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Episode 215: Coronavirus with Dr Lisle and Dr Howk
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so here we are doing a little different type of podcast delivery this week we're coming to you in a video format how are you doing tonight everybody where we decided we would do a video tonight and so Nathan will be back with us next week on the radio but so we but general I thought we'd do this for fun wish we could just see how it goes yeah we're still getting a lot of questions about coronavirus and this is like a topic that just continues coming up and we have new things to say about it and some old things to repeat and to reiterate about it and just figured that it would be useful to get this information out in a slightly different format so I think what when we think about this thing the reason why I was thinking about today why it is that we were thinking about it all the time or at least signing em and I think most people are and that's because essentially the whole cost benefit matrix of your whole life is now got all kinds of variants in it yeah your your mind has to keep chewing through these variables trying to figure out what this all means for you yep so you can make good decisions so yeah trying to do is certainly Jen and I hear from many people that we talked to they are they're really a very uncertain may be a lot of anxiety irritation anger think that there's conspiracies you know and don't know what the future holds and so what were what we're all trying to do is try to get a better estimate about what we think that future does hold and what the risks are for you in various ways we're essentially trying to get a more accurate picture of reality and that's what we're gonna try to give give you tonight as best we can yeah yeah I think this is the the most sort of destabilized and uncertain people have been about how to project themselves out in some kind of what political scientists would call an ontological II secure position in the future since I would I would say probably since 9/11 even I don't think the 2008 crisis quite constitutes the current level of of just existential uncertainty that people are experiencing and so it makes sense that everyone is returning again and again and and sort of obsessively to understanding what's happening and trying to make sense of it and locate themselves and the hole in the whole matrix of it so that's why this is part part three of an ongoing discussion and perhaps more to be determined but I think we're well positioned to kind of mention some really important things today that will help people get grounded with us very good well Jen what are your our resident Harvard doctor you people are supposed to be so smart that's the reputation that we have tell us like what you know as a political scientist tell us what some things that you're seeing and what's going through your mind and just you know give us a little backdrop about anything that you see this administration doing or and sort of the world press what what do you see that's interesting to you yeah well what's been interesting is you know I am a political scientist first and foremost and sort of a classically trained social scientist and so I'm always looking at things through the lens of social processes and you know it's we are in a major election year and so there is a little bit there's been a little bit of exaggeration of everything that's going on in in service of strategic political goals which you would expect that's that's just gonna happen anytime there's any kind of crisis any kind of new piece of information and so I think all things equal and we talked about this on the podcast a little bit last week all things equal you have you have the the left exaggerating the degree of the crisis as that as a sort of challenging position to the incumbent right side of the political spectrum which if anything is sort of a little a little overly rosy a little a little overly optimistic about where we are relative to everything and this is what you see reflected on the non-stop news cycle and this is what people are experiencing as they maniacally refresh their social media feeds and and sort of silo themselves into one of these perspectives or in others so when you talk more about that later about the ways in which people kind of get a narrowed version of reality that is that is related to some some type of political agenda or other kinds of but that's that it been something that I've been watching just on an ongoing basis over the last few weeks which is not not surprising from a political science point of view and I was feeling a little irritated that the administration was was overly optimistic ie we're gonna be filling churches by April 12th on Easter this is no no big deal we don't have anything to worry about it's all gonna be cleared up in no time so it's been really interesting for me just today in the last last 48 hours or so is to watch Trump walk that back which is something that you don't you don't see that often from him you don't see him admit that he was wrong about something so that's that's interesting enough to watch but he he is correcting himself in saying that was overly aspirational and that was what we were hoping but that's not what it looks like is going to happen after all it looks like more like we're remaining in the quarantine default until the end of April at the earliest and looking at some return to normal life probably in June or so so just from a political science point of view that's very interesting in the sense that it tells me that they are narrowing in on some some parameters which of course are your favorite thanks Krantz but we just love nothing more than some good parameters and that they are they are probably a little more optimistic than June or they wouldn't they wouldn't be putting that out there they wouldn't be taking the political risk of of being being distorted with that estimate twice in a row and having to correct twice in a row so it's one thing to sort of say oh gosh you know our bad we we had that a little a little bit off and it's actually this is gonna require a little more sacrifice than we thought it's it's bordering on a political disaster to have to do that again and and to repeat that process and lose the trust with the polity that they I don't think the administration is willing to take that kind of risk and I don't think any incumbent would be so all of that filters through my political so I put my political science hat on and that tells me that they they're narrowing and on some numbers that are telling them that that we are we're peaking in the curve or about to peak in the curve and that that curve is petering out by the end of May or June which is which is pretty much this model that you you've been talking about on couple of shows and elsewhere just looking at this as far as we we have any reliable data which is always a big question mark but I know you even have some thoughts on that but does does that make sense is there you do you share my political science hat totally I think that's uh that's very interesting that the notion that that the Trump wouldn't want to be wrong twice yeah expensive yeah that that makes sense to me when I actually think about that so Trump being Trump he's got a oh I don't know he's got a a barstool let's just talk kind of way about him yeah not not easy to get that guy depressed I don't know that I've ever seen him look sad and so he probably can I mean under tragedy but the point is is that that that's a that's an extremely inherently optimistic personality yeah so the April twelfth thing you know had a nice ring to it Easter in churches and American us out the rebirth yes yes it's a very it's a night it's a lovely political image and when can see why they were drawn to it and wanted to deploy it that if it's not plausible it's not plausible right yeah I think you're right that if you you make two mistakes of that magnitude then you're effectively untrustworthy so yeah very interesting well that that is consistent with something with the sort of general members because I have not I'm a rookie in in epidemiology I've never faced an epidemiological problem before and all the stuff that I'm used to is scientific experiments and correlation and regression and just you know basic stats but not epidemiology which has its own strange it has its own strange set of data right so when I originally have talked about this I was very concerned about the big thing that one would worry about would be the death rate or the fatality ratio the and so when I was looking at everybody's numbers and actually even people that are pretty close to and some pretty smart people looking at fatality ratios we were all very concerned and so when I was looking at what looked good a week or two ago in Germany looking at you know somewhere around 0.3 than 0.5 that seemed reassuring to me but in the context of all the horrendous other fatality ratios that we see it was daunting and so I didn't I didn't come to the party until about a week ago that this is all just terrible math and none of this makes any sense at all to even pay any attention to right oh I I'm now this is a Mia culpa of somebody who's very comfortable with numbers that actually didn't quite understand how to look at the numbers properly I'm going to show this so that people can see it and this is what I call I'm going to start this with what I call catastrophe math and catastrophe math is apparently what was a major I think a guy named Neil Ferguson a major model or over in the UK had a big impact on Parliament and basically told Parliament listen we've got we could lose 500,000 people in our country and 2 million Americans this is what that is is that translates to more or less a 1% death rate mm-hmm in other words if you had 200 million people in America affected the way you can do this math in your own head is since a thousand thousand is a million two hundred million infections at a one in a thousand ratio would be 200,000 deaths but of 1 percent ratio obviously it would be 2 million big difference yeah so that's uh so what I did was I looked at what so many people have been looking at you know and I want to share this with people about where we are today and today is Monday evening on the 30th of March this is prerecorded for a couple days the this is the u.s. you'll see were it we're at 3,000 deaths over 165 in Italy 11,000 over a hundred thousand Germany 645 over 66,000 and worldwide were at 38,000 dos over seven hundred eighty-five thousand cases over all five percent the u.s. running under two percent Germany running right around a little bit under one percent Italy at eleven percent the those are to any honest person looking at that you would be terrified and so this is what has riveted you know if you can't do math then you're just listening to the news and crossing your fingers but our people are smarter and so I've got many calls from beach or jeans folks saying what's up and I've been trying to get my head around this and the truth of the matter is these numbers folks are totally meaningless meaningless that's our utter really mean word yeah meaning okay they are they are not worth looking at you don't take out the calculator you don't look at world ohmmeters case counts and then do the math for yourself because they are utterly they mean nothing okay so let me explain what what the only legitimate mouth is the legitimate math is the total death rate divided not by the cases that they have seen and that they can identify but all cases of the virus that have occurred in the population and have closed including a symptomatic cases being asymptomatic cases so in other words this is this is the proper way to do the math the proper way to do the math is that you have 3,000 deaths in the United States today divided by 165 thousand known cases plus all of the other closed cases that have taken place that you haven't seen so the question is obviously how many cases have we not seen and in order to do that we have to say well how many have we seen and the number that we've seen is as of today we have tested million people and that's how we got the 165 thousand people that identified is that we've tested now a million well if you tested a million people in a country of 350 million people you've tested one third of 1% of the individuals in the country so an honest statistician would say well we have to multiply 165 thousand by 350 mm-hmm that's the only rigidity do this mm-hmm or to to do that if we were to do that man out that comes up with I can't I can't he I didn't know what that is 50 million a much bigger number yeah now so obviously the people that we tested the test is 16 and a half percent out of 100 the tested positive those are not a representative sample right so clearly we we might want to look at another country and see what their rates of positive testing are that have better testing than we have in other words they've covered far more of the population that country would be Germany and the reason why Germany would be a very good facsimile for the United States is because Germany has had about 1/4 of the fatalities that we've had almost exactly I've had about 650 fatalities we've had about 3,000 so we're basically a perfect ratio relative to the two populations of the countries so Germany has about 80 million people we have 350 or so we're right in there 4 to 1 so it looks like these two populations are in lockstep as of this time and so Germany's testing because they're the Germans have been so sophisticated and and fast about getting their testing off the ground shockingly Sermons efficient does it make sense Germans I actually talked to a client in Germany who's over there overseas with a in the service and she said oh it's very organized here Doug yeah sir yeah so the Germany has has had about a million tests as well and they have identified about 65,000 people I think so they're running at about six and a half percent more or less hmm now we realize that the US isn't at 16 percent positives so we don't have to worry about the fact that we have 50 million people infected right now we realize that it's much closer that six and a half percent in Germany would be the upper boundary because obviously the Germans are testing more people that are sick more people are going to their drive-by thing and getting tested if they're a little sick than if they're well but they're grabbing so many people that it wouldn't be a surprise at all if that rate was three to five probably is the reason why I say that is I'm not pulling that out of the air in Italy in the small town in Italy though that was where they they quickly recognized that they had cases they this is in late February but they tested everybody in the town 3,000 people and they came back with a 2.7 positive rate now this virus doubles about every three days where does in the early in the early stages of the epidemic so that would mean by early March Italy was at six percent and by mid-march Italy was at ten percent 12 so it means the Germany is probably not too far behind is somewhat behind probably a week behind and so the Germany is is unlikely to not have not be a three or four or five percent now with three or four or five percent we are probably a three or four or five percent which means that America is probably sitting today on call it four percent a case for Bastogne population which would take us to about 15 million right now those numbers are important to know so for various reasons but one of the reasons is is that if the if the death rate from this virus is 1% then the existing cases that we that are already out there ie 15 million we would be looking at 1% which would be 150,000 deaths those hundred fifty thousand deaths doesn't even remotely resemble the three thousand that we see today right so we know that of these millions of cases that are in the United States that some significant percentage of them have walked their way through the first couple to three weeks where they've been which would be lethal and so as a result it seems inconceivable that that we are looking at something like 1% what does it look like well frankly it looks a lot more like 0.1 so it looks like if we are facing out of the first 15 million that we probably have right now in our country that we would be facing 15 thousand deaths given the fact that we have about three right now that would make sense that we would go up by a factor of five here in the next two or three weeks and that would be essentially closing out those 15 million cases that now exist now those 15 million cases are are spawning another 15 million cases so but at some point it slows down it slows down because the virus starts running into itself we're also doing a lot of the social distancing that we're doing in other words I wouldn't expect the next 15 million to happen in the next three days not at all so I think this is now starting we should see a lowering of the pace but we still believe this is this is interesting that that you're talking about the administration and and some of the things that they've been talking about what a fiasco that we're not having intelligent discussions about the death rate yeah I'm just astounded at this know where are you having intelligent conversations about the death rate you're having poorly informed conversations to begin with because people are looking at the wrong the wrong ratio on your first chart you're a very fancy chart that you presented so that that is that's their starting with that data and then they are inferring wild notions about why their death rates vary across different countries and so this is like the worst of my subfield in political science is called comparative politics and and people will hitch these theories to these observations that are their two rooted and bad data like this one is and then they make up stories about why they see the variation that they see so oh well your death rate is 16% and ours is five because we've in gate we have better quality care or we've engaged in different kinds of social distancing practices or we've done this or we've done that and these make for very compelling headlines for a country ie the u.s. that is living in the state of great agitation in fear and uncertainty and once understandably to do the right things to mitigate its risk and for the fewest people to die and so all it can do is look around comparatively and who's who's the most successful what have they done how can we mimic that and and also ensure a better outcome for ourselves but it's all based on bad data it's like trying to win an election based on early reporting precinct data that comes in where it's like 1% of precincts reporting and and trying to infer who won the election from that and saying oh well they're gonna win the election so we should do what they did last time this is like you can't make those sorts of inferences based on that sort of poor information but that's what people are doing all over the globe right now and it's insane it's truly it's it's yes watch it's very disturbing to people understandably right well that's why we called this podcast March Madness March Madness this is the this is the ultimate March Madness I mean usually I'm looking at you know betting pools and percentages it's got a six foot nine inch guy that can score yeah Final Four but the truth of the matter is is that you know these are the numbers were running this March and I as a rookie in this math I've been quite frustrated at the of the lack of acute discussion about what's really important is there's really two things which is what's your death rate and how many cases are you likely to wind up with and so the I I read something today Jen from some smart fancy Brit who said well there could be 1.6 million cases in the UK yeah what dope are you smoking yeah you've got I don't know how many how big the UK is 60 70 million people yes there's there's no doubt they've got you know four or five percent there's of course they've got 1.6 million it's not a it's not a hypothesis it's a it's almost a near certainty that you're many times besa the same screaming headlines about the u.s. yesterday where Oh Trump acknowledges we may have millions of cases and are looking at a hundred to two hundred thousand deaths like terrifying numbers very very scary numbers very tapping into huge social fears but it's it's those are actually very statistically grounded numbers and they are not they're not infinitely increasing in this out-of-control chaotic way that we can't we can't predict or that we don't have an understanding of why it's going that direction or when it's going to peak and so people need to develop a different sort of relationship to these big scary numbers because millions of cases most of those are asymptomatic and and the vast majority of them are not requiring any hospitalization let alone a fatality rate and so it's it's really that there's there's missing perspective on all of this yeah I I certainly as you and I both do we we respect the the the catastrophic theory and yeah when you don't know what's happening when you you you have to we've had horrendous diseases they've gotten loose and most of them are have been probably quite stuff limiting because they're so deadly this thing this thing doesn't look like it's going to be limited because it's it's gonna it's going all over the globe it's gone incredibly quickly partially because it's not killing off the hosts right though as a result it's you know the the catastrophic view has been a loud shout saying don't call the flow okay job minimize this and you know what I understand their frustration that we don't want to blow it off like it's nothing this is a major tragedy however it probably is about like the flow may be twice as bad but but twice is that the flu is still just twice as bad the flu which doesn't warrant a single headline in any given year as it kills 50,000 people it's it's astounding the lack of perspective if you had screaming ticker tapes and counters going on the evening news cycle with the flu every flu season you would you would see a similar level of social hysteria but you don't see it because it's very normalized even though the numbers the number of cases like one thing we don't know what the case fatality would rate with the flu in any given year is how many people would test positive for it if you if you were systematically randomly testing the population for the flu which we don't we only we're only dealing with symptomatic people so we know the case fatality rate for symptomatic people but we don't we don't actually know how many people have the flu at any given time and are not presenting with it and are just developing immunity and contributing to the herd immunity of it and and shaping the curve of that contagion every year but again it's not it's not the source of endless endless news cycle and social media drum beats it's just nice yeah let's keep let's take the camera back for a second everybody and realize that right now I think as of tonight there's maybe 40,000 deaths worldwide that the flu every year kills about 650,000 people worldwide so right now in the United States you have 3,000 deaths usually in the United States every year we have about 50,000 deaths on the float yes though is this gonna get worse is this gonna rival the flu yes and it's nastier it's nastier than the flu if you do get it and certainly if you get it and you're in a vulnerable group and you do need to be hospitalized it is a gnarlier disease then a typical bout with the flu is so we don't want to understate that either no no I mean I've talked there's doctors that have seen it and they'll say when you're looking at one of the bad cases which understand what we're looking at we're looking at you know the bad cases are 1 in 500 1 in 300 1 in 1 and 150 in other words but they're looking at you know if you're in an ICU and you're looking at these cases they say they're awful cases to look at and and of course this is this is we've now you know gotten too close to the animals again and some nasty animal has now I mean some animal and it's virus has jumped to human and now we've you know this is part of the price of human world domination of the earth and the fact that we've got billions of us and we also raised phenomenal amounts of animals when we eat them and you know this is it's actually remarkable to me that that we're generally as safe as we are yeah really now we're facing a situation where it's it's probably down here in the ranges of one in a thousand that would mean that's interesting that the administration was talking today in some very interesting numbers that that's what perked my years of Jen and I one not past you which is then so dr. Burks was talking about how you know it could have been two million but now if we do everything right it looks like it may be two hundred thousand right know that this is pricking my ears yeah so I'm hearing that of course the catastrophic position even a week ago was legitimately not knowing the numbers was saying this could be one percent and if it is one percent and you have two hundred million infections in the United States then it would be two million and you're looking at from my perspective of any adjective this is an utter catastrophe you know to two million Cheerilee yeah did people some numbers so that they can put this in a little bit of perspective in the United States we have about 2.8 million deaths a year that's about what it is and as people get to 80 years old and they die that they're about you know 1% of the population we have 350 million people they they're not quite 1 percent of the population in other words because there's more young people than there are elderly people so in the long long short of it is 2.8 million people die every year that means you've got about 230 240 thousand people die a month this month another 3,000 died of this disease so right now if you didn't know that there was a worldwide epidemic this would be utterly unnoticeable it's such an important point it wouldn't it wouldn't be a blip in the data you would not it would not register a single eyelash flutter it would it would just be lost in the noise of the confidence interval around the expected death rate CDC wouldn't even have its eye open no totally so that's actually where you are and you would if we didn't have international communication if I was was in our own silo being you would literally we have doctors starting to report hey the strange thing pretty bad flu season you know it's like particularly rough flu season and it seems to have a this is this strain is kind of can be nasty in some cases but it would not be that would be it that way it would be like a rarefied conversation among epidemiology nerds and it would not it would not make a single headline or a single Facebook post no one would be aware there would be there'd be no change in everyone's daily life whatsoever and it was to say that hasn't happened before that that may have absolutely happened before where we're looking at a situation like this but we just didn't know it yes situation like this what that was ultimately probably milder than this is going to be right this now we now know I think we got enough deaths around that I think we can I think we can see that we are probably looking in something like effectively a novel flu mm-hmm a novel flu that's visiting populations that has no immunity it's gonna race its way through the flu stops at 50 million people a year because there's all kinds of immunity around this may not this this could speed right up to 2 million Americans maybe more but probably not and that's what Burks is signaling uh-huh I think she is she is tapping to us in Morse code that that they can sniff out that it's a tenth of a percent yeah therefore the upper probably upper boundary limit is two hundred thousand cases but those cases are gonna come probably in the next four months yeah so now you're gonna see an additional fifty thousand deaths a month on top of the 235 that you usually get that's a big change three new months here we are in for incredibly rough weather that's assuming there's zero seasonal break and there could be a significant seasonal break because we go into springtime and summer and we may not find two hundred million cases yeah and and yet so it's it's very possible that that we wind up with seventy five million cases or 100 million cases etc and so it may wind and it may wind up that it's not point one it's point it point oh eight weren't horse okay right now I I guess what I would want to summarize to people is that there's actually no evidence at present to suggest that the fatality rate on this is worse than the flu it may be certainly could be it could be not quite as bad yet it's unlikely to be catastrophic ly worse based on the evidence that I see right now and I also am heartened by the administration signaling one of the things that I of course a frustrated chen is that why isn't anybody out here giving me the numbers right like yeah yeah well they don't they don't deal in numbers okay yeah yeah the the thing is folks is that it doesn't take a genius to realize that all this all that with all that it takes to get a fatality ratio you don't have to look at how many deaths and how many infections and estimate the infection rate of the population all you have to do is follow one cohort just just go Endemol II find a cohort that's big enough and and follow them through time and see what happens to them it doesn't it has nothing to do with whether they've tested positive or not that's the point it shouldn't have anything to do with that you just go into the population you test it you you grab a bunch of people and you follow them through time and and watch what happens and then you know everything that you need to know about the the pattern of the disease or anything else about that group yes they the problem with with this is on understanding is that the early in one of these epidemics you the rates are so low the net is gonna catch no fish right ah yeah sure goes so fast and so they kind of tried to do this in Iceland just so that people understand how why I'm confident about the fact that we probably got somewhere between 2 & 5 percent of our people infected ie we're somewhere between 5 and 15 or 25 million cases so it's it's not 200 thousand cases folks and it's not even a million cases it's not even close right he knew an Iceland that has a beautifully sequestered population that they're extremely careful and keeping people out of there that they did one of the only random tests in a population and they came back at over 1 percent even on that island so there's no way that America and that was days ago that was that test was done and remember it doubles every three days right though the America raced through 1% 2% 4% you know undoubtedly we're up here in 15 million cases the the most sophisticated testing place in the world is Germany yeah because we can tell the Germans have tested a huge amount of people that are pretty healthy that's why they only have a 6 or 6 percent positive take rate you know a crate of 16 percent we're testing the sick people so our tests are not representative therefore if we did a if we did a cohort analysis and watch 10,000 Americans that have been positive over the next 3-4 weeks they would give us a bad data they're too inherently sick see we were to go back three weeks Gramp take German case number 10,000 I wouldn't take the first 10,000 because those were the sick people the sickest people that they tested right away sure even as they got their act together and the Germans were testing even early in march 125,000 people a week that's five six seven percent it's it's child's Flemming at that point identify ten thousand and then three weeks later we have a really good count about how many of those 10,000 people died yeah listen folks this is I know that there are people arguing and frustrated and you know I've had you know very negative email come to me like how dare you downplay this me too yeah and this is that know what we're trying to do here is just deal with the facts and really estimate the parameters and understand what we're really dealing with and this would this is child's play now to look at those 10,000 cases and today we know how many of those people have died and you might say well is it a thousand and the answer is it can't be because all of Germany only has 645 death so so tonight so of those 10,000 people remember we've got three million Germans infected so of those tiny little 10,000 people how many of those people are in the 645 I don't know but let's look at a few numbers to give us a notion of how to test two opposing hypothesis one is one percent and one is 1/10 if it's one percent and they followed this 10,000 people we're gonna look at a hundred deaths give or take whatever it is if if it's about a tenth of a percent like I'm hoping and I expect then we're gonna have about ten of those people it's not gonna be close you can't turns out it's 50 then it's right in the middle and it's a lot worse than I think but it's it's not the catastrophe of a 1% but it's a big catastrophe trust me half a percent is really really bad that's bad that's a lot think so Nancy back that's you've got an awful lot of people in Germany that must have this disease and many people had to have had this disease three weeks ago or four weeks ago so that 6:45 times a thousand with the six hundred forty five thousand that's how many cases we needed to have seen three or four weeks ago in order to account for the six hundred forty five people dead today on a one in a thousand basis do I think it was six hundred forty five thousand people in Germany ill three weeks ago well since three percent of Italy was ill at the beginning of March if that's true then certainly one percent of Germany was ill by March seventh yeah that was true on March seventh in Germany that would have been eight hundred thousand cases in Germany which would give rise to 800 cases dead today which is the six forty-five that we see today yes I think that the numbers are triangulating on 0.1 yeah let's hope that and what I was get back to Jen is I think they know I think they absolutely know I think that that is between the lines in the way that they're communicating about it I think they would be much more they would you'd see a whole different flavor of rhetoric if they didn't know or if they thought this was going to be a lot worse I ie above 1% or 5% or 10% or any of the numbers that people throw around today they even even this administration would be cool in its Jets and and be very very careful about the rhetoric it would not be talking about open for business in June and so so and it would not be talking about how we're peaking in two weeks which it looks like we are it's like according to this model that's also what you and I would would be anticipating and that's what they're echoing so they're there talking to pointy-headed epidemiologists who are doing the math just like we're doing it yes looking at the cases just like just like we are and coming to very similar conclusions and I want to also to add that you know we're you and I are both getting kind of critical and occasionally nasty emails about this is really interesting like it's the it's the one topic that I've gotten that kind of pushback on you know I'll do I'll do q and A's and get really nasty comments I'll get you about how irresponsible it is and we're doing this you know not not for entertainment or for fun or for you know for its own sake but because from a psychological point of view it's so important to understand what's really going on so you're not getting caught up in in an overly hysterical view of reality that is distorted so we talk endlessly on the podcast about distortion and how it affects your life experience and how you have to control your environment this is your environment information that you're letting into your world to affect your cost-benefit analysis of how to how to move forward and make choices for yourself that is the kind of environment that we're always talking about and the only thing over which you have any meaningful control and so if you're being exposed to bad information that is that is giving you bad or incorrect conclusions about what you're facing you're going to make incorrect inferences and an incorrect cost-benefit analyses for how to use your time and energy and you're particularly if you have a personality that is wired to be a little more anxious a little more unstable a little more a little more concerned or you're being directly impacted because you're your livelihood has been affected more directly or your living circumstances have been like this is this is unnecessarily turbulent for people if they don't understand what's really going on so we're doing this we're going through this over and over again and really trying to make it very clear because we want to understand for ourselves because we're going through the same process everybody else is weird sitting here in our little respective social isolation pods and run in math and trying to understand so we can make good choices and understand but also because we're talking to clients constantly who are who are suffering needlessly because they don't have good information so we just want good information to be summarized and available for people so they can they can understand and move forward meaningfully absolutely I think one of the things you and I talked about must air so was that this is a you know obviously this is a horrendous process and however I think at the end of it we're gonna find we're gonna find lives lost and and you know certainly a tragedy but it's not going to be even close to what we were fearing right and as a result we talked about how this is a great dry run yes it's a rehearsal for a true a true disaster true 5% 10% 1% massive contagion Ebola type situation which you know is always sort of at the at the gates like that's always possible it's certainly been a recurring theme in Hollywood yes yeah but yeah even 1% even 1% of something like this is sufficiently truly catastrophic to to derail institutions and and really destroy the healthcare system as we know it in the way in the ways that you see these headlines and and a lot of the the rhetoric that is leaning in this direction but we don't think that this is that disease for all of the reasons that we're talking about here but we are learning such important things from it and you said you said last week the the great John Wooden quote you know if when you lose don't lose the lesson and so this is I mean there's so many lessons here about how we've we've been in the an informational vacuum for too long and looking looking in the wrong places for how to understand what we're dealing with and and now it's like okay now we now we understand how to get a real proper case fatality ratio and and and look at the the presence of this an entire population and not to make these mistakes again sure yeah next time I want these people the geniuses that are supposed to know to grab a cohort very quickly yeah that number in your calculator as fast as you can so you can inform actually all the world so that the world doesn't miss manage its resources in a crisis okay all we can do in a crisis is to to manage the resources base because intelligently as possible and that that requires the most precise data that we can get our hands on and this the great uncertainty of what this is I I I call it you know it's a it's an order of magnitude or more but it's it's an order of magnitude question yeah why you know if you No and some investment if you're gonna lose you know five percent of your fortune or 50 percent of your fortune that's very scary oh sure it's like huge that's too big of a difference yeah huge difference that's why I'm sniffing from what you're from what you're saying and what I heard I'm sniffing that they know yeah I think that I'm heartened by this and we're in for an extremely messy and heart-wrenching couple of months but I think that's I think that's what it looks like yeah yeah yeah well the I think I think that's pretty much what I have to say any any final thoughts I know I think that I covered most of them in my last rant that just I think you know there was that there was that headline today about the the German financial minister who committed suicide because of because of his sort of concern about this looking at this and inferring again a bad cost-benefit analysis from bad information and thinking that he was up against a an intractable disaster that he could not do anything about and and running a CV through through a filtered personality that led him to decide to commit suicide and so this is this is the kind of thing that we're having this conversation because we want to avoid that outcome we want people to understand what they're really dealing with and to D distort the information environment so they can make the best possible choices and the best possible inferences it's just there's nothing more important than that in any area of life that's the whole it's what we're up to all the time that is literally what we're doing we are D distorting that is the whole purpose of evolutionary psychology therapy and so this this is when you're dealing with something that is this disruptive and this is contributing to so much uncertainty it's never more important to D distort and to get clear on the information and to you know we're not we're not trying to be unreasonably optimistic for the sake of just being optimistic or for staking out some kind of claim and a grand debate we're really trying to get get the truth the capital T truth on this situation so people can can just live their best lives Paul I would add to that that well we may talk about this more if questions warrant or if people have other specific questions that we didn't cover or if they want to they want to hear more maths claiming from the great dr. Lyle and I can always come back to it and cover a couple more next week
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