Coronavirus Summary

This blog is based on one of the best articles I’ve read on the whole coronavirus scene. Here’s what Ed Yong has to say.

What’s in a Name? The “coronavirus” is the name of a class of viruses (500 of them till date), not the one virus that has made it so (in)famous:

“SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. COVID-19 is the disease that it causes. The two aren’t the same. The disease arises from a combination of the virus and the person it infects… Some people who become infected never show any symptoms; others become so ill that they need ventilators... The virus might vary little around the world, but the disease varies a lot.”

The silver lining so far?

“There are no signs of “an alarming mutation we need to be worried about,” Gralinski says. For now, the world is facing just one threat.”

Wide Range of Impact: Unlike good old measles and malaria, SARS-CoV-2 has a wide range of impact on patients. This makes it very hard to analyze:

“The disease seems to wreak havoc not only on lungs and airways, but also on hearts, blood vessels, kidneys, guts, and nervous systems. It’s not clear if the virus is directly attacking these organs, if the damage stems from a bodywide overreaction of the immune system, if other organs are suffering from the side effects of treatments, or if they are failing due to prolonged stays on ventilators.”

And as a result of such a wide range of impacts:

“COVID-19 has developed a clinical mystique—a perception that it is so unusual, it demands radically new approaches.”

Ergo, we hear of “solutions” like blood thinners, hydroxychloroquine and er, bleach.

Infection Rate Calculations: The parts that don’t go into the equation?

“The (fatality rate’s) denominator—total cases—depends on how thoroughly a country tests its population. Its numerator—total deaths—depends on the spread of ages within that population, the prevalence of preexisting illnesses, how far people live from hospitals, and how well staffed or well equipped those hospitals are.”

And then he gets into the other issues with the data being used:

“Those numbers do not show how many people have been infected on any given day. They reflect the number of tests that were done (which is still insufficient), the lag in reporting results from those tests (which can be long), and the proportion of tests that are incorrectly negative (which seems high).”

Yong isn’t being dismissive of the numbers; his point is more nuanced:

“The numbers still matter; they’re just messy and hard to interpret, especially in the moment.”

                                                                                                           

Present and Future: This is related to the point above:

“If measuring the present is hard, predicting the future is even harder.”

“This is how science actually works”: Many are frustrated by how slow progress has been. And how contradictory the updates often are. Yong points out this is how scientific progress happens:

“It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty… but it looks jarring to people who aren’t used to it.”

Assimilating New Information: Announcements and assessment are made without proper context:

“If officials — and journalists — are clear about uncertainties from the start, the public can better hang new information onto an existing framework, and understand when shifting evidence leads to new policy. Otherwise, updates feel confusing... it seems like an arbitrary flip-flop.”

Information, not Knowledge: We get and seek endless data, but have no idea how and what to piece together:

“Pandemics actually “unfold in slow motion,” (Bergstorm) says, and “there’s no event that changes the whole landscape on a dime.” But it feels that way, because of how relentlessly we quest for updates.”

The media is totally unsuited to the job of putting long term events in context:

“Journalists still think of their job as producing new content, but if your goal is public understanding of COVID-19, one piece of new content after another doesn’t get you there,” (Rosen) says. “It requires a lot of background knowledge to understand the updates, and the news system is terrible at [providing that knowledge].”

Probabilities aren’t Intuitive: Sadly, this is true even for those who understand the maths of probability well:

“It seems unlikely that a random bat virus should somehow jump into a susceptible human. But when you consider millions of people, in regular contact with millions of bats, which carry tens of thousands of new viruses, vanishingly improbable events become probable ones.”

Someone to Blame: The US and Germany have sued China for all this:

“The desire to name an antagonist, be it the Chinese Communist Party or Donald Trump, disregards the many aspects of 21st-century life that made the pandemic possible: humanity’s relentless expansion into wild spaces; soaring levels of air travel… a just-in-time economy that runs on fragile supply chains… social networks that rapidly spread misinformation… the devaluation of expertise… It may be easier to believe that the coronavirus was deliberately unleashed than to accept the harsher truth that we built a world that was prone to it, but not ready for it.”