Elon Musk Provides Only Sane and Calm View on Coronavirus - Says You're More Likely To Die in Car Crash

Ok, I did find some information on asymptomatic positives. Kind of conflicting, actually.

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf

The first study out of China states that it was "rare", but the only number I could find in the report was about pregnant women and it found 1 asymptomatic person out of 147.

This one is vastly different.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/6/20-0452_article

Of the 705 cases on the cruise ship, 392 were asymptomatic.

I'd say, until we have more data, it seems premature to make a claim that the vast majority of people are asymptomatic.

Just so we're clear, I'm not against the people saying we should have a harsher response, or the people that say we should have less response to the disease. I'm trying to gather data, and if anyone on either side starts "pulling numbers out of thin air", I will question them on it. It's ok to admit we don't have enough data yet.

Why are people so concerned about the death rate? If ICUs fill up people are gonna die rapidly, even if -in theory- severe cases rarely lead to deaths. We have a gigantic population with no immunity and a virus that appears to spread quite quickly.

More quotes from what Elon Musk said about the illogical alarmist panic over the coronavirus. The man is absolutely right:

Musk said in his email to SpaceX employees last week that the risk of death from COVID-19, “is *vastly* less than the risk of death from driving your car home.” He wrote that, in the US, there are “about 36 thousand automotive deaths per [year], as compared to 36 so far this year for C19.” Since that email, 49 more people have died from the disease in the US. On March 6th, he tweeted that the “coronavirus panic is dumb.”

“My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself,” Musk wrote. “If there is a massive redirection of medical resources out of proportion to the danger, it will result in less available care to those with critical medical needs, which does not serve the greater good.”

Regarding the virus. I'm changing my whole analysis. I had assumed that the Influenza numbers were based on actual testing and deaths. It turns out the flu mortality is based on estimates. With this new knowledge, I'm taking back everything I thought before about this COVID thing.

If we applied the same assumptions and estimates to COVID that are applied to the flu, so far this epidemic would be less than a rounding error. Conversely, if we applied the same assumptions to the flu every year that we are applying to COVID, every year would look like the end of the world.

Also, in reading how the CDC estimated flu deaths, it becomes clear that many times a cause of death is just guess work because a patient (especially elderly) can have many things wrong with them. So it's entirely possible that COVID has been in our population for a long time, that it has similar mortality to the flu, and whatever harm it causes has been going unnoticed because it gets lumped in with other pneumonia and pulmonary issues. But since we just started paying all our attention to it, it suddenly looks like something new and scary.

I could be wrong, but I think this is a valid hypothesis. My hypothesis would be disproved if there are verified and widespread reports of hospitals being overwhelmed with COVID case. I can't find any recent articles that claim this is happening in the US. And I don't presume to know what is really going on in other countries. Since we are taking so many measures to limit disease transmission for all infectious diseases, it's now likely we won't see any hospitals overwhelmed with this thing. So lack of many hospital cases will not automatically prove my hypothesis.

Ultimately, it will take month for us to know what is really going on, and the only way to tell would be widespread sampling and genotyping of the COVID viruses in the US and other countries to prove this really is a new outbreak. But so many political decisions have already been made based on the accepted narrative that it's possible the truth about this thing will be obscured from view for decades.

Even if my new hypothesis is totally wrong, and my assumption in the previous post that this is an emerging outbreak is correct, the mortality numbers in the US are already well below what I predicted. So either way, in a short time people need to stop freaking out about this thing and go back to business as usual, with maybe just the elderly taking extra precautions.

Are we talking about the same Elon Musk who yesterday tweeted something moronic about producing ventilators if there is a shortage, and then went radio silence when the governor of NY said that yes, there was a shortage in NY and they needed them desperately?

THAT Elon Musk?

The same Elon Musk who, unless he had been living under a rock the ten preceding days, would have known how desperately short hospitals are, in major cities, not only regarding ventilators but also all sorts of PPE?

THAT Elon Musk?

The same Elon Musk who can hubristically launch a car into space but doesn't really know whether hospitals need ventilators, yesterday, desperately?

Great work with Tesla, but still, a clown.