It's futile arguing that the risk is low because the officials classified it as such when I stated that I disagree with their risk assessment and management strategy. If I look at a risk matrix I would classify the risk impact of not quarantining as significant to disastrous and the likelihood as very likely. That puts the current situation in all of the world at the highest risk.
One last comment because you clearly seem to prefer to live in your own world.
Assessing risk the way you do has one big issue (it actually has multiple but let's stick with one). When you put Corona in the disastrous category you habe to provide reasons for doing so, otherwise it is just a gut feeling. And by classifying it as disastrous, you run into issues when classifying stuff like Ebola for example. Over-classifying has that effect on measuring systems, that's why you need teams of experts from multiple disciplines to do it properly. And would have to do so at multiple sub levels for each criteria. The whole purpose is to take gut feeling and emotions out of the process. Doing it alone makes the whole exercise pointless.
This over-reliance on "experts" is what got things to this state in the first place. Not that long ago, WHO was adamant in saying that flying to China was still okay and that "there was no reason to take extreme measures". How many lives were lost because of that?
Conversely, had they recommended more aggressive contention measures, how many trips would have been avoided? How much slower would the virus come to Europe? If sirens were ringing 4 weeks ago by the WHO "experts", perhaps Italy wouldn't need to be in lockdown now.
> When you put Corona in the disastrous category you habe to provide reasons for doing so, otherwise it is just a gut feeling.
Not really. We put in the disastrous category because we don't have enough information to claim that it is not a mass-extinction event. In the face of a threat of unknown risk and the potential impact is unbounded, we got to treat it as the worst and prepare for the worst, cost-analysis be damned!
Your comments are breaking the site guidelines by being snarky and posting in the flamewar style. Please don't do that. It's not what this site is for, and it evokes worse from others.
Do you have kids? Older parents? Would you tell them that is totally fine to keep doing what they are doing just because the experts haven't assessed the risk yet?
It doesn't have to be a literal mass-extinction event for this type of thing to lead to some catastrophic events affecting people you know and care about. If it were to happen (I honestly hope it doesn't) to someone you care about, I am sure that "the experts told me things were fine" will be of little consolation.
How about dropping the sarcasm and word-thinking and start to put some thought into the questions I made regarding the WHO recommendations up until some weeks ago? I bet if you could go back in time to Italy just three weeks ago, you wouldn't be telling people to just "listen to the experts", would you?
You might think this is strange, but the short answer is yes.
Now a slightly longer one. Guidelines on how infection risk can be minimised are very consistent. And they make perfect sense. So yes, that's the advice I give my two kids, my parents (both of which fall into the high risk age groups, luckily they are following that advice already without me), and the advice I follow myself.
WHO recommendations are based on the best available picture to them. I prefer to trust someone changing his opinion when data changes over someone who paints a worst case scenario from day one on.
And yes, if someone from my family ultimately dies, which I really don't hope, having done everything experts told us to do to prevent it would be the only consolation there is. The alternative being fear mongering, panic and paranoia. In which any infections happening toy loved ones (assuming I am the only factor behind there behaviour, which I am thankfully not as my family thinks pretty well for themselves) would be to a certain degree on me.
And the experts have assessed the risk. Hence the advice they give. But you do you, ok? As long as you stop spreading stories about mass extinction and stuff like that.
It's of course different when people are making statements about their own nation, or a place that they lived for a long time. But these distinctions are too subtle to matter on the internet. Others will react the same way they do to garden-variety flamebait, so the effects on the site are the same, so it's best to just not go there.
Also, while different, it's not necessarily benign—just more complicated.
Criticisms of national identity can't be topics of curious conversation on the public internet. A small, closed group could, but a large open group can't. 'Large' implies that someone is going to get activated, and 'open' implies that they can show up and comment—at which point game over.
Thank you for understanding the spirit of my comment. I will take this flag as a very good lesson in risk management: no matter how many times you are positive in the exchange, the one time that you strike out can be fatal.
Yes, and the effect is worse because there's a massive disconnect between how we perceive our own intent and how it comes across to readers on the internet--or at least to some segment of readers, but when the community is large enough, every segment is an entire audience.
I can see your point. But if we are going meta... the discussion was going for quite some time exclusively between me and hef and though it got "heated" at one point, I didn't get the feeling that it was derailing at just some senseless uncivil exchange of insults. It is the kind of thing that can happen between a group of people talking at the bar, not just the internet.
Also, precisely due to this disconnect between what we write and how it can be perceived, it does seem helpful to me to occasionally have some curved ball thrown into the mix to help calibrate my sense of (a) where the other party is coming from and (b) check if the other party is willing to listen to you or just participate in a screaming match.
Risk matrix example: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kevin_Fleming3/publicat...