Hi!

So this blog is basically a twitter thread that outgrew twitter. It started with me stating that I thought some amount of fear around this new pandemic was quite rational and ended up with me doing statistical modeling to try and figure out how rational it was to fear different outcomes. But let’s go back to the beginning:

So. We’ve got this new coronavirus. There are a number of different types of coronaviruses. Some are mild and we just brush them off as colds. Others, a lot less so and we give them names like SARS or MERS. This latest one here in 2020 is called 2019-nCoV, because that’s where we are on the whole naming things front. It’s a global health emergency. But what does that mean? How bad is this thing?

Bad news: I don’t know.

Worse news: no one else really does either. The data is still coming in and a lot of people who have the most experience to know are busy trying to keep people alive.

So we’re going to all find out together over time.

In the meantime, I have a questions I wanted to ask my computer. I went ahead and got some answers and I want to go ahead and share them with you all, because I think it’s interesting and can help us understand what’s going on. Sharing information on the Internet is weird these days. Especially when it’s a developing situation, some people are dying, other people are doing their damndest to be racist, and yet other people are just panicking in a bunch of ways.

So… I’d like to ask you not to do those things. And take these statistical models with the huge grains of salt that is appropriate. I’m just some person with a statistics package and enough knowledge to be dangerous and I need your help to make sure that this danger isn’t amplified by this weird network of computers we’re all part of.

Cool? Cool.

Thanks!