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Author: Jay Harwood

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Covid math fail


Created by Memeit Jul 22, 2020 at 09:59AM EDT

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Origin Entry: COVID-19 Pandemic

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Sam Harris Q D A Gift a subscription 3. Elon and I didn't converge on a common view of epidemiology over the course of those two hours, but we hit upon a fun compromise: A wager. Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldn't see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (cases, not deaths). The terms of the bet reflected what was, in his estimation, the near certainty (1000 to 1) that he was right. Having already heard credible estimates that there could be 1 million deaths from Covid in the U.S. over the next 12-18 months (these estimates proved fairly accurate), I thought the terms of the bet ridiculous and quite unfair to Elon. I offered to spot him two orders of magnitude: I was confident that we'd soon have 3.5 million cases of Covid in the U.S. Elon accused me of having lost my mind and insisted that we stick with a ceiling of 35,000. 4. We communicated sporadically by text over the next couple of weeks, while the number of reported cases grew. Ominously, Elon dismissed the next batch of data reported by the CDC as merely presumptive while confirmed cases of Covid, on his account, remained elusive. 5. A few weeks later, when the CDC website finally reported 35,000 deaths from Covid in the U.S. and 600,000 cases, I sent Elon the following text: Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases? 6. This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.
I guess we should retire the expression "avoid it like the plague given how little effort people put into avoiding an actual plague
FRED 35,000 Thousands of Persons 34,000 33,000 32,000 31,000 30,000 29,000 28,000 27,000 26,000 25,000 - Population - With a Disability, 16 Years and over 2009 2010 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics vurmm 2018 2019 wwwww 2020 2021 2022 2023 fred.stlouisfed.org D
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Uploaded Jul 22, 2020 at 09:59AM EDT

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COVID-19 Pandemic

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covid, coronavirus, mathfail, covid-19, cdc

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