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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by Xyril View Post
    I'm a little worried about how much thought you've put into designing a zombie virus.
    I took one course on the brain, and passed it with minimal margin on the fourth try. Two of the things I learned are:
    1 Feelings and emotions are generally speaking the simple parts of neurosciences.
    2 Everything about neurosciences is super complicated, including the simple parts.

    But we can oversimplify and state that "basically" you just need the right cocktail of glutamate, adrenaline, noradrenaline (action), serotonin, GABA (aggression, if very specifically applied to certain pathways and receptors), and dopamine (reward, addiction) to induce extremely aggressive behavior. It's not a cocktail anyone currently alive could actually make/administer, the interactions are way too complex and not understood well enough, and doing anything to a brain without just plain killing the patient is pretty hard too. It's more one of those things we're pretty sure could exist.

    Superpowers are harder to do, the best we've got for now is mental tricks for overriding the safety limiters to get closer to actual and/or harmful peak performance, like pro athletes do. Since a pro athlete also has a lot of physical training to back these tricks up any zombie using these mechanisms will still peak out below Olympic levels of performance. Maybe around Olympic level (with side effects) if the virus gets the body to produce enough performance enhancing drugs.

    Quote Originally Posted by Imbalance View Post
    You called?
    Yeah, this is the world. Please do not cause zombies.
    Last edited by Lvl 2 Expert; 2020-03-25 at 04:01 AM.
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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    *hides bokor potion

    Nothing to see here...

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    How many people being tested are asymptomatic, and have little to no reason to be tested?
    The latter, fairly few, I would imagine. Docs don't have to test you just because you want it, and will decline to test you for diseases if there is no reason to believe you might have it.

    Asymptomatic, however, is only part of the criteria. If you've had significant contact, testing might still be warranted, because of the long potential time before symptoms exhibit.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Just saw a news report that a 21-year-old with *no* previous health problems died from the virus. I can but hope that news will shut up some of the "It's only the flu and I'm young so why worry" crowd, but I suspect it won't.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
    Just saw a news report that a 21-year-old with *no* previous health problems died from the virus. I can but hope that news will shut up some of the "It's only the flu and I'm young so why worry" crowd, but I suspect it won't.
    That kind of argumentation will backfire IMO. Its manipulative misrepresentation of probabilities and that may make people ignore subsequent arguments as self-serving even if they have a strong basis. It doesn't take that much numeracy to notice that among 10000 cases, 0.01% chance of death is still one death on average to be expected, and its not that far to comparing with traffic accidents and the like.

    I'd tend more towards the 'So, do you care if people kill your grandparents? Then please do these minimal things to not kill theirs.' line of argument.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    That kind of argumentation will backfire IMO. Its manipulative misrepresentation of probabilities and that may make people ignore subsequent arguments as self-serving even if they have a strong basis. It doesn't take that much numeracy to notice that among 10000 cases, 0.01% chance of death is still one death on average to be expected, and its not that far to comparing with traffic accidents and the like.
    Umm, yeah. Most people don't meet even your low bar of "that much numeracy." Most people over-consider low-probability risks, particularly ones that are notable for reasons beyond their rarity, and habituate themselves to higher-probability dangers that are less convenient to avoid and easier to rationalize away. (I.e., "I don't care what the numbers say, cars driven by a good driver like me are safer than airplanes flown by some random pilot." Most people tend to remember stories about tragedies that strike individuals or small groups of people--stories that have more of a chance to humanize the victims--better than they remember stories that expect them to fathom a massive number of deaths or dispassionately cite statistics. These stories resonate even more when they see some point of connection or commonality between themselves and the victims.

    The people who would actually care about transmitting diseases to others have for the most part already absorbed that information and have made their decisions as to how much to allow those considerations to dictate their behavior. The ones still going out like it's normal have largely already decided that they don't care about anybody else's grandparents. (In fact, there's a non-negligible number of people are cracking jokes about the "boomer disease" finally freeing up some jobs.) Stories about the rare young, healthy victims are not misleading, nor are they manipulative. They simply acknowledge an uncomfortable truth--there are many people who don't care about others (or at the very least, care superficially enough to remain willfully ignorant of the threat to others), but give great consideration to even the smallest risk to themselves.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by Xyril View Post
    Umm, yeah. Most people don't meet even your low bar of "that much numeracy." Most people over-consider low-probability risks, particularly ones that are notable for reasons beyond their rarity, and habituate themselves to higher-probability dangers that are less convenient to avoid and easier to rationalize away. (I.e., "I don't care what the numbers say, cars driven by a good driver like me are safer than airplanes flown by some random pilot." Most people tend to remember stories about tragedies that strike individuals or small groups of people--stories that have more of a chance to humanize the victims--better than they remember stories that expect them to fathom a massive number of deaths or dispassionately cite statistics. These stories resonate even more when they see some point of connection or commonality between themselves and the victims.

    The people who would actually care about transmitting diseases to others have for the most part already absorbed that information and have made their decisions as to how much to allow those considerations to dictate their behavior. The ones still going out like it's normal have largely already decided that they don't care about anybody else's grandparents. (In fact, there's a non-negligible number of people are cracking jokes about the "boomer disease" finally freeing up some jobs.) Stories about the rare young, healthy victims are not misleading, nor are they manipulative. They simply acknowledge an uncomfortable truth--there are many people who don't care about others (or at the very least, care superficially enough to remain willfully ignorant of the threat to others), but give great consideration to even the smallest risk to themselves.
    The problem is simultaneously assuming that the people you're trying to convince are ignorant, and that that ignorance will work in your favor when taking an oppositional stance to their extant behavior.

    Its usually the other way around.

    There is an uncomfortable truth here - someone with a mild case and anger against the old could easily see it as an opportunity, not a danger. They likely won't die, when they get over it they'll be immune for awhile to something others are afraid of, and they may feel (correctly in some cases) that if they infect the people they generally resent they likely won't be held accountable for it. So, what argument would actually work to dissuade someone in that case?

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    The problem is simultaneously assuming that the people you're trying to convince are ignorant, and that that ignorance will work in your favor when taking an oppositional stance to their extant behavior.

    Its usually the other way around.

    There is an uncomfortable truth here - someone with a mild case and anger against the old could easily see it as an opportunity, not a danger. They likely won't die, when they get over it they'll be immune for awhile to something others are afraid of, and they may feel (correctly in some cases) that if they infect the people they generally resent they likely won't be held accountable for it. So, what argument would actually work to dissuade someone in that case?
    What they now have in Italy. If you deliberately sneeze on someone (which you will have to do if I understood the ways this things transmits correctly), you can actually go to jail. I think the maximum penalty is five years, but I'm not 100% sure. That should at least deter some people.
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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    This kind of inhumanity (using the illness as payback) is, I believe, highly unlikely. Sure, there's a lot of people, so there might be someone evil enough for that, but the real problem are those who will go for the behaviour they find most convenient, even if it spreads contagion.
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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    So, what argument would actually work to dissuade someone in that case?
    Them not being a sociopath ought to be enough, really.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    The first covid-realted death of a (as described in news, "below the ages of 18") child (in the United States) was in my hometown of Lancaster, CA this week (11 miles from my current location). I'm already fairly frustrated with my 20-year-old brother for insisting on hanging out, even one night, with his college friends freshly-returned returned from Spring Break, in close quarters playing board games. I'd finally managed to convince him to grab his stuff and go home, but he couldn't resist just one last hang-out. At least he's mostly self-quarantining in his room and trying to stay separate from our 60+year-old parents who both have underlying health conditions (diabetes and heart-conditions, at minimum). It honestly took a combination of "do it for the country/community, do it for your family, do it for yourself, do it because your scientific/mathematical sister told you to, or do it because otherwise I'm going to be personally very deeply angry with you for a long time (but I will still love you)" just to get him to come home mostly right away. But he still didn't think of the possible consequences of one more hang with his friends who'd spent the last week who-knows-where across the country.

    The statistics may be very small (right now), but the statistics are descriptive, not predictive. They can absolutely bite YOU (yes, YOU) in the butt at a moment's notice. They can bite YOUR friend, parent, child. You can be that one-in-a-million. I have personally been on the "wrong end" of statistics at least eight times. I don't care that the chance of something bad happening to me were one-in-a-hundred, or one-in-a-thousand, or one-in-a-million. They still happened. And this is an exponential situation. That one child death in the US will almost certainly not be the ONLY child death in the US.

    Take this seriously: follow guidelines, wash your hands, disinfect your belongings/purchases, avoid the vulnerable (unless caring for them, then observe high precautions), avoid unnecessary (including board games) in-person gatherings, and follow the guidelines and legal orders for your community. This is real. Find that space between panic and dismissal.

    Better to talk online about the struggles with being apart from friends, with boredom, with loneliness, than to later talk about the struggles of planning a funeral/burial for a family member (or two or three) who you weren't even able to visit in the hospital and whose funeral/memorial will have to be held during a stay-at-home/shelter-in-place/lockdown/quarantine situation. Be proactive and preventative. Reactive is almost always more expensive, and in this case, the costs are high.

    **Would have included link, but I don't seem to have enough posts yet to do so. Just search "child covid death Lancaster" for articles. The death was of a 17-year-old who tested positive for covid, but the "complex" circumstances of the death are still under investigation.

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    Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
    Them not being a sociopath ought to be enough, really.
    This is kind of like assuming that the person you want to exist already happens to agree with you...

    Quote Originally Posted by Vinyadan View Post
    This kind of inhumanity (using the illness as payback) is, I believe, highly unlikely. Sure, there's a lot of people, so there might be someone evil enough for that, but the real problem are those who will go for the behaviour they find most convenient, even if it spreads contagion.
    There was a case of someone doing this in Japan in early March - they tested positive and then said they would intentionally go around spreading it, bragged about it to the staff and customers of bars he visited (and infected at least one person at one of the establishments so far confirmed), were hospitalized the next day, and have themselves since died of it. This kind of 'I will force you to notice that I exist' behavior isn't 'common' here per se - I wouldn't expect even 0.1% of the population to go and do this, for example - but its sort of a case where people are empowered to cause a disparate amount of damage with casual behaviors.

    I would agree that e.g. the people going out en-masse for hanami are going to cause more deaths in the long run than intentional spreaders.

    But I think its a useful example for checking expectations about how similar other people's mindsets and viewpoints are, in terms of figuring out how to make convincing arguments to get people to shape their behaviors. Someone who already has it has nothing to lose from their actions (especially if they're convinced they'll die from it); young people in the 0.01% death band may feel that getting it is inevitable (and they may not be wrong about that depending on the strategies or lack thereof taken in the places they live) and that the things they're being asked to do to save others are going to be more harmful to them than just pushing through.

    It's one thing to say 'my, how terrible of them for being so selfish' or 'they're just ignorant' but I think the better thing is to actually understand the mindset and come up with arguments for better behavior that are attractive from within that mindset, rather than attacking it from without.

    Quote Originally Posted by farothel View Post
    What they now have in Italy. If you deliberately sneeze on someone (which you will have to do if I understood the ways this things transmits correctly), you can actually go to jail. I think the maximum penalty is five years, but I'm not 100% sure. That should at least deter some people.
    Yeah I think this is one way.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    There was a case of someone doing this in Japan in early March - they tested positive and then said they would intentionally go around spreading it, bragged about it to the staff and customers of bars he visited (and infected at least one person at one of the establishments so far confirmed), were hospitalized the next day, and have themselves since died of it. This kind of 'I will force you to notice that I exist' behavior isn't 'common' here per se - I wouldn't expect even 0.1% of the population to go and do this, for example - but its sort of a case where people are empowered to cause a disparate amount of damage with casual behaviors.
    I just read a couple stories about people in the US who we intentionally trying to spread the disease. Or at least claimed they were. One claimed to have the Wuhan and purposefully coughed on someone they didn't like.
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    Quote Originally Posted by SerenaRaeyld View Post
    Take this seriously: follow guidelines, wash your hands, disinfect your belongings/purchases, avoid the vulnerable (unless caring for them, then observe high precautions), avoid unnecessary (including board games) in-person gatherings, and follow the guidelines and legal orders for your community. This is real. Find that space between panic and dismissal.
    We have (touch wood) so far no deaths in my country, and it's now actually illegal to enter someone else's home without a very good reason. The police have said that they can and will enter private dwellings and - do something to completely peaceful gatherings if they hear of them happening. What exactly they would do, I don't know - the most logical response would be to lock the house down and make everyone in there stay there for the next four weeks.

    We're taking it seriously.

    If nothing else, in six months' time we'll be able to look back and compare the casualty rates of countries that imposed these kinds of measures vs those that didn't, and have some interesting data - no more than that - for the next pandemic.
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    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    The problem is simultaneously assuming that the people you're trying to convince are ignorant, and that that ignorance will work in your favor when taking an oppositional stance to their extant behavior.
    The problem is that you're reading an argument that I never made in the quoted text, which doesn't invalidate the rest of your response, but does raise doubts as to its relevance.

    What I'm talking about is the disproportionate effect of emotional resonance in changing attitudes and behaviors. Ignorance can be an aggravating factor, but sometimes it's the people who are intelligent and educated who really get blindsided by this phenomenon: Because they're aware of this bias and see their field as particularly rational and dispassionate, they think they're immune to it and aren't on guard.

    The other thing to remember is that human behavior isn't always a direct line from knowledge to action. Willpower is part of the equation, particularly when the action you want to take is to change a longstanding attitude or habitual behavior. This has been demonstrated with particularly ingrained attitudes such prejudice or politics. If you make sound logical arguments using credible evidence, you might convince a few people to change their attitudes. However, when you instead put them in a situation where they have to work with a member of a group they dislike, or tell them one person's story so that they can see how they came to take some contrary political position, more often than not you reach far more people than you can with cold logic and numbers alone. You have to change hearts, then you can change minds.

    The challenge with this quarantine is that it's not about asking people to do one or two big things--it's asking people to change pretty much every habit they have. If you're trying to get people to take a flu shot, you only need to convince them long enough to sit for the shot. If you hammer them with facts and statistics, that might be enough to convince a decent number of people. Convincing them to self-isolate requires a more lasting change--you not only have to get them to acknowledge the facts as you see them, you have to get them to care. Care even after you're gone and your carefully curated facts and figures have faded from their memory. Care enough that when they're stuck at home and Netflix is slow, they resist the temptation to run out to the beach or go to the grocery store to boredom-shop. Care enough that they're not tempted by cheap plane tickets and uncongested roads.

    It's not about, as you somewhat disdainfully put it, using ignorance against the ignorant. It's about giving them something that's easy to put into human terms.
    Last edited by Xyril; 2020-03-26 at 12:14 AM.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    I highly recommend anyone here with the means to watch the movie "Contagion". It portrays a much more deadly virus sweeping the nation and the drastic actions that happen throughout the country.
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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by Rockphed View Post
    I just read a couple stories about people in the US who we intentionally trying to spread the disease. Or at least claimed they were. One claimed to have the Wuhan and purposefully coughed on someone they didn't like.
    And that's assault with a deadly weapon. (With a bunch of conditions and caveats depending on the jurisdiction. But this forum is not for legal advice, the point here is only that trying to murder someone is still trying to murder someone if you use a weird weapon.)

    I don't think there's a lot that can be done to dissuade this. At this point most of the "praksters" have probably stopped thinking it's funny to pretend they're infecting people because of how serious everyone is treating the situation, so what's left is only actual wannabe murderers who figure this is so much more convenient for them than trying to use any other potential deadly implement. And unless "killer, no killing" has started working while I wasn't looking there's not much you can say to murderers to stop them.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Xyril View Post
    The problem is that you're reading an argument that I never made in the quoted text, which doesn't invalidate the rest of your response, but does raise doubts as to its relevance.

    What I'm talking about is the disproportionate effect of emotional resonance in changing attitudes and behaviors. Ignorance can be an aggravating factor, but sometimes it's the people who are intelligent and educated who really get blindsided by this phenomenon: Because they're aware of this bias and see their field as particularly rational and dispassionate, they think they're immune to it and aren't on guard.

    The other thing to remember is that human behavior isn't always a direct line from knowledge to action. Willpower is part of the equation, particularly when the action you want to take is to change a longstanding attitude or habitual behavior. This has been demonstrated with particularly ingrained attitudes such prejudice or politics. If you make sound logical arguments using credible evidence, you might convince a few people to change their attitudes. However, when you instead put them in a situation where they have to work with a member of a group they dislike, or tell them one person's story so that they can see how they came to take some contrary political position, more often than not you reach far more people than you can with cold logic and numbers alone. You have to change hearts, then you can change minds.

    The challenge with this quarantine is that it's not about asking people to do one or two big things--it's asking people to change pretty much every habit they have. If you're trying to get people to take a flu shot, you only need to convince them long enough to sit for the shot. If you hammer them with facts and statistics, that might be enough to convince a decent number of people. Convincing them to self-isolate requires a more lasting change--you not only have to get them to acknowledge the facts as you see them, you have to get them to care. Care even after you're gone and your carefully curated facts and figures have faded from their memory. Care enough that when they're stuck at home and Netflix is slow, they resist the temptation to run out to the beach or go to the grocery store to boredom-shop. Care enough that they're not tempted by cheap plane tickets and uncongested roads.

    It's not about, as you somewhat disdainfully put it, using ignorance against the ignorant. It's about giving them something that's easy to put into human terms.
    I do generally agree with this text, but now to me it seems disconnected from the original interaction that started this branch of discussion.

    Basically, my observation is that I've seen a lot of people try the line of argument that goes something like: 'Look, one young person died, it could happen to you too! You should behave responsibly!' and it has fallen totally flat because those people observe e.g. 'I'm personally more likely to suffer from losing my job by not showing up to work than I am to die from working through Covid'. So this assumption that 'now the risk is personal, they will be moved!' reads to me as though making an assumption that the listener will not actually take a few seconds to evaluate by whatever means just what the risk/tradeoff is for themselves, and will reach a conclusion.

    The danger of using the 'one person your age died, you could die' argument is that the moment someone does think in terms of relative risks, it's very easy to reach the conclusion 'to minimize risk to myself, I should just continue as normal and go to work' and have that conclusion actually be perfectly fine and rational (because it frames things as being about that individual's personal risk, and you have to convince them to be willing to increase their immediate personal risk of e.g. bankruptcy for the longer-term good of the context in which they live). So if someone uses this argument in an adversarial setting - e.g. they are saying 'you are wrong and this is why' then it's very easy for it to come off as either the speaker being the naive person, or just being an intentional trick. And in an adversarial setting, that means that the person you're talking to is going to shut down and entrench.

    See for example the backlash against the 'you don't know how to use masks properly, so they're worthless to you, so you shouldn't wear them' message - people hoarded more, because rather than saying 'okay it makes sense that these masks have more aggregate effect on me in the hands of a healthcare professional' they saw the argument as self-serving - something intended to shape their behavior through castigation rather than to actually bring them to the same side as the speaker.

    So along the lines of your post, in both of these examples, a better way to approach the argumentation would be to first make some connection or shared point - something that both the persuader and the recipient are likely to care about in a similar way - and that does require understanding where the behavior you want to change is coming from. I'd make a guess that the people who are doing extreme things like compensatory partying are in some sense trying to prove to themselves that everything is going to be the same as it was before, that basically there's some kind of 'normalcy' they can hold onto. So I'd look for ways to frame the argument as working together to re-create that normalcy - 'we can act together to save the things we care about', etc. Try to build up 'we are on the same side/we need your help' sentiments more than focusing on the 'you are acting dumb/ignorant/etc' sentiments. Also it seems like it would be good to look for places to suggest the ability to be locally in control or in charge - something like the DIY cloth masks movement in the Czech Republic might be a good example of this - 'here's a proactive positive thing you can do with your energy to help us'.
    Last edited by NichG; 2020-03-26 at 02:48 AM.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    This is kind of like assuming that the person you want to exist already happens to agree with you...
    You were literally describing a situation where someone decides that untraceably killing people they don't like is something they should be doing. That is the attitude of a sociopath, someone who does not care for society or other people so long as they're getting what *they* want. Most people wouldn't even think along those lines, or if they did, would rapidly be repulsed from the very idea.

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    Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
    You were literally describing a situation where someone decides that untraceably killing people they don't like is something they should be doing. That is the attitude of a sociopath, someone who does not care for society or other people so long as they're getting what *they* want. Most people wouldn't even think along those lines, or if they did, would rapidly be repulsed from the very idea.
    Then perhaps the way to put it is, I think that it is in fact possible to make a convincing argument to people who don't care for society or others as long as they're getting what they want, and that being in the situation where those people are the ones who need to be convinced is not fantastically uncommon - especially when you consider the effect on various dehumanizing framings of others that people might operate under.

    If you want to convince someone who talks gleefully about how this virus will kill members of an older generation more than of their own (I've edited out the term since, well, its crass) to not go around infecting others, I don't think its unreasonable to approach that conversation with the mindset that you can't appeal to their sense of humanity with respect to the group they've just othered, and I don't think you can generally afford to just write them off as a lost cause either.
    Last edited by NichG; 2020-03-26 at 03:05 AM.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    If you want to convince someone who talks gleefully about how this virus will kill members of an older generation more than of their own (I've edited out the term since, well, its crass) to not go around infecting others
    I think there are probably a lot of people who will talk that way without actually really meaning to go through with it, or else they don't *really* believe that infecting the older people will kill them. I don't think they actually think along those lines if they were to put their mind to it.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    So, what argument would actually work to dissuade someone in that case?
    Arguments tend not to work that way. There isn't some magic argument that will make someone swap to your side. In fact, confrontational arguing doesn't seem to be very effective at all at persuading the person you are arguing with. In some cases, it may convince onlookers, but that is also not a guarantee.

    I find it is more effective to figure out what that person cares about, and share perspectives and information. Those may help inform a new position, but they may not. If a person is concerned because, say, they are a small business owner, and shutting down will kill their business, as has already been the case for one friend of mine, that's...kind of a valid concern. We shouldn't try to shout them down, call them sociopaths, or attempt to lie about risk in order to trick people into compliance. It's better to find a way to address the concerns of both parties. Are there ways to reduce infection risks without utterly killing small businesses wholesale? Sure. South Korea appears to have focused heavily on testing and isolating those that are infected, rather than everyone else, and this does seem very effective.

    As for people who talk about ignoring the risk, or intentionally infecting others...they may simply be trying to appear tough, or edgy, or are dismissing the personal risks to themselves. They may not actually be sociopaths. Also, non-sociopaths totally do kill other people, or prioritize their own well being over that of others. History has many horrors that cannot be easily explained away by sociopaths alone. Human behavior is complicated, and a person may misjudge risk or have pent up rage for all sorts of reasons.

    Long story short, lying to others in an attempt to gain compliance is going to damage credibility. This'll lead to more non compliance in the long run. Particularly in the case of health care, this can be extremely damaging. If people start distrusting doctors, believing that the doctor will tell them whatever is convenient for society, rather than them, they may avoid treatment or even a diagnosis. It doesn't take a lot of mistrust to have a huge impact, either. Look at the whole anti-vaccination thing. One bad study, and suddenly there's all kinds of distrust, non compliance, and ultimately deaths. When we're talking about pandemics, you want to stay as far away from that as possible.

    So, yeah, the masks thing was a bad play. Masks are certainly more useful on the affected than the unaffected. For starters, there's a *lot* more of the latter, before we even get into discussion of the transmission vectors. However, they are not useless on the healthy. Even masks that can't specifically block the virus can block the water droplets containing the virus in, say, a sneeze. At a minimum, this'd reduce the viral load of the contact and improve the probable outcome for the healthy person. Attempting to tell people the masks did basically nothing rang false to many, and if someone's lying to you, it's never in your interest to do what they want. So, many bought up masks. It's stimulating the very behavior it is meant to prevent.

    As an aside, I am surprised that people are not putting out guides to making effective masks. I'm seeing a lot of hand sewn mask stuff or 3d printed respirators out there, but usually it's using standard fabric, which is...better than nothing, but not great. If you visit a Home Depot or similar and peruse the furnace filter section, you will find among the more expensive filters those which are rated to stop viruses. They are abundant in supply, and every filter contains enough material to make a fair number of masks/respirator filters. Use that instead.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by Lvl 2 Expert View Post
    And that's assault with a deadly weapon. (With a bunch of conditions and caveats depending on the jurisdiction. But this forum is not for legal advice, the point here is only that trying to murder someone is still trying to murder someone if you use a weird weapon.)
    In the case I know of, the charge was actually terrorism.
    Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    In the case I know of, the charge was actually terrorism.
    I think the general thought process right now is "if youre going to treat this as a bio-weapon, were going to treat you like youre using a bio-weapon."
    “Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by farothel View Post
    What they now have in Italy. If you deliberately sneeze on someone (which you will have to do if I understood the ways this things transmits correctly), you can actually go to jail. I think the maximum penalty is five years, but I'm not 100% sure. That should at least deter some people.
    We have no such thing here in Italy.
    You are strongly encouraged to stay inside by videos of celebrities on social media and government ads on tv, and there's a fine between 400 and 3000 euro if you are outside your home without a valid reason, but that's it.

    For what is worth, I've never heard of anyone during this emergency starting to deliberately sneeze on other people. We're taking the situation quite seriously here.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Here's something mildly interesting. Someone here in Denmark made an effort to shed some light on the 'dark figures' - as in, how many are really affected, how many need help, and so on.

    215000 respondents.
    5800 infected.

    Match this against the official number of 34 dead.

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    The thing being, of course, you don't know how many of the currently infected may still die. But it's still a good sign.
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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    The thing being, of course, you don't know how many of the currently infected may still die. But it's still a good sign.
    There are all sorts of reservations to take. Those are unofficial numbers, they're not by any means automatically representative, and it's 200k out of 6 million people.

    But it's still ... interesting =)

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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Quote Originally Posted by Tarnesh View Post
    For what is worth, I've never heard of anyone during this emergency starting to deliberately sneeze on other people. We're taking the situation quite seriously here.
    You're lucky. One poor grocery store down state (in Pennsylvania) had to toss 35,000$ in food because some lady decided to cough on it (fruit, vegetables, meats). She's under arrest and might be going in for mental health treatment.
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    Default Re: The Corona Virus

    Oh - I think I can tell you all one more thing about the covid-19 that you don't know: It tastes awful. That's not something they report in the media (and it's not something I can 100% guarantee is universal) but both my girlfriend and I have found the mucus filling our heads to have a sweetish, really disgusting taste.

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