So, a techie took a look at the numbers, and over the weekend published a data-drive look at the Wuhan coronavirus...After watching the outbreak of COVID-19 for the past two months, I’ve followed the pace of the infection, its severity, and how our world is tackling the virus. While we should be concerned and diligent, the situation has dramatically elevated to a mob-like fear spreading faster than COVID-19 itself. When 13% of Americans believe they are currently infected with COVID-19 (mathematically impossible), full-on panic is blocking our ability to think clearly and determine how to deploy our resources to stop this virus. Over three-fourths of Americans are scared of what we are doing to our society through law and hysteria, not of infection or spreading COVID-19 to those most vulnerable. ~ Aaron Ginn, "COVID-19 - Evidence Over Hysteria"
Aaron Ginn is a Silicon Valley technologist who has written for Breitbart, TechCrunch, TheNextWeb, and Townhall. Ginn has published a piece at Medium about the Wuhan coronavirus. It’s called “Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19.”...it didn't take long for censorship to ensue!
Ginn is not a scientist or a doctor, but he seems like a capable numbers cruncher and analyst. Moreover, he marshals views of medical and health professionals.
I think his piece is worthy of your consideration. However, as with just about everything written on this subject, it should not be considered definitive. At this point, some level of skepticism is almost always in order.
For attempting to argue against the hysteria, Big Tech (ironically) in the form of social media began a campaign to quash one of its own! Medium, the articles original publisher, has taken down Ginn’s post and replaced it with an ERROR 410 page that says his post “is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.” What does that mean? It means what he wrote goes against the grain of the doom-and-gloom narrative, and we can't have anyone besides Big Media controlling the virus narrative...
The coronavirus threat creates new challenges for social-media companies already grappling with the limits of free speech online. China is waging an information war to whitewash its handling of the virus and impugn the U.S. Meanwhile, charlatans hawking bogus science or false cures could endanger the public.I've been running my own stats throughout, because it's important to maintain perspective. Here's the latest: Of the U.S. deaths compared to total recorded American cases, the mortality rate is around 1.2% (actually down from last week at 1.3%). If we divide that by the total U.S. population, that mortality number goes down to .00016% (I rounded up). Not to say anything against the seriousness of this virus nor to criticize precautions taken against it, but just trying to apply some perspective against the panic...just as the President's trying to provide hope for Americans, while the damn MSM seek to sensationalize.
Yet some of the web’s gatekeepers are tempted to go further and stamp out the free debate that helped alert Americans to the threat of the virus in the first place. They want to require conformity with the judgment of expert institutions, even as many of those institutions themselves woefully misjudged the situation months or weeks ago.
Over the weekend Medium, a web-publishing platform, took down a long article entitled “Evidence over hysteria—COVID-19” that had been viewed millions of times. The piece, by Silicon Valley technologist Aaron Ginn, was an exhaustive case for optimism about the coronavirus. It highlighted some of the most hopeful available estimates, mostly from good authorities, of the virus’s growth rate, severity, transmissibility, and responsiveness to warmer weather.
Those estimates may be wrong, and the piece doesn’t address more troubling evidence. Yet Mr. Ginn did not deny the virus is a public-health threat or urge people in hot zones to go to nightclubs. The page now says “this post is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.”
Meanwhile, Twitter has unveiled sweeping restrictions on posts about the coronavirus. The company says it will restrict “content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.” If you click on the link to the Medium post from Twitter, you get a page warning it is “potentially harmful.”
The problem is that the situation is changing with blinding speed and so has “guidance from authoritative sources.” The World Health Organization—widely seen as subject to pressure from Beijing—tweeted in January that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.” And while the U.S. public-health response has finally kicked into gear, organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have hardly been perfect oracles.
Twitter users and bloggers were sounding the alarm about the potential damage from coronavirus and inadequate testing before the authorities and major media. The idea that “democratizing information” leads to better outcomes is often exaggerated, but the freewheeling marketplace of ideas has sometimes performed better than the central authorities. The churn of arguments and data will improve the response to coronavirus as new information becomes available, and shutting it down may undermine public faith in the official response.
Related link: Ricochet: Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19
