COVID-19 | Munk Debates
This is a debate you should listen to for its factual information on the Coronavirus and the exaggerations of its overall threat and lethality. One epidemiologist is a liberal, the other is more conservative, and they don't disagree on the facts.
They disagree on policy, and in predictions. The Yale guy will say a blind panic nationwide lockdown for months is justified until we know more, the Stanford guy says we know enough to know that blind, long-term lockdowns are not justified and may in the long-term cause more problems than the virus. The Yale guy will say he believes that the lethality of the Coronavirus will be "five to seven to ten times" that of the Flu. The Stanford guy says not enough data yet, but if it is more lethal than the Flu, then more realistically it will be by a factor 1.5 to 2.
The Yale guy takes the opportunity to plug Green theology and politics and jab the administration (and with one or two debunked assertions), while the Stanford guy is saying pandemic unpreparedness is more a result of the public apathy at large.
A couple noteworthy quotes here:
Also...
This is a debate you should listen to for its factual information on the Coronavirus and the exaggerations of its overall threat and lethality. One epidemiologist is a liberal, the other is more conservative, and they don't disagree on the facts.
They disagree on policy, and in predictions. The Yale guy will say a blind panic nationwide lockdown for months is justified until we know more, the Stanford guy says we know enough to know that blind, long-term lockdowns are not justified and may in the long-term cause more problems than the virus. The Yale guy will say he believes that the lethality of the Coronavirus will be "five to seven to ten times" that of the Flu. The Stanford guy says not enough data yet, but if it is more lethal than the Flu, then more realistically it will be by a factor 1.5 to 2.
The Yale guy takes the opportunity to plug Green theology and politics and jab the administration (and with one or two debunked assertions), while the Stanford guy is saying pandemic unpreparedness is more a result of the public apathy at large.
A couple noteworthy quotes here:
"The number of people infected is much larger than the number of cases we have documented....In most places with few exceptions around the world we are just testing people who have substantial symptoms who come to healthcare and seek help or even to be hospitalized.
"These are just the tip of the iceberg. The Iceland experience [where a complete assessment was done and shows a mortality rate lower than that of the common Flu] and all our other data from Vo in Italy where the entire city population was tested showed that the vast majority of people [who are infected] are either completely asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic in ways that you would not be able to differentiate from Common Cold or Common Flu."
Also...
"Influenza, for example, kills many, many children. We don't really see deaths in children less than ten years old [with SARS-CoV-2], and we see extremely few severe cases in young individuals in the absence of underlying disease, while we do see it quite a lot with Influezna."
