feedMorbid Corona Bet
9 March, 2020From the honorable Elliot Olds.
I bet Paul $100 that on August 1st 2020 there will have been at least 2000 coronavirus deaths in the US. Rob has the same bet with Rangan except the timeline is end of 2020. Rob is on the >= 2000 side.
I am probably going to lost this bet because 2000 is pretty low but I wanted to bet against the corona virus hysteria. Especially since some people are claiming there will be megadeaths.
Here’s me talkign to my friends on whats app. about this Robin Hanson odds: #COVID19 will kill >250K in US by 1/1/2022, as reported later by WHO?
People are having it both ways with the data. Calculating the death/icu rate from those who actually show symptoms which makes it look high Then also assuming there a bunch of asymptomatic people who will spread it, And then assuming it will be exponential. Tech twitter loves to assume things will take off exponentially and take over the world. So it feeds into their hysteria bias. I think we’re just going to have a second flu season with no vaccine. Which is bad but not a catastrophe. So deaths will be less than 10x typical flu deaths So less that 120-600k deaths Italy makes me nervous since it’s not as dense and unsanitary as China and is getting hit kinda bad
2000 is far less than that. In my favor is deaths are 22 now and if it doubles every month we’re looking at < 1000 in August. We’re also going into summer which isn’t great for flu. Going against me is this trump administration might have no idea what they are doing. Luckily America is somewhat decentralized still.
This is still my favorite map for tracking Guess we could use WHO numbers though