I dont know whether this is the right place to post it: But why are we caring about the risk of the coronavirus for us as EAs? Why are people thinking about canceling EAG or other local meetings?
(are we caring for selfish reasons or because this indirectly reduces the extent the virus spreads?
If we believe that a young healthy person has a 0.5 percent of doing from the virus and 5 percent of the world will be infected in expectation and all these actions (cancellation of EA events) reduces my chance of being infected by 5 percent:
(This seems super optimistic as most of the attendees wont change other behavior just because EA events are cancelled. They will just go to other events.) then we are talking about roughly 10 micromorts. It seems like that the EA events might be worth the cost. If we want to reduce micromorts telling EAs to stop drinking alcohol seems like a better idea (1 micromort =0.5 liter wine) than changing the way we spend our time because of the coronavirus.
I am interested to hear why this argument is wrong
Datapoint (my general considerations/thought processes around this, feeding into case-by case decisions about my own activities rather than a blanket decision): I am (young healthy male) pretty unconcerned personally about risk to myself individually; but quite concerned about becoming a vector for spread (especially to older or less robust people). While I have a higher-than-some-people personal risk tolerance, I don’t like the idea of imposing my risk tolerance on others. Particularly when travelling/fatigued/jetlagged, I’m not 100% sure I trust my own attention to detail quite enough on reliably taking all the necessary steps carefully enough, so this makes me a little hesitant to take on long-haul travel to international events (I also work/interact with older colleagues reasonably regularly, and am concerned re: the indirect activities of my actions on them).
I would also like to see society-level actions that reduce disease spread, and I intuitively feel that EA should be a participant in such actions, given it takes such risks seriously as a community.
On personal risk: a calculation I am stealing from a friend (who I believe does not want credit) suggests a young person’s risk after catching is around 1000 micromorts (based on ~.1% young healthy person’s IFR). This is doubling or tripling your risk of dying in a given year. See also Beth’s comment about chronic fatigue, and note the unknown immunity period etc. I’m not super psyched about those personal risks (if I were to catch it).
This stands if you take best guess if you take the median parameters for things. It seems like if we were to actually propagate uncertainty over the values of parameters like per-age IFR, long-term follow-on conditions like chronic fatigue, infection risk in location of origin, infection risk in San Francisco, infection risk from domestic and international air travel, the posterior distribution looks pretty different. In particular, I’d guess a mildly risk averse (say 75th percentile) decision point would say that cancelling EAG saves a fair bit more than 10 micromorts per person, given how bad current information is.
Other random things:
-SF seems a likely place for an early outbreak given community transmission was first documented in Nor Cal and east asia travel links
-There might be some signalling benefit
-EAs probably have higher risk of infecting other EAs outside the conference
-Conference attendees are generally young but some may be at much higher personal risk because of age or comorbidities.
I don’t know if these points are conclusive. On a meta-level, my doc is really intended for friends and family and is not trying to weigh in on this point.
I dont know whether this is the right place to post it: But why are we caring about the risk of the coronavirus for us as EAs? Why are people thinking about canceling EAG or other local meetings?
(are we caring for selfish reasons or because this indirectly reduces the extent the virus spreads?
If we believe that a young healthy person has a 0.5 percent of doing from the virus and 5 percent of the world will be infected in expectation and all these actions (cancellation of EA events) reduces my chance of being infected by 5 percent:
(This seems super optimistic as most of the attendees wont change other behavior just because EA events are cancelled. They will just go to other events.)
then we are talking about roughly 10 micromorts. It seems like that the EA events might be worth the cost. If we want to reduce micromorts telling EAs to stop drinking alcohol seems like a better idea (1 micromort =0.5 liter wine) than changing the way we spend our time because of the coronavirus.
I am interested to hear why this argument is wrong
Datapoint (my general considerations/thought processes around this, feeding into case-by case decisions about my own activities rather than a blanket decision): I am (young healthy male) pretty unconcerned personally about risk to myself individually; but quite concerned about becoming a vector for spread (especially to older or less robust people). While I have a higher-than-some-people personal risk tolerance, I don’t like the idea of imposing my risk tolerance on others. Particularly when travelling/fatigued/jetlagged, I’m not 100% sure I trust my own attention to detail quite enough on reliably taking all the necessary steps carefully enough, so this makes me a little hesitant to take on long-haul travel to international events (I also work/interact with older colleagues reasonably regularly, and am concerned re: the indirect activities of my actions on them).
I would also like to see society-level actions that reduce disease spread, and I intuitively feel that EA should be a participant in such actions, given it takes such risks seriously as a community.
Yeah, its a good point.
On personal risk: a calculation I am stealing from a friend (who I believe does not want credit) suggests a young person’s risk after catching is around 1000 micromorts (based on ~.1% young healthy person’s IFR). This is doubling or tripling your risk of dying in a given year. See also Beth’s comment about chronic fatigue, and note the unknown immunity period etc. I’m not super psyched about those personal risks (if I were to catch it).
This stands if you take best guess if you take the median parameters for things. It seems like if we were to actually propagate uncertainty over the values of parameters like per-age IFR, long-term follow-on conditions like chronic fatigue, infection risk in location of origin, infection risk in San Francisco, infection risk from domestic and international air travel, the posterior distribution looks pretty different. In particular, I’d guess a mildly risk averse (say 75th percentile) decision point would say that cancelling EAG saves a fair bit more than 10 micromorts per person, given how bad current information is.
Other random things:
-SF seems a likely place for an early outbreak given community transmission was first documented in Nor Cal and east asia travel links
-There might be some signalling benefit
-EAs probably have higher risk of infecting other EAs outside the conference
-Conference attendees are generally young but some may be at much higher personal risk because of age or comorbidities.
I don’t know if these points are conclusive. On a meta-level, my doc is really intended for friends and family and is not trying to weigh in on this point.