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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't Elon Musk going to make a website that rated the credibility of journalism somehow? What happened to that?

Musk is still actively downplaying the severity of the situation. Recently he's been signal boosting the idea that many more people are infected than we think and therefore the alarmism is unwarranted

So what exactly are you saying? 1) he is evil, 2) he is wrong?

For 1), it's up to you to judge him based on your perceptions (I'd disagree), for 2) you'd need a little more than your gut feeling to call him wrong. Germany is testing extensively and resulting current estimates are around 1% mortality (WHO estimate: 3,4%).

He's wrong.

More people being asymptomatic is not a cause for reacting less strictly, which is the view being promoted. If more people are asymptomatic, that's great news, but it does not impact how severely you should lockdown society as the DDOS'ing of the health sector is still clearly a problem to avoid looking at france, spain and italy. It only means that you'll be able to end the lockdown sooner than expected

We'll see how Sweden fares in the end. I'm not promoting their methods of dealing with the pandemic, but I believe the different health systems affect the outcome more. Italy has around 1/3 to 1/4 the hospital beds per capita of Austria, Germany, South Korea but more than Sweden and the USA.

Comparing Denmark vs Sweden, it looks like we're beginning to see the difference in outcome on the death toll and hospitalization rates. Denmarks death toll is stabilizing (or at the very least only growing linearly) and the amount of people in hospitals with covid-19 has been stable for a week [0] (and no not because the hospitals are packed)

While Sweden is seemingly continuing the exponential trend in both over the past 4-5 days

[0] https://www.sst.dk/da/corona/tal-og-overvaagning the chart say "Indlagte patienter med bekræftet COVID-19 pr. dag "

It may be a bit early to say. Social distancing delays the infections. It's possible that it kills the virus, but unlikely, so people will be infected and possibly die later if they aren't immune already. Sweden is not able to stop infections at all, their health system is guaranteed to be overwhelmed, but survivors will most likely be immune and it will be over quickly, one way or another, when everyone has been exposed to the virus.

Do you think they’ll have the stomach to continue with the plan once their hospitals are overwhelmed? I’m extremely skeptical they won’t eventually have to lock down harder than Denmark

I am not sure - there's still a chance that we won't reach the claimed 50-70% infections for some unknown reason, like the weather or some people being more resistant. Our (Austrian) chancellor said recently (~2 weeks ago) that he expects all health systems in the EU to become overwhelmed, though currently the outlook seems much better (even Italy has been sounding more optimistic lately). I don't know what to conclude from this other than that the worst possible outcome might not be as dramatic as previously thought, so Sweden might just pull through with it.

Considering the amount of testing that is actually being done, no one has much ideas of the real number of cases. With any luck he will be right but no one really knows.

> With any luck he will be right but no one really knows.

Even he doesn't know if he's right, but apparently that doesn't stop him from using his influence to push his hot take.

At this point, the only thing that can be claimed with confidence is our global ignorance of this pandemic, and how much more we have to learn about it.

His idea of credibity and mine are not the same. At minimum, he himself is not trustworthy.

That doesn't mean that the concept is a bad idea, or that he won't come up with something that can be demonstarted to be trustworthy.

Haven’t heard if that’s going ahead.

But I’m working on a similar concept: https://verifact.io which will be launching soon

Musk himself has no credibility when it comes to coronavirus. He's spent three months demonstrating that he knows nothing about it:

https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-has-played-an-extremely-dange...

I thought that was a joke. The name he proposed for it ('Pravda') was certainly a joke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravda

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