidence"

Your tone is alarmist. You people worry me. [...] Yes lots of people will die in the next few weeks, but a sense of proportion is required in analysing the statistics. Those who die are going to die soon anyway, just a few weeks or months sooner than if there was no Covid 19 Pandemic. Please be realistic about this"

I cede the field of reason to you.

Math Professor wrote:

Can any of you alarmists even create any proper statistics? Everything I've seen from you panic types is so flawed its like none of you ever took statistics in math class. Everything we have seen shows the vast majority of people either show no symptoms after being infected or very mild symptoms. Only those with some other pre-existing disease that already made them sick have more complicated symptoms. Can you at least acknowledge that the coronavirus is not dangerous for the vast majority of people? If you can't even acknowledge that, what are you even doing here?

I guess the Math Professor has no idea how a virus works.

Of course most younger people will survive this. The problem is that anybody who gets the virus spreads it a little more before it becomes obvious and stays home. Medical assistance might be needed as well. Older people will get infected and than there is not enough medical care to help everyone. In Italy the doctors right now have to make these choices.

So if your grandma dies in a couple of weeks it might be, because of the overwhelmed healthcare system. And that's were "flatten the curve" and math comes into play.

This is a perfect example, his post took 30 seconds and mine is going to take 30 minutes.

Math Professor wrote:

David S wrote:

How many people need to shout down a crackpot before the messaging is neutralized?

So far the only crackpots have been all you end of the world alarmists. When are you going to realize that you are not a god and don't know anything?

I know some things and I can make educated guesses.

You asked in an earlier thread how the 1% figure was obtained, and someone gave you the answer that everyone on that cruise ship was tested and 1% were found positive. Roughly 50% were found to be positive but asymptomatic. I believe they performed a similar experiment in a town in Italy where everyone was tested. The exponential curve throws everything off because of the people who haven't died *yet*, but epidemiologists are trying to do inference-based analyses like this one to account for it:

Having said this, I'm not an end of world alarmist. I think it's going to be a very painful year for the world, much more painful than our government acknowledges, and I'm frustrated that faster action isn't being taken. Isolation and social distancing may lower the number of infected, but we need to be able to chase down infections and bring it from a small number of cases to zero. Otherwise we're going to need 3-week quarantines every couple of months.

So "Math Professor", what is your solution, what is your proposed path forward? "Nobody knows what's going to happen so don't do anything"? "Just let the virus spread until half the population is infected and it can no longer spread"? The problem with this is that it will cause many more deaths than even the 1% estimate because the people who *need* to be hospitalized won't be able to be hospitalized. If the hospitalization rate is 20% and half the population is infected then 10% of the population will be hospitalized. We don't have that many empty hospital beds. A few percent of the population (depending on source, 1-5%) will need to be in the ICU or on a ventilator. We don't have that many ventilators in the country. The US has 160,000 ventilators. There will most likely be 10x that many people who need them and it won't be possible to evenly distribute patients.

The "do nothing" solution will, in all likelihood, result in far more deaths than the current death rate of the virus, and probably a greater societal catastrophe than the one we're currently undergoing.

David S wrote:

This is a perfect example, his post took 30 seconds and mine is going to take 30 minutes.

You must be a really slow typist if it took you 30 minutes to write something that short.

The answer is easy. If you have some other pre-existing illness and think you are at risk then you can stay home. Let the rest of society get on with our lives because the coronavirus is harmless for the vast majority of people. What do you suppose we do about the many thousands of deaths every day from car crashes? Lock everyone up?

What do we mean by the term Death Rate? wrote:

Hardloper wrote:

How often does a flu kill 7 people on one cruise ship? The Diamond Princess cruise ship had about 1% fatality of those infected with the coronavirus and 0.2% of the total population of the ship. With no action taken there's no reason to think the virus won't infect 40% of the population or more. If the fatality rate is 1% that would be 1.3 million deaths in America. If you're extremely optimistic that the real fatality rate is only 0.1% that's still 130,000 deaths.

1% is the normal mortality rate for Covid 19 is it not?

The virus could infect 80% of the World's population over the next year or more.

Yes Covid 19 may indeed be a factor in the deaths of over 1 million Americans in 2020.

What's your disagreement with people then? You just call them "alarmist" but I think those numbers call for an alarm.

Racket wrote:

There are multiple sites dedicated to providing accurate and up to date information from actual scientists who are processing the data directly from the field. Snopes is one and Johns Hopkins is another. Those are the places people should be going. LetsRun is not the authority on this and no one here should be taken at face value on anything they say. It really isn't hard to google "is xyz really that high/bad/gonna kill us/etc."

LetsRun is a huge offender when it comes to pseudo-intellectual armchair scientists consuming data from their favorite blogger saying stupid sh!t or doing legit fear mongering. It's not gonna change. At best they can remove patently false information but most people are throwing around real statistics that can be interpreted irresponsibly if you spin it (is statistics even a real science?).

That's a good point too, but I don't see you or other people posting links to respond to all of the bullshit. It isn't easy. If multiple posts from crackpots go unchallenged then I fear some proportion of the readership will start to believe them...

If this post was not reported i would let it stay up. The person is saying crudely, "what if the people who are afraid of being infected just stay inside and everyone else lives their lives?". A lot of times if a post gets reported it's more likely to get deleted as we do go off our users input.

I don't see a problem with that question being asked.

They are asking a question from what I can tell. Even if they said "I think those concerned about this should stay quarantined and everyone else live their lives," I wouldn't be opposed to it being left up. I think it would be best for you to say, "that sounds simple in practice but the hospitals would get overwhelmed. Too many people would die and even those who wanted to stay out of harm isolated at home could not get the medical care or basis services they then needed." What is wrong with handling it that way? You are 4 pages into a thread discussing this matter. It's not like this guys question is official LetsRun policy.

The posters opinion may seem idiotic to you but it's not that far off from what British experts were considering as a strategy 2 days ago where they were going to essentially quarantine the oldest and most vulnerable in society and try and keep things fairly normal for everyone else.

But this is a forum and we operate on the users input. Should the post cited above be deleted?

Math Professor wrote:

I call out your inability to calculate even beginner level statistics for a population and this is your response? Shows that you are the idiot.

Found the Stats 101 student. This guy's "gotcha" is embarrassing.

Thanks for the post, Wejo. I think we disagree about almost everything. I appreciate your response.

What is untruthful and manipulative is your use of the 'British Model' for dealing with Corona, considering that yesterday the Brits abandoned that model as it became clear that Corona is going to decimate their population. Wejo, you know this to be true and yet you hold up the already-abandoned and discredited model of 'herd-immunity to novel virus' as a reasonable way forward. Three days ago, that was true, but you know that today it is not. You are breathing air into the balloons of the deniers and foot-draggers around here. Wake up.

Math Professor wrote:

You must be a really slow typist if it took you 30 minutes to write something that short.

The answer is easy. If you have some other pre-existing illness and think you are at risk then you can stay home. Let the rest of society get on with our lives because the coronavirus is harmless for the vast majority of people. What do you suppose we do about the many thousands of deaths every day from car crashes? Lock everyone up?

I'm not a slow typist, but I'm thoughtful, and it can be difficult to convey ideas into words.

Car crashes: This is not a good analogy because the issue here isn't the number of deaths, but the number of *preventable* deaths. With our current medical infrastructure, almost everyone who gets into a car crash can get a hospital bed and whatever necessary life-saving treatment. However, if this virus becomes widespread it will be impossible to give everyone a hospital bed, let alone necessary treatment. The number of patients will be far above anything our infrastructure can handle. We can't hospitalize 10% of our population! So many preventable deaths will be caused by lack of existing infrastructure.

"If you think you're at risk just stay at home": This is also not a good strategy because (1) you can't always know whether or not you have a preexisting condition, (2) it will require very long-term isolation of a very large fraction of the population, and (3) as I stated above, it will lead to disastrous consequences for our healthcare system and many preventable deaths: (1) What fraction of the population do you think is at elevated risk? Anyone over the age of say 60 (that's 20% of the population), anyone with a minor cold? Not to mention immune compromised individuals and so on? (2) How long will they have to stay isolated? It might not disappear completely within a year (at which point hopefully a vaccine will be developed). (3) That IS the pre-quarantine strategy. It's already been a failure in several countries. And if you're wrong and you do get sick it doesn't just affect you, it affects the other person you might be taking life-saving care from.

"The coronavirus is harmless for the vast majority of people": The current death rate is something like 1%, but that's only because most of the people who need life-saving treatment are able to obtain it. 20% of the infected population actually needs hospitalization and won't be able to obtain it. If half the population is infected and 10% of the population dies, the rest of society won't be able to just "get on with their lives". And I'll reiterate that these are preventable deaths we're talking about. So we're deciding it's ok to let millions (tens of millions?) of additional people die because it's inconvenient for us?