Forget it, Lyman. It’s China.

Through the magic of the internet, AEI’s Lyman Stone joins The Remnant all the way ...

By

Through the magic of the internet, AEI’s Lyman Stone joins The Remnant all the way from Hong Kong to talk all things coronavirus: how we got here, the numbers, China’s role in the outbreak, and where we go from here.


Show Notes:

–Lyman’s work at AEI

Create a free account
Access additional articles and newsletters for no cost, no credit card information needed. Continue ALREADY HAVE AN ACCOUNT? SIGN IN
By
Comments (14)
Join The Dispatch to participate in the comments.
 
  1. Matthew

    Late to the conversation here. Sorry. A new subscriber getting caught up on all this fantastic content. ... The case for China’s misinformation was well put. I found it interesting though that nothing was said about misinformation in the US itself from the administration and the conservative media. Not trying to turn this into an anti-Trump thread, but it does seem to me that behavior of US citizens would be far more affected by the messages coming out of the US rather than China. Do you feel otherwise? (It is possible I missed it; listening in our more crowded house does present some challenges)

    Collapse
  2. Avatar photo
    Andrew

    One point of clarification that I wish had been asked: Mr. Stone stated that he thinks it will later be shown that full lock downs are not necessary, that closing schools and preventing large gatherings would have been enough. My assumption is that he meant that once you do that you scare enough people to take it seriously and the lock down effect takes hold because behaviors change without edict. The alternative interpretation would be that he doesn't feel those behaviors will prove to have been necessary to slow this down, but all of his previous statements wouldn't seem to support that.

    Did I miss some point of clarification here?

    Collapse
  3. Avatar photo
    W. Hartline

    Lyman is a rising star in my view. His ability to synthesize data across multiple sources and drill-down to understand what about the data is defensible or questionable is very useful, and the way he presents data on twitter (https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky) is constantly worthy of RT's.

    Collapse
  4. Avatar photo
    Kevin Johnson

    Fantastic pod, Jonah. Was worried when Lyman initially dismissed bad data from China...but luckily you pushed to get him to,clarify that it was only a small set of China’s lies that he called less important. You got his analysis and evidence that China’s awful behavior has been deadly. Great interview!

    Collapse
  5. Avatar photo
    CynthiaW

    Very interesting stuff about the variable quality of the data. I wonder if, although there are errors in the data, rates of change are still informative. If the same errors (or assumptions) went into the same calculation of a number on March 15 and on March 30, the difference could be a useful fact.

    Collapse
  6. Craig Knoche

    Good interview, interesting and thought provoking. Jonah thank you for resisting making this about Trump (pro or con).

    Collapse
  7. Avatar photo
    Pastorfbt

    If I understand the contention to be that people will take appropriate precautions if only given accurate information about the disease, I have to question if the average person anywhere is that rational. As the saying goes, denial is not just a river in Egypt.

    Collapse
  8. Avatar photo
    BWG

    Why am I getting hydrant commercials as a paying customer?? I value this site both for the commentary and for the lack of commercial content. It's worse than creeping communism - it's infiltrating and crawling right into your perimeter!

    Collapse
  9. David D

    Great podcast! As other commentators have mentioned, it's great to listen to people folks who follow the data and acknowledge the shortcomings.

    I have to ask, can you guys here at The Dispatch write some sort of piece about this "dying with COVID" trope that we're starting to see floating around trump-world? I saw you responded to a tweet of Brit Hume making this point on Carlson, but I'm making this point here because I refuse to actually make a twitter account, probably just out of laziness.

    There's really no numbers out there to directly refute this point, but we can come up with an estimate that makes this argument look really dumb. In the US the mortality rate is ~0.7%, or ~700 people per 100,000 die each year. That's ~2 out of 100,000 per day. The number of folks who've tested positive is ~350,000. With those numbers we can say, out of the people who've currently tested positive, we'd expect 3-4 of them to die each day for reasons other than coronavirus. That's a far cry from the ~2,000 who died today. This whole "dying with, not from, COVID-19" point is profoundly idiotic if you take a second to think about the numbers.

    Now, there's a few possible gotchas here that are inconsequential but I can see people trying to make the,. For one, we know that old folks represent a larger share of those who've tested positive than they do in the general population. Even if you multiply the 3-4 we estimated to die daily WITH but not FROM coronavirus by 10, you go from ~0.2% of the deaths overcounting to 2%. That's still negligible, especially considering the evidence we're getting out of NYC in the number of homedeaths increasing by a factor of 10. Plus, you'd expect a lot of those who tested positive to be quarantining themselves inside, and are thus a lot less prone to accidental deaths.

    Collapse
    1. David D

      Oops, math error, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 folks dying with rather than from COVID-19 per day, not 3 or 4. Doesn't change the argument, though.

      Collapse
  10. Avatar photo
    Samantha Ruffin

    I loved this podcast. Mr. Stone's breakdown was the most helpful analysis of the currently available data I have found/heard. Always my favorite podcast, and I eagerly await each episode. Thanks for all your hard work!
    This one was extra helpful!

    Collapse
Load More