[kolanos]

Did you watch the video or are you just basing this on out of context quotes? What you're quoting was a brief anecdote about what those doctors were seeing on the ground. Their extrapolations are based on state-level aggregates in New York and California. Sample sizes of 300-650K patients.

[brlewis]

I did not get the chance to see the video before it was taken down, but I got the content of their arguments here: http://www.tathasta.com/2020/04/watch-er-doctors-urge-reopen...

They use the same logic for Kern County, California, and New York. Their logic is, that if you test N people and find M positive cases, that in the population at large you'll have an infection rate of M/N. This would be true if the N tests were performed on random members of the population. But because the tests are only performed when there's reason to suspect infection, M/N is a higher infection rate than in the population at large. Their inflated number for total infected persons makes the death rate appear smaller.

[TechBro8615]

FYI the full video is available at the website of the news station that uploaded it to YouTube (where it was removed):

https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/video-interview-wi...

[brlewis]

Thanks. 51 minutes is too long for me to watch. Anybody who knows of anything in there that addresses the sampling bias issue, please point me to how far in it is.

[runawaybottle]

> I did not get the chance to see the video before it was taken down

I suppose that’s the real problem, in so many words...

[shkkmo]

I did watch the video and the critique by brlewis is perfectly accurate.

[xeromal]

But why should we believe you? Why can't we watch and make our own judgements?

[runawaybottle]

Because, I’m Youtube, why would I ever lie to you. I have your best interest in mind, and trust me, this shits gonna get us all killed if we watch this.

[shkkmo]

> But why should we believe you?

Because you have a basic understanding of statistics.

> Why can't we watch and make our own judgements?

You can. The video is available in many places.

[vannevar]

I did watch the video. At about the 5-minute mark, they make a huge error in extrapolating the percent positive of tests to the general population (in California, 12% positive test rate). As many others have pointed out, that is an inexcusable error that leads them to an wildly erroneous conclusion about the mortality rate of COVID-19. Recent antibody tests in Santa Clara County and Los Angeles showed a rate around 2-4%, and those studies were criticized because those percentages are close to the levels of false positives one could expect in the antibody tests. So at best, the conclusions in the video are off by a factor of three, and most likely, more.

[kolanos]

I'm not saying these doctors are correct in their statistical extrapolations. What I am saying is the Kern County anecdote being spread around to discredit them by people who haven't even seen the video are practicing in the disinformation that they accuse these doctors of perpetrating.

[brlewis]

As I fully explained in a nearby comment, the logic in their Kern County anecdote is representative of their logic for California and New York statistics as well. I am not misrepresenting anything or practicing any form of disinformation.

[fao_]

>I am not misrepresenting anything or practicing any form of disinformation.

I'm not saying that you are misrepresenting or disinforming people. But, how would you know unless someone told you?

[brlewis]

Answered in nearby comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23014548

[threatofrain]

> The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) jointly and emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical society and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19.

https://www.aaem.org/resources/statements/joint-endorsed/phy...

[soamv]

I did watch it. Their extrapolations were wrong. You can't just multiply positivity rate found in a biased sample by the whole population. That's not a meaningful extrapolation. Then using that extrapolation to say the death rate is low is just building up the error even more.

And then, comparing that to the flu and saying this isn't much worse, we're now well into the "this video is a potentially a public health hazard" territory.

[stOneskull]

No, you just debate it. A follow up video where there's a debate. Simple.

[ceejayoz]

That puts you in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop territory, where watching hours of video and an epidemiology and stats degree is needed to tease out the truth.

[thu2111]

And then, comparing that to the flu and saying this isn't much worse, we're now well into the "this video is a potentially a public health hazard" territory.

No, lockdowns are the public health hazard. The data is quite clear at this point that what's going on here is no worse than the flu. Here's a simple graphic from the UK to make that point clear:

http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/

And if you look at when lockdowns could have possibly started working given incubation and death lags, you'll see that most countries seem to have peaked before the lockdowns could have started working. Implication: they weren't responsible for the peak and decline.

But the more important point is that it's critical such things can be debated. Simply assuming you're right and anyone who disagrees is a "public health hazard" is totalitarianism. You won't have any ability to defend yourself, or even any right to, next time someone erases you because e.g. Trump declared your views to be dangerous.

[orwin]

Well, i don't know about the us you probably have more hospital beds than us, but in france it was absolutely criticla to enforce a lockdown at the time we did. Even with this timely lockdown, we still had to stop intubating >90 yo patients for two weeks (it's getting better). And bear in mind that only a part of one region (1/13th of France basically, not really true but...), not even the whole area, and all the hospital in the region (not the hot area) were so full they had to transfert arounf 20 patients abroad and hundreds to hospital in other regions. My cousin in Colmar, eastern France (SMUR chief) has transfered around 20 people to my other cousin (intensive care anesthetist) in western Brittany. If you have a map: its basically the longest East-West travel you can do in France. In Colmar they also had to close almost all of their non-maternity, non-urgency service, and the number of people dying of overdoses or of too much alcohol (don't have the english word sorry) is at least twice as high (we will have the true numbers in a few months).

Also i've said it here before, but young, healthy people who did not had to have invasive respiration (so no ICU) still got out of their sickness with lingering asthma, possibly caused by a pulmonary fibrosis. I found this [0] in English if you don't know what it is. In five to seven years (assuming we find a vaccine for sras-cov2 in two year) we will really start counting our dead, unless we find a non-chirurgical fibrosis cure.

[0] https://lungdiseasenews.com/2017/06/16/12-facts-pulmonary-fi...

[shkkmo]

I did watch the video and I can safely say that these doctors make massive and very convenient statistic mistakes throughout.

Sample size doesn't help if the sampling method is biased. Even if tests were available to everyone regardless of symptoms, you would still have a selection bias that would skew the numbers. The only way to accurately estimate overall infection rates in the general population is to test a random sampling.

Then there is the "comparison" of Sweden (no lock down) and Norway/California. They mention the death counts and population of these countries in another attempt to show that the "number of cases is high and the number of deaths is small regardless of lockdown" but completely gloss over the fact that Sweden has more that 5x the covid deaths per capita that Norway and California have.

Regardless of if this video should be censored, these guys are awful scientists.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Regardless of if this video should be censored, these guys are awful scientists.

This is the exact reason why it shouldn't be censored. Because if their science is bad then it needs to be available for people who know better to tear it to shreds.

If you take it down then the story can't be "this is why they're wrong" because what they said isn't available anymore, so a rebuttal isn't believable because you can't tell if it's an accurate representation of the original presentation.

So then the story becomes about censorship and you're making it all too easy for motivated people to spin a conspiracy theory about how these scientists are speaking truth to power and getting oppressed, even if they are in actual fact totally wrong.

[shkkmo]

Yet if you look at the comment sections for this video, there isn't anyone tearing it to shreds.

This isn't something I have been able to confidently form an opinion on; it's a hard topic. I think we will be strugging with how to balance bias, deliberate misinformation and freedom of speech for a long time.

But I think at the very least, YouTube needed to put up prominent disclaimers and links to limit the harm that this content can cause.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Yet if you look at the comment sections for this video, there isn't anyone tearing it to shreds.

I count several detailed criticisms of it just in this thread. Do none of them have a YouTube account?

Why don't the people proposing to censor it post their own rebuttal?

> I think at the very least, YouTube needed to put up prominent disclaimers and links to limit the harm that this content can cause.

Which is totally different. Leaving the video up while posting a prominent link to a rebuttal isn't censorship, it's more speech.

[shkkmo]

> I count several detailed criticisms of it just in this thread. Do none of them have a YouTube account?

I did post a rebutal in some of the duplicates I found on YouTube. YouTube comments are not really a great platform for debate and the way their algorithm works tends pull videos like this into an echo chamber that avoids the exact types of critical discussion you are calling for.

So, given the (artificial) choice between leaving the video up as is and taking it down, I suspect that in this particular case, the practically beneficial choice for society (in the short term at least) is to take it down precisely because of how YouTube works as a platform and community.

> Which is totally different. Leaving the video up while posting a prominent link to a rebuttal isn't censorship, it's more speech.

Yes, I am a big fan of free speech. However it has become increasingly clear that simply making speech as free as possible in as many places as possible is not enough (by itself) to solve the problems of misinformation, partisanship and radicalization that we are facing as a society. We can't just dismiss those problems, so as advocates for free speech, we need to find non-censorship ways to help solve those problems.

[AnthonyMouse]

> YouTube comments are not really a great platform for debate and the way their algorithm works tends pull videos like this into an echo chamber that avoids the exact types of critical discussion you are calling for.

This seems like a YouTube-specific problem that should have solutions not involving censorship.